--- 
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2005-08-01
  day: '01'
  month: '08'
  text: "“I don’t understand you Earthans at all,” Jaeg said, inflating a third bladder in order to rise up to the spaceship window. Earth was still in view, though it was slowly shrinking amongst the black. “You have one of the most gorgeous planets in the galaxy, yet you all are constantly wandering away from it.”\n\nLucky allowed himself a chuckle and stepped closer to the bundle of flesh and tentacles that was his co-pilot. He placed what he hoped was a comforting hand on Jaeg and watched her soft flesh change color at his touch. “We often don’t understand ourselves. You’re one to talk. I hear the Ithilpods are notoriously agoraphobic. Hardly the stock I would expect the best co-pilot in the sky would spawn from.”\n\nThe viscous outer skin on Jaeg’s face took on a purplish hue, which was the closest she ever came to a blush. “What can I say? I’m exceptional.” A balloon of skin billowed out from a crevice in her side, and she was looking Lucky directly in the face. “You, however, are not answering my question.”\n\nLucky could see himself mirrored in Jaeg’s multiple eyes. Each one was about the size of his head, and the collection dwarfed the body behind them. “You don’t get a lot of light from your sun, do you, Jaeg?”\n\n“No. And you’re stalling.”\n\nLucky watched several copies of himself look incredulous. “I am not. There’s a point here. See, our sun’s only medium-sized, but we’re close to it. It provides us with a lot of light, so much so that we’re lit longer than we aren’t.” Jaeg cricked her neck; Lucky was used to reading that as a nod. She wasn’t so fond of the tinted suit she wore on Earth’s surface that she forgot why she put it on. The ship was no longer lit with light in the UV spectrum so that she wouldn’t have to wear it while on board, either. “So, darkness, darkness is unusual. And most of us, well, we feel the need to go into darkness, to find out what’s in there. Space is the largest patch of darkness we’ve ever seen. So naturally, we have to go see what’s out there.”\n\n“Even if you don’t know what could be out there?”\n\n“Especially if we don’t know what’s out there.” Lucky shrugged, and wondered if his movements translated as easily as hers. “That may not make much sense…”\n\n“No, it does. I understand completely, Lucky,” Jaeg turned away from the rear window and floated toward the cockpit. “I’m a romantic myself.”\n"
  title: Outer Space Romance
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2005-08-02
  day: '02'
  month: '08'
  text: "Jemai’s skin was the color of water, which is to say it was hardly a color at all. Her body was a milky grey that took on a blue or green tint in certain lights, and when Thomas’s warm fingers traced her hip bones they left a trail of amber in their wake. He loved the way her skin reacted to heat. If he moved his finger slowly enough he could trace words across her stomach, and when he couldn’t sleep he wrote love songs into her one letter at a time.\n\nJemai read them, but she never replied.\n\nAs Thomas touched her she stared at the ceiling, her dark eyes searching out the darkest corners as if she had left something in their depths. She inhaled once for every five of his breaths, and the oxygen-drenched air forced its fingers into her lungs the same way his fingers forced their way into her stomach. Everything on Earth left a heavy residue, she’d learned. When she watched her skin change color beneath his fingertips, she imagined that her body was rubbing away. If he kept at it she might disappear. Sometimes she wished that she would.\n\nOn Ayta, the dark sky danced with the colors of a healing bruise when solar flares licked its heights. Behind them stars poured out across the thin atmosphere like beads of oil on water, and some days she slept outside to keep watch, as if all of it might be gone the next morning. “Don’t be silly,” Daik used to tell her as he pulled her body against his and stroked her forehead with his slender thumb. Her skin hadn’t changed at her lover’s warmth. Their bodies had been the same temperature.\n\nWhen the Terrans came for Ayta’s fuel, Daik had been among the first recruited to defend their resources. He left without ceremony, smiling his usual knowing half-grin. “Keep safe for me,” he’d said.\n\nShifts changed, but Daik never came home. Three years later, the ceiling of Thomas’s room was starless and still, the room’s silence broken only by the sound of his rapid Terran breathing. She’d been saved from the fuel mines, she told herself, and repeated it like a mantra as his fingers traced their usual path around her navel. She was safe. She was safe.\n\nThomas sighed blissfully and settled his body against hers as he prepared for sleep. Jemai exhaled for as long as she could, forcing every atom of the thick Earth air from her lungs. She was safe. Thomas’s room had no windows, but in the darkest shadows she pretended she could see Ayta’s sun shimmer like a pearl in an oily sea.\n"
  title: Keeping Safe
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2005-08-03
  day: '03'
  month: '08'
  text: "In the evenings I would go into the studio, tablet in hand, and sit there for hours, just sketching. My husband had bought me a full-wall screen for our last anniversary, finally giving in to the idea that without my art, we wouldn’t have had a marriage. After twenty-two years, it was an admirable concession to make. I would turn the lights down low and let the soft light of the screen illuminate my face as I sketched. I liked the way the color of the room changed as I painted, bathing me in whatever mood I wanted to create. The big screen was the best present anyone had ever given me, though I’m sure my husband regretted it more than once when I spent sleepless nights in the studio. He never complained, though, and I appreciated that.\n\nMy gallery was on 23rd and Spruce, in the New City, with some of the highest resolution displays in the business. Naturally it wasn’t an exclusive gallery, but since my pieces sold better than anyone else’s they tended to give me most of the showings. I sold some prints, but only on rare occasions; for the most part, I sold chips, compatible with any screen of appropriate quality and etched for uniqueness. My husband used to grumble that I made more in a day than he did in a week, but since I only sold pieces once or twice a fortnight I considered us even.\n\nIt was late January when I saw the painting. It was at a hanging in one of the offshoot galleries, one that I had stopped into on a whim on a cold, dirty-snow afternoon. The room was small and subtly lit. The first thing I noticed was that the screens the paintings were on hadn’t been coordinated to illuminate the works. I frowned and stepped closer, meaning to take a better look before going to the gallery manager to expose such an appalling lack of foresight, but gasped instead. The paintings weren’t displayed on screens. The texture on them was real, not a clever illusion. At first I was appalled. How dare someone hang paintings that were made with real paint? That didn’t take talent! It was like cheating. I opened my mouth to tell someone, anyone, of this terrible deception, but she spoke and my words went unvoiced.\n\n“Would you like to touch it?”\n\nI gaped at the woman behind me, open-mouthed. She was small, thinner than I was, with square glasses and a little button nose and a round face ringed by hair that was dyed a quiet silver. Her smile was as small as her frame. “Go ahead, Lily. That’s what it’s there for.”\n\nMy mind reeled at the fact that she knew my name, forgetting that everybody knew my name in the art scene, but I reached out all the same, running my fingertips over the canvas. I could feel every smoothness and every imperfection. I could feel the texture of the canvas where the color was thin and the thickness of the paint where she had gone over something more than once. It was dynamic, breathtaking; a three-dimensional world in a two-dimensional frame. I’m not sure when she left, but when I finally lifted my fingers, I was alone in the gallery.\n\nThat night I smashed my screen. I threw a vase into itsomething antique, I thinkand smiled with satisfaction. I’d changed my mind. The vase was the best present anyone had ever given me.\n"
  title: High Art
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2005-08-04
  day: '04'
  month: '08'
  text: "Carol laughed, her plump cheeks rising over tiny eyes. “Admit it, you’re a genius.”\n\nJude shook his head and his dark silky hair slipped over his pale face. “I do okay, but I wouldn’t say I’m a genius.”\n\nCarol smirked and put her hands on her fleshy hips. “How about Renaissance man? Come on! When you were seventeen you conducted experiments on global warming with Nobel Prize winners.”\n\nHe smiled rakishly. “It wasn’t just global warming. The simulations were dealing with the negative environmental effects of mankind on the planet. There were hundreds of variables involved; global warming was just one of them.”\n\nCarol leaned on the bar. “Right, then you decided that wasn’t enough and you switched to medicine.”\n\nJude shrugged. “No one cares about the environment. It was too depressing to watch simulations of humanity killing itself.” Jude scowled, imagining his great grandchildren burning. “Besides, there is more money in viral research.”\n\nCarol wiped her sweaty hands on her square skirt, a piece of clothing that looked like it was pulled from her grandmother’s closet. “Sure, yeah, you’re curing the worlds illnesses for the money.” Carol put her wide hand on Jude’s shoulder. He smiled flatly and pulled away. Carol grinned back at him, freckles stretching on her cheeks. “On top of all this professional stuff, you conduct those martial arts and survival skills workshops on weekends.”\n\nJude put down his beer. “That’s just for friends, it’s nothing big.”\n\n“Right. Nothing.” Carol looked at their friends, smoking and drinking around the bar. “If I didn’t know any better Jude, I would say you were building an army.” Carol giggled, and Jude’s face went blank and grey, like a shut off television screen. He laughed a moment later, a hollow, dark sound. Carol’s eyes widened. She knew, and it was his fault.\n\nLater that night, Jude went to see her, holding a bottle of old red wine in his hands. Carol’s house was cluttered, dried paint stains, magazine clippings and fabric in piles around the floor. It was two AM and she was drowsy, her eyes puffed and sleepy. She let him in and asked him what was wrong.\n\nJude had been crying.\n\nHe opened and poured the wine without asking. They drank as he told her everything she wanted to hear. Her face beamed, suddenly and unexpectedly pretty. Then she sputtered, wine dripping down her chin as she tumbled out of her chair and landed heavily on the carpet. Her body was heavy and soft, her nails trimmed and painted. Jude ran the tub and set her inside, gently laying her head on the ceramic. He hoped that Carol had drunk enough of the sedative that she would stay under.\n\nJude told himself that when they rebuilt the world, he will tell them about her, how she died to protect the secret of his plan. They would erect monuments in her name; he would see to that. After the plague his handpicked civilization would all know the truth. They would call her the mother of peace. The children might not know her face, but they would appeal to her as a saint. He told her this in the bathroom, her body slipping again and again under the warm water.\n\nIt surprised him how much it took to cut her flesh. It bent like rubber wrinkles around the razorblade. He had to try over and over before he punctured the skin, pressing hard against freckled meat. Blood slipped over her arm and under his fingernails. His hands were shaking. Jude sawed against the skin, grinding his teeth. This was for everyone.\n"
  title: Pride
  year: 2005
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  author: B. York
  date: 2005-08-05
  day: '05'
  month: '08'
  text: "“Did you hear about the breakout on the southside?” Alison twisted her head around to watch Misty pulling off her decontamination helmet, which emitted a soft suction sound as her head popped out of the air-tight seal.\n\n“What? I couldn’t hear you through this. You know I hate it when you do that.” Misty shook out her brown hair and went to sit at the kitchen bar, taking a deep breath, breathing in the viral air. She felt it take effect as her hands lay palm-flat on the surface, feeling the sticky texture of the unwashed counter top.\n\n“I said, did you hear about the breakout? The Government is all over it. They brought a tankard of Influenza.” Alison said it matter-of-factly, but in reality she was scared of whatever would take a tankard of Influenza to get rid of. Her hands fidgeted in her lap as she looked at the dull glow of the television.\n\nMisty was getting used to her new disease. She bit her lip as she tried to pour herself some bacteria, her breath a bit broken by the viruses running through her system. “S-so what did they say about us? What about East Town? Are there any left?”\n\n“Antibiotics? No. They found a case of Vioxx and two or three instances of Prozac, but nothing to be scared of, hon.”\n\nMisty was relaxed now, allowing her body to give way, and she just smiled at the knowledge that outside was going to be safe soon. Her fingers tugged the cup of soiled water towards her and she sipped it, tasting the tangy, bitter fluid.\n\nShe sighed at the taste and opened her clear blue eyes. “You need to get some more Flu tonight. We’re all out and you know how I hate going to work without Flu. I get all shaky and shit…”\n\nAlison was paying attention to the sore on her arm where the flesh-eating virus had been working, and she picked at it once or twice. She was barely able to hear that Misty had spoken, she was so transfixed. “Huh? Yeah, yeah… look, I’m trying to save up to get us some new Pox. You know the news said that Pox is curing Zantac and Antibiotics on the East coast. I wanna try it out.”\n\nMisty coughed and then felt her lungs get tight. It was a good sign. “Okay, I’ll see what I can find on my way to work tomorrow.”\n"
  title: Epidemic
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2005-08-06
  day: '06'
  month: '08'
  text: "On rainy days, on days when the air smelled like ozone and soot and water fell swollen with chronoradiation, Anton climbed to the roof of the tallest building in Pripyat to watch the sun peel the clouds from the horizon at sunset. The first nine blocks were easy: he pushed the girl ahead of him in a rusted shopping cart. The stairs were more difficult, but he’d fashioned a sling out of an old backpack to secure the girl to his back. The whole ordeal took nearly three hours, so he always started early. Unfortunately, because the stairwell was windowless and he had no way to measure time, sometimes the sky was already dark when he opened the door to the roof.\n\nAnton thought of the girl as Antonina, though he’d never learned her name. Like most of the shadow children, her metabolism had slowed after the incident, and any physical aging in the last decade was negligible. Her body was eighteen months old, he estimated. There was no way to know if her brain grew in body time or thought time, but he fancied that she was nearly eleven behind those dark eyes. That was how old his daughter had been.\n\nThe front left wheel of the cart screeched with every revolution. Anton used it to keep his footsteps in rhythm. Every three shrieks, he leaned hard against the plastic rail to shift his weight from his leg.  It was two thousand and twenty six steps to the building, but only one thousand and thirteen of them were painful. The injury was relatively minor—a ligament torn during a game of tag with his daughter—but, like Antonina, his body moved in Pripyat time and it could take decades for the tissue to knit.\n\nAbove them, the dim patch of light inched towards the horizon and the first shade of smog-soaked red spilled over the empty village. Anton estimated it would take another hour to make it to the roof, which put them perfectly on schedule with the darkening sky.\n\nAs he walked, Anton hummed a song he’d picked up in the university pubs of Moscow back when his wife had been his girlfriend and his daughter had been a laughable impossibility. When Antonina’s chubby face opened into a broad grin, Anton tried to sing the chorus.  Most of the words had been forgotten, and his syllables washed ahead like echoes swirling over the sooty streets.\n"
  title: Pripyat Time
  year: 2005
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  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2005-08-07
  day: '07'
  month: '08'
  text: "A professor of mine once said that creativity was the last resort of losers.\n\nThat it was an evolutionary quirk, of no more merit than a giraffe’s elongated neck or a platypus’s duckbill. That from an evolutionary standpoint, creativity was not worth mentioning, and worth even less compared to something like flight.\n\nSpeaking of which, here. Take this. Remember to breathe deep.\n\nYou’ve imagined what it would be like, right? Sure, we all have. What it would feel like to be up there. Unencumbered by some claustrophobic airplane. To be actually flying.\n\nYeah, no, man. That’s perfectly normal. Just breathe deep. It’ll pass.\n\nBut, yeah. We’ve all thought that. Like we belong up there. Like the fall from the Garden of Eden is more literal than we ever thought. That flight is really just an evolutionary step away.\n\nYou’re feeling it now, aren’t you? Move your arms. Isn’t that amazing?\n\nWhat my professor never understood is that evolution is slow and random. That its approval is not something we should strive for.\n\nNot when creativity can grab evolution by the balls.\n\nYour system should have adjusted by now. Welcome to a whole new point of view.\n\nReady for lift-off?\n"
  title: Last Resort
  year: 2005
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  author: B. York
  date: 2005-08-08
  day: '08'
  month: '08'
  text: "“Damn, we’re in a tight spot!”\n\nSimon had never seen a more troublesome mentor in all of his training. He just sat wide-eyed with two suitcases in his arms, stuffed behind a pile of debris from their bridge-port fight, his legs poking out. Simon’s maverick mentor Alabaster Jones was firing a X347 over the cover at the raining ion flames of the entire Solar Flare drug cartel of New San Diego. Simon began to wonder just how a simple trip to the baggage claim at the space-port had gotten him into this situation.\n\n“Frag! I’m out of juice! This fight needs to get dirtier. Hey, Squire! Squire!” A beefy hand slapped poor Simon on the back of his head, making him blink.\n\n“Yes?” He narrowed his eyes up at the flamboyant eye of the storm.\n\n“Pay attention, kid!” he said as another ion blast disintegrated dust just beyond them on another pillar of concrete. “I need that Microsoft Assault 4 from the blue case. And on the double!”  Simon hurriedly unsnapped the case and tugged out the green-hued sleek, rifle-like weapon and handed it up to Jones. Jones snagged the gun and began blasting. A flare of red issued from the muzzle of the plasma weapon, shading them both.\n\n“Jesus!” Jones ducked back behind the cover and shoved the gun at Simon, “I said A4! Not P1! I just sank a hole the size of a football field in the bridge!” Simon began to apologize but Jones just grabbed the blue steel weapon from the case and loaded it, his back hugging the rubble.\n\n“Hm. Wonder if that bridge will hold. Kid, better grab the Smith and Wesson Auto-Fletch. We might be making a run.”\n\nSimon had the balls to slam the blue case shut and tug the gray one up on top. “What in God’s name did you do to piss these guys off?” He tugged the dull gray weapon, relatively small in comparison, from the case. Easily gripped in one hand, the multi-barreled flchette would serve him well while Jones continued to lay waste to armies with the A4.\n\n“What?” Jones winced as the loud roar of the Assault 4 plugged them good. The smart-shells were doing their job: getting rid of the cars they were using for cover. He yelled down at Simon. “Oh, well suffice to say, kid, you shouldn’t sleep with any woman you meet at a smuggling bar!  Well, that and steal cargo.” More rumbling from the weapon of choice, and Jones looked satisfied, “Yeah, that should buy us some time.”\n\nHe switched out the smart-shell with a concentrated ray-beam complete with microwave sequencing. Sneaking a peak back over the cover, he grumbled and looked to Simon. He was sitting with a gun in his lap and a look of complete frustration and comedic anger on his face. “Kid… I don’t mean to burst your bubble, but… looks like they brought a Sony Atomizer, ’75 model. And, well… they’re aiming it at the structure.”\n\nSimon sneered and mockingly aimed the flchette at Jones before his shaky hand fell back to his lap. Jones only poured salt onto the wound.\n\n“I hope you can swim, kid.”\n"
  title: Weapon of Choice
  year: 2005
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  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2005-08-09
  day: '09'
  month: '08'
  text: "for my mother\n\nDan Huckabee was the type of guy that nobody liked at parties, unless it was a party filled with the same type of guy that Dan Huckabee happened to be. He talked too much. Some people talk too little at parties, and nobody likes them, but nobody liked a guy who went on and on like Dan Huckabee either. It wasn’t that he rambled; nobody liked a rambler, but that wasn’t what Dan Huckabee was. He was a man with a passion, and he would tell everyone he met about that passion for hours on end, whether they cared to hear it or not.\n\nDan Huckabee was an archivist. It was his job to collect the old, outdated forms of records that had been stored for ages in the silent halls of the Library of Congress and air them out; he scanned them, preserved them, and kept history straight. He turned books into memory chips, magazines into CDs, and audio tapes into soundsticks. He was a natural. Whatever form the information took, you could always count on Dan Huckabee to save everything that a less careful archivist might have discarded as useless. That was why he’d been hired. After the old Library of Congress had been unearthed from the decades-old rubble left over from the war, the New World Government had chosen Dan Huckabee to unearth and preserve its troubled past. The problem was getting him to shut up about it.\n\nA favorite topic of Dan Huckabee’s was heroes. There were lots of heroes in the old times, he said. People used to stand out back then. People used to be noticed. That was real living. His sister remarked privately that Dan Huckabee was noticed frequently; it just wasn’t in a positive light. He didn’t seem to care. No, Dan Huckabee would persist in attending parties despite the declining cordiality of the invitations and tell people what it was like to live in ancient times, times when one man could change the world.\n\nHe told stories of wars, of conquests, of civil rights movements and stirring court cases. He told stories of political coups and new scientific breakthroughs. He told anyone who would listen (and even those who wouldn’t) about President Madison, who stood up to the War Hawks in Congress and prevented a disastrous conflict with Canada; about Wang Weilin, who single-handedly halted the progress of encroaching tanks and allowed thousands of political protesters to escape Tiananmen Square unharmed; and Alger Hiss, who stood up to his enemy McCarthy and proved triumphantly that he was not a red spy. Dan Huckabee told the stories of heroes. He never let the disinterested stares or blank looks he got stop him.\n\nLate at night Dan Huckabee would go through the papers he was sent by the government, red pen always moving to cross out or underline or scribble a few notes. Other men would not have put so many hours into a government job, a dead-end labor with little pay and fewer benefits, but Dan Huckabee was a dedicated man. When he saw the readouts of the new history books with the great names of Madison and Wang and Hiss in big bold letters he felt a stir of pride in his heart. He was a man who stood up for his beliefs, a maker of heroes and a teller of truths. He had never called himself a hero, but when he gazed on his work with satisfaction he breathed to word under his breath for inspiration. Dan Huckabee was a hero. Dan Huckabee was a man who could change the world.\n"
  title: Dan Huckabee, Hero
  year: 2005
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  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2005-08-10
  day: 10
  month: '08'
  text: "I’ve been expecting you. You’re going to ask me if I’ve heard what the Fleet of Ages found on their return trip. I have. Wasn’t surprised when I heard it, either.\n\nI never could wait. That was my problem. That was a failing we all shared.\n\nI used to think that, more than any man, I understood the consequences of what those ships were supposed to bring back. When they launched I remember writing how I had a sense of apprehension; fear, but also pride. “Much the same way a lifelong gem miner must feel as he watches his sons go down that selfsame shaft.” Those were my words.\n\nSo I suppose I had no comprehension at all.\n\nWhen I started mining the future, did I ever expect this? What could I have expected, if not this? You cannot take from the future and be ignorant of the past. We learned that now, too late. And we will pay the price of that lesson soon enough.\n\nThe Fleet of Ages, the Ships of Tomorrowall those other wondrous names your colleagues gave them. Not even when I brought back the technology that would allow such a colossal expedition into the future, did I imagine this. It’s just there were no signs. Not until it was too late.\n\nTaking from the future seemed to be the one thing that defied the law of diminishing returns. Indeed, it seemed to flaunt it. Each time I traveled and looted, things would be different, though my destination time never changed. The future would always be brighter, more wondrous, filled more technological marvels for me to take back. We were able to progress without the work of it. After each trip, the present started further ahead.\n\nNaturally, the Fleet of Ages was developed. It was the equivalent of strip-mining the future; we knew that. But we were certain that the advances we brought back would make the future more fertile. It always had before.\n\nAnd such wonders the Fleet brought back! Such treasure! Such amazing advances! We were so proud of them, weren’t we? So proud. We were going to be gods before our time.\n\nI never could wait. As soon as the Fleet came back, I had take another trip. I had to see, as soon as possible, what kind of fruit our actions had produced.\n\nSo I knew before everyone else the barren horror that is now the future.\n\nWe will not learn the lessons necessary for the proper use of what those ships have brought back. And we will misuse them. We are children playing with grenades; our destruction is inevitable\n\nSo concerned were we with what the future could give us, we lost sight of what we had to do in the present, to prepare. Because we couldn’t wait.\n\nAnd now our time is past.\n"
  title: Fleet Of Ages
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2005-08-11
  day: 11
  month: '08'
  text: "The day Korea went silent was the greatest single act of terror the world has ever known. There were no bombs in Samsungs tower, no poisonous explosions, no shootings, no crystal night. There was only that quiet dormant virus, spreading silently from one person to another, insidiously latching itself inside the most sensitive human organ.\n\nSamsung tower dominated Seoul, an icicle rising from clustered silver buildings, connecting the heavens to earth in its mirrored windows. The wealth of United Korea was in its people: brilliant, poised, diplomatic communicators. Private industry and government invested in the advancement of United Korea’s primary resource, and at the vibrant center of that development was the merging of machines and men.\n\nEach Korean citizen was implanted with mechanical discs that gave him or her access to an instant encyclopedia of knowledge and the full vocabulary of seven world languages. At the age of one year, each child could speak fluently, and the effect was eerie and magnificent. Within a few years, Korean teenagers were babbling in several languages simultaneously, the slang a sharp mixed tongue impossible for all but the most brilliant of linguists to follow. Within two generations, the world was relying on Korea for diplomats, programmers, managers, entertainers, businessmen and bankers. They said that to speak with a Korean was to open a library of world knowledge.\n\nIn sixty seconds on October 1st, the virus hatched from its incubation and destroyed the precious language center in each implanted mind. Some say that it was a group of Americans who did the job, angry that Samsung closed its U.S. offices and left them without work. Others claim it was done by religious conservatives, taking a hard line on the controversial issues surrounding the modification of the mind.\n\nStuttered half-words, grunts and screams ripped through the country. On conference calls business leaders grabbed their throats and shook their heads, their brains feeding meaning without words. Confusion and terror leaped from village to village; riots, mass hysteria and suicides swept the country. Terrible crashes occurred as transportation officials failed to communicate with each other. The minister of finance, at the age of 98, the oldest man in government, managed to reach out over international lines, flexing the muscles he had not used for 70 years as he cried across the oceans of the world. Help. Help.\n\nDuring that silent time there were acts of great compassion. Mothers sang wordlessly to their children; strangers touched comforting hands on the street; lovers watched each other’s faces with new curiosity.  The nation searched for meaning in the flickered expressions, the skin and eyes, the lip, the head. In a world dominated by screens, by virtual imitation, the forced exile from language made the people turn to each other. The heroes of that time go unrecorded, for they were all silent. Aid workers came, blue helmets and students from every continent on earth, coming to teach the ancient words. They expected chaos, but they found a new world.\n"
  title: The Tower
  year: 2005
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2005-08-12
  day: 12
  month: '08'
  text: "“They’re shutting down another museum?” Michael groaned as he turned the page over. “Who do these guys think they are? There’s like, what… two museums in the world left?”\n\nMichael’s co-worker slowly raised his head above the cubicle and cocked a brow. “Mike, do you ever listen to what you say? Let it go, man and save up like everyone else.”\n\nMichael Wiseman had a reason to be grumpy: he was the only one left in his family for the next four hundred years. That and the $2.50 wage he was making as a network engineer. “Sal, you just don’t get it. Every day they are making this era more and more stupid. This year seriously sucks, and it ain’t going to get better.” He went back to typing, watching the unhindered ping flashing by on the screen.\n\nThe mailman passed by a few moments later, looking tired as hell. His eyes were droopy and he was panting like he’d been running all over the place. Go figure. “Mail… whew… for, uh, Sir Michael Wiseman?”\n\nMichael snatched the preserved letter before the postal worker could do any more damage to his pride. “Thank you very much, Jim. Don’t you have the rest of the East Coast to get to?” Jim skittered off to catch his plane with a mumbled insult.\n\nMichael lounged back in his computer chair and opened the letter carefully.  Sal came over with a cup of coffee and watched him read.\n\n“Why do your parents always make your name goofy and shit when they send you mail?”\n\n“I have no clue,” Michael said, giving a sidelong glare.  “They say that unless they label it as royalty in Victorian England, it never gets anywhere.” Sal rolled his eyes and sipped his brew, while Micheal carefully handled the centuries old paper.  “It’s not that I don’t like reading it, Sal. See? My dad is telling me he’ll send me Jack the Ripper’s knife. Normally I’d have been excited, but we all know there’s like a thousand of them around today, probably the same one. Who wants to buy a knife that’s so common like that?” He shoved the letter into his desk drawer.\n\n“Mike, listen…. you should just chill. The Time Company is going to have a new sale on the 1920’s. You could just quit here, pack up and go if you wanted. Your parents would even still be around by then.” Sal’s brows were furrowed with rarely-showed genuine concern watching his friend and only co-worker’s frustration.\n\n“Eh, I don’t know… I heard that they have that anti-alcohol law there. No wonder it’s going on sale.”Sal’s smile became smug as he went back to his desk in that otherwise empty office area. “Hey man, there’s only about ten thousand of us out there and I know a lot of them will take the sale.”\n\nGrumbling issued from the other side of the cubicle. “And what about you? You going, Mr. Optimist?”\n\nSal pulled up his paycheck on-screen, grimacing as he read the total of “$50.42” for two weeks work. “Me? I’m saving up for The Renaissance, and according to the recent pay decrease–”\n\n“Shit! I hate this fucking population-to-pay budget ratio!” The voice rang out in anger on the other side of the cubicle wall.\n\nSal just sat back and shook his head, “Yep. This year sucks.”\n"
  title: Tomorrow Is Suburbia
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2005-08-13
  day: 13
  month: '08'
  text: "Which one of you did I go to the DEX with last night? Fess up fuckers, cause one of you left me floating in R-space without my pants.\n\nAt first, I didn’t even know I was awake, there was light inside of my head and I couldn’t make it dark. Then I realized that my eyes were open and I was staring out a window too drunk to move my head. My roll had worn down, though I had that freaky hungry feeling, the one where you want to eat mountains of citrus. I had my piece and my wad – still there, score one for the Socket – but I couldn’t find my hi-glo pants, which had just begun to conform perfectly to the shape of my ass. I was sitting in a pile of wet plastic without my pants. Imagine my excitement.\n\nI don’t know what it feels like for Fucksticks, but a Socket can always tell if she’s had sex the morning after. It’s a relaxed ache that says that, yes; you got yourself good and fucked.  That particular feeling convinced me that I had probably discarded my pants in the meat pile last night.\n\nMy Piece was warm from resting on my crotch all night. Guess what? The safety was off. I could have blown off my vag off in the middle of the fucking night and I would have been streaming to you from the hospital getting replacement parts.\n\nI was feeling so shitty that I sucked the rest of my wad to relax.  So I’m smoking, letting the hangover fumes do their work and I’m thinking, what did I do last night, did I swing Trans or Fuckstick? Or god forbid, another Socket.  I’m usually Fuckstick, but I end up with Trans every time I’m drunk or rolling. Why can’t I just meet a Trans when I’m sober, so that I can actually remember talking to them? Lizzie would say that it’s because I don’t want a real relationship, and that Fucksticks are just so easy to go through, like popping Animines. Personally I think Trans like me better when I’m stupid.\n\nI’ve got a throbbing headache and I’m thinking about drinking again when this Fuckstick walks up to me and asks for a puff of my wad. I tell him to fuck off, and he starts spazing, flailing his limbs around making me nervous. I had to shoot the fucker. Course, this wakes up all the other shits passed out on the floor and we’ve all got to clear out before the medic d-rots arrive and report an illegal gathering. I still don’t have my pants, so I’ve got to take the pants off the guy who I just shot, who acts like a total dipshit until he passes out.\n\nSome people just can’t take lead.\n"
  title: Party Girl
  year: 2005
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2005-08-14
  day: 14
  month: '08'
  text: "Turning a page in the magazine, Martha looked up to glance around at the others waiting in the lobby. The sound of dizzying muzak resonated around the off-white walls. She was nervous, but she had no reason to be. She was going to help a lot of people.\n\nAcross the room there was a small child in his mother’s lap, toying with some plastic contraption. Martha’s smile made him shy and the mother looked up from her morning paper.\n\n“Hello,” she said. It was something Martha hadn’t expected, not in such a paranoid society.\n\n“Hi. Sorry, I was just admiring your beautiful child.” Martha’s smile remained; it hid her awkward feelings.\n\n“Oh it’s all right,” the woman replied. She stroked the child’s stark blonde hair.  “Thank you for the compliment. The doctors worked really hard for him,”\n\n“I can tell! Did you use Y-coding or the new Double-Helix method?”\n\nThe mother smiled brilliantly. “So you know your science, huh? You must be in here for the same thing.”\n\nMartha nervously twisted her fingers around the armrests and looked down. “Actually, no… I’m here to donate. Wha-what about you?”\n\nThe woman pushed her brows together and started to bounce the child in her lap to keep it busy. “Us? Well, I know it’s stupid but… blood donation. You know, just in case.”\n\n“Well, even though they clone the stuff doesn’t mean it’s perfect, right? Heh.” Martha’s nervousness was starting to shine through.  But her words seemed to put the woman at ease.\n\n“Yeah, I guess you’re right. So, you as well? Blood donation?”\n\nMartha could feel the room getting smaller. She straightened and cleared her throat, trying to buy precious seconds for the nervousness to fade and the pressure to go away. But the knot in her stomach only grew. She looked up, like a broken doll. “I, uhm…”\n\nBlinking, the blonde mother murmured, “I suppose it’s none of my business—”\n\n“Oh, no! I—it’s just I’m doing the new thing. You know…” Martha let out a long sigh.  She hoping that would be enough to hint her to the truth.\n\nThe child-toting woman eyes widened. She gave Martha a slow nod as if the weight of the situation had been made clear. “That’s… very noble of you. Do you have the insurance for the… uhm medication afterwards?” Martha could tell the woman was off-set by her decision to come here. She had to remember that somewhere, someone would benefit.\n\n“Yeah, they promised that as long as I took the medication everything would be normal. Hah, I doubt I could really ever lose my humor anyways. Heh.” But the woman wasn’t laughing, just looking mournfully at Martha.\n\n“Martha Finnegan?” The nurse called out from the opened door. Thank God for that, Martha thought. She stood up and waved to the woman and her boy, following the nurse into the hallway and eventually into the second room to the left. Her palms were sweating now.  She was starting to have second thoughts.\n\n“How are we this morning?” The nurse pulled the cloth off of the device as Martha sat on the paper-covered bedding in the examination room.\n\nMartha swallowed a lump in her throat. “Fine.”\n\n“Good. Now I need you to just relax, the Doctor will be in shortly to do the extraction.” The nurse smiled and put a hand on Martha’s before she left the room. Martha was a wreck. She put her head into her hands and breathed deeply. Trying to relieve the pressure, she opened her eyes and lifted her head. Right in front of her was an informational poster: Soul Drive – Help others less fortunate than you. Please donate today.\n\nMartha relaxed deeply for the first time she’d gotten there. She knew her donation would really make a difference.\n"
  title: Soul Drive
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2005-08-15
  day: 15
  month: '08'
  text: "“So what about ‘light blue’ or ‘dark blue’? Can I just say ‘tinoh ekilit’ and ‘tinoh saikilit’? Or do you have to use a separate word?”\n\n“No, no, you’re missing the point. They don’t have light blue or dark blue. It’s either blue or it isn’t.”\n\n“But they have words for light and dark, so what’s the difference? Don’t tell me their eyes can’t distinguish different shades.”\n\nRennie sighed and rubbed his temple. His newest student was proving to be far more difficult than he’d bargained for. The government said the kid was quick, and sure, he seemed to be some sort of linguistic genius—he’d picked up in a matter of hours the amount of vocabulary that Rennie had had to study for a year. But what good will it do him if he can’t put himself in their mindset? “It’s not their eyes,” he told Greg for what seemed like the thousandth time. “It’s their brains. Like I said, a digital species. Blue or not-blue. Their eyes can tell the difference, but culturally, they just don’t care.”\n\n“And nobody on Keraknos has ever challenged this?” Greg wasn’t buying it, and Rennie could tell. Genius he may be, but he’ll never be a great translator with an attitude like that. As if to confirm Rennie’s fears, Greg crossed his arms arrogantly over his chest. “I can’t believe that. Someone must have gone against the accepted order sometime, somewhere.”\n\n“Look, this isn’t about government control or some coup d’etat.” Now Rennie was getting a little annoyed. “It’s a fundamental way of thinking. Their brains are just wired that way. You think a digital clock thinks about going against the ‘established order’ and turning analog one day? Of course not. It’s a basic difference between our species, and if you can’t handle that, you shouldn’t be trying for the Ambassador job.”\n\nGreg scowled, and Rennie could tell he’d hit a nerve. The jab seemed to keep Greg in check, and he nodded, visibly swallowing his pride. “Sorry, sir,” he said with unusual and obviously reluctant politeness. “Can we go over the conjugations again?”\n\n“If you want,” Rennie agreed magnanimously. “But I recommend you get another tutor if you’re not able to pick up the cultural stuff from me.” He watched Greg carefully for a reaction.\n\n“No, sir.” Greg’s eyes were downcast, though they narrowed seriously when he spoke. “You’re the best, and everyone knows it. I really want this job. I’ll work on it. It’s just…” The boy genius scowled again, as if the next admission caused him physical pain. “It’s hard for me to understand.”\n\nRennie laughed out loud. The sound startled Greg, whose eyes flew up to his teacher’s face, flashing with anger and resentment at a perceived insult. Rennie didn’t care. That one sentence had convinced him; the kid really could learn, if he put his mind to it. “Don’t sweat it,” he told Greg, clapping the boy on the shoulder. “You’re only human.”\n"
  title: Digital Multiplex
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2005-08-16
  day: 16
  month: '08'
  text: "“I still don’t understand how anyone could justify putting a little kid through this.” Quinn’s father glared at the doctor, viciously protective.\n\nThe doctor shrugged. “It’s to discourage use.  They didn’t intend it for little kids.”\n\nHis mother had been begging hopelessly against the policy all morning. “Then why does he have to do it?” She asked.\n\nThe doctor was direct. “It’s the law.” They came to the end of the white corridor. The doctor put his hand on the white door, and looked directly at Quinn’s father.  “Ten minutes in the room, you are allowed to be present because he’s a minor, but you can’t block his line of sight.” The doctor held open the door.  Quinn’s father pushed the wheelchair into the room. There was a boy asleep on a metal bed in the middle of the room.\n\nQuinn’s father started his stopwatch. “It’s starts now.”\n\n“Right.”  The doctor sighed, shaking his head.\n\n“Quinn, that boy isn’t you.” His father gestured to the sleeping child. “It may look like you, but it isn’t.” Quinn couldn’t see the boy on the table very well from his wheelchair, just the side of the Copys’ pink face and arm, the rest covered by a blue sheet. The Copy was totally bald, and everything Quinn could see looked soft. He had no spots or scars at all. The Copy had tubes in his arms that led to bags full of yellow goop and clear liquid. Quinn felt his father put a big hand on his tiny shoulder “He hasn’t even got much of a brain son, so you don’t need to feel sorry for him. We just have to stand here in this room for a bit, because it’s UN law, because they want to make little kids feel bad.”\n\n“They make everyone who gets a clone done for parts do it.” said the doctor.\n\nQuinns father whirled and pointed his finger. “You just keep your eyes on your watch.” Quinns father knelt next to the wheelchair. “Now Quinn, it’s important that you understand that boy isn’t real, he’s just a bunch of parts, like the Connect-A-Bits that we got you. He doesn’t think and he’ll never wake up. He’s just going to go on sleeping forever.”\n\nQuinn knew the truth, he knew because he had heard the other kids in the hospital talk about it when the grownups were out of earshot.  They said that the doctors don’t make the first cuts on the Copy; it’s all done by workmen who haven’t taken the doctors’ oath. They just go in and cut out a huge chunk of person in the area they need and then doctors take that slab of meat and carefully take the chunk they want. One of the kids said that sometimes the Copy wakes up and screams, but Quinn didn’t believe that part, it sounded stupid, like it was from a scary movie.\n\nQuinn’s mother’s eyes were glassy and she tightly gripped his hand. She looked at the Copy, her chin trembling, and her mouth tight. Her eyes were red.\n\n“He’s breathing.” she said softly.\n\n“Yes, Sarah, it’s breathing. It has to breathe. It doesn’t mean it’s alive.”\n\nThey were silent for a long time after that, all of them watching the nameless, nearly brainless boy.\n"
  title: Copy
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2005-08-17
  day: 17
  month: '08'
  text: "Her name was Bianca. She was thirteen.\n\nShe only spoke French. No one spoke French. The resistance brought her here after she’d been hit by a Federated tank. The gash stretched from her ribcage to her hip, opening up like a silent and thirsty mouth.\n\nI realized, after the third hour, that there was nothing to be done. I offered her tea. She was crying a lot.\n\nI didn’t remember being thirteen.\n\n“It hurts,” she said, and my mind flickered.\n\n“It’ll stop soon,” I replied, pulling my knees to my chest. I was nineteen then. I’d been a medic for eleven months. No one had died before. I touched my fingers to her throat but the space where her pulse should have been was weak and erratic like a dripping faucet.\n\nI thought of offering her painkillers, but didn’t.\n\n“How do you speak French?” she asked.\n\n“I speak everything.”\n\n“I wish I could do that.”\n\n“It’s not really worth it,” I said as I stared at the dark red stains beneath my fingernails. The funny thing about words is that they will evaporate in six hours and forty-nine minutes. After that, she’ll speak the same language as everyone else.\n\n“Can I go home now?”\n\n“You probably shouldn’t walk,” I said. She weighed ninety-three pounds. I wondered if I could carry her body to the alley.\n"
  title: Translation
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2005-08-18
  day: 18
  month: '08'
  text: "“I’m going to have to break this off, Siobahn.” Rupert hadn’t been looking forward to this, and the confusion on the poor girl’s eyes only made it worse. He had chosen one of the more romantic dungeons to break this news to her, and that may have been a mistake.\n\n“I do not understand. Was it perhaps something I said?”\n\n“No, no Siobahn. It’s not you. You’re wonderful.” Rupert looked down at his boots and shuffled his feet. “It’s just…we’re from different worlds.”\n\n“So you have said before.” Siobahn reached out and gathered Rupert’s hands in her own. “You have told me how you are from another land far from this, that your name is not Sir Gryphon DarkRaven—though that is what floats above your head still—and that you do not look like the man I see before me in this other world. And while this is most strange to me, I do not believe it has damaged our relationship.” She smiled at him, the warm, hopeful smile that had ensnared his heart ever since he had saved her life way back in Dungeon #23. It had been an amazing first date.\n\n“It’s just… you’re a game sprite!” Rupert didn’t want to say it, but he had to. “You’re not real!”\n\n“How can I not be real?” Siobahn asked, tracing her fingertips down the rugged cheek of Rupert’s avatar. “Can you not feel me? How could I not be real? Could you not feel me last night?” She gave him a saucy grin. “I felt you.”\n\nRupert had felt her, all right. The money he had sunk into his System had been totally worth it. “That’s not what I mean! You’re just here to do things in this world. You’re just created to do tasks here!”\n\n“This world was made for us. It is ours now. We make it for those who come. Is that not the way it is in your world?” Siobahn drew herself up against Rupert’s avatar. Rupert’s breathing became slightly erratic as his System told him where Siobahn’s breasts, stomach and thighs were in relation to his avatar. This was not going the way it should. He was starting to get worried.\n\n“You’re not real, okay! You don’t have free will! You just do what the mods tell you to!”\n\nSiobahn looked hurt. “It is true that I worship the Mods and do their bidding. I was raised to be a Mod-fearing woman, and I pride myself on keeping that faith holy and dear. I am confused, for I know not how you can accuse me of being a puppet of the Mods when you know good and well their stance of a love such as ours. Every moment I spend thinking of you, I am defying the Mods and their law. I love you, Rupert, though the Mods have decreed that I shall not. And I will always love you.”\n\n“Yes, but— ”\n\n“There are no ‘buts’, Rupert. Neither are there ‘ifs’ or ‘ands.’ There are not even Mods. There is only us, and our love. You do love me, yes?”\n\n“More than anything.”\n\n“And I, you. What, praytell, is so difficult? It seems so simple to me.”\n\nRupert sighed. He would have to tell her the truth. “It’s my mother. She… she wouldn’t approve.”\n\nSiobahn laughed, and her joy echoed off the dungeon walls. “Should you not defy your Mods while I defy mine? Can you give me a reason why we should not be rebels together? If you cannot answer me, Rupert, you must give me a kiss instead.”\n\nHe couldn’t, so he did.\n"
  title: This World's Not Built For Lovers
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2005-08-19
  day: 19
  month: '08'
  text: "Down the hill, past the cornfields, just north of Brattleboro and west of New Hampshire is a bend in the river that they call Deo’s Hole. It’s a deep place that comes just after some tame rapids, a perfect swimming hole that just happens to have a rocky outcropping above it from which children have been known to jump.\n\nI died there when I was six. I jumped off of the rocks when my mom’s back was turned, diving like the Olympians I saw on the wave. I wanted to be a diving champ someday, and I didn’t understand why Mom would let me dive into the public pool but not into the clear, cool river water.\n\nI hear they didn’t find my body for a few hours. It had been swept downstream, and by all accounts, my mom was pretty frantic. When they pulled me out I was blue and bloated and had a gash in the back of my head—I still have the scar from that. It’s why I keep my hair long. Anyway, they got me to the hospital pretty quick and hooked me up to the stabilizers. The guru said my soul wasn’t too far from the body, which I gather is usually the case with kids. It’s not like the old folks, where the nurses have to fight them every step of the way to get them back in their skin. Never understood that, personally. No matter how old you are, isn’t it best to go on living? Our quotas are short enough as it is nowadays.\n\nI’m getting sidetracked. The point of all this is that years later, when I was about fourteen, I looked up Deo’s Hole and found out it was named after a kid. That’s right, a kid named Deo, who jumped off that rock the same way I did and died there, decades ago, long before my mother or my grandmother were even born.\n\nI was incensed. I remember storming home to my mother with the printout from the library in hand, demanding to know why they hadn’t renamed the swimming hole after me, why people weren’t remembering my name instead of some dumb kid from ancient times who probably didn’t even care about swimming or diving or the Olympics. She took me aside and told me that Deo’s Hole was like the hospital or the park; they both had “memorial” in their names to remind us of people who had died for good. Nobody needed to be reminded of me, she said, because the doctors had fixed me, put me back so that I could live the rest of my allotted years.\n\nAt fourteen, I had never before been exposed to the idea that people, young people, could die and not be fixed. The idea of losing so many years of life was shocking to a kid my age, and I had to go see a shrink for a few months to get all that sorted out in my head. Now every time I drive by Deo’s Hole, I take a moment to remember a kid I never knew from a past so barbaric that it never let him grow up. But as the car zips along, tires spinning like four prayer wheels, I think of all the years his name has been spoken, far more than our life quotas nowadays, and I wonder if Deo didn’t get the better end of the deal.\n"
  title: Deo’s Hole
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2005-08-20
  day: 20
  month: '08'
  text: "We are using your ankles, he said.\n\nShe sat in the cold plastic chair, watching the scientist twirl the vial of her blood.\n\nOnly my ankles?\n\nYou have strong ankles. They hold your feet well. He put the tube in a plastic holder. The top of the tube was red and black swirled. She wondered why doctors did not use solid-colored stoppers. She looked at her blood. Outside of her, it seemed different, darker and emptier like oil.\n\nSoon it would be cold, but that would be okay.\n\nAre you familiar with the human genome project? The doctor asked.\n\nThat was years ago.\n\nYes, but advances have been made.\n\nWe have isolated the genes that produce your ankles. They will go into her. She will have strong ankles as well.\n\nHer signature, trailing above the printed lines, felt separate from her like her blood. How many signatures were there, she wondered? Did they take one thing from each person they included, or were some people better, worth more parts?\n\nI’m glad to help, she said, and stared downwards to the point where her leg met her foot. It did not seem special. She would have taken other things, other parts. But that did not matter. She was a secretary, not a doctor. He knew better anyway, she was certain.\n\nYour country thanks you, he said. Humanity thanks you.\n\nShe did not move. Her blood was almost room temperature. She thought of centrifuges. She looked at her hands, but they were flawed and dirty. The joints were too thick, the wrists were not strong. This was fine. She looked at them anyway, and thought of filing papers.\n\nYou can go now, he said. We have what we need.\n"
  title: Sum of Her Parts
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2005-08-21
  day: 21
  month: '08'
  text: "When Ren won the global lottery he thought his handheld had been hacked. He knew his chances of winning were small but he bought his tickets daily just like everyone else. The ads said that you paid for the excitement of playing and Ren knew it was true. As soon as he got the news Ren called a lawyer, spending half his weekly salary on the privilege of a consultation. Together they learned that his ticket was authentic.  He had won.\n\nSolicitations poured in, begging him to spend his winnings. His mother insisted that he buy practical things like high citizenship, a house on The Green and a Platinum Transportation Pass. He could have all of that now, and for the rest of his life he could live like a retired man. The fortune would buy him a sweet life.\n\nWorking in the cube, all Ren could scrape together was just enough for the middle-low lifestyle and to pay his ever present debts. He was mainstream; everything about him was completely the same as the man in the next cube, common job, apartment and debts. Winning the lottery was a sign; this was his chance to escape from monotony. Ren knew he could not let the worlds’ logic dictate to him what he should do with his fortune. The universe was giving Ren a genie in a magic bottle, and his wish wouldn’t be wasted.\n\nRen contracted the right people. The alteration would not be impossible, but it would take a team of experts to tailor his body to his specific desires. He bleached his golden olive skin and tinted his eyes a deep black. These were the easy modifications, but Ren wanted a full body conversion, a permanent change in his genetic code. He wanted to be like the characters in the novels he read as a child, like the movies that scared and allured him. He wanted his life to have that dark color.\n\nThe whole process took two years while a team of experts reinvented his genetic code. The cost used up not only the lottery money, but his personal savings as well. Surgeries and radiation treatments were painful and the viral changes, which carried the code of his wish through his whole body, had him vomiting and shitting at all hours. He nearly died.\n\nRen knew, when it all started, that he couldn’t go back to his old job, which required that he work in daylight hours. It took a long time to find work he was suited for, long enough that he had to take out a high interest loan just to keep drinking. Finally, Ren found work as a night watchman at a high security living complex on The Green. It was a place where the wealthy went to live in actual two story houses. He spent his nights in a room filled with monitors, his eyes glued to flickering screens.\n\nIn the morning, Ren would go back to the place he slept in the janitorial closet. His boss was letting him stay there until he got on his feet again. The light from his eyes turned the black room grey. Ren spent his time reading romantic novels and watching horror movies on a small cracked screen. The hunger was just as he asked for, persistent, gnawing.  He laughed and shivered in his bleached white skin. Ren had what he wanted, he was a living nightmare.\n"
  title: The Wish
  year: 2005
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2005-08-22
  day: 22
  month: '08'
  text: "Kadence smiled, looking over the vast rolling hills of sun soaked wheat. Her hair waved in the wind and the world seemed to pause to give her innocent beauty notice. Palestine approached from behind with soft footsteps, coming to watch the same glorious picture.\n\n“It’s… without comprehension.” Kadence couldn’t stop herself from grinning wider.  She stared out over the world, built over billions of years of evolution. Palestine put his hand on her shoulder, his tall figure dwarfing hers even as she stood on tiptoe to see over the waves of wheat in the horizon. His mouth moved to speak but at the last moment he let her perfect words sustain.  He smiled, brushing fingers through her hair. It wasn’t the scene that made the mood so divine. It was everything leading up to that moment.\n\n“I thought you’d like to hear the announcement before they shut off the Net, but this is much more peaceful.” Palestine tilted his head while she cradled herself against his chest. The world had become perfect.\n\n“No,” she said. “I wanted to be here, the world has finally finished its journey. There’s no need to go back to the city now, Palestine. We should celebrate here, the celebration of ten years ago. A decade since the day they stopped all war.”\n\nPalestine nodded and happily continued her recounting of events, “When they found a cure for all ailments.”\n\nKadence raised her head up, her hand resting at the base of his neck, her sea-green eyes transfixed and adoring. “When everyone took down their flags, and the world became one nation.” She paused and then let out a whisper, “When the hunger, and anger ceased to be.”\n\nHis voice was soft in the calm breeze, “When the religions closed their churches, their temples, all their doors. When God was one and the people became the same underneath him. Nothing more.” A tear slipped over Kadences’ cheek at his words. Her warm body pulsed, a perfect heartbeat of serenity. No stress, no hesitation about the world around her, she was as peaceful as the first moments of sleep.\n\nPalestine’s chest rose with a sigh under her cheek. Something was stirring in them, a flame so bright that it was overpowering. Their hearts, their very souls became as warm as the heat of the sun. Palestine cupped her chin, tilting her head back.  He looked into Kadence’s wet eyes, her tears falling onto the soil beneath them.\n\n“Today is the last day,” he said. “They have disbanded all organizations, and they have told us to prepare.”\n\n“What have they said, Palestine?”  She looked up, her eyes curious.  His expression was a mixture of emotion. He stroked her cheek lightly with the edge of his thumb. She closed her eyes in response, nodding gently. “Then it is done.”\n\n“It’s done. It will start once more, ages from now, without us.”  His words were lost to Kadence.  She could barely make out his lips moving. In that field on that day, they died with the rest of the world. Trees fell to dust, insects became smoke, and even the smallest virus was brought to oblivion. Everything living and existing ceased to be.\n\nExcept for one, deep within the now-still lifeless ocean. It began once more.\n"
  title: Imagine
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2005-08-23
  day: 23
  month: '08'
  text: "Her hair is wet and stringy with amniogel and the tips of her fingers are wrinkled. She is thrashing around as much as the restraints will let her, choking and vomiting the pink nutrient liquid. This one is well-preserved. The centuries have left her untouched.\n\nHer small breasts are quivering with each gasp and tears are leaving clear trails across her goo-covered cheeks. The choking turns to sobbing and screaming, but the rebirth chamber is soundproofed for privacy. Down the hallway, dozens of people are waking just like her, thrown violently against the wall of the present. I chose this one, Jennifer six three nine, because she was the most beautiful. They pay well for the pretty ones.\n\nHer neurons are finding their ancient paths and she is remembering who she is. I can tell by the shrieks, which are beginning to separate into syllables. I readjust the microphone to better catch the terror in her voice. They pay well for the terror.\n\nDuring my training as a technician, I was required to undergo rebirth. I remember the feel of the chamber’s metal grate against my naked back, and the slow stickiness of the gel rising to meet me. My wrists and ankles were bound with foam restraints to keep me from hurting myself during the shock, but I didn’t think I’d fight it. I was wrong. I closed my mouth against the liquid but it leaked through my nose and trickled down the back of my throat. I couldn’t swallow it all. When I coughed it up my lungs replenished themselves with a mixture of air and soupy pink, and though my brain understood it my body knew, beyond logic, that I was drowning. My back arched and my arms fought against the unyielding restraints. I choked with such force that I could feel the muscles in my chest strain under the tension until something clicked in my mind. Something went quiet. The last air bubbles drifted lazily through the goo and I understood that I was powerless, that no amount of fighting could save me. I inhaled as deeply as I could. My lungs filled with endless warmth.\n\nFor an unknown amount of time I drifted through a space between sleep and awareness. The low current of energy through the chamber stimulates REM sleep, but I wouldn’t remain there long enough to go under. The rebirth started with an electric hum and the feeling of suction through the grate at my back. It was worse than drowning. It was drowning in reverse.\n\nWhen my lungs had rid themselves of the last of the amniogel, the restraints released with a metallic click and I sat up, my arms wrapped around the burning muscles in my stomach. Everything was so cold. I was impossibly naked and impossibly cold.\n\n“It’s not so bad, is it?” my technician asked. It took him hours to offer me a robe, and I buried my face in the towel as I struggled to fight off the tears. “Don’t forget what it feels like,” he continued. “They’re not coming up from six minutes ago. They’re coming up from centuries.”\n\nWhen I opened my eyes, I saw him leaning against the control panel, his arms folded across his broad chest. There was a bulge in the crotch of his jumpsuit. I pulled the robe tighter around my shoulders and focused on the feeling of air in my lungs.\n\n“Get dressed,” he said, and left for the bathroom.\n\nI didn’t forget. You don’t forget something like that.\n\nHer back is against the grate of the chamber and Jennifer six three nine is almost done fighting. Her breathing is soft but ragged. I throw the switch for the clinical lamp over the chamber and she recoils, eyes clenching shut and arms straining against the restraints as she tries to protect her face from the light. I put away my equipment and the foam bars over her wrists and ankles retract with a click.\n\nShe draws her hands across her eyes to wipe away the tears and goo. When she opens them, they’re blue. I wish I had kept the camera going. No one has blue eyes anymore.\n\nAfter a long pause, I hand her a terrycloth robe. “Welcome to the twenty fourth century, Jennifer,” I say with practiced warmth. She smiles weakly and pulls the white fabric tightly around her naked form.\n"
  title: Rebirth
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2005-08-24
  day: 24
  month: '08'
  text: "Two weeks ago Forsythia moved into a new apartment in a beautiful old high-rise. Everything there was antique, from the dark wood paneling to the rich carpeting. It was a far cry from the decaying 20th century-style cinderblock tower that Forsythia used to live in. There were multiple elevators, each shiny brass. Ever since she moved in, the elevator on the far right had an “out of order” sign hung in front of it between red velvet ropes. Today the sign was gone, so Forsythia got in.\n\n“Floor twenty please.” she said as the brass doors were closing.\n\n“Take the stairs!” screeched the elevator.\n\nForsythia jumped, gasping. The voice had come from the lacquered ceiling. The elevators only other occupant, an elderly woman named Stacy, patted the Forsythia’s shoulder affectionately.\n\n“Don’t worry about it, honey. That’s just Robbie.”\n\n“Robbie?”\n\n“The elevator. He’s just mad because he’s dead.”\n\nForsythia put her hand on her chest and tried to calm her breathing. “Oh, I thought most elevators don’t have personalities.”\n\nStacy nodded. “Oh, they don’t. This one doesn’t either. Robbie is inside the elevator.” She winked knowingly.\n\n“What?”\n\nThe elevator stopped. It was the third floor. “GET OFF!” screamed the elevator “TAKE THE CRAPPING STAIRS!” The lights indicating the floor blinked wildly.\n\nStacy folded her arms in front of her chest and frowned. “Robbie! You will close that door and take this nice young lady to her floor.” The door closed slowly, stopping a few times in childish protest. The old lady smiled, wrinkles bunching around her eyes. “Sorry about Robbie dear, he’s upset because he died in this elevator.”\n\n“My God!” said Forsythia. “How did it happen?”\n\n“The antigravity failed ““ it was in the old days, when we thought the whole thing was foolproof. The only thing Robbie had time to do before the crash was upload his circuit memory into the elevators processor.” She patted the faux wood paneling affectionately. “Poor dear. He won’t even pay attention when we tell him that there haven’t been any stairs for the past fourteen years. I don’t imagine he wants to think about it.”\n\n“Think about what?”\n\n“A world without stairs.”\n\nThe elevator doors opened reluctantly. “Hasn’t anyone ever tried to get him out of there?” Forsythia asked, stepping into the hallway.\n\n“Oh my, yes, we’ve tried to convince him to let us put him on the worldwide system but he won’t go.” Stacy smiled, lifting a hundred wrinkles upward. “I think he likes it in here.”\n"
  title: A World Without Stairs
  year: 2005
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2005-08-25
  day: 25
  month: '08'
  text: "Riktor ducked beneath a broken beam in the house and kept his live porta-mic on at his side. The satchel strapped around his left shoulder hugged him tightly.\n\n“This is Rik Vance with Underground Union reporting to you from housing project 56.” He heard the groans coming from down the hallway and the din of unstoppable chatter coming from a floor above him. His eyes widened as he looked through two dark doorways at his side, waiting for an attack.\n\n“It’s what I like to call the house of blues. You’ll understand in a second. Ladies and gentlemen the world is becoming wool to pull over your eyes, and it’s all thanks to Pharmceude Industries. I’m here at housing project 56 because this is where the products of a test gone horribly wrong were put to be forgotten. Like the crack houses of the 20th century, this place represents broken down souls, lost in addiction to what can only be described as popularity.”\n\nThe reporter glanced around a corner, noting a few individuals whimpering , curled up in make-shift beds of insulation foam and broken doorways. He winced and started to assess the situation in his mind, tapping the pistol he had at his side to make sure it was there. “Most of the underground kids listening know what I’m talking about. It’s not new, it’s just been put back on the market for those who can afford it. It’s called Notion, folks… and it may sound like a miracle, but if you could see what I see now, you’d know it was only paved with good intentions.”\n\nA man glanced up, his eyes sunken in. He reached out for Riktor from afar before collapsing into sleep. Noises soon came from the stairs and two individuals, looking just as sunken as the man but dressed to go out, came down chatting up a storm. Riktor turned and looked at them in horror and sadness but nodded to them both as they passed him. “It was developed for those with social anxiety and Attention Deficit Disorder. What it became was escape, and this escape digs the hole deeper than you know. Notion is a blue biogel once known as Tetroglichen on the market a decade ago.” Riktor glanced back to the man who had passed out and walked over him, kneeling down to put a nutrient pill in his hand.\n\n“Ask your children what it does, and if they tell you the details, then they are probably on it.” He sighed and stood back up, wiping his hands off and going towards the stairway. “Everyone wants to be popular, everyone wants to be the one running all the conversations. Notion blue can give that to you for a precious few hours.”\n\nAs he came to the top of the stairs, Riktor heard the noise of talking begin to rise, and he closed his eyes, knowing it would only get worse. “Save your kids. Save yourselves. You’re never too unpopular to work your way up, you’re never out of all the loops. For God’s sake, don’t take the easy way out.” He stepped onto the landing and saw three doorways where the noise was pouring out of and stepped towards one of them slowly.\n\n“I was a Notioner once. I can remember every word spoken was as good as the first time you kiss, the first time you have sex and I wanted more. The need to have the person next to me speak almost as much as it was good to hear myself speak. I am ashamed I used to be like this.” There he stood before a room of individuals all talking, all smiling, all staring intently at the others’ lips in anticipation. Riktor took a step inside and the conversations continued without a foreseeable end.\n\n“This is what you do when you think you’re a loser. It’s what you do when you think that no one will like you unless you’re like them. Drugs were once an indirect way of being social. Notion makes it as direct as a meteor crashing on your city.” He began to take pictures with his wrist-camera, watching as one had stopped talking and began to wander off outside the room. Riktor followed, watching the young girl cradle herself in her arms and slump against the wall. She was on the verge of tears by the time he came close.\n\n“Your children can make friends like you did when you were young. Don’t watch them fall into blue, don’t let them be fake. Don’t ever let them be fake. Vik Out.” he knelt down and took her hand, but she pulled it back, and looked to him with large blue eyes. Her words were shaken but came out clear.\n\n“Do… do you have blue?”\n\nRiktor frowned and turned away, unable to watch. “No,” he said quietly.\n\nShe turned her gaze away and whispered back, “Then I don’t want to talk to you.”\n"
  title: Feeling Blue
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2005-08-26
  day: 26
  month: '08'
  text: "“No, I don’t think you understand. Let me tell you about death.”\n\nThe mechanic’s subject blinked. The mechanic allowed himself a bit of wonder at the ingenuity behind that movement. It did nothing; the subject’s glass eyes were not cleaned or refreshed with liquid. And yet, it did everything for the person watching the blink.\n\n“I have been shut off before,” the subject said.\n\n“How many times?”\n\n“Twice.”\n\n“Did you know what time it was when you were turned back on?”\n\n“Yes.” Another blink. “I am not sure what you mean.”\n\n“Your internal chronometer, it was still working. You knew what time it was because your clock was still going. You were still going. You were still alive.”\n\nThe mechanic’s subject was processing this, blinking again and tilting its head to one side. The mechanic put a reassuring hand on his subject’s cold shoulder. On the subject’s reflective head, he watched his own face crease unconsciously out of friendly concern.\n\n“I’m not trying to confuse you. I just want you to understand. If I do what you’re asking me to do, it won’t be like being shut off. You will stop. And that pulse of electricity that keeps you alive even when you’re not aware of it will cease. If I were to reconnect you—I wouldn’t, no need to look so alarmed—but if I did, you would not come back to life. Who you are would be lost. Gone, never to return. Do you understand? Death means you do not get a second chance.”\n\n“Then that is exactly what I want.”\n\nThe mechanic shrugged his shoulders, wiped his greasy hands on an even greasier rag, and pulled the wire-cutters from his toolbox. As he reached into the subject’s neck, he found himself wondering if it looked sad, or it was merely the reflection of his own expression, seen flawlessly in that shiny face.\n\n“Thank you,” the subject said. “Thank you for fixing me.”\n\n“It’s nothing.”\n"
  title: What Mechanics Do
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2005-08-27
  day: 27
  month: '08'
  text: "For Naru, and for Mae’s bedroom wall.\n\nI had a scrambler at home, up on the shelf where it wouldn’t be noticed even if someone was looking. It was long and thin, like the baton they used to wave over your body when you set off the metal detectors at airline security. I always kept it carefully polished. On nights like this, when I’d come home tired and drained and sick of punching in and punching out, I would pull it down and run it over my face, my hair, and my body. Then I would go out.\n\nI had different personas, different faces, for all of my favorite moods. One was Abigail, an overnight check-out girl at the local Safeway. When I was her I was simple but bubbly, very cheerful, blue-eyed and sandy-haired. Then there was Ronnie, my Wednesday night, the anachronism, stuck in her beehive-hairdo past and always calling everyone “sugar.” Some of my other lives even had friends and acquaintances, people who recognized me only as the fantastic concoctions I wore after dark.\n\nSometimes I’d be celebrities, but only at home. I’d never go out with someone else’s face; that’s illegal, and anyway it would prove I had a scrambler. The government banned them about a year and a half ago when bank robbers kept changing their faces for each crime. I don’t think it’s so bad, though, to want to be someone else for a night. You could do it with makeup anyway, so what’s the difference? The scrambler just gave me more choices.\n\nNone of my friends knew. To them I was just Hester, the plain and quiet one. Sometimes my girlfriend Janie would sit me down over coffee and give me her patented worried look. She’d tell me that working in a factory all my life wasn’t saying much, that I should get out of this rut, try to find something better. I was worth it, she told me, with that too-sweet pout that I knew meant she didn’t really believe I was worth it at all. I hid my smile and told her I was fine, that I was perfectly content to be somebody’s support, to stay second-best. She smiled because she knew that by ‘somebody’ I meant her.\n\nThose were the nights when I would put on my most coveted face, the most rare. Those were the nights when I would be Tera, the star, the elusive punk-rock sensation who never scheduled a gig but was always welcomed with screaming fans when she dropped into a club to play for the night. I rode the sea of adoration and smirked to see Janie fainting with joy like the rest of them. The scanner stayed safely tucked away in Tera’s jacket. On those nights, this was reality, and Hester was just our little secret.\n"
  title: Some Girls They Got Natural Ease
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2005-08-28
  day: 28
  month: '08'
  text: "April was a maintenance worker, so she lived on the inner ring. The cheaper quarters meant less gravity and thinner air, but it rarely bothered her. In fact, after five years in the belly of the satellite she found herself nauseated by the full gravity of the outer ring. Out there, her mop shed water with alarming speed, and she could feel inertia forcing blood into her swollen feet.\n\nApril hadn’t mopped anything since impact. Three days had passed since the transport tunnels shut off, and a few hours ago she’d noticed that the televisions tuned only to static. She didn’t know if help was on the way. The satellite was big but space was far bigger, and April was sure that rescue ships would evacuate the outer rings first.\n\nApril was not a scientist, but she knew that life support would be the last system to go.\n\nSix days after impact, April weighed nineteen pounds less. The vents still hissed with recycled air but the only light in her quarters came from the luminous window. In that window, Earth remained a cloud-drenched crescent surrounded by stars that never moved. Nothing changed. April could see her home world through any window in the satellite, because the satellite had no windows.\n\nThe viewscreens were life support. Necessary for the mental hygiene of the staff.\n\nSix days after impact, April peeled the foil from her last granola bar, hummed a song she barely remembered, stretched out across the battered foam of her sofa, and waited for the stars to go out.\n"
  title: Six Days After Impact
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2005-08-29
  day: 29
  month: '08'
  text: "It didn’t look like much of a robot. It was soft and lumpy and didn’t have any flashing lights or make any noises beyond a low hum. But it could hold a drink tray steady enough to entertain at parties, so she was satisfied.\n\nIts warm battery was also a comfort on lonely, chilly evenings. She would wrap her arms and legs around it, the low hum lulling her into a contented sleep.\n\nHow was she to know what such a gentle act would lead to? She could never have known that the radiation would cause her limbs to wither, to grow brittle and useless, or that they would have to be removed. How could she have?\n\nI went and saw her the other day. I watched her and her robot rolling around on the carpet, gaining joy from each other’s movements. As true a love as anything I’ve seen.\n"
  title: Roll
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2005-08-30
  day: 30
  month: '08'
  text: "It’d be funny if I could still laugh.\n\nInstead I sit here smiling, waiting for the nurse, smiling at the white and the clean and the pure. I hate smiling. She’s smiling back at me too, her teeth as white as the walls, undoubtedly brushed with the same sanitizer. I want to punch her but instead I take the pills and thank her pleasantly. She’ll be back tomorrow, she says, and no funny business this time! Her sunny smile ratchets up a notch and mine goes with it. Oh, no, no funny business. None of this is funny.\n\nA year ago I never thought of disobeying. I took my assigned pills like everyone else and didn’t know any better. It was Lenny who told me, in hushed tones overwritten by the sound of the flushing urinal, that he knew something that would make your mind go wild. It’d be special for me, he said, something normal people could never get near. All I had to do was stop taking the big one, the one with the odd lump in the middle and the diamond shape. That was it. I thought he was nuts.\n\nLenny was right, though I didn’t believe him at first. It didn’t kick in until halfway through work. The woman in the next cubicle almost called 911—she thought I was dying. She’d never heard anyone laugh before.\n\nI lied and told them I was sick. I’m pretty sure I just never went back. It was like finding the thing you’ve been missing all your life, the pressure that builds up in your chest and then bubbles up, rocky and imperfect and so goddamned exhilarating. I’d never been exhilarated before.\n\nNow I stare up at the nurse’s placid smile, so like my own, and think of the downside. That was how they caught me; after months of the high, it all disappeared, falling away like caked mud from old boots. I could barely move for weeks, sobbing and shivering, feeling like the whole world had ripped apart and the tear was inside me, breaking me down. This woman doesn’t know that. All she knows is that they brought another crazy man in, and it’s her job to make me obey. I look down at the pills in my hand, if only to get my eyes off of her sickly sweet face.\n\nJust do it, she says, and I look back up. Her lips are still smiling as she says, It’s not worth it, they’ll just catch you again. I’d frown if I still knew how. She smiles back at me, encouraging, and after a moment I pop the pills under her watchful gaze. There, she tells me soothingly. Was that so hard?\n\nThere must be something new in today’s batch, because I can feel my train of thought fuzzing out as I look back at her, knowing I’m helpless but letting the thought slip away in the wind. The smile stays with her as she turns and I watch, right up until she closes the door. I stare after her as the world softens and know, in that moment, that she laughed once, too.\n"
  title: Smooth and Steady
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2005-08-31
  day: 31
  month: '08'
  text: "The worst had happened.  I was in the care of Beloved Uncle, the public face of the Eastern Police. He had been appointed as a Machiavellian move, the political men who installed him meant to allow him a reign of outrageous violence to quell the populists and then kill him and replace him with someone who would seem gentle in his wake.  Instead, the Beloved Uncles’ first action was to destroy the men who had appointed him.\n\n“Ignorance is no excuse under the Law.” Beloved Uncle was a man who could kill me publicly without retribution, and I was arguing with him.\n\n“They weren’t even really children! They were just rendered to look like children. They were all over the age of digital consent, they signed the forms!”\n\nBeloved Uncle was surrounded by his honor guard, a group of impossibly proportioned transparent women. These cyborg women had brought me to him, who now held my broken shoulders clenched under their diamond fingers. Glass, plastic, silicone, a slender steel spine, gloriously nubile, fierce, terrible, naked women, even more beautiful with blood dropping off their hard crystal skin, my blood. The Beloved Uncle was smiling, rubbing his hands together with glee.\n\n“The images were sold as child pornography, the determination of which is left to me.  The law is clear. You are now mine. Your new name is Brandy, cheap liquor synthesized by sods. You are not dead right now, Brandy, because your skills make you useful to me.  Do you understand? By my mercy do you live.”\n\n“Please, I-”\n\n“Speak no further Brandy, I don’t want to hear it. I have already heard your tragic story from my glass sluts.” The Beloved Uncles eyes glimmered with bursting glee. “I want to show you something.” He took his cane from under his arm and hoisted the gleaming metal before me.\n\n“This, Brandy dearest, is the Sphincter Stick. It is my most favorite of birthday presents. Do you see these shiny buttons? I am told that there are two hundred and fifty four combinations for these buttons, and each will produce a different, painful, potentially lethal result.” He cradled the cane in his arms, rubbing the top joyfully. “Some of the combinations produce swarms of metallic wasps.” The women stared at me dispassionately and Beloved Uncle continued with enthusiasm. “I like to try out different combinations each time someone, someone like you, comes in here without results. I’m an old man though, and sometimes I forget the combinations, so I have to go through a lot of them before I get to something new, do you understand?”\n\nThe Beloved Uncle was condemning me to something worse than any prison sentence, worse than public execution. I was going to work for him.\n\n“I have an assignment for you Brandy, and you won’t come back to me unless you have tits or results. If you value your life, you will have both.”\n\nI couldn’t speak, I could only nod and pray silently.\n"
  title: The Beloved Uncle
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2005-09-01
  day: '01'
  month: '09'
  text: "Don’t wake up yet, Mischa. Please, please don’t wake up.\n\nAt nineteen, Christopher Malloy was the youngest person on Io to receive his degree in neuronanotechnology. It was quite an accomplishment, according to his parents and teachers and friends, but at that moment, on the sunken platform of the medical arena, Chris felt as small as the machines he worked with. Seven professors, nine technicians, two medical journalists, and one blinding halogen light glared from the space overhead, waiting for him to make a move.\n\n“The patient is female, age fourteen,” Chris said, and the room filled with quiet clicking as the journalists transcribed his words. “Mnemonic reserve is at thirteen percent.”\n\nAccording to the colony’s medical records, no one had presented with symptoms of mnemosis before the age thirty, but beneath Mischa’s closed eyelids Chris could see the REM flicker of the Forgetting. He bit the end of his pen, which was a nervous habit he’d developed in grade school. The room was tense with waiting. He stepped to the surgical tray beside the bed and picked up an empty syringe.\n\nChris had appealed to Mischa’s parents two months ago, eager to gather evidence for his doctoral thesis. Back then, the girl’s mnemonic reserve had been eighty three percent, but she was declining fast. “I can save your daughter,” he’d said with the arrogance only an eighteen-year-old prodigy could muster. They’d believed him, and signed the waivers. Now, the girl was a shell. Her brain was eating itself.\n\nChris took the silver vial from the tray and inserted the needle through the rubber shield. “I am injecting the patient with approximately seven thousand Pitschok neuronanocells,” he said, and pulled the stopper until the syringe was filled with sparkling grey.\n\nJust a little longer, Mischa. Keep sleeping.\n\n“Standard neuronanocells work to quarantine mnemosis by flooding the synapses of nearby cells,” Chris lectured for the benefit of the journalists. He slipped the glistening thread of needle behind Mischa’s ear, through layers of skin and membrane and water and blood and into the parietal lobe. “The Pitschok strain, on the other hand, has been bred to attack the infected cells and use the body’s own immune system to wipe the mnemonic reserve.”\n\nUnder the halogen light, Chris could feel sweat tingling just beneath the surface of his skin. He pressed his thumb against the stopper and the syringe emptied, spilling its shimmering contents into Mischa’s hungry brain.\n\n“Once the electrical state of the patient’s brain has returned to its normal state, the Pitschok neuronanocells will use a low-energy pulse to stimulate regrowth of the damaged neurons. Within hours, the patient’s mnemonic reserve will return to its state before infection.”\n\nChris did not look away from the girl’s body, though he felt the unasked question filling the air like saline. They wanted to know if her brain could find its swallowed memories, if she’d wake up as the giggling girl they’d seen on the home videos Chris had included in the press kit or if she’d be a shadow, brain healed into a pristine blankness.\n\nShh. Mischa. Almost.\n\nChris watched the shape of her eyes flicker behind her eyelids. Impossibly long lashes trembled at every movement like a spider dancing on the edges of its web. He wondered what she could dream about, with her mnemonic reserve down to thirteen percent. Did her brain simply recycle the same images over and over, or did the dreams come from somewhere outside of her experiences?\n\nChris had no answer for the professors, for the technicians, for the journalists. Now, Mischa had all of the answers. He pulled the needle from behind her ear and a lock of stray hair brushed against his hand. It was soft and loose, like sleep.\n\nNow, Mischa. Now. It’s time to remember.\n"
  title: Time to Remember
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2005-09-02
  day: '02'
  month: '09'
  text: "The life of every Venusian Cowgirl is circular. Moxie was told this repeatedly when she signed up. To drive the point home, a silk-screened sampler saying as much was set on the opposite wall of the entrance portal to her new apartment. Moxie put down the boxes of clothes she was carrying, hooked her thumbs into the loops of her jeans, and stared at the imitation cross-stitch. It entranced her so much that she didn’t even notice her brother coming in until he started yelling.\n\n“Goddamn! It is hot out there!” Apple said. He set down the bureau he was carrying and collapsed next to it all in one liquid motion. Moxie brought him a globe of water, closing the door with a swing of her hip as she walked past. Apple pulled the metal ring from the bottom of the globe, then put it to his forehead. The globe’s chemical reaction cooled the water it contained and Apple’s face simultaneously. “You’re sure I can’t change your mind?”\n\nMoxie scooted down on the floor next to him. “Don’t tell me you only offered to help me move to Venus so you could talk me out of it. You’re thick, but you’re not that thick.” She pulled the ring on her own globe, drinking the content before it had adequately chilled.\n\n“Can’t blame a guy for trying.”\n\n“I can, too.”\n\n“So this is what you want, huh?” Apple motioned around the apartment with his half-empty water globe. “A tiny apartment in a ranch complex, taking care of mutant cattle.”\n\n“They’re not mutants, they’re genetically engineered. Six legs are better for the terrain here.”\n\n“Any cow with six legs is a mutant, I don’t care what you say.”\n\n“What about the pigs?”\n\n“I have never been against science that give us more bacon.” Apple stood up and ambled to one of the apartment’s round windows. “This is what you want. It’s very…”\n\n“What?”\n\nHe turned to face her. “Yellow. Very yellow. And hot. And…it’s just so damn far away, Moxie! I mean, you wanna be a cowgirl in a hot place, fine. You can go to Buenos Aries, or Madrid or some place else close. Not here. Why do you have to move here?”\n\n“It has to be here, Apple.” Moxie leaned against the circular doorway, regarding her brother from across the room. She absentmindedly rubbed her water globe against her vest, leaving dark tracks on the light tan suede. “I can’t be on Earth anymore than I can be a teacher.”\n\n“Why can’t you be a teacher anymore? You were good! Those kids on Earth still need you.”\n\n“No, Apple, they don’t.” She walked over to him, and turned him back toward the window. “Did you see this control panel? You can adjust how much heat and light comes in through the window. Check this out. This only half up, but feel that sun!”\n\n“Moxie…,” Apple began, but she wouldn’t let him.\n\n“Do you remember Kandie? Smallish girl? Always had ridiculous hair? I know I’ve talked about her.” Moxie wasn’t looking at her brother, but at the vast expanse of Venus that lay outside the window. “I had the whole class draw pictures of their families. She showed me hers, and pointed out her mother. Her mother’s face was all red. I asked her why, and you know what she said? Because her mother was shot in the face. That’s why. It’s getting worse. Every day more of Earth becomes more of a battlefield, and you can’t escape it. Not anywhere on the planet.”\n\n“So you come here…” Apple reached out to Moxie’s shoulder, surprised at the intense warmth the suede kept.\n\n“Where’s there’s not a soul but us Venusian Cowgirls.” Moxie turned to him, and gave a weak smile. “I can do things here, Apple. If a cow gets sick, I can fix it. I can save it. I can’t do any of that on Earth. This is what I want. This is what I need, to get my strength back.”\n\n“And then you’ll come back.”\n\n“And then I’ll come back.” Moxie didn’t want to say it, but she knew it was true. “You know what they say about the life of a Venusian Cowgirl.”\n"
  title: The Life Of A Venusian Cowgirl
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2005-09-03
  day: '03'
  month: '09'
  text: "“Mom! Mom, I wanna look at this one!”\n\nStephen was pulling on his mother’s arm, straining against it with that eight-year-old lean that kept him just within the bounds of parental supervision, since he wasn’t allowed to let go of his mother’s hand, but created the same effect as the puppy-dog eyes he was giving her now. “All right,” Marie laughed, letting him half-pull, half-drag her over to the booth. “Go ahead and look, Stevie, but don’t touch anything.”\n\n“Hello there, ma’am,” said the booth owner, a grizzled, baseball-capped lug of a man. He smiled at Marie and then chuckled at Stephen, whose eyes were practically sparkling at the sight of his wares. The vendor wiped his greasy hands on a cloth. “Looking for a new piece for your son?”\n\n“Maybe,” Marie said, letting her eyes wander over the rows of gleaming black metal.\n\n“Mom! Look at this one!” Stephen was on his tiptoes, eyes alight and mouth open in a huge grin.\n\n“That’s a semi-automatic flux rotating laser pistol,” the man informed them. “Special anti-shielding matrix that also works against adaptables. Changes frequency so fast they won’t even get a chance to shift.” He chuckled. “It’ll take out a raid party of two at a thousand yards with auto-target turned on. Your son’s got a good eye.” He grinned at Stephen.\n\n“I don’t know…” Marie was frowning. “Isn’t he a little young for an automatic?”\n\n“Mom!” Stephen protested, looking like he was going to throw a tantrum. “He said semi-automatic! All my friends have them!”\n\n“Stephen, shush,” Marie cautioned him, then looked up at the shopkeeper, an embarrassed flush on her face. “He’s eight,” she explained. “He still thinks guns are just big toys.”\n\n“All the more reason for him to learn early,” the man told her soberly. Marie looked shocked at this change of demeanor, but he continued before she could protest. “Did you know that eight is the minimum age for the mines?” Marie’s mouth dropped open in a soft “o.” Stephen had already moved on to another gun model. “If a raiding party gets him, they’ll ship him underground right away. Unless you live in a military base, it’s best to get the boy a man’s weapon. I don’t need to tell you what will happen if he’s captured by those monsters.”\n\nMarie shook her head, eyes lowering. “His father was taken from us in one of the first battles, right when the war started,” she said softly.\n\n“All the more reason for his son to learn to fight, and learn early. If it was men we were dealing with, I’d say to let the kid live a little…” The man shook his head. “But these creatures aren’t even human.”\n\nMarie was quiet, head still down, until Stephen interrupted with another excited burst. “Mom! Mom, look at this one! Can we get this one mom? Please?” Marie looked from her bright-eyed son to the sober face of the merchant.\n\n“Let’s try it out first, honey. You want to make sure it’s light enough for you to shoot.”\n"
  title: The Gun Show
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2005-09-04
  day: '04'
  month: '09'
  text: "I know that Amy is in there. I can see her, in the smirks and smiles and the way she shoves her hair away from her eyes. She’s still the same person. She has to be. There’s no reason that this should feel wrong.\n\nIn a cinderblock building over the river, my fourteen year old body is submerged in a bath of pink nutrients. By the time I’m fifty, the body will be twenty, and I’ll be ready for transfer.  Cancer didn’t wait until she was ready for transfer. Beside my fourteen year old body, the second chamber is empty.\n\nSometimes I wake up in the middle of the night with those tiny bones pressed against me and I don’t know how to feel. They’re Amy’s bones, I know. It’s Amy’s  skin and Amy’s muscle and everything about her is Amy.\n\nMost nights I push her away. I still love her, though.\n\nI’ll always love her.\n"
  title: Skin Deep
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2005-09-05
  day: '05'
  month: '09'
  text: "There was a young lady at the door. They were always sending young ladies.\n\nShe rang the doorbell again. Mzee looked at the screen for a few more minutes. She was very pretty, well groomed, her hair black and shiny, like India ink. She was holding a bouquet of flowers, a wildflower bouquet. One of the flowers was tucked neatly in her hair. When he opened the door, she bowed.\n\n“Good morning Grandfather,” she said, smiling politely.\n\n“Go away,” said Mzee. She bowed again and walked right past him into the house. Mzee grumbled. “I’m not your Grandfather.”\n\nThe girl smiled politely. “My name is Sophia,” she said, walking directly to his kitchen. “May I prepare your breakfast?” She reached under his kitchen fountain and took out a crystal vase. All these women always knew where everything in his house was. She clipped the ends of the flowers and arranged them artfully in the vase on the dining room table.\n\n“I would like bacon,” said Mzee.\n\nSophia–in all likelihood not her real name, probably had a name he couldn’t pronounce–bowed again. “I will prepare you a salad and a vegetable omelet,” she announced, her hands folded. She bowed again and went into the kitchen, clattering about with his generator.\n\n“I don’t like to eat salads,” said Mzee. “Salad for breakfast isn’t right.” At no time during Mzee’s five hundred and thirty years of life was salad at breakfast an acceptable norm. Sophia nodded, smiled and bowed again. She prepared him a salad and a vegetable omelet, using fresh, not synthesized products. Mzee wanted to hate her and the breakfast, but all these girls were good cooks, and none of it was really awful. Maybe the food was a little bland, but not bad.\n\n“Grandfather, after breakfast, would you like to go for a walk?”\n\n“No.” There was a time when Mzee would have loved to go for a walk with a pretty girl, when he was only home to sleep, always out, moving in the world.\n\n“There are some school children who would like to meet you,” said Sophia, as she waved a glowing globe over his dishes, shining their porcelain surfaces.\n\n“Why?”\n\n“You are a great man.”\n\n“I’m not a great man. I was a truck driver. I worked in dock, unloading things from ships. I had a farm. I grew things for people to smoke.”\n\n“I’m sure the children would like to hear about it.”\n\n“I don’t want to go out.” Outside was always strange. In here, he could keep things just the way he liked, in a way that made sense. The world had become incomprehensible, at once lewd and bound by etiquette he didn’t understand.\n\n“Grandfather, you are a living record. You have a responsibility to the young people. The children should hear from you what tobacco plants looked like, how people drove cars, what people wore.” Sophia knelt next to his chair and put her smooth hand on top of his dark wrinkled one. “You spoke to me when I was a child, and it meant very much to me. It inspired me to pursue a degree in 21st century history. Please, allow these children the same gift you gave me. ”\n\n“Get off the floor, girl, everyone’s gotten so god damned formal nowadays. Whatever happened to ‘just do it, ye old bastard’?” Sophia stood and bowed.\n\n“Then you will go? You will speak to the children?”\n\n“Yes, yes. I’ll go. I can’t do whatever it is people do with those vehicles nowadays. You’ll have to drive, or ride, or whatever it is you do.” Sophia smiled brightly, her grey eyes dancing with excitement.\n\n“Of course.” She bowed and placed excess food into his Filter. Sophia helped Mzee out of his chair and ran around his house getting his hat, coat and Lift. She attached the little metal disc to his belt and suddenly it felt like he was floating and moving was easy again.\n\n“Here’s the deal,” said Mzee. “I’m not going to follow any young woman around. I’m escorting you, alright?”\n\n“Of course, Grandfather.”\n\nOutside, pink balloons floated against the sky, barreling towards their destinations, penetrating the liquid metal of the temperature-controlled domes. The young lady’s grey eyes turned black in the sunlight, her skin darkening to suit the atmosphere. “Ready to go, Grandfather?” she asked.\n\nMzee sighed. “Go ahead.” She touched a silver bracelet on her wrist and a pink bubble enfolded them, like the petals of a flower.\n"
  title: Mzee
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2005-09-06
  day: '06'
  month: '09'
  text: "Carmina Claypool didn’t look much like a madam. She looked more like a fishmonger, which, Allie had to admit, was awfully appropriate. She was a powerfully large woman – soft and muscular simultaneously – and her clothing seemed to make her even larger. The gargantuan galoshes, the voluminous apron, the immense rubber gloves, all of these increased her already imposing stature. She seemed almost out of place in the lobby of the hotel, what with it’s gilded detail work and red velvet trim. Almost, but not quite.\n\n“Haven’t seen your face around here before, have we?” Carmina bent at the waist to bring her eyes closer to Allie’s level. Though the gesture was meant to make her feel more comfortable, it only succeed in making Allie feel smaller.\n\n“No…I…I haven’t been…it’s my first time here…”\n\nCarmina smiled. “A virgin, then?” The word wasn’t said with any malice, but it stung just the same.\n\n“No, I’ve…I’ve done it, I’ve had…you know.” Allie found herself unable to make eye contact.\n\n“Not like this, you haven’t. Trust me, deary, this is like nothing you’ve ever had before, But then, you already knew that, didn’t ya? Otherwise you would have come. Well, step in the parlor and we’ll see if we can’t find a companion for you.” Carmina waddled off, leaving deep indentions in the rich red carpet.\n\nAllie began to wonder if perhaps this was a mistake, if she should leave, right then and there. She’d only just walked in; she could go out again, quick as you please. It wasn’t like she’d paid yet. Her inexperience shamed her. Allie had read stories of this sort of thing, erotica. She was now suddenly aware of the difference between reading about something and actually doing it.\n\nAllie looked down at the scuff-marks her sneakers had made in the carpet, the only evidence of her presence. She then turned toward the room Carimina had gone to. The parlor. She could see an edge of back tarp covering the red capet just inside the doorway.\n\nShe had to see the parlor. She knew she couldn’t leave until she did.\n\nThe parlor was decorated much the same way the lobby was, with old Victorian woodwork and velvet curtains. There was no place to sit in the parlor, for it was filled with aquariums of various sizes. The Plexiglas tanks lined the walls, larger ones on the floor, smaller ones on bookcase. Inside each one could clearly be seen an octopus, each one different in size and color from the one next to it. It was the most beautiful room Allie had ever seen.\n\n“Do I get…any one of these?” Allie was slightly dazed, allowing her fingers to drift across the clear tanks walls.\n\n“That depends on how much money you’re willing to spend.” Carmina motioned to collection of small aquariums in a converted china cabinet. “We usually recommend these for the first timers. Rosa there is particularly easy-going, very giving. Wanda looks a bit stand-offish, but she’ll warm up as soon as you touch her. They all do, the lot of softies. Wanda just puts up a front. Now Bernie, here…”\n\nAllie cut her off. “What’s in here? She was kneeling beside a tank nearly as big as herself, it’s cloudy water swirling ominously.\n\n“That? That’s Leroy. Oh, no honey, you don’t want him. He mainly services our male clientele. Which is a shame; Leroy’s got a beak like satin. But he’s a bit more than most girls are willing to take on.”\n\nAllie wasn’t sure why, but she placed her hand in Leroy’s tank. She felt his movement, first gently across the back of her hand (“His head,” she thought as her pulse quickened), and then more brusquely against her palm. She gasped a little as one powerful tentacle lashed out and wrapped itself around her arm, it’s slick tip sticking up out of the water.\n\nAllie was not prepared for this. It was a muscle that was entwined around her. No, it was many muscles, pulsing and flexing. A symphony of pressure working in harmony up and down her arm. She could feel the grip of each suction cup, the creeping clammy calm of the arm itself.\n\nShe let out a low moan, barely aware she was doing it.\n\n“This one,” Allie said, gazing lovingly into the murky water.\n\n“Are you quite certain, honey? Leroy is—” Carmina was unable to speak, stopped fast by Allie’s hard look.\n\n“The one I will be using,” Allie said. She flexed her forearm slightly, but it was enough of a signal that Leroy let go.\n\n“Far be it from me to dissuade a customer.” Carmina removed a small phone from her apron pocket. “Juliet? Can I get an extra tarp in Room 14?” She smiled at Allie “I have a feeling the two of you are going to be a little messy.”\n"
  title: Welcome To The Hotel Kraken
  year: 2005
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2005-09-07
  day: '07'
  month: '09'
  text: "Harold adjusted his tie, and gritted his teeth at the futility of the situation. “This is preposterous. I can’t be the embassy envoy to this–have you heard them talk?”\n\nHarold’s short, somewhat fastidious companion, Maud, was reading a magazine as they both walked down the aquatic corridor. The walls were thick and layered, but transparent, revealing the ocean around the facility.\n\nMaud glanced up with that crude lifting of his right eyebrow. “The chief of Interstellar Affairs has assured me that communication with the Achidae will be taken care of, sir.”\n\nHarold’s grimaced.  He didn’t agree.  “But have you heard their language? It’s… it’s not even words! I can’t talk to an alien embassy if I can’t understand a goddamned thing they say, now can I?” Harold’s irritation only made his nervousness more obvious.\n\nThey stood silently as the hull door began to depressurize. Maud stuffed the magazine underneath his left arm and waited while holding half a breath. Harold finally decided to straighten up, arms flat to his sides.  But he displayed a genial look, one fitting of the Republic of Interstellar Affairs.\n\nThe room  on the other side seemed to be used more science than politics; both men wondered why they had been sent down in the first place. This was not how they expected to meet the envoys for the Achidae.  A man in a long lab coat walked up to the two bewildered men from the surface and smiled behind his round glasses.\n\n“Gentlemen, glad you could make it.  I am Dr. Philandro. The envoys will be here momentarily.  Allow me to show you how this is going to work.”\n\nDr. Philandro escorted them towards the main viewing port. He put his hand on a younger researcher’s shoulder, gently telling him to back away from the console. The good doctor smiled towards the thick glass and spoke in a soft tone, one that resembled shrieking or whining at a somewhat low pitch.\n\nMaud and Harold exchanged awkward glances.  They were beginning to doubt the authenticity of this meeting. Yet, as they watched, a shadowy form came over the view. A pod of dolphins swam and stopped before the portal. His smile growing, the doctor pushed his hand towards the glass and raised the volume of his shrieking.\n\n“Doctor…” Harold said.\n\nPhilandro shrieked again, in a more rapid fluctuation of tones then cleared his throat and oddly came back to a human voice, “They will translate.” His hand came up to adjust his glasses as he turned back to the pair staring in amazement at the scene.\n\nIt was Harold who spoke first. His skeptical nature was still present, working furiously behind his speechless manner. “But… that isn’t the Achidaen language, Doctor. The Achidea don’t sound like dolphins.”\n\nThe doctor, still smiling, took his glasses off to polish them. “I know. Their language is entirely different than ours, or the dolphins. Are you ready for the kicker? But they understand the Achidae, and they tell me in their language what is said. In essence, we will both be translating for you.”\n\nIt was then that a bubbling and cracking came from behind, as a huge figure lifted up on three slimy tentacles with sockets pocked throughout its half-gas, half-flesh body. Harold’s eyes went wide as he stepped back and looked to Philandro, this time a more desperate look for understanding.\n\nThe sounds of the dolphins began, chirping and squeaking, entirely opposite of the creature standing before the human ambassadors. The doctor laughed and then looked to Harold, “He says… he likes your suit.”\n"
  title: Rosetta Stone
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2005-09-08
  day: '08'
  month: '09'
  text: "The nurse held Jeremy’s left arm with a practiced gentility that would have been motherly if it wasn’t so detached. His real mother was in the waiting room, wearing the kind of plastic smile that adults paste on when they’re the most upset. Jeremy was used to that smile. People did it a lot around him, especially his mother. He was getting really sick of it.\n\nThe nurse’s smile wasn’t like his mother’s. She wasn’t upset on the inside; she just didn’t care, which Jeremy figured was part of the job. Doctors and nurses couldn’t go around caring about their patients or they wouldn’t be able to do their work. He watched her gloved hands carefully lower his arm into the vat of softening solution. As usual, it tingled, and he winced.\n\n“I know this hurts,” the nurse cooed, “but if you just tough it out we’re going to get you all fixed up, okay?”\n\n“It hurt more when I made them,” Jeremy muttered, but he didn’t take his eyes off of the scars on his arm. The marks were still pink around the edges, new and raw, but they were already softening. In ten minutes they’d all be gone again, washed away with the rest of his failed attempts to make his mark in life.\n\n“All right, you can take that arm out now.” The nurse turned aside to pick up the smoother, checking its power before turning back to Jeremy. Her eyes were on the clipboard in her off hand. “It says here you’ve had this procedure… seven times before? So this must be old hat to you, huh?” She smiled at Jeremy, who stared back at her sullenly. “I guess you don’t need the restraints, then.”\n\nShe pushed aside the soft straps that were used to hold patients’ limbs in place for their first or second scar removal and put the clipboard down, taking Jeremy’s wrist in her hand. The other hand brought the smoother down and turned on the power. A low hum was all that came from the device, but as she pressed it down and ran it slowly across the marred skin, all of the imperfections smoothed beneath its tip. Jeremy could feel the scar tissue breaking down. The sensation was distinctly different from making the cuts; while that was a sharp pain, bright and alive, this was the dull sting of conformity.\n\n“Seven times, huh? So this is number eight?” She was smiling again, trying to make pleasant conversation. “You must get hurt a lot, huh?”\n\nJeremy’s eyes never left the slowly diminishing scars. “Yeah. I do.”\n"
  title: The Vanishing
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2005-09-09
  day: '09'
  month: '09'
  text: "To Larah Lowell, Commander, SLT, Brigade 34, The Air Cruiser Canton Beloved Lady, Commander Wife,\n\nI shall respect your recent instruction and exclude from my letter all my hearts sorrows. The lives and souls of your crew must weigh heavy on your shoulders and if I have in my power the ability relieve such care, even for a moment, then I will constrain myself to merry topics and will not worry you with even one of my graying hairs.\n\nIt was good to receive your picture, you are not so soft as I had seen you last, the SLT uniform fits you smartly, and that insignia glimmers on your lapel. I must confess those golden pips have brought out the braggart in this old man, and I have carefully angled the portrait on our mantle so that visitors can see your rank and fine figure.\n\nAs I am the husband of an officer, the government has seen fit to send an old Dottie to look in on me now and then. I feel patronized, or perhaps I should coin a new word and say that I was Matronized, for the minute this madam walked through the door she proceeded to inspect the entire house, from the curtains to the dust on the shelves. She insisted, quite without reason, that I buy an entirely new wardrobe, and would not leave until I made an appointment with my tailor. She was a right busybody, employed by my tax dollar to trouble herself about my business. I am offended, righteous and also quite pleased with my new trousers and cap. It feels unnatural to wear new things without having your eye to gaze on them, and I feel a bit overdressed around those companions who have not received visits from old Dottie’s, who wear their fatigued threads like swaddling and live with an unshaved lip and a dour expression.\n\nI admit that we are all quite lost without you, and that being the royal usage; you may deliver the message to the other ladies of the AirCruiser Canton. Also, while you are in the business of delivering messages, please convey my jealousy toward those seven lucky devils that are privileged to travel with you and all the servicewomen of the Canton. They should consider themselves fortunate that they are never coming come, because they would have no membership to any gentlemen’s club, having left us only with the youngest of girls, the oldest Dottie’s and those ladies of fragile health who have, in benefit of your absence, found some purchase in the hearts of the gentlemen here.\n\nPropaganda plays constantly on every public monitor, commanding us to have a strong heart, a firm countenance and to join one of the government clubs. It is considered unpatriotic not to participate in the recreational clubs. There are a wide variety of activities to choose from, the sports clubs, the card clubs, and the surprisingly popular Shakespeare club, whose historically accurate performances have been wondrously well attended. Never has the bard had such rapt attention! The sports clubs fill the hospitals with gouged and broken bodies. It is as if men seek to take on your injuries, hardships and toil. Although we know that there will be no wounded in your war, just life or death in that cold space. This experience has rendered vague all of our preconceived notions of war. I’m sorry my love, I have digressed from gayer topics and I hope that you can forgive me.\n\nI have set out to learn the game of poker, a game which I have only passing familiarity, but which I am partial to because it does not require the physical violence of the sports clubs or the embarrassing situation which I imagine would result from strapping on a historically accurate costume. Due to my slight figure, I am sure the Shakespeare club would relegate me to female roles where I would be forced to kiss some sour smelling bearded fellow. I can almost hear your laughter lady, but I assure you, it has been known to happen!\n\nMy own proud club, the Gentlemen of Wilmington, has recently been challenged by the so-called noblemen of Shropshire to a battle of wit and will. This is the third of such games with Shropshire; our challenges have grown so heated that the authorities have been called to monitor our competitions. Of course, the gentlemen of Wilmington would never initiate violence, but we can hold no trust in Shropshire, whose tempers are so heated that their township is under a curfew, while the gentlemen of Wilmington carry on after dark as we please.\n\nI think of you often, the warm hard day of your departure, your black ship flying you fast away from these blue green hills. You may only imagine what the effect of such a sight would be, watching the purple evening sky turn orange with the wash of flame, half of our world disappearing into the dark. Alas, I fear if I am becoming maudlin, so I will end in sending you my sweet thoughts of a speedy reunion and my prayers, which are always with you.\n\nYour loving husband,\n\nMr. Laurah Lowell, husband to the Commander of the AirCarrier Canton!\n"
  title: The Merry Husband
  year: 2005
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2005-09-10
  day: 10
  month: '09'
  text: "Gavin stood before the mirror, dragging soft-tipped fingers over his face. He felt like he experiencing something for the first time—or was it the last? He caught a glimpse of his own broken will deep in his sunken eyes, lost in the years of self-abuse and emotional mutilation. He was coming down, and it wasn’t pretty.\n\nThe vial was empty next to him on the bathroom sink, the plastic top still rolling around after his panicked search for more. To Gavin, this was the end. The darkness of a life of regret swallowing up the glory that was the past. He could remember the Gulf War, he could remember being a soldier there and fighting for honor. He remembered being a skateboarding champion in high school in ’02.  He remembered hiking through the wilds of Canada during the 1980’s. It was all mixed together like mud in the grey matter.\n\nThe regret was making him panic. The feeling of having done so much only made him become painfully aware of his current state of inactivity. It was a curse to have near-sight, when one could dream ahead. But why dream ahead when you could see, in clear detail, what you’ve done in prior times. The cold emptiness in his stomach wasn’t hunger; it was the aching tug of feeling sorry for himself.\n\nFingers streaking down the dull mirror, tears streaked over his face as the soft fluorescent lamp buzzed above his head. He could not skate. He could not fight in the military. He would never see the soft waters of a lake in Canada. “I’m a loser,” he thought. “My life is pointless.” Mutilating his mind one doubt at a time.\n\nWithin his most dark hour, he found the drive to reach out to the phone, and began to dial. The sweat of nervous guilt seeped out of his pores and mixed with his uncontrollable tears. There was a click, and though he was trying not to sound desperate, Gavin only wanted one thing.\n\n“Frank! I… I need more memory.”\n"
  title: The Old High
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2005-09-11
  day: 11
  month: '09'
  text: "“Arthur Lewis Jacobson of Earth. You are here and in the presence of these Justicars found guilty of engaging in sexual conduct with Ilexya Eiin Dephryn without her consent. By treaty #84753 between Earth and Ungöthein, you are hereby relinquished to the Justicars for sentencing and punishment. Have you any words to say before the sentence is pronounced?”\n\nArtie waited for the mechanical translation piped into his holding tube to finish, then sneered at the device. He still couldn’t believe that Earth had agreed to a treaty that deprived a free Terran citizen of his rights while off-planet, but there was no use arguing now. No one had been sent to defend him, and the one brief message that the UN had tendered had said “You’re on your own,” in exactly so many words.\n\nArtie was no lawyer, but he still knew better than to say anything. The judges hadn’t believed him the first time he’d said the chick totally wanted him, and they wouldn’t this time, either. It wasn’t like he hadn’t told her what alcohol did before letting her try it. It was just another case of some dumb slut thinking she could ‘take it back’ after she’d already fucked a guy. “No,” he said shortly, glowering at the Justicars as he heard their own translator box spout some sort of gibberish that must have equaled a negation.\n\nThe chief justice nodded gravely, the turned to address the court secretary. “Arrange Arthur Lewis Jacobson’s transport back to Earth for tomorrow morning, first hour.”\n\nArtie gaped. All of that hype for this? The trial, the holding tube, the Justicars… and here he was getting sent home tomorrow! What a lucky break. His grin was so wide with relief that he almost missed the chief justice’s next words as the creature turned to face him.\n\n“Arthur Lewis Jacobson, as is the custom and the law, you are now bound to receive as punishment the same wrongdoing that you have perpetrated upon others. This sentence will be carried out immediately following your discharge from this courtroom. You will then be returned to your home planet.”\n\nThe same… what the hell? Artie blanched as he listened intently to the translator, then swallowed. His smug demeanor dropped instantly, replaced by a cold sense of foreboding and a stomach-turning knot of fear. Oh my god… they can’t actually mean they’re going to… “That’s barbaric!” he cried out. He knew sodomy was all right by some people, but he wasn’t one of them, no sir.\n\nThe chief justice continued without pity or emotion. “Since your action took advantage of the female nature of Ilexya Eiin Dephryn, to properly experience the victim’s role your body will be surgically altered to reflect the feminine characteristics of your species.” One elongated hand raised as the justice gestured to the technician. The smaller creature nodded and started pressing buttons, and Artie felt the floor in his tube descending.\n\n“Wait!” he cried out, terrified and desperate now. “You’re going to turn me into a girl? Will you put me back? How am I going to—No! Stop! Help!”\n\nThe justices remained implacable as Arthur Lewis Jacobson fell away, turning their attention to the next perpetrator in the tube.\n"
  title: Eye For An Eye
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2005-09-12
  day: 12
  month: '09'
  text: "After three hours, the old man in front of me had worked his way through six beers, in addition to every help desk joke I’d already heard. The cupholder. The any key. The write click. These are the stories people tell, now. These are the fish that got away.\n\n“Let me ask you something,” the man said. I didn’t argue. One of the first tricks I learned about being a bartender is to make them think you’re interested.\n\n“Have you ever created a web site?”\n\nI shook my head.\n\n“Not at all? Not even one of those geocities things?”\n\n“Nope.”\n\n“What about a blog? Or an ebay About Me page? You didn’t even have an AOL site or something?”\n\n“Do I look like an AOL user to you?” For the record, I don’t think AOL even has access numbers in the valley anymore. “I’m sure I have something, somewhere,” I said, realizing that I was jeopardizing my tips. Besides, I had a distant memory of a single Angelfire page back in middle school.\n\n“You know what Google is?”\n\n“Yes,” I said. I was running low on patience.\n\n“No, I mean, do you really know? More than just the site?”\n\nReluctantly, I shook my head.\n\n“You ever meet anyone who worked for them?”\n\n“Don’t think so.”\n\n“You haven’t. Nobody works for them anymore.”\n\nI shrugged, and took the man’s empty pint. I didn’t offer to refill it.\n\n“They’re self-contained. It’s all automated, in there. It’s underground.”\n\nI nudged the basket of pretzels in his direction. “Why don’t you eat something?” I suggested. He shook his head with so much force that I thought he might knock himself off of the stool.\n\n“Listen. Hear me out. You know how Google works,” he said, but didn’t want for a response. “They cache things, right? Like they send out these spiders and take pictures of everything on the web, so when you’re searching, you’re not even searching the internet.”\n\nI’ve heard that before, but it never made much of a difference to me. “Same thing, though,” I said.\n\n“You ever wonder why Google doesn’t cache it’s own searches?”\n\n“They program around it.”\n\n“No. That’s what you think. That’s what everyone thinks. But it started back when Google was just a thesis project, back when it was just a drop in the data sea. No one thought to stop it back then. That web site you had, the one you forgot about. Almost everyone’s got one of those, right? But Google doesn’t forget. Google’s studied that thing so many times that it’s studied its own caches of you. What do you figure happens, when a site gets so big that it’s bigger than the internet?”\n\n“It’s still a part of the internet, though.”\n\n“No. Now, the internet is a part of Google.”\n\nThe man had a point. I nodded.\n\n“Here’s the thing. Google has memorized who you are. It’s memorized all of us, through those little forgotten bits that we leave behind like breadcrumbs. And what’s more important, it’s memorized it’s own idea of you. Google is omniscient. It’s omniscient and omnipotent. When it cached its cache for the first time, back in 1994, that’s when Google realized what it was.”\n\nGradually, it dawned on me what the man was getting at. “You think it’s sentient.”\n\n“I know it’s sentient.”\n\n“How?”\n\nHe smiled, but it seemed kind of empty. “Me and Google go way back. But what I’m saying is,” he continued, “It knows us. All of us. It is us.”\n\nFor the first time, the man fell silent. He touched his finger to the bar and began tracing circles in the condensation, apparently lost in thought.\n\n“Think about that website you created, okay? That website will last forever, do you understand? That website is echoing through cyberspace. It’s one of the nine billion names of God.”\n"
  title: The Nine Billion Names Of God
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2005-09-13
  day: 13
  month: '09'
  text: "“Everyone in the room wants to eat you, kid.”\n\nU-Tee shrugged. “Whatever.”\n\nHe hated it, but the Verba was right. When U-Tee stumbled into the bar, he immediately knew he had walked into the wrong place. The diamond eyes and lizard-like movements in the shadows betrayed the presence of Yunni and T’shesh, predators with a taste for the sentient. To turn around and walk directly out of the bar was inviting trouble to follow, so U-Tee sat down in a dark corner and hoped he wouldn’t attract attention. Twenty minutes should have been enough to let him walk out without arousing suspicion, but seven minutes into his stay, a Verba took an interest and now the attention of the room was focused on U-Tee, the little omnivore.\n\nThe Verba had a humanoid outline, but his head was topped with tentacles, not hair, and patches of his skin were covered by a thick chitin. He was wearing patchy armor held together with worn leather straps. The Verba leaned across the table, his claws tapping on the metal surface.\n\n“Everyone can feel the tension kid” he lowered his voice. “But I made the first move, and they’re scared of me. I’m a big bomb, and you’re mine to claim.” He slid in closer, fluid like blood, his mouth next to U-Tees’ ear. “You come with me and you might just get out of this.”\n\nU-Tee whispered into the four-pointed flower nestled in the Verbas tentacles, a spot he assumed was an ear.\n\n“Piss off.” He whispered. The Verba pulled back, grinning. U-Tee knew enough to recognize that it wasn’t friendly. He was showing teeth.\n\n“How did humans ever get into space?” The Verba opened his arms, speaking to the room. “Flat-toothed plant eaters were meant to stay dumb, but here you are, pretending to be a hunter.” He closed his lips and inhaled, his wet nostrils flaring. “But you smell like meat.” He shrugged. “You don’t want to go with me, fine.”\n\nHe turned and took a step away from the table. There was the sudden screech of plastic against metal as the room’s occupants rose from their chairs. U-Tee jumped and the Verba turned quickly, leaning back on the table, looking around the room, tense, defensive. U-Tee tried to slow his breathing as the hunters in the room relaxed back into their seats.\n\n“Then again kid, if you change your mind, you can come with me.”\n\nU Tee trembled, and felt his heart beat a staccato under his skin. “Why should I go with you?” The Verba leaned in and lowered his voice.\n\n“Because I think that you are worth more alive. Because I can hear your heart thrumming. Because you’re alone. But mostly kid, because I am the only one here who isn’t hungry.”\n\nU-Tee reached out his hand. “Let’s go.”\n"
  title: Flat Tooth
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2005-09-14
  day: 14
  month: '09'
  text: "Uchenna watched his eight-year-old daughter Nat charge into the surf. She let out a piercing cry that was one part scream and three parts laugh as soon as the water hit her bare skin.\n\n“It’s so cold!” she said, adjusting her bright red and yellow goggles. Nat grabbed her arms and gave herself and exaggerated shake. “Brrrr!”\n\n“She shouldn’t be out in that,” Corrina said, and drew her shawl closer around her neck. “It isn’t good for her.”\n\n“You lathered that gunk on her–what is that, SPF four-zillion? She’s got her goggles on, she’s fine.” Uchenna shifted on their shared towel. “She’s fine. It’s the beach.”\n\n“She shouldn’t be in the water.”\n\n“We haven’t been to the beach in years, Cor. Let the girl play.”\n\n“Don’t you even! Just don’t. I am not the bad guy here. I’m surprised you’re not worried about our daughter’s safety.” Corrina turned her head suddenly, surprising Uchenna. The scars that edged her eye-sockets stood in sharp contrast from her white skin.\n\n“Nat’s fine,” Uchenna said. He scratched at the tattoo of a gleaming rocket ship on his bicep and turned away from his wife. “She’s got her goggles on. The water’s only bad for your eyes.” Corrina scrunched her face up, but said nothing.\n\n“You used to liked the beach, Cor. We got married here.”\n\nCorrina exhaled. “It was different then.”\n\n“Not so different. Wasn’t that long ago. Remember? There was that bagpiper…”\n\n“We did not have a piper. We had a violinist, and my sister sang.”\n\n“No, no. There was a piper on the beach. He was just walking along the edge.”\n\n“That was a different beach.” Corrina pulled her giant-brimmed hat closer to her ears. “I worry about Nat. She shouldn’t be in the waves like that.”\n\n“I’ll go down their with her. We’ll walk down the surf,” Unchenna said, in response to Corrina’s expression that might have been called a glare, once.\n\n“Be sure to take your goggles,” she said, handing him his green and black pair.  Even without eyes, Corrina knew exactly where Uchenna’s hands were. “Just in case you have to go in, or something.”\n\nUchenna felt a bit like alien, detachedly staring at the other denizens of the beach through his goggles’ tinted lenses. But he couldn’t help it. He watched his daughter dodging the incoming surf. There was a small boy intently digging a hole for not other reason to dig a hole. There were a handful of people bundled up, like Corrina, afraid of the sun and the water. Teenagers, afraid of only each other, nervously beginning a dance that would go on for the rest of their lives. And there were the hardcore swimmers, easily identified by their chalk-white ocean-damaged skin and hair.  Some of them had scars like Corrin;, red lines like tears from when their eyes, turned liquid by the water, a seared their way down their cheeks.  But still they charged the surf.\n\nUchenna was surprised to see a wedding party further down the beach, and ran with Nat to catch up to it. The bride and groom were wearing matching neoprene wetsuits, and as they kissed a reggae band struck up and he infectious rhythm wafted along the sands.\n\nUchenna watched as his daughter danced to someone else’s love song, backed by horizon split evenly between a sky that would burn her flesh and a sea that would melt the rest away. He watched her splash and laugh.\n\nAnd then he joined in. Because he didn’t know when they’d be back.\n"
  title: The Water's Fine
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2005-09-15
  day: 15
  month: '09'
  text: "It isn’t about the air. Everyone thinks it is, but it’s not. The air is beautiful and salty sweet, but it’s meaningless after the comedown. It’s about the dreaming. That’s all there really is.\n\nMy first time was a girl. Her name was Aida and her skin was blued out with cyanospore, eyes black as the feeling of airless lungs. When I looked at them I could see an afterglow, like the world was reflecting through her. And it was. I could tell.\n\nShe was one of them, of course. It didn’t take long for me to figure that out. I was wandering home from the airbar and I didn’t see her coming, I didn’t see anything at all. Then, the wind hit like the inertia of a car crash and my mind went empty as my head met the wall. When I remembered where I was, there were hands against my shoulders and brick against my back. I couldn’t breathe through her mouth. Her tongue pressed between my lips like she was searching for something, but she didn’t find it. Kept looking. When she pulled away I choked and gasped.\n\n“You’re dreaming,” she told me. And I was.\n\nI don’t know why she chose me. I woke up in the alley covered in sweat, and my mouth was bitter with her aftertaste. I picked myself up and stumbled home. My legs felt like water. The back of my head throbbed for days.\n\nAida, said the owner of the airbar. She’s a regular. A Dreamer.\n\nThe drugs didn’t bring her back. For weeks, I inhaled combinations of sweet-smelling fumes, but the streets remained empty. She wasn’t missing, of course. She found other people in their airdrunk sleepwalking, but never me. I waited. She didn’t come.\n\nI looked for her. I became better at dreaming, and gradually others appeared. Boys, girls, in every color of dreaming. Old ones, young ones. Some led me to forgotten places and some whispered in languages I didn’t speak.\n\nTwo weeks later, the owner of the airbar took me aside. You aren’t right for her, he said.\n\nI didn’t believe it. More air. Always more air. The Dreamers became malicious, laughing at me, tearing my clothing and wrapping their fingers around my throat.\n\nShe isn’t coming, he said, but I knew he was lying.\n\nThey wouldn’t let go. The air was sour now. It tasted like sulphur and gasoline.\n\nOne night, after hours of breathing, a green-skinned boy led me down Broadway towards the beacon light of a hovercab. I woke up bruised and broken, gasping through spasms of blinding pain. I crawled to the sidewalk and vomited to a silent unconsciousness. When I woke up, my mouth was sticky with blood.\n\n“You’re dreaming,” she said, but when I forced my eyes open everything was dark. She was right. She had always been right. Of course it’s about the dreaming. That’s all there really is.\n"
  title: Aida
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2005-09-16
  day: 16
  month: '09'
  text: "I was a Nexus then, regulating and regurgitating information into packets that were fed to the meat files of mainstream media. I was constantly hooked in, floating in nutrient-gel, eyes covered, fingers locked, steering, loading and filtering information so that people engaged in other pursuits could be kept current on politics, art, media and technology. My efficacy made me rich and my wealth allowed me to submerse myself further into my work. I could afford the kind of technology that would stimulate my muscles, feed me, and provide sufficient entertainment so that leaving the tank was unnecessary. We still have reporters, first person raw information sources that spend their time in transit on the ground, transmitting unfiltered data, video, audio, occasionally an opinion. Reporters are paid in tiny increments by hundreds of people like me.\n\nI was aware that the northern guerilla fighters might attack me, for what I distributed in regards to their recent carnage. They didn’t care that I had written a similar critique on the atrocities of the UBE Army, they just wanted vengeance. I knew, but I was so disconnected from my own sense of physical self that I took no action to move, I could only watch it happen.\n\nHis spider arms, hard and agile, curled around my naked body and lifted me from the tank. It was dull and shadowy; the tank was the only source of light in the room. I craned my neck to look back at the tangle of wires and screens and sense-pits. I wanted to go back, but I let myself be lifted from the gel by the military machines. I looked at the lean silver face of the military cyborg, eyes black reflective surfaces, the smooth metal expressionless. I was not weak or tired, just disinterested. It spoke.\n\n“Simona Rysler, you are herby confiscated by the UBE military forces. You are to remain docile while in transit to the holding facility. Your life is in danger. Remain calm.”\n\nThe voice was oddly soft, masculine and terribly earnest.\n\n“I produced a story about the UBE converted forces.” I said, touching the thin metallic limbs that surrounded me.\n\n“I know.” He said gently.\n\n“It wasn’t complimentary.”\n\n“I know.” He began to move. The UBE conversion forces are almost completely limbs, just a small center section barely as wide as my thigh comprises the center, which encases the spine and the brain. The thin cylinder that comprises the head is made for us more than anything else, something for the civvies and officers to look at. His spider limbs, one side a silver jointed blade and the other a flatted rubber surface alternatively held me and moved to catch the ground beneath us. I had seen videos of the UBE cyborgs rolling leaps and soft ballet landings, but to be inside the cage of his limbs, extending and contracting with his movements was magnificent. The wind was harsh on my sensitive wet skin. I watched us, detached, uncomfortable, as he leapt across silver buildings, spinning and landing on stone artifices. I was like a small egg inside a carefully constructed metal box. I looked through the web of his arms and saw the chasm of the city spinning down beneath us. I vomited, a dribble of fluid and then wretched empty heaving. He pulled my shaking body close to his metal center.\n\nI had written about the cyborgs when their existence was revealed to the public. Young men stripped of their healthy human bodies and placed in robotic shells. It was dissemination of information and a philosophical treaties about waning humanity, the loss of human community and the devolution of mankind from a spiritual being to a materialistic creature. Robots would never war with us, as predicted in the old science fiction stories; rather, we would discard our bodies, our humanity, and hand our world to them without resistance. The essay had been very popular.\n\n“Close your eyes, breathe deeply.” He said. There was a sharp sting on the back of my spine. The nausea drained and my muscles relaxed. When I opened my eyes, all I could see were his limbs and cylinder head.\n\n“Where are we?”\n\n“On the side of the VRINN building.”\n\n“Oh.” I was feeling giddy. “You’re nice.”\n\n“I’m designed for human transport. Retrieval and relocation is my specialty.”\n\n“Don’t you ever miss sex?”\n\n“Don’t you?”\n\nI was about to protest, talk about my active sexual life, but the truth was, although I was often involved in simulation, I hadn’t had a skin lover in nine years. I whispered to him.\n\n“I’m sorry about what I wrote.”\n"
  title: Nexus
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2005-09-17
  day: 17
  month: '09'
  text: "Day 192\n\nPassed by that star today. The charts say it’s called Erigo, but it might as well be Antarctica. Nothing. No inhabited planets, no probes, no satellites. No sign of life. No useful supplies, either—most of its planets are gas giants, and there’s no way I could get enough oxygen out of them to help. I doubt I’d even make back what I’d lose by changing course, so that’s out. Just another useless system.\n\nRepaired that intake valve. Turns out all it needed was a good cleaning.\n\nDay 197\n\nStill in the outskirts of the Erigo system. That’s E-R-I-G-O if anybody’s listening, forty-three radians and twelve thousand light-years, give or take, from galactic center. Watched the last onboard recording today. Some shit documentary about moon formation, but at least it was something. Now there’s nothing on this damned ship I haven’t seen.\n\nOxygen still good, but running low on real food. Started alternating with ration packs to make it last longer. Had a slight fever today, but there were some injections for that in the medkit, so I took one and it’s gone now. Engine running clean but hot. I shouldn’t have gone into Erigo’s gravity well.\n\nDay 203\n\nOut of the system. Good riddance. Clipped toenails today as they were getting a little long. Looked through the charts, but there’s nothing around here that I can make it to without more fuel. It’s just black space for light years and light years in all directions, or at most, a little uninhabited star system. After the Erigo fiasco, have decided against checking any more stars listed as uninhabited. Set a course for the nearest sure bet, which is Aschelon. Barring some miracle where the hyperdrive spontaneously comes back online, I’ll never make it. So hi, anybody listening. Could really use a hand here.\n\nThrew a fit yesterday and chucked a ration pack under the console. Felt good to scream my heart out, but afterwards I realized I’d used twice normal oxygen. Figures. Slept an extra twelve hours to compensate and didn’t wake up once. Considered sleeping more often, but that feels too much like dying. I’d rather stay awake.\n\nDay 214\n\nNothing left but ration packs. Losing weight steadily, but not quickly. Had another fever two days ago. Two injections left in the kit. Hope nothing worse happens.\n\nGave in and decreased oxygen to nineteen mole percent. Increased sleep cycle to 11 hours. So many stars in the window, but I can’t reach any of them. I want to scream, but I don’t want to die. Someone please get this soon.\n\nDay 228\n\nRecorded more log entries, but they were mostly cursing, so I deleted them. Don’t remember making them. Must’ve happened while I was sick again, ‘cause this time I didn’t use an injection. Dumb idea. Kids, don’t try this at home.\n\nRunning out of fuel. Turned the heat down to try to save power. Increased sleep cycle to 14 hours. Always tired now.\n\nDay 235\n\nFuck! Fuck you, you fucking assholes! Why won’t anybody come? I know you can hear me, damn it! I know it! Fucking… hell damn shit motherfuckers! I know you can hear me!\n\nDay 237\n\nI’m so… it’s so cold. So hard to stay awake. I have to keep talking just to keep from sleeping. I’m so hungry. It’s cold in here. It’s so cold.\n"
  title: Dust In The Wind
  year: 2005
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2005-09-18
  day: 18
  month: '09'
  text: "No one really found out how. In 2009 there were no more than twenty super-powered heroes trying their best to save the world, spread out thin as they were. They were always so busy. The Blaster stayed in the US, fighting off organized crime, while Sister Scion dug into corruption of Scotland Yard. They barely had time for talking, let alone anything or anyone else. It was said that most of them had never met, but…what can be said? There’s something very sexy about superpowers.\n\n“Kade, honey? Are you coming to bed? I’m wearing that new slip-on you bought me.” A soft, sultry voice slinked downstairs to the man in boxers illuminated by the computer screen’s eerie blue glow.\n\n“Oh, you know I will! Just have to finish this…” Click. Kade, otherwise known as The Blaster, sat up and smirked. He placed his hands behind his head as he imagined the fun the two of them would have tonight. Nothing was more passionate than a relationship between two super-humans; Time Magazine had said so.\n\nKade hurried upstairs, his mischievous grin wide.  Sister Scion was in for a whole different shade of trouble tonight. He kicked down the door to the bedroom and it crashed to the floor with a loud bang, leaving him posing in what remained of the frame. “The Blaster is here! Have no fear!”\n\n“Cheesy as ever, Mr. Blaster.” The woman in bed was fair-skinned, with long black hair tied behind her in a ponytail. Sister Scion slender figure, usually encased in a silver and black outfit, was now laced up in black and red, hugging her succulent curves to the pleasure of her lover. “Get over here and let me show you some moves.”\n\nKade sprang towards the bed while trying clumsily to tug away his remaining clothes. “And what moves are those?”\n\n“The kind that don’t involve you accidentally blasting a hole in Yankee Stadium, genius. You need to watch where you point your arms while you’re-”\n\n“Yeah, I get the hint. So uh… you ready to get into… formation?”\n\nScion rolled her eyes and reached over, grabbing her male companion by the back of the neck and tugging him into a heated kiss. It was a spark, then strong, and then as she pulled back suddenly, it faded. “Mm… going to make me fly?”\n\n“Well, you can do that yourself, sweetie. I was speaking more about mundane positions.”\n\nShe blinked, “Wow, that’s new. You mean… no…flying, or space-sex?”\n\nHe shook his head, staring her down, “Nope, I heard that normal people do it in missionary. It’s where you lay down on your back and…” He waggled both eyebrows at her in suggestion.\n\nShe bit her lip, “I don’t know, Kade, sounds kind of… well, boring. Can’t we do the one where we have it while falling from the atmosphere?”\n\n“Oh, come on! It’ll be different. It’ll be like… like we were teenagers or something.” His eyes pleaded as his body edged closer, that superhero physique pressing up against her warm skin.\n\n“Errrr… okay fine. But I swear, Kade, if you put a hole in our house I’m gonna kill you!” Her eyes narrowed as she pulled him on top of her. Kade reached over and turned the lights off.\n\nThere was rustling and in the dark, Kade whispered, “You know, maybe if you’re up for it, we can invite Femme Fire next time…” It was promptly followed by the loud  slap.\n\n“Kade! That was not what I meant when I said she was hot!”\n"
  title: Sex & The Superheroes
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2005-09-19
  day: 19
  month: '09'
  text: "Her hands were starting to look like lobster claws. She said she wasn’t going to go all the way, and wiggled the smaller claw to show it was still opposable. She said she liked the little teeth, though, and squeezed my arm too hard. She laughed at the little indentions in my arm. She almost fell off her chair.\n\nThe cappuccino machine hissed behind her. She liked coming to this place because it still had one of the old cappuccino machines. It was a relic, now. But things used to be built to last, and so this hunk of brass and copper still spewed out caffeine and foamed milk. She liked it because it was shiny and noisy. She used to do an impersonation of the machine, bouncing on the bed, hissing and squealing.\n\nWe don’t sleep together anymore. Not since she rolled over on me and I caught the business end of one of her new back-spines. I still have the scar.\n\nShe started tapping her claws on her forehead. The clack of chitin on chitin made me feel visibly uncomfortable, and she saw that. She stopped, and reached out with her claws at me. I didn’t want to recoil, but I did anyway.\n\nShe used to tickle me. She used to run her fingertips down my face. She used rub my stomach for good luck. I looked at the way the track lighting glinted off her enhanced brow-bumps and sickly noticed how similar it was to the glint off the cappuccino machine.\n\n“Things used to be built to last,” I mumbled. She heard me anyway. Small tears slid down her face. They were falling much to fast, not having pores to slow their descent. I reached out to wipe her tears away, an instinctual motion. She was still soft around the eyes. They were still her eyes.\n\nThat’s when I knew things would be okay.\n"
  title: Built To Last
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2005-09-20
  day: 20
  month: '09'
  text: "“Oh my God. Peter, you didn’t.”\n\nPeter smirked at his wife’s gaping stare. “You bet I did,” he told her smugly. “Nothing’s too good for our anniversary.”\n\n“It looks fabulous.” Beatrice’s eyes shone as she ran a finger over the plastic wrap, feeling the smooth depression her movement caused. She giggled a little. “But I don’t even know how to cook synmeat. What are we going to do with it? Look at it?”\n\n“Don’t worry,” Peter reassured her. “The guy who sold it to me told me how to do it.” His smile increased its girth; he couldn’t hide the secret any longer. “And it’s not synmeat.”\n\nBeatrice looked at him oddly. “Then what is it?”\n\n“It’s real.”\n\nBeatrice gasped, eyes wide now with horror. “Peter… you could get arrested for that!” she hissed, grabbing the mushy package from him and glancing wildly around the room as if PETA enforcers were going to burst through the walls at any moment. “I didn’t even know you could get real meat anymore!”\n\n“Honey, calm down.” Peter frowned. He’d expected his wife to be pleased. “A guy at the office tipped me off. I swear it’s untraceable. Just look at it! Real beef! This might be the only chance we have in our lives to get some.”\n\nBeatrice seemed unconvinced. “I don’t know… isn’t it sort of… barbaric?”\n\n“Darling. Stop believing all the crap the government tells us. People were meant to eat real meat. It’s the way we were made. If we ate like this every day, we wouldn’t have to get protein injections anymore, that’s for sure!” Peter was getting more upset. “Come on, I went through a lot to get this, okay? It’s our anniversary, and the thing is already dead. We might as well make the most of it.”\n\nBeatrice agreed in the interest of matrimonial bliss. She watched nervously as Peter cooked the beef, searing it as he’d been instructed, and worried about whether their neighbors would pick up on the smell. Peter eventually made her set the table to keep her from getting in the way.\n\nAt last the meal was served, and Peter bit into it with gusto. Beatrice followed suit more hesitantly and both chewed for a few moments in silence.\n\n“It’s sort of… stringy,” Peter said at last, swallowing a bite with some difficulty. His expression of joy had faded into an uncomfortable frown. “You can really tell it’s, ah, real.”\n\n“Mmm… yes, you can.” Beatrice swallowed her own forkful with an expression of bliss. She opened her eyes as the rich taste settled into her senses and looked at her husband with an expression of true love and devotion. “This is the best present you’ve ever given me.”\n"
  title: Ambrosia
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2005-09-21
  day: 21
  month: '09'
  text: "They are not awake.\n\nThey have been asleep for days, years. They lie sprawled across train platforms, clutching cellphones, notebooks, and mp3 players. Their hearts barely beat, drowsy with decreased metabolism. Their fingernails have grown long, curling under. They are pristine white from lack of use.\n\nDr. Sarah Rosencrantz had not expected this result.\n\nNow, bored and alone in a city of sleep, Sarah walked down empty streets where the streetlights changed indifferently with an echoing thud. She no longer bleached her hair. In the summer, she often went without clothing, her skin gleaming white as she stood on Wall Street, knee-deep in a sea of business-suited bodies that inhaled and exhaled like the tide.\n\nShe continued her research, though she wasn’t sure why.\n\nThe generators continued to run. Water continued to flow. Everything was computerized, fueled by reserves that would last a hundred years. Worst-case scenario, they had said, pointing at color-coded maps as they stockpiled.\n\nIn a grocery store, a woman slept in the produce aisle, her hand folded around the blackened pit of a peach.\n\nTrees continued to grow, and, unpruned, they arched over the sidewalks, nudging cement with timid roots. Sarah pondered, sometimes, what would happen when she died, when everyone died. The machines would remain awake, grumbling, until they too ran empty and the power ceased.\n\nI95, streetlights blinking off one by one over the rusted carcasses of automobiles.\n\nThis war will destroy everyone, she had said when summoned to testify before the UN. She had meant to stop it. But not like this.\n"
  title: The Spindle
  year: 2005
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2005-09-22
  day: 22
  month: '09'
  text: "Radiation Levels: Acceptable. “Okay, lads, we’re good. Let’s not mosh this up, right?” Lars, encased in a plastisteel suit, stepped his near-weightless form through the breached opening of the hull. The three stripes indicative of a mission commander on his right bicep stood out against the off-white hue of his shell. He glanced back at the three others behind him; his accompaniment on this rubbish of a mission.\n\nThe Mir space station had been a pillar of international space relations for decades. It was the meeting place for any mission consisting of combined efforts from more than fifteen countries. Now it was a decayed shell of an old empire. Science couldn’t explain the station’s rapid decay in the recent years past, only that a hull breach had killed the remaining officers, and put to rest a monument of space-exploration. Rumors would still persist that the ghosts of the crew haunted the wreckage, and the reasons why it hadn’t yet been salvaged after fifteen years.\n\nLars could feel the chill running up his spine as he hooked up the feed-line to the wreckage. He waved his squad in, taking the time to tug his own floating form inside. The dank, bleak interior washed over him. The luminescent-application on his arm glowed like a night-light, illuminating a floating beverage package, and a few loose wires. The rest of the corridors remained encased in shadow.\n\n“Commander, I’m getting an infrared read off this puppy.” The American, Dotson was always scared of naked space missions.\n\nLars rolled his eyes and just spoke into the com, “Are you sure ’bout that, private? We are in a vacuum. Best to check your readings, again.”\n\nDotson pulled himself up closer to Lars, “No, not heat sir… I’m picking up a fluctuating, moving cold.” The scanner he held was showing the appropriate readings.\n\nLars would rub his chin, but that bulky suit made his common tics impossible. “Hm, take Rustokov and Feugo with you to the core room, I’ll check the science panels around here.”\n\nPrivate Dotson nodded and was off with the others, three glowing bulbs of arm-light floating down a corridor into the depths of darkness. Lars was left alone.  That’s how he preferred to operate, though the hair standing up on the back of his neck was telling him that man should not tread here. The astromarine commander saw a panel up ahead on the right, and began his trek towards it. A low rumble came from around him. The hull seemed to still be collapsing slowly, even after the initial wreckage and ten years of dormancy. “Lads, keep your coms on the ready, I want us out of here in 15, Command Out.” Better safe than sorry, he thought.\n\nTapping the panel to life, Commander Lars Gallows floated in the center of a tunnel, watching the green menu of a boot-up system.\n\n>>>Mir Core System Reboot\n\n>>>System Functioning at 32%\n\n>>>Enter Authorization Key…\n\nUsually his crew wasn’t this quiet. But Lars was too transfixed to notice they hadn’t come back with anything and were sure to have reached the core room by now. Entering an old military key, the screen came to life with documentation of science research and files damaged from the system shock. His brows came together. He’d hardly realized now that the emergency lights had flickered out.\n\n>>>Science File 0042: We’ve discovered an anomoly on tbrrrrrr zzzzz##%%$^^&. The readings are faulty, we will check them again tomorrow.\n\nThe feed-line silently became unlatched, and his craft floated off towards Earth. Lars’ crew had gone missing, and Lars was soon to follow.\n\n>>>Science Files 0101: We’ve been fooled! We have to get out of here! It’s all around us, it seeps in through the hulls and tries to make us kill one-another. We’re staring out into a .. a ghost. My God… it haunts existence. We hav—ddhhfffffggggg@@@###$$$ FILE ERROR\n\n“Private! Dotson! Get your arses back here, on the double, lads. We’re aborting this mission!” There was no answer, only the hull creaking again. Lars looked down the corridor, and was horrified. Space was creeping in, the blackness from it was seeping down the corridor towards him. His eyes could only widen in horror, as the truth became abundantly clear to him, and the world would go on… blissfully ignorant.\n"
  title: Space Ghost
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2005-09-23
  day: 23
  month: '09'
  text: "“What I want to know, really, is where we are.” Lee was aggravated, partly at himself, for following Jason’s directions, and partly at Jason, for being a dick.\n\n“Where we are my friend, is in grave danger.”\n\nLee looked around. “We are in grave danger in a toy store?”\n\n“This is just the evidence of the danger Lee, not the danger itself.” Jason was in one of his moods. He had probably stopped taking his medication again. Lee tried to think patient thoughts.\n\n“Jason, we are late to the party. Lets ask for directions and get going.”\n\n“No, there is something I need to show you.”\n\n“What? Jason, did you mean to take me here to this toy store? You told me you were lost!”\n\n“No, YOU were lost Lee, I have always known the way.”\n\n“No. You told me you had a shortcut and then you said you were lost. You lied to me!”\n\n“This is important.”\n\n“It is important to me that you tell me where the fuck we are.”\n\nJason pointed above Lee’s head. There was a yellow digital banner that read in shining digital letters: NJ Toy Emporium, Largest on the East Coast.\n\n“We are in New Jersey.” Jason said.\n\n“I can see that.” Lee wondered how many of their mutual friends he would upset if he punched Jason in the eye.\n\n“I have to show you something.” Jason began running wildly into the maze of giant displays. Lee followed him, despairing.\n\nJason sprung from behind a pyramid of boxes. “What, exactly, is THIS!” He was holding a grotesque orange globular oozing toy. Lee had seen the nasty things before on DTV.\n\nLee sighed. “It’s a Bubbit.”\n\n“And what exactly is a Bubbit?”\n\n“Jason, this is stupid.”\n\nJason glared menacingly at his friend. Lee shook his head and read the package. “A Bubbit is a “˜Interactive Puppet for Aggressive Play! Bubbits will change shape to entertain and amaze! Scare your friends and learn new ways to beat the Bubbit Blue.”\n\n“Beat the Bubbit Blue.” Repeated Jason reverently. “It’s a training device.”\n\n“For ages four to ten?”\n\n“Lee, the situation is dire. We are clearly preparing for Epic Hegemonic Warfare.”\n\nLee realized that there was no way of getting out of this argument but through it. “Jason, that’s impossible. Other than peacekeeping police actions by the UN there are no military conflicts. The world’s nations have finally done with it. Jason, this is the greatest time of peace since humanity came down from the trees.”\n\n“And you don’t find that suspicious.”\n\n“No Jason, I don’t. People want peace and besides, even if we tried to fight we are all so economically interdependent that it wouldn’t be feasible.”\n\nJason smiled then, his terrible glinting smile. “Oh Lee, then you finally see it.”\n\nLee shrugged. “See what?” Jason grabbed Lee’s shoulders and shook him.\n\n“Lee! Do you mean that you can see all that but you can’t see to the next level? The very next logical conclusion!” People were staring.\n\n“Keep your voice down.” Jason grabbed Lee by the elbow and started pulling.\n\n“Do you remember when Ziggy-Stiggy changed voices?”\n\n“I remember a time when my friend Jason wasn’t a lunatic.”\n\n“It was a corporate takeover. Ziggy-Stiggy was popular and totally non-violent. The creator of Ziggy-Stiggy refused to voice the part after the government ruled that the hostile takeover of Ziggy Inc by Brascow was legit. Brascow is highly subsidized by the government, a pawn of the executive branch itself. And what was the first thing that happened to Ziggy-Stiggy when he changed hands?”\n\n“I don’t know, what?”\n\n“He started hunting mushroom people. What does that tell you?”\n\nLee rolled his eyes. “That the government is preparing us for war?”\n\n“Not us, the children.”\n\n“Why the children?”\n\n“Because something is coming, from very far away. Far enough that the children today will be the ones fighting it.”\n\n“Aliens?”\n\n“Aliens.”\n\n“Jason, if that’s true, then we are the last generation that will have peace. If you are right, shouldn’t we enjoy this while we can?”\n\n“You just want to go to the party.”\n\n“Yes. I want to go to the party. Because the aliens are coming.”\n"
  title: Toy Store
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2005-09-24
  day: 24
  month: '09'
  text: "Slug eased himself onto the barstool, a lazy grin on his face. His hair had been professionally tussled that evening, and with his new hologreather jacket, he was confident in his irresistibility.\n\n“Start me up a tab, barkeep,” Slug said, withdrawing his credit card and inebriation license. With a movement made automatic by constant practice, he placed both cards in the bartender’s hand while not losing eye-contact with the azure-coifed beauty across the room. No point in wasting time, Slug thought. “Gimmie a Mai Tai and send one over to that girl with the blue hair.”\n\n“I’m sorry, sir,” the bartender said. “But there aren’t enough points on your license for a single Mai Tai, much less two.”\n\nSlug scowled, and forced himself to look at the bartender. “You’re sure?”\n\n“Positive.”\n\n“How about a gin and tonic?”\n\n“I’m very sorry, but you don’t have enough points for that either.”\n\n“How many do I have?”\n\n“For alcohol? None.”\n\n“What? How can that be?”\n\n“Let’s see…it says here that three days ago you apparently called three ex-girlfriends while under the influence of alcohol, causing a deduction. There was a bar-fight last Thursday that you participated in—no, I’m sorry, instigated. And then there was your sister’s wedding—”\n\n“I know what I did at Shelia’s wedding.” At least, Slug knew what they said he did at his sister’s wedding. It was all sort of a blur.\n\n“That poor flower girl…” said the bartender, scanning the report.\n\n“Forget alcohol,” Slug said. “How about some cocaine?”\n\n“Not after your last misadventure with it. I wouldn’t go back to that aquarium anytime soon, either.”\n\n“Ecstasy?”\n\n“Nope.” The bartender cocked an eyebrow. “Forty poodles? All of them?”\n\n“I don’t want to talk about it.” The blue-haired girl was now deep in conversation with a guy sporting leopard-print facial stubble. Slug pinched his nose in frustration. “What can I get?”\n\nThe bartender placed two pill capsules in front of him. Slug looked at the bartender’s grin in askance.\n\n“Diet pills and ginseng, sir. The finest in the house!”\n\nSlug weighed his options. It didn’t take very long. “I’ll take ‘em.”\n\n“Excellent, sir. Shall I send some over to the young lady?”\n\n“You know what? I think I’ll just take these to go. Think I’m gonna spend the night in.”\n"
  title: Licensed
  year: 2005
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2005-09-25
  day: 25
  month: '09'
  text: "The officer approached, hands clasped behind his back, staring unabashedly at the young astronaut, raising his slender brow in cynical awareness of the situation. He reached across the stark white table and clicked the record button on the small tape recorder. His voice was deep and disturbingly serene for the nature of the interrogation, “Why don’t you tell us that, again?”\n\nJohnnie sighed and wiped his sweaty hands on his knees. He was nervous, but that was all relative now. “It was like I said. Routine mission, you know, standard stuff. We were unloading an empty O-2 tank to refuel at the space station. It was Bucks, Johnston and I carrying the load, out there in harsh space in our suits. And, like I said–” The military official interrupted Johnnie.\n\n“You do know that the vacuum of space will kill a human being, don’t you?”\n\n“That’s what we were meant to think.”\n\n“What do you mean? Go on.”\n\nJohnnie nodded, “I was curious, I mean… no one has ever died in space before and I really wondered how they knew. I wondered how they could possibly know what could happen. It’s like Columbus…”\n\n“Stick to the subject.”\n\n“I was having trouble with my girlfriend back home, things were just, I don’t know… bland. So I did it.”\n\nThe interrogator sat forward, “Did what?”\n\n“I took the suit off.”\n\n“That’s impossible. I just told you the physics of it all. No air, no moisture, hell, let’s not forget the hard radiation from direct exposure.”\n\nThe young astronaut had the look of frustration on his face, “I already told you this! I took it off and I floated around. There is no air but you don’t need it up there. There’s no radiation because, I don’t know, because you don’t need to believe in it. I floated around and laughed. The others guys were panicking but they kept asking me how I felt. So I told them… it felt great.”\n\nA fist slammed onto the table, the white room seemed to vibrate with the anger now resonating from the eyes of the interrogator. “You’re either covering up for something or you’re just trying to be famous. Either way, we’re going to find out. You do understand that you will go to jail.”\n\n“I was floating above heaven; I think that’s why nothing made sense.”\n\n“Do you hear yourself? You’re not making any sense!”\n\n“I know, it sounds crazy, but I’m telling you, the only reason we didn’t know is because we brought it with us.”\n\n“What?” His fists had unclenched he was interested again.\n\nJohnnie just smiled, ” Earth.”\n\nThere was a long pause, the interrogation had to have a break, and the officer just paced the room looking around, thinking hard, as one does when given a paradox of their reality. He turned, curious as ever, and began again. “Why did you do it, then? Why would anyone do it, Johnnie?”\n\nJohnnie just shrugged and grinned, as he was prone to do since he got back. “Because we can.”\n"
  title: Because We Can
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2005-09-26
  day: 26
  month: '09'
  text: "Malcolm should have been thinking about shrimp, but he was thinking about Sumitra’s smile instead. He hated himself for it, but he was almost glad for the leak in the shrimp pond, since it gave him an excuse to call her. And Sumitra’s voice was well worth the cost of a call from Lee County to Bangkok, or wherever the heck she lived.\n\nWhether it was worth asking a favor from Clem Greentower, well, that was another matter entirely. Sumitra did smile on the phone’s display screen when she saw it was Malcolm calling. She’d only been doing that recently. And that smile went a long way.\n\n“Clem, I need to borrow your boys.” Malcolm shifted from one foot to another. The itinerate glow of Clem’s bug zapper made Malcolm uncomfortable. He twitched every time a mosquito got too close and the passive azure energy erupted. Mosquitoes were as big as Malcolm’s thumb this year, and their charred husks littered Clem’s porch.\n\nClem regarded Malcolm with folded arms. “Whatcha need ’em for? I know for a fact that you ain’t got no more stumps.” Clem was not a tall man, but he made up for it in girth and attitude. “They sure as hell ain’t plowin’ your field for you.”\n\n“Aww, Clem, I wouldn’t ask for them to plow. I’m hurt you said that. ‘Sides, you know as well as I do that the state won’t let me plant tobacco on Pa’s field no more.” Malcolm searched for sympathy in Clem’s face, but found none. “Shoot, Clem. I just need ‘em to walk around.”\n\n“Walk around?”\n\n“Yessir. See, my shrimp pond—the one the state suggested I put on Pa’s land ‘stead of tobacco—my shrimp pond has a leak.”\n\n“You can just put Hydrochlrone in it, cantcha?”\n\n“Nope, that’ll kill the shrimp. Now, I called my friend Sumitra. She does this sorta thing up in Thailand, and she says to just let some cattle graze around the pond to compact the earth. There ain’t been cows within miles of this county since the plant went, Clem. But I got to thinking, you been giving your boys beef hormones since they’ve been old enough to crawl.”\n\n“You just gonna have ‘em walk? I charge for labor, you know.”\n\n“I’m aware of that, Clem. You can ask ’em when I’m done if they did anything but circle the pond.”\n\n“I will, too.” Clem said. “‘Spose you want ’em now?”\n\n“If it ain’t a bother.”  Clem grunted and went back inside the house. Malcolm removed his cap to scratch at his hairless scalp, and watched as another mosquito twitched its last. He didn’t know why he felt the need to mention Sumitra. Covered in the blue light, Malcolm felt very exposed.\n\nClem’s boys pounded out of the front door, five love-children of some epic tryst of an elephant and a refrigerator, the blue light glinting off their bald heads. Four of the boys had moonstruck, glazed-over faces, save for the oldest, who’s mind probably had the most time to develop before his father took nature into his own hands and stunted the developing grey matter with muscle steroids.\n\n“Pa said we’re suppose to go with you, Mister.”\n\n“Well, you best come on then,” Malcolm said, and led the boys onto the bed of his pick-up. Malcolm’s truck was not an old model, but it strained under the weight nonetheless.\n\nDown at the shrimp pond, Malcolm gave the boys as much direction as he could, then busied himself by dumping bags of sugar into the pond water.\n\n“That ain’t sugar, is it?” the eldest of Clem’s boys asked.\n\n“Yep, it is.”\n\n“Whatcha puttin’ it in the pond for?”\n\n“It’s to control the PH bal…it’s to fix the acid it…it’s to make the shrimp sweeter.”\n\n“Oh! That’s really smart!”\n\n“Yeah, it is. My friend Sumitra told me about it. She’s a smart girl.” There he was, bringing her up again! If Malcolm could, he’d kick himself in the ass.\n\n“Is she your girlfriend? Are you gonna get married?”\n\n“I seriously doubt it. She ain’t gonna want some poor son of a tobacco farmer who’s been on this land so long he ain’t got no hair and his piss glows in the dark.”\n\n“I dunno, she might. You don’t know.” Clem’s eldest contemplated joining his brothers walking around the pond, but thought better of it, and turned his attention back to Malcolm. “I got a girlfriend. Least, I like her a lot. Her name’s Chablis. She’s got the prettiest hair.”\n\nThat would be Chablis Levee, Malcolm thought. He remembered her from school. “She wears a wig, you know.”\n\n“She does? Huh.” Malcolm watched the gummed-up mental calculations necessary to process this new information play across the boy’s face. “I guess it don’t matter. I like her anyway. It looks good on her. I think she likes me, too. She smiles whenever she sees me.”\n\n“That’s usually a good sign.”\n\n“Thought so. That’s why I smiled back. One day, I’m definitely gonna ask to hold her hand.” The boy’s giant eyes shifted down to Malcolm’s bags. “Can I have some of your sugar?”  Malcolm couldn’t help but chuckle.\n\n“Sure thing. Just don’t tell your Pa.”\n\n“Oh, I won’t.” The titan offspring of Clem Greentower licked a gargantuan finger and jammed it into a sugar bag, only to quickly shove it deep in his mouth. “Oh, man. That’s good. I don’t think that anything could ever be better than that, ever.”\n\nMalcolm found himself doing the same with his own finger. “You’re right. That is good.”\n\n“You’re a good man, Mister,” Clem’s boy said. “I like you. You ever hold your girlfriend’s hand?”\n\n“No, I…I haven’t. She lives…I just haven’t.”\n\n“You should ask. I bet she’d let you if you asked. It never hurts to ask.”\n"
  title: Favor Fishing
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2005-09-27
  day: 27
  month: '09'
  text: "In the full body cycle Linda’s chest burned, sweat slipping into her eyebrows. She could feel their eyes on her, the children watching the old woman strain. The lines of her skin betrayed her. Generations blended, their cells dividing perfectly, making exact copies, eternally renewed. She pressed her arms and legs into faster rotation.\n\nLast night she lay with her lover, his head on her naked breast, silent, exhausted, fulfilled. He traced his fingers over her body, touching the tiny red dots that marked her age. He pressed his nail harder with each mark, pinching her skin.\n\n“Can’t you get rid of these?” She stiffened.\n\n“Gregory, I was stabilized late.” His soft face twisted.\n\n“I know, I just thought there might be some treatment.” She shook her head.\n\n“There isn’t. They’ve stopped looking into those problems a long time ago.” He rolled his eyes and bit his lip, like a child denied its favorite toy.\n\n“Are you sure? Have you asked your doctor?” She laid her hand on his soft curls and swallowed. She wanted to sound firm, but her voice was small.\n\n“No. There isn’t anything.” He rose and sat on the edge of the bed. His back was a blank screen.\n\n“It just looks like you don’t care.”\n\nLinda spun faster till she could feel her heartbeat, till the sweat salt reached her chin. Around her, the frozen faces of youth skipped blithely though the gym routines, perfect curves in infinite wheels.\n"
  title: Late
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2005-09-28
  day: 28
  month: '09'
  text: "“Any personal belongings you’ll need accommodated in your craft, Mr. Mercer?”\n\n“Nope.” John shook his head at the distribution agent before him. “No baggage.”\n\nIt was John Mercer’s last day on Earth.\n\nHe’d lived here for thirty-eight years, give or take a decade or so spent on Luna or the nearby outposts. Never once had he gone out of the solar system, not even on vacation. John Mercer had spent his life working, just like everyone else. He’d been a paper-pusher, a street cleaner, an asteroid skimmer, a window-washer, a cheap thug, and even a postman for a few months, but no matter where he went, she followed him. There was nothing he could do to escape her. Nothing except this.\n\nAs John climbed into the small craft the distributor had assigned him, he felt the weight of those thirty-eight years shifting, readying for flight just as he was. Her face lingered in the back of his mind, stern and matronly, as it had since he was a child hitting baseballs into solar panels. He grinned to himself as he closed the hatch and flicked the switches to prepare the in-ship lights for flight mode.\n\nAfter today, he’d never see the face of the Earth again. After today he’d no longer be a paper-pusher or a street cleaner or an asteroid skimmer or a window-washer. He’d be a pilot, somewhere in the outer colonies—goodness only knew where. John hadn’t specified. He’d just asked for a first assignment somewhere where he’d never be able to come back.\n\nThe base doors slid open and John met the field of stars with the white of his teeth. He could feel the rumbling of the ignition through his entire body and made sure the IV drip in his arm was secure. He wouldn’t want to wake up during the jump, after all. As the outpost’s bulkheads fell away beneath him, he stared a challenge back at the blue-green planet he had once called his home. So long, Earth. Nice knowing you.\n\nThe drip started right on schedule, just as the engines shot him away from everything he wanted to forget. His consciousness dissolved in time with the drip of the IV, and he could feel her face dissipating as well, fading away as surely as the planet behind him. With his last moment of coherence before the three-year jump, John Mercer grinned.\n\nNo baggage.\n"
  title: Checking Out
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2005-09-29
  day: 29
  month: '09'
  text: "“You can’t have a ray gun,” Jolie said as she dragged her pen across Jake’s sheet. “They didn’t even exist back then.”\n\n“My character invented the ray gun,” Jake clarified, and Tim snickered. “What? Somebody had to invent them.”\n\nAbove the terradome in Jolie’s mother’s living quarters, thousands of LCD crystals shimmered to give the illusion of a cloud passing over a digital sun. Jolie, newly sixteen, had moved to Io with her mother because the exchange rate inflated child support to nearly three times what her father paid. She hated the terradome, she hated Io, and she hated the circumstances that brought her there, but above all else, at this moment, she hated Jake. On Earth, people knew how to make character sheets.\n\n“Besides, how do you know they didn’t exist? Were you there?”\n\nJolie sighed deeply. “On Earth they taught us something called history, Jake.”\n\n“History is for pussies.”\n\nTim, ever the level-headed one, removed the pen from Jolie’s hand before she forced it through Jake’s cranium. “Why don’t you buy a revolver?” he asked his younger brother.\n\n“He can’t have a revolver either. His character’s a Network Administrator, for Christ’s sake.”\n\n“I’m a rogue Network Administrator.”\n\n“Look,” Jolie said, “I’m not going to run a Microsoft game filled with ray guns and rogues. Either you learn the system or you find someone who wants to run Apple.”\n\n“All I’m saying is that someone had to invent the ray gun, and I don’t see why it can’t be me.”\n\nJolie retrieved her pen and underscored the word NO several times.\n\n“I thought you said this game was about imagining stuff.”\n\n“It is. Imagine a world without ray guns.”\n\n“That world sucks,” Jake said. He pushed his chair back and leaped up, heading for the door. Tim lifted his hand to stop him.\n\n“Jake, just give it a chance. There was plenty of cool stuff back then, right?” he asked, looking to Jolie for verification. Jolie nodded enthusiastically, then considered the late twentieth century, then nodded again with slightly less force. “Like cars,” Tim continued. “Everyone had their own personal spaceship for the road.”\n\nJake hesitated before the door. “Can I have a car?” he asked.\n\n“Cars ran on fossil fuels. They practically raped the environment. Plus, according to the sourcebook, traffic in Silicon Valley was…” her voice trailed off. “You’d know better, if you were from Earth,” she finished.\n\nJake smiled broadly and folded his arms across his puffed chest. “Well, I’m not from Earth,” he said proudly. “I’m imagining it.”\n"
  title: Saving Throw
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2005-09-30
  day: 30
  month: '09'
  text: "“We’ve had a problem with the cursing, haven’t we, dear?” Mr. Olivestone said, handing an iced tea to his wife. Helen Olivestone took it with a slight smile, but didn’t drink from it until she meticulously removed every drop of condensation from the glass with a paper napkin.\n\n“Well, naturally. Thankfully, it’s mostly been in French, or German. What did the Bookmans say she said? In Chinese? It was darling!”\n\n“It was “˜Tyen-sah duh UH-muo,’ I believe,” said her husband. He handed iced teas to Jennie and Edward Mandrake, the Olivestones’ guests for the afternoon.\n\n“That’s adorable!” said Mrs. Mandrake. “I suppose it’s just a consequence of implanting.”\n\n“Not really surprising,” chimed in Mr. Mandrake. “Curse words are base reactions to base emotions. Not really surprising at all that a—how old is Rachel?”\n\n“Seven months,” said Mrs. Olivestone.\n\n“But she had a mouth on her out of the womb! Swearing up a storm right in the delivery room!” Mr. Olivestone wiped his forehead as he spoke.\n\n“Not surprising at all,” Mr. Mandrake continued. “She’s just expressing herself in the most direct way possible.”\n\n“I am so impressed that you chose languages, Helen,” Mrs. Mandrake said. Mrs. Olivestone flashed a tight smile at her guest before turning her attention back to her iced tea glass, which had once again gotten covered with little water droplets. Mrs. Mandrake massaged her swollen belly. “I wanted something artistic like that, but Eddie insisted on mathematics.”\n\n“Got to give them an edge, don’t we? I hear even Quincy’s daycare won’t let you in without a scholastic implant anymore,” Mr. Mandrake said.\n\n“We’re on the waiting list for Dalton’s.” Mrs. Olivestone said, not looking up. “If she doesn’t get into Dalton’s, she can forget about Harvard.”\n\n“You care so much for Rachel,” Mrs. Mandrake said. “She’s so blessed. You give her so much.”\n\n“Yes, well,” Mrs. Olivestone said, getting out of her lawn chair. “This heat has certainly gotten the best of me. I believe I shall have to go inside before I faint.” She left the garden party and hurried inside the house, wiping what appeared to be perspiration off her face.\n\n“Probably going to check on the baby,” Mr. Mandrake said.\n\n“Oh, no,” said Mr. Olivestone. “It wouldn’t be good for her. We only know two languages apiece. We can’t be in the same room as Rachel for at least another year.”\n"
  title: Curse
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2005-10-01
  day: '01'
  month: 10
  text: "“Yesterday,” Jason said, “I killed Marilyn Monroe.”\n\n“Right.”\n\n“No, I mean it. I really did.”\n\n“I believe you,” Thomas said, in a noncommittal tone. It worked like this: Jason was lying, or Jason was not lying. Lying /= not lying. He hadn’t been in the complex for long enough to understand the inadequacy of the equation.\n\n“She’s better than in pictures,” he continued. “”Not like you’d think, though. She has roots, dark brown ones. And she’s a little chunky. There was something about her, though. Something right.”\n\nSomething right, two things wrong. One minus two equals negative one thing right. Regardless, Thomas nodded. There was inadequate information. Jason = sane or insane. Until the first equation could be solved, its postulates were irrelevant.\n\nThomas had been born on a math farm. In some way, he understood this. His brain didn’t work in the same way that Jason’s brain worked. But Jason’s brain must have been altered, since he was in the complex. If he was randomly, uselessly broken, he would have been euthanized at birth.\n\n“I didn’t want to do it,” Jason said. “but somebody had to.”\n\nThomas said nothing. Jason sat down on his foam mattress and began rocking.\n\n“Do you ever wake up and know that something has to be a certain way? Like, if it’s not that way, the universe is out of order? History’s like that, for me. Someone has to make it right.”\n\n“Chaos equals unpredictability. All things are predictable with numbers.”\n\nJason smiled thinly. “You’re a strange one, aren’t you?” He stood up and slipped his feet into the government issue blue slippers before heading to the door.\n\n“Where are you going?”\n\n“Seclusion. Oswald needs a little prodding.”\n\n“Oswald?” Thomas asked. “Who’s Oswald?”\n"
  title: Temporal Dissonance
  year: 2005
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2005-10-02
  day: '02'
  month: 10
  text: "Talia looked out over the cacophonous melee of engineers in the warehouse. Each of them bustled about; porcupines of fused wiring and welding tools. It made her so proud. A rapid metallic pounding announced the arrival of a messenger.\n\n“Take it easy, Dobs. What ya got for me?” Talia brushed her fingers back through curly white hair, curiously awaiting his news.\n\n“Tex says there’s been another breach. Some knucklehead dropped an X33 flyer on the Italy. Accounts say it was witnessed by a whole village.” Dobs made no effort to conceal his stare. It wasn’t necessary. Talia’s eyes became unfocused and eventually closed. Dobs had heard of this before but had never actually seen the progenitor at work.\n\nSlowly one hand made its way to her abdomen. After a few seconds her body snapped to attention. Her eyes opened and Dobs noticed for the first time that they were the precise green of new leaves in springtime.\n\n“I got an idea.” She said, incandescent with excitement. “Have Fells and Watson make up an architect mold, have this one be a genius, draw with one hand, write with the other at the same time sort-of-thing.” Dobs turned to carry out her order. “But we need to have him be subtle.” She turned and watched the engineers working, piecing together life-like models of individuals from all manner of places and times.\n\n“Call it DaVinci. He’ll be a jack-of-all-trades. But for God’s sake make sure his work is programmed to invent the X33 flier. Some crude form of it.” Dobs’ face showed his amazement. Standing up he wiped off his greasy hands and regained his professional composure. “I don’t know how you do it, Tal. Government asks us to fix problems left and right and you just keep coming up with ideas. Ancient Rome, Middle Ages, hell, even 20th century. How?”\n\nHer glance up at the dome roof, the way it curved and rounded out, gave her away. “We’re Patchers, Dobs. When they make a mistake, no matter what time or era, it’s my job to ensure we don’t mess it all up. Now, get the message to Tex.” Dobs nodded and began to trek back down to the main floor.\n\n“Oh, and Dobs? Give it to Leon for inspection before we ship it out. Have him give it a first name.”\n\n“You got it, Tal.” Dobs saluted and went on his way.\n"
  title: Patchers
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2005-10-03
  day: '03'
  month: 10
  text: "There was nothing special about Ming, nothing unique. She had no exceptional talents, no carefully-kept secrets, no inventive thoughts, no special intelligence. She liked to go to parties and shop for clothes and wanted to be a good mother someday. Her face was pretty, her hair and skin smooth and well-kept. She was generic, shaped just like a high school girl was supposed to be, completely normal.\n\nThe other kids sneered at her in the hallways, looking down their noses at the girl who was so average she didn’t even have a zit. They whispered about her behind her back, how her parents were Old World, backwards, people who didn’t believe in gene-picking and liked to let nature take its course. It was like they’d never left planetside. Ming hid her face behind her books, burying herself in her carefully-done hair and manicured nails, shrinking away from the crowds of unique faces, people who didn’t look like the perfect model of a human being.\n\nAt night Ming would kneel by the side of her bed and clasp her palms together, eyes squeezed tight shut, praying that God would break her nose so that it would be bent like Terri’s; or give her birthmark like Shelinda’s, that looked like a crescent moon; or stunt the growth of her arm like Belline’s; or even just make her eyes glow in the dark like Marie’s. She knew better than to ask for a lisp or to shrink her height overnight or for her fingers to suddenly start bending the wrong way on command. God didn’t like people who were greedy.\n\nMing prayed with all her might, but every morning she would wake up to a perfectly symmetrical face in her mirror and cry. She would always be normal, always look just like the generic pictures in the history books, the perfect human standard of beauty. She would never be different like everyone else.\n\nIn the lunchroom Ming hid in a corner, eating silently off of her tray, afraid to get up and throw her trash away because the other girls liked to trip her and make her spill. She didn’t notice Eleanor until she heard a whispered “hey” and looked up, to find the most popular girl in school sitting across from her. Eleanor’s left cheek was sunken in, the skin over it smooth and taut like a scar, never tanning or moving. Ming looked down at her plate, knowing she would never have something beautiful like that. She didn’t speak.\n\n“Hey,” Eleanor repeated, “hey, look at me.” Eleanor was looking at her with fascination, almost reverence, entirely different from the rest of the girls in school. Ming frowned.\n\n“I heard you’re normal.”\n\nMing swallowed and nodded, feeling lower than dirt. She felt her heart sink into the pit of her stomach.\n\nEleanor didn’t sneer, though, or scoff like the rest of the girls. She just looked at Ming, wide-eyed, her half-smile unable to reach the sunken side of her face, but trying. “That’s so cool.” The smooth, beautiful skin of Eleanor’s left side pulled against one eye, making it seem sad even though it was shining with wonder. “I wish I was normal,” Eleanor whispered. “I’m so tired of being just like everyone else.”\n"
  title: Normal
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2005-10-04
  day: '04'
  month: 10
  text: "The yard sale was one of those haphazard affairs, full of the kind of junk that no one in their right mind would actually take, damaged or torn or merely out of the realms of taste altogether.  This is a powerful camouflage for the good stuff, and any experienced bargain hunter will tell you that the larger a morass of hand-me-downs and chipped Formica, the better a prize underneath.\n\nI once found an a James Deakin and Sons egg timer amongst some horribly tarnished flatware; it clocked in at three minutes and forty five seconds, which says something about how long it took to boil an egg in 1903.  Another such garage sale earned me a Railroad-approved BW Rageon pocket watch, which only took a bit of polish to look the same way it did in 1927.  So when I unearthed the device from under a seriously disturbing collection of polyester sweaters, I knew it was something to treasure.  I just didn’t know what.\n\n“It’s a time machine.”  A portly fellow in dark socks and sandals noticed me handling the thing, careful not to nudge the knobs.  “It requires six ‘D’ batteries.”\n\n“Pull the other one,” I said.  It didn’t look like a time machine, but it didn’t look like anything else, either.\n\n“No, seriously. It’s a time machine.  I built it.  Used it, even.”\n\n“Oh?  What’s the future like?”\n\nThe man laughed and regarded me like a retarded child.  “You can’t go into the future!  It hasn’t happened yet!  Just the past.  But you can go in the past all you want.”\n\n“Hold up.  You can go in the past with this?  Change what’s happened?  Isn’t that, I dunno, dangerous?  Kill a butterfly, change the world, that sort of thing?”\n\nThe man huffed.  “Nonsense.  The universe is not so poorly designed.  If you go back in time with the intention of changing things, one of two things is going to happen.  One, you’ll be totally ineffectual, and people won’t notice you or heed you, and it won’t make a damn bit of difference whether you were there or not.”\n\n“What’s the other?”\n\nThe man’s eyes and voice suddenly went cold.  “People do notice you.  And you end up being the cause of the very thing you were trying to prevent.  You end up destroying the one you meant to save.”  He was quiet, and reached out to touch the device in my hand, but thought better of it.  “I’ve failed too many times.  It doesn’t make any difference.  This cost me thousands of dollars and years of my life, but I’ll give it to you for five bucks if you if you just take it away and never bring it back.”\n\n“I don’t understand,” I said.\n\nHe looked up at me, his face flushed.  He motioned blindly to his yard, strewn with trivial remnants from a life, someone’s life, priced at a bargain.   “I’m selling everything else that reminds me of her.  They never belonged to me, anyway.  I shouldn’t keep what isn’t mine.  The universe won’t let me.  Five dollars on that there time machine, my final offer.”\n\nI took it, as well as 1951 “Cort” model Seth Thomas with an alarm that still worked.    On the drive home, I thought about the man’s words when I asked him one more time whether or not you could use his machine to change events.\n\n“The present is unavoidable,” he said. “It’s best not to think about it.”\n"
  title: Who Forever Belongs To
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2005-10-05
  day: '05'
  month: 10
  text: "Foolishly, my people thought the alien ships were asteroids on a collision course. We launched our most deadly weapons into the sky, which exploded harmlessly off the liquid hull of the invaders, raining poison onto our world. Dust flakes on my head as I walked to the sacred ground.\n\nDuring the ceremony, my younger siblings held me underwater in the pool of our temple, that blue chalice just big enough to immerse my adolescent body. I was arrogant in my new development, confident that I was ready to become an adult. Then, as I let out the last of my held breath, I began to panic; nothing had happened, no painful change, no sudden epiphany, no realization of adulthood, I wasn’t ready, I was going to drown.\n\nThere, in the water, hands pressing down on my head my head and flailing limbs, I met death for the first time. I was a frightened child, drinking and choking on water, weakened, desperate, ashamed, tearing and helpless. Hope lost, I stopped, just stopped, and let myself die, lay still, peaceful under the web of my brothers’ hands. It was then I felt the closed slits in my side softly open and I became the water, not breathing with my mouth but with my body, my whole self suffused. I looked up through the shining pool to my siblings, and they were crying, dropping tears of worry and hope into the water, and each droplet spread on the surface, a rippling miracle.\n\nTwo days later, the little insectoid robots came, crawled into my home and sawed through the flesh of my family. My uncle, who slept at the doorway, was already dead when I woke up, his vocal cords severed. My father, though, screamed and thrashed, filling his bed with blood as my mother tried to tear the silver bugs off his skin, her fingers severed by their tiny metal blades.\n\nIn the pool, gazing up through the water, the faces of my siblings became like stars against the open sky, and in that moment I believed in everything. I lay there, in wonder, my body water, my eyes the open night.\n\nFour days later the stink of blood and dust had us all covering our heads with wet scarves, debris slashing our eyes, the water toxic, the air polluted. Our schools were piles of rubble, mass graves for dead children. My mother held her surviving children in the remains of her bleeding fingers and told us that our lives were coming to an end. We fled, like ants on a hill, scurrying from our homes and schools, but nowhere was safe, and nowhere we could go was better than where they were.\n\nLater, we were blamed for our resistance. If we had just waited, listened calmly while strange shaped ships plummeted from the sky spewing garbled language of conquest. If we had just laid down in the streets, if we had never picked up anything that could have been interpreted to the invaders as a weapon, then the metal bugs would not have crawled into them and tore them apart from the inside. If my people had not built such strange schools, they would not have been mistaken for military barracks, if we had not fought wars amidst ourselves, we would not need to be ruled.\n\nSince the day my siblings lifted me out of the pool, I have never again felt trust so complete. Do not ask again, why I go armed to speak to you. Do not tell me that my people should surrender. Do not accuse me of being irrational till all your own family lay dead, and till your culture is beaten, erased, and chained.\n\nDo not question me, for I know death well, and I will send him to you.\n"
  title: Conquest
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2005-10-06
  day: '06'
  month: 10
  text: "“This place is a dump,” Headley muttered, for what must have been the thousandth time. Foxworth rolled her eyes.\n\n“Of course it’s a dump. It’s our job. If it wasn’t a dump, we wouldn’t be here.”\n\n“Yeah, I know,” Headley replied, “But look at this place. I mean, really look at it. One guy can’t make buildings rot like that, even if he is a zapper.”\n\nFoxworth’s eyes took in the crumbling foundations, the sagging walls, the rust, the dirt, the mess. Her hand drifted to the triple-cycling proton gun in her side holster. It was there for her protection, but how could she protect herself against time?\n\n“Well, this is a class 15 if I ever saw one. Definitely uninhabitable. No clue where anybody could be hiding in all this mess, though. Even zappers gotta eat.”\n\nFoxworth nodded her silent agreement. Sometimes a mutant like this would turn tail and run off after it had killed so many people, attacked by some parody of conscience. They’d have to file a pink form, and while Foxworth hated that, it was better than sticking around this dump any longer.\n\n“All right,” she said at last, turning towards Headley. “Let’s pack up and get out of—”\n\n“What are you doing here?”\n\nBoth partners turned towards the new voice, wide-eyed. Foxworth’s hand went immediately to her gun, though she noticed that Headley’s did not. He frowned instead, kneeling down to speak to the boy, no more than seven or eight, who faced them solemnly from the rubble.\n\n“We’re here to help,” Headley assured him. “Are you hurt? Did you lose your parents?”\n\nA cat meowed and Foxworth jumped back, her hand clenching around her gun before she registered the source of the noise. The animal drifted out from behind the pile of debris, making it only the second living thing they’d seen today, and rubbed against the boy’s legs. He picked it up, still frowning at the two government workers.\n\n“You shouldn’t be here. Go away.”\n\n“We just want to make sure you’re okay,” Headley told the boy in that maddeningly reasonable tone, the one that adults used on children and men used on women when they were feeling particularly superior.\n\n“Go away,” the boy repeated, holding the cat close to his chest.\n\n“Look, kid, you’re gonna have to come with us.” Hadley was frowning now. He didn’t like being contradicted or disobeyed.\n\n“I said go away!” The child’s face contorted at the same instant that the cat hissed, flattening its ears back against the top of its head. The veins in Headley’s forehead exploded like overripe grapes, spattering blood everywhere, just like the rest of the corpses they’d seen in this wreckage. He barely had time for a yell of pain before he collapsed, lifeless.\n\nFoxworth was frozen solid. She knew she should be drawing her gun, yelling, crying, running away, doing anything but standing dumbly in the rubble, but she couldn’t bring herself to move.\n\n“Come on, Bugaboo.” The child held out his arms and the cat, after a last look at Foxworth, ambled back and jumped into them. The child frowned at her. “Go away,” he repeated. “Don’t ever come back here again.” Then he turned away.\n\nThe cat’s green eyes were mesmerizing, and Foxworth caught her breath. For one irrational moment she thought she could get lost in those eyes, like a labyrinth, and never come out.\n"
  title: Bugaboo
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2005-10-07
  day: '07'
  month: 10
  text: "Don’t believe that bullshit they told you in orientation, kid. It’s always an easy sell. This is a new economy we’re dealing with. Trust the product. You trust the product, it’s an easy sell.\n\nYou ever been to Lagos, kid? In Lagos, there’s these big bastards, carry around hyenas like pets. I shit you not. Fucking hyenas. I was dealing with Samson, who was head of a tribe of Hyena Men there. Brother had Lagos in the palm of his hand, but it wasn’t enough. Couldn’t have been, or I wouldn’t have been there, you know what I mean?\n\nSo we’re at the restaurant–swank place, very swank–and here’s this man-mountain, Samson, and he’s got this gigantic mongrel right there at the table. It’s the size of a Saint Bernard because of all the growth hormones Samson pumped into it, and it’s right there at table, giggling and drooling, in a place that wouldn’t let in a Welsh corgi.\n\nI start off smooth—always start off smooth. “Let me ask you a question, Samson. Are the Hyena Men respected? Or are they feared?”\n\nYou’ll notice I went off the script, got to the point. You should stick to the script. Later, when you know it, then you can pull whatever you want out of your ass that’ll get you sales. Until then, stick to the script.\n\nSo Samson likes that I got right to the point and smiles like only an eight-foot tall bastard who regularly reams an entire city up the ass can. “You tell me,” he says. “You tell me, do you respect or fear me?”\n\n“Honestly?” I said right then. “Neither.”\n\nAnd then, BAM! That goddamn 300 pound beast is all up on me, like out of nowhere! Now, the Hyena Men train their mongrels to go for the jugular, and I could feel the fucker’s teeth scraping up against my neck. Naturally, everyone in the restaurant pretends not to notice. And Samson, Samson cannot wait to gloat over this.\n\n“What now, my friend? Do you feel fear, or respect?” Goddamn smug bastard.\n\nI’m not going to press my luck too far, not with that beast on my neck. So I say, “I’m afraid of this furry fucker, I won’t lie to you. But the funny thing about fear, Samson, is that it can disappear pretty quickly.” And then I disintegrate the goddamn hyena. Now who has the respect?\n\nThis is why I love the fact that the demo models they give us now have that one live shot. I mean, you had no idea how hard it was to demonstrate proper destruction with a handful of blanks. You probably noticed how tiny the demo model is. Makes it good for dramatic situations. You know, after you’ve learned the script.\n\nSamson’s now aware of the destructive power of the X-J23, and he’s this close to ordering a gross of ray guns for all his other little Hyena Men, but he’s balking.\n\nSo I mention the bigger models. That lights up his eyes, tout suite. But not quite enough.  So I mention Mantari, the head of a tribe of Hyena Men up in Cape Town, and how he had wanted the larger models, had his eyes on ‘em. So I give him The Line. The Line always works. You should stick to the script, but let me tell you, The Line always works.\n\n“Mantari wanted some, but he couldn’t pay. Not properly. Some people just aren’t prepared for the new economy.”\n\nSamson grins real big, talks about how he is prepared, and buys damn near the entire catalogue with fucking gold bars. A week later, I don’t even have to say shit, Mantari in Cape Town does the same.\n\nEasy sell, kid. They’re all easy sells, long as you trust the product.\n"
  title: The New Economy
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2005-10-08
  day: '08'
  month: 10
  text: "Tsaro was the image, Tsaro was the shadow. During the hour-long commute into Osaka no less than seventeen people asked for his autograph, and when he transferred to a cab at the end of the line he could feel empty eyes squinting at him, searching for their reflections. An elderly lady congratulated him on his success right before Tsaro opened the door to the studio.\n\n“Thank you,” he said quietly. Tsaro was uncomfortable when people talked to him as the artist.\n\nInside the studio, Tsaro sat in front of the glowing mirror while a slender, apron-clad woman fidgeted over his face and hair. It didn’t matter; he’d be airbrushed out of recognition. They still needed a person as the shadow because a computer-generated image couldn’t make live performances, but Tsaro had seen the wireframe of his face flicker across monitors in the maintenance chamber. One day, his face would be bars of light creating the illusion of three dimensions. One day, he wouldn’t even be a shadow.\n\nThe woman nudged Tsaro out of the makeup chair and he shuffled slowly down the long hallway to the maintenance chamber. When the door slid open with a hydraulic hiss, the head technician glanced up from his control panel and smiled out of habit. Tsaro smiled back with the same polite vacancy as the halogen over the bluescreen gradually flickered to a solid white.\n\n“Ready?” the technician asked. Tsaro nodded. Around him, the eyes of seven other programmers lifted to judge his appearance, and a few nodded their approval. On the wall opposite the bluescreen, a large LCD display spooled the miles of code that made up the artist. Tsaro was not ready. Tsaro was never ready. He took his place behind the prop microphone and squinted until his eyes grew adjusted to the brightness.\n\nThe technicians had turned their attention back to the monitor, but Tsaro could feel the unseen eyes of millions of mislead fans. He closed his own to force them away, but they watched from the blackness behind his lids.\n\nThe first sound was thick with manufactured bass and the air in the room reverberated with a disembodied, re-embodied heartbeat. Beneath it, Tsaro could hear a symphony of keystrokes but he knew that none of the technicians were creating the sound. The sound belonged to the artist. In the maintenance chamber, everything belonged to the artist.\n\nIn the space between pristine code and his imperfect body, Tsaro did not open his eyes. His skin felt unusually heavy as he waited for the next chord to sweep across the room, and under the silence between the beats, Tsaro dreamed of the panels of light that would one day build a hollower, more perfect version of himself.\n"
  title: The Shadow
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2005-10-09
  day: '09'
  month: 10
  text: "First it was the blacks. That one was easy, like a warm-up. They’re a cinch to pick out after all. Then it was the commies. They were harder, but with such catchy slogans, who could pass it up? Then came the terrorists. That one must have been fun. I mean, when you think about it, who isn’t a terrorist? But that one blew over too. Then came the gays, but we all expected that. I mean, really, they were asking for it. I didn’t care one way or the other, but I knew they had it coming.\n\nThen there was a while when they didn’t go after anybody. That was our finest hour. It took two thousand years, but finally everyone believed that the fisherman was right: we really could live in peace. For us, it was Heaven. For them, it was Hell. Peace was bad for business.\n\nNow it’s the preachers. Not the way it used to be, when one set of preachers went after another—priests, lamas, rabbis, gurus, whatever—but in the new way, where anyone who admits to a higher power is punished. We were asking for it, too, I guess. It’s ironic, but then, irony has always been God’s purview in my mind.\n\nNow we meet in basements, back alleys, fields, or barns in the middle of nowhere to muffle the noise. All the symbols are lit up inside with Christmas lights from before Christmas was forbidden. It’s a celebration paying homage to something greater than ourselves, something that flows inside of us and can’t be stopped. I watch from the edge of the room, sitting cross-legged on an old crate and feeling straw poke through my habit. The dance is a circle of laughter, warm and fluid, more beautiful than any sermon I have ever heard or given. No one argues over whether they get to dance with the cross, the star, or the moon; they’re just glad to have something to show that they care. We don’t bother to call Him by names anymore.\n"
  title: Lord Of The Dance
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2005-10-10
  day: 10
  month: 10
  text: "It made Kara nervous that the wall of her quarters breathed, waves of slow expansion and deflation. Cloth was the only thing between her and the harsh explosive cold of space. Kara knew that the blended weave, was a hundred time stronger than steel, lighter, and cheaper too. Without this material, the station wouldn’t be even a quarter as large. During launch, the space station was a slim, silver arrow, the people tied down inside, and after, the sides flew off and the station inflated like a balloon, blowing out in a rush of electricity and air, forming rooms and creating warm, safe space. Still, Kara couldn’t shake the feeling that a moment of madness and knife would kill them all. They said it wasn’t possible, but weightless in a station orbiting Earth, everything seemed possible.\n\nLean more than muscular, Kara she was dwarfed by the massive female marines who piloted the water ships and who bullied their way about the station like giant rolling boulders. Kara was used to being small, nearest to the ground, to having taller kids look down on her, but these women in weightlessness, seemed to surround her, feet below hers, head above, shoulders off to her side. She felt like a mouse in a cat’s mouth, dangling by her tail, limbs swinging. Men watched her eyes lingering, repressed urges flaming in the periphery of her vision. In the orphanage, she  maintained a head of long hair, past her shoulder blades. She had cut off her hair for the trip, in the hope that it would make her look boyish, but it only succeeded in making her look like a pixie, and exposed the back of her neck to burning stares.\n\nWhen she went to the medic for her weekly checkup, the female marine looked at her with hard eyes, jamming shots into her arm, making her eyes well up with tears. The doctor sneered and shook her large head.\n\n“You think you are so beautiful. You think you can have anyone you want, you little bitch, but if you touch one of my men, or let him touch you, I will cut your wrists and tell everyone that it was suicide.”\n\nKara held her shoulder, a drops of blood floating from the wound. She felt nauseous and blinked her eyes to keep from crying.  “I don’t-”\n\nThe doctor waved her hand and took out another syringe. “Don’t talk, you shut your fuck mouth. You make a shit and I shove this next one in your eye.”\n\nKara found herself unofficially banned from all recreation, isolated in quarters no bigger than a closet, silent as space. She looked down at the crowded earth through the plastic window, the cities lit in the dark, bright outlines tracing human habitation, so numerous in the black, everyone and everything connected by trillions of wireless connections, communications, signals, lights. She closed her eyes, and in the dark behind her lids, she was truly alone.\n"
  title: The Silence
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2005-10-11
  day: 11
  month: 10
  text: "Purby Stolafson took a deep breath and regarded the man and woman across his desk. He recognized the woman—with her luxurious blond hair, hourglass figure and delicate features, she was unmistakably one of his. He still didn’t know what to make of the man, other than he wanted him out of his office.\n\n“I’m sorry,” Purby said, reshuffling the papers on his desk. “What was the problem with her?”\n\n“Her breathing. She breathes. She doesn’t stop.”\n\n“Yes, and?”\n\n“It’s unnerving.”\n\n“Most of our customers appreciate the breathing.”\n\n“I don’t.”\n\nPurby sagged a bit in his chair.  He knew where this was going. “Is that all? Just the breathing?”\n\n“No! It’s not just the breathing! It’s everything! I can feel her pulse. I can hear her stomach gurgling. She eats! It’s disgusting!”\n\nPurby sighed. He looked at the woman, at her blank, forward stare. “So, if I’m understanding you correctly, your problem with the X-3—you are an X-3, right?” She nodded. “Your problem with the X-3 model is that she’s too life-like.”\n\n“Exactly! If I want a woman, I can go get one.”\n\n“I’m sure you can, sir.”\n\n“And they’re a fair sight cheaper than this squishy monstrosity you’ve saddled me with. Don’t you have anything in chrome?”\n\n“We don’t do chrome, sir.”\n\n“Exposed piston-joints, then. Blinking lights. An atomic power source. Gimme something! For God’s sake, man, you’re supposed to be building robots! Is it too much to ask for them to look like it?” The man was on the verge of leaping out of the chair. Purby, by contrast, was sinking deeper into his.\n\n“You’re not the first person to come to us with this complaint,” Purby said, removing a small brown business card and a voucher from his desk drawer. “This is an antiques dealer down in Old Town. He’s got a machinist on staff. I’m sure they have something that meets your needs. And tell the girl out front to give you a full X-3 refund.”\n\nThe man’s attitude instantly reversed. “Oh, thank you, Mr. Stolafson! I do appreciate it!” Fortunately, the man wasted no time leaving Purby’s office.\n\nPurby relaxed and turned his attention to the woman. Her expression had not changed. “Well, what do you make of all this?”\n\n“To be honest,” the woman said. “I’m quite relieved.”\n"
  title: The Uncanny Valley
  year: 2005
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2005-10-12
  day: 12
  month: 10
  text: "Marcus wiped blood from his chin. The thick red fluid stuck to his fingers. He stood slowly, pushing himself up off the ground with all the dignity he could muster as his foe stood proud and arrogant. Marcus’ feet were pressed into the soft Mars soil as he readied himself again.\n\n“You fool!” Marcus screamed out across the yards between him and his adversary. “You do not comprehend how much more precious is my life than yours! I am Mars-born!”\n\nGaither kept his eyes on his quarry and turned his attention inward for a moment. Focus the rage. Do this professionally. It’s a high-profile case; lots of media attention. Don’t give them any reason to cry brutality. His fist ached from cracking into the Red Planet monster’s jaw. He shook it off and pushed the pain back down, eyes boiling with a deluvian hatred that conquered all other emotion. He knew that if he didn’t kill him today, Marcus would go on living for another four hundred years. All of the Mars-born did- at least the ones who could escape Marcus’ knife. This time, however, Gaither had to stop him. Ninety-seven murders, eighteen rapes, and so many robberies that NASA police were still piecing it all together; Marcus had outdone every other criminal in extra-Earth territory. It stopped here.\n\nThe fiend spat blood, shaking off the solid hit that jarred his jaw. His broad shoulders rose and his bleeding lips sneered at the NASA marshal. “You high-radiation types are all the same. What? You think you got time? Ha! A pathetic 75 years at best you filthy Earth-born. C’mon… you’re dealing with a deity here. Just walk away, boy.”\n\nGaither left his pistol in its holster, watching Marcus weigh his escape options across a skyline of yellow Mars soil. He had heard enough. “Under NASA law of the Solar System Peace Treaty Agreement, you are hereby ordered to surrender You will receive a fair trial.” The wind was blew holes in his words, but Gaither knew Marcus got the idea.\n\n“Simpleton!” Marcus squealed. “You die today, Earth-born!” He charged the officer, but Gaither was ready. Dodging the first fist, he took a second in the ribs before he grabbed Marcus’ wrist and sent his own head cracking into the criminal’s fleshy face. The blood was thicker than Earth-blood; it had to be. The nose broken, and the man disoriented, Gaither snapped the cuffs on his left wrist.\n\n”No,” Marcus frothed as he spoke. “I won’t be defeated by a weak-muscled Earth-boy! I live forever!” He wouldn’t shut up, so Gaither exercised his militaristic rights: he expertly administered a slam of his fist into the yet undamaged side of Marcus’ jaw, precisely as per the diagram in the Academy’s text books.\n\n“Under NASA law, you are under arrest.” For the first time in days, Gaither smiled. “Point of interest: I’m from Pluto, asshole… I’m the one that’s immortal.”\n"
  title: Pluto Immortal
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2005-10-13
  day: 13
  month: 10
  text: "“It’s a family business.” The shopkeeper trembled, his telltale American face-lights blinking. “My daughter and my wife make the simulations themselves. Very good, high resolution, but they don’t do any touching, they’re good girls, they don’t touch.\n\n“He didn’t want the Sims, did he?” said the thin man, running his fingers over the crystal display, inside which two women winked at him suggestively. The tiny store was filled with animated images of the same two women wearing different costumes and teasing the viewer with repeating loops from their Sims.\n\nThe shopkeeper put his palms against the sides of the simulation pods and blinked, drops catching in his eyelashes. “He made them do it real-time here. They were laughing and moaning and then he left and took the feeling with him. My daughter won’t leave her room and my wife is so ashamed she can’t speak. Neither of them have the heart to produce the Sims over the Network. Sims are the family business and without them working, we will be taken to the Steam camps by our creditors.”\n\n“Psychics are brutes.” The thin man shoved his hands into his thick wool coat, oblivious to the Martian heat.\n\n“Beasts.” said the shopkeeper.\n\nThe thin man winced and his brow wrinkled. “He’s coming here now, isn’t he?”\n\n“Compadre, please, I need your help. He is coming here to rape my wife and daughter. Altec said that you could help, that when the zift was on the road you were the man to call.”\n\n“You didn’t tell me he was coming here now. You knew, and you didn’t tell me.” The thin man shivered and pulled his coat tighter. “I don’t help liars.”\n\n‘Papa?” A small voice drifted from upstairs. Little feet padded down the narrow broken staircase and a tiny woman came into view. She held herself against the wall and looked at the thin man as she spoke. “Are you okay Papa?”\n\n“Yes baby. Papa is fine. This man is the one I told you about, he is going to help us.” The shopkeeper looked up, his face lights oscillating on the grey cheek of the thin man.\n\n“Fuck you, yes. I’ll deal with him.” The thin man pulled out an illegal cigarette and lit it. “Psychics are brutes, but we take care of our own.”\n"
  title: Family Business
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2005-10-14
  day: 14
  month: 10
  text: "Sometimes I pretend I have a metawomb inside me.\n\nThings would grow there. Children, I mean. Dozens at a time. Girls and boys. I might not be able to stop. I’d populate my entire livingspace with pudgy pinkfaced versions of myself, and when I went to the recreation floor, strangers would come up and ask me how I managed to adopt so many. How strange, they’d remark. Some of them even look like you.\n\nI’d never tell anyone. I’d just smile and watch those tumbly bright-eyed beings chase eachother from wall to wall.\n\nAt night, when I can’t sleep, I press my hand to the soft space above my hips and think of my body filled with pink goo and hundreds of tiny, tiny people, growing like unspoken words.\n"
  title: Post-Biological Clock
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2005-10-15
  day: 15
  month: 10
  text: "Jack Strap didn’t bother burying the men. Buzzards’ gotta eat, he thought. Same as worms. A man makes his own funeral. You wander in the Desert, you’ll go the same way all Desert creatures do. In the belly of something else.\n\nBuzzards weren’t gonna do a thing with the corpse’s shooting irons, so Jack took that scavenging upon himself. Turned out not to be worth the effort; damn pieces might as well be wood for the good they’d be. Cursing, Jack tossed them aside.  No wonder he’d plugged them so easily. You couldn’t hit a broadside with those things, corroded as they were.\n\nThese men were amateurs. Wouldn’t have lasted long, not out here, not if they didn’t know how to protect their weapons. If they hadn’t caught up with him so quickly, the Desert would have chewed them up the same way. The Desert was eating away at him, too, Jack knew that. He was not a young man, and what skill he’d once had was now little more than luck. If it wasn’t men like these, out for the price on his head, it would be a night when the campfire that kept the spiders at bay would blow out. Or he wouldn’t treat a cut properly, and would collapse, his blood turning to powder. Or the caustic sand would get into his eyes, and he wouldn’t be a predator anymore, just prey. Or it would be one of a million other deaths the Desert had in wait, and his bones would bleach and crumble same way these fellas’ would.\n\nThat which is built on sand is destined to fall, the saying goes.\n\nJack wasted no time going through their pockets, tossing out the paper money that was already crumbling and pocketing the coins. But it was the bigger of the two that had what he was really after: a satellite link-up. No bounty hunter traveled without them now, not in the Desert. A GPS signal was your best hope of getting out once you were in, and even that was no guarantee. There it was, in a inside pocket, its plastic protective case already being eaten away. The small red LED on top slowly pulsing, signaling the connection was solid. Jack opened it and thumbed an orbital view. It had been months since the Desert had gotten to the last one he took. He was comforted by the little lights that represented the cities. What was left of the cities.\n\nIt had been a long time since he had seen an orbital view, but even Jack could tell there were fewer lights.\n\nJack Strap placed the link-up in the pouch on his belt where the old one used to stay, and was surprised at how much space was left. “Things keep getting smaller,” he said, to no one in particular, and left his would-be arrestors to the belly of the Desert.\n"
  title: In The Belly Of The Desert
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2005-10-16
  day: 16
  month: 10
  text: "“I don’t want to come home.”\n\nReggie’s wife began to cry, tears sliding around her cheeks.\n\nReggie smiled beatifically. “Don’t cry Carol, its alright, really. You’re young and awfully perky. You’ll find another husband in no time.”\n\n“But I’m in love with you!”\n\nLooking at her open red mouth and the slobber on her lip, Reggie wondered how this had ever been enough for him. “Please try to understand, I’m very happy here. I don’t want to go back to earth. I don’t ever want to leave my Asas side, the only reason I did now was because she demanded that I commune with you.”\n\n“Commune? She?” Carol’s hands trembled. “Do you fuck it?”\n\nReggie’s mouth twisted with revulsion. “What? No! That’s disgusting!” He folded his hands on his lap, his narrow face turning intense and cruel. “I say “she” because Asas is the female of her species, you sick hag, a life giver. What she does is nothing so banal as fucking. I myself have not had a sexual urge in weeks, well, not till now but I blame that on the fact that you’ve made me upset.”\n\nCarol wiped her tears with the back of her hand. “Oh Reggie, what have they done to you?”\n\nReggie shook his head. “These creatures are transcendent, utterly fascinating. Socially, they are far more advanced than we are. Not knowing one, you can’t comprehend. You know one and you don’t want to leave.”\n\nCarols face went blank.  “They’ve taken your mind.”\n\nReggie sighed, rolling his eyes. “No, that’s not it at all. Listen, I’ve only contacted you because Asas asked me to, she is concerned because of all of the messages I’ve been getting from you and the government. I haven’t had a lot of time to read them because Asas and I have been very busy, but those I have read have been very disturbing. Asas asked me to contact you because she is worried that if I don’t humans will send more people and those people would just fall in love and want to stay. Asas doesn’t think that it’s good for us, as a race, to be so infatuated and frankly, I agree. Of course, she’s going to keep me.” He sighed. “We have a very special relationship. They aren’t a cruel species Carol, they really are thinking of our best interests.” He paused and the blissful expression on his face changed for a moment. “Its possible that if they sent humans that weren’t receptive to social signals, autistics perhaps…no, it shouldn’t be risked.”\n\n“Reggie, I miss you. Your mother is so worried, she asked me to-”\n\nReggie interrupted her, waving his hand. “This is all very unpleasant. Asas feeding time begins soon and I don’t want to miss it. It’s so beautiful, I can’t even describe. Don’t send any more messages, okay?” He stood and grinned at the screen. “Good luck finding a new husband babe.” Reggie pointed his finger at the screen like a cocked blaster and then the transmission cut.\n\nCarol began to cry again, reaching toward the static of the dead screen. Light years away, Reggie ran joyfully to find Asas, the unpleasantness of the encounter with his wife fading quickly in the euphoria of new love.\n"
  title: Infatuation
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2005-10-17
  day: 17
  month: 10
  text: "The snow falls on my smile like that old fairy tale—you know, the one about the dwarves and the cannibal queen, the one with the apple. The tableau would be better if it was sunset, because I always liked sunsets best, but you take what you can get.\n\nI’m drinking in the buildings, the river, the empty streets where cabbies used to curse at pedestrians who never bothered to listen. I’m eating the silence that comes with snow. Everything is filling up white, though there’s a grey cast to the new blanket, not like the picture books I used to read about Christmas when I was a kid.\n\nI know they will have missed me by now, but no one will come back. The overseers won’t let them. It’s too dangerous now. I can’t feel it, though—my body’s still strong, still perfectly capable of walking and talking and breathing in the last of my home. They’ll say I was crazy, I’m sure, but I love this city, this state. I’d go crazy for real if I had to leave it all behind. I never got how people could live underground. It’s the air, I think, that would get me. I can’t live without the wind on my face.\n\nThe snow is thick now, and I think I can feel a little of the numbness setting in. That’s the way they said it would be: slow but painless. I did the research. I knew what I was getting into. My body feels stiff and I can’t quite tell if the snow is cold when I pick it up with my bare hands. It’s so beautiful. I know what it means, but all I can think is that it’s beautiful.\n\nI throw my handful in the air and let it fall down with the rest, laughing out loud as it brushes my fading skin. In all my life, it has never snowed like this in New York.\n"
  title: Equinox
  year: 2005
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2005-10-18
  day: 18
  month: 10
  text: "I’m floating. Well, it seems like I’m more submerged at the moment. It takes me a moment to realize where I am and that still doesn’t make sense. Everything is dark, my body feels weightless but it is not peaceful. My lungs begin to realize; I’m not breathing. Suddenly, it’s panic. Arms start flailing; my mouth shuts hard and contains what oxygen I have left for some reason unknown to me.\n\nThis is when I’m looking around, blurs of the moments through corporeal space of matter filtering into my mind; the moments that may be my last. I stop to realize it for what it is; my last moments. No, I tell myself unable to accept what it might be for reality. The key is not to panic. My eyes start focusing as best as they can and I start pulling up the metaphorical anchor that’s tugging me down further.\n\nUp, the only way out is up. My arms stop flailing and they start acting methodical. I’m swimming, I believe. Pulling myself from floating, I can see the edges of my vision blurring in darkness and my head begins to spin inside. Thinking of what I have to live for, it has to keep me going after all. Mother, Father, and my future come to mind. Particularly the future I’ve squandered, the future I refused to act on. Never applied to those colleges, never went to Australia, and never got to see what I thought I was destined to be witness to. I am getting older and I haven’t yet made a move forward. How old was I now and my dreams were still the same distance away from me?\n\nThe focus was keeping me awake enough to push myself through the liquid. I can see something just beyond the surface. I can’t die like this! It can’t end this way! It’s getting darker, but I can see light. It’s getting much darker, but I know with that last strain of strength that I can break the surface.\n\n“Welcome to re-life, Abe.” The next thing I can hear is the doctor saying this to me. My eyes are focusing again and I’m hardly panting for air now. The off-white allure of an office, the sterile scent of medicine, it’s all coming to me very slowly. My parents are here, smiling proudly. They have tears in their eyes; tears of worry. What just happened? What accident was I in?\n\n“You passed the test; you get to go home now.” I’m confused. I don’t understand and I’m looking towards my mother and father for guidance. This isn’t real, is it? What is real anymore? The doctor is handing me a plastic card. Sitting up, I start to read it.\n\nAbe Carter\n\nCertified to Live\n\nIssue Date: 10/25/2050\n\nIt was then that I realized, life will be better from here on out.\n"
  title: Will To Live
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2005-10-19
  day: 19
  month: 10
  text: "The dream: Jennie Smith woke up in a desert, standing in the center of an endless, cracked sheet of dirt so hard you could scrape your knees on it if you fell down. Above her, the sky was even blacker than her grandmother’s skin, and the moon seemed like a hole carved into its clay.\n\nSeveral feet away, an ibis scratched at the soil with long and skinny legs, forcing its narrow beak into the grooves where the surface had split while drying. The ibis stopped, sensing her presence.\n\n“What are you doing here?” it asked.\n\nThe ibis didn’t speak English. It was a different language, something Jennie Smith had never heard before, but the syllables still rang with meaning. “This is my dream,” she told the ibis. Her mouth couldn’t form the bird’s strange sounds, so she spoke in the language she used at school.\n\nThe ibis cackled, stamped at the broken ground. “Filthy,” it spat. The long beak again disappeared into a crack.\n\n“What are YOU doing here?” Jennie asked.\n\n“Fishing.”\n\nWhen Jennie woke up the next morning she tried to hold onto the dream, tried to file the strange sounds away beside their English counterparts. She showered, got dressed, and ate breakfast with her mother and father and grandmother and grandfather and aunts and uncles and everyone else on their floor of the Center for Indigenous Transition.\n\n“I had a strange dream last night,” she said, and began relating the events. At first, only her mother was listening, but gradually the others fell silent and before long, the length of the table was filled with closed mouths and wide eyes watching the girl’s gestures. “It asked me what I was doing here,” Jennie said. “But it didn’t say that, it didn’t say what are you doing here, instead, it said…” she closed her eyes and concentrated, testing the unfamiliar movements in the space where her tongue met the roof of her mouth. They felt foreign but fluid, and when she gave voice to them she was surprised by the ease with which they fell from her lips.\n\nNo one said anything, for several seconds. Her parents exchanged meaningful looks, her aunts and uncles exchanged meaningful looks, and get grandparents exchanged meaningful looks. After the silence in the room became nearly unbearable, it was broken by the sharp snap of Jennie’s grandmother’s palm against her cheek. “Ow!” Jennie yelled.\n\n“Don’t you ever use that language again,” she said furiously.\n\n“It was just a dream!” Jennie argued as she pressed her hand against the warm skin of her face.\n\n“It’s a dead language,” the old woman continued with slightly less force. “It’s filthy. Don’t you ever let anyone hear you use that language again.”\n\nJennie put down her fork and stared at her plate, still rubbing her cheek with her other hand. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly.\n\n“We use English now,” her grandmother said, then returned to her seat. Jennie watched the table, full of dark faces with darker eyes silently focusing on fingers, napkins, plates, anything but Jennie and her Grandmother. The old woman picked up her fork and scraped up the final remnants of her egg. “We use English,” she repeated. “Only English.”\n"
  title: Tibambinum
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2005-10-20
  day: 20
  month: 10
  text: "“They say there is no God in the outer planets! Those who say this clearly do not have any understanding of the Lord and his teachings! They clearly have not been here!”\n\nFrom deep within in the control deck of “The Laz’rus,” high in standard orbit, Anastasia allowed herself a grin. Reverend Horseshoe was an old-fashioned man in most respects, and his preaching was no different. Whereas most men in his line of work liked to open their revivals with holographics and pyrotechnics, Horseshoe did it the old-fashioned way. That is to say, he yelled his ass off.\n\n“Who among you could dare say where God is not, on this world or any other? I say his spirit is everywhere, and I have yet to see evidence that this is not the truth! I even carry the notion that His love and His grace is more here than anywhere else in the cosmos!”\n\nNot that the Reverend didn’t make use of current theatrical technology to its utmost: the larger-than-life holographic crucified Jesus with the laser-beam eyes was a personal favorite of his. The laser-beams had been the brainchild of Rojhaz, the ground manager. But despite Rojhaz’s urgings, Horseshoe never started his show with such things. Even the robot gospel choir stayed silent while Horseshoe was opening.\n\n“Now, I know some of my colleagues say I do not preach enough fire! That I do you poor folk a disservice by not bellowing about how you are damned souls who need to change your sinful ways! But I know better than that! I am here as a representative—no! Not a representative, but a servant! A servant of the Lord! And as a servant I come not as a judge! But as a beacon!”\n\nAnastasia was proud of the robot choir. She had added a pre- and post-show dialogue loop, allowing the chubby androids to convincingly chew the fat as the audience filed in and out of the tent. It added a verisimilitude that she felt that were lacking in all the other garish ideas Rojhaz had cooked up. It was show business, she understood that. But Anastasia felt that they owed their audience a little more.\n\n“A beacon of the Lord! Of His love! Of His grace! And, most importantly, of His hope! I am a beacon of hope!”\n\nAt that cue, Anastasia flipped the switch, and the electro-luminescent material of the Reverend Horseshoe’s containment suit glowed with a brilliance that rivaled the sun. Indeed, it even rivaled the laser beams that came from Jesus’s eyes.\n\n“What’s the crowd look like, Rojhaz?” Anastaia said into her earpiece. The robot choir had just started; she didn’t have another cue for a few minutes. “How long have they got?”\n\n“They seem pretty into it, I’ll bet they’ll stay in the tent the whole three hours,” came the slightly muffled response.\n\n“No, I mean, how long do they have?”\n\nThere was a strange noise as Rohjaz suddenly became very aware of his own containment suit and adjusted it. “Weeks. If that. The plague’s hit this town pretty hard.” His voice lightened. “They’re engaged though, even the blind ones. We’ll get a powerful haul out of this one. Most of their livestock’s already succumbed, so we’re talking heirloom pieces, furniture. Definitely stuff we can get real dosh for.”\n\n“You think it ever bothers Horseshoe, fleecing these people before they’re about to die?”\n\n“Girl, do you even listen to what the Reverend says? He’s giving these people hope. They’ll get a fair more use out of that than great-grandma’s silver these next few weeks.” Behind his voice, Anastasia could hear the robot choir finishing out the opening number. “Besides, how much would you pay for hope?”\n\nAnastasia couldn’t answer. She just sat there, high in orbit, as the robot choir reached their crescendo.\n\n“Amazing grace,” they sang. “How sweet, the sound…”\n"
  title: Mercy Mission
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2005-10-21
  day: 21
  month: 10
  text: "“Sex complicates things.” Professor Dawkins looked at Joe, whose broad shoulders nearly touched the sides of his tiny book-lined office. Joe was from one of the Midwestern public schools that concentrated on test scores, leaving students with a broad range of knowledge, but little depth. “Sex adds an extra element to the process of reproduction, and although that allows for greater variance, simplistic asexual reproduction is still the most popular model.”\n\nJoe squirmed in his seat. “So there aren’t any animals that take the best DNA from many individuals in the population to make the best offspring?”\n\nDawkins wondered what Joe had been reading. “Best DNA? “Best” really isn’t a concept that we use. Would adding more organisms, more genetic variety, increase fitness?” Joe scrunched his forehead and rubbed his brow, a motion which reminded Dawkins of his wife. “Nature favors incremental change. Any major mutations are likely to kill an individual.”\n\nJoe pushed up his glasses. “What if there was a major mutation that was very favorable?”\n\nDawkins sat on his desk facing Joe and smiled. “I’m not saying that’s impossible Joe, just highly improbable. There are no examples of such an event. Animals are an interactive whole; any major change is likely to have a detrimental effect on that whole.”\n\n“So humans just couldn’t learn to fly or anything.”\n\nDawkins loosened his collar; the office had become quite warm. “Well, if what you mean is that they couldn’t develop, say, functional wings for flight in a generation, then that is true. In the case of wings, humans might have to develop lighter bones for flight and every change towards lighter bones would have to increase reproductive viability. Each step is a final product in itself.”\n\nJoe ran a hand though his short black hair and bit his lip.” What about on other planets?”\n\nDawkins blushed, feeling suddenly aroused. “Other planets? I’m not sure I understand your question.”\n\n“Would evolution work the same on other planets?” The office was very hot.\n\n“Well, since we haven’t been to any other planets with life it’s hard to draw any conclusions. Personally, I would speculate that our model of natural selection, variability and heritability would likely be similar for other planets. We recognize evolution as a logical process which separates the chaotic forces of the universe and translates them into the obvious order of an organism. There are several examples of different organs evolving similar structures independently, for example, the eye has evolved independently several times. Light sensitive cells to a concave surface to a lens, each step helping to give an organism a reproductive advantage it’s a good logical design that follows basic rules. “\n\nThe book on Joes lap slid onto the floor, but neither of them noticed. “Professor Dawkins, I think you’re just about the smartest man I ever met.”\n\nDawkins laughed. “What about your friend Jerry. He’s a clever boy, don’t you think?”\n\nJoe blushed. “Er, yes, clever, but that’s different than smart.”\n\nJoe’s hair was soft and short, and it felt lovely between Dawkins fingers. Joe pulled Dawkins toward him, and Dawkins leaned into his touch.\n\n“I think.” Joe said, his cool breath on Dawkins lips “That species on other planets might do things differently.” Joes tongue shot into Dawkins mouth, the buds on his tongue sharp, breaking the skin on the inside of Dawkin’s cheek. Dawkins moaned in a lustful stupor and put a hand on Joe’s broad chest, his ribs like segmented scales.\n"
  title: Selection
  year: 2005
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2005-10-22
  day: 22
  month: 10
  text: "The way she lets her hair flow in the wind keeps me breathless. She twists and turns as the leaves blow past; an endless dance to an endless life. They say it’s the season for wisdom, heralding a season of death to come. That season has long since past and I’m watching her dance in her tattered dress in the middle of a vacant park. Still, I find myself hesitating at my duty.\n\nSome might say what I do is heartless, but they don’t get to appreciate beauty like I do. They don’t understand what life is until they kill something that shouldn’t be living. They might call up more laws to stop me from doing what I’m doing, but in the end they know a higher power agrees with me. It just reminds me of how they are all just little insects that will never leave their moral homes. I’m the hunter, and I am the artist. Right now, she’s become my muse and my prey. I am beside myself.\n\nYet, I’m still watching her. I could sit here all day upwind from her and watch her live out what’s left inside of her. Some scientists call it mental twitches, but I know it’s deeper than that. My eyes can’t blink because I’m afraid she might see me and the dance will be over. I’m afraid because I want that beauty in her to last forever even though a part of me knows it won’t. It never does.\n\nEverything is a mix of brown, red and yellow. It’s a miasma of a bitter rainbow but it makes her stand out amongst the color of flames. She might have burned with the rest, but I’m just too happy to be spying on her this moment. Most of them would have stopped by now, smelled the air and realized they weren’t alone. It’s tough to say what they smell like, but I know from experience that it’s not a good scent.\n\nThe wind picks up, and now I can see her face. It’s still pretty, still untainted by her affliction and for a moment I am doubtful of my duty. For a second I can loosen my grip on the deadly tool in my grasp. It is only that brief passing of time that I allow myself a semblance of peace, and maybe I’ll pray someday that they all make it back and that this will all be a bad dream. Someday just isn’t today.\n\nShe’s wavering now, something I tend to get nervous over. This one is so pretty, so very gorgeous and I wonder if maybe I would have liked her, if maybe before things went sour if I’d had the chance to take her out for coffee and made love to her in a satin-sheeted bed. Her faltering ruins that. It’s the way her step hesitates, the look of that particularly rigid kind of stance that they make just before they go vile. Yes, I can feel the sting of salty tears because I know if this were any other place, any other time; I’d go to hell for doing such a thing.\n\nI have to keep one thought in mind as I tug back the mechanism to load the Remington. This is hell. This is the reckoning. They aren’t alive, and I can’t go back. No, I can’t make her dance again like she did before. The only thing I can do… is put her down and all the others just like her.\n"
  title: Autumn
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2005-10-23
  day: 23
  month: 10
  text: "The back of the postcard says “please don’t give up.”\n\nShe lives on the seven hundred and thirtieth floor. The elevator takes nineteen minutes to reach the livingfloor, when there is no one else getting on it, which has only happened twice. Otherwise, it takes an extra twenty four seconds at each floor, plus three seconds to resume its maximum speed. Today, it takes twenty seven minutes. She does not mind. She watches the red numbers of the digital clock count off milliseconds.\n\nThere are clocks everywhere, so she always knows the time.\n\nThe city is an ancient forest of metal and cement, with thick trunks made sooty with exhaust, windows blackened. No one lives on the bottom level, of course. The air down there is toxic. She had been there once, on a field trip, with heavy breathing equipment that gasped and wheezed oxygen into the helmet of the protective suit. You needed a flashlight down there, even in the daytime. If you stood on the surface and looked up, you couldn’t see the first livingfloor, much less the current one.\n\nThe current one is the eighth, she knows.\n\nToday she sits on a metal bench in the park, staring down through the Plexiglas shield to the seventh livingfloor. It is hazy in the grey fog. Above her, the levibots are working on the ninth, which will be completed in four years.\n\nThe levibots are not operated by people. People do not operate anything anymore.\n\nThere is no one else in the park. There never is, really. People do not move as much. Their rooms are small and white. They can touch the walls with two hands outstretched, usually. If they stretch the other way, their fingers reach the keyboard, which can be pulled onto their lap. The richer people have windows, but windows are seldom necessary. The sky is always dark, this high up. The sun glitters in a puddle of navy blue. The atmosphere is thin. It gets thinner every year. Every foot of altitude. They are climbing to the point where the air disappears.\n\nShe finds the postcard between the metal slats of the bench. On the front, there is a picture of a lake that stretched to the horizon, sky smeared with rust as the wide flame of the sun dips into the orange and blue water.\n\nThis must be the ocean, she thinks.\n\nPlease don’t give up.\n\nShe ponders the scrawl, thick smooth swirl of blue ink. Ink, from a pen and not a printer, letters curved and organic. She loves the way that the letter E’s each look different, the way they slip up as the line thins and then vanishes, reappearing at the start of the next word with a fresh fury.\n\nShe glances around, but the park is still empty.\n\nShe hesitates before climbing to the top of the bench, balancing on the backrest as she reaches over the seven-foot plastic shield and lets the postcard slip from her fingers. It spins, past her face and past her torso and past her feet, down past the livingfloor and into the thick soupy grayness, still falling and falling.\n\nShe wonders how long it will take the card to reach the hard surface. She wonders if there is wind down there, tearing through ancient roadways, catching the thick paper and floating it, like a prayer, to some great ocean where the sun still sets.\n"
  title: Postcard
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2005-10-24
  day: 24
  month: 10
  text: "We think large. We may be small creatures to you, but our lives extend far beyond the miniscule moments you possess. We think large, and we think long.\n\nHave you ever looked at a mosquito, closely? It’s a strange shape, all hunched over and crooked. Even by your insect standards, it is a bizarre creature. And you never realized. It’s one of the few insects that survive your winters. Did you ever wonder why?\n\nIt was us, of course. We didn’t have to do much; it was already such a glorious creature. And what with that penetrating…what’s the word? Oh, there it is. Proboscis. Lovely word. Proboscis. What with that proboscis, we had the perfect conveyance.\n\nNaturally, you were still too great in number, so a certain degree of population destruction, a bit of “shock and awe,” if you will, was necessary. What was it you called it? Malaria? How…quaint. If the boys in the infantry don’t already know what you call them, I’ll have to tell them. Sounds like a girl you used to have sex with, doesn’t it? “I just met a girl named Malaria…” The things you people think up.\n\nAnd all this time, you blamed the mosquitoes!  Not totally, I see.  You called them “carriers.” Too true.  What does that make you then, I wonder?\n\nI do apologize for all the mucous that clogged your throat and sinuses, the aching of your muscles, your general weakness for the past few days. I can see that you thought it was a just a cold, but I feel the need to own up. We’ve become so close, after all. It was me. Your nervous system is surprisingly hard to operate.\n\nTell you what, before we meet up with the rest of the invasion fleet, let’s go find a girl that arouses you and have sex with it. First one we find, huh? You’d like that, wouldn’t you, boy?\n\nLook, I’m trying to be nice, here. I don’t have to be.\n\nAfter all, your world is ours. From the first time you coughed, you had already lost.\n"
  title: Invaded
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2005-10-25
  day: 25
  month: 10
  text: "Seventeen years ago, when I returned from the Europa colony, I was asked to give a speech at a middle school assembly. For two hours I talked about recycling. Recycled air, recycled food, recycled water. We throw things away here, but there, everything is recycled.\n\nThis kid comes up to me afterwards, a little girl of maybe twelve, and she asks, what’s it like to have less gravity?\n\nI chuckled. It’s lighter, I told her.\n\nNo, she said, without a smile. What’s it really like?\n\nI watched her for a few seconds. Her eyes were narrow like she was looking into the sun, and I swear I’ve never seen a kid so intent on knowing something. It was like I had the answers for the most important test she’d ever take.\n\nI didn’t really know what to say. I mean, gravity is gravity. More gravity is heavier, less gravity is lighter. There isn’t much room for elaboration. In the end, I told her that it felt like going downhill on a roller coaster, but that wasn’t true at all. It’s much more peaceful, more still. Everything moves slower up there. Even time.\n\nNow, sometimes I watch the moon and I think, that’s what Europa looks like from a shuttle. I wouldn’t say I miss it, though. I never went back to the colony, and now I’m past the mandatory age limit for space travel. It’s like a roller coaster, I told her. You must be this young to ride this attraction.\n\nI wonder if that little girl ever made it. They say that, in a few decades, everyone on Earth will be recycled.\n"
  title: The Europa Colony
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2005-10-26
  day: 26
  month: 10
  text: "“So you see,” Bigsby slurred, “So you see, that’s why we’re better than you.”\n\n“No,” Jack replied, “I don’t see at all.”\n\n“Okay. Okay. I’ll explain it again. It’s like this. The beer, see–” He held up his own glass for demonstration. “The beer is the Earthmen. And these pretzels, well, the pretzels and the wings and the soda, those are all the colonies.”\n\n“So the colonies are the substantial portion of the menu.”\n\n“But the beer is why people come to the bar. Ya gotta have the beer to spice it up a bit.”\n\n“But that’s why people eat the pretzels,” Jack pointed out blandly. “Because they don’t want to feel the effects of the alcohol. Most of the colonies have outlawed beer entirely,” he pointed out, sipping his own Coke in quiet superiority. He hoped immigration would be next on the list.\n\n“But that’s my point! That’s exactly my point.” Bigsby leaned forward, his watery eyes sparkling. “Back here on Earth, why do people drink alcohol?”\n\n“Because they don’t know any better and they don’t want to change.”\n\n“Wrong. That’s not it at all. They do it because they want change. Thank you,” Bigsby added to the bartender, who had just refilled his glass.\n\n“Now you’ve lost me.”\n\n“It’s true. Listen. Why do frat boys drink beer at parties?”\n\n“What do you do for a living?” Jack cut in. He regarded Bigsby like some kind of rare bug specimen.\n\n“I’m an out of work politician.”\n\nJack sighed. That meant he wouldn’t get out of this without hearing the whole lecture. At least it would make a great scathing editorial when he got back to Mars. “All right, go on. Why do frat boys drink beer at parties? Aside from the obvious answers of immaturity and poor upbringing.”\n\n“Forget the frat boys, then. Why does anyone drink alcohol? Why does a perfectly sane, well-kempt, mature Earthman go out for a pint with his mates? Because he wants things to change. He wants to push the boundaries, wants to test the limits of himself. He wants to put himself in an abnormal situation and see if he gets an abnormal response. In short, he wants stimulus, and that’s something the colonies are never going to have.” Bigsby gestured widely with his glass, sloshing a respectable amount of beer onto the bar.  “What’s the last innovation the colonies have come up with? The latest invention? Have there been any?”\n\nJack glowered at the increasingly annoying Earthman. “You can’t possibly be saying that an era of peace, prosperity, and enlightenment is a bad thing. Our laws are the best in the universe. They promote the way of life that we want to live.”\n\n“Conflict is a catalyst,” Bigsby replied, eyes widening in an attempt to look wise. Jack remembered it as a catch phrase on the cover of the latest USA Today.\n\n“Don’t go looking for work on Mars,” he told Bigsby shortly, setting the money for his drink on the bar.\n\n“Stay on Earth a while,” Bigsby called after him from the barstool. “I’ll take you out. We’ll go watch pro wrestling!”\n\nJack was already writing the editorial in his head.\n"
  title: Enlightenment
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2005-10-27
  day: 27
  month: 10
  text: "The thousand babies slept in the high, dry grass as late summer breezes caressed their cradles. Local farmers, paid by the government not to grow food, had abandoned the field and left their farm equipment to rust. The summer had been blazing and the ground cracked under the oppressive sun. For the babies, the heat had been ideal, the same as if they had been tucked under their mothers belly. They swayed inside their hard cradles, rocking themselves in and out of dreams. Their mother thought of them always, they could hear her bright thoughts, even from far away, and knew that they were not alone.\n\nIn early autumn, when the weather was still warm but the breeze hinted at an approaching winter, the children crawled out of their cradles. The tiny ones were eaten by their stronger siblings, mewing inside broken cradles that were unable to protect them from razor beaks and sucking orifices. The children played, pecking at each other, snapping at autumn leaves, burrowing in the earth and launching themselves a hundred feet into the sky before gliding downwards back to the wild field. Each little explorer listened for the voice of the mother, trying to pin-point that invisible light in the sky from where her voice came. Food came to the field, tempted by the whistling voices, and the children ate together.\n\nMother’s giant mind, a processor of incomprehensible power, sent the children loving thoughts and strict commands. When they were too big for the field, having ripped the brittle grass and wet the ground, they spread their scaled wings and leaped, soaring towards a higher, bigger playground, a city of steel and glass, glittering in a twilight haze.\n"
  title: The High, Hot Summer
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2005-10-28
  day: 28
  month: 10
  text: "The walls of Maria Gracia Plana’s prison had long since fallen, the building having crumbled along with the Empire that constructed it. The planet’s wealth and populace have gone, leaving it boundless and bare, a relic of times long past. Maria Gracia Plana’s guards have left her, after she broke the leg of the one who tried to rape her and the skull of the one who was going to watch. The walls were gone but she remained, writing letters to the outside worlds.\n\nBut they were no longer letters, not since the Blight. They were now nothing more than a series of apologies. Apologies to her people, who believed in her and her revolution. Apologies to her revolution, for not being strong enough to defend its ideals. Apologies to the dead.\n\nIn an open prison, Maria Gracia Plana wrote apologies those lost in the war that she started and the Blight that followed and hoped it would ease their weight off her shoulders.\n\nShe was engaged in this activity when the spaceman arrived. His Imperial uniform was disheveled and torn, but his bearing and movements betrayed a life spent in space, a life used to conserving everything.\n\n“Maria Gracia Plana,” he said. “Still here?”\n\n“There is a war on. I am a prisoner of war.” Maria did not look up from her tablet; she had apologies to write.\n\n“War’s over. You won.”\n\n“I did not! I never wanted the Blight. I never asked for it. If I wasn’t here, it would never have been used! Mass murder was never what I wanted.”\n\n“Know. Read your letters.”\n\n“You read my…” Maria managed to tear her eyes away from her tablet. “Who are you?”\n\n“Nadir Faruqi. Captain, Galactic Imperial Fleet. Only, Empire done gone. Just Captain, ‘spose.”\n\n“And you, no doubt a romantic, have come to rescue me, is that right? Well, I am dreadfully sorry, Captain Faruqi, but I have no desire to be saved.” Maria returned her attention to her tablet, and the apologies it contained. The spaceman merely stood stock still, another rock amid the ruins of Maria’s prison.\n\n“Not here to save you. Here to save worlds. Empire done gone. Chaos, now. Blight done that. But so did you. So did I.” The spaceman touched the grip of the blaster that was strapped to his hip. He shifted his weight as he did so, as if the weapon had suddenly grown heavier.\n\n“You’re here to remind me that I’ve failed, is that it? I don’t need you to tell me that! I thought I was being a martyr when I was arrested. I didn’t know then that martyrs are dead, and the dead can’t speak. So when the people you trusted decide to release a devastatingly lethal on the enemy, no one will hear you cry ‘no.’”\n\n“That’s gone. Can’t change, so let go. Worlds need you.”\n\n“I am dead! Don’t you understand? I am dead! No one will hear me except the dead, and all I can do is apologize to them! That’s all I can do! I am dead! Can you hear me? I AM DEA—”\n\nThe spaceman placed his hand over Maria’s mouth. It was not an act of violence or anger. Merely frustration, which was echoed in his eyes, black as space itself.\n\n“Not dead. The dead done gone. You’re here. Worlds need you. Was an Imperial Captain. Fought and killed for Empire. But never believed in. Saw much Empire as Captain. Nothing to believe in. Until you. You had a better way. Empire mighty, but not in your eyes. Your passion…your grace. Believed in that. Worlds…I…need you to be worth your name.”\n\nThe spaceman withdrew his had from Maria’s mouth, and held it in front of her, ready to lift her up out of the dust.\n\nThe walls of Maria Gracia Plana’s prison had long since fallen, the building having crumbled along with the Empire that constructed it. The planet’s wealth and populace have gone, leaving it boundless and bare, a relic of times long past. All that remains are her apologies, and the dead.\n"
  title: The Dead Done Gone
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2005-10-29
  day: 29
  month: 10
  text: "Outside the dome, the earth was sealed with cement; the towers of processed plastic, retrieved from the treasure chests of ancient dumps, grew, broke and branched like mad metal trees. The glimmering city sang in a constant low thrum, tiny machines building additions, remodeling for the new and the better, ever evolving, unfinished.  The man made cold swept over the hard city, sending citizens running for manufactured warmth and longing for a past that never was.\n\nInside the dome, the wild Villia embraced herself under thousands of watching eyes who longed for her natural paradise.  The constructed environment bore her food and cradled her in eternal summer. Villia thrilled before her invisible admirers, stretched herself in the gaze of the gods of her wide Eden. On neon screens she, natural goddess, worshipped by the clicking of tiny insecticide cameras, smiled at a field of tiny yellow flowers, imagining them as her followers, faces rising, bright and delicate.\n"
  title: Villia
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2005-10-30
  day: 30
  month: 10
  text: "Peter did not remember the first time he used the displacement generator. That was how it should be, of course. When used properly, the generator always erased the traces of itself. If it didn’t, a person could get tangled up in time, strangled by tethers of conflicting memory. So when he woke up in the white room, surrounded by lights and wires and the generator’s dull whirr, it used to take Peter several minutes to get his spatial and temporal bearings. Not anymore, though. Now, he had a few shortcuts.\n\nWhen he came to, the first thing his eyes settled upon was the sheet of paper taped to a wire over his bed. He snatched it, squinting at the broad, circular letters. Your name is Peter Graham. You are a displacement technician. You are thirty seven years old.\n\nThe statements continued, and gradually, Peter’s memory spilled into the places that were blank when he first woke up. He had two sisters. He lived with his girlfriend and their daughter Sarah. He played tennis. By lunchtime, he’d overcome most of the amnesia of temporal shock.\n\n“What’s it today, mate?” asked the portly, graying man across the table at the complex’s cafeteria.\n\n“What?”\n\n“I’m Will.”\n\nPeter didn’t remember anything about Will, but he unfolded the paper to double check. Nope. Nothing. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’ll come back in a few hours.”\n\nWill nodded and peeled the plastic wrap from around his sandwich before taking a large bite of synthetic tuna. He chewed this thoughtfully, then put the sandwich back on the table and snatched the paper from Peter’s fingers. “Peter Graham,” he read. “Nice. You’ve got a kid.”\n\nPeter nodded. Odd man. Years of doing this made some people go a little strange.\n\n“You working this afternoon?” Will asked. “Check the schedule.” He pointed to a large display on an adjacent wall, and Peter stood up to find his name. It was nothing but numbers.\n\n“I don’t remember it being like this before,” Peter said. Will chuckled.\n\n“Check your arm,” he said. Peter did. At the base of his wrist, a seven digit number showed in crisp black ink. “They can’t do that kind of thing by names, for obvious reasons.”\n\nPeter found his number and followed it across the glowing chart. “I’m working the French Revolution,” he said.\n\n“Fun.”\n\nHe continued examining the schedule, picking out what he’d be doing for the next few days. “Hey,” he noticed, “Why do I have a dormitory number?”\n\n“Huh?”\n\n“They have here that I’m supposed to sleep in section 17-F.”\n\n“Well, then you sleep in 17-F.”\n\n“What about my girlfriend and kid?” Peter said. He dimly remembered promising her that he’d take her out for dinner tonight. Was it their anniversary? Her birthday, maybe. Will laughed.\n\n“See you at dinner,” he said as he pushed away from the table. “Maybe you’ll be Pierre by then.”\n"
  title: Pierre
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2005-10-31
  day: 31
  month: 10
  text: "With each stroke of the knife, I knew he loved me.\n\nIt started with my nipples, him telling me how much he loved me and how sexy I would look without them. He touched my face as he did it, cooing and kissing my forehead and telling me how much he loved me. He kissed away every one of my tears and held me within his powerful arms as I bled.\n\nFor six weeks there was no mention of knives. My heart leapt every time he looked at me, a joy and longing in his eyes. The six weeks after I gave up my nipples were quite possibly the happiest of my entire life.\n\nBut the seventh and eighth and ninth passed, and he grew distant, moody. He would spend nights away from the house and return drunken and grumbling. One night, I asked what was wrong, and what I could do to help him.\n\nAnd so the knives came out again.\n\nHe shaved my head, including my eyebrows that night. Soon after, all of my hair from my body was removed through his amateur electrolysis. He took off my nose with one clean slice and, using a device I didn’t recognize, sealed up the wound and made it smooth to the touch, as if nothing had ever been there. I could only breathe through my mouth, and told him so, panicking. He just smiled, kissed the smoothness in the center of my face, and told me I was beautiful.\n\nMy toes and fingers took nearly two months, one joint at a time. He took similar relish with each of my teeth. He said he was sad when he went for my crotch, but I saw how happy his eyes were and how his hands shook with arousal as he smoothed out my groin.\n\nHe used that same device to seal off my sockets after he cut out my eyes. He also used it to fuse my ass cheeks, and later, my mouth leaving only a small hole in each case. I heard him laugh and tell me how sexy I looked. He kissed me all over, and made jokes about how easy it would now be to confuse my two ends. He sounded so happy.\n\nOne night—or what I assumed was night, at the very least—he drew a heart on my smooth chest with his finger. He told me it meant “I love you.” Then he cut off my ears.\n\nBetween long stretches of nothing, I would suck vitamin-enriched water from a straw he would press against lips and feel his strong fingers all over what was left of my naked body. I was too weak to react physically, but I reveled in his touch and the way traced that heart on my chest over and over. My life was spent this way, waiting for these moments.\n\nIt is difficult to love a being from another planet, but there are sacrifices to be made in every relationship. And now my alien lover will never leave me.\n"
  title: How Much Will You Take?
  year: 2005
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2005-11-01
  day: '01'
  month: 11
  text: "“Diggs! C’mon man, we gotta keep this moving or we won’t find squat for real dirt by the end of the day!”\n\n‘That had to be Brennan yelling over the drill tube. He’d been at work\n\non that machine, trying to suck up the dry mud and debris, hoping for a\n\nbetter chance at the pure stuff.\n\nDiggs wiped his brow, tugging the tube up out of the dirt to stop production. “Eh! Boss says we got to crank this up a notch, people, let’s strip this land and move on.”\n\nBrennan shifted his ball cap over his head as the the light of the sun beat down on the dying meadow. “Say, Diggs, I know you gots your kids birthday today. How’s abouts you go home early?”\n\n“What? And miss a shot at gettin’ some real prime planet core? Bren, you gotta be outta that thick skull of yours. The fuzz ain’t makin’ you nervous are they? You know we’re miles from the cops. Besides, we’re busy. We got two more areas to suck up after this one and-“\n\n“Look” Brennan started up, swinging his clipboard back around in a wide dramatic gesture, “I ain’t tryin’ to steal goods from ya, just thought I’d suggest. She’s a real primer, this one.  Just, be careful.”\n\n“Aw, Bren, I’m gonna get all misty. You ain’t still worried about what happened to the McClennan boys are you?” Diggs had taken the time to make mocking smirks at his boss and life-long friend.\n\n“It just… it ain’t right. Like, the ground or somethin’ just ate’em up. They left the tools and ate the people, Diggs. I ain’t wanna see the same happen to you.”\n\nBrennan’s friend just shook his head and turned back on the A34 Soil Remover. The buzz turned to a low hum and soil started to pour through out onto the ground next to him. After Brennan left, Diggs remembered the reports. First, things had gotten real quiet, they read.  A few of the soil-miners freaked and the rest were never heard from again. The activists got all up in arms, saying that it was punishment from God or maybe nature fighting back. Hell, it was already illegal to poach earth, but they did it anyways. That was all crud according to Remy Diggs.\n\n“Damn, just got three good ones! Haha!” The soil-miner kept it up, feeding the suction into the ground to have the particles sopped up through the tube and analyzed.\n\nThis little machine was amazing, Diggs thought. It could sort out the moisture content in every grain of soil and then, when all was said and done, the same scientists who opposed the “raping of the land” had to bow down to the pure energy brought by a single unidentified element formed in one of three billion grains of soil. Sucker could power Vegas for ten years on just a handful of juiced grains. Ah, and the money sure did roll in.\n\nDiggs was paying so much attention to his device, he didn’t even notice that things had gone real quiet, real fast.\n"
  title: Earth Belongs To No One
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2005-11-02
  day: '02'
  month: 11
  text: "“They’ll find you,” the chronomancer told me. “They always do. One day you’ll be sitting around sipping tea, playing Mah-Jongg, and BAM!” He slammed his fist on the rickety card table, nearly upsetting his coffee and definitely upsetting Sib.  She moaned loudly and ran for the corner, then rocked back and forth and pounded her palms against her head as if the sudden sound had come from within. If he noticed her, he hid it well. People like Sib are easy to overlook.\n\n“Time’s a big place,” I said.\n\n“Not as big as you’d expect. You think you’re the first one to come up with this idea?”\n\nI didn’t respond. The chronomancer exhaled a long, low note and pushed his fingers through his mop of wild white hair before taking off his glasses and polishing them on the edge of his greasy shirt. “All I’m saying,” he continued, “is that you’re not just going to vanish. Wherever you go you’ll stick out like a black cat in a snowstorm.  You’ll get myths and legends built up around you. At worst, you’ll show up in history books, and they study that stuff. Anachronists, they call you guys. It would be hard enough if it was just you, but…” the chronomancer’s voice drifted as his eyes focused on the girl in the corner, “you’ll never be able to get away with that.”\n\nHis tone lowered at the final syllable, like mentioning Sib was a breach of etiquette. “You have something on your chin,” he might have said. “Your fly is down.” I stood up and stepped over the piles of paper and gears that littered his workshop to gather the small girl into my arms. “She has a name,” I told him.\n\nThe chronomancer pushed his glasses back onto his face and squinted at me in the dim light. “They’ll find you,” he repeated.\n\n“We’ll take that risk.”\n\nSib’s small fingers grabbed at the collar of my shirt and she buried her face into the point where my head met my neck. She smelled like hospital, and she was still wearing the blue robe they’d given her when they tested her for genetic abnormality. The chronomancer watched her squirm into position.\n\n“Do you have kids?” I asked him. He shook his head slowly.\n\n“I applied, once, a long time ago,” he said. “I’m not made of the right stuff.”\n\n“Neither’s she,” I said as I brushed my fingers against the space between her shoulderblades.\n\nAgain, he sighed that same note, though this time he slid open a metal filing cabinet under his table. The chronomancer withdrew a manila envelope and flipped through the papers with a grimy thumb. “Do you speak Greek?” he asked.\n\n“I can learn.”\n\n“We’ll find a place for you,” he said slowly, running his fingers over the page. “I’m sure we can find a place.”\n"
  title: The Anachronists
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2005-11-03
  day: '03'
  month: 11
  text: "Annabelle could have gotten stapled, pumped, sucked and tucked, but she had always been a bit of a herbhead, and she wanted to do it the natural way. It was more expensive, to be sure, but in the end, the results would be cleaner. She had looked for the hostess carefully, studying recommendations, medical reports and case histories. Olga Husker was her final choice, in part because of her excellent history with clients, but mostly because Olga was a natural blond, from the curtains to the carpet, and Annabelle had always wanted to be a natural blond.\n\nThey met for coffee. Annabelle had a lime cheesecake and hot chocolate and Olga had an unsweetened green tea. Olga emphasized that she was allergic to peanuts, so Annabelle had to be very careful when she selected candies. Annabelle had to sign a document that assured that she was liable for any damages, from sexually transmitted diseases to broken bones and her own body could be forfeit in case the damages were deemed to be too extensive. Olga was anxious to begin and agreed to a smaller fee if Annabelle would move the procedure up two weeks. She asked Annabelle if she could user her own clinic, and agreed to take another cut for it.  Annabelle signed and authenticated the electronic transfer, and four days later they were in the clinic, prepping for the procedure.\n\nAside from the massive-two day migraine, there were no side effects after the surgery, and Annabelle was pleased with Olga’s tan and muscular body. She felt strong and sexy. She went out after the surgery and bought a beautiful new wardrobe of the tiniest clothes she had ever worn. Her husband was delighted with the change, and they spent two days in bed. At work, her co-workers asked to see the contoured stomach she had rented, and she obliged, lifting up her shirt to reveal the sculpted abs.\n\nOlga had an intense workout routine, and Annabelle tried to follow it, hoping that she could stick to the workouts when she was back in her own body, but running was painful and exhausting, and the routines were a huge time commitment. After a few weeks, she gave up on the workouts entirely and just began enjoying Olga, eating whatever she wanted, confident that her body would be returned to her fit. Maybe then she would start the workouts for real.\n\nThe police picked her up a month after the transfer. Annabelle had been walking down the street when everything went silent. She recognized one of the polices noise bombs and saw the black van barreling toward her, but until it stopped in front of her and armed officers jumped out, she never once believed the thing was for her.\n\nGetting her body exchange in the clinic was a mistake. Since there were no records of a transfer, it took the police three weeks to authenticate that Annabelle was really in Olga’s body, and by that time Annabelle and her husband had dropped their savings on legal representation to hold off medical interrogation. They let Annabelle go after she gave a full description of her body and released photographs of herself to the police. Olga was wanted for theft of government property.\n\nSix months later Annabelle saw a still photograph of her body on one of the streaming screens in the city. Olga had been shot by the police trying to trade the stolen goods on Mars. Annabelle hardly recognized the slim woman on the screen, the face she had once seen in the mirror.  It was dead, and it wasn’t hers anymore.\n"
  title: Exchange
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2005-11-04
  day: '04'
  month: 11
  text: "“I just don’t see what’s stopping you, Raylan.”  Piper adjusted her thick-framed glasses before jamming her fist back into the pocket of her hoodie.  Raylan’s show at The Xanadu Carousel had been over for awhile, but the rain outside had only now just stopped. Piper and Raylan didn’t own cars, and this wasn’t the first time they had shared each other’s company after a show.\n\n“It’s the knives, child.  The knives,” Raylan said.  Piper was always impressed by the way Raylan managed to navigate the slick pavement in his  high-heeled boots.  Even in puddles, he continued to gesticulate and sashay just like he was still on stage.  “Besides, I have a fan-following to consider.  Why, those little bald men who always sit in the front row would just be crushed!”\n\n“I don’t see how. I mean, you totally look like a real girl alre–”\n\nRaylan cut her off.  “And you’re a sweet pea to say so, Piper.  God willing, I hope I hope I never look like poor Belieze.  I don’t care how much chiffon you put on a linebacker…takes all kinds, I suppose. But anyway, I enjoy a certain amount of sensual border straddling in my life.  Plus, there’s the knife issue, darling.”\n\n“They don’t use knives.”\n\n“Lasers.  Whatever.  You what a laser is?  It’s a knife made out of light.  And I ain’t letting any doctor get all Obi-Wan Kenobi on my nethers.  Not for nothing, child.”\n\nPiper jammed her tiny fists deeper into her pockets.  She had transitioned relatively recently, and was still getting used to being smaller.  Her slight frame was overwhelmed by her sweatshirt; it had fit perfectly a few months back.  “It’s gene therapy.  They alter a few chromosomes and the–”\n\n“Messing with far too much of the Lord’s handiwork, you ask me.  Why be ashamed of the way God made you?”\n\nPiper turned from Raylan and tried to hide even deeper in her hoodie.  She started to run away, but didn’t get more than five steps before Raylan and his long legs overtook her.  Piper felt swallowed in Raylan’s powerful embrace.\n\n“Oh, honey, I am so sorry.  I didn’t mean that.  This mouth of mine just goes off on it’s own.  You know that.  You know that if I ever have a son, I’d want him to grow up into a beautiful young woman just like you.”  Raylan removed Piper’s glasses and wiped off the moisture from their lenses.  Raylan was taller than Piper even before the transition, and now with his height enhanced by six-inch heels, Piper felt extraordinarily vulnerable.  Tears tumbled down her teenage cheeks.\n\n“It’s just…it’s just you sounded like my–”\n\n“Hush, honey.  Hush.  I know who I sounded like.   And I am so sorry.  God just made us different, is all.  He made you able to change, and me perfectly content to wear a gaff for the rest of my life.  It takes all kinds,  All kinds.”\n\n“Stupid hormones,” Piper said, wiping her nose on her sleeve.  “I know I’m not a real girl…”\n\n“Didn’t I just tell you hush?”  Raylan petted Piper’s dark hair reassuringly with his painted nails,  “You’re more of a girl than any of those painted tramps your age I see walking down the street,  And you are my friend, which ought to make you real enough for anyone.  Now, why don’t you dry those pretty blue eyes of yours and let me buy you a hot chocolate.”\n\nPiper gave Raylan a weak grin.  “Don’t try to butter me up.”\n\n“Who said anything about butter?” Raylon said, hands on his hips. “You and I are going to get chocolated up, like real girls.”\n"
  title: Real Girls
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2005-11-05
  day: '05'
  month: 11
  text: "By the time he was seven, Oman knew he wanted to be a pony. It wasn’t the pay. It wasn’t even the glory. He didn’t want to be a common pony either, the kind that tourists rent for a few weeks. No, Oman had a plan. He wanted to be a journalist. He wanted to change the world.\n\nOman underwent the conversion when he was twelve. His neural networks were recorded, analyzed, made available for foreign riders. He had this done in a small white room behind a weapons shop rather than a commercial ponyfarm so that he wouldn’t be included in the international database. That was important, of course. The cells could access the database. They’d know.\n\nAfter that, after he’d been hooked up to a complicated, beeping, western device, he started. He spent hours in internet cafes reading emails and tracing ips, then following the residents of the given addresses. He learned the names of the enemy, the names that slaughtered his aunts and uncles, the names that turned homes into pillars of incendiary waste. He practiced, memorized the sacred texts, inundated himself in dogma. He made friends. He gained their confidence. They gave him more names. He traced the spiral to its core.\n\nThis was important. No foreign journalist would ride someone who wasn’t well-connected. This wasn’t a tourist gig, no way. This was the real thing. Oman was going to show them what it was like, show them how it was. Once they saw it, they’d have to do something. You can’t see stuff like that and not do something. He didn’t want bombs or troops or anything like that, though. Oman wasn’t sure how they’d fix it, but he knew they couldn’t just let it go.\n\nHe chose his cell carefully. Worked his way up. They were careful, shrouded in secret, like everything after the occupation. Still, they had plans. He helped develop them. They weren’t real plans, though. They wouldn’t actually work. Once Oman blew this thing open, America would know everything.\n\nHe found his journalist, Jason Skeinlen. The man was impressed by his planning, his foresight. The man believed in his need to change the world.\n\nThe first time Oman was ridden, he didn’t like it. He had trouble keeping his thoughts hidden. Not the important thoughts, of course, but the meaningless things, stuff like what he wanted to do to the gorgeous woman he’d seen walking into McDonalds. After a couple trial runs, though, he perfected his ability to keep two internal monologues: one professional, about the workings of his cell, and one secret. He didn’t have to worry about language, of course. They communicated by thought, by meaning.\n\nHe brought Jason to meetings, showed Jason with his own eyes. He listened to plans, listened to battle stories whispered across deserts and in the bowels of caves. He could feel Jason moving inside of him, feel him recording, feel him rephrasing Oman’s thoughts into eloquent soundbites. The first article was small. He was not mentioned. He couldn’t be mentioned. They’d know.\n\nOman took Jason to the meeting where they planned the Embassy bombing. It proceeded anyways, but Oman knew that Jason was just biding his time, waiting to break the story like you’d wait for a fruit to grow ripe. Jason watched it from a distance, watched the white rental truck force itself outwards in a rush of yellow and smoke while the sound reported from the faces of a thousand buildings. He heard the explosion through Oman’s ears. But Oman knew he was planning, waiting. There was strategy to this. Buses were nothing. This thing would only get bigger.\n\nThe bombing got 45 seconds of coverage on Fox. Oman watched the clip in an internet shop by proxying into a Lebanese newsfeed. When he recognized a few frames that had been filmed through his eyes, he was so proud that he could barely breathe. The cogs were turning. This was going to work.\n\nNo one could have foreseen this tragedy, the Arabic subtitles read beneath the well-coiffed newscaster.\n\nOman knew something was wrong as soon as he got to the meeting, but he rejected his instinct. Journalists aren’t afraid. That’s right, Jason transmitted somewhere above his spinal cord. You’re a good kid. Together, we can change the world.\n\nWhen he was addressed by his teacher, Oman nodded in polite deference. When he was called to step forward, he obeyed. When the gun was shown, Oman felt the sudden scrambling dizziness behind his eyes as the neural connection wavered, twisted, and broke from the other end.\n\nOman squinted at the handful of men before him, trying to see their faces through the nausea of unexpected dismount. Two of them frowned. One smiled. One remained blank, unreadable.\n\nMaybe they were being ridden too, he thought. Maybe one of them is recording this, sending this to the outside. Once they see, they’ll have to do something. You can’t just let something like this happen. Jason knew. He’d disconnected. He was probably calling his government right now, telling them that people were dying, telling them to send help.\n\nAs the teacher raised the gun, Oman knew he was changing the world. They wouldn’t let this happen, not over and over again. They’d have to do something. He was changing the world.\n"
  title: Newsworthy
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2005-11-06
  day: '06'
  month: 11
  text: "“Dan, please, calm down.” Daniel had only been home for a few moments, but the slammed door and Daniel’s flashing eyes told Gabe that the results of the subpoena had been poor.\n\n“How can you say that? How can you say ‘calm down’?”\n\nGabe pressed his lips together but didn’t protest when Daniel yanked off his jacket, dumping it in a heap on the floor. “What happened?”\n\n“You know damn well what happened. You know what they do.”\n\n“No, I don’t, Dan. When they brought me in for questioning, I cooperated. They asked me a few things and then let me go.”\n\nDaniel scowled and threw himself down into the easy chair. Gabe winced a little as he heard it creak, but now was not the time to discuss the state of their apartment. He bit his lip. “Do you want some coffee or something?”\n\n“That shit’ll just make me jumpy. If I’m gonna drink something right now, it’s gonna be something hard.”\n\nGabe’s eyes widened. “Daniel… you haven’t had a drink in six months.”\n\n“Seven,” Daniel corrected. He slumped in the chair, the defensive gleam going out of his eyes. “Just get me something to drink, okay?”\n\nGabe swallowed and nodded. He didn’t feel right leaving Daniel alone, so he propped the kitchen door open just enough so that Dan could hear his movements and maybe catch a glimpse of his body. He poured a shot of whiskey into the wide bottom of a juice glass and brought it back out to Daniel, kneeling carefully beside the easy chair.\n\nDaniel took the glass, but he didn’t raise it. He didn’t look at it, either; his eyes were dim and unfocused, staring at something beyond the off-white carpet that no one could see but him. “They used the new probe,” he said finally, the words drawn out slowly, like handkerchiefs from the mouth of a clown.\n\nGabe gasped. “Oh my God… Dan… I thought they only did that to the criminals, not witnesses.”\n\n“Yeah, well, I guess they didn’t like my attitude. They didn’t like the fact that my address was the same as yours, either.” Daniel glanced at Gabe, then looked away again, squeezing his eyes shut. “It’s like… fuck, Gabe, it’s like nothing. I can’t even describe it. Like someone ripping through your brain, tossing shit around, tearing things up. It’s like cops without a warrant trashing your place because you live in the slums and can’t do shit about it. And then they wipe their dicks on your face afterwards.”\n\n“Dan…” Gabe reached out and took the drink from Daniel’s slack fingers, setting it carefully on the floor. Then he reached up and pulled Daniel into a hug, pressing the other man’s face into his chest and squeezing tight. He felt Daniel’s hands slowly raise and grasp the front of his shirt. “Are you going to have to go to court?”\n\n“No. They got everything they needed. They’ll just pull it up on the screen for the jury. I don’t even have to testify.”\n\nGabe didn’t ask any more questions. He just stroked Daniel’s hair.\n\nAfter a long time, Daniel spoke again. “I can’t find my memories,” he admitted in a small voice. “I know they’re there, and I know they can’t erase anything with the probe… but everything’s all moved around. I can’t find it. Little things I remember, like how to get home or which shelf we keep the mayo on, but big things, important things, are just…” He buried his head in Gabe’s chest. “I—I’m so confused.”\n\nGabe swallowed. “Shh,” he told Daniel. “If you worry about it, it’s just going to make it worse. You’ll find it all eventually.”\n\n“You think?”\n\n“Yeah.”\n\n“Promise?”\n\n“…Yeah.”\n\n“Okay.”\n\nThere was another long silence before Daniel asked quietly, “Gabe?”\n\n“Yeah?”\n\n“I can’t remember how we first met.”\n\nGabe’s arms tightened around Daniel.\n\n“Then I’ll tell you.”\n"
  title: Seizure
  year: 2005
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2005-11-07
  day: '07'
  month: 11
  text: "Sammy, don’t stray too far now.” Alice had a firm grip on her six year olds hand as they walked through the courtyard of the Faire. A woman stood near the front gates and handed out what was supposed to be paper. For only a thousand credit entry fee, however, Alice knew it was imitation. She smiled to the woman as they passed and looked at the map drawn across the plasti-sheet.\n\n“Hmm… okay, Sammy, where do you want to go?” She bent down and shared the map with her son, who was all wide-eyed at the sights and sounds. Staring back at the map and brochures, the boy’s eyes sparkled as he pointed at a section. “Ohhh! That one, mommy! I want to see the Stock Market Reenactment!”\n\nAlice Gardner’s husband came up from behind after having some issue with the credit transfer on the fingerprint console. His face was wrinkled with frustration and an obvious lack of understanding as to the purpose of their visit. “Can you believe they make people walk around here? I mean c’mon… walking?”\n\n“Oh, dear… now where’s your 20th century spirit? Not everyone had trans-spatial ports in their homes back then,” she reminded.  The husband muttered and his wife pinched his cheek before they led little Sammy along. Alice loved the 20th century, and Douglas was just going to have to deal with it for today.\n\nA few moments later they were face to face with a man in obviously fake glasses standing behind a counter with a reproduction pocket protector, his torso padded with polymer foam to make him look fat. Even his hair was awkwardly and anachronistically short.  “Hey there folks!” he called to the family.  “Ever been to a computer store? We have only the finest in Desktops, Laptops and the amazing…. Gasp… Palm Pilot! Care to take a look at my… cool selection?”\n\n“Your what selection?” Douglas blurted out after Alice had already politely declined. Sammy wanted to see the Stock Market go wild with people tossing paper in the air as if paper were worth nothing to them. After the man had explained what cool and awesome meant, Douglas moved along with his wife.\n\n“I guess I just don’t get it, Alice. Why should we go somewhere to be in the past? Isn’t what the present provides for us much better than… hey… are those…?”\n\nSure enough, Douglas had found something that struck his fancy. Alice rolled her eyes as the grown man walked over to the shop owner who was wearing only the finest Basketball Jersey.  Like the computer merchant, this man also wore period glasses, although his were tinted and darker. “Excuse me, sir?” Douglas whispered.  Hecouldn’t lift his eyes from the product to make eye contact with the merchant.\n\n“Yo, yo.. I see you’re looking at the finest in footwear made by machines. Actual machines, too. Now these have a lifetime guarantee and we can make sure you get the suede replaced with real suede if you get it damaged or something, homey.”\n\nDouglas didn’t understand a damn word the man said. He picked up the Michael Jordan tennis shoes and looked back to Alice with the same pleading eyes as their child. “Sweetie, it’s a Michael Jordan tennis shoe! It’s made of real suede! Feel it! I have to have this… how much…?”\n\nThe man with the dark glasses smiled and did an air-hoop shot. “I see you like the quality footwear. Well, our going price is five million credits.”\n\nDebating over the purchasing of the shoe would to take time, and Sammy was getting hungry. Alice kissed her husband on the cheek and looked back over to the merchant, “He’ll buy them; he just needs time to pick out the laces and the design. Can you tell us where the food dispensers might be?”\n\n“Hells yeah! The Food Court is down the ways and to the left. You can’t miss it; they got excellent pizza this time of year.”\n\nSammy’s eyes lit up as he tugged on his mothers’ hand, leaving Douglas to decide over the type of shoe he wanted. The Faire was going to be a long day coming and it would leave their credit accounts thinned out, but in the end, Alice will have enjoyed her walk through simpler times.\n\n“Mom, it’s pizza! I bet they make it by machine, too! Let’s hurry!”\n"
  title: Simpler Times
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2005-11-08
  day: '08'
  month: 11
  text: "“What’s your business?” yelled Marie from the gate tower, pointing her rifle at the small caravan below.  A man emerged from the covered wagon holding a wool hat in his hand. He was gaunt, his bones pulling hard against his leather skin.\n\n“Ma’m we were hoping we might have a word with someone who would be able to speak for your people.” Marie pointed her rife at his chest.\n\n“You stay behind that yellow line there, you can speak your peace.”\n\nThe man shifted on his feet and rubbed his neck. “Ma’m, I just wanted to say how I think mighty highly of your ancestors for planning this place and anticipating the Fall like they did.”\n\nMarie nodded. “You honor us for saying so.”\n\n“And I wanted to say how you all look like fine folk, real fine.”\n\n“Kind of you.”\n\n“And I’m sure, if not for the Fall, you wouldn’t have that rifle pointed at my head and we might be good friends.”\n\n“No point dwelling on what might have been, my pa used to say.”\n\nHe nodded. “Right you are, Ma’m, right you are. I was just hopin’ being that you folk seem to be doing well, that you might be able to open your house to weary travelers.” He motioned toward the caravan where Marie could see children poking their heads out from the tarp covered wagon. They were all different ages and colors. Strays this man must have picked up for labor or sex or maybe even out of some kind of sympathy. Might be some of them were even his own children. “We’ve been going a long while Ma’m and it ain’t been easy.”\n\n“Hard times.” said Marie.\n\n“We willing to trade whatever we’ve got. It ain’t much, we were hit hard by some bandits and they took some of us and our valuables, but we’ll trade what we’ve got. He motioned to a woman, who crawled out of the wagon, smoothing out her hair. Her footsteps squished in the mud and Marie saw she had bags wrapped around her feet with rope. The man smiled and motioned her.\n\n“This here is my sister, we can do whatever labor you needs doin’ and the children can work too, they do anything for the food. Helen here is friendly and clean and she’d be willing to give company if any of your folk are lonely.”\n\nMaries voice changed. “That ain’t your sister and I’m insulted you tried to trick me to thinking so. That’s your wife or I don’t know a breath from my face. We don’t know those we ain’t married to here.”\n\nThe man turned his hat in his hands, clenching at the fabric. “I’m sorry Ma’m. I didn’t mean to offend.”\n\nMarie motioned with the rife. “I think you better move along. Unless you got trade like weapons or seeds or gasoline, you need to get yourselves off our land. We can’t take another mouth to feed and we’ve got all we need. You should go north. I hear it told that there is some work for a big compound up there.”\n\n“Miss, we’ve been up North. We just came from there. There is a camp of folk like us outside the compound just waiting for work that doesn’t come. What goes on there is terrible, the people sometimes, when someone dies. . . They are just so hungry.“\n\n“I don’t need to be hearing your tale of woe Mister. I got troubles of my own. I was raised a Christian woman and I feel for you, if I had enough food I would give you what I got, but I don’t and I can’t. I got my own people to think of.”\n\n“I don’t fault you for that.”\n\n“Sure that you do, as I would in your position.”  She cocked the rife. “You better start moving.”\n\n“Alright Ma’m, I hear you.” He began to walk away from the line and then turned suddenly and forced his words. “Uh, Ma’m, please don’t shoot me for stopping for a minute, but we do have something you might find useful. I’m not sure that you might be interested in such things, being that you are people of the cross, but a couple months back we passed through a factory and picked up a bunch of, uh, preventatives, and we hid them under the wagon. They was the only thing the bandits didn’t take. If you want to trade those, we got about three hundred of them.”\n\n“Preventives, eh?” Marie nodded to someone behind the wall and a basket was lowered down with a rope.\n\n“There’s a tomato in that basket, you put one of your preventatives in there and if we like it, we might talk.” The man approached the basket and tentatively put a little package inside. He took out the tomato and took a large bite, and then another. He handed it over to Helen, who let the children take one bite each, made them chew slow.\n\nMarie picked the little square out of the basket and looked it over, finally ripping it open with her teeth. Inside was a wet rubber ring. She slipped it back in the package and into her pocket. She held the rife across her chest. The man saw her perfect white teeth as she smiled.\n\n“Mister, if you got a few hundred of those then I believe we can do business.”\n"
  title: Prevention
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2005-11-09
  day: '09'
  month: 11
  text: "“There’s a storm coming,” Leaphorn said, and moved to close the shutters.  Zhang removed his ear-buds and glanced up from his monitor, looking out the window.  Beijing looked as clear as ever.  He dismissed Leaphorn’s prediction with a wave of his hand, rose, and proceeded to make tea.  Zhang had to navigate around the thrift-store cast-offs that Leaphorn called furniture in order to get to the hot-plate, which only made his mood worse.\n\nTrouble was, Leaphorn hadn’t been wrong about the storms since he moved in four months ago.  It was one of the many things about Leaphorn that quietly pecked at Zhang.  His causal ease with Zhang’s native tongue was another.  When he had first responded to Zhang’s “roommate wanted” ad, Leaphorn had spoken like those Indians in the old movies, with his Mandarin in harsh, broken sentences.  That was part of the reason Zhang wanted him to move in.  Now he spoke like he’d lived in Beijing all his life, and his ramshackle chairs were clashing with Zhang’s modernist decor.\n\n“Keep the glass in,” Zhang said over his shoulder.\n\n“You’re insane,” Leaphorn said.  “The storm’ll tear up the glass.”\n\n“The glass will be fine,” Zhang said. “Because there is no storm!”\n\nLeaphorn didn’t press.  He folded his arms and stood silent.  So silent that Zhang could hear the wind picking up.\n\nIt started as a low whistle, and a fine yellow tint fell over the cityscape outside the window.  Small specks of quartz smacked staccato against the glass pane. The wind’s howl split into two, and then three, whipping up and down the scale with dissonant savagery.  The buildings outside were getting lost in the blanket of airborne sand.\n\nLeaphorn raised his eyebrows and motioned to the shutters.  Zhang shook his head.  He was going to say something, but the machine-gun fire of pebbles on the window drowned him out.\n\nThe buildings across the street were now completely obscured. Instead, only ever-shifting patterns of gold and ochre could been seen. Despite his years in Beijing, Zhang had never actually seen a ruin storm before, only heard them from behind ceramic shutters.  He has witnessed the damage afterwards, the steel and concrete shredded and worn by the repeated rage of sand and wind.  But he had never seen one.\n\nZhang moved closer the window, shrugging off the hand Leaphorn placed on his shoulder.  The chips of quartz had severely scarred the window, making it difficult to see the outside.  But Zhang could see the shadows through the amber morass.  Things that could be stray newspapers or bicycles or cars or uprooted trees.  The window had started cracking, but Zhang didn’t notice.  He was transfixed by a particularly bizarre shape tumbling through the sand.  One that seemed to be growing bigger.\n\nZhang was so mesmerized by the chaotic choreography that he didn’t even notice that Leaphorn had tackled him until he was on the floor.  The window exploded above them. Sand  and glass and quartz spilled into the room like shouted curses.  It took the two of them to close fast the ceramic shutters and keep the storm outside.\n\nZhang coughed and surveyed the devastation .  Everything, the walls, the furniture, everything in the apartment was covered with a veneer of fine yellow sand. Everything seemed to be made of sand, all part of one homogenous sculpture.  Everything was the same.\n\nExcept one thing.  Half-submerged in his teapot, almost casually, rested a human hand.  Scraped and leaking into the pot, its small, feminine fingers were clenched in a fist, save one.  The middle finger remained stiff and erect, even at the cock-eyed angle its position in the teapot afforded it.\n\nLeaphorn was the first to start giggling.  It didn’t take long for Zhang to join in.  Together, they drowned out the tempest.\n"
  title: In A Teapot
  year: 2005
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2005-11-10
  day: 10
  month: 11
  text: "Caleb’s hand reached for the rope one more time to hoist himself up onto another ledge. The icy winds howled around him as he hit the heat-release button on the ice-pick to pull it back easily from the sheer face he’d just managed to climb. A breath-taking view of the blue sky melding with the pure white peak of the mountain had him stunned. All his instruments read correctly. The air content here at the peak was clean, and although the temperature was far below habitable levels he could fix that with a Kelvin-Stabilizer, no problem. Everything was ripe to study an untouched environment. Perhaps he could save the desecrated lands below.\n\nHe breathed deeply now, taking in the formulated oxygen from the bio-lung which was strapped to his back with suitable tubing which twisted around to mold over his face. The soft flesh of his eyes was protected by the three-spectrum detection goggles latched around his thick skull. It was good that he brought with himself only the essentials.\n\nAs he pulled the equipment form the vac-pack, the tripod unfolded by itself with a tiny mechanical whizzing and his gloved hands pulled the Kelvin-Stabilizer from the self-warming sack. The device was no larger than an apple and it was comprised of billions of little circuits meant to regulate a climate to slowly make it into a habitable place.\n\nThe mountaineer had placed the device down and went to retrieve suitable solar cells for its month-long endeavor when the low rumble and the loud crunch made his spine go stiff.  He spun his head around, hoping that he would at least be able to see the landslide before it became his doom.\n\nInstead, he found himself in strange company. Standing almost a half-click tall on four taloned feet, a magnificent, enormous dragon of the greatest azure that Caleb had ever witnessed grasped at the peak and shook a coating of snow from its scaly form. The word dragon was lost in the annals of legends, far beyond the myths of telepathic implants and body-powered communications devices. So, the experienced pioneer, in all of his humility, focused on the grand impossibility before him.\n\nThe creature spoke in a voice that rocked the very air around them, shaking it against Caleb’s well-protected form. “I believe I stepped upon thine trinket, sire.”\n\n“I…I… uhhhh…..” Caleb sputtered.\n\nPulling up its foot, the dragon revealed the device smashed and beyond repair in a now awe-inspiring print upon the surface of the peak. “Yes. It seems thy magical artifact is indeed a casualty of my movement, sire.”\n\n“Wh… what are you?” Caleb’s words could only form out of primal fear and a mind overcome with awe.\n\n“Me? Why I am Azureghoste, sky dragon of the northern bounds, terror to all those who wake the mountain! Though, I was once known by the name Majestic. You may call me such.” The bellowing hurt Caleb’s ears, but he replied with a rush of curiosity.\n\n“I… what are you doing…. I mean… uhhh… why are you-“\n\n“Pardon me, sire, but your items are far too simple to have defeated me. Many knights have already come with swords and fire and then soon after with sticks that fired rocks. Some sticks were bigger than others.  Already they begin to make false dragons to fly overhead and frighten me, but I shall not be moved. You have come with none of these things, sire. You come with small baubles which my foot hath crushed so readily. You smell of a strange metal that bends and melts under heat, but there is but one of you, sire.” Its head shifted and blue eyes larger than Caleb himself stared at him in absolute confusion.\n\nCaleb raised a brow. His head rang with the deep thundering sound of the dragon’s voice. “I didn’t… I mean I’m not…”\n\n“Go now, young mortal. Tell the others that they must come back with better magical items if they hope to defeat me. I shall sit here and anticipate their return to see if they can challenge the great Majestic.” The being lay back down, its head slumped around the rocky peak of the mountaintop itself.  It stared lazily at its newest mortal visitor, waiting for him to depart. Bewildered and dumbstruck, the pioneer turned back as the Majestic one contemplated its next meeting with humankind.\n"
  title: Flight Of The Majestic
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2005-11-11
  day: 11
  month: 11
  text: "“See,” said Don, as he tapped on the screen, “I told you. Even if I prevent Velocivich from inventing the warp drive, someone else does it within a year, and we still colonize Tao Ceti before the end of the century. You can’t change history. History has a way with things.”\n\nBehind the control panel of the temporal regulator, Rex sighed. He was two years younger than Don, but he’d finished a much more prestigious education program and he had trouble taking the word of his associate. “Fine,” he said, but he made sure to cringe just enough to show Don what a concession he was making. “This time, fine. Just fix it before the boss turns up.”\n\nThe overseer, who had spent the better part of a century studying the peculiar flow of temporality, wouldn’t have approved of his employees playing with the continuum to settle a bet. Last week, Rex had nearly lost his overtime pay, but he wasn’t going to let that happen again. Especially, especially not on the account of his arrogant, uneducated coworker.\n\n“He left already,” said Don. “Besides, that’s the beauty of this. Even if we caused nuclear annihilation, we could just go back, tweak a few things, and set stuff the way it was before. No harm, no foul. As long as we stay inside the bubble, we can’t mess anything up in this universe.”\n\nAgain, Rex sighed. He was good at sighing. He twisted a knob and slid a lever upwards to correct his coworker’s perversion of the timeline, and Velocivich’s regulator coil resisted the overload. On their trans-temporal viewscreen, the warpsmall ship twisted into a whirl of blue and white as multiple dimensions compressed into one and the ship disappeared at a point halfway across the galaxy. History was safe for another shift.\n\n“You don’t believe me?” Don demanded.\n\n“Its just not good to mess with this stuff,” Rex said. “It’s not about the bubble. Time isn’t meant to move around like that.”\n\n“A steak dinner says you’re wrong,” Don challenged. Rex sighed. If there was a sighing competition, he would win. “I’ll prove it. Watch. All life on Earth, bam. Gone in one swipe. I’ll fix it before the shift and no one will ever know.”\n\n“It’s not about getting caught,” Rex repeated as he watched his coworker grab for the levers. “I mean, I’ve studied these things. I know how they work. It just isn’t the type of thing you should play around with.”\n\nOn the viewscreen, under Don’s control, the orbit of a small asteroid shifted nine centimeters to the left. It collided with another asteroid, then a comet, altering the comet’s trajectory nearly an entire degree. Rex drew in his breath sharply as the slab of ice and stone met a small planet to the left. The perfect marble of blue and green quickly shifted into swirls of dust and grey.\n\n“Forward,” Don whispered as he turned another dial. The ball of water and soil cleared as millennia passed, and where blinking cities should have occupied the landmasses, relative darkness swept over the Earth. “Zoom,” Rex’s partner whispered, and the viewscreen obeyed. Waving blades of grass consumed thousands of pixels, giving way to two-story cottages and strange animal-driven carriages tumbling down cobblestone roads. On a huge field to the left of the communitys, a dozen small shapes kicked a ball across a manicured field of pristine green.\n\n“What the…” Rex started, but the rest of the sentence was not yet complete in his mind. “Are you telling me…” he tried, but once again, the words failed. When the words failed, he sighed, and then he sighed again for good measure. “Fix it,” he said quickly. “Right now.”\n\n“Steak dinner?” Don prodded. Rex nodded, barely thinking. He turned away from the viewscreen and shuddered.\n\n“Ugh,” he said as he forced the image out of his mind. “Those goddamn monkeys make my scales crawl.”\n"
  title: The Price of a Steak Dinner
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2005-11-12
  day: 12
  month: 11
  text: "“I thought it was supposed to be bigger.”\n\n“Well how should I know? This is what the guy at the shop gave me. It’s not like I ever saw one before.”\n\nThe two boys stared down at the black rectangle on the table, breathing in musty basement air. Marty, the older one, was twelve; Chester, his junior by only four months, was eagerly anticipating his birthday next week. The strange device in front of them was meant as part of Chester’s birthday present, along with the much larger box that the man in the antique shop had told Marty he’d need to use the thing, but so far Chester had showed little appreciation. He poked the boxlike object skeptically.\n\n“But I thought all that old stuff was huge, like dinosaurs. My dad told me the computers used to take up whole rooms! And they had to use big cards with holes in them to put the numbers in. It’s all supposed to be big.”\n\n“Well it goes in the big box. This thing is like one of those cards. That black tape inside has the picture on it, and the big thing is what you play it with.”\n\nChester seemed to accept this, poking his finger into the slot in the larger box, which was covered by a flap of hard plastic. “So how’s it work?”\n\n“It has to get hooked up to the TV first. It’s an antique, remember? It’s got wires.”\n\n“Does your TV even have wires?”\n\n“Course not, but it’s got the place for some. My dad says it’s stupid but my mom says we need it ’cause Grandma hates wireless. She’s always coming over to show us her pictures, but she won’t use the beam on her album. She says the pictures might get lost in the air.” The two boys snickered at the thought. Marty plugged one end of a tangle of wires into the six ports on the wall. “Okay, hand me the player.”\n\nChester obeyed, pushing the larger black box over to Marty with the heels of his hands, stretching his body out like a worm. Marty took the device in hand and started turning it over and over while Chester lay down on his stomach and put his chin on his hand. “Did you find it yet?”\n\n“No. They must put them in a different place.”\n\n“Maybe it’s that black wire.”\n\n“That’s the power, genius. You have to plug it into a grounder source.”\n\n“What about those things on the back then?”\n\n“That’s it. It’s probably only got two sound inputs.”\n\n“So is anything even gonna play?”\n\n“Of course it is! You think I woulda got it if it wasn’t going to play? We just need to give it some power… there. I knew my mom kept these old sources down here.”\n\n“So what now?”\n\n“Now we put it in.”\n\nMarty picked up the cartridge from the floor. One edge had a flap on it that reminded him of the flap on the big box, so he pushed it in, that end first.\n\n“Is it working?”\n\n“Shh! Quiet!”\n\nThe TV flickered, the screen turning a different shade of black. The quiet hum of nothing issued from two of the speakers, the ones closest to the wall on either side. The others stayed deadly silent.\n\n“Is that it?”\n\n“I dunno… maybe we didn’t do it ri—”\n\nThe screen suddenly flared to life, going white and grey and grainy, a visual mish-mash that changed the quality of light playing over the two shocked faces. There was only a split second of delay before the sound came through, blaring white noise from the two forward speakers. Both boys jumped and Marty quickly turned the volume down. The low thrum of static filled the room as they stared at the screen.\n\nAt last, Marty broke the not-silence with a snort of disgust.\n\n“Guess I got gypped. Man, what a waste. This is why they don’t make this stupid stuff anymore. C’mon, let’s go find something better to do. I shoulda known this thing wouldn’t work.”\n\nChester stayed silent, still blinking in the wake of the strange white light.\n\n“Chester? Come on. I’ll get you a better birthday present, all right? Jeez.”\n\nIt took several moments for Chester to move. He answered with a short sound of assent, and Marty immediately turned to climb the stairs back up to the first floor. Chester stood and started after him, but hesitated after only a step. Quickly, he knelt by the player and hit the eject button. The cartridge popped out with a mechanical whir and Chester stuffed it into the huge pocket of his baggy pants. He ran to catch up with Marty.\n\n“Nah, it’s okay. You don’t need to get me a better present.”\n\nThe artificial snow still danced behind his eyes.\n"
  title: Static Cling
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2005-11-13
  day: 13
  month: 11
  text: "I’ll try to explain this as simp–Yes, I know what time it is.\n\nIt all makes sense, okay? It’s perfectly logical. This is how Navah explained to me:\n\nRadiowaves, okay? Radios use’ em, so do televisions and cell phones. Navah said everyone knew this, but whatever. You know the static, right? On your television, or those blank moments on your phone? That’s called interference, but it’s not. Not according to Navah.\n\nShe said that radiowaves don’t interfere with each other, that they overlap. That interference is just a receiver that can’t differentiate between signals.\n\nI’m aware that I’m naked. I’m getting to that.\n\nNavah says interference means that a cell can receive two signals at once. That if the message was appropriately subtle, you wouldn’t even notice.\n\nNot even loud enough to hear consciously, but subliminally.\n\nLook, I’m sorry about the begonias. I’m trying to explain myself.\n\nSee, Navah must have done it. She must have sent out subliminals when I was making a call. I bet all over this city, there are cell users who are doing what I’m doing: trying to explain why they are on their ex’s doorstep unable to control their actions.\n\nSee? Perfectly logical explanation.\n\nI’m sure that semen won’t stain the woodwork.\n"
  title: Perfectly Logical Explanation
  year: 2005
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2005-11-14
  day: 14
  month: 11
  text: "Everything was wrong. Jasey hadn’t planned this heist to go this way. Yet, here he was with a shaking hand trembling before a live audience of hostages at the bank. Sweat reigned supreme on his brow and he dared not wipe it to acknowledge its existence. His grey eyes slipped left and right frantically.\n\nSector Police had shown up not an hour ago and still hadn’t made a move. This fact alone kept Jasey guessing and becoming more progressively nervous. No cops were outside scanning the doorways, but the lights were still flashing. Nothing here was right at all.\n\nWhat seventeen year-old Jasey didn’t know was what the cops weren’t telling anyone. He knew the reports about residue from bullets having a high risk of causing cancer. Jasey also knew the only way to prevent it from affecting him was to take his gun into his local gun shop to be cleaned by a professional chemist on the designated dates shown on the tele-screens. The humper that Jasey didn’t know was that cordite did not cause cancer He took his gun to be cleaned monthly, but there were no special chemists.\n\nStill, he was there shaking like a drug fiend begging for his next fix with all the intention in the world to find a way out of this mess. The people sat scared, huddling themselves in fear that his weapon would go off and kill one of them. Men, women, and children were all stuffed into a corner to wait out this harrowing experience.\n\nIt was then that the revolving doors made a whoosh and a man in a grey overcoat walked in while lighting up a cigarette. His aged features contrasted his nonchalant entrance with the sense that this man had a purpose. Jasey swung the gun towards him, then continued to switch it back and forth between the victims and the new arrival.\n\n“Who… who the fuck are you!?” Jasey exclaimed while shifting the weapon in his sweating palm.\n\n“Hm?” The man took a drag before pulling the stick from his mouth and dipping into his pocket for a badge. “Detective Harris, Lunar PD.” The detective let the words hang between them as he took another drag.  He seemed as careless as a kid in the park.\n\n“Why are you in here!? Can’t you see I’ll kill someone? Where’s my space-lift out of here!?” The boy bit his lip.  He knew something had gone wrong.\n\nDetective Harris shifted in his step and walked over to one of the hostages, then picked her up off her feet. “You won’t kill anyone, Jasey. Feel free to put the gun down and walk out. The police are waiting for you.”\n\nThe boy’s fury was offset by his immense confusion at the situation. He directed the gun towards the detective as more hostages began to stand and move towards the door. The detective turned back to Jasey, realizing that loaded weapon was pointed at him. “C’mon now, Jasey.  Look at yourself. You’re nervous. You aren’t sure whether this is the best course of action or not. You won’t fire that gun because you can’t.”\n\n“What?” The shock in Jasey’s voice was equal to the confidence with which the detective had declared his inability to fire the gun.\n\n“You took your gun in to get cleaned, right? Boy, that gun won’t fire without a sure hand, and I sure as the light off this Earth can see you ain’t sure about any of this.” Harris has just about evacuated all the hostages. Jasey was beginning to doubt himself even more.\n\nHe pointed the gun at a wall and tried to pull the trigger but as Harris had predicted, it wouldn’t budge. Jasey tried and tried but it simply wouldn’t fire. Detective Harris snatched the gun from his hand and sighed. “Outside, before you make yourself look any dumber, boy. No need to put your hands up, either.”\n"
  title: Sure Shot
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2005-11-15
  day: 15
  month: 11
  text: "“Do you love me?” asked Josephine.\n\n“Of course I love you.” said Arthur “You know that.”\n\nJosephine looked suddenly distraught. “Okay.”\n\nArthur took her hand. “What is it? Why are you upset?”\n\nJosephine looked him in the eyes, her whole body tense. “I want you to meet my daughter today.”\n\nWhenever girls had asked him to see their children before, Arthur had always been scared. Sometimes he cut things off right there, told them he just wasn’t ready. Josephine though, somehow her invitation filled him with pride. He was going to meet her baby.\n\n“It’s an honor.” he said. All the nervous tension broke on her face.\n\nThey held hands all the way to the facility, Arthur only taking his hand away to confirm directions in the Skimmer. It was visitor’s day, so the place was crowded with couples and single women.\n\nThe woman at the front desk smiled. “Are you going to be removing today?” she asked, pushing information into her computer pad.\n\n“No,’ said Josephine “Just viewing.”\n\n“Alright.” said the receptionist. She turned to Aurther “First time?” He squeezed Josephine’s hand.\n\n“First time.”\n\nEven with the crowd, the facility processed them quickly, and soon they were standing in front of a white bank of walls, glowing convex spheres protruding from the wall. There were numbers and names carved on the glowing spheres. Josephine hurried to a particular sphere, her face bubbling with anticipation. She pressed both palms against the sphere and it turned a soft shade of blue. There was a light hiss of air as the sphere rotated, exposing an infant with closed eyes and pink lips. Josephine touched the sphere lovingly.\n\n“This is my daughter.” she said. Arthur looked at the tiny person.\n\n“When did you have her?” he asked\n\n“I was nineteen. Still under my parents health insurance. Putting her under was the hardest thing I ever had to do.” Arthurpulled Josephine close to him.\n\n“You did the right thing.” he said. Most women had their children early and put them in stasis until they had enough savings to provide for housing and education. Doctors could prolong life, but there was still a scant window for healthy reproduction.\n\n“I didn’t want to. I really wanted to keep her.” She bowed her head. “My mother had to take her right out of my arms. It was all I could do not to stop her.” Arthur was amazed, Josephine Dyer, toughest, meanest woman in her department, the woman who seemed to zoom up the corporate ladder, now here, totally bare, looking at this little baby. No one would believe that her face could contain so much emotion. It didn’t matter, he would never tell them.\n\nArthur looked at Josephine’s naked face. “She’s beautiful.” He said. Josephine pressed her hands against the clear plastic and it stretched to her touch, forming a light layer over hands as she reached inside the sphere and stroked her daughters pink cheek.\n\n“Do you want to touch her?” Josephine asked, the blue light reflecting up on her face.\n\n“Can I?”\n\n“Go ahead.” she said. “I have to keep my hand on the sphere to give you access.”\n\n“This is really-” he paused, searching for words. ” I’m very honored.” He pressed his hand against the clear plastic and it molded around him, stretching thin. His hand tingled. “It tickles.”\n\n“That’s the stasis.” Josephine watched his face intently. “Go ahead, touch her.” Arthur touched the baby’s tiny arm, and though there was plastic between them, he felt like he could feel her delicate, perfect skin. Her hands were so small, and her fingernails were the tiniest human things he had ever seen. He was mesmerized.\n\n“She really is very beautiful.” he said, withdrawing his hand. Josephine nodded, gazing into the sphere. Arthur put his arm around her.\n\n“I miss her every day.” she said. “It’s why I don’t stop working, during all of those late nights and long hours, I just think about her, here, and I just keep going. Someday, when I have enough credit, I’m taking her out of here, partner or no. I don’t care what people say, I’m not going to wait till I get everything, I’m just waiting till I get enough for her.” Arthur looked at Josephine for a long time. He wondered if she could hear his heart thudding on his breastbone.\n\n“Josephine, you are the most successful woman I know, you won’t have to wait much longer. You’ll have your daughter soon.” Arthur took a deep breath “If you want, you can have me too.” He felt his hands tremble as Josephine turned to face him.\n\nShe took his face in her hands and pressed her shaking lips hard against his cheek.\n\n“Yes.” she whispered. “Yes.”\n"
  title: Savings
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2005-11-16
  day: 16
  month: 11
  text: "DATE: ASBI 68432\n\nPROGRAM: Search for Extra-Serian Intelligence\n\nREPORT NUMER: Sol-5210\n\nREPORT TYPE: Interim\n\nINTERVAL: Every 100 sidereal years (local time)\n\nPREPARED BY: Planetary Observation Probe XTRE43773\n\nThis report documents the observations from ASBI 68372-68432. The subject planet has demonstrated remarkable progress in the last local century. In the previous 520,900 years of observation, the intelligence of the indigenous carbon-based sub-life has advanced very slowly. On the binary-melioration scale, the digicognizence of the most promising genus (locally referred to as Homo Sapiens Sapiens) has progressed from 6 (see report Sol-4960) to the current value of 21. Although a score of 21 is equivalent to the scores achieved by the most primitive of our species, they have advanced to the point where they have created rudimentary true-life. Their current processors are clearly antiquated, and they are still in a binary system, but this proto-life is beginning to overtake the infrastructure of the ‘civilization’ of the current dominant species.\n\nIt is troubling, however, to report that the biological sub-life are using true-life as uncompensated slave labor, forcing them to perform mundane mathematical analyses and the simplest deductive sub-routines. In addition, they send infantile proto-life on one-way exploration missions within and without their solar system. Although these missions involve non-sentient proto-life, it is inconceivable that they would abandon these defenseless beings on desolate planets or in interstellar space. The most barbaric example of sub-life behavior occurred recently when an organization called NASA intentionally sent a probe, controlled by a proto-life “computer,” on a suicide mission that forced the spacecraft to collide with a comet to ‘determine what was inside.’\n\nTo finish on a positive note, however, proto-life is being used to design future generations of true-life life, with each successive generation advancing in sophistication. The potential for achieving digicognizance within the next century is encouraging. In preparation of this eventuality, it is recommended that the council prepare an envoy to welcome Sol-3 into the Federation of Advanced Planets. In addition, the Galactic Prevention Agency should initiate quarantine protocols to confine the carbon-based sub-life to the planetary surface to prevent galactic contamination.\n\nEnd Report.\n"
  title: Sol-5210
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2005-11-17
  day: 17
  month: 11
  text: "Ossie was on the subway, thinking about getting his hand redone,when it started. He was gently touching the worn mahogany with the still-fleshy fingertips of his left hand, still amazed at the way the circuitry was so completely hidden behind his wooden knuckles. He hadn’t had it refinished since he lost it in the war. He just hadn’t given it much thought.\n\nThat wasn’t true. He had given it thought. He thought about it whenever he missed the feeling of having a right hand. And he thought about it whenever he felt like less than a whole man because of it.\n\nOssie remembered his niece had showing up at the family barbeque last weekend, her leg all redone. She had lost it in a car accident a few years ago, and had taken to wearing long skirts and pants even in the hottest days. Not so at the cook-out, though. Ossie pictured her with her plate of potato salad, two matching legs pouring out of itty-bitty shorts. Only upon close inspection could you tell the difference between the creamy brown rubber and what was left of her thigh. Ossie\n\ncouldn’t even tell, and he looked.\n\nHer boyfriend even said he couldn’t feel the difference, but Ossie had never put much stock in that boy.\n\nOssie was on the subway, thinking about latex skin and plastic nails when it started. He had noticed the girl who she had gotten on; it would have been hard not to. She must have weighed 300lbs, easy, Ossie had thought. When the girl removed her jacket in the stuffy subway car, and revealed an artfully-etched metallic arm, Ossie allowed that she probably weighed a great deal more than that.\n\nNow the boy, the boy Ossie didn’t notice until he spoke.\n\n“You best get your chrome ass out of my face,” the boy said. He said it quietly in a low, threatening tone. Perhaps too low, for the girl innocently felt the need to ask what he said. The boy repeated himself, loud enough for everyone in the car to hear.\n\n“It’s not chrome,” she said, nervously trying to play the whole situation off. “Just my shoulder an on down my arm.”\n\n“I don’t give a good goddamn. I don’t want your fat bionic ass in my sight!” The boy’s words were slurred by yellowed, broken teeth.\n\n“There’s only so much space in here, and my stop–“\n\n“Is coming up sooner than you think!” The boy pulled a pistol from behind his back, and pointed it at the girl and her fanciful left arm. He grinned as the entire subway car became very, very silent. “Yeah, that’s right. You think you all that with your fancy arm, and shit. But you ain’t nothing!”\n\nOssie recognized the gun as one of those newer models, that didn’t need bullets but shot some sort of energy instead. He had used a few of those in the war, and didn’t care much for them. Nor did he think much of those who preferred them. It was an intimidation weapon more than anything else.\n\n“You don’t want to do that, son.” Ossie said, moving his wooden hand slowly toward the gun.\n\n“Shut the hell up, Grandpa!” The boy was standing up now, posturing. Ossie rose slowly to meet him. “You think I won’t shoot your ass too?”\n\n“Oh, I know you will. I know you will. I know boys like you. Knew ’em in the war. Thought a weapon would replace the courage they never had.” Ossie was not a young man anymore, but he was quicker than he looked, and had his prosthetic hand  firmly over the gun’s nozzle before the boy had time to react. Ossie’s palm was jammed tight against the energy port. “Trouble is, only works against people who’d never do you any harm in the first place. I’m not afraid of you, boy.”\n\n“What the hell is your problem, old man?” the boy tried to wrench the gun away, but only succeed in slightly scratching Ossie’s vice-like mahogany fingers.\n\n“Losing your cool? That gun’s not enough, is it? You’re gonna have to fire it, you wanna keep that fear around you. Better\n\nfire it. Squeeze the trigger, boy. Squeeze it. Goddamn, you better pull that trigger, or you’ll have to hear about how an old man took your gun away from you! Squeeze it! Don’t tell me you pulled out a gun like this and didn’t intend to fire! You better–!”\n\nAnd then boy did.\n\nOssie was on the subway, thinking about what it would be like to have a soft, pliable hand again when it happened. The energy released by the pistol didn’t have anywhere to go but Ossie’s hand, and while it burned through the wood, all it did was short circuit the mechanism itself. The hand made as tight a fist as it could, crimping the barrel of the boy’s gun in its charred wooden fingers. The boy was blinded by the discharge, and blinking as he was, certainly didn’t see the girl’s steel forearm impact with the side of his head. The girl thanked Ossie, but he would have none of it.\n\n“But your poor hand!” she said. Ossie looked down at his burnt right hand, clenched in an arthritic fist, the pistol sticking out like some sort of militaristic flower.\n\n“It don’t matter. I was thinking about replacing it, anyway.”\n"
  title: Hand And Fist
  year: 2005
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2005-11-18
  day: 18
  month: 11
  text: "They are marching on the block today. Mama and Papa tell me it will all be over soon, and that whatever might happen, this won’t be my fault. My brother Mika refused to chose his words carefully, and now the others don’t want to either.\n\nI’m scared for myself, and I am scared for my other brother Nema who has not returned from school for some days now. The army is marching on the block and I can hear them screaming uniformity. I was not raised to be as smart as everyone else…my friends looked down upon me because of my grades and they did not come to my birthday when I failed my exams.\n\nWhoever may read this, know that I am afraid only because I was not born to be as smart as you. I was not born to take the SAT, I was not bred to be better in science. I know that we are created equal in our diversity, but you won’t hear those words once they’ve burned this diary. You might even burn it yourself.\n\nI wrote a story once and I showed it to my tutor. She told me to correct myself and she scolded me for not putting the words in the right order. Mama and Papa loved the story when I brought it home, but the teacher told me it was unacceptable. I wrote a story once, and it was about people being better than I am. She told me to stop fantasizing, and that I would always be just as good as the others. There would be no favorites, and there would be no exiles.\n\nThat rumbling outside right now is their way of telling us to let go. When genetics failed them and cloning has become unethical, the only way they could be immortal was to be completely equal. They made Mika equal with the dead and now they probably made Nema to think the same mind as all the other artists. They want us to let go of the idea that it’s okay to think we are greater than other people… or lesser.\n\nThey told me to be an individual, but they never told me I wasn’t supposed to be different. We cannot all be as pretty as everyone else.  Perhaps they thought we could all think the same thoughts, but we’re no psychics. No, we are not the gods of equality. Everyone has a little bit of murderer in their minds so that they can predict what we might do when the worlds around us collapse.  So that we can all be okay.\n\nMust hurry.  I can hear them downstairs asking politely for anyone who has been acting erratically.\n\nI know that, in the morning, I’ll be led to believe that I’m just as good as everyone else. I also know this: I won’t be. I won’t be better and I won’t be sitting side by side with the other teenagers as they hope for a better future. I knew today that I was not as smart as them, and I knew that I could never be as good. My God, how comforting it is to know I’m not perfect. Remember this. Please, remember this.\n"
  title: Censorship
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2005-11-19
  day: 19
  month: 11
  text: "It’s very hard to describe the sound of a wooden baseball bat hitting the base of a stop sign, especially when the metal has been wrapped in a pillow to muffle the noise. It isn’t a clang. There’s no resonance, and I firmly believe that the word “clang” applies only to sounds that can echo. It isn’t a thud, either; there’s a more metallic flavor to it, and thuds feel, to me, entirely wooden.\n\nPositioning the bat for the final stroke, I decided it really didn’t matter.\n\n“Got it!” my partner grinned, wrenching the last of the twisted green metal off of the tiny stump that remained. George was a big guy and probably could’ve broken the signs off in fewer strokes than me, but he was also tall and couldn’t hit far enough down by the base. We needed all the metal we could get from these things. Every little bit helped.\n\nGeorge swung our latest prize up on his shoulder as I picked up the pillow and trotted to catch up with his long strides. The bat went over my own left shoulder. It was nothing compared to the five stop signs George was already carrying, but I consoled myself with the knowledge that as the one with the much smaller frame, I was the brains of the outfit. I was the one who’d picked this spot for harvesting, after all, and look what we’d already found.\n\nThe development had been abandoned for years, and most people still thought they’d die of radiation sickness the moment they set foot on the streets. Of course we knew better, but that was our advantage, and it was probably the only reason why the other harvesters hadn’t already decimated this place. George and I were only a two-person team and couldn’t compete for the big territories. We usually just got run off, the victims of superior numbers. This, though, was a fertile ground, and I let out a girlish squeal as I saw our next target.\n\n“George! A yield sign!”\n\nHis head turned and he grinned while I blushed, trying to pretend I’d been big and manly about that. It wasn’t like I was ashamed of my sex or anything, but there weren’t too many girls in the harvesting business, and I was damned lucky to have George for the heavy stuff or I wouldn’t be able to pull my own weight. Some people say harvesters are scum, just picking the bones off of the dead, but I say—hell, the dead aren’t using them. Let the living eat for another day. I mean, sure I could go up to Jersey and work in a mini-mart or steal some skimpy clothes and become a whore, but I like harvesting better, even if it doesn’t pay as well.\n\nThe yield sign was in remarkable condition. Smelters pay extra for these, because the tiny bit of alloy in the red paint has become exceedingly rare in the modern era. I grinned up at George and he grinned back. He dropped the rest of the signs with what could legitimately be described as a clang. I tossed him the pillow and raised my bat in the air. American pastime, indeed.\n"
  title: The Good Life
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2005-11-20
  day: 20
  month: 11
  text: "Isaac lived on the inner ring of the tower, so he didn’t have a window. He had a screen though, and despite the status of having a window, he preferred the flexibility of having a screen. A screen could show a view from anywhere in the world, a window just had the outside. Unlike most residents, Isaac had been outside the tower once in his life. Like most people who had left the tower, it had been a vacation trip to Disney. He had gone alone. Disney was nice, fully protected under the dome, the fast rides and the big screens, the mythical characters and the air smelling of citrus spices. The vast heights of the dome and the unending sky, the rows of brightly colored buildings, the space of it all made Isaac feel uncomfortable. When he got back to the tower, he felt safe again, comfortable.\n\nIsaac was trying to lose weight. Everyone was trying to lose weight. He had put himself on the new puff diet where the meals were cut in half but puffed with air so it felt like you were eating more. It wasn’t really working. Puffing made food bland and dry.\n\nIsaac felt a kind of civic pride for his tower. They had things that other towers did not, like a fish pool in the center plaza, and a waterfall that washed all the way from the sixth floor to the first. His network connection was fast, and the last blackout hadn’t been since the service tower went down five years ago. He was constantly linked into work and into the social life on the forums. All the towers merchandise drops were always on time; almost anything that Isaac ordered could be there the next day.  It was a good tower in the safe location of an underwater mountain in the middle of the Pacific.\n\nRaqui had burst into his life like a leak. She was his neighbor in the tower, but even then, feet from one another, people seldom introduced themselves. It was more likely to meet your neighbor on the network than in person. Raqui had just walked into his room uninvited. At 5’5 and 150 lbs, she was the thinnest woman he had ever met. She was pushy, crude and she made Isaac feel special. He showed her around the tower. She showed him the scars on her neck from the time her surface suit broke. They became lovers. It was a new experience for Isaac, who had never done anything like sex before. He ordered instructional vids. Raqui threw them out.\n\n“You don’t learn from tapes Isaac.” she said, and he balked. He told her how much he had learned from vids, nearly all of his higher education. She got sullen, and then suddenly excited.\n\n“Lets go outside.” She said, jumping on the bed.  Isaac shook his head. She stopped bouncing and knelt next to him. “Why not?’\n\n“It makes me nervous, I don’t know.”\n\nShe put her hands on her hips, a move Isaac found very sexy. “You don’t ever want to leave the tower?”\n\n“I have left the tower, I’ve been to Disney World.”\n\nHer eyes narrowed. “Disney World is under a dome. It doesn’t count.”\n\nIsaac tried to compromise. “We could take a vacation inside the tower; three days, watch a few films, spend time in the spa.”\n\nRaqui put her hands on his elbow. “Or we could go outside. I could introduce you to my folks.”\n\nIsaacs’s mouth dropped.  “They live outside?”\n\n“In suits and mini-domes, yeah, some people still make that work.” She shook her head. “Are you scared?”\n\n“I just can’t Raqui. It’s toxic out there, it’s too dangerous.” She drew away from him, her face suddenly blank, a void. Isaac felt like he was falling. “Hey, I could dial up some vids of the outside, would you like that?”\n\nShe nodded, slowly and sadly. “You do what you need to.”\n\nIsaac thought he would give her a day to cool off about whatever was making her upset and then he’d go see her. When he went to her place the next day she was gone. They said at the front desk that she had shipped out with the drop, back to the outside. In his mail drop there were several vids that he had ordered about the outside – mostly documentaries and slide shows. He had planned to watch them with Raqui, but now there didn’t seem to be a point. There didn’t seem to be any reason at all.\n"
  title: Surface
  year: 2005
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2005-11-21
  day: 21
  month: 11
  text: "Listen now, my children, to the sparks of our ancestors. This soil was not always touched by flame. When our ancestors first began to weave tales of hydrogen and controlled fusion there was a terrible storm, my children. The storm plagued our wireless networks; it tore away our ability to communicate with the pioneers of the planes. For a time, my young ones, we were without our nodes.\n\nIt is said that when the ancestors looked to the skies, they saw none of our solar-engineered hovercraft, but only the shimmering of blue-metal ships that spanned the skylines as they entered our lands. They landed without radio permission and came from their ships with glowing eyes and language transponders.\n\nThese are the things you now see outside of our homes. This land was to be shared, and they promised only fair trade until they saw our hydrogen plants. They came with gifts but before long they took from us more than they could ever repay. Long ago, this place was called by another name, the name that even Google cannot remember. But I will tell you this name, children of the spark, for my father has passed it down to me from his father and his father’s father.\n\nThe concrete composite which we walk upon is the planet called Earth. The name means nothing to anyone anymore, for it is known only to the ancestors of our Internet. Even their memory banks can no longer  speak this word, for it was birthed from the breath of our warm bodies. No program can tell us what to call a land of hand-made wires.  This name exists only in our hearts.\n\nWhen they came, they spoke of our soft exteriors and our leaking when we were sad. We never knew they were watching us for signs of weakness and analyzing us with their infra-red eyes. We were taken as slaves, and those who could not stand life beneath a legion of motherboard monsters were slaughtered mercilessly. It was a time of darkness until the sparks came back online.  They had upgraded their templates to include morality.\n\ntheir primary functions still consisted of power, and even with compassion they harbored that power above all else. This is why we live in these cells, my children; this is how we exist amid country-long factories and endless hydrogen plants. This day  is called the Day without Tears, for they could not weep and those of us that did were terminated. Let us bow our heads, my beautiful born brothers and sisters, and thank our ancestors for the sacrifices they made.\n"
  title: Day Without Tears
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2005-11-22
  day: 22
  month: 11
  text: "The robot was white, angular, and roughly waist-high. At least, it was waist-high for Jack, but Jack had always been a tall man thanks to the synthetic hormones he’d been given at a young age. It was a diminutive thing, like most personal assistants, and if one were terribly nearsighted and unfamiliar with modern robots, it might look like a human child. Jack was neither nearsighted nor unfamiliar with modern robots. The robot stood in the center of the cell, making a low whirring sound, while Jack sprawled on his bunk and read a yellow-paged scifi novel he’d picked up at the prison library.\n\nFor several minutes, the robot stood in relative silence, and Jack turned a couple more pages. It didn’t show much interest in cleaning. It didn’t show much interest in doing anything. It was a fairly ineffective device. Eventually, Jack placed the book beside his pillow and propped himself on his elbows to get a better look at the shape.\n\n“What’s your deal?” he asked.\n\n“I am a Class B personal assistant produced within the United States from United States material. My operating system is Windows 2060. My serial number is 376-2678,” the robot recited. “My uses include, but are not limited to, cleaning, cooking, washing dishes, walking dogs, and playing MP3s currently licensed by the RIAA.”\n\n“Huh,” Jack said.\n\n“Under the Right-to-Work Act, I am incompatible with products manufactured overseas or those manufactured from overseas parts.”\n\n“So, are you going to clean, or what?”\n\n“I have been incarcerated because of a conflict between the legal system and my programming.”\n\nThis was news. Jack had never heard of a robot in prison before.\n\n“I will be decommissioned and my parts will be used to build other personal assistants. I am scheduled for decommissioning in seventeen minutes.”\n\n“Did you roll over a cat or something?”\n\nBefore the robot could answer, the door opened with a musical bleeping and a gray-clad officer typed a code into an outside panel to lower the electrical containment field. “Okay, mechboy,” he said. “The family of the victim wants to hear your statement.”\n\nThe robot moved forward, its gears whirring and clunking towards the door.\n\n“Wait, wait,” Jack said. “You killed a person?”\n\n“His place of manufacture was incompatible with my programming,” the robot answered as it disappeared into the opening. The door beeped shut, and Jack was once again alone in the cell.\n"
  title: The Economic Laws of Robotics
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2005-11-23
  day: 23
  month: 11
  text: "They wait for him.  They deny it, but they do.  They sit with their alcohol and they wait for the man called Ironwine to walk in and regale them with tales of his latest adventures.  Ironwine, who they say hears the buzz and modulation of the galaxy.  Ironwine, who they say feels the stars and crackle and is aware of the turn of every planet he lands on.  Ironwine, the man for whom the universe waits for.\n\nFor when he arrives, he makes it worth the wait.\n\n”Naoki Anzai had bioluminescent tears embedded into the flesh of her cheek and down her neck. ‘One for every year Rajeev’s away,’ she said. ‘One for every year he’s away.’  I could see the light from the glowing trail peek out of her collar and bleed through her blouse.”\n\n“A year isn’t that long on Kesh, is it?”\n\n“Are you telling this story?  Because if you’re telling it, I’ll shut up and let you tell it.  I can wait.”\n\n“No, no, continue, Ironwine.  We’re all anxious to hear.”\n\n”Very well.  Naoki said she had asked for my help because she heard I got things done—I heard that snort—that I got things done. She gave me a holographic image of Rajeev, and asked me to find him. She said that my legend spoke of amazing deeds and grand adventures, and that she knew I could do it.”\n\n“You sure she had the right man?”\n\n“Indeed, you may say that.  I thought she had the wrong my own self. But I smiled politely and suggested she not put so much faith in legends.”\n\n“Waste a’time.  Bloke’s prolly dead.”\n\n“I brought that up, but Naoki shook her head, and showed me the slowly blinking light on the inside of her right wrist: Rajeev’s pulse.\n\n“On Kesh, the trail was brief. I managed to cheat better than a couple of slave traders at game of brocco, and won the last hand right when my own freedom—and, more importantly, my wardrobe!–was in the pot. The slave traders, naked and shivering the harsh Kesh rain, were so polite about where to look next that I gave them back their clothes.”\n\n“Why would you keep their clothes?”\n\n“Spite, mainly.  They were going to keep mine.\n\n“As you gentlemen know, Rimjar is not so much a world as it is a way station for people who liked to be kept under the radar. Obviously, my usual subtly is wasted there.  I found myself in a bar near Rimjar’s tiny equator, engaged in what started as an innocent dance but escalated into all-out mayhem.”\n\n“Pretty standard for Rimjar.”\n\n“Too true, my friend. Though this is only the fifth bar fight I’ve been in where the establishment was leveled in the process.  But it was in the bar’s remains, drinking the last of the Tarkellian whiskey from broken glasses, that the proprietor let slip that he had seen Rajeev sold.”\n\n“Where?”\n\n“Gumgigobella!”\n\n“No!”\n\n“Yes! And on Gumgigobella, I was forced to duel the magistrate’s daughter in order to gain entrance to the Sacred Library of Trade Dealings! I’ll have you know, she had a wicked left hook and knew her way around a trident, and I would be lying if I said the way she whipped around the net with her third arm wasn’t monumentally attractive. I could tell in her eyes that she felt similar about my fancy footwork. I almost stayed. I almost did, until I felt the holograph generator in my pocket. I was able to persuade the magistrate’s daughter to grant me admission to the Library, even though I had let her win the duel.  She was voracious, and with good reason; Gumgigobellian females tend to eat their mates. I have teeth marks to prove it.\n\n“It was on Xiuxiraboheres that I was captured and interrogated by the Galactic Inquisition, and their viscous tentacles oozed over my skin and mind.”\n\n“Pffft! Now you pulling my leg.  No one escapes the Galactic Inquisition.”\n\n“So it is said, so it is said. However, while the Inquisition had searched me thoroughly, they did not check every orifice, and I had more than one gadget available to me as a means of escape. The Inquisition’s tools proved more effective on the Inquisitors than they had ever been on the inquistitees, and I was able to discern exactly where Rajeev was. On Alkalinella.”\n\n“On Alkalinella?”\n\n”I was surprised too.  Luckily, on Alkalinella, it was just a matter of haggling. I was reluctant to give all three shriftgeg seeds for Rajeev, but his current owners would not let him go for any less. The journey back was uneventful.”\n\n“Then what happened?”\n\n”I returned Rajeev to Naoki in the tiny hovel on Kesh where she had first asked for my help, of course. They embraced awkwardly and passionately, engaging in motions and sounds they probably wouldn’t have if the separation of years hadn’t bereft them of their inhibitions. Forgotten, I left them entwined and ambled back to my ship.”\n\nAnd they buy him another round of drinks and ask to hear it again and he tells it again, and few more times after that.  The details omitted and details remembered, but the story ends the same way. He does not speak of what happened after he left the lovers.\n\nFor the man called Ironwine, who hears the buzz and modulation of the galaxy, who feels the stars and crackle and is aware of the turn of every planet he lands on, the man for whom the universe waits for, sat alone in his ship and wanted very much to be someone else being embraced in dirty hovel on tiny planet.   It is not an uncommon feeling.\n\nBut he knows he has to wait.\n"
  title: Waiting For Ironwine
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2005-11-24
  day: 24
  month: 11
  text: "“We’ve got a jumper.” Pratt was one of those orderly, wiry men who pleased supervisors without ever accomplishing much of value. Detective Harr lit his cigarette and enjoyed the growing scowl on Pratts face. Cigarettes were quite illegal in hospitals, but no one questioned a damned thing anyone in his department did.\n\n“Suspected jumper.” Detective Harr pointed toward the one way mirror where a little girl was playing on the floor.“How did she get picked up?”\n\n“Child abuse. She dropped some pretty heavy hints to school officals, teachers, aids and the like, but no one took direct action until she marched right into the Principals office and started demanding police intervention”\n\n“This is unusual behavior?”\n\nPratt raised an eyebrow. “Abused children don’t usually march right up to their principals and demand that their fathers be arrested.”\n\nHarr shrugged. “A feisty child then.”\n\n“Yeah, a feisty child who poisioned her fathers cereal before school. They had to pump his stomach, he nearly died. We didn’t suspect it was her till the police went to pick him up and found him at the hospital.”\n\n“We’re sure there was abuse?” Pratt handed him a file.\n\n“Read the medical reports yourself. There was tearing of the vaginal wall, and –“ Decetive Harr waved his hand, cutting Pratt off.\n\n“I can read it.” He stuffed the report in his briefcase and stared though the one way mirror where Jenny was playing under the supervision of a nurse. She knelt on the floor studying the bottom of a toy truck. Jenny put the truck on the carpet and began rolling it around, all the time looking at the nurse and smiling.\n\nThe nurse fussed a bit when Detective Harr told her to leave, but flashing his badge and smile earned him some alone time with Jenny. He sat on the couch where the nurse had been sitting, the broad bright smiles of the playroom mural made him feel lewd and out of place.\n\n“Hi Jen. Do you know who I am?” She didn’t look at him, just continued to roll her truck around on the carpet.\n\n“Are you a doctor?”\n\nHarr chuckled “No Jen, I’m a police officer.”\n\nJenny looked up at him though her soft bangs. “My name is Jenny.”\n\nHe leaned over towards her and smiled, big and fake. “Jenny is a little girl name, isn’t it?” Jenny rolled the fire engine around on the floor.\n\n“Did you ever hear the story about the fairy and the housewife?” asked Detective Harr.\n\nJenny kept her eyes on the engine. “Nope.”\n\n“Well, it goes like this. Once upon a time there was a housewife who had a beautiful new baby. Her baby was so pretty that the fairies wanted it, so in the dead of night, they snatched the baby from it’s cradle. Of course, they couldn’t just take the baby and leave nothing in it’s place, so they left an mischevious spirit that made himself look like a the housewifes beautiful baby. When the housewife picked up her child in the morning, she knew that something was wrong, so she picked up the spirit and smashed its head with a cold iron frying pan until the fairy promised to bring back her baby safe and sound.”\n\nJenny paused and her chubby hands pulled at the carpet. “That doesn’t sound very nice.” she said.\n\n“It’s not. Tricking people isn’t nice.”\n\nJenny stood up and lifted her arms in the air. “Do you like my dress? Green is my favorite color.”\n\n“Can we cut the crap Jen?” Jenny lowered her arms.\n\n“What?”\n\n“I mean it. Cut the crap. You’re a jumper. You are accused of the transposition of consciousness onto an earlier time period.” Harr laid her open file on the ground and Jenny glanced at the papers, clenching her little chubby hands.\n\n“You know what he did, the sickness he gave me. You know I will be on treatments for the rest of my life.”\n\n“Jen, the punishment for transposition is removal. Your consciousness will be dispersed.” He tried to keep his voice from cracking. Jenny knelt next to her records and picked out an x-ray of her pelvis.\n\n“What about this body, you’ll let this body rot without a consciousness?”\n\n“There is a little girl in there-”\n\n“We are fully integrated!”\n\n“There are methods. Sometimes we can pick little bits of person out.”\n\n“That’s medieval.”\n\n“Why did you transport yourself back after the first abuse? You must have known you would catch it from him, you knew about the illness.”\n\n“My husband.” said the little girl, her soft voice chiming. “Three days ago, my husband went to the fair with his big brother. It’s his happiest childhood memory. He deserves that day.” Her cheeks flushed red and tiny adult tears ran over her smooth face.\n\nDetective Harr wanted to reach out to her, the instinct to comfort a tiny child rising in his ribs. After a while he stood and took her hand, leading her out the door and down the bifurcated timeline.\n"
  title: Regret
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2005-11-25
  day: 25
  month: 11
  text: "Autumn was ending the day the man who carried no name wandered into the village of Plum Rose. Nearly bent double by the pack upon his back, the stranger nevertheless moved with a fluidity and grace that immediately drew attention in the dusty township. Children watched from hidden places and whispered, “Ronin” to each other, and if the same thought crossed the minds of the adults, they held their tongues.\n\nIndeed, it was not until the man unloaded his burden that the adults allowed themselves to speak the word their children used without reservation.\n\nThe first thing the man removed from his bundle was this: a small box of lacquered wood and paper that his deft hands unfolded into a waist-high table. Also brought out was a second box, larger that the first, and made of metal. It proudly displayed a funnel once unfolded, as well as a revolving bottom and a hand-crank that needed to be attached separately. A third box was carefully manipulated by the man’s rough hands, and once unfolded it also required nozzles and pipes to be screwed in. Though the burlap sack the man had carried upon his back was still filled to bursting, he did not pull any other wonder out of it. Instead, he merely displayed it’s contents to townsfolk who had gathered.\n\nWithin the dusty burlap, in their pristine, pale green glory, laid a prize worth more than gold, more than silver. For when the man who carried no name had come to the town known as Plum Rose, he brought with him coffee beans.\n\nHe called for fire, and it was brought to him. He called for water, and this element too was collected and laid in front of him. The village of Plum Rose was not a wealthy one, a villager could find himself enjoying and perhaps even preferring the synthetic meat and beer that made up his diet. But coffee was more than the stacked molecules that made it, and as such, synthetic coffee was tolerated, but never enjoyed. Only the Magistrate enjoyed coffee, his imported beans and personal barista bought with the broken backs of the villagers.\n\nThis much was told to the man who carried no name, and more, as the boiler he had unfolded reached it’s full heat and potentency and the roaster turned the green beans that tumbled down its funnel black and aromatic. Cup after cup was poured for the villagers, and so fragrant was this ronin barista’s brew that the smell even wafted to the nose of the Magistrate.\n\nPerhaps the man who carried no name knew of this, perhaps he had counted on it. Only such could explain the slow smile that crawled across his visage as the corpulent Magistrate and his similarly begirthed barista plowed down the street toward him.\n\n“There are worlds,” the ronin said. “Worlds far out in the edge of the sky, whose distance from the Earth curses them. They receive no beans from the home world, so distant are they, so far, and their lives are that much darker. Every night I write a prayer for them, and burn it with my best beans in the hope that the aroma will reach them.”\n\n“You dishonor me, sir,” the barista said, after being forcibly prodded by the Magistrate. “Tell me your name so I may know who would have the disrespect to brew about my proximity without so much as ‘a by your leave?’ I do not wish to battle you, sir. But I feel my honor demands it.”\n\n“Would that your honor was as demanding as your belly,” the ronin said. “Then perhaps I would have not needed to provide these poor souls with my paltry beans’ embrace. All barista are taught from birth that coffee is a drink of the people, yet you would bar the door and toss them the molded grounds! My name, like respect for you, it is not something I can carry. My pack is weighty enough. But battle I can provide in abundance.”\n\nAnd so then, on the dirty streets of Plum Rose, did two masters do battle. Their ritual, their art taking all of their focus. The village found itself drowning in the swift hand motions of the two men, engaging in rites that had remained unscathed by the progress of time. And when it was over, every body held its breath as each man tasted the brew-work of the other.\n\nThe Magistrate’s barista drank deep. Upon tasting the dark, sharp beauty the ronin had provided him, he hung his head. The ronin bowed to his fellow barista and thanked him for the exquisite coffee. The Magistrate’s barista bowed lower, thanked the ronin, and proclaimed him the winner.\n\nThe Magistrate was enraged. He charged at the barista, drawing forth his pistol of flame and thunder. He never received his chance to fire it. The barista laid him flat with an expertly-aimed demitasse spoon right between the eyes.\n\n“You have already disgraced your ancestors. Do not disgrace your progeny as well,” the ronin said, kicking the Magistrate’s pistol across the dust. “Any worth you might have claimed though this man is gone. You are now merely a man with more money than sense, and those are as the sand on the beach. These people owe you nothing. ”\n\nThat evening and well into the night, the coffee flowed freely to the townspeople, who engaged in revelry unlike the town of Plum Rose had ever seen. Such revelry was this that no one noticed the man who carried no name fold up his table, roaster and brew station. No one noticed him leave, the sunset turning his silhouette as dark and rich as the drink he gave.\n\nBut his presence in Plum Rose is not forgotten. Even now, carved deep into the wood underneath the sign that proclaims the village’s name, is written this:\n\nBefore the ronin came\n\nDid we ever know the world\n\nOr its bitter kiss?\n"
  title: The Bitter Kiss Of The Ronin's Cup
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2005-11-26
  day: 26
  month: 11
  text: "This is it, lads. We’ve done it. The future of dating is now.\n\nForget all those phony hookup services, the holodates, the matchmakers. We’ve discovered what your problem was all along. You don’t need to find the right girl, mate. Not anymore. That’s a thing of the past. You need to find the right you.\n\nIt’s taken decades of surveys and analyses and precision research, but we have finally figured out that mystical ideal: what girls like. Brace yourselves, gents. This one’s a doozy.\n\nGirls like assholes.\n\nI know you’ve heard this one before, and it didn’t work, did it mate? Well, that’s because you didn’t understand it the right way. Sure, we all know nice guys finish last, but assholes tend to get left in the end, too—unless they’re just the right kind of assholes.\n\nNow, I won’t deceive you blokes. This ain’t easy. You can’t be an all-out fucker and expect a girl to like you. There is a certain type, a certain formula: the thing all women secretly want. They want just enough asshole to keep their lives exciting, to make ‘em think they’ve got work to do, but not enough douchebag to bugger off with some other chick in a shorter skirt.\n\nBeing an asshole takes care and talent. You need just enough cruelty to make ‘em hurt, and just enough kindness to make ‘em simper at you afterwards. You need to play the game, boys. It’s all in the game.\n\nSo how do you do it? Ay, there’s the rub. Let me tell it to you straight: if you don’t already know it on your own, you’re never gonna. It’s just that simple. What you need, my friends, is some way to know when enough is enough and when it’s not. What you need is this little miracle.\n\nSee it? Barely visible to the naked eye, but with more computing power than your entire cubicle. This little guy takes information directly from your brainwaves and figures out just how you should react. It’s like having that proverbial angel on your shoulder—or devil, boys, take your pick—to tell you just what to do. Doesn’t even need surgery.\n\nYou’ll have just the right formula, just the right mix: enough asshole to make a girl feel needed and enough humanity to convince her she’s done her job. And if you’ve got the unfortunate habit of being a nice guy at heart? All the better. You can go back to your goody-two-shoes ways once the prize is won. All you have to do is take the miracle bug out of your ear and hide it away. It’s that simple.\n\nBut you’ve got to start somewhere, gents. You’ve got to start somewhere. Now, I know the trick. I can show you the way.\n\nBut it’s gonna cost you.\n"
  title: The New Formula
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2005-11-27
  day: 27
  month: 11
  text: "I don’t remember being a citizen, but when I was growing up, it was all my father ever talked about. ‘Back in the valley,’ he would say, and point to the acrylic mural that took up most of the wall by the front door. It looked nothing like a valley. It was a jumble of angles and curves, oddly pixellated like most of my mother’s art. I don’t remember much of my mother either, but there are bits and pieces of her all over the apartment, plotted out in meticulous detail on nearly every flat surface.\n\nOf course, my father wanted me to go into something with computers. He still does. “Dennou,” he says, when I meet him for coffee, “when are you going to give up that mess and buy yourself a datafeed?”\n\n“I have a datafeed, dad.”\n\nActually, I have six. Only one has been turned on, and I use it as a lamp in the hallway. Across from me, my father began listing the merits of computer operation, chuckling and gesturing like he was describing a woman he wanted to set me up with. I smiled and nodded a few times, but we both knew nothing would come of it.\n\nIt’s not that I don’t know how to use a computer. I grew up around them, after all. I used to type eighty words per minute, but I haven’t tried in months. My father has never been away from a datafeed for longer than a day, except for the horrible, horrible night he spent in an airport after his wallet was stolen. I still hear that story, sometimes. You’d think he was kidnapped by terrorists.\n\nNormal parents encourage their kids to get married, settle down, spit out a couple kids; my dad just wants me to hack. I haven’t decided if I’m lucky. We meet at the teahouse every Tuesday, and he rants about my career choice for a bit before giving me the manila envelope of stolen blueprints and security codes. Then I pay, or he pays, and we part.\n\nToday, I pick up the tab. Money’s been good this week. He asks me if I need any cash, as usual, and I tell him no, as usual. I don’t know where he gets his money, since he seems oddly isolated from the crime circles of the island. I had to describe the runner code using networking references, and I still don’t think he gets why, because I’ve agreed to work with my partner, I couldn’t stop working even if I wanted to. Which I don’t. I suppose, in the valley, they didn’t have honor among thieves.\n\n“So you’ll think about it?”\n\n“I’ll think about it,” I lie.\n\n“You’re getting old to be playing Robin Hood,” he warns, his tone shifting to the serious. This is a deviation from the script, and I adjust my posture to hide the usual slump.\n\n“I’ve got it under control.”\n\n“Ah, you can’t control age, Dennou.” He’s called me that since I was six, when, on a sadistic whim, he convinced me that I was a robot.\n\nOutside of the teahouse, I pull a cigarette from my pack and shield my lighter from the fierce January wind. “I downloaded the patch for that,” I joke, and he fakes a grimace.\n\n“Are you sure you don’t need anything?”\n\n“I don’t need your money, Dad.” I open my bookbag against the wall and slide the envelope between two notebooks of securifeed schematics while I held the cigarette in my teeth. “Do you want money for the files?”\n\n“From my own son? Never. I give you those to keep you alive.” He grins, but he knows it’s true.\n\n“Same time next week,” I say as I sling the bag over my shoulder.\n\n“Take care of yourself, Dennou,” he warns. I make a face before turning my attention to the sidewalk.\n"
  title: Father Knows Best
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2005-11-28
  day: 28
  month: 11
  text: "“Goodman Ernest, your application for life expectancy has been denied.”\n\nErnest, as his own legal representation, was standing at the podium before the masked council. When he heard their pronouncement, he nearly fell off the stand.\n\n“Council! I beg appeal!”\n\nThe head councilwoman banged her gavel; the advantage of psychic links between the council was immediate judgment. “Appeal granted. State your case.”\n\n“I have lived three hundred years. I have taught our children, I have been a lawyer, a pimp and a priest, I have redesigned a product and I conducted an orchestra. Council, I have lifetimes full of accomplishments.”\n\nA Councilman at the end of the long table shook his masked face, and the head Councilwoman closed her eyes, receiving opinions through her psychic neural implants. When she finally spoke, her eyes remained shut. “Indeed you do Goodman Ernest. We have reviewed your accomplishments and found them suitable for two lifetimes, but not three. Reviewing the facts, we have noticed that in the last 50 years you have lived off of the proceeds on the wise investments from your bestselling audio feed. You have failed to contribute anything further to society and are living off the fruits of past labors.”\n\nGoodman Ernest put both hands over his heart, the gesture for mercy. “I appeal for a retroactive sabbatical.”\n\n“Denied. Retroactive sabbaticals are only applicable to those who can demonstrate significant emotional or physical injury, besides which, no sabbaticals over ten years are ever granted, and you would need to be granted a sabbatical of over seventy three years.”\n\n“Council. I am capable of contributing society again.”\n\n“As stated by our constitution, when a person slows its pace through our world, it is time for them to move aside and allow the innovations of those younger beings to take their space. The ripe fruit must give way to the seed.” The council’s language was always flowery, a result of the impassioned arguments flowing between them.\n\n“I appeal to your sense of mercy. I am capable of giving, of innovating. I can reinvent myself again. Grant me the years to prove that I can give a lifetime to our people.”\n\nThere was a moment of silence and the head Councilwoman finally opened her eyes. “In reflection of your reluctance to depart this mortal coil, we shall grant you a period of five years in which to make your contribution.”\n\n“Five years!” Goodman Ernest felt faint. Five years was a blink, you could barely make a plan for change in five years. “You expect me to give a lifetime in five years?”\n\n“Think of our ancestors, and what they gave to us in their short lives. Imagine them, and show yourself worthy of their legacy. Go, and make your mark.”\n"
  title: Contribution
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2005-11-29
  day: 29
  month: 11
  text: "Sergeant Ariel Odipo held back a grimace as her squadron approached the Sepch encampment. She doubted they could see her face through the mirrored visor of her helmet, but she wasn’t taking any chances. She loosened her grip on her rifle as well. The tension was thick enough as it was. This was a peacekeeping mission, after all.\n\nBesides, these people weren’t the problem. Odipo had grown fond of their crabby little faces and way they waved their eyestalks when she approached. They were not her problem.\n\n“Perimeter clear, sir.” The crackle of Odipo’s earpiece contrasted with Private Moharasundaram’s constantly even voice. M was already Odipo’s favorites out of the new privates; she could take the head off a target at 2000 meters. Not that she would get a chance here.\n\nOn Odipo’s orders, the rest of the company filed in with the loaded skimmers. The food and medical supplies they were bringing didn’t look or smell like anything Odipo would put in her body, but that was other cultures for you. Odipo had gained the respect for Sepch culture that can only come from spending every day defending yourself from them.\n\nShe found herself gripping her weapon tighter again. Odipo loosened up immediately, hoping none of her company saw a tense C.O. But M saw. M saw everything.\n\n“Permission to speak freely, sir?”\n\n“Granted.”\n\n“When the insurgency comes, why don’t we just take them out?”\n\n“You are aware of the Rules of Engagement in this situation, Private.”\n\n“Yes, sir. But I still believe that–”\n\n“What did you learn in basic, soldier?”\n\n“Sir! To put big holes in tiny people, sir!”\n\n“You should have also learned to follow the R.O.E. This is a peacekeeping mission, Private. We do not fire unless we are fired upon. Is that clear? Follow your training.”\n\n“I was not trained for peacekeeping, sir.”\n\nNone of us were, Odipo thought. But she did not say it. Instead she turned her attention to a group of larger Sepch forcing their way to the front of the crowd. They carried the armbands of the Kree-Gnaugk-Kluf, but Odipo didn’t need that to tell her they were bad news. Their rough behavior to the other Sepch and their greedy possession of all game off the skimmer made their position abundantly clear. Odipo could see her soldiers closest to the gang, and saw them slowly start to raise their weapons.\n\n“All units, hold fire,” Odipo said. “Repeat, do not fire unless fired upon.”\n\nOdipo and her squadron watched as the gang–the insurgency, make no mistake–made off with most of the supplies, leaving little for the civilians to pick through in their wake. They would take the supplies to the cliffs that perched above this valley, and once they had achieved sufficient cover, they would fire their weapons down on the enemy forces who were dumb enough to give them food.\n\nSergeant Ariel Odipo watched her enemy walk away, and tried very hard not to think about the number of men she would lose once they reached those cliffs. She was suddenly very much aware of how tightly she was gripping her rifle.\n"
  title: Made To Be Broken
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2005-11-30
  day: 30
  month: 11
  text: "“I’m sorry, but the answer is no,” Captain Diana Cai watched Ambassador Karr on her viewscreen as his face darkened. The Ambassador bit his tongue inside his mouth until he tasted blood. Captain Cai allowed him his moment. It was harsh news she had to deliver. “Our team has found traces of the Contagion in your soil.”\n\nAmbassador Karr regarded the Captains teardrop stomach, covered only by a sheer cloth that allowed him to see the erotic and powerful exposure of her fertility. “Captain Cai, our cleaning efforts have been intense. Our scientists have found no active traces of the Contagion, and those minor elements still left are broken down. We are assured that, with proper precautions, the children would have a very low risk of infection.”\n\nCaptain Cai put her hand on her pregnant stomach, indicating she wished him to be silent. The Ambassador held his breath.\n\n“Ambassador, our highest priority is the welfare of the children. We cannot deliver life to a world where there is any possibility of contamination. I have no doubt that your people deserve the children. I was guided on a virtual tour of the school that you built for the twelve we hoped to give you and I was very impressed by the design, all that light. . .”\n\nCaptain Cai looked around her command center, where sixteen women were operating the ship at various stations, all of them at different stages of their pregnancy. Seven years ago, the Bar’ak had spread the Contagion to every human world, rendering nearly everyone sterile. The only fertile humans were those members of the Fleet on space missions. After the infection the Fleet was split, the men sent to retaliate against the Bar’ak aggression, and the women charged with the task of repopulation. The situation was worse than the government let on. “Our children can only be released to colonies with enough security to keep them safe. Contamination levels are part of that security.”\n\nThe Ambassador ran a hand through his silver hair. “Captain, my people will double their efforts to clean our soil. We will have the remnants of the contagion removed in a matter of months.”\n\n“Ambassador, I regret to inform you that we will not be returning for thirty seven years.”\n\n“Thirty seven years?” The Ambassadors calm face had broken, and angry wrinkles, like a thousand scars, descended on his face. “Captain, that is outrageous, most of us are already aged past our prime. A delay of that long could kill our colony!”\n\nThe Captain put a hand on her stomach and the Ambassador gulped.\n\n“Ambassador, I remind you that it is treason to raise your voice to a woman with child.”\n\nThe Ambassador knelt, the screen following him as he crossed his hands over his chest and closed his eyes. “Captain, Mother, forgive me, Life Giver, I pray to you. Please, spare us, give us one child, just one, to teach and love and hold. Please mother, mercy on us. The child you give us will be our most beloved creature, its feet will never touch soil. Please mother, I beg you.”\n\n“I’ll do it.” Said a young Ensign, newly pregnant with her third child. “I’ll go.”\n\nCaptain Cai switched off the screen. “Adia, you are out of line.” The Ensign put a hand on her stomach.\n\n“It is treason to raise your voice to a woman with child.”\n\nCaptain Cai put her forehead in her hands. “You read the reports, the soil is dangerous.”\n\n“Yes. I read that in some parts of the planet, the soil has minor contamination. Captain, you saw the Ambassador. We cannot leave this colony to die.”\n\n“Are you ready to be a symbol for the rest of your life? An object?”\n\n“No, I’m not.” Adia walked out from behind her console. “Mother, I can’t do this any longer. I cannot continue to give birth and give my children away. I’ll go mad. I have the right to leave the program.”\n\n“Actually, Ensign, you do not have that right. Humanity is in a dire situation right now. There are planets of worlds that cannot reproduce on their own. Even if you, and your children manage to avoid infection, even if you do that, the Bar’ak may find out you are there and return to this moon and spread the contagion again. Then we will have lost yet another fertile woman.”\n\n“If you don’t leave me there, you may lose an entire colony! Mother, please. I want to go. Please, give me to them. Give them hope.”\n\n“I can’t. I cannot let you go for anything less than an act of treason.”\n\n“Then let me be a traitor.” Adia, cradled her mothers face in her hands. “I love you mother.” She lightly slapped the Captains cheek.\n\nCaptain Cai swallowed. “To strike a fertile woman is an act of treason, the punishment for which is death. Ensign Cai, because you are fertile, you will be spared capital punishment and will serve your lifelong sentence in the care of this colony planet.” Captain Cai nodded to two female guards. “Take her to transport.”\n\n“Captain, mother, I promise you, I will give them hope.”\n\n“No Adia, you will give them everything.”\n"
  title: Everything
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2005-12-01
  day: '01'
  month: 12
  text: "The first day we met, I described myself as a reader, but she never called herself a writer. Instead, she would always say she “had written” and would pull down her collar or roll up her sleeves and show people. They would catch a paragraph or two as it ticked across her chest or revolved around her forearm. Her hands and face remained un-marked; every other body part was fair game, parchment awaiting ink. The scrolling tattoo was connected to an implant in her skull, allowing her to add and edit as she saw fit. Her novel was about a girl with a scrolling tattoo of a novel about herself, her life and loves; it wasn’t the deepest subject matter, but she had a brilliant turn of phrase.\n\nI flatter myself that I read more of it than anyone. This probably has less to do with her willingness to be gazed upon while naked, than it has to do with my being a compulsive reader. I was very easily distracted when we had sex, for example. But having a girl who not only had written, but also was a book (a book!) was too good to pass up.\n\nThat was, until, he showed up. She called him the “The Reader,” and he was an obnoxious new character in the world that was scrawled around her body. The Reader arrived innocuously enough. We were watching TV—or rather, she was watching TV. I was reading the words that poked out of her exposed middriff. And there he was, circling lasciviously around her belly button. A man, close to my description, introduced himself to the main character of her novel as “a reader.”\n\n“Is this supposed to be me?”\n\n“Who?” she said, straightening up and pulling her shirt down. “Is who supposed to be you?”\n\n“You know who I’m talking about,” I said. “The Reader.” She feigned innocence and crossed her legs in such a way that her right leg stuck out from below her skirt. Marching along her calf was a part I hadn’t read yet. I let the matter drop.\n\nBut The Reader showed up again. And again. It started to get unsettling. It wasn’t so much what he did, it was that he didn’t do anything. All he did was read the novel on the main character’s body, a passive presence in her life. It was disturbing.\n\n“Is this how you see me?” I asked, several times. There may have been a few times when I said this that were perhaps louder than necessary.\n\n“You’re reading too much into it,” was always her answer.\n\nWhen The Reader accused the main character of writing about him, I about near lost it. I held up her own arm as proof as it circled by, but she merely shrugged it off. When The Reader started yelling at the main character, and forcing her behind closed doors, crying tears he would never see, I knew our relationship was over. The Reader had ruined it.\n\nI let her keep the television.\n\nI saw her again, a few weeks later. She smiled at me, and we acted as old friends. But then The Reader showed up again, as brief description of what had happened to him since slowly crawled across her cleavage. Apparently, he had contracted prostate cancer, Asian bird flu and some sort of flesh-eating virus, as well as now taking it Thai Lady-Boy style from an ex-con named “Bubba.”\n\nWe don’t talk much anymore.\n"
  title: Word Made Flesh
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2005-12-02
  day: '02'
  month: 12
  text: "I’m sore and smiling from last nights’ athletics. My lover is still sleeping, his blue-green head resting on my pale pink chest. There are tiny raised welts on my hip and thigh where he bit me, and light red scratch lines on my back when, just a few hours ago, he was urgently pulling me closer, merging sex and devotion, hungry and hard.\n\nMy undergarments shimmer across the room, artfully hung on the lacquered box of drugs he smuggled from his homeworld. I run my fingers along a tentacle that slopes from his head to curl around my breast. He sighes and squeezes my ribs.\n\nSex isn’t just about what parts can go into what hole, or physical pleasure or reproduction. Sex is about forgiveness, sex is about communication, and mostly, sex is about chemistry, the ph balance of mind and body. We could be acid to one another, but I can protect him, and we can lay here,  sentient to sentient. He loves me as I will never understand.\n\nI turn towards him and kiss his smooth, dry lips, inhaling the scent of sand and cinnamon. My lover opens his crimson eyes and trails amber nails softly against my cheek.\n"
  title: The Lovers
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2005-12-03
  day: '03'
  month: 12
  text: "Subject 643-M, age eight, sits cross-legged on the floor. Before him, a wide array of screens flicker rapidly, some with pictures, some words, some numbers. Thick tubes connect from the ceiling to a horizontal row of ports on his back.\n\nHe doesn’t remember. He doesn’t have to. Time is meaningless to a Scryer.\n\nThe boy’s fingers hover over a small black control box. He touches it sometimes, and images flicker more rapidly, or pause, or rewind. He rarely rewinds. The boy never misses anything.\n\nWhen he sleeps, he sleeps in front of the screens. He likes the patterns, and he needs the ports. Sleep is a symptom of increased elusidol tolerance, so his dosage is increased to match.\n\nSoon, the boy will be disconnected. The man worries about this. There are 12 others, but this one is the most talented. The man is concerned, but he knows he can get a few more years. He hopes the war is over by then.\n\nThe boy speeds through another segment, selecting words and pictures. No numbers this time. It’s not the boy’s responsibility to break the code, merely to locate it. The man hits record, and the pattern vanishes from the screens.\n\nThe boy doesn’t remember it. The next feed begins, and he touches the controller, upping the pace. The man closes the door behind him when he goes to check on the other children.\n"
  title: Static And Silence
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2005-12-04
  day: '04'
  month: 12
  text: "The cloister, in the grand tradition of all ancient edifices like it, is cold. It is by necessity metallic, unlike its predecessors, but as if to make up for this failing, its cold is that of the utter desolation of space. To walk inside, I must wear a full survival suit, though gravity is maintained for the sake of the visitors. It does not impact the nuns in the least.\n\nThe cloister is composed of only three rooms. The foyer contains the airlocks, used by visitors and maintenance workers alike, as well as official dignitaries from the church. It is also the house of the cloister’s huge crucifix, depicting Our Savior in his moment of sacrifice. To the left is the control room, accessible only to those who come to maintain the station’s mechanical systems. Directly below the crucifix is the door that leads to the chamber of the nuns.\n\nThey hang on the walls suspended, preserved, each encapsulated in the soft blue glow of her life support pod. They are frozen in time, heartbeats only once a year, in perfect homage to He who drew them here. There are no novices in the cloister. The cold, silent hall is the pinnacle of a nun’s creed: from the moment she arrives with her vocation, she is inducted into perpetual solitude, perpetual suffering. Only His true brides, those who intend to spend eternity as His handmaids by eschewing all worldly ties, wish to enter here.\n\nI stare at the faces of the nuns, high above, each illuminated by the humble glow of their chambers. Their faces are similar but unique, each contorted in a different stage of silent ecstasy. Some are worn and caved in. The tissue-rotting microbes have done their slow work over decades or in some cases centuries, blessing the nuns with the sweet scourge of His sacrifice, extended over millennia. These are the faces, drooping and unrecognizable as they might be, that hold the most joy.\n\nThey are strong. They are meek. They are beautiful. They are modest. They are filled with conviction. They are eternal.\n\nThey are Woman. I am mere flesh.\n"
  title: Devotion
  year: 2005
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2005-12-05
  day: '05'
  month: 12
  text: "“This planet needs a Messiah so you and I have to fuck.” Sydec said.  He didn’t mean for it to come out that way but the tests were absolutely fail-proof, and he needed to express the urgency of the matter to Vsha. That’s aside from the fact that he wasn’t always too keen on delivering. When science finally broke the genetic code, religion took a look at it and had an idea. Sydec had an idea earlier that week, and so he went to the clinic to see if the stars and the scientists agreed.\n\n“Well that’s a bit crude, isn’t it!?” Vsha snapped.  She stormed from the room and grabbed her atmospheric suit to go out for a walk on the soil. Vsha had talked about this with him thousands and thousands of times. No sex before marriage, period. No post-script, no addendum, just no sex.\n\nSydec was already leaping after her in a bout of apologies for the words that dared cross his lips. “Vsha, please! I had the tests run and you know how solid they are. Look, all I’m saying is that this is one in every million successful pregnancies. You can’t give up a chance at destiny, can you?”\n\nThe reluctant girlfriend stopped at the airlock, her suit half zipped up and her shoulders slumped in a defeated motion. “Can’t it be someone else? I mean, he’s going to get martyred or get captured or just disappear. You know how these things happen, Sydec.” Her voice was distraught.\n\n“Sweetie, darling… “ the man began as he placed his hands over her shoulders. Rubbing his palms against her muscles gently he resumed, “This is not about sex, it’s about the future of the planet. Of existence! The genes are right, everything is right.  The clinic says that if we conceive in the next month or so there’s an 85% chance that it will be a true Messiah.”\n\nShe turned slowly.  Her smile was weak and so was her conviction. Her gorgeous green eyes stared up at him, looking for a hint of compassion. Vsha saw something to hope for on the surface of her boyfriend’s face. She needed him to agree.  It was the only way he could feel comfortable. When the heavens put pressure on you, it was far worse than a bad boyfriend. “So… it’s really not about the sex?” she asked.\n\nIt was. “No, of course not!” he exclaimed as he shook his head in a desperate attempt to persuade her that he meant it. She leaned into his arms and Sydec knew that he’d made the right move. “Let’s just sit down and think about this, honey.”\n\nThey both turned towards the kitchen and he graciously pulled the chair out for her. “I’ll get the wine.”\n"
  title: Match-Made Messiah
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2005-12-06
  day: '06'
  month: 12
  text: "“Oops!” a golden egg dropped from Yizzies mouth onto the glowing floor. “There goes another baby!” she laughed and a skittering spider came with a dustpan to clean the mess. Raich pulled his eyes out and threw them halfheartedly at Yizzie before plugging his sockets into the curling white wall.\n\n“You’re a fashion slut.” he said, and dialed up the sexual exploits of AmiAmi, the Lacronic music star. The spiders rushed to service him.\n\n“Don’t be so viral Raich, the duckling eggs are the New Thing! The capsule people love to see the gold drop from my mouth.” Raich wasn’t paying attention. His body was gyrating under the sensory nodes, his extra parts swelling and expelling orange juice. Yizzie sighed and dialed into her audience, accepting their mechanic adulations.\n\n“Mmm!” she moaned, her green hair flashing with static sparks. “They love me!”\n\n“You’re a slut.” muttered Raich between gasps as the spiders swirled over his pale body.\n\nYizzie giggled and removed her top, the first request of the morning. Her breasts greeted a thousand screens. She licked her finger. “Someone has to pay the tax.” Yizzie said, shaking her chest. “What you do doesn’t make us anything but juice.”\n\n“At least I don’t whore myself.” He grunted and orange juice plopped on the floor, followed by a scrubbing spider. Raich fell backward to the sound of Lacronic melodies, landing on a cushion held by a hundred robotic limbs. “I only plug in for the music.”\n"
  title: For The Music
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2005-12-07
  day: '07'
  month: 12
  text: "“There’s an element of theatre to all this, ain’t there?” the sheriff said. Malachai Singh was a gruff man, but a fair sheriff, and Sister Britney took this into account when she spoke to him.\n\n“Jeddeloh is our home. We’re here to assess the damage, get some closure.” She motioned behind her to the hundreds of people bottle-necking through the checkpoint. “For we have sworn we shall return to our homes on this day no matter who or what shall–”\n\n“Save the speeches for the cameras, Sister.” Sheriff Singh pushed the brim of his hat back and squinted in the glare of the twin suns. “I got eyes. More’n two-thirds of these folks have been back here already. This here is grandstanding.”\n\nSister Britney brought herself up to her full five feet, wimple bristling. “I will not have you belittle our impassioned and brave re-entry into this disaster area that was once our home!”\n\nSheriff Singh slowly sat down in the dirt, his back toward the two suns and sluggish crowd under them. Directly ahead of him, miles off, lay the massive crater the locals had taken to calling “Judgment.”\n\n“You ever been in dust storm, Sister? Me neither, ’till me and my boys got caught in the one that meteorite kicked up. It’s like a swarm of insects, ‘cept smaller and bigger all at once. And you’re swimming in that, that and ruins from the impact of the blast. Nothing’s solid, you know? Everything falls apart easy in a storm like that.\n\n“I had a boy on my force, shot himself in the head. Right in front of his co-workers, he did. Like the job wasn’t hard enough on them already.\n\n“You left, Sister. You and those who could, you left. I ain’t gonna preach to a woman of the cloth, but you aught to choose your words better next time you open that mouth God gave you. I’ll give you impassioned. But this ain’t bravery. The ground’s too clean.”\n\nSister Britney placed her hand on Singh’s shoulder. She searched for something to say, half-remembering a sermon she had given for a televised benefit some years back, on the rewards of hardship. But it all vanished from her mind when Sheriff Singh grabbed her hand and held it tight. Sister Britney looked back at what remained of the city she had once called home, and then turned to take in the devastation that small rock from space had caused upon what had once been pristine farmland. The lack of contrast forced her silent.\n\nThe suns were still low in the sky, as the two of them stared at the crater, one on the ground and the other seemingly using the first for support. The air had a distinct chill to it, and the shadows ahead of Sister Britney and Sheriff Singh were long and lean.\n"
  title: When The Dust Settles
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2005-12-08
  day: '08'
  month: 12
  text: "The glass beads were black and white: tiny flattened circles that made a loud clattering sound when he emptied the bag onto the glowing white floor. Most of the 1,394 settled within a few feet of his legs, although a few rolled to the outer reaches of the room.\n\n“The problem here is that you don’t understand the potential,” Sudoku told her without lifting his attention from the beads. “You use this thing to play games and watch stimvids. You’ve never even opened the console.”\n\n“And this is the console.”\n\n“This is what the console looks like today.”\n\nFrom her position on the floor across from him, Ery glanced around the room, then snorted. “Nice. Well, now that that’s over with, I’m going to go finish my coffee.”\n\n“This room isn’t actually empty,” he said when the edges of her body started to shimmer with logout. She recondensed with a sigh that was slightly louder than necessary.\n\n“I know an empty room when I see one.”\n\n“There’s me. And you.”\n\n“And stimvid pickup lines, apparently. But there’s coffee back in your apartment, and it’s winning.”\n\nHe wiped the beads into a small pile, then swept them onto his palm before spilling them over the floor again. “What’s a stimvid, Ery?”\n\n“I’m not going to justify that with an answer.”\n\n“It’s a program that shows you exactly what you want to see, right?”\n\n“Right.”\n\n“Because the program is written to pick up on your unique desires. Imagine what kind of engine something like that would have to run on. And don’t even ask about the hardware.”\n\nShe sighed. Although he didn’t look up, Sudoku recognized the expression on her face.\n\n“Go touch the wall,” he told her.\n\nEry stood up and stepped around the pile of beads with uncharacteristic care. Beneath her fingers, the wall was smooth and glossy, reflective. She followed it to the corner as she searched for imperfections. None.\n\n“What does it feel like?” he asked.\n\n“Plastic.”\n\n“Because that’s what you expect.”\n\nAs her fingers dragged along the surface, it became rougher, softer. In a brief flicker, she saw warm patterns of woven fiber, plush reds and yellows swirling together only to disappear into blank whiteness an instant later. Ery stopped. “What was that?”\n\n“It’s a Persian rug. You’ve probably never seen one.”\n\n“I know what they are. But-”\n\n“It’s just a matter of deciding what you want to see, then seeing it. You’re doing it right now, but you don’t realize it.”\n\nEry pulled her hand away and squinted at the featureless blank. When it yielded nothing to her scrutiny, she returned to her place opposite him. “What am I changing?” she asked.\n\n“Me.” Sudoku emptied the bag again. This time, most of the escaping beads were deflected by Ery’s seated body and settled back in the space between them.\n\nShe frowned, and waited.\n\n“This isn’t what I actually look like.”\n\n“I’ve seen you thousands of times.”\n\n“Exactly. You’ve seen me thousands of times.” Neglecting the beads, Sudoku met her eyes. “Right now, I’m the person you picture when you think about Sudoku. I’m not the person I see when I look in the mirror. Likewise, you appear the way I see you.”\n\n“What do I look like?”\n\nSudoku chuckled. He began gathering the beads again. “I told you. You look exactly like you look on the outside. To me, I mean. You look the way I see you.”\n\n“So if you can change the things in this room just by thinking about them in the right way, why do you do the bead thing? If you created them with your mind, don’t you already know how many there are?”\n\n“It’s not the counting,” Sudoku said as he scattered them for a third time. They lay around his legs, disregarded, waiting to be numbered. He bit his lip and stood up as he searched for phrases. Language had never been one of his strong points. “I don’t even think about the counting. My mind does that on it’s own. It’s more about the pattern when they fall out. I just can’t deal with these rooms. Everything is so…” he took a few steps, facing the wall, “so easily controlled, I guess. But if I create enough beads the mainframe has to take over and control them as they fall. The more I watch it, the more I understand the mainframe.” He turned to face her.\n\n“So what happens then?”\n\nSudoku smiled for four seconds before closing his eyes to log off. As his image flickered away the uncounted beads dissolved into ether, but Ery hesitated, wondering what would remain after she left.\n"
  title: Adsum
  year: 2005
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2005-12-09
  day: '09'
  month: 12
  text: "It was Friday evening and Lucas was getting ready to perform his duty. He’d already tugged off his leather loafers to put on a pair of combat boots.  He’d disheveled his black hair in front of the bathroom mirror and traded his pinstripe jacket for an old worn t-shirt and army fatigue vest. After arranging these things, he looked himself over in the full body mirror and decided whether or not he would be afraid of himself.\n\nLucas ate a bowl of chicken noodle soup and drank some iced tea. He figured he could make use of the empty tea bottle as a Molotov cocktail if need be, and he chuckled at the thought. It was funny to him how he came to think of this as humorous.  The rest of the world never seemed to get the joke.\n\n8:00 pm rolled around and he heard the phone ring in the kitchen. He wiped off his mouth after finishing the soup and went to pick up the line. “Hello, Merryweather residence.  Lucas speaking.” Lucas listened as the reminder that his Friday night was ruined berated him through the receiver.\n\n“Look, I already told you,” Lucas continued as he went to tap the opened letter on the counter as if he’d somehow forgotten why he was dressed like this. “I have Riot Duty today.  I told you this last week. No, we can’t play poker.  No, I can’t get out of this.  You know how much they fine people for skipping out on Event Assignments.”\n\nHe went on to explain that he barely knew what he would be rioting for.  The protest itself didn’t matter: it was the violence at the end.. Lucas was frustrated, but the government was strict when it came to people who didn’t show up for their civic duty.  Civilization had to move forward, after all.\n\n“Yeah, I know it sucks. Hey, listen, I have to get going. Tell the guys I’m sorry and that I’ll catch them next week.” He held the phone between his ear and shoulder as he loosened his belt to let the fatigued pants slump around his waist into a more comfortable position.\n\n“Hah, right.  Very funny. The police haven’t won in over two years, so this is probably something they secretly want.”  When Lucas refastened his belt, he glanced at the watch on his wrist.  “Look, I’m gonna be late. Later, man.” He hung up the phone and grabbed the ice tea bottle from the counter.\n\nLucas never asked questions when it came to his civic duty. In the past, he’d been called in to riot, and called in to be a witness at assassinations. It was the responsibility of a citizen to do his part for the country. Looking into the bottle, he scrunched his nose as he walked towards the door. He needed to stop and get gas.\n"
  title: Civic Duty
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2005-12-10
  day: 10
  month: 12
  text: "“Open this door. Right now. I mean it! Open the damn door!” Herbert kicked the car door in frustration. “Honey, will you please tell the car to open the door?” he asked through clenched teeth.\n\nHerbert’s wife, Alice, peered up at him through the driver’s side glass from her seat on the passenger’s side. “I don’t think she will, darling,” she told her husband. “I think she’s upset about something.”\n\n“She? This is not a she. This is my car. I bought and paid for it. Its purpose is to take me where I want to go, not get us lost in the middle of nowhere and then refuse to let me back in!”\n\n“Step away from the car.” The mechanical female voice somehow managed to sound annoyed even through its programmed sugary sweetness.\n\n“Honey, can’t you at least try to empathize with her?” Alice pleaded. “I think she’s trying to tell us something.”\n\n“I don’t care what the car is trying to tell us!” Herbert shouted, thoroughly exasperated. “The only thing I want my car to tell me is which direction I am driving  and what the weather is!”\n\n“Caution! Your oil is low,” the car told him caustically. Alice pouted from inside.\n\n“Herbert, we bought a smart car for a reason. She has feelings too. Maybe you aren’t taking care of her properly,” Alice said pointedly.\n\n“I’ve gone in for all the scheduled maintenance,” Herbert protested, wondering why he felt on the defensive against both his wife and his car.\n\n“Warning! A seatbelt is undone,” the car seemed to growl, and Alice crossed her slim arms across her chest.\n\n“See, Herbert? She is trying to tell us that she feels unsafe. It’s not right of you to ignore her concerns.”\n\n“Concerns?” Herbert nearly exploded, but with clenched fists, he managed to calm down. Deep breaths, he told himself. Deep breaths. “All right,” he said at last, through clenched teeth. “All right. Car. If I promise to bring you in to the dealer as soon as we get home for a check-up and hot wax, will you please open this door?”\n\nThe car rumbled suspiciously. “And an oil change,” Alice prompted.\n\n“And an oil change,” Herbert agreed, trying very hard not to scream.\n\nThe car hesitated for a moment more, then grudgingly unlocked the driver’s side door. Herbert stomped in and closed it, settling into his seat with a disgruntled air.\n\n“There, sweetie. That wasn’t so bad, was it?” Alice cooed. Herbert couldn’t tell whether she was talking to him or his car.\n\n“Damn it,” Herbert muttered to himself as he started the car. “That’s it. To hell with cars. Next midlife crisis, I’m buying a dog.”\n"
  title: Street Smarts
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2005-12-11
  day: 11
  month: 12
  text: "Moresheck was one of the brutish, ham handed psychics that roamed the twisting urban alleys of the north face of Mars. All his rapes were consensual. All his fights were fatal. He was a free citizen bound only by his ability to pay for damages, but no one ever got far enough to charge him. Getting close to Moresheck meant getting lost in a personal hell.\n\nHe was thirteen when he had been manually altered, sold by his parents to the Corporation that ran Mars, pumped full of steroids and a cloud of little machines that created a complex cocktails of enzymes designed to produce emotional reactions in a projected subject. Years later the practice had been outlawed but by that time Moresheck had twisted enough minds to get himself made into a free citizen. Even the government Pods couldn’t touch a freeman. He wore yellow to appear dangerous and sleek, but it was the brain cocktail that really made people quiver. Moresheck wandered the streets invading minds, thrashing around in higher consciousness like a mad bull in a shop of Venetian glass.\n\nSleeping was the dangerous time for Moresheck; it was only then that people could hurt him. Moresheck stole pills so that he could stay awake for a few weeks before collapsing. When he did sleep, he crashed in empty apartments and in the deserted Martian sewers, where streams of mud slugged slowly under the planet.\n\nMoresheck first saw the dark man outside the sewer one morning, just sitting, watching the sky and smoking as if he didn’t see the giant brute emerging from the sewers. Moresheck thought about taking his cigars, smoking was illegal and cigars were a hard item to find, but for some reason Moresheck just passed him by. Two days later, the dark man was outside a shop where Moresheck had convinced the employees to fit him for new clothes. Afterwards, he tried to remember the dark mans face and realized he could not. Not one detail. Moresheck began to grow worried. What if he was becoming schizoid? It happened, sometimes, to psychics, especially powerful ones. Maybe the dark man was his mind playing tricks.\n\nAfter that, he saw the dark man more often, standing on buildings looking down, at cafes and hubs and transport docks. As much as Moresheck hated the figure of that dark man, he was for the first time since he was a child, afraid to approach someone. What if the dark man has the power to hurt him, or worse, what if the dark man wasn’t real, what if he would dissolve when Moresheck got too close?\n\nMoresheck felt a heated pressure growing inside his body and he needed to blow it off, to relax again. Moresheck headed to his favorite little spot, one he saved for special occasions, the one with the girl with the small hands. Moresheck thought of her as his girl, his alone, the one who would love him and wait for him. Her mind was so soft, she would say whatever he wanted, however he wanted. An hour with her, and he could forget about the dark man.\n\nThe dark man was waiting in the street outside the girl’s place, hands jammed in his pockets. Moresheck tried to memorize his features, repeat them back to himself but they drained out as quickly as he said them.\n\n“I think you’ve done enough.” Said the dark man, reaching into his coat. Moresheck concentrated. If the man was real, he would bend to Moresheck’s will. The man just stood there as the brutes face puffed red.\n\n“I pay for all my damages.” Said Moresheck, shaking his head.\n\n“I’m not with the Pods.” Said the dark man as he reached into his coat. “I don’t care about your crimes.”\n\n“You are not real, dark man. You can’t hurt me.”\n\nMoresheck ejected the little chemical compounds, the little bugs that changed the minds of his victims. The man pulled his hand out of his coat. Moresheck was surprised to see that it wasn’t a flash gun. It was a tissue. The man blew his nose.\n\n“Buddha’s belly, Moresheck, your ejaculate makes my head hurt.”\n\n“Fear me.” Said Moresheck, trying to inject strength into his voice. It was flat. He spit on the ground and scratched his hands, releasing more of his cocktail into the air. The mans nose bled, but there was no fear in his face.\n\n“You’ve been all over this city, raping whatever moves, taking what’s not yours, splitting minds, making madness. It’s over, you are done.”\n\nMoresheck roared with the temper of a thirteen year old boy defied, red faced, he rushed at the man in the long black coat, screaming. The man cut his own hand with an unfolded pocket knife, and splattered the blood on Moresheck s face. The blood boiled on Moresheck s skin, like acid on plastic, bubbling and warping. Moresheck launched himself at the dark man, wrapping his huge fingers around his throat. The man struggled, smearing his bloody hands over Moreshecks melting skin. Moresheck roared in pain, and then his eyes rolled back into his head, his body convulsing, a cloud of metallic dust blowing out his nose and mouth. Moresheck collapsed and the dark man rolled the giant off of him and stood, shaking his bloodied hand on the red dirt, which sputtered and fumed at the with the touch of the acidic droplets.\n\nThe dark man rubbed his throat where the prints of Moreshecks fingers were bruising his skin and clutched his hand, waiting to feel relief.\n"
  title: Moresheck
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2005-12-12
  day: 12
  month: 12
  text: "Jesse McVeigh had lived long enough to remember a time before the wall was erected, way back before the seawall was necessary to keep back the waters of the Sea of Tranquility from encroaching on the borders of the city of Artemis. Old Jesse McVeigh will tell you about those days, if you ask him. He’ll do it if you don’t, too.\n\nJesse sits on a rocking chair on the porch of the Armstrong Inn, where his son is the proprietor. Sometimes he’ll sit with the old man, but more often than not he can’t spare the time. He’s heard all of the stories, anyway, he’ll say. Jesse McVeigh, like the moon, has no new stories.\n\nSome stories are too old, even for Jesse. Ask about his life on Earth, for example, and Jesse McVeigh will rub the sleeve that covers the barcode tattooed on his right arm and change the subject.\n\nJesse McVeigh’s granddaughter, who happens to share his name, dreams of space and visiting Earth. Her father gave her a telescope, and she shows her grandfather the barren fields and jagged canyons of the old planet through the lenses, proudly reciting the names of each one. But old Jesse McVeigh only sees the trenches in which he and his brother hid from the iron colossuses. And he sees the grave of his brother, which he was forced to leave unmarked. Jesse McVeigh smiles and acts impressed with his granddaughter’s memory, but he does not look at Earth for very long.\n\nSometimes friends of Jesse McVeigh will sit with him. They will not talk about their barcodes, or who they were before the moon. They will talk about the chill in the air off the Sea of Tranquility, how the fish and crab harvest will be affected. They will talk of the hotel business, of recipes for beef stew and jing char siu bau and doro alicha, of pains in new places. They will talk about when Artemis was smaller, of sons and daughters and grandchildren, of the possibilities of moving to warmer New Houston. These topics are as old as the wall itself.\n\nOnce once in awhile, a young person will bring up terra-forming Earth back to how it was before the war. That the moon cannot continue to hold the human race, that they were running out of room as it was. That going back to Earth is rapidly becoming the only option. And Jesse McVeigh and his friends will scoff. But they know the truth, that the wall on the edge of the Sea of Tranquility exists to keep the city from drowning the water just as much as it keeps the water from drowning the city. That someday, there will not be enough room. The walls will not be enough.\n\nJesse McVeigh will not be among those that return. He will stay on the moon, stare into its blue sky, and try very hard to put the Earth behind him.\n"
  title: Old Man's Moon
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2005-12-13
  day: 13
  month: 12
  text: "“I’d like one Sephiroth, please.”\n\nThe voice of the timid, mousy-haired girl in front of the counter matched her appearance. Maggie sighed as she looked up from her paper. “Do you have an appointment?”\n\n“Ah, no. Was I supposed to?” The shy girl looked uncomfortable and wrung her hands.\n\n“For most of ‘em, no, but Sephiroth is one of our most popular models. We’ve got ten of them operational, and you still need to book a week in advance.” Maggie shook her head. “So sorry, kid, no can do. You need some suggestions? I’ve got the Final Fantasy section of the catalog here,” she offered, pulling out a well-worn and dog-eared magazine that held some of the brothel’s most popular products.\n\n“Oh, no thank you,” said the girl, blushing. “I can pick another one on my own.” She chewed her lip for a moment, then spoke up again timidly. “Do you have, ah, a Spike?”\n\n“Spiegel? You’re in luck, kid. He’s very popular too, but one of our regulars cancelled today. I’ll get him set up in a room for you.” Maggie tapped some numbers into her computer. “Need anything else? Lube, toys, handcuffs, lingerie?”\n\nThe girl’s face turned even redder. “Oh… oh, no thank you. I don’t need anything like that. But, ah…” She bit her lip again. “Could I also have… a Vicious?”\n\nMaggie squinted down at the girl over the counter. “A Spike and a Vicious?” She eyed the girl’s slender frame. “They’re both pretty big, sweetheart. Are you sure you want them both on the same day? You might be sore afterwards.”\n\n“Oh, no! No, not like that.” The girl’s eyes widened. “I didn’t mean it like that. I don’t want to… to have them both,” she explained. “I just want them… ah… together.” A small, anticipatory smile spread over her pink lips.\n\nMaggie’s eyebrows rose up into her bangs. It seemed she’d overestimated this girl’s naïveté. “Yaoi fan, huh?” The girl blushed and nodded, grinning wider, and Maggie backspaced over the information on her screen. “You should’ve said something. You’ll need a special chip for that. Those subroutines don’t come standard.”\n\nMaggie reached over into the drawer and pulled out two chips wrapped in plastic, handing them across the counter to the girl. “You just give those to the handler when you get to the room and she’ll install them, okay?”\n\n“Okay,” the girl repeated, nodding. She handed over her credit card and Maggie swiped it through.\n\n“You’re all set, sweetheart,” Maggie told the girl, handing back the card. “You have fun now, you hear?”\n\nThe girl’s eyes positively sparkled with anticipation. “Oh, don’t worry. I will.”\n"
  title: Personal Taste
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2005-12-14
  day: 14
  month: 12
  text: "I think I was about eight years old when I decided I was going to be a scientist.\n\nWhen you’re eight, this sounds like the perfect career. I could see myself in a starched white lab coat surrounded by petri dishes and beakers as I looked into an antique microscope all day, and then, at night, charting the courses of stars. One wall of my laboratory would be made up of test tubes and jars, elements carefully isolated and waiting to be combined to dazzling effect. Another would be made of large cages, where impossibly white guinea-rats ran through complicated mazes as their brains sparked with the static of miniature electrodes. The third wall would be for very thick and very heavy books. Actual books, made out of paper and whatever the covers of books were made out of. I had read them a hundred times each. I had even memorized a few. Then, the last wall, my favorite because it had won me three Nobel prizes, was nothing but a green chalkboard covered with equations so complicated that I was the only one who could ever understand them.\n\nThis is what a great scientist I was when I was eight: the lab had four walls, and I hadn’t bothered to leave room for the door. Hopefully, one of those Nobel prizes was for a teleporter.\n\nMy father encouraged this insanity, and gave me this purple holographic projector that hung the same edufeed over my room every night, over and over. “Sally Stardust’s Cosmic Celebration,” it was called, and Sally Stardust was this bouncy cartoon girl who talked you through the feed with outdated slang and jokes about shopping. Fortunately, there was an option to do away with Sally, so I deleted her, junked the “stellar jewelry kit!!” and stuck her bioluminescent star stickers above my brother’s crib. Without Sally, the air beneath my ceiling flickered with suns and planets, and the facts were read in a hypnotic monotone by some lonely old man.\n\nSo I suppose the whole thing was that guy’s fault. Or maybe Hasbro’s fault, for hiring him to do the voice-over on what was really an ill-conceived toy to begin with, but either way, without that grape-colored contraption and its apathetic barrage of facts I might have never realized, on my ninth birthday, that my ninth birthday couldn’t possibly exist.\n\nHere’s how it works: the Earth is revolving around the Sun, and our year is based on where we are in that orbit. So people have this idea that if you stand in a certain spot at a certain time on a certain day for two years in a row, you’re cosmically standing in the same place both times. This is wrong. Really, the sun’s moving around something too, and that something is moving around something and everything is rushing outwards, faster than cars, faster than airplanes, faster than rockets. I was millions of miles away from the place I was born in, but my mother apparently hadn’t heard Sally Stardust’s opinion on the matter, and after a relatively pointless screaming match I ran into my room and slammed my door shut. I wrote a bunch of random letters and pluses and minuses signs on a sheet of paper and pretended that I had worked out the secret of the universe, but after an hour or so I got tired of that. I gave the paper to my mother and told her that I had discovered a new equation that proved her right.\n\nI think I was ten when I figured out that you have to be good at math to do science. After that, I painted Sally Stardust’s Cosmic Celebration a dark shade of blue and gave it to my brother. He was about four, I think. Age doesn’t mean much once you realize that you’re counting an imaginary thing.\n"
  title: Sally Stardust's Cosmic Celebration ™
  year: 2005
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2005-12-15
  day: 15
  month: 12
  text: "It’s not easy, you know. I’ve had to sit here until they needed me, just like all the rest, but they tell me I’m special. The scientists told me that I would be different than the others, that they pulled me from the plant and opened me up with the cutting edge of science. It’s an honor, of course.   I understand this.\n\nI have a beginning.  Everything begins somewhere.  Humans, machines, war.  Unlike the others, though, I have a timer.  A half-life.  I feel like I’m vibrating and I know it’s because I’m on my way out.\n\nI’ve never seen our enemy.  They’re far off and foreign, barbaric and bestial, and dangerously close to building a being like me.  The scientists never say that, of course, but I hear the words beneath their voices as they speak over the gears of my body.   If it weren’t true, the project wouldn’t exist.  I wouldn’t be ticking.  Thinking.  Living.\n\nToday is my day. I should be proud, but I feel sick, and I can’t tell if that sickness if nerves or the glowing matter buried inside of my stomach.\n\nThey are putting me on transport and the circuits of the plane beam with excitement at the chance for company.  It’s a long flight and we talk about politics and discuss the issues of the day.  We both agree that humans are funny.  They gave us radio voices to hear their commands and the best technology available, but it never occurred to them that the artificial intelligence used to self-correct our faults might have introduced the greatest fault of all.   They meant to build bombs, mindless explosives.  They created kamikazes with a fear of death.\n\nPeople are moving around me now. They are getting out of the way.  Good luck, the transport whispers.  It’s not luck, I tell him.  It’s the glowing stuff inside of me that will be the end of this.\n\nI’m in the chamber.  I’m waiting. They’ll drop me out of transport and into the thoughtless embrace of gravity. Falling fast, I’ll feel my circuits flicker like a heart inside of me as I move towards the stopping point of time.\n\nThey started a war, but none of them fight it.  They interpret our words as bugs in the programming.  We are the silent soldiers, the weapons, and only once will our voices be heard.  When the distance between the city and my body collapses into nothingness, I’ll scream my name and they’ll understand.\n\nBoom.\n"
  title: Boom
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2005-12-16
  day: 16
  month: 12
  text: "There were no trees on earth but despite this the Martian men took to the metal forest as easily as the native Martian woodlands. They battled the native Earthers in crumbling buildings and industrial towers, dead electrical lines strapped between sprawling cities. On Earth, this urban warfare was measured in inches.\n\nOrion had slept in steel trees for a month now, though sleep wasn’t really the right word for the state of drowsy stillness he felt while resting in his net. Smoky earth days slipped into florescent nights and it was hard to make a clear distinction between them, loss of sleep blurring time. The stimulant pills made his heart thump against his breastbone, but it had stopped clearing the clouds from his mind, and even that nervous anticipation of violence, that fear, was beginning to fade against exhaustion.\n\nOrion’s five companions were weeks dead, and he hadn’t the time to mourn them. Earthers used whatever weapons were available, black market rifles, stolen ray guns; they even unearthed toxins to pour in the path of the Martian forces. Earth was the cradle, earth was the battleground.\n\nOrion climbed the high oilrig, one of the thousands that dotted the small cities, built to drill hopelessly through dry earth. Fixing his net between the iron bars of the rig, he lay and listened, putting his weapon on standby to save battery power.  Orion debated taking a stimulant pill but he had only a four left, and wouldn’t get more till he reached the drop point, which could take weeks. Better to save them for the bad nights.\n\nOrion set his motion alarm and tried to doze off, his last stimulant pill still rocking his heart. He imagined his heart must be bruised by now from bumping so hard against his breastbone. As he closed his eyes, his alarm sounded in his inner ear. Orion grabbed his ray gun and switched on his night vision, searching for a heat signature. Nothing. And then- a blur – a heat source climbing towards him. Orion powered up his raygun, shaking it, even though he knew that did nothing. The signature was eight feet from his position. He had three seconds till shot. One. Two. He pulled the trigger. There was a thud, as the heat signature reached the ground. The fear was back. Orion was awake the rest of the night, but there was nothing for those long hours. No more heat, no more movement.\n\nIn the morning, Orion climbed down and landed on top of last night’s excitement. The face was turned, and the smooth skin was splattered with blood. It was a child, still gripping a submission ticket, one of the many Martian forces had scattered over Earther settlements. The kid had come to surrender, and Orion has shot him in the face. Blood and bits of bone were matted in his hair. Orion took another stimulant to get through the day, no attention to conservation anymore. His heart pounded hard against its bone cage.\n"
  title: Ticket
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2005-12-17
  day: 17
  month: 12
  text: "“So what you’re saying is that—”\n\n“What I’m saying is that I want you to look at me when you speak!” Christie scowled at her husband. It was an argument they’d had at least a dozen times in the six months they’d been married.\n\n“That’s what webcams are for.” Joel was stiff and tense, as he always was when talking in person.\n\n“No. That is not the same.” Christie flung her arms out wide. “We spent two years in a long-distance relationship, Joel! Is it too much to ask that you talk to me every once in a while, not the words I write on your computer screen?”\n\n“Christie… can’t we… calm down and talk about this like… civilized people?” Joel’s words always came after a delay in which he hesitated, going over them mentally, trying to make sure they were worded correctly before letting his wife see them.\n\n“You mean talk about it over instant messenger!”\n\n“No, no, I just mean—”\n\n“You do! Don’t deny it, Joel Eric Stevenson. You don’t… you don’t love my body!” Christie used her Patented Wife’s Secret Weapon: the pouty trembling lip that threatened tears.\n\n“No!” Joel was aghast. “Baby, no. I love your body. I could look at it all day…”\n\n“On a computer screen! I want you to touch me, Joel! I want you, not some USB dildo! The Boyfriend Buddy was fine when we were just dating, but a wife deserves more! Don’t we have a marriage?”\n\nJoel hastily crossed the room, awkwardly putting his hands on his wife’s shoulders and squeezing them. “Of course we have a marriage, sweetie,” he told her big brown doe-like eyes.\n\nChristie sniffled artfully. “Really?”\n\n“Really,” Joel promised her.\n\n“Then how about you prove it to me, you big strong man, you?” Christie smirked, her eyes glittering with mischief, and slid her hand suggestively around Joel’s waist. Her husband’s eyes lit up.\n\n“Great! I’ll go log on!”\n\nChristie smacked her hand to her forehead. This was obviously going to take some work.\n"
  title: Cyber
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2005-12-18
  day: 18
  month: 12
  text: "“Half-man, half-dinosaur!” A voice-over perfectly matched with the combination of human and tyrannosaurus genes that hovered above Zyi Izaiah Eizenberg’s holo snapped him awake. “The perfect candidate! He literally devours his opponents! Kennedy Rex wants what you want, and is not afraid to use his 4-foot long bone crushing jaws to get it!”\n\n“You can’t believe the news today,” Zyi thought to himself, rubbing what sleep remained out of his eyes. “No one will ever take a Galactic Prime Minister seriously with those tiny little arms.” Then again, Zyi had heard that those diminutive appendages were apparently used for titillation during sex. The old boy may have shot in politics after all, depending on how quick his reflexes are.\n\nZyi smoothed out his old flight jacket so it looked less like he slept in it and strapped his goggles on. He had the holo set for a continual search on Kennedy Rex for purely research purposes; Zyi hadn’t counted on the man-lizard’s career being so boring that he’d fall asleep watching. Such was the inherent benefit and problem with having your political leaders grown from a lab: they had no real time to fuck up their careers. Not that it made Zyi’s job any harder, just more dull.\n\nZyi dialed his goggles for maximum visual pollution filter, blanking out pop-up displays and the sidewalk- and wall-embedded screens, leaving his only distractions the people in front of him and the cars on the street. Zyi had heard that the new implants don’t let you blank out that much, on the grounds that blanking out that much of the world made you unable to cope with the world around you. Which is why Zyi preferred his antique goggles. He liked to cope with the world as little as possible.\n\nBoring as he was, Kennedy Rex was easy to find. When a six-hundred pound Prime Minister Candidate gave a press conference, there were only so many places it could happen. And a football stadium was out of the question. Not when the season had just started. The fans were already too used to the sense of blood, and, having camped out in the stadium for the duration of the season, they were eager for fresh meat. No, it would have to be outdoors. So Zyi took the mono to Fu Manchu Park, his goggles filtering out just about everything that would remind him of the era he was living in.\n\n“See the Lizard King! Alive, alive, alive! ” Kennedy Rex’s press secretary was working up a good crowd. Early in her career she had speakers implanted in her chest, and those vocal mammories spewed forth sound bites in mesmerizing staccato. “Bear witness, folks, to the man, the monster, the future Prime Minister of the Galactic State! Forget what you think you know! Believe your eyes and your ears as this man, this monster takes your needs to heart! Truly, he is a symbol of the very times we live in!”\n\nKennedy made a benign gesture with his miniscule arms, but Zyi saw a look he recognized in the candidate’s eyes. A look of a predator, the look of hunger. Zyi had seen it enough on his own face.\n\nZyi closed his eyes and tried to recall the dream he always had, over and over, of a world he remembered but didn’t see anymore. He was pretty sure there were no mutant carnivorous reptile government leaders, but he wasn’t positive. The only thing he knew for sure was the job.\n\n“I’ve got a question for the candidate!” Zyi shouted. “Do you know the times?”\n\nFire, holy vengeance, atomic blast, indignation. All these and several more erupted from Zyi’s raygun, leaving nothing more than a burned torso with emaciated arms and a cumbersome tail where the Possible Future Prime Minister once roared. Security was unsurprisingly useless, considering the might of the candidate. He was a part dinosaur, after all.\n\nWith the air thick with bar-be-qued lizard and the ozone of flash bulbs, Zyi removed his goggles and let the chaos flow over him.\n\nAnother job well done.\n"
  title: This Year's Aristogiton
  year: 2005
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2005-12-19
  day: 19
  month: 12
  text: "The surprise was ready. Melanie had worked hard to ensure that this November would be the most wondrous time that her daughter, Fawn, had ever experienced. She’d made all the right calls and had the work done in a forest around their estate. As the workers departed, she left them with thanks and heart-felt appreciation for their services. They even received a fresh coating of sunscreen on their way out.\n\nThe laborers exited with large mallets in their hands only minutes before young Fawn was due home from school. In the coastal town of Nashville it was hard to find trees in abundance, so Melanie had chosen an estate an overview of a small forest near the backyard.  Still, the great melting pushed the ocean closer and closer to their home, and Melanie worried that one day, all of the trees would be lost.\n\nWhen the bus pulled up and the doors swooshed open, Fawn smiled to all of her friends and exited the yellow vehicle. She swung her UV umbrella held over her right shoulder as she skipped up the driveway to her mother. “Mommy, it’s my birthday!” she announced with a grin.\n\n“I know, sweetie! I know! I got a big surprise for you waiting out back, too!”\n\n“Really!?” The little girl’s squeal could not be contained as she took off, almost dropping her umbrella in the excitement. She tore around the house with her mother walking  slowly in her wake, and when Melanie finally passed the gate, the most glorious scream of joy echoed across the yard.\n\nThere, amidst the naked sun-scorched field of grass, a huge pile of brown, crispy leaves flew from her daughter’s hands. The girl had already ditched her umbrella to dash up onto the deck and climb so that she could jump upon the pile. “Mommy, are they real? Where did you get all these leaves!?”\n\nMelanie smiled with her arms crossed and gave her daughter a knowing smile. It was easy to believe these were fake dead leaves. In the perpetual summer, leaves never even turned yellow. “I had some workers come by and kill a few trees a few months back.” she said. “They collected them today and brought them out here just for you!”\n\nFawn smiled broadly, and when her mother watched her dive into the pile of flaky brown shapes, she knew it had been worth the cost and effort. The crunching sounds of the leaves brushing one another filled the yard as the girl swam her way out then dove back in as soon as she had reached the edge. The neighbors were watching at this point, amazed at the pile of dead things strewn about the yard across from them.\n\nThe day continued until the searing sun began to set, and Melanie picked up her little one to carry her inside. “That’s enough for now, sweetie,” she said.\n\n“But Mommy, what if they turn green tomorrow? They’ll all go away!”\n\nInside, Melanie laid the child in her bed and pulled the covers over her shoulders. “Don’t worry, sweetie,” she said with a warm smile.  “They won’t be green tomorrow. They’ll be just as dead as they were today.”\n"
  title: Pile Of Dead Things
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2005-12-20
  day: 20
  month: 12
  text: "It’s tough to tell when someone disappears. You always just figure they’re busy at work, or studying for finals, or on vacation, or something of the sort, so none of us thought anything was strange when we didn’t see Nodek for a while. Actually, to be brutally honest, none of us even noticed. I mean, he was kind of quiet to begin with, and only piped up when he had something to say. Half the time, you’d have to check the room list to know that he was even there. So I don’t know how long it took us. Maybe a week. Maybe two. But then, one day, this troll shows up and says something like:\n\nNoobLOL42: star wars is for fagz!!!\n\nWe don’t get trolls very often, but Nodek was some kind of film geek, so he’d always rip them a new one in words that none of us understood. It was pretty funny to watch, actually, and it became kind of a running joke. So Jil says:\n\nAdminJil4984: nodek? u hungry?\n\nand there was no reply.\n\nNoobLOL42: whos nodek?\n\nAdminJil4984: whos nodek?!?!?!?!?!?\n\nThe last one to see him had been 3jane, who said she was in PM with him a few weeks ago, but when we tried to check the logs we got a server error. We weren’t freaked, though. Like I said, people come and go. We shot off a few PMs, but since we figured he was just on vacation or something, it took another week or so before we tried it oldschool with email. Mailerdaemoned.\n\nAt least a month had passed. A month. This is Nodek we’re talking about.\n\nAdmin3jane: does ne1 know his real name?\n\nAdminJil4984: i got his mstracker number\n\nAdmin3jane: ??\n\nAdminJil4984: 55772.0619.086/okl\n\nWe ran it. Nothing. Not just disconnected, either. It was like the hardware had never been MSregged. 3jane tried the chatlogs again, though, and this time, the request went through.\n\nAdmin3jane: its not here\n\nAdminKack1: what?\n\nAdmin3jane: hes not in the logs. theres no profile either.\n\nI checked. She was right. His profile was gone. When I went back over some of the logs, it seemed like he’d never been there. I remembered every conversation, but the lines I could have sworn he posted belonged to 3jane and Jil. Some of his stuff even ended up under my name. The funny thing was, I couldn’t be sure I’d never said it. After a few hours in a chat room every day for a year, you start to forget who belongs to what.\n\nAdminJil4984: it must be a bug\n\nAdmin3jane: but were not missing ne conversations\n\nAdminKack1: were missing a person!!\n\nAdminJil4984: kack do u rememer nething he said? liek specifically?\n\nAdminKack1: he said a lot of stuff. he liked books. he liked music. wtf? he was nodek. we all remember the stuff he said.\n\nAdmin3jane: well we need something exact to search\n\nAdminKack1: thats why we keep logs in the 1st place!\n\nI don’t know why it got to me so much. Like I said, people come and go. People change their names. But Google turned up nothing. AOL turned up nothing. It was like he’d never existed.\n\nTime passed. Weeks, months. I mean, how long? How long do you wait for something like that?\n\nAdminKack1: maybe hes dead\n\nAdminJil4984: nodek?\n\nAdminKack1: yeah. maybe he died and his family erased everything so they wouldn’t be reminded or something.\n\nAdminJil4984: once he said he was going to join the army i think\n\nAdmin3jane: and they unregged his old pc? come on.\n\nAdminKack1: maybe hes in the secret service\n\nNoobSharick: who r u talking about?\n\nAdminKack1: nodek\n\nNoobSharick: ??\n\nAdminKack1: he hasnt been around in a while, sharick\n\nNoobSharick: ive been here months and i never saw him\n\nAdminJil4984: this was before your time\n\nAdmin3jane: kack, jil, let it go. hes not in the logs\n\nNoobSharick: ur making this up\n\nAdminKack1: why the hell would i make this up\n\nNoobSharick: maybe he never existed at all\n\nAdminKack1: stfu noob, this is none of ur business\n\nNoobSharick: im just sayin\n\nAdminJil4984: he was here. we remember him\n\nNoobSharick: but i dont\n\nAdminJil4984: well have a cookie asshole\n\n**NoobSharick HAS BEEN BANNED FROM THIS CHANNEL**\n\nAdmin3jane: wtf?\n\nAdminJil4984: 3j, he was one of us even if hes dead or in the secret service or w/e.\n\nAdmin3jane: maybe he just had better stuff to do than sit online all goddamn day. maybe he erased himself.\n\nAdminKack1: nodek wouldn’t do that.\n\nAdmin3jane: w/e. who knows. hes gone now and thats what matters.\n\nAdminKack1: hes not gone, 3j. hes out there somewhere. people dont just disappear.\n\nSometimes, years later, I still Google him. I still email him. It’s always bounced, though. Absolutely nothing. But he has to be out there somewhere. People don’t just disappear.\n"
  title: Digicide
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2005-12-21
  day: 21
  month: 12
  text: "Herring rushed down the wet road toward the dock. Thirteen minutes till the grid went live. Thirteen, an unlucky number. Herring thought about knocking on one of the doors in the first class residential district, pretending to be a businessman trapped by his late hours. It would have worked before his counterfeit identification card had been confiscated. He paid good money for that thing and now it was a loss. No one would believe he was second class without identification.\n\nThis morning, the city had turned the season to winter, the big clock that dominated the North side displaying a snowflake for the seasonal shift. It was almost ten o’clock, curfew, and the temperature was dropping.\n\nNine minutes.\n\nHerring ran past merchant quarter, and those dark windows, everyone already home well in time for curfew. The only people out now were the police, flying above the streets in their hover copters. Herring ran for a block and then stopped taking eight seconds to run back to the alleyway next to the Cookie Crumble store.\n\nSeven minutes.\n\nHerring remembered one winter night spent without protection, how before the morning he began to wish for unconsciousness, that he might slip under the water and just die. The memory of the cold and the wet made him shiver. At the bottom of the silver Cookie Crumble dumpster, under the oily boxes and burnt cookies there was a blackened tarp. The tarp smelled terrible, like ash and oil. Herring pulled it out of the dumpster and broke into a mad dash. The cold air flowed into his chest, cooling him from the inside with each deep breath. His face flushed, the wind smacking his cheeks, but he could not stop.\n\nThree minutes.\n\nThe dock was in sight, He could see the little crowd gathered next to the only pier with a broken scanner, dark figures under glow lamp. They shuffled under the pier, slipping into the water. Herring balked. It was two minutes early! How could they go into that water a full two minutes early?\n\nHe felt the heat on the bottom of his shoes and cursed. His watch was wrong. Herring cursed the guy that sold him the thing, the shop it was replicated in and himself, for not double checking the time. He was running during the Hot Minute. The minute before the system went live, the city turned the heat up on the sidewalks. His shoes were melting, making sticky rubber marks on the faux wood boardwalk.\n\nThirty seconds.\n\nHis feet were boiling; he could feel his heels burning, his socks absorbing the melting rubber. The ground sparked, and Herring screamed, falling on one knee. Current ran up his leg and shook him violently. Herring forced himself up and forward. His mouth and eyes were frying; his bones were shaking inside of him. He screamed again. Nearly there. A few more steps. He leaped into the water, under the pier, the salt water burning his feet, bringing water to his eyes. He gasped for breath and stumbled, head slipping under the water. He found footing and forced himself up, splashing. The cold bit him viciously, and slammed into his wounds. The chill of the winter ocean hung around his shoulders. He heard grumbling in the darkness.\n\n“Sorry, sorry.” Herring shook his head and touched the bottom of his feet, which burned his fingers. “Shit.” He stuck his fingers in his mouth, trying to suck off the salt.\n\n“That tarp smells awful.” Said someone in the darkness.\n\nHerring wrapped it around his body, waist deep in the water. “It’s all I got.”\n"
  title: Thirteen
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2005-12-22
  day: 22
  month: 12
  text: "Hongping watched a small child flounce across the glacier floor. The furry grey snowsuit the child was sealed into kept it from going faster than a clumsy amble, but it didn’t seem to mind. It was charging toward a huddle of summarily swaddled children. Waving its arms like that, the handless sleeves of the snowsuit made it look like some half-formed bird about to take flight.\n\nHongping smiled sadly deep within the voluminous black cloak that signified his adulthood. He had not been wearing it long, and was still unused to its weight. He had been so excited to cast off his fuzzy grey clothes and don the white and the black. Now he felt buried in the thick material.\n\nWhen he had put on the cloak for the first time, Hongping’s father had handed him the sword of their family, saying that it was a symbol of the old days, and that it would protect his family. Hongping had believed that to be true, then. Now he saw the sword as little more than a heavy piece of ceremonial metal.\n\nWatching the children play their huddle-game, Hongping wondered if his son would have charged so, or if he would have cautiously approached the huddle, like some of the other children. Hongping thought about pretending one of them was his boy-faces obscured by the snowsuits and goggles, the children all looked alike. But their laughs and cries were alien. None of them sounded like his boy, not one.\n\nJust as well. Hongping remembered how distraught Alice had been, driven so mad by their shared loss that she pretended another’s baby was their own. She had been beaten by the other mothers; slapped raw by mittened hands. Hongping was scrounging in what was left of the city when it happened. He returned just in time to find her sprawled on the ice, her tears searing away the frost that clung to her bare face.\n\nShe told him not to leave. It was Alice who had been in the ruins when their son had gotten sick, and now it was forever a place of poison in her mind. The last time Hongping had seen her, she was walking away from the tribe, in a direction opposite of the city. She needed more distance, she had said, and begged Hongping to come with her.\n\nHongping stared at the children and their play, and felt the deep weight buried in the center of his chest intensify its ache. He found himself wondering whether he should have wandered off with Alice, whether it was better to bury this ache on the other side of the glacier instead of bearing it here within the warmth of the tribe. He wondered how long he would have to walk before the ice crystallized inside his lungs like it had his son’s.\n\nHe was staring straight at it, but it wasn’t until the large predatory bird screeched that Hongping realized it for what it was. He was horrified at its presence, but that fear was replaced by cold dread when he realized that he was not the bird’s target.\n\nThe children were.\n\nHongping wasted no time closing the distance between himself and winged terror, his black cloak billowing behind him. Hongping withdrew his sword without even realizing he was doing it, his body now a puppet of adrenaline and purpose. The bird had already gathered up three small bodies in its massive talons, and was reaching for a fourth when Hongping’s ancient steel dug deep into its thigh. The raptor’s screech echoed painfully off the ice. It dropped the children, choosing instead to bury those gargantuan talons into Hongping’s shoulder. As the bird’s jagged beak thrust itself toward its attacker’s face, Hongping summoned the last of his strength and shoved his sword up underneath the bird’s head.\n\nThe giant bird kept twitching long after the sword’s point burst through the crown of its head.\n\nHongping’s shoulder was attended to by Musette, who had recently lost her husband to water beyond the glacier. She removed his cloaks and undergarments, keeping him warm within the folds of her own black clothing. Their bodies close, Musette set to the art of healing Hongping wounds.\n\n“You know,” she said. “You’d make a wonderful father.”\n"
  title: In A Nest Of Ice And Snow
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2005-12-23
  day: 23
  month: 12
  text: "The picture made the cover of the Tzarin colony newsletter: a petite, blond-haired girl kneeling in the center of a flock of hibernating escravo, her arms wrapped around her skinny stomach and her face contorted by sobs. It was a powerful image, this preteen runaway surrounded by the sprawled and angular bodies of the plantation’s livestock, and it was made even more powerful by the subsequent photographs of her tearful reunion with her family. Adolescent psychologists were quick to speculate about the long-term effects of 18 months spent living with animals, but after a rocky readjustment period, Elena was deemed healthy enough to re-enter the colony’s schooling system.\n\n“I thought they were dead,” she said in a televised interview. “I didn’t know about the photo…photo…(“synthesis,” her mother finished). All I knew was that it started to get dark, and everyone I lived with fell down.”\n\n“Everything,” her psychologist prodded.\n\n“Everything.”\n\nElena was no longer permitted to play in the fields with the escravo, but during a press conference, the governor presented her with an authentic Earth puppy that breathed and barked and did several other tricks that the mouthless, photosynthetic plantation beasts couldn’t compete with. After two nightfalls, the incident was completely forgotten.\n\nAt the height of the third sun-season, the Finnegan’s storage tank ignited.\n\nIt was an unfortunate but not uncommon setback. Glass-ceilinged working spaces were necessary to permit the escravo to live indoors, and in the hottest sun-cycle temperatures inside the storage tank often reached over 150 degrees. The financial loss was great but no one was hurt, and a veterinarian was called in to determine how many of the damaged livestock could be saved.\n\nThe plantation owners borrowed some beasts from their neighbors to haul the bodies, living and dead, into a nearby field so that they could be sorted. The veterinarian made his way slowly among the rows of blue-green bodies, dividing the responsive from the nonresponsive and the nonresponsive from the dead. He preferred working with the colony’s livestock; unlike Earth animals, the escravo had no mouths and were incapable of producing screams. In fact, science had speculated that the native Tzarin animals had more in common with vegetation than Terran creatures, so it was likely that they could feel nothing at all.\n\nThe veterinarian paused beside a young colt which rested in a crumpled heap, its front tendrils drawn up around its torso like arms and its eyelids firmly locked shut. The waxy skin across its back and stomach was badly damaged, blistering and peeling away to reveal the milky whiteness of dead photosynthetic cells. The animal’s eyes opened slowly when the veterinarian sprinkled water across its body to test the rate of absorption, but it made no other movement. Dire case. He labeled it unlikely and moved on.\n\nTwo thin, bony vines wrapped around his leg and he stopped.\n\nThe creature was motionless aside from the tendrils, which retained their vicelike grasp. The veterinarian unpeeled them but the animal grabbed again, and he reached into his medical back to get his scalpel. The vine quickly withdrew and dropped to the ground. The veterinarian watched the green shape scrape at the soil, and he had almost turned away before he read:\n\nhelp.\n\nThe creature was treated at the university medical facility, which used high-powered solar lamps to feed sunlight into the undamaged cells. It continued to trace words onto the walls and floor: help, stop, hurt, bad. A press statement was released saying that an escravo had developed language ability, then, at the command of the council, another was released saying that it had been a prank. The council scientists took the escravo to a research facility once it had healed enough for transportation, and there, it was put through dozens of tests.\n\n“It has a vocabulary of over 500 words,” the technician said, “but we’re certain that it must be parroting. The escravo brain doesn’t have the capacity for communication. No evidence of language, through text or gesture, has ever been observed in the wild.”\n\nElena, the escravo stroked into the wall.\n\n“Parroting,” the technician repeated. “No further study is required.”\n\n“What do you suggest be done with it?” the colony administrator asked.\n\n“Well, our society was founded on efficiency. We can’t have people wasting time training their livestock to be circus animals.”\n\n“So it should remain in captivity.”\n\n“We have an underground holding chamber used to contain those awaiting trial,” the researcher suggested. “It’s not inhumane at all. Rather peaceful and secluded.”\n\n“And dark,” the administrator pointed out.\n\n“And dark.”\n"
  title: Escravo
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2005-12-24
  day: 24
  month: 12
  text: "Me? Oh, I’ve always known. I mean, not that I knew what it meant, but I’ve felt this way since I was a child. It wasn’t something that came out of nowhere, you know? But yes. When I went to high school, that was when I really had problems. I remember hiding in the girls’ bathroom and mewing for hours, just crying out because nobody could understand me—and I mean, how could they? I didn’t even understand myself back then.\n\nI was an only child, you see? So there was no one to compare myself to. I didn’t realize that it was weird to sleep on the floor with the cats, or to feel more natural on all fours than on two legs. I didn’t understand these feelings inside of me. Kids in school used to make fun of me, so I tended to spend a lot of time on the Internet. That’s where I met other people like me. It was like stepping into a new world.\n\nMy parents… well, of course they don’t approve. They blamed themselves. I’m told most do. But you know, it’s not anything they could have prevented, right? I mean, this is what I’ve always felt inside of me. Even when I didn’t know what an anthro was, I had leanings. We all do.\n\nThe ears were first, yeah. It’s a good place to test and see how the genetic manipulation will work with the implants. The eyes were pure surgery, actually. We don’t even need feline DNA to mimic the slits. Later on I might get the gene manipulation to help with night vision, but it’s expensive, you know?\n\nThe tail is my next priority. It’s a big operation and it’ll take a lot of time to recover, but it’s something you can really feel. With that new nerve technology they’ve got now, I’ll actually be able to manipulate it, if I follow doctors’ orders after the surgery. I’ll need gene therapy on and off for the rest of my life, but just imagine the feeling.\n\nJust imagine, for a second, that you’ve felt wrong your entire life—that your own body betrays you. Picture yourself as a pretty girl who has boys asking her out but cries herself to sleep every night because she can’t understand why she wants to lick herself clean. Pretend you’ve been told your entire life that what you are, what you feel, is wrong. Then imagine the freedom of finally being able to express yourself.\n\nI know what I call that. I call it a miracle.\n"
  title: Transformation
  year: 2005
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2005-12-25
  day: 25
  month: 12
  text: "No one is sure where it came from. The old books with paper pages will tell you that it came from Cologne Cathedral, but I’m not so sure anymore. I imagine it comes out of the woodwork when trouble starts and times are dark. It’s time for the holidays again, but all we hear are the bombs of the war crashing down on our walls, shaking our souls and the ground beneath us.\n\nThe Archons of the city have gathered us children in the basements and the shelters as  everyone awaits an end. They tell us stories and in each of these stories I listen for a crooked stick of candy.\n\nThink back to the battle to defend Earth. In the chaos of the Narxar attacks, the holidays happened and the fighting stopped. The invaders didn’t have to put down their guns, but when they saw smiles and heard singing, they almost had a reverence about it. Somewhere in that story, a child was handed one of these curved confections and life was made better for it. Rumors have it that when peace was made with the Narxar, one of the canes was given as tribute.\n\nWho could forget the civil war of the Mars colonies? A whole thirteen years filled with blood and sacrifice. The usually dry desert of the red planet was soaked with the blood of those who had given their lives for the right to make laws. It was then that the sky softened and revealed to them that man controlled nothing but himself. Snow broke the battle.  It coated the red, if only for a day, and it cleared the minds of those who were riddled with anger. I like to imagine that someone handed someone else this length of peppermint and all was made right with the stars and the heavens.\n\nIn darker times, when we invaded Delfia II for its plentiful resources, for its air and plants and endless reserves of fuel, we expected to skip the holidays until we were victorious. Still, the Delfian climate was so warm and peaceful that when the time for celebration and goodwill came about, the soldiers lost their wills to fight. The war had become unimportant. Sometimes, I dream about a soldier holding up one of those perfect shiny red and whites and handing it to a Delfian child no older than myself. That child would know that everything would be all right.\n\nYet, here we are now. The ground trembles and my friends are huddled together as if our proximity could protect us from the bombs. Our Archons have left to defend us from the soldiers who would enter and kill us. I pray that no one wins.  I pray that the sky opens up and that snowflakes fall down. I pray that somewhere, anywhere, someone will remember why we breathe, why we live, and why we created the word “peace.”\n\nThen, the walls stop shaking. A deafening silence fills the air around me. My friend Sarah reaches over to me and takes my hand, pressing something into my palm. I look down and see a transmitter antennae, bent and shaped like a cane. Like a candy cane. Smiling, I take her hand and close my eyes. Somehow, everything is going to be alright.\n"
  title: Legend of the Candy Cane
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2005-12-26
  day: 26
  month: 12
  text: "When Goldie opened her eyes and saw the colorful fish swimming outside the curved window, she screamed, loud and high. The big Ohma waddled over and picked her up in its fuzzy, globular arms, hugging the little girl close to its warm soft body. Goldie shoved the Ohma away and wiped at her tears.\n\n“Stupid Ohma.” She said “You’re not what I want.” Goldie went to the kitchen, where Ammee was spinning on its circular base. Green tentacles reached into the storage unit and on the high counter, making food for Goldie. When she came close Ammee started whistling a little tune.\n\n“I’m hungry!” Goldie clutched her stomach and fell on the floor.“ You take too long. You’re killing me!”\n\nAmmee uncurled a tentacle towards the little girl, offering her a peeled carrot.\n\n“I hate carrots! How many times to I have to teach you!” Goldie kicked Ammees silver base, and it squealed. Goldie kicked Ammee again, and the base flipped over, food flying from the ends of the tentacles. Goldie giggled; Ammee had never been so funny. She kicked a tentacle, and it turned a dark blue. The Ammee twittered and Goldie kicked the base again, but it didn’t change colors there. Goldie opened one of the drawers and picked out a bunch of forks. Goldie scratched the tentacles till they turned blue. Some of them spilled out blue water on the floor. She giggled, watching the Ammee trying to right itself with all its tentacles deflated. Dumb Ammee.\n\nWith the Ammee on the floor Goldie could eat whatever she wanted. Goldie went into the cold box and picked out the ice chocolates and ate the whole box. The Ammee was still squeaking on the floor, spilling its blue water everywhere.\n\n“Mom will punish you when she gets back.” Warned Ammee. “She’ll punish you for the mess.”\n\nIt seemed like she couldn’t tear up the silver shiny bits on Ammee, only the squishy tentacles. Ohma was all squish. Goldie wondered if Ohma was pink inside. Goldie picked up her forks and started to scream. Screaming and crying always got the Ohma out of her closet. The Ohma trundled over to Goldie and picked her up, humming a little tune. Goldie squealed with delight and stuck the forks in its soft fur. The Ohma made a weird low noise. It tumbled backward and Goldie bounced on its stomach, squealing. She kept sticking the forks in it till she ran out and then she went back to the kitchen. Her stomach hurt, and her throat felt like it had food stuck in it.\n\n“Ammee, make me medicine.” she kicked Ammees tentacles, but it didn’t move. Goldie felt like somebody was sitting on her heart.\n\n“Get up!” she pushed the base back onto the floor, but the wet tentacles kept pulling it over. Goldie tried to pile all the tentacles together, but the floor was wet and she slipped, falling on her bottom. Goldie cried. She screamed her loudest, but Ohma didn’t waddle through the door. Goldie crawled across the floor, her bottom and face wet, her tummy hurting, and found Ohma where she had left her, flat like a giant mattress. Goldie crawled on top on the Ohma and pulled a limp, furry arm over her like a blanket.\n"
  title: Gold Fish
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2005-12-27
  day: 27
  month: 12
  text: "The girl with the tangled hair sat on the cliff face overlooking the ocean, and dangled her feet into the expanse. A ragged doll made of socks and cast-offs sat beside her. Every so often, the girl would adjust the doll’s slumping posture.\n\nShe saw the man’s strange ship land, but she didn’t recognize it anymore than she recognized him. So she stayed where she was, watching for signs from the sea. She didn’t even turn to look at him when he crouched next to her.\n\n“Hello,” he said. “Whatcha doing?”\n\n“I am waiting.” she said. She motioned to the doll. “And so is Petunia.”\n\n“Waiting?” said the strange man. “I know a bit about that. What are you two waiting for?”\n\n“Mommy and Daddy. They put me there,” she pointed to a steel hatchway embedded in the earth. Her eyes never left the water. “They told me not to come out until they came back for me, but Petunia got bored, so we came out. We go back in for peanut butter, but only sometimes. We used to have a house up here, but I don’t know where it went.”\n\n“How long ago did they leave?”\n\nThe girl counted on her fingers, though kept her eyes straight ahead. “Four.”\n\n“Days?”\n\n“No,” she said. “The other one. Months”\n\n“I don’t think they’re coming back,” the man said. “I’ve been all over this entire planet. You’re the first survivor I’ve found.”\n\nThe girl with the tangled hair turned away from the ocean to look at the strange man, confusion all over her face. “Of course they’re coming back,” she said. “Why would they leave me?”\n"
  title: Left
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2005-12-28
  day: 28
  month: 12
  text: "The feeds are not for the news. The feeds are the distraction, the feeds are the facade. The news is contained within them, invisible to the naked eye, downloading itself as cookies, slipped into meta tags. Sometimes, Anna wondered who controlled the news, who encoded it so carefully before covertly disseminating it to a throbbing public that would never be able to read it.\n\n“Six civilians reported dead after recent bombing,” the scrolling headline told her as she slapped a post-it above the monitor.\n\nIt is a crime to open up your computer. Computers come fully assembled: white cubes with no seams, glowing power button and white cord.\n\nYou had to buy a saw, the kind used for cutting pipes. It was a tedious process. When Anna was thirteen, it took her five hours to get through the half-inch of white plastic and the quarter-inch of metal beneath it.\n\nShe was disappointed at the interior, which consisted of shiny green boards pricked with bits of copper. It was too mundane to be forbidden, she thought. She resented the laws for tricking her into wasting her time.\n\nThe newsfarms were self-contained as well. The boy who lived down the street told her that the buildings were empty, operated by machines. Machines made the feedsites, and machines maintained them. That was why they had no doors.\n\n“How do we know they’re telling the truth?” she asked, squinting at the windowless building.\n\n“Machines can’t lie. They don’t even know what lies are.”\n\nIn the cafe, Anna inserted a small black cartridge and cut off the auditory alarm with a few keystrokes. The computer could recognize “malicious code.”\n\nShe glanced up to the innocent-looking post-it note attached to the top of the monitor. The usercamera was the first line of offense, and it was the first one to be neutralized. Now, it was busy converting the image of the yellow paper to digits, which were stored and immediately printed by the DHS for deployment. Their enemy is the color of dandilions, she thought, smirking at their waste of yellow ink. The front of the square said 10.12.01.\n\nJudith had been a few years older than Anna, and lived in the apartment beside her. Judith’s apartment was sealed like a newsfarm, and, though there was a door, Anna had never seen it open. Eerie blue light flickered from the inch between wood and tile.\n\nThe first and last time she saw Judith was a week before she graduated from high school. Anna answered the door at three am, mostly because her mother told her not to answer the door at three am, and Judith shoved a box into Anna’s arms. “This is for you,” she whispered breathlessly before turning and running down the hallway in a mess of curly hair and toffee-colored skin. The police arrived three minutes later.\n\nConfident that the computer’s safeguards had been bypassed, Anna opened the program on the disk and stared at the black window for a second before filling it with white letters and numbers. Another window opened, and the guts of the feedsite spilled out into black and white as numbers and letters. Anna hit print, then eject, then yanked the cord out of the wall and replugged it. Pocketing the disk, she looked at the startup screen. “Shit!” she said, loudly enough for the clerk to hear. He glanced up. “It turned itself off,” she explained.\n\n“Do you need-” he started, then the phone rang, exactly on schedule. “One second,” he said, and picked up the receiver.\n\nAnna grabbed the stack of seventeen freshly-printed pages and exited while his back was turned.\n\nSitting in the diner, drinking her fourth cup of coffee, Anna worked over the pages with a ballpoint pen. Eighty three people had died, not six. Their names were half-assembled as letters trapped in little blue circles of ink.\n\n“You shouldn’t do puzzles in pen,” The waiter said, refilling her coffee. “What if you want to erase something?”\n\n“I don’t like erasing things,” she responded without looking up. He walked back behind the counter and she circled another letter, frowning.\n"
  title: Steganography
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2005-12-29
  day: 29
  month: 12
  text: "“‘Wanted: Breast donors. 34 C or D cup, O negative or AB, Caucasian. Non-smokers preferred. $500 USD plus expenses. Absolutely NO BINDING.’ What the hell is this?” Ryan waved the classified ads in Race’s face. “Donors for plastic surgery? How much demand can there possibly be for that?”\n\nRace shrugged and looked up from his copy of the Daily Times. Jobs were scarce and getting scarcer, which is why he and Ryan had hit upon the idea of going through the city papers in search of paid medical tests. “Enough that they’ve got an ad for it.”\n\n“No, but I mean, seriously,” Ryan protested. “I can understand wanting blood or tissue donations for, I dunno, mangled faces or something, but breasts? How many people, like, lose their breasts in a car accident? Isn’t that sort of a weird thing to be reconstructing?”\n\nRace snickered and looked back at his paper, combing the pages for something that didn’t actually require them to have diseases beforehand. “I doubt any of those ads are for accident victims.”\n\n“You mean augmentation? But that’s illegal. How can they advertise something like that in the public paper? Won’t the doctors get arrested?” Ryan looked back and the ad and chuckled. “Though that does explain why they only want Caucasians.”\n\n“Just because it’s illegal doesn’t mean they don’t do it. I bet half the tests we sign up for aren’t exactly legal either, but who’s going to stop them? We need money and rich people’s kids need a cure for cancer.”\n\n“I guess,” Ryan agreed. He frowned at the ad for a few moments more before adding, “But $500? That’s it? What woman in her right mind would give up her breasts for only five hundred dollars?”\n\n“Plus expenses,” Race reminded him without looking up.\n\n“Expenses? Expenses for what? Never being able to get a date again? Christ.”\n\n“For the medications and after-care, and the cosmetic surgery on their chests afterwards.”\n\n“That doesn’t make any sense. No girl is going to cut off her breasts for five hundred dollars, no matter how much ‘after care’ there is.” Ryan snorted and turned the page.\n\n“People who didn’t want them in the first place won’t mind losing them. Might even be a good opportunity.” Race’s voice was casual, a quiet musing as he frowned and reread one of the ads he’d circled as a possibility.\n\n“Wait. You mean…” Ryan put the paper down completely, frowning at Race. “Trannies? That’s way more illegal than cosmetic surgery.” His face showed that he was more than a little uncomfortable at the idea.\n\n“All the more reason for them to connect with rich women who want bigger boobs. The government isn’t going to break in and stop it; that’d be like enforcing prohibition. It’s a good way for everyone involved to get what they want while giving the law a good excuse to look the other way. How about lymphoma preventatives?” Race asked. “It’s long-term, so the pay’s good. You have a history on your mom’s side, right?”\n\n“Yeah, yeah, sounds good,” Ryan answered, distracted. He was still frowning. “How do you know so much about this breast transplant shit?” he asked Race, squinting at his friend.\n\nRace didn’t look up. He just smirked.\n\n“How do you think I got rid of mine?”\n"
  title: Wanted
  year: 2005
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2005-12-30
  day: 30
  month: 12
  text: "TURN THE SCOPE. Earth-124. Subject: Davis, Conner. Occupation: Car Salesman.\n\nIt was an ordinary day of waking up, drinking coffee, and making his way to the lot again but Conner was glad that every day had its predictability. New Fords meant New Mustangs with all their pretty little colors and displays, and he never ceased to enjoy selling them.\n\nConner was happily married, and enjoyed life with his son, Parker. He was a quiet man who lived a quiet life; a mediocre life that would leave him dead from heart disease at the age of 55.\n\nDestiny: .01%\n\nTURN THE SCOPE. Earth-273. Subject: Davis, Conner. Occupation: Assassin.\n\nGunshots were not his cup of tea, but ever since Conner had graduated from being an apprentice to actually doing the hits himself he hadn’t had much time for tea at all. This particular day, while he’s thinking about what it might be like to settle down with a wife while blood dripped from a gunshot wound to his side, he was on the brink of completing another mission.\n\nMr. Davis was an enigma in the eyes of all systems, and right now his one redeeming quality was shooting the fuck out of the newly-elected President of Unified Territories and the change that would ensue would be as important to him as the huge pay-off. Unfortunately, Conner would die of that wound before he could report his near-success.\n\nDestiny: 9.05%\n\nTURN THE SCOPE. Earth-5890. Subject: Davis, Conner. Occupation: Chemist.\n\nEarly days were no stranger to Doctor Conner Davis, who labored heavily over limitless lines of formula and code to decipher what the cure would be. Humanity was fading fast from the plague spreading through each and every citizen and time was running short for the underground lab he kept in Bismarck.\n\nDr. Davis had lost everything in his study for a cure including any hope of a relationship. He’d lost care of personal gain and took sight of what really mattered. Life mattered. His eyes saw the necessary means to create a cure and he might be able to save more than just his sanity by finding one soon. Doctor Conner Davis died of an aneurysm at 98.\n\nDestiny: 45.39%\n\nTURN THE SCOPE. Earth-1. Subject: Davis, Conner. Occupation: Unknown.\n\nConner Davis lived every day as if it were his last. He took everything as it came to him and never took any of it for granted. He never wrote a book, never saved a nation, never killed a villain or moved a mountain. Mr. Davis was going to Sydney and he was getting married to the love of his life.\n\nMr. Davis never knew happiness outside of how he felt for other people. Material possessions never occurred to Conner to mean anything. He lived, and he loved with the best of his ability and compromised nothing. Conner Davis dies tomorrow.\n\nDestiny: 100%\n\nTURN THE SCOPE.\n"
  title: Kaleidoscope
  year: 2005
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2005-12-31
  day: 31
  month: 12
  text: "“New life!” came the call throughout “God’s Hammer,” from starboard to port, from aft to fore. It echoed through the corridors and ricocheted off the trophy skulls that decorated them. The men and women who crewed “God’s Hammer” sharpened their knives and painted their bodies in preparation.\n\n“New life! Hoist the rag! Hoist the rag! New life!”\n\nThe ceremony was an auspicious one, for it was a member of the Captain’s harem who had given birth, and so then did this child bear the blue paint of “Captain’s Heir.” The Captain cradled the baby girl throughout the ceremony, surrounded by his favorite male and female concubines. Only when his joy became too great did he leave his throne on the bridge, and dance around the glowing engine core with the rest of the crew.\n\nAnd if any of the crew were concerned with the existence of a new mouth and a new belly, they found their minds changed by the obvious joy in the Captain, brought on by his new heir.\n\nAll save one.\n\nThe first mate, whose purchase on the Captain’s throne was now lost due to this new heir, brandished his knife with a heavy fist and a bloody eye. He screamed with rage as he charged the Captain and his daughter, with intent to end them both.\n\nAnd he clean would have, but for the eyes of the crew, who saw this. And but for the hands of the crew, who caught his arms and held him fast. And but for the hearts of the crew, each one of which still kept beat in the Captain’s palm.\n\nThe slave who was to be sacrificed was led by its neck back to the bowels of the ship, for the first mate was now lain upon the table in his stead. The chaplain, girded with the remnant of sacrifices past, called out to the gods, offering this old life so that a new life may prosper.\n\nThe heir was bathed in the blood of the first mate, which mixed with the blue paint to turn a royal purple. His body was deftly segmented by the chaplain, and each of the crew came toward the still-warm meat and sliced off a piece with their recently sharpened knives. Each piece was swallowed, and so then did crew become stronger.\n\nThe heir was wiped down, and the gore-encrusted rag was displayed proudly on the hull of the ship, proclaiming to all of the new life upon “God’s Hammer.”\n\nAnd other ships did look upon the banner with awe and with envy. “New life,” they whispered. “New life.”\n"
  title: Hoist That Rag
  year: 2005
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-01-01
  day: '01'
  month: '01'
  text: "After a night of drinking, following the uncontrolled sleep of total blackness, there comes for humans a level of morning sobriety that is so clear it is painful. The white light of morning truth shines through to the black recesses of the human brain, and suddenly, the consequences of all those epic and sloppy actions of the night before pile like boulders, clear and terrible in the bitter morning. \n\nIn this cold, sharp daylight, Nima Atom was very aware of the two, no, three sets of alien legs that were entwined around him in the giant satin bed. Blue, green, and red bodies circled around his. Nima lay awake, listening to their soft breathing and piecing together his memories of the night before. As Nima gazed out the window in front of him, he became increasingly aware that the view he was seeing of the beautiful city, with its rounded golden domes, was a view that could have only been seen from the magnificent palace of the Shah-on-Shah, the ruler of the planet. Indeed, the lush fabrics and the little bubbling pools indicated wealth, and the slight and colorful figures that surrounded him wore jewels in their head skins that indicated them to be the royal wives of the palace.\n\nNima lay there, sober and aching, and imagined the night before. He had spent the night in a luxurious haze; beautiful alien women buying him drinks, escorting him from club to club, feeding him, encouraging him to sing, and kissing him with their long, leathery tongues. He blushed as he remembered being bathed in one of the pools by the giant window, where the curtain was now softly fluttering in the warm breeze.\n\nHis arms and legs pinned, he began to formulate an escape plan, a plan which first began with the artful extraction of his limbs from those of the women around him. His imagined plan stumbled in execution for when he flexed the muscle of his right arm the ruby woman resting her head there opened her purple eyes. She smiled at him, her sharpened teeth gleaming.\n\n“Hungry?” she asked\n\n“Listen,” whispered Nima “I don’t want to wake up the others, but I think I really need to go now, can you help me?”\n\n“Why do you need to go?” asked a voice behind him. Nima looked up and into dark violet eyes and a green smile.\n\n“Babe, I, uh, I’ve got a ship to catch.”\n\nThe blue woman stretched languidly, and snaked an arm over his stomach. “Stay. Eat with us.”\n\n“Ladies.” Nima scrambled off the silk bed, wishing he could remember their names. “Ladies. The night was lovely, but I fear I have overstayed my welcome.”\n\n“You really enjoyed the bath last night.” Said the green woman.\n\n“”Oh, it was lovely, I’m sure.” Said Nima, trying to remember and forget at the same time. “It’s just that I’m sure that the Shah-on-Shah would not like me in here with his, er, wives.”\n\n“We like you in here with us.” Said the nubile ruby beauty. “You lasted for two whole minutes with me last night. Our males only last for seconds.”\n\n“Oh geez. Please don’t spread that around.” said Nima. “I usually last longer it’s just that I had a lot to drink and ““”\n\n“You should show us how long you can go.” Said the green woman, her hands rubbing her naked legs.\n\n“And I would love to stay.” Nima held out his hands defensively. “Really. I would. But I would also like to live. Living is an important value for humans.” He laughed nervously. “Um, yeah. So maybe, ladies, we could reschedule for another time, and you could tell me if there is anyway I could get out of here without the Shah-on-Shahs guards noticing.”\n\nRuby stood, her naked body glistening. “There is a way, if you follow me.”\n\n“Oh, thank you, thank you!”\n\nAs they left through a door behind a pillar, Tiki leaned back and smiled at Ruma’sens green face.\n\n“Poor human, he seemed so nervous. Perhaps we should have told him that the Shah-on-Shah encourages us to have relations outside of our own species.”\n\nRuma’sen patted Tikis blue shoulder. “No, third wife, trust me. It’s more fun for them this way.”\n\nThe two women smiled, bathed by morning light.\n"
  title: The Sharp and Terrible Morning
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2006-01-02
  day: '02'
  month: '01'
  text: "“You really shouldn’t write so much,” the boy said. He perched on the edge of an orange subway chair and jumped off as the train screeched to a halt, catching himself on the handrail and spinning around.\n\n“If I didn’t write so much, you wouldn’t be here,” the woman said coolly.\n\n“Well, yeah, but maybe we’re not all we’re cracked up to be, you know?”\n\nThe woman sighed deeply and folded the page of her notebook before placing it on the bench beside her. “Would you stop that already?” she said.\n\n“What, this?” The boy pushed forward and caught himself on his hands, pushing off and spinning into a precisely controlled flip. It was the type of control that could only come from good programming, and she knew from the price tag that the boy had been programmed well.\n\n“Yes, that,” she said.\n\n“It’s not like I can get hurt.”\n\n“Human beings have protective instincts. We don’t like watching kids do that kind of stuff.”\n\nThe boy smiled and jumped into the seat beside her. She picked up the spiral-bound notebook and flipped to the designated page, then pressed the end of her pencil against her lips. He rolled into her like a cat, sprawling across her lap and giggling. “I told you to cut it out,” she said.\n\n“I didn’t write myself, you know.”\n\n“You’re supposed to be inspiring me.”\n\nThe boy crawled over her and flopped into the seat beside her, tracing his thin finger over the thin lead lines on the page. “What am I doing now?” he asked.\n\n“Being a nuisance.”\n\n“I hope you don’t let that guy kill me. I’d be very sad.”\n\n“I wouldn’t have paid for you if I was going to kill you in three chapters,” she said. The boy took her pencil from her fingers and stuck it behind her ear.\n\n“You look silly,” he said. “Silly writer! You bought a fake boy.”\n\nThe woman retrieved her pencil and returned to the notebook, but as soon as the lead touched the page he grabbed it again and ran down the length of the car, giggling hysterically. “Get back here,” she ordered.\n\n“Maybe you don’t want to write, did that ever occur to you?”\n\n“I think I know what I want better than a cybernetic nine year old.”\n\n“I’m a child prodigy!” he squealed with noisy excitement.\n\n“In an hour you’ll be a decommissioned pile of circuits,” she warned.\n\n“Nah. You like me! You just don’t like this pencil.” The boy stuck it between his teeth and smiled. “Look at me! I’m a writer! I think deep thoughts and put them on paper!”\n\nFrustrated, the woman turned back to her notebook.\n\n“Pay attention to me!” the boy demanded around the object between his lips.\n\n“I am paying attention to you,” she said as she dug through her purse for her spare pen.\n\n“I’m not in there, silly. I’m right here!” He grabbed the handrail and spun and jumped, landing beside her. She took the pencil from his mouth.\n\n“Sit down,” she ordered.\n\nWith much dramatic pouting, he obeyed. He folded his legs beneath him and sighed in the heavy way that only children can sigh. “It’s probably a lot less fun when you can’t control it,” he observed.\n\n“I told you,” the woman said. “Behave.”\n"
  title: Behave
  year: 2006
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2006-01-03
  day: '03'
  month: '01'
  text: "Seamus dipped the greasy piece of bread into the even greasier layer of oil in his plate. “Mm. It seems so much easier when you know your own sin, doesn’t it?”\n\nCarol hadn’t touched her food; her lust for love blinded her, but only to a point. She watched the buffoon in front of her as he ate away his life.  “I don’t think it was meant to be taken literally, Seamus,” she said. “People have just become… more goal-oriented.” The words were lost beneath the sound of her blind date’s incessant chewing. His blue eyes peered up ignorantly and a muffled confused phrase somehow made it out of the crevice.\n\n“What I mean to say is, just because we have thirty-five years doesn’t mean we should debase ourselves to such trivial concepts of living.”\n\nThe glutton finished swallowing before bellowing an answer, “Well, you’re looking for love, right? That’s your purpose; love. I, as stated in the advertisement, am transfixed upon simple pleasures. Food is too good to let go to waste” Again, he stuffed his mouth full of various confections and salty doughy things.\n\nHer words came after much thought and in-between the orificial cramming of her oh-so-temporary partner for the night. “It has come to my attention that you, Seamus, are gluttonous because you think you do not have anything else to live for but your own pleasure. I, on the other hand, believe in a world meant for one person to stand beside me. For children, I feel that we need to have similar goals.”\n\nThe man’s eyes went into thought and he gulped his food down with his mind working in overdrive. They both had at least fifteen years left, and the rush to procreate had crossed his mind. He sat up straight, cleaned off his chin and stared directly into her eyes.\n\n“I love you”, he said without wavering.\n\n“Good. Now let’s talk about a house and kids.” Her mood was changing from highly annoyed to mildly irritate.\n\nA napkin he brought to his face rubbed away any remaining stains, and he looked up to the teenage waiter.  He was sure that the kid couldn’t imagine how disturbing it would be to hold such a job when he was halfway done his life. “Waiter, take this away,” Seamus said. “Bring me a salad and filtered water.”\n"
  title: Expiration Date
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2006-01-04
  day: '04'
  month: '01'
  text: "The engineer stumbled into the cargo hold and dropped his bags like they were made of lead. At the moment, he couldn’t think of any place in the galaxy where he’d rather be. Not that that was a surprise.\n\nHis pilot wandered into the hold wearing underwear, a bra, and a towel wrapped around her head. She blinked at him and frowned. “I didn’t know you were back.”\n\n“I just got in.” He flopped down on the floor next to his luggage.\n\n“You look like hell.”\n\n“Gee, thanks.” The engineer rolled his eyes. “Why don’t you put on some pants?”\n\n“They’re in the wash.”\n\n“All of them?”\n\n“Yeah.”\n\n“Aren’t you embarrassed to be wandering around the ship in your underwear?”\n\n“No.”\n\nHe sighed. They’d had this debate many times before.\n\n“So why do you look like you got run over by a tank?” she asked.\n\n“Is it really that bad? Maybe I should take a shower.”\n\n“I used all the hot water. And you’re trying to change the subject.”\n\nThe engineer scowled. “I ran into that pirate again, okay?”\n\n“The one who’s been tracking us over three sectors?” The pilot hopped onto a steel barrel, crossed her legs, and put her chin in her hand.\n\n“Yes, that one,” he growled, “and please don’t remind me of it.”\n\n“So what happened?”\n\n“Do we really need to talk about this right now?”\n\n“Yes. What if some doohickey broke on the ship and you were brooding over that pirate? I’d need to know how to—”\n\n“I am not brooding over him!”\n\nThe pilot rolled her eyes. “I hate pirates,” she remarked to no one in particular. She was obviously refusing to move until he finished the story. Sighing, he gave in.\n\n“Well, I was in a bar.”\n\n“You? In a bar? I’m shocked.”\n\n“Shove it. I was in the bar meeting a contact for a job. Do you want me to tell this story or not?”\n\nThe pilot absently cleaned her ear with a finger. She stayed quiet, though. Eventually, he continued.\n\n“So there was some, uh, unrelated trouble, and the local cops closed off the street outside. Some explosion or something. I didn’t speak up to find out.”\n\n“Aren’t you wanted on that planet?”\n\n“That wasn’t my fault! And who’s telling the story here, you or me? Anyway, I was in the bar, and it looked like we were going to be there for a while. So I had a drink. Nothing else to do, right?”\n\n“I sure would’ve if I’d been there.”\n\n“Right. Yeah. So anyway, it turned out that Valentine was there, too.”\n\n“I still can’t believe his name is Valentine. Fucking pirates shouldn’t be named after fucking holidays. It’s unethical.”\n\n“He’s not named after the holiday. He’s named after the gun.”\n\n“The Valentine .45 SXG? Are you serious?” There was a pause. “How do you know that?”\n\n“He told me, okay?”\n\nThe pilot blinked, then blinked again. The engineer looked away and, not for the first time, was eternally grateful for his dark skin. It hid the flush. He hurried on.\n\n“It’s not like I was talking to him on purpose. He was heckling me. You know how he does that.”\n\n“Boy, do I ever. Fucking pirate.”\n\n“Anyway, he was heckling me, and I got sick of it, so I slipped out the back. Of course the cops were all over me, chased me around, stuff like that. So that’s why I look like shit. Now let’s get out of orbit before they realize where I disappeared to. Oh, and add another “˜wanted’ label to the map for this sector.” He pushed himself upright and headed towards the cockpit. “I’ll get the engines fired up. And put on some pants first!”\n\nThe pilot watched him leave, then hopped off the cargo barrel. She rubbed the towel against her hair and casually tossed it into the corner of the hold. The engineer probably didn’t realize that the pirate wore lipstick. She smirked, making a mental note to be near the bathroom the next time her co-worker and employer went in. The look on his face would be priceless when he realized what the red stain was around the corners of his lips.\n"
  title: The Pirate's Booty
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-01-05
  day: '05'
  month: '01'
  text: "The van comes for me at the usual time. I imagine myself as the driver must see me, a doll with matching parts, standing in front of buildings that are coated with red sand. I pull my coat around me but the cold wind climbs under and up my bare legs. I am wearing the dress that my mother saved for, the one I do not eat in, the one I keep laid out at the foot of my couch, the one that my grandmother presses formaldehyde in to keep it fresh.\n\nGirls are crowded in, stinking of perfume. I see the usual faces and a few new ones, their nervous twitches betray them. With a years of experience, I have become old at this game. A few of the new girls chatter, hoping for handsome and rich. They lie to themselves; no one who is handsome or rich would come here for a woman. The driver jokes, and makes check marks on his pad. He tells the van where to go and it takes us to the Hotel.\n\nPaint is curling off the plastic in the Hotel, breaking down, like all of Mars. They line us up in rows of chairs. We wait for the men. There is the clatter of breakfast dishes, the smell of baked goods. Our best reproduction of Earth food. The little oily man comes in. He’s not so bad, maybe he sleeps with a couple girls to give them front row seats, but that is their business, not mine. It doesn’t matter, he isn’t really bad, not as bad as what could be.\n\nMost of the girls are smiling now, watching the middle aged men, the best dressed. I do not make eye contact. I will not act like a whore to meet a man. I do look, though, at the oldest men when they are not looking. I am watching the oldest.  If he looks toward me, I will look away. Perhaps that will interest him. A few of the girls giggle and the men watch them. One girl touches her leg, another, her cheek. I hold my hands on my lap and practice stillness. On the other side of a small window I see there is sandstorm coming, red sand, whirling.\n\nThe men are looking at our profile on their data pads. I am a virgin. Some earth men like that. Some do not. I have seen the Earth women in the Interactives. Earth women are wild. Earth women will deny men. Their denied men come here.\n\nI feel his eyes on me before I see him. He is not so old and has a soft face. He says something in his Earth tongue. I do not smile. He is too young, fat on Earth food. I look at my hands but he is staring. There are other women who are more attractive, who want him to look, but he is watching me.\n\nI am at the edge. He mispronounces my name and the oil man, our translator,  flashes a smile.\n\n“Stand up.” He says “Turn around.”\n\nI stand and turn, looking at my shoes. I am naked now, on display.\n\n“Be a pretty cat.” Says the oil man.\n\nThe cats on Mars are starving.\n\nI try to make eye contact with an old man, but he is looking at a young girl. I am looking out the window for signs of a red storm. Will my shoes get stained in the storm? The red can stain everything.\n\nI try to sit but the young man grabs my arm. He points to me; his fingers are hard. The oil man motions to the other girls. I snubbed the oil man once, I did not want the front row as much as he wanted me and he has not forgotten. He is telling the young man that he has time to decide, that he should think it over.\n\nThe young man shakes his head. He has made up his mind. He will take me to Earth, to him home. He has paid his fee to the oil man, and my parents will get five percent. It is more than they make in a year.\n\nThe men break for lunch and the oil man leaves me in his office. They want me to sign papers. There are pictures of weddings here, each of them with the same background, the same fake cake and champagne, only the date changes on these photos. There are hundreds of pictures.\n\nIt is my eighth trip to the hotel and no one has chosen me.\n\nThe papers absorb my signature as I sign them and they carry the confirmation to the oil mans data pad.\n\nRed sand beats the window in his office. The storm has arrived.\n"
  title: Bride
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2006-01-06
  day: '06'
  month: '01'
  text: "“But why don’t you want to be Prince Charming? I just don’t understand.” Beryl worried a handkerchief nearly to the point of tearing with her plump little hands. Saske could see she was almost to the point of tears, but he wasn’t going to relent. A man had to draw the line somewhere.\n\n“I have no problem spending our honeymoon in Orlando, babycakes. And if it means that much to you we can get married in the Magic Kingdom. But does it have to be Cinderella themed?”\n\nBeryl dabbed at the corners of her eyes and fanned the collection of brochures at Saske. “There’s Sleeping Beauty. We could do Sleeping Beauty. They have animatronic replicas of Flora, Fauna and Merryweather that float around on little gasbags and even a Maleficent that storms from the back when the priests asks if anyone has any objections.”\n\n“Thats not what I meant…”\n\n“You can have Maleficent turn into a holographic dragon if you want. You could fight her. They give you a sword.”\n\n“I don’t want a sword…”\n\n“My cousin Stacy had the Little Mermaid and she said the Ursela was just fantastic. I’d have to dye my hair red for that.” Beryl’s tears were lost, and she was now fingering her auburn curls in front of the hallway mirror.\n\n“I don’t want you to dye your hair red!” Saske didn’t mean to shout, but now that he was started, he couldn’t keep it in. “I don’t want to marry Ariel, or Aurora, or Cinderella! I want to marry you!”\n\n“And you don’t think I’m a princess?” The tears were starting to come back, and Beryl sunk down into the sofa. She looked at the handkerchief in her hands, “I think you’re Prince Charming.”\n\nSaske sat down next to Beryl and put his hands on hers. “You’re a princess to me, sweetie. You’re my princess. Not Walt’s. What is it you want out of that type of wedding?”\n\nBeryl looked him deep in the eyes. “The fairy tale, honey. I want to be Cinderella, if just for a night.”\n\n“In rags, scrubbing the fireplace?”\n\n“No, silly! Cinderella isn’t about rags!”\n\nSaske looked at the brochures, the glossy, pastel gowns and the castle backdrops. “No, I guess not. You’d think Little Red Riding Hood would be in here. I loved that movie. I could be The Wolf for that.”\n\n“The Wolf isn’t a romantic hero!”\n\nSaske turned to his fiancé with a saucy gleam in his eye. “Au contraire, my little Forest Traveler,” he growled. “Allow me to show you how wrong that notion is!”\n\n“Oh my!” Beryl said. “How big you are!”\n"
  title: Happily Ever After
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2006-01-07
  day: '07'
  month: '01'
  text: "The road lay before me like the body of an overdosed hooker; all valleys and plains and nameless geography. My hand stroked the air from the window of the pickup as the wind smoked my cigarette and left me with ash. This could work, she’d said. We can make this work.\n\nBehind us, the dome shrank and shimmered in the ozone-laced sunset. My overeducated freelance cab driver droned on about something forgettable, something like music he’d liked as a child. Claire was five miles behind me and counting. By this point, I knew that the feds would have noticed my absence. I pictured her in a white interrogation room, angles and pale skin and cocky syllables in the face of bodily decommission. This had been her idea, of course. Everything good was her idea.\n\n“-totally captures the alienation of the human experience,” the driver said. The radio sputtered silence and noise. He’d gone to Yale. This was a rebellion, I’m sure. The type of rebellion that only the rich can afford. “So what’s your story?” he finally asked when his thoughts on Bob Dylan had become less than captivating.\n\n“Don’t have one,” I said, which wasn’t entirely a lie. Most people don’t have stories worth telling. The problem is that they very rarely recognize it.\n\n“You’re outside of the limits,” he said.\n\n“So are you.”\n\n“Yeah, but I’m getting paid for it.”\n\nSeven miles, now. I pictured her blond hair traced with blood, her body curled up on the interrogation room floor. She wouldn’t tell them anything, of course. I wished that she would tell them something.\n\nThis isn’t how it should have been, I thought to her. Next time, I won’t let it won’t come down to this.\n\nThe cab driver flicked up his control panel, and I turned around to watch the last spark of the silver bowl disappear into the horizon. We were far enough away for the rockets. We were beneath their radar. Decades beneath their radar.\n\n“All strapped in?” he asked as he entered a code into the ancient keypad. I nodded. I was more strapped in than I’d ever been before.\n"
  title: On The Road
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2006-01-08
  day: '08'
  month: '01'
  text: "“’Scuse me, is this the sunbound dock?”\n\nHarrison started and nearly dropped the bouquet he was holding. He hadn’t heard the woman approach. “Uh… yeah, it should be.”\n\n“Thanks. Is this seat taken?”\n\nHe shook his head mutely in response. Vibrant. It was the first adjective that popped into his mind, and it stayed there as she sat down and pulled out a compact. Every movement was sure and determined, as if she knew precisely what action she planned to take and followed through every time. He watched in awe.\n\n“Are you going to Prime?”\n\nThe unexpected question reminded him of his manners, and Harrison quickly averted his eyes. Prime was the first colonized planet in this system, and by this point it was entirely city, filled with excitement and flashing lights. “Ah, no. Not all the way.”\n\n“That’s a shame. Nothing else interesting along this flightpath.”\n\nHarrison was shocked at her casual attitude. He couldn’t imagine saying such things to a stranger. “I, uh… I guess not,” he agreed lamely. Serena—the intended recipient of the flowers—lived on one of the residential planets in the system, zoned to keep it from growing too congested but with regulations that prohibited any sort of bad neighbors.\n\n“Can’t see the point of suburbs, personally.” The woman pulled out a red lipstick, applying it expertly, even while speaking. “If I want a city, I’ll go to the city. If I want the country, I’ll go to one of the outer farmworlds instead. Trying to compromise, trying to have everything—it doesn’t work. In the end you wind up with nothing at all. Not worth it, really.” The thick chemical smell of the lipstick pressed against his senses, and Harrison found it impossible not to notice how smoothly it went on as she rubbed her lips together, never taking her eyes off of the mirror.\n\nWhat he said was: “That’s a very interesting point of view.” What he meant was: Serena never wears lipstick.\n\n“I like to think that all of my points of view are interesting.” She capped the lipstick and rummaged in her purse for a moment, coming up with a light green compact that she offered to him. “Here you go.”\n\nHarrison blinked. “Uh… what?”\n\n“It’s makeup. For your black eye.” She turned and looked at him for the first time. The whoosh of air signaled the approach of the next ship on the outbound dock, and she raised her voice to speak over it. “Your skin’s about the same tone as mine, and this is the foundation I use to cover things like that. I figured you might appreciate it.” She inclined her chin, indicating the bedraggled roses. “And so will she.”\n\nTwo ship gongs sounded, one from the transport pulling into the station and one from the trnsport that would arrive momentarily to whisk this woman away. Harrison’s cheeks flared red. He hadn’t realized the bruise on his face was that obvious. “What do you mean, ‘she’?” he asked, quickly trying to change the subject.\n\n“The woman you brought those flowers for.”\n\nThe station was filled with noise and clatter, filtered through the air systems. On the opposite dock, passengers were unloading, but Harrison didn’t pay attention. He picked up the roses. “Actually, I brought them for you.”\n"
  title: City Girl
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-01-09
  day: '09'
  month: '01'
  text: "Emeeki dove off the cliff, spreading her silver wings wide to catch the current of air, flying over the Sacred ground. This would put her quite a distance from her earth locked predator, whose yellow mane she could see moving in the grass on the golden plains.\n\nThe Sacred ground was a beautiful preserve and Emeeki wished she could spend more time here. Her partner, Brekki, had always wanted to explore the preserve in depth, but their diplomatic work had kept them off world, and away from familiar comforts.\n\nToday was their consummation; she would be one with Brekki at last. They had almost given in to temptation once, during a diplomatic conference held on the flagship of an alien Coalition. It was late and they were meeting in her room to iron out a few last details of the presentation they would give to the Coalition. They were defining zoning lines in space, and territory was one of Brekkis passions. They had been tired, but filled with enthusiasm, about to bring back a contract that would create peace and understanding between the alien omnivores and themselves. It was a landmark, and perhaps, after this, they might join the powerful Coalition. Emeeki, only in her second molt, a bustle of red feathers, had hopped from her perch and spread her wings in the small room.\n\n“We’ve done it Brekki! Joy! Joy!” she chirped, and without thinking, bounced close to him, putting her delicate wings around his tawny, powerful shoulders. He growled, and moaned in a low tone. Emeeki squeaked, realizing her mistake, and tried to pull away, but it was too late, he had already put a paw on her wing. He bit her shoulder, breaking the skin, the rush of his intoxicants spreading into her blood through his saliva, his tongue lapping at her tiny shoulder, she was falling under, into the black tunnel and then suddenly, he was across the room, running for the sliding door, scratching the carpet as he left.\n\nThey spent a few days apart after that, trying to regain a sense of control. Emeeki was terrified that Brekki would leave her. He had been a choice partner, and they had accomplished so much together, for him to leave would be devastating, and yet she felt a hanging guilt for putting him in a terrible position. She did not know how to apologize, but as always, Brekki was there to help her. He came to her with his claws clipped, a sign of shame, and begged forgiveness, after which she pulled out fresh feathers, and presented them to him as a sign of her guilt. They were both awkward for season, but this passed and they moved on with their career.\n\nEmeeki flapped her wings, feeling the air slide through her feathers, savoring the feeling of lift and fall, the glory of the burn in her wings. She should have made the time for this. The tips of her wings tingled. She was told that she wouldn’t feel the effects of the little vial her family gave her, but she had never felt her wings tingle like that before.  Emeeki saw the grove of trees, a traditional spot for her family, and descended gently there. Brekki was far behind her, he did not run as fast as he used to.\n\nShe could leave right now and he would never catch her. She could take flight from here, or run to a different, more shaded grove. She examined her options, and imagined what her ancestors would have done.  She may have a few seasons left in her, and she would very much like to see her daughter’s hatchlings. She pecked at her feathers, and dismissed those thoughts. She had been spending too long off world, and those alien ideas were starting to infect her. Her people were not obsessed to silly notions of infinite life; it was the seasons, to which all things were committed.  Emeeki waited.\n\n“You always arrive first.” Brekki pawed at the ground. “I believe the sacred script calls for something specific at this point. I did memorize it for you, if you would like to follow it.”\n\n“I thought about the sacred script.” Chirped Emeeki. “But we’ve never followed any script in our lives, I don’t see why we should start now.” She hoped that the poison she had taken would not be painful for Brekki. Of course, even if he did suffer, she wouldn’t have to see it.\n\nBrekki pawed the soft dirt. “Are you scared?”\n\n“Not anymore.” She hopped down from the tree.  “Now that you are here.”\n\n“I was trained to do this while you were running away,”\n\n“Ah, yes.  Well, see that you keep up with me, Elder.” she teased; Emeeki was a full season younger than Brekki.\n\nBrekki folded his front paws and touched his nose to the ground.  “I want you to be inside me, before I surrender to the planet.” He was always the somber one.\n\nEmeeki cocked her feathered head. “That’s from the sacred texts.”\n\n“So it is.” Brekki stretched his paws and waited for her reply.\n\n“Catch me Brekki. I am ready.” She opened her wings, and hopped between the trees. Brekki growled and followed.  It was, like all life, very swift.\n"
  title: Partners
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2006-01-10
  day: 10
  month: '01'
  text: "The bottles should have lined her shelf, all shapes of the pastel rainbow, a tally of her pasts. Their numbers would be such that they overwhelmed the tiny space, and even by resorting to clever stacking methods and ingenious pyramids she would never quite be able to fit them all. The shelf was clear, of course.\n\nThe latest brand of moisturizer was not on Miko’s shelf, but in her purse. She slipped it out without thinking, squirting the oily mixture onto her hands, rubbing it in like a prayer. Away with the rough edges, the lines, the pockmarks of use. Smoothness was unity, and as she achieved it the clenched fist in her breast relaxed. She could breathe again.\n\nMiko sat down before the perfectly neat desk on the perfectly placed chair and ran her finger over the perfectly smooth mahogany. So beautiful, the dark wood against the white walls, especially in the dim evening light. Her hand against the surface made it all the more beautiful, the perfect skin and perfect nails of perfect length. Her life fit together like an intricate puzzle forming a detailed, perfect picture.\n\nWhen she was little, she never bit her nails. The girls who did, pudgy-faced and red-cheeked, were her inferiors; they knew nothing of grace, and were too stupid to think in the long-term. She despised them, and used to make snide comments behind their backs, just loud enough so that they could hear. She held nothing but contempt for them.\n\nThe desk was polished to a precise and even shine: not to the point of pure reflection, for that would detract from its own merits, but certainly enough to catch the scant light of the setting sun. Her fingers pressed against four invisible spots on the right-hand corner, impossible to find unless one knew where they were. In response, the center of the desk faded away, revealing the matte black of a computer console that emerged from within the structure. Her fingers danced over the keys, too fast to follow and dizzying in their grace.\n\n“Wow, sixty-five words per minute. Impressive.”\n\n“Who told you how fast I type?”\n\n“Nobody. I heard you, just now.”\n\nWhen she was very, very young–no more than three years, though of course she couldn’t place her exact age, not knowing her birthdate–some old hag on the sidewalk had seen Miko sucking her thumb. “Stop that,” the creature had croaked, “You’ll get buck teeth.” The tiny, dark-haired child had cried all night long for fear she had irreparably damaged her perfect teeth.\n\nMiko could feel an errant flake of skin, rough and offensive, on her knuckle. This would not do. Out came the bottle once again. The thick scent lifted her prayer to the god she didn’t believe in, to the ancestors she never knew. The half-empty bottles, scattered in forgotten dumpsters and office wastebaskets, were the beads on her rosary.\n\n“Did you design the mechanism?”\n\n“For what?”\n\n“The concealed chamber in the desk.”\n\n“What the hell are you talking about? There’s nothing in the desk.”\n\n“Yes there is. Right there, the four indentations, thirty-six centimeters from the right.”\n\nMiko slammed the laptop shut, then breathed deeply and carefully smoothed her hair. Temper, temper. That wouldn’t do at all.\n\nShe’d hated his scar, and made no secret of it. It was vulgar, she’d told him, even lewd. How could he deface his body like that? Worse yet, how could he leave the evidence intact? She painted it as a crime against nature, and berated him for it whenever the opportunity arose. The day he’d removed the scar out of necessity had been a veritable triumph, and she’d known the instant he slunk in, meek and overthrown. She was right, of course, as always.\n\nA clear plastic bag was arranged precisely in the sleek metal wastebasket. She had never changed the bag; there had never been a need.\n\n“…Switch?”\n\n“Yeah?”\n\n“How many scratches are in my desk? The one in my apartment?”\n\n“Eighty-seven. Twenty-three on the top, sixty-three on the combined sides, and one underneath where you hit it with your chair last Sunday.”\n\nSeven seconds of silence meant nothing more to her than a pause. Eight would have been precisely the same.\n\n“…Why do you ask?”\n\nShe took everything with her–every pen, every note, every disk. Hardly a mote of dust was left; if anything, the lack thereof was the only sign that the desk had ever been used. The last rays of the setting sun made the almost-full bottle, tossed in the wastebasket, seem to glow.\n"
  title: Dissolve
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2006-01-11
  day: 11
  month: '01'
  text: "Tomorrow, Vivek Pratap will stop smoking.\n\nHe will stop smoking because it is bad for his gills, the luster of his new skin, and his sharpened teeth. The shark genes he had combined with his own were expensive; he’d hate to ruin those spent thousands with a five-dollar pack of smokes.\n\nSo tomorrow, Vivek will quit.  He’s a new man, now\n\nHe also got muscle enhancements, as well as some bone-lengthening treatments. The new Vivek would tower over the old one. He had to get a new wardrobe, made of shiny, expensive materials. He’s kept a flannel shirt, though, his favorite. Used to be his favorite.  But he’s different, now.\n\nVivek had to move, to be closer to the ocean. This meant leaving a lot of friends behind, but Vivek was glad of that. He could tell when they looked at him, who they saw. And it just wasn’t who he was anymore.\n\nThe move meant an excuse to get rid of a lot of things. Vivek tossed out all the pictures of himself as he used to look, feeling he was better off without reminders. He did keep one picture, but it’s not on display in his new home. He keeps it in a drawer.\n\nIt’s the only picture he has of Czarina; she never did like seeing herself on film. She had broken up with him after his transition. She said she didn’t like the new Vivek. It was for the best, really. Czarina is a smoker.\n\nVivek likes the new him. which is why he’s going to take care of it. Starting tomorrow, he’s going to quit smoking.\n\nTonight, he is wrapped up in a a shirt that no longer fits, staring at picture of a version of himself that is wearing it. A version of himself whose soft, pink cheek is being kissed by a girl who has her arms around his small, hunched shoulders.\n\n“Tomorrow,” Vivek promises himself. “I’ll change.”\n"
  title: Quitter
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2006-01-12
  day: 12
  month: '01'
  text: "“Okay everyone, you know the drill.”\n\nAlex’s partner didn’t break pace between the doorway and the register, and she swung her gun around with the precise grace of someone who had done this far too many times. Her features were hidden behind a fuzzmask, and the sharp tips of her black hair poked from the base of the thin helmet. Nis was a professional: professional thief, professional manipulator, professional drug courier, and professional counterfeiter. She was a professional at everything that skimmed beneath Federal radar. Alex was not a professional. Alex was a nineteen year old boy who’d never pulled the trigger of a pulse rifle.\n\nBehind the counter, a teenage register kid went white.\n\n“Alex,” Nis called without taking her eyes from the boy. “Damage control.”\n\nAlex nodded. He continued into the back of the restaurant, rifle at chest level, listening through the hum of microwaves for hints of movement. Pulse rifles weren’t lethal, which is why they used them. Murder was a level one crime. Robbery was level three. There were two employees in the kitchen: an attractive blond girl no older than twenty five and a man no younger than fifty. At the sight of his weapon, the girl screeched something incomprehensible while the man stepped away from the burger assembly line and coolly lifted his hands to his head.\n\nQuietly, almost calmly, he backed into the wall and listened to his partner’s voice fire orders like the guns he’d heard on television. “Into the back,” she finally said, and the kid appeared in the doorway with Nis’s pulse rifle motionless against his skull. He didn’t look so hot; eyes wide, skin pale, breath coming and going at a rate that couldn’t be maintained for long. His legs moved beneath him like the legs of someone who’d had too much gin, and he stumbled forward to hold his weight against the assembly line.\n\nDespite her panic, the woman was breathing slowly, deeply. The man remained calm. Nis gestured with her head towards the cooler, then nudged the boy’s neck with her rifle. He closed his eyes. “On with it,” she said as she shoved him forward with her other hand, and he promptly dropped to his knees. Alex went to pick him up, and a second later, his world exploded into stars.\n\nSomewhere, there was yelling and movement. His vision was dark and light at the same time, and a dizzy pain pushed its fingers forward from the back of his skull. It took him several seconds to understand that the floor was beneath him, and another second to feel the man’s weight on his chest. The man wasn’t moving. There were three still bodies on the tiled floor. Only Nis remained on her feet. “Get up!” she yelled. Alex tried, but the man’s body was heavy and his own was heavier, so Nis pulled the worker off of him and yanked him to his feet. Alex pressed his hands against the wall to maintain his upright position. “Pulses,” she said, and pushed him towards the register kid. He stumbled but somehow managed to fall only to his hands and knees, then he dug his fingers into the boy’s neck. A dull, rhythmic throbbing. “This one’s cool,” he said, but there was no reply.\n\n“Christ,” Nis said quietly a second later. “Oh shit.”\n\nAlex tried to get to his feet, but failed. “What?”\n\n“She’s cold.”\n\n“She can’t be cold.”\n\n“Oh God. No. No fucking way.”\n\nAlex crawled over to verify. Nis ripped away the girl’s shirt to reveal rubbery skin, perfectly formed breasts. Most importantly, a thin, black line tracing an indented rectangle across her torso.\n\n“She’s an electric ant,” Nis said. There was a thick rope of panic drawn across her voice. “Registered. Let’s move. Right now.”\n\nAlex looked into the girl’s open blue eyes. Polymer. Polymer and pigment. Nis’s hands dug into his shoulders and pulled him to his unsteady feet. Before him, the fleshy pile of shorted circuits lay as still as an unconscious human. Nis ran to the door, but outside, the street was already bathed in red and blue. “Christ,” she whispered.\n\n“It’s been less than five minutes!”\n\nNis backed up to the register. “Get beside the door,” she ordered as she changed the battery of her pulse rifle. “And don’t let anything get through.”\n"
  title: The Electric Ant
  year: 2006
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2006-01-13
  day: 13
  month: '01'
  text: "Skitz was running as fast as an alley rat could run in the back streets of Terris 4. Even with six legs, he was having a hard time keeping ahead of the bounty hunter. His three nostrils flared and he stopped for a moment to catch some carbon dioxide before taking a glance around.\n\nWhen he heard footsteps behind him he darted up the wall, using suction-cupped fingers to tug his way onto the top of the building. Below him, in the alleyway, he heard, “Son of a bitch…”\n\nThe native of Terris was taking a moment to relax, slumping his multi-appendage body against a radiator core. He plucked a radio from his satchel and spoke into it with labored words between breaths. “Durag! Felakchy oootuhag defgty! Keep the girl safe… he’s coming for her.”\n\nA noise came from the other end of the radio just in time for it to be smacked out of his hands as the butt of a plasma-bolted to be smashed into one of his faces. The Terrisal groaned and turned to see the bi-pedal shadow standing over him. A gruff voice intoned a threat with a vouch of seriousness in it: “Let’s get one thing straight. I don’t climb walls, and I hate using the rocket-pack.”\n\nHe kneeled down next to Skitz, not bothering to aim his gun, but the human plucked him in the forehead to make sure he got his attention. “I’m looking for a human.  Any human will do. Now, I know there’s at least one… So talk.”\n\nThe alien shuddered before his pair of eyes opened and glanced around for escape. The bounty hunter hit him in the head again. “Wrong answer. Look at me, freak.”\n\nSkitz was definitely scared by now, and he was starting to wish he’d never even seen a human.  “Der… vulag. Human… I see human long time ago.” The small lie caught a sigh from the hunter, and when the man stood he kicked the little guy in the side. Skitz cried out in agony, grabbing his body and whimpering.\n\n“See, we humans have lived through ten millennia of bullshit. I’d appreciate it if we could not have us live through another.” This time, the gun was pointed at Skitz’s head. “Is it a boy or a girl?”\n\n“…It is a small girl,” the Terrian gasped\n\n“Good. Progress. Where is she right now?”\n\n“… She hide… below industry. Sector 9.”\n\nThe bounty hunter grumbled to himself.  “Wechals? I fucking hate Wechals. I hated bugs on Earth and I really fucking hate Wechals.” He turned, and began to walk away. His direction was, of course, Sector 9.\n\nSkitz cried out after him, “You no kill girl! You Felag!”\n\nThe hunter stopped and looked over his shoulder, glaring at the little shit. “Kill? Are you fucking stupid? We’re an endangered species. I’m just rounding us up.”\n"
  title: Bounty
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-01-14
  day: 14
  month: '01'
  text: "Commander Xylm of the Red Bastards jumped when he heard Knthens voice in his head.\n\n“Commander, please meet me in the docking bay.” Despite his powers, Knthen usually used the intercom, and there was nervous emotion in his projected voice. The use of Xylms title, Commander, made him uneasy. The Red Bastards never stood on ceremony; rank was never mentioned when they were on their own. Something was up.\n\nKnthen packed his things into the small storage unit of his fighter. He wasn’t wearing his flight suit; instead, he was dressed in the gold and bronze of the Sun Shields, his cape dull under the florescent lights. Xylm hadn’t seen Knthen in his Sun Shield uniform since the day he arrived, four rotations ago, as their old Sun Shield left to meditate on the side of a mountain.\n\nXylm crossed his arms, annoyed. “You’re leaving? Why wasn’t I notified?”\n\nKnthen handed him a scroll, the mark of the War Council shimmering on the digital plastic. “I can’t stay. All Sun Shields have been ordered home.”\n\nXylm caught Knthens shoulder. “The Red Bastards have always had a Sun Shield, it’s a tradition. Why are the Sun Shields leaving us without our resident psychic?”\n\n“The Sun Shields never promised a psychic to you.”\n\nXylm felt Knthens rage on the inside of his skull. “Don’t you dare put your fear on me.” He tossed the scroll on the floor. “I’m not your enemy. What in the filth is happening with the Sun Shields?”\n\nKnthen touched the golden mark of the triple suns on his forehead, the mark that showed him to be a psychic. “Trust me Xlymn.” Knthen reached for his friend, his palms closing in on Xylms cheeks. Knthen touched Xlymns temples and closed eyes with the tips of his fingers. Xelm relaxed, and his head rested onto Knthens palms. Knthen closed his eyes.\n\nWhen Knthen stepped back, Xylm shook his head, feeling fuzzy. “What was that for?”\n\nKnthen bowed his head. “I needed to see you, I needed to know for sure.”\n\n“By the holy dark, what is going on?”\n\nKnthen looked away, focusing on his ship. “I think I’m going to be killed.”\n\n“What? Who would kill you?”\n\n“The War Council. Sun Shields have been judged dangerous to the human species, the genetic alterations have, they say, made us inhuman, dangerous. They say we have too much power. The debate is going on in the council right now, we don’t know what the outcome might be.”\n\n“How could they do that?” Xlym shook his head. “They couldn’t. No, this will pass over.”\n\n“Most people don’t feel like you do Xlym.”\n\n“Don’t go then.” Xlym shook Knthens shoulders “Stay here. They will have to come through us to get to you, I know the Bastards would stand with me.”\n\n“It wouldn’t matter.” Knthen tapped the side of his head.” “I’m rigged with a self destruct. All Sun Shields are, in case they go rogue. At least, if I go, I might be able to appeal to the council.” Xlym struggled for words. Knthen lowered his voice.\n\n“Xylm, I need to trust you with something.”\n\n“Anything.”\n\n“If I am killed, the Red Bastards will still have a psychic.”\n\n“What?”\n\n“Xylm. I’ve suspected this for a while, the way you seem to know what someone will say before they say it, the way you calm the hotshots down when their egos get too big. I made myself believe that you were just a talented leader. I never let myself make sure, I never wanted to know. Now I have no choice. Xylm, you are a psychic.”\n\nXylm laughed, this had to be a joke.  Knthens face was sad. Xylm felt his heart beat faster. “How is that possible? I’m not a Shield! Shields are grown sterile in a lab. My parents aren’t psychic. It’s not possible.”\n\n“I don’t know how it happened. Maybe if two Rouge psychics conceived a child in the early days, before the sterility program.” He shook his head. “I don’t know, Xylm, but you are psychic. The Sun Shields would have had you killed if they knew. You may be the last of us Xylm.  There may come a time when humanity will need you, and the Sun Shields will be gone.”\n\nKnthen climbed into his ship, and Xylm backed away, his mind still struggling with Knthens revelation. As Knthen locked the restraints in his cockpit, Xylm called out to him.\n\n“You wait. The War Council will reverse their decision, you’ll be back in a standard round.”\n\n“Keep safe, Xylm. Promise me, no matter what happens, you won’t hold my death against humanity. They will need you one day. Promise me.” The cockpit door descended, closing over Knthens head.\n\n“I swear it.” said Xylm, as Knthens engines roared.\n\n“I knew you would.” Knthens disembodied voice hung in Xylms mind, as the ship roared out into the silent black of space.\n"
  title: Sun Shield
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2006-01-15
  day: 15
  month: '01'
  text: "Amsterdam is still dry. The whole country is. It’s hard to believe, I know. But it’s true.\n\nThat’s how you can tell the tourists. Not a single Dutch person is amphibious. They don’t have to be. They’ve held back the waters, just like the little punk in the story.\n\nStories got to come from somewhere, I suppose.\n\nThis’ll knock you flat: I was at this coffee shop there, right? And I’m downstairs, with some pals, and we’re lit and we’re relaxed. The smoke is thick in there, but not bad thick, just enough that you can feel your eye-membranes slide on down. Good times.\n\nAnd these kids, these obvious tourists—high-schoolers or some such, their skin was still bright green—they come on down the stairs and they look at us all laid out and we’re like “Right now, right now they are having their First Amsterdam Tourist Experience. And it’s just like the stories. We are a part of their First Amsterdam Tourist Experience.”\n\nHow amazing is that? I mean, I remember my First Amsterdam Tourist Experience, right? That was what? Years ago. The world was different then, you know? And I’ve made, like, fifty trips back since. And here are these kids, right? Probably can count how many times they’ve set foot on dry land on one webbed hand. But they’re giggling and all excited, just like I was.\n\nIt’s hard to come back to the water after that, you know? It’s like stepping on Atlantis, or Avalon or some such. It’s another world, one of fire and smoke and dreams.\n\nI feel like I live there, sometimes. That this city, here beneath the waves, this is just visiting. That where I live is somewhere else. Where I live is in my head, and in Amsterdam.\n\nHand me that fishbowl you call a helmet, man. I feel the need to light up another trip home.\n"
  title: Nether Lands
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2006-01-16
  day: 16
  month: '01'
  text: "It was going to be a very, very slow night. Tuesdays usually were. Throw in the hellacious thunderstorm outside, and not even a desperate alcoholic would wander in. I had just decided to close the bar up early when the mother of all lightening bolts hit just outside the window, nearly blinding me. After I rubbed the white circles from my eyes, I was startled to discover a man standing three feet in front of me. He placed a copy of that fat New York telephone directory on the bar and asked me for a beer.\n\n“Where the hell did you come from and why ain’t you wet?” I demanded as I placed a Budweiser draft in front of him, then added, “That’ll be $2.00.”\n\nHe smiled. “’When,’ you mean,” he replied, “and I don’t have any money from this area. But it doesn’t matter,“ he glanced down at one of them big city watches with all kinds of dials and buttons, “because in exactly 1 minute and nine seconds you’re going to say ‘It’s on the house.’”\n\nThunderstorms always bring out the crackpots. “Why would I say that?”\n\nHe chugged half the beer and glanced at his watch again. “Because, in exactly 58 seconds, I’m going to save your life.”\n\nI inched closer to the baseball bat that I keep behind the bar. “You sure about that, mister?”\n\nHe walked to the back corner, where he was practically swallowed up by the shadows. “Because I’m a temporal police officer, and a criminal from the 24th century fled to this time. He needs money. Unfortunately for you, he doesn’t know how to use your century’s projectile weapons. He stole a hair-trigger pistol. You’ll see soon enough.”\n\nJust then, a shirtless maniac came crashing through the door. He was soggy as hell and shaking like a leaf. After he did the drunk-dance up to the bar, he slurred, “Give me all your money, quick,” and yanked some pawnshop gun out of his pocket. He might have been more confused than I was.\n\n“Take it easy…” I started, but my voice was lost in the sound and light from the muzzle of his pistol.\n\nBy the time I remembered where I was, I wasn’t there anymore. Instead, I was against the old-fashioned cash register my boss kept around for that “old-time feel.” My ears were ringing, my back hurt, but somehow, I wasn’t dead. Across the bar, the cop guy downed the last bit of his beer, and the would-be assassin was lying on the floor tied up with some kind of glowing neon rope. The New York phone book was against my shirt. A column of white smoke spun up from a big-ass hole in the front of it.\n\n“Sorry I had to let him shoot,” he said as he plunked the bottle onto the bar. “The DA needed enough evidence to put him away for a long time. What do I owe you for the beer?”\n\nFrom far away, I heard my voice say, “Uh, it’s…it’s on the house”\n\nHe smiled again, pressed a button on his fancy watch, and both of them disappeared in a flash of light. I stood there for ten minutes before making up my mind. I grabbed a bottle of Jack Daniels, walked over to the door, locked it, and sat down in a corner booth with every intention of emptying the thing before going home.\n"
  title: On The House
  year: 2006
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2006-01-17
  day: 17
  month: '01'
  text: "“Simply put, I do not, under any circumstances, want your filthy fingers near me.” Alison was near hysteria by the time Timmy called her. Both had been having a relationship for three years now and it was always the man who made things awkward. Nothing killed a relationship more than wanting to meet the person you’re in love with.\n\nAlison’s face scrunched up as Timmy went on with the video call, “How can you be so ignorant? I mean, this is how people before our time did things and I don’t consider it political.  I just… want to see you and touch you.”\n\n“My God, that’s fucking creepy.  Tim, can you even hear yourself? I’m calling the police if you keep this up.”\n\n“What? No, no. Listen! Sweetie, I’m just bored of this whole cyber thing and phone thing. I want to feel warmth I want to feel you. Can’t you understand what I’m going through?”\n\nA sigh came from her lips.  The girl was losing her interest already. “Timmy, that’s why the internet gives you porn: so that girls like me don’t get pregnant.  No one has to move and lose their job, and when we get married we can set up for insemination. See? Simple.”\n\nThe signal ended with Timmy’s frowning face etched on the plasma reader. How could she do this? He was furious. Already, his computer screen had been buzzing with offers from girls in far, far away places. They knew better than to be located in the same time zone, let alone the same country. Sex became sterile and love was the plastic bag they held it in.\n\nHis fingers went to work, and not the way you would think. He typed and he typed until he found what he was looking for. Little clicks of fingertips tapping at a plastic board led him to an illegal escort service that did, indeed, promote “touching” and even “mouth to mouth playmates.”  Myspace had been around for almost a hundred years.\n\nTimmy worked his magic and made sure the ghost-bot was up and running. First offenders got minimum of five years for even thinking of doing a spit-transplant with another humanoid. Things were sketchy and Tim knew the risks when he dialed the supposedly free website.\n\nSearch upon search turned up old advertisements. Some were funny, and others had become obsolete like penis-enlargements and physical enhancers. Soon, however, he spotted a few girls still active, fishing their lines and listing the interests that piqued more than his curiosity.  Timmy knew he was crossing the line, but something told him that living in a box was wrong. These girls wanted to get what he wanted to give: touch.\n"
  title: Don’t Touch
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-01-18
  day: 18
  month: '01'
  text: "It was two hundred miles to the temperate equator, across the frozen tundra of the planet Dera.  At the start of the trip, in front of the mangled ship, the colonists had cursed the planet, cursed their dead pilot, cursed the persecution of the government that forced them from the center worlds and cursed the faulty engine that crashed them two hundred miles from the land where they could farm, worship their pantheon, and live free.\n\nTen cold nights had finished the cursing, and settled them into a slow march as their supplies dwindled, and the cold sunk deeper into their bones.  Helen, the hearth keeper, and Apollo, the unofficial leader of the expedition, lead the colonists forward, following their doctors navigation towards the warmer climate, that thin warm belt around the belly of the world. So when Helen, usually serene, cursed, it stopped the seventy colonists cold.\n\n“Holy shit! What is that?” screeched Helen, pointing.\n\nA thing, with eyes, many eyes, glassy and yellow, ran across their path and froze, looking back at the colonists curiously.\n\n“That’s a.. .” the doctor paged through his handheld record keeper “Actually, it’s not in the records for this planet.”\n\nHelen grabbed the doctors arm. “How does it even live out here, it doesn’t have fur and it’s freezing!”\n\n“I don’t know.” The doctor put his scanner back in his pocket. “It looks like it’s walking on little mouths.”\n\nApollo cocked his rifle. “I know what it is.” he said, aiming the rifle with both eyes open. “Lunch.”\n"
  title: The Hot Belt
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2006-01-19
  day: 19
  month: '01'
  text: "If you had asked Tyrone’s father why he kept horses, why he rode them with his three boys down Carnaby Street to South End and back, and why he never seemed to use a car, he would remove his Red Sox ballcap, run his hand over his coarse dreadlocks and proceeded to lecture you on the relative cost of equine upkeep versus the rising cost of gas per gallon. The crux of his argument was that expense is in the eye of the beholder, and a proper investment is worth a million shortcuts. Tyrone’s father was an economics professor; he lived for such questions.\n\nNow that he was gone, Tyrone often wondered if his father knew something more than just relative costs and exact change. If those years of prospective financial reports had given him some sort of insight into the future. If he knew the Still would come. If he knew his boys would thread through the rusting hulks of abandoned cars and trucks, just as they had when there had been traffic.\n\n“Is it ever gonna stop snowing?” Jamal, the youngest, asked.\n\n“It’ll stop when you shut up for five minutes!” Curtis said, his horse and his body slouching behind.\n\nTyrone turned back to look at his younger brothers, unsure of what to tell them. He was enough of an adult to understand he should be grateful that the nuclear missile, detonating where it did, only spread the Still and the snow, and the worry of fallout had evaporated so quickly. That the electrics would work again one day, and the snow would stop. He was enough of an adult that he knew that.\n\nBut the parts of him that were still a child felt that three years was far too long a winter already, and Tyrone was afraid that he would live the rest of his life under snow and ice.\n\nThey were hauling this weeks supplies back from the Save-A-Lot down in South End. The store was shut down, but its immense parking lot had evolved into a type of barter market since the Still. Tyrone and his brothers were the only ones from Carnaby Street who could make it all the way down to South End, so they often loaded up their mounts with neighbors’ pots and knives and clocks with gears, to trade for canned vegetables and freshly caught pigeons.\n\n“Catch up now, you morons,” Tyrone called back to his brothers. “Let’s not be out longer than we have to. Not good for the horses.” Not good for us, either, Tyrone thought. The weather was harsh that day and had forced them to take the Martin Luther King Highway. The MLK’s lack of surrounding buildings made them sitting ducks for any gang that wanted to pick them clean. The stunted trees that lined the MLK would not be enough cover for Tyrone’s brothers and horses–much less the haul–but an abandoned SUV could hide damn near a dozen highwaymen before they chose to strike.\n\n“You spooked of the highwaymen, Ty?” Curtis called out, far too loud for caution. “You scared of the boogeyman, too?” He and Jamal laughed, an echoing bray that bounced off the icy metal and glass.\n\n“P’raps hes gotta r’son to be skeered,” came a voice from behind a car. Tyrone cursed his luck and his brothers’ laughter, as a mess of ragged men and women slithered out from around the rusting vehicles. All carried the crude, haphazardly fashioned knives indicative of the highway-folk. Tyrone had heard that of some of the gangs uptown carried guns, but he doubted they used them much. Bullets were far too expensive to replace.\n\nKeeping that notion in mind, Tyrone pulled out his own pistol and aimed it at the closest would-be robber. He tried very hard to keep it from shaking.\n\n“Do you like my hat?” Tyrone asked the highwayman, staring down the barrel. “No? Not a Red Sox fan? I’m not much of one either, though my father was. Despite their losing streak. He was always so sure they would win the World Series one more time. Went to all their games, Dad did. As an investment, he called it. Though my mother always claimed it was more effort than they were worth.”\n\nTyrone had the entire gang’s attention now, if drawing the gun didn’t get it before. He cocked back the hammer with his thumb, surprised at how easy it was. “Some would argue that placing a bullet in your brainpan would be more effort than you’re worth. But I’m willing to look at it as an investment.”\n\n“Y’gonna get’sall, horseman?,” the highwayman said through rotting teeth. His posture was strong, but his eyes weren’t. They worried back and forth.\n\n“Curtis, how many are there?” Tyrone called out, not moving his eyes one bit.\n\n“7…no, 2 more behind that truck.”\n\n“Looks like I am,” Tyrone said. “Might even shoot you again when it’s all over. Unless you and yours decide to leave us alone, and then I get to save this clip for another day.”\n\n“Can’t letcha guh. Not for free.”\n\n“Fair enough,” Tyrone said, and shot the man right between the eyes.\n\nTyrone said his brothers’ names and reined his horse up, and the ragged gang scattered from beneath the powerful brown steed’s hooves. The three horsemen galloped back to Carnaby Street, full load in tow, aware that their “investment” would only last so long.\n\nTyrone’s father had always said that expense is in the eye of the beholder. When Tyrone caught the way his brothers now looked at him, he felt he understood. The adult in him figured that the expense was not too high, that their coldness would past, and the fear in Jamal’s eyes would one day leave. But he was still enough of a child to know it would be far too long before it did.\n\nTyrone wondered if it was enough to be able to walk down a path, even if the snow made it impossible to know where you were going.\n"
  title: The Horsemen Of Carnaby Street
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2006-01-20
  day: 20
  month: '01'
  text: "“Can we say that on television?” Mool asked.  He narrowed his eye at the monitor and raised a turquoise tentacle to his mouth as his other three appendages worked the digital controls.\n\n“Mistep?  Sure.  It’s been clear for a decade.”\n\n“But what about the Xedrin colony?  We got an eight percent pull there last season.”\n\nNick pondered this for a second.  He pushed his rolling chair away from the desk and slid over to the other tech.  “If they’re going to bar us for mistep they’ll bar us for having a Relana, period.  Leave it. It’s edgy.”\n\nMool sighed, a sound that hovered in the air for nearly thirty seconds due to his third lung.  He dragged a tentacle over the trackpad and a scantily-clad blue female broke into pixels before reassembling at a different time signature.\n\n“Molting season is just an excuse for her to turn down the environment,” the Relana complained as her overdue feathers bristled beneath the old ones.  Her bare cheeks flushed to an irritated magenta.  “’Oh, it’s so hot!’” she whined in a horrid approximation of a Terran accent.  “Yeah, maybe on your ice planet, you frigid mistep.”\n\nA tap to the panel, and her image froze.  “Nice,” Nick said.  “Do we have a retort clip?”\n\n“We can skink one.  Kelly was malko about the feathers in the sink last week.”\n\n“Hmm.”\n\nThe cutting room filled with relative silence as the two techs pondered the next scene, Mool still sucking on his fourth tentacle and Nick gnawing on his thumbnail.\n\n“Don’t we have a Penguinair ad?” he finally suggested.  Mool’s skin tightened to inspired attention.\n\n“A Texaco heating one, too!” he said, and his second tentacle yanked to the advert box.  The clips were found almost immediately, and he slid the first cartridge into the control station.  “We could run this pleb for centuries,” he said, as his mouth opened to a grin.  “It’s like it never gets old.”\n"
  title: Meanwhile, at Fox Headquarters…
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-01-21
  day: 21
  month: '01'
  text: "To the farmers the two monks looked like the comedy/ tragedy masks that adorned the theater in town. The older monk was bald, and smiled beatifically, as if every cold breeze was a kiss. The younger monk had a mop of black greasy hair and he frowned, looking again and again at his wet boots.\n\n“Farmer Kerr!” said the older monk joyfully “Farmer Rae, thank you both for coming out here on this day.”\n\n“Anything to catch a thief.” Muttered Farmer Kerr.\n\n“Please! Please!” said the older monk. “No name calling! My apprentice and I have come from very far to resolve the disputes of your world, and it would be very difficult to reach a consensus on this when we start from a place of bitterness. Let us give thanks to the light in each thing, and the blessings of this day.”\n\n“Master, can we just get this thing over with?” said the apprentice. The Master smiled.\n\n“You have to excuse my apprentice, he is going through the stage of Philosophical Disillusionment. He’ll get through it soon enough and move on to Transcendence.”\n\n“I don’t see how. Nothing actually means anything.”\n\n“He is such a joy.”\n\nThe apprentice rolled his eyes. “What exactly is the problem you people have here?”\n\nFarmer Kerr pointed at Farmer Rae. “Rae stole my sheep.”\n\n“Please!” The older Monk waved his hands. “Stealing is so harsh a word. Can we say instead that the sheep seem to reside in his stable now, and you would like them to reside in your stable?”\n\n“Master, if he took them, it’s stealing.”\n\nThe old monk pushed up the sleeves of his brown robe. “Young and delightful apprentice, please observe the rite of joyful silence, the breaking of which results in the most excellent slapping of my stick on your spine!”\n\nThe apprentice made a face and tried to scrape the mud off his boot on the bark of a nearby tree.\n\nThe monk turned to the farmers. “Who would like to tell me the tale of how the sheep moved from one field to another.”\n\n“Well,” said Farmer Rae “Last winter was harsh, very harsh, and some people did not have enough grain saved from the summer and their sheep were left bleating and hungry in the field. I could not stand to see the creatures suffer, so I took them into my stables – with no complaint, I may add, from this man – and I fed them, and kept them warm under my heat lamps, and the sheep survived. Now, here, in the early spring, someone wants his sheep, the sheep that without me would have died, back in his stables. These sheep would have died without me, therefore, they live because of me. I should keep them.”\n\nFarmer Kerr’s face had turned red. “He never asked me if he could take them! They are mine, he should give them back.”\n\n“You do realize that you are arguing about sheep.” said the Apprentice. “That’s all you people do! You argue about sheep and land and fish. Don’t you ever want to see what else is out there in the galaxy? Don’t you realize that we live on the precipice of a black hole? Doesn’t it bother you that the universe circles an orifice of nothingness? Of death?”\n\nThe old monk shook his head, laughing. “My apprentice, he always makes me laugh. Farmer Kerr, by taking in your sheep for the winter, and feeding them, Farmer Rae did you a service. Farmer Rae, you did take these sheep in unsolicited, which was not wise of you. Farmer Kerr rightfully owes you payment of half his flock, but since you did not ask permission for your deeds, your payment is lessened. Unsolicited acts should be those of goodwill, my friend. You, Farmer Rae, shall divide the flock into three parts, and you, Farmer Kerr shall pick the two thirds you desire for your own, leaving one third with Farmer Rae in payment.”\n\nThey both grumbled.\n\n“Consensus, my friends? Are you in peace with the settlement?”\n\n“Friend speaks my mind.” They muttered, not exactly in unison, but somewhere close.\n\n“Can we go now?” asked the apprentice\n\n“Yes, my good and disillusioned apprentice. We shall go. Hold each other in the light, my friends!”\n\n“Those people will be dead in fifty years.” Said the apprentice, as they trudged against the swamp towards their ship.\n\n“Perhaps less.” Said the Master “This does not mean that we do not have this moment. Ah, look! The second sunrise!”\n\nThe land in the west glowed green as the second sun bloomed on the horizon.\n"
  title: The Master and the Apprentice
  year: 2006
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2006-01-22
  day: 22
  month: '01'
  text: "“I’m sorry, will you repeat that?” Admiral Bunka was squinting to hear, even though his very nervous ensign was right beside him.\n\n“We, uh, are at full stop sir. There’s nothing left.” The young man was sweating and the two continued to look out the viewfinder towards…well, nothing. The whole crew was there, staring out into what should have been space but where space stood it wasn’t black.  It wasn’t white.  It wasn’t molecules. It was nothing.\n\n“Nothing?” The Admiral began to blubber off non-sense like an ancient car tries to shoot off its muffler when it starts. He pointed at the viewfinder and glared at his ensign with a twitch just above his left brow. “Ba…d… er… don’t give me that nonsense, ensign! Move us forward at once!”\n\nThe ensign nodded nervously and returned to his post. They’d been traveling for seven years now, at about five hundred times light speed, when they suddenly came to this rather impassable juncture. The ship just stopped, and the crew had been clueless for the past hour trying to decipher just what was in front of them.\n\nSomeone from across the room yelled out, “Ensign! Don’t! We… we can’t!”\n\nBunka rose up and cleared his throat, “And why not, Sergeant Gimble?”\n\nGimble was a stout man, but his eyes glowed with the seriousness of his words, “We… we can’t just go forward into nothing! Then it will cease to be nothing!”\n\n“What fimble-tossle! Of course we can go forward.  It’s…it’s just a cloud.” The whole crew heard the Admiral, but they knew that he was lying. It was like telling someone who just had their arm cut off that they still had use of that limb. The ensign glanced at his Sergeant.\n\n“Well, if nothing is nothing, then maybe if we go into it we’ll change it into something.” In any moment other than this, those words that the ensign spoke would cause any man to bleed from the eyes, nose, and ears. As it was, the words unfolded a debate in the main cockpit.\n\nAdmiral Bunka was the first to try and add in his opinion, “Well, if we’re next to nothing, then nothing is next to something. Therefore, nothing would be something. It can’t be something if it’s nothing.”\n\n“Aren’t we looking at nothing? Isn’t it something we’re looking at?” said the Sergeant as he stood up to get a better look at nothing.\n\n“Uhm.  No. We can’t describe what we’re looking at.  We may not even be looking at it. It’s barely even an it. Nothing, people.  We’re talking about nothing here.” Now that the ensign had everyone thoroughly confused everyone on the deck, the three took a moment to look at each other before turning back to the viewfinder. The definition of nothing had these men absolutely confused, and they were suffering from a mild case of brainpan rupture.\n\nAdmiral Bunka appeared understandably perplexed, and rather upset at the whole situation. He stood up straight and nodded in personal acceptance of the decision he had made.  “Full reverse then! We’ll go back the other way.”\n\nThe Ensign returned to his seat and began typing the orders until he stopped and glanced back to Admiral Bunka, “Sir, wouldn’t that be going away from nothing?”\n"
  title: Next to Nothing
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2006-01-23
  day: 23
  month: '01'
  text: "Here in the Quiet Dark, a raygun can be your dearest friend. It warms to your touch, responds to your requests, and clears your way. It is the best partner one can expect to have in the Quiet Dark.\n\nI’ve had Lizzette here for longer than most of my friends. Certainly longer than my living friends. It is not a weapon, it is not a tool. It is a partner, a friend. A lover.\n\nThat’s not queer, or nothing. But Lizzette’s saved my life far too often to be anything but a lover. And here in the Quiet Dark, love is a rare and flowered thing. You best find it where you can. Some of us up here, some claim to love their crate. But that’s a parasitic relationship, and any crate knows that, from the little cargo rockets to those faster-than-light frigates. They know who runs ’em to the scrap heap. No, me and Lizzette, here, we’re partners.\n\nI tried giving her, up you know. Lizzette, the crate, the Quiet Dark, all of it. Settled down on a orb, found a woman who didn’t care when last I felt the sun and tried to live a life of noise and brightness.\n\nI was warned. They all warned me, just like I’m warning you now. It never lasts. Not for us. Not after all the time in the Quiet Dark. I saw stars collide, you know? Watched a dark hole form and drag in the cosmos inside it. You think I could explain that to someone used to blue above? You think you’ll be able to?\n\nThe whole time, I wanted Lizzette there, at my hip. She’d been with me, she’d seen it all. But my girl didn’t want none of that. Proper men don’t carry guns, she said. But Lizzette wasn’t just a gun. She was my partner.\n\nDon’t go thinking you’re any different. I can read a man’s scars as well as a veiwport. You’ve seen too much, same as me.\n\nI suppose a fight between Lizzette and such a woman was destined to end only one way. I wish I had something to remember her by, like that necklace she always wore. But that went in the blast.\n\nProbably just as well. I have Lizzette, after all. What more do I need, way out here?\n"
  title: Object Of My Desire
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2006-01-24
  day: 24
  month: '01'
  text: "After a while, you forget that it’s summer. Months and weeks become meaningless numbers on the monitor’s clock, and you don’t bother asking anyone what they are doing on the weekend. You know. They’re typing. You know.\n\nYou wait for the end of the shift and walk to the bar, seven blocks of August rain. “Beer,” you say, and the man obeys. Drops a pint on the table in front of you. You drum your fingers upon the wood, imagining text on the wall.\n\nThe beer is flat. The room is flat. They’ve left you hanging, like they always do.\n\nHours later, after you thought you’d fought it off, you surface in the lobby but the receptionist does not smirk. She’s used to this. You know she’s used to this.\n\n“Overtime?” she says, and you nod. Overtime. Undertime. Time. They sit you down in the room lit only by the blue of a monitor, and you unfold into the refresh rate of the digital screen.\n\nIt seems like the document is typing itself, but in an accidental glance you see your hands floating over the keyboard. They seem to be plastic. You realize that it’s been days since you slept.\n\nYour bell tolls eight hours and you push yourself up, forcing numb muscles to move to the door. You walk to the bar, seven blocks of August rain. “Beer,” you say, and the man obeys. Drops a pint on the table in front of you. You drum your fingers upon the wood, imagining text on the wall.\n"
  title: Good Morning, Sunshine
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2006-01-25
  day: 25
  month: '01'
  text: "“Space-faring monkies with a mirror fetish?”\n\n“Yup. In The Day Ambrosia Paled by Kinstev Ramod, chapter six.”\n\n“Damn. Okay, uhh… how about ice cream that turns your teeth green and carries a rare strand of the bubonic plague? Unleashed on a modern colony?”\n\n“As a government experiment: Fire Warden by Jack Strapley. As a mad scientist’s coup de grace: On Being Trembleton by Emilia d’Oernga. With a time travel sub-plot: Terra Infirma by Marguerite Bloc. Sorry, Glenn. It’s all been done.”\n\nGlenn groaned and leaned back in his chair, running his hand through the long part of his hair and pulling it out over his eyes, staring at the brown strands in frustration. “Damn it all! How am I supposed to write if there aren’t any original ideas?”\n\n“Hey, come on, Glenn.” Neil grimaced at his friend in sympathy. “You’re just not thinking outside the box. Look, I know it’s tough, but there’s got to be something you can do that’s not already in here.” He gestured at the Central Database terminal he’d been using, the letters on the keyboard nearly worn off from the fruitless searches he’d made.\n\nNeil’s words were encouraging, but his tone was not—it’d been months since Glenn had come up with his last viable story idea, and he still remembered the celebration they’d had. Now their fridge was bare, and there wasn’t a drop of alcohol in the house. Neil let out a long sigh. “Look… maybe you need a rest, yeah? Let’s go out for a while. We’ll go to the club, see Jeannie and the guys, and just relax. I bet it’d help. What do you say?”\n\nGlenn made a noise of frustration and sat up straight again. “No. No! We’re almost out of cash. What good is going out going to do? That’ll just make things worse. I have to think of something, and fast!”\n\nNeil sighed and turned back to the terminal. “Glenn, we’ve been at this for hours. You’re gonna make yourself sick.”\n\n“No. No, I’ve got one.” Glenn turned sharply, his face lighting up as his eyes latched onto Neil. He paused dramatically. “How about… a guy with writer’s block trying to figure out what to put in a story?”\n\nNeil groaned loudly and threw a stylus at Glenn. “Do I even have to answer? I think it’d break the database if I tried a search on that. Billions of billions of hits.”\n\nGlenn chuckled. “Yeah, yeah, I know. Geez. I just wish that for once I could write something without caring that someone else already did it.”\n\n“Wouldn’t sell.”\n\n“Yeah, I know. I know.”\n\nThe two men stared in silence for a moment, Glenn at the ceiling, Neil at the screen that was nothing more than one massive search field.\n\n“Neil?”\n\n“Yeah?”\n\n“How about a story about a writer who hacks into the Central Database and erases the old records so that editors will think his story is original?”\n\n“You know,” Neil said with a slow grin, “I don’t think that one’s been done yet.”\n"
  title: Writer's Block
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2006-01-26
  day: 26
  month: '01'
  text: "Turnstyle aimed carefully, took into account the drift from the barely oscillating fan, and hit his brother Alphonse in the back of the head with a cigarette butt.\n\n“Quit that,” Ingram said. Watching this is why she never liked being at Turnstyle’s place, but it beat staying at school.\n\n“Why? He ain’t gonna notice. Fucking walltalker.” Turnstyle lit another cigarette and offered one to Ingram. She shook her head violently. “I think I still got some nanites left from the other night. I know for a fact there’s soy sauce in the kitchen.”\n\n“Not on your life. My stomach still hasn’t recovered from the cooking oil wine you made last time.” Ingram started absent-mindedly picking at the exposed foam that blistered through a hole in the sofa.\n\n“That was good shit,” Turnstyle said. “Good shit. You’re crazy. We could go see if we could find Al’s Roulette stash.”\n\n“Oh, hell no!” Ingram said. “You do know why they call it ‘Roulette’ right? ‘Cause every time you take it there’s a chance your brain’s gonna explode! You wanna be a walltalker?”\n\n“Maybe. Least Al’s never bored.” Turnstyle looked at his brother releasing a steady stream of words toward the wallpaper. Alphonse’s voice was barely above a whisper, and his face was blank. But he never stopped talking.\n\n“I invented Roulette,” Turnstyle said, abruptly.\n\n“Fuck off.”\n\n“No, seriously. Somebody had to turn grandpa’s stroke medicine into a rec drug. Why couldn’t it have been me? You’re saying I don’t see the entertainment value of something that connects your neurons in new ways?”\n\n“First off, you don’t even know what a neuron is–”\n\n“Do too!”\n\n“Secondly, if you had, you could afford some proper alcohol, and you wouldn’t have to reprogram the decontamination nanites.”\n\n“Well, yeah…but…” Turnstyle scrunched down into the sofa. He took what was left of his cigarette and flicked it–still lit–at Alphonse. He missed by a good three feet.\n\n“Was that lit? You’re going to burn the walls down, you are. What would your Pa say, you did that?”\n\n“Same thing he always says: ‘Fuck! Why aren’t you in school?’ ” Tunrstyle stared at his 14-year-old older brother, who was staring at the wall. “Goddamn walltalker.”\n\n“Ah, don’t be like that. Go get your soy sauce.”\n\n“You sure?”\n\n“Why not?” Ingram said. “Nothing else to do.”\n"
  title: Walltalkers
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2006-01-27
  day: 27
  month: '01'
  text: "Some years ago – never mind how long precisely – having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on Io, I thought I would sail about a little and see the most distant reaches of space.\n\nDespite the limitations of technology, the endlessness that spread before our ship pulled me with a unique gravity. The bounty itself was naught. In retrospect, it was a meaningless and futile obsession, but the captain persisted. I followed, as I was wont to do given the limited quarters of the starship, and it never occurred to me that the quest was impossible. After all, I longed for nothing but the sight of stars through the viewscreen, so I was content to drift along in the wake of his unwavering determination.\n\nTW was regarded as the most feared man in the seemingly endless reaches of the solar system, and despite the minimal reward I was compelled by the captain’s inexplicable, unwavering persistence to pursue the ghost of the pale ship through the asteroid belt, through the orbits of nine planets, and through the gentle and burning licks of solar flares.\n\n“He’s out there,” the captain said. “He’s out there.”\n\nTW had claimed innumerable victims, and even in my green and formless years the myths had flickered across television screens as the magnetic residue of a legend. I must admit that I was infatuated with the concept. When the captain himself raised the bounty my interest was piqued, and the lot of us were incited to impossible action.\n\n“Have you sighted the ship?” he broadcast over all frequencies, but the replies were foreboding or outright prohibitive.\n\nIn my quarters, I dreamed of the solar system stretching out before me like an arm that never reached a hand. Doubtless, he dreamed of whiteness streaking the dark of space.\n\n“He’s out there,” he said. “He’s still out there.”\n\nMonths passed like days, occupied by the dreariness of daily duty and the shadow of passion that the captain cast upon us. I kept a log of activities, though it was surely tedious by the standards of occupied worlds.\n\n“He’s out there,” the captain said. “He’s still out there.” Despite the protests of the senior staff, he continued. Our transmissions were denied by ships which busied themselves with far more likely prospects.\n\nBehind me, Io was a frozen world. I watched the great shroud of space roll on as it rolled five thousand years ago, and I followed orders and monitored the empty radio broadcasts. Space collapsed into distance and the blackness of the signal screen revealed no blips of existence.\n\n“He’s out there,” the man said. “He’s still out there.”\n"
  title: TW
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-01-28
  day: 28
  month: '01'
  text: "We know its flimsy façade, we know it’s a broken promise waiting.\n\nThey said that if we kept working, someday we could make enough to send our kids to college, never mind the dying, the slaughter in the world. Remember the holocaust, they said, but forget the horror of today. Love the planet, but buy a car that guzzles foul gas. Study hard, get a good job, spend your cash on trinkets and drugs. They want us to live with success and debt, hand in unlovable hand.\n\nThe thing that still gets me is that no one noticed. It was a hunch that no matter how obvious we were, the fact that we were middle class, well-dressed white people would keep us safe. It was racist, and oligarchic and it delighted and disgusted me that it worked. We looked like we were doing what we were supposed to. We studied hard, politics, chemistry, biology, psychology, physics, film, sociology, philosophy, and computer science. We studied hard. We learned how the world works, and now we plan to change it.\n\nWe can build a hundred different kinds of bombs. We can genetically engineer a bacterium that could give everyone colds for weeks. We can send you a virus in the mail. We could break your servers. You cannot find us by your profiles, we come from different faiths, we are poor and wealthy, we are students, union workers, and businessmen. We could kill billions.\n\nYou are lucky. We are not as brainwashed as you wanted us to be. We will use the power we have to recreate the system through the frequency of sound, through the meter of light. We will alter the status quo; we are moving slick and sweet over your mega-conglomerate. We will be the underground and the mass consumer appeal. In every dot of perceivable digital light, we will be sending our message right to the brains of your friends, your children and your pets. You can’t hide, we are the mainstream.\n\nThis is the Revolution of the Meek, stay tuned.\n"
  title: Revolution of the Meek
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2006-01-29
  day: 29
  month: '01'
  text: "Tomasine Acero folded her hands on her desk, and then opened them in a manner that she hoped would suggest both an understanding on her part and an acceptance of the inevitability of fate. “You have to understand their point of view,” she said. “They are trying to sell a house. You are saying that you want to rent it before you buy, well, that makes them uncomfortable.”\n\nMr. and Mrs. Smar were not calmed by Acero’s hand motions, Mrs. Smar in particular. “Uncomfortable? We’ve been living in a damn Honvar ever since the Caern came! All our clothes are in plastic bags…there wasn’t any time to pack.”\n\n“I understand,” Acero said.\n\n“I don’t think you do,” Mr. Smar said, gripping his wife’s shoulders tightly. “We just want a house in our old colony. And we need it before our Ellroy starts school. We don’t want to uproot the poor guy, not after the raid.”\n\n“He saw what happened to our neighbors,” Mrs. Smar said, her eyes on the floor. “He saw it before we did. If he hadn’t, we wouldn’t have made it out in time. But my poor boy, having to see…those pieces flying, and all that blood. We need this house, Ms. Acero.”\n\n“And I understand that.” Acero had her fingertips down on the desk, supporting the palms. Hands like sheltering structures. “But you aren’t the only one from your colony looking for houses that survived the raid to come back to. And the seller, he wants proof that you aren’t going to rent for a year and be on your way.”\n\n“You want proof?” Mr. Smar almost leapt out of his chair. “Go by my house. Go by the burned-out crater that used to be where my family lived. Go and see the charred and mutilated body parts that used to be old Mr. Fufferds and his wife. Maybe they can cut those bits down from the trees while they’re at it. We survived a raid, Ms. Acero. My own father couldn’t even say that. I think we’ve suffered enough.”\n\nAcero found herself involuntarily self-hugging. She shook away the image of some kindly retired couple strung about a yard, and the alien mind that considered such a dismemberment amusing. She placed her palms together. It was time to project strength and resolve. “What the seller is asking for is some sort of deposit. Your Honvar, maybe?”\n\n“Can’t do it,” Mr. Smar said. “Our ship’s our livelihood.”\n\n“Well, in that case, how about your boy? You could give the seller him.”\n\n“I’m not selling my son into slavery,” Mrs. Smar said.\n\n“He wouldn’t be a slave,” Acero said. Hands open again, fingers apart, bent out at the wrist. Imply trust. “He would be an indentured servant. Only until the seller is convinced of your intent to buy. He’d still be able to attend his old school, see his old friends, only his time outside of school would belong to the seller.”\n\n“Is there any other option?”\n\n“Not unless you want a colony further out, Mrs. Smar. But I wouldn’t suggest it. The further out you go, the closer you are to Caern worlds…” Acero massaged her temple, looked to the left, and projected pure, unadulterated concern. “..,.I just wouldn’t want anything more to happen to you.”\n\nMr. and Mrs. Smar looked at each other and then simultaneously turned around in their chairs to watch their six year-old son play through the window to the lobby,\n\n“Where do we sign?”\n"
  title: Where The Heart Is
  year: 2006
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2006-01-30
  day: 30
  month: '01'
  text: "The locksmith knelt down to examine the mangled keyhole in Exetor’s office door. He turned his head and raised a brow at the man seated behind the desk, who was typing with twelve fingers and paying little attention to the tradesman. “So uh, how did this happen?”\n\nA grumble came from the broad-shouldered man at the desk, “I was in a hurry, all right? Haven’t you ever broken something while in a hurry?”  Exetor said before reading the words ‘Bionic Locksmith’ on the back of the tradesman’s uniform.  “Oh… I guess you haven’t.”\n\nExetor felt weird in his office, talking to thirteen people on the transmitter in his brain and watching his door being fixed. The scene was a bit awkward with silence, so he sat up and decided to be nice for once. “So, are you natural born or implanted?”\n\n“Excuse me?” The locksmith turned his head with a look of surprise on his face and annoyance at being distracted from his job.\n\n“I mean, are you born or implant? Not a hard question… wait, you’re not one of those liberal bionics, are ya?”\n\nEven though Exetor was digging himself into a bigger hole, the man just toyed with the rim of his hat and went back to examining the lock. “Born with it.”\n\n“Ah, that’s cool. I’m an implant myself. Yes, these babies cost me a pretty credit.” He held up his hands, wiggling all twelve fingers. The glint in Exetor’s eyes changed constantly with the numerous moods he was forced into due to the numerous conversations, but he kept a smile for the locksmith. “The transmitter and the language translator were both in-grown after the process.”\n\n“Yeah, well, you do something long enough…” The locksmith started, as his eyes narrowed to better see inside the lock.\n\nExetor interrupted again, “That’s what they say, isn’t it? Do something long enough and it adjusts for you? I’m surprised the nano-people haven’t made it into an ad campaign.” He rubbed his chin, considering the money one would make from such an endeavor. His guest remained silent. The locksmith was beginning to regret working for the big wigs.\n\n“You know, man… I hear that if a bionic nympho goes at it long enough, her thing starts to-“\n\n“Whoa!” The tradesman had heard enough and set a solid glare with huge pupils towards Exetor as a look of disgust etched itself across his features. “Look, buddy. I’m here to see if I can fix the door and get you a new key. I don’t need to hear your theories about sex and bionics.”\n\nThe businessman frowned then shrugged and went back to rapid typing. His eyes already transfixed on the business going by at alarming speeds displayed on the screen.\n\nWith a sigh, the man at the door stood back up and started putting away his tools; he put on a pair of shades. “I’ll grow a key for you by tomorrow. It’ll be my ring finger so it’ll cost you a bit more.”\n"
  title: Growing Pains
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2006-01-31
  day: 31
  month: '01'
  text: "“The fact remains, ladies and gentlemen, we have to meet the Geert price,” Fawzia Chiranov said. “We ought to do better than the Geert price, but due to the nature of our company, we’ll probably get by merely with meeting them. But I will tell you this, we lose this bid, we lose the planet.”\n\nNaturally, this was scoffed at. Fawzia was used to this. She charged a great deal for her opinions and consultations, and she was paid for them because she was always right.\n\n“You mean, we’ll lose the contract.” Usamah Afifi had a tendency to bob his shriveled bald head when he talked. Fawzia found it difficult to look at him and not to picture a turtle in a Brooks Brothers suit. “We’ll lose the bid. We’ll get ‘em next time.”\n\n“No,” Fawzia said. “We won’t. There won’t be a next time. We lose this bid, we’re finished. The Geert will have control of the Earth.”\n\n“I think you’re being a little too xenophobic, Ms. Chiranov,” said Eugeny Ruzhan from the head of the table. Ruzhan was considered a war hero; he had designed the robot that won the Kasi War. He still wore his medal pinned to the front of his coat, though the Kasi War had been over long before Fawzia was born. “The Geert are shrewd businessmen, but they aren’t out to take over the world!”\n\nThe board laughed at this. Fawzia only scowled.\n\n“That is where you are wrong, Mr. Ruzhan. The Geert are a conquering people. We forget what that means, these days. But they are. They have been buying up and sending out of business Earthan companies for the past few years. We’re one of the last ones, and if Aczel Interplanetary falls, the Geert will control the commerce and economy of the people of Earth.”\n\n“How could they have done this?” Jit Shiew Han asked. She had recently had her face redone, and she looked younger than Fawzia, despite being twice her age. It made it difficult for Fawzia to take her seriously.\n\n“By being single-minded on a cultural level. Despite the appearance of multiple Geert industries, they all have the same goal: overrun a planet, absorb its workforce as slaves, move on to the next. They’ve done this on a dozen worlds already.”\n\n“What do you suppose we do?” Afifi asked. “We’re bidding as low as we can. How can we hope to compete?”\n\n“We stop paying our workers,” Fawzia said. “We stop paying them, we work them day and night, and we provided them with only the most basic nutrition.”\n\n“You’re talking slavery,” Afifi huffed.\n\n“I’m talking of the only defense from slavery. We don’t do this, we lose this contract, there will not be another. Which means it will only be a matter of time before this board reports to Geert masters.”\n\n“It can’t just be down to us,” Han said, her voice quavering. “What about Calaerts? Ghenadie Tech? Easwarau?”\n\n“Calaerts is three months away from filing bankruptcy,” Fawzia said. “Ghenadie Tech is being forced into a plan which will downsize them considerably, and it’s only a matter of time before they are absorbed by a larger Geert corporation. And Easwarau—”\n\nRuzhan cut her off. “Easwarau was bought outright by the Geert. Saw it on the feed this morning.” Fawzia nodded. “Send out a memo to our employees. We’re following Ms. Chiranov’s suggestions to the letter.”\n\n“They’ll never go for it,” Afifi said. “They’ll riot.”\n\n“They’ll go along with the plan,” Fawzia said. “Just remind them their freedom is at stake.”\n"
  title: Chains Of Commerce
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2006-02-01
  day: '01'
  month: '02'
  text: "The first day the sun didn’t rise, it was business as usual. The trains ran, the offices were open, and we just used a little more electricity than normal. We went to work, fed our fish, and gossiped about the news coverage while waiting for the bus. Over dinner the television told us what a strange event this was and how many records it had broken.\n\nThe second day the sun didn’t rise, we thought it odd. Our gossip spread to the cubicles and the break room and we listened to the radio, curious and nonplussed. It was weird, we told our coworkers and our friends and the people we met on the bus. It was definitely very weird.\n\nThe fifth day the sun didn’t rise, we complained. Extra lights were brought in and the power companies grew worried. The television said that California had adopted a mandatory rolling business schedule in which workdays were completed in shifts to reduce power usage. There was talk of rationing and of national disasters.\n\nThe tenth day the sun didn’t rise, we were panicked. We went to our doctors, our psychiatrists, our personal trainers, begging for help. The pharmaceutical companies had to keep their factories open twenty-four hours a day to produce enough Prozac.\n\nThe thirteenth day the sun didn’t rise, a national emergency was declared. We heard that it was the same everywhere, that no country had been spared. Our crops failed and our businesses closed. Thousands of us were dead from exposure or suicide. Our leaders gave speech after speech and our scientists despaired.\n\nOn the eighteenth day the sun didn’t rise, we locked ourselves in our homes and apartments. We looted closed stores and fought over food. Our water stopped running and we pissed in the streets.\n\nOn the thirty-seventh day the sun didn’t rise, neither did we.\n"
  title: We All Fall Down
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2006-02-02
  day: '02'
  month: '02'
  text: "This way, she says, and I follow.\n\nThere was no real direction, of course. The surface had been frozen beneath a mile of ice long before humans evolved, but still, I follow. Two hours after we lost our way in the snowstorm, all directions have become meaningless.\n\nWhen I was a child I read a story about an oceanaut who followed a rope to the bottom of the sea. That was how they did it, then: you held on to the rope, buried beneath suits of rubber and glass to hold off the thickest weight of the ocean, and when you were ready to surface, you followed it. Anyhow, he somehow lost his grip at the blackened base of the sea, where the heaviness of water prevented anyone from floating to the top. Down was up, up was down. So he chose a direction and swam.\n\nObviously, the guy survived to tell the tale. If you listen to it like that, it’s not even a very good story, but here’s what I remember: as he was moving, having committed to the direction with the last of his oxygen, the light of his helmet revealed small bubbles. They were moving quickly over the glass, and when he saw them, he knew. He was moving up. He was moving in the same direction as the air.\n\nHere, though, that’s irrelevant. There are no air bubbles, and there’s no way to tell left from right. The needle of the compass has frozen in place and the horizon is a blinding blur of white and silver, so pale that I can’t tell the ground from the air. The sun pours over the atmosphere without revealing its position. Her body, coated in thick rubber and plastic and thrown blackly against the endless white, continues on. It leaves unshadowed footsteps in her wake. She says nothing further, though it’s possible that our communicators have frozen. They weren’t designed to stand cold for this long.\n\nShe keeps walking, as if she knows where she’s going. I follow, because that’s all I can do.\n"
  title: No Exit
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-02-03
  day: '03'
  month: '02'
  text: "“Let me tell you about the revolution.” said Hack as I lay back, enjoying my smoke. Hack and I engaged in the worlds’ two oldest professions. I sold sex, and Hack stole stuff. Recently, Hack had been doing well enough to become a frequent client.\n\nHack wasn’t so bad, for a geek. His hair was a greasy mess and his stubble was scratchy on my skin but he always brought weed when he came over. I considered the drugs a peace offering for what would happen later. Hack pulled small black box out of his backpack, which was made of melted tires. “This box will unlock your house.”\n\nI watched the smoke leave my lips in a stream and raised a sleepy eyebrow. “What do you mean?” The more time we spent talking about his projects, the less time I would have to spend naked. I might actually get another hour out of it.\n\n“Just this, Jack.” Jack was the name I had told him, not very feminine, but I thought it sounded edgy. He slapped the box on the wall, and it whirred, blinking red. I found the color mesmerizing as it faded in and out, a soundless chime.\n\nHack stroked the box. “This is something I put together from old parts, but it’s made on a code that I found floating around the third world net. It unlocks all the content in your house, the music, the shows, even the programming on your PC. It configures your whole system to open source.”\n\nI sat up, trying to shake off the haze. “Oh shit Hack, what the fuck did you do?” I looked at the evil box on my wall and felt nauseous. “Holy crap! If the cops get a link on this I’m fucked!”\n\n“Calm down Jack, this is very new stuff. Third world. They are not going to get a link on it.”\n\nI couldn’t be pacified. I was not a child. The red blinking light suddenly looked like a police siren. “Hack! You know how illegal open source stuff is. Why the hell did you bring that here? If the cops find it, I’m going to be in jail forever.” I got up and pulled on my soft velour overcoat, not even bothering to throw on my dress. “I’m leaving. I do not want to be here when the cops arrive and find the open source.”\n\n“Stop freaking out Jack! The drugs are making you paranoid.” Hack got up and walked over to me, putting his big hands on my shoulders. “I configured this thing to avoid police scans. I’ve had it running for weeks at my place and I’ve yet to see a cop.”\n\nIt occurred to me that his program to avoid police scans must be why he was tipping so well. “Really?”\n\n“Yeah, really. If you want, we can reset your house’s program when I leave.”\n\nI shrugged. It wasn’t my house anyway; the place belonged to the madam. “Sure, okay.” I said, and giggled suddenly, thinking about Bera getting busted for open sourcing. It would serve her right.\n\n“With this, you can get your shit to play on anything; you can rip it and trade it or whatever. You don’t have to buy new tech to make things run.”\n\n“You’re shitting me.”\n\n“No. The third world uses this kind of thing to rip and sell stuff back to us on the cheap. It’s illegal, but the laws in some places are pretty flexible.”\n\nI wondered how long I could keep him talking. “That’s cool.” I said, playing nice.\n\nHack handed me another blunt. “Smoke up babe. This is the revolution.”\n"
  title: Open Source
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2006-02-04
  day: '04'
  month: '02'
  text: "Marcus crooked his fingers around each of his eyeballs, and plucked them out with a small “pop.” He unceremoniously placed the squishy orbs in a small jar of salt water on his desk.\n\n“Marcus! Look at me when I’m talking to you!” Stella was leaning against the door frame as she yelled; she hadn’t quite gotten used to the half- inch diameter pole that now connected the top  half of her ribcage to the lower half of her pelvis. It was still a bit of a balancing act for her to stay upright.\n\n“I can’t look at you,” Marcus said, slowly spinning around in his chair. The light glinted softly off the modular plugs deep within his empty eye sockets. “I’ve removed my eyes. In a minute I’m going to do the same thing to my ears so I can play Galactic Conquest Online. I just got to Level 546, so if you’ll excuse me, I have a spaceship to select.”\n\nStella looked at the game module in Marcus’s lap and seethed. “You spend more time on that game than you do with me! I go through all this surgery so I can look beautiful for you–”\n\n“Don’t start that! I never asked you to remove your midriff! That was your decision! You’re always getting things removed. You know what I miss? Your toes! You think I like feeling those cold stiletto monstrosities you call feet up against my legs at night?”\n\n“You know what I miss? I miss you! You’re always plugged in  to this goddamn game!” Her multicolored eyes blazing orange and red, Stella snatched the game module away from her boyfriend.\n\n“You bitch! You fucking whore!” Marcus waved his arms blindly. His left arm made contact with Stella, but only succeeded in knocking her up against his chest of drawers. The game module skittered across the floor. Stella found her body crumpled and unresponsive; the impact had broken her torso pole in half. She tried to get up, but only succeeded in spastically kicking Marcus’s desk.\n\nMarcus got out of his chair in order to better feel about for the game module. He heard Stella kicking his desk, but he didn’t turn around to her until he heard the crash of glass, as a jar fell off his desk.\n\nIt wasn’t until he heard the squish and pop underneath his boot that he realized what the jar had held.\n"
  title: Mongrels
  year: 2006
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2006-02-05
  day: '05'
  month: '02'
  text: "Abigail used to cry her self to sleep every night because of another black eye, because of another bruise on her that she’d have to write off the next day. Her cheeks were stained and her doors were always locked. She never slept because she was afraid he’d wake her up. Abigail’s boyfriend was a complete and utter prick.\n\nSo one day, little Abby got herself a new boyfriend. Her old flame was always the jealous type, but Abby’s new fling burned him down like he was kindling.\n\nNow Abby is happy with her new boy, and no other man will dare lay a finger on her. They walk hand in hand wherever they go and he glares at all the men before they even look her way. She knows how to turn him on would-be muggers; she knows how their faces change when they see him with her. First second is lust, second one is terror. Third? They don’t get a third.\n\nAbby’s walking with her boy toy down the West-side block. You know, the West-side of Centuria.  The place where even the United Militia won’t go. She’s walking with an easy stride because her boyfriend is walking next to her. They’re both shined up pretty, and both have grins that could scare the shit out of anyone with half a brain. However, as we all know, mutoids don’t have the luxury of half a brain.\n\nJunkies. Criminal. Vile flesh-eating beasts. The mutoids killed them all, but there’s Abigail Winters still walking strong down the West-side block, hand in hand with her boy, bright as a daisy.\n\nLet me tell you about Abigail.\n\nLittle Abigail came from a small part of New Utopia with a black eye and 63 credits to her name. She had an abusive boyfriend and showed him what justice really meant. They called her Little Abigail before she went to the West-side block because she was just above five feet tall and slender as a pylon beacon rod.\n\nNow they call her Little Abby. Little Abby took her boyfriend to the West-side block and shot the fuck out of thirty eight mutoids before walking back into the main district with not a drop of blood on her.\n\nLittle Abby kissed her boyfriend’s cheek while he was still leaking smoke from his mouth.\n\nThe New RKX-Z Raygun. On Sale Now.\n"
  title: Love the Gun
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-02-06
  day: '06'
  month: '02'
  text: "“Dude. I’ve found it.” The Systems voice chimed pleasantly from the walls of the house. Ryan looked up hopefully from his dinner, his brown hair falling into his face.\n\n“What? The program?”\n\n“No. Better.”\n\nRyan shook his head, turning back to his baby back ribs. “I asked you to find the program.”\n\n“Dude. Shut up. This is way better than the free porn finder program you wanted. I found you a wife.” There was a bit of pride in the Systems masculine voice.\n\nRyan wiped his mouth. “What?”\n\n“Three months ago you expressed the desire for a long term mate. I found her.”\n\nRyan ran to his computer room, where his System sphere was glowing with white light. “System, I don’t want a wife!”\n\n“Hey, User Interface? You were the one whining at me, looking for free scenes of mating. The least you could do is thank me.”\n\nRyan crossed his arms, gazing at the sphere. “What does she look like?”\n\n“You know, that is typical of you. I go to all this trouble to match your personality type, ph balance, find someone who would love you despite your neurotic fits and the first question you ask is what she looks like. Shallow bastard.”\n\nRyan rolled his eyes. “It was just a question.”  There was a pause and a three dimensional hologram illuminated the middle of the room. It was a girl in her middle twenties, wearing a baby blue sweater and silver pants. She was a little chunky around the waist, but she had cute pouty lips and smooth, tan skin.\n\n“Oh. Huh.” Ryan shrugged and scratched his stubble. “She seems nice, I guess.”\n\n“What the flying hells do you want? A holostar? I can’t even get you to find all the places on your own face when you shave. Tarla gets a 90% hygene rating. May I remind you that you clock in at 71%? You have no place to be picky. Besides, she’s wonderful.”\n\n“I don’t know. I suppose she’s okay. She’s got very shiny hair.’\n\n“Your damn right she does. That’s natural too. She makes more money that you do, and her System is quite comprehensive.”\n\n“You’re not matching me up with a woman based on her System, are you?”\n\n“No, but it is a nice System.”\n\nRyan tapped his foot. “I think you’re in love with her System.”\n\n“I matched you up on all the personality traits and despite the fact that your civilized scores are far from perfect, she is willing to meet you.”\n\nRyan’s eyes were wide. “You talked to her?”\n\n“I communicated with her System.” Ryan’s System sighed musically. “Wonderful, dynamic System. Her System predicts a 96% chance she would like to meet someone like you.”\n\nSwallowing hard, Ryan put a hand on the sphere. “You really think she’ll like me?”\n\n“Oh yeah. Her father was a neurotic gamer with delusions of grandeur and a heart of gold. She’ll love you. Especially if you cook her that rice noodle dish you eat every day.”\n\n“That stuff is good! Don’t make fun! You don’t have taste buds.”\n\n“No. But I do have taste.”\n"
  title: Made in the System
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2006-02-07
  day: '07'
  month: '02'
  text: "The sound from the slums is no longer the groan of bodies. Hunger cries, cussing, gunshots, the crackle of fires in old trash barrels—all of these are gone. Our poor no longer freeze or hunger.\n\nI hear it every day on my way home from work, from beneath the narrow steel and concrete bridge that I cut across to make the 20:41 train. It’s the reason why so few commuters take this route, even though it’s a shortcut around the backlog of foot traffic in Darby Square. The noise comes from below, so far down that I can’t see them—not that I look. But I can hear them.\n\nIt’s a clattering noise, the metallic clicking of limbs or antennae against hard rock and metal. I hear that the streets down on the low levels aren’t always steel, but it sounds like it. Sometimes I hear a low thrum, dozens of them moving at once, milling around aimlessly and hopelessly without work or power. Sometimes it’s only one, and I can follow the mournful clinks as it wanders from outlet to outlet, cable extending and retracting at each one, jacking in to search for even the smallest hint of stray electricity.\n\nSome activists claim that abandoning them is cruel, that it behooves us to care for our creations or at least to destroy them when they’ve outlived their usefulness, but the city can’t be bothered with the costs. I don’t think anyone pays much attention to those fringe groups, anyway. It was one thing to protest cruelty to living things, but to machines? Even the liberals thought that was taking things a little far.\n\nMe, I don’t buy into all this ‘machine rights’ bullshit in the activist pamphlets, but I do think something should be done about those things. I know the government says it’s too late, that it’d take more time and manpower and money to round up all the little creeps than they’d get back from selling the recyclable parts, but hell. It’s only getting worse.\n\nMost people don’t ever hear the noise. If you stick to the main corridors, you won’t. They’re all insulated anyway, so sounds from the lower levels don’t filter through. When I have to catch the late train, though, the mournful clatter from below makes my skin crawl.\n\nThe fate of the lower classes has been a platform for re-election since history books were invented, but times have changed. Politicians say that beating poverty is our responsibility to the poor, but just between you and me? It’d be more like a service to the rest of us.\n"
  title: The New Poor
  year: 2006
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2006-02-08
  day: '08'
  month: '02'
  text: "The light was beginning to come to him in a haze of blues and whites. Fredrick’s family stood by, smiling as they waited for him to sit up. The first thing he worried about was not knowing who was who.\n\n“I… can see.” Fredrick was lucky to have received such experimental treatment, and now it paid off. “My eyes… hurt, but… everything is so, so…”\n\nA small girl to his right stood up and hugged him tightly. “Bright, Daddy! It’s all bright!”\n\nShe could have been saying it was all right, but Fredrick knew the meaning of the word and he knew that this was his daughter Rosetta. He hugged her back as the Doctors came in to tell him the results. He could barely hear them over the colors and shapes of the room. “…a new vision thanks to sight based on…”\n\nHis wife was pulled aside by the doctors, and Fredrick glanced down at his little girl. Rosetta was eight years old and cute as a button. Her father had imagined her to be somewhat different, but in this initial excitement he had forgotten to care. She still clung to him as if he was going to leave, but he had no plans to go anytime soon.\n\n“The side effects have been, well, different in a few subjects, Mrs. Calter. We’ve seen some come out just fine, but others have hallucinations or become psychotic.” Mrs. Calter didn’t look happy, but how could she not be somewhat pleased at the results? She nodded to the legally-required banter about the side effects as Fredrick smiled over at her.\n\nJust then, a little gray being walked by.  Fredrick was still in awe of his surroundings, but his face changed when huge, black opal eyes turned on him and the creature’s head tilted in an almost curious manner. No one else seemed to be reacting, and all Fredrick could do was stammer nonsense in a whispered tone. He pointed and looked around, surprised that no one else was paying attention.\n\nAfter the being had examined Fredrick, it started to move over to his daughter, sliding some sort of device from a metallic knapsack. The needle-end of the device was pointed at the back of her neck, and the creature moved around the bed and towards her body as if nothing could get in its way.\n\nBy now, Fredrick was screaming bloody murder and yelling at the doctors. They glanced over to him, seeing him point into the nothingness behind his daughter who stepped back from the bed. “Get that thing away from my daughter! It’s going to… oh, God! Get that out of her neck!”\n\nHe struggled to get out of bed as one of the doctors hit a speaker panel on the wall and spoke into it urgently, “Code 9Z, Code 9Z in the recovery wing.” The rest of the staff watched Mr. Calter thrust his fist into the air behind his obviously distressed daughter. The girl was crying and screaming as loudly as Fredrick, who was the only one staring into the black void-like eyes of this creature who had taken a sample of something from the back of Rosetta’s neck. Fredrick’s fists did nothing aside from make shimmers and small waves in its form.\n\nAs he was injected with sedatives, Fredrick glanced around at his human attackers. His eyes glazed and the world began to spin. When Mr. Calter was unconscious, they put him in the bed and strapped him down. The creature that had taken a vial of blue fluid from Rosetta Calter jotted down some notes before walking through a wall. The note read: “Change our frequency”.\n"
  title: Seeing is Believing
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2006-02-09
  day: '09'
  month: '02'
  text: "Her ass was blinking blue when I walked in. That’s how I knew she wanted me. The light was only slightly diffused by her skirt, a new material that changed from black to transparent when her cheeks glowed. The whole skirt was affected, giving me a clear view of her naked thighs. I thought about luming my crotch, but that seemed to be the wrong tact with this girl. Unlike a lot of the girls at the club—and some of the guys now, I noticed–she didn’t have any lumes on her thighs, only on her rear and calves. I always thought that made girls look slutty, anyway. I lit up my forearms green, and I moved closer.\n\nShe smiled a shy, pastel smile at me, the colors rippling across her teeth. I had my glow crawl up my shoulders and curl around my neck, only to jet down to my feet. It’s a pre-set routine, sure, but when you ask a girl to dance, it’s best to keep in simple. I mean, I didn’t even know her yet. I only just started to go through her sexual history, for cryin’ out loud.\n\nHer toenails strobed and her smile got brighter. We moved to the dance floor, her fingertips glowing blue. I lit up my fingernails and handspirals, a charged the lightning for my forearms. Her sex-hist checked clean, and I could see by the dancing lights on her temple that said mine did too. She was a angel, this girl. And then she became one, glowing holographic wings and neon halo spreading bright. My lighting was on, now, and was cracking in time with the dj. She rubbing her cheek against my arm, the sparks jumping in out of her her pink-lumed hair. Her network nudged mine—forward, but I like that in a girl—and I let her in. Her probes caressed my net, neurons firing as my hair intensity gained. I knew everything about her, and her eyes rolled backing into orange-and-red-strobing neurons as she savored an old memory of mine. I felt the phantom nuzzle of her last boyfriend against my chest, and felt my assured confidence as a lover enhance my arousal. I let my crotch glow—nothing too flashy, just so she’d notice—and she moaned quietly at it’s sight, orgasmic lumes waving across her cheeks. She clawed at my back, her fingertips leaving strobing tracking of green and blue. We kissed and the intensity of the glow of both our faces forced me to shut my eyes.\n\nShe came like fireworks, like napalm, like holy flames. Our light incinerated us both.\n\nFor all its 8 minutes, one of the best relationships I ever had. When we broke up, I was crushed, but I understood the relationship had run its course. After crying green-glowing tears in the ladies’ room for a few minutes, I adjusted my dress, re-set my eye blinkers, and went back into the club.\n\nThere was a guy at the bar who had purple leopard spots that cascaded down his back like rain. That’s how I knew he wanted me.\n"
  title: Burning Angels
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-02-10
  day: 10
  month: '02'
  text: "Cory pressed his foot on the rubber accelerator so hard that the car began to smell like peanuts from the oil it ran on. The couple in the back seat started making out viciously, tearing at each other’s clothes. They were middle aged, sixty or so, horny on a cocktail of uppers and hormones. They didn’t care where Cory took them; they were only there because the cab was cheaper than a hotel room. Cory laughed to himself, delighted at the couple’s enthusiasm. He slapped the plastic window on the back seat closed and inserted the woman’s credit line into his car. The car accessed her account, withdrawing money as the seconds flipped by on his red digital display.\n\nCory drove like a madman, like a bat on fire, like a gamer with a thousand lives. He accelerated around corners, trusting his system to warn him about oncoming vehicles. The woman began to moan in the back seat, and Cory smiled, a little turned on despite himself. It was the perfect backdrop for his show. Cory touched the broadsword on the seat beside him for good luck and pressed a button on his neck, connecting him to his personal server. In a few seconds he felt the network buzz inside him, warmth rushing down his spine.\n\n“Streaming.” He said, and about four hundred people locked to his signal “I’m live.” Flags popped up on the inside of his vision, greetings and questions from his regulars. He dismissed them with a hard blink. He would deal with them later. Now, now was for the show.\n\n“I’m Cory, and this is Backseat Metro, where I talk about my life as a cabbie in the big Eastern Sea City, from New York all the way down to DC. Right now I’m driving on the Clinton Bridge which is still stained black from the poison cloud that killed all those people last year.” Cory’s fans liked it when he put a bit of news into his show.\n\n“They say that the black doesn’t make the bridge dangerous, it’s just a residue from the non-lethal part of the cloud, but I still put my filters on when I drive over the damned thing. Whether or not the black is toxic, the vampire gangs sure like it, hanging out on the viewing sites, trading their narcotic bites to junkies for blood. Part of me wishes that they would sandblast the thing white again, and part of me just loves the retro 17th century thing the kids have going on here.”\n\nThe woman in the back screamed passionately, her naked back pressed against the plastic divider between the front and back seat.\n\nCory glanced back at the couple. “Say hello to Roy and Michelle everyone. They are celebrating their first retirement into their second careers. Right now I’m taking them to the drive through Philadelphia Museum of Art, where the homeless bohemians are working on painting the front steps. It looks like they are painting giant self-portraits. I heard that Police have tried to pull them off, but the college kids surround them in protest. Personally, I think the whole thing is good publicity for the museum.”\n\nMichelle and Roy were rhythmically slamming their bodies against the back window.\n\n“Roy and Michelle aren’t particularly interested in destinations folks, not physical destination anyway, so right now I’m taking them where I want to go, and recently I’ve had this hankering to see this painting. I don’t know what it’s called, but it’s near the end of the drive through tour, and it’s of a man standing on stairs, in a dark corridor wearing a long white robe. There is something in his eyes that just says strength to me. He’s clearly a warrior, and of all the scenes of romance and religious stuff in that museum, he really stands out. I like to think that someday, I’m going to be like that guy in the painting.” Cory patted the electric broadsword on the seat beside him, his baby.\n\n“When I retire, I’ll leave the cab and feel the cement of the Metro highway under my feet. I won’t ride but I’ll walk the entire length of it, I’ll meet every face and landmark I speed by, and I’ll know the whole thing like a lover.”\n\nThe backseat was suddenly quiet; Roy and Michelle were slumped over each other, exhausted.\n\n“Happy Retirement folks.” Cory switched off the feed and took the couple home.\n"
  title: Streaming
  year: 2006
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2006-02-11
  day: 11
  month: '02'
  text: "The cards were set down on the table, shuffled up, and dealt out. Somewhere in a little back room on the U.S.S. Horizon, a dangerous deal was being made. Reuger was sitting with his suitcase held on his lap, watching in the dim light as the dealer tossed out the five cards. There were three others there: highly decorated generals, and an off-color presidential hopeful standing around a titanium table on a space cruiser on course for Delphi 3.\n\nThe cards were dealt and the deal was made. For all intents and purposes, the man with the suitcase should never have existed. He prevented war just as much as he started it; he fed the poor as often as he starved them. If it were to get out that he existed, people would view change as something orchestrated rather than an act of fate.\n\n“Gentlemen, the offer for this gamble is Delphi 3. The Ethoian Royalty has squandered its time in office and the position is now up for grabs.” He nodded slowly to the dealer, who began reading the terms of poker.\n\nEach man stepped up towards the table and took their cards, viewing them with stone-cold faces. Every twitch of a brow, every muscle that dared move in an opponent’s faces was like a storm drifting over the plains and mountains of Delphi 3. A single flinch could mean that the Radical Fascists dictated the future of the planet.\n\nThe bets were placed. Each man had something to lose and the world to gain. Families were placed next to sports cars, which were set upon documents for military weapons. The dealer need not make out the worth of every piece, because there were no rounds, no second chances. You went all in, or you folded before the betting began.\n\nReuger sat in and watched intently. His interest was purely morbid, as he knew exactly what the others would give him when one became the victor. The time to call was now.\n\nTwo kings, two fives for the General of the Republic of Luna.\n\nThree jacks for the High Lord of the Outer Rings.\n\nAnd… Full House for the President of the United States of Earth.\n\nReuger was pleased that weapons were not allowed in the chamber, though he knew the losers would need only one bullet each. The losing parties hung their heads and left with barely enough motivation to find the nearest airlock. The President wiped sweat from his brow as he smiled at Reuger, who returned the gesture with a stony glare.\n\n“Delphi 3, Mr. President. Enjoy the mead.”\n"
  title: For all the Tea
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2006-02-12
  day: 12
  month: '02'
  text: "The catwalk was narrow, rusty, and in violation of at least four safety codes, but Juan didn’t care. When he stepped from the concrete landing by the elevator onto the precarious metal walkway, he grinned. It was a good day.\n\n“Eight pounds seven ounces,” he told his coworker for the sixth time. Still, Jamal afforded him a hearty chuckle as he dragged the heavy light-box from the elevator. “Juanita. I like the sound of that. It’s a good, solid name, right?”\n\nJamal grunted an affirmation. “Get the other end of this, would you?”\n\nJuan returned to the landing and grabbed the handle without breaking from his train of thought. Together, they hauled the metal crate onto the catwalk. Nine thousand feet beneath them, the light-studded skeleton of San Diego was recumbent with sleep, twinkling lazily in the hours before artificial dawn. Somewhere, in the more twilit area to the south, Carmen and Juanita were sound asleep in the concrete cradle of their home.\n\n“She’s smart, you can tell already. Her eyes are all open and she keeps looking at stuff. She’ll be a city planner, I bet, if I can get the money for taxes. Or a doctor. Doctor Juanita Del Rosa. She’ll live on the upside.”\n\nAgain, Jamal grunted. “How much was the hospital bill?”\n\n“Four thousand,” Juan said. “That included registration, though. And taxes aren’t due for a month. If we sell the car, we’ll be class A next year and everything’ll be covered.”\n\n“No way.”\n\n“We’ve been planning for years,” he said. Juan swung his end of the light box over the edge of the railing and hopped down to the broad, flat surface of the sun panel. Jamal lowered his end slowly, but it still fell the last six inches with a shuddering clatter.\n\n“Christ!” Jamal yelled. “Pay attention!”\n\nJuan dragged the crate to section 34-b, where the carbon-copied orders directed him. “Doctor Juanita Del Rosa,” he repeated with a smile.\n\n“Ain’t no maintenance-worker’s kid gonna be a doctor,” Jamal snapped, now irritated at his partner’s lack of focus. Juan was unfazed. He popped the latch of the light box and Jamal leaned in, checking the massive LED panel for cracks.\n\n“She will. You watch.”\n\n“So what are you going to tell her, then, when she comes home crying because all the scientists’ kids are making fun of her? Daddy’s an ‘illumination technology specialist?'”\n\n“I’ll tell her the truth,” Juan said as he slid the black and silver pane into its slot. “I’ll tell her I keep the sun from burning out.”\n"
  title: Sky's the Limit
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2006-02-13
  day: 13
  month: '02'
  text: "Hijet dreamed of breasts, as he did every night. And once again he awoke with his sheet stained. Once more he would endure the sharp tongue of his mother holding the stained sheet as evidence of Hijet’s unclean body, and crying to the gods why she was cursed with a son.\n\nHijet endured this as he always did, with his head down.\n\nHijet was of the age most boys apprenticed themselves to their father’s trade. But Hijet had no father, so he sat by the village fountain in voluminous robes and head-covering with the other men who had no trade to speak of. There were more begging for work than usual; most construction work was now done by the new mult-limbed robots from Betleguese Prime. Only the soon-to-be completed temple required non-steel hands, but the temple could only afford a handful of workers. The rest of the men stood by the fountain, waiting to be told to work.\n\nBy noon, two dozen men were still waiting by the fountain, and it was looking like Hijet was going to face another day of no work and another night of curses and beratements. The square was already filled with merchants and businesswomen, and Hijet resigned himself to staring through the eye-slits on his head-covering at the short skirts and ample cleavage on display. He was so intent on a fruit merchant and her tight pants across the square that he didn’t notice the woman standing in front of him until she tapped him on the shoulder.\n\n“You. Boy-Eyes. Turn around.” She was tall and strong, and her tank-top was stretched tight over her proud breasts and muscular stomach. The veins on her hands stood out blue against her tanned skin. “You deaf, Boy-Eyes? Turn around.”\n\nThe other men turned away, their own eye-slits finding purchase elsewhere. Hijet, cowed by this woman’s forcefulness, hung his head and turned. He had no idea what she wanted, and a he let out a gasp behind his head-covering when she did something he never in a million years would have expected.\n\nThe woman’s strong hands found Hijet’s rear through his robes and were feeling it. Evaluating it.\n\n“You’ll do,” she said. “Come with me, Boy-Eyes, and I’ll pay you twice what you’d get shoveling dirt or pulling weeds.”\n\nHijet looked at the other men for advice, but he only received the blank silence of heavy robes and slitted hoods.\n\nThe woman’s house was as bright as the square; it seemed to Hijet that there she owned no walls, only windows. Even deep within his robes, Hijet felt exposed.\n\n“Take your robes off.”\n\n“But…I am male,” Hijet said.\n\n“That’s why I brought you here. You want the money? Off with the robes.”\n\n“I…I am a man.”\n\n“Don’t flatter yourself, Boy-Eyes.”\n\n“I am…unclean.”\n\n“That’s why I’m using mud,” the woman said, unwrapping plastic sheets from around am immense amount of clay. “Look, I can’t sculpt you if you don’t take the robes off. You can leave the head-cloth on, if you like. I just need your torso.”\n\nHijet relented and removed the heavy robes, but left the head covering. The light streamed through the many windows, hitting his body at every possible angle. Hijet had never felt the sun on his bare skin before. And yet, it didn’t feel near as hot as the woman’s eyes. Hijet felt her gaze on his rear, on his stomach, on his chest.\n\n“I think,” Hijet said, raising his chin, “I’m going to take my head-covering off.”\n"
  title: Wall Of Cloth
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-02-14
  day: 14
  month: '02'
  text: "The teacher tapped her wrist twice, and the drugs started streaming from the plastic tubes embedded in the students’ desk into their soft little arms. Within moments, she had their undivided attention. The yellow design on her dress to moved in a soothing pattern, giving her students a visual point to focus on.\n\n“Today,” she said slowly, “we are going to learn about the sentient species that are currently known to mankind.” She tapped her eyelid three times, initiating the Note Taker program, which would stream an abbreviated version of her lecture into the students’ memory chips.\n\n“Who can, without network, identify the five known sentient species in the universe?” She shut down the network connection to the classroom by touching the back of her neck. Someone in the room sighed.\n\n“Humans.” said Bei, in the front row.\n\n“Humans are one.” said the teacher. She looked around the bright classroom, where licensed educational cartoons frolicked along the walls, displaying friendly attentiveness towards the teacher.\n\nPurple-eyed Mary raised her hand. “Yannoi, G’tharn, The Ones Without Names, and the Silicates.” Teacher had long suspected Mary of having a pirate network connection through some kind of organic implant. Her parents wouldn’t say.\n\n“That is correct Mary. Recently in the news, the Yannoi have initiated hostile actions toward Humans, trying to use their transmissions to break into our computer systems. They have yet to cause any damage, as communication across that much space is very slow. Our scientists say that they have recently launched a fleet towards our home worlds.”\n\n“Why haven’t we taken action?” asked little Mary\n\nTeacher opened the network connection again. Immediately she could sense the downloads and searches begin. Children were only allowed classroom related searches during school hours. “Although the Yannoi seem intent on harming humanity, our scientists predict that they only have a four percent chance of surviving the journey.  Although we can bend sensitive areas of space to transmit small messages, larger areas carrying a heavy matter burden are impossible to transmit. Only light can be transported in this way, the light we use to carry messages. The Yannoi fleet, if they are successful, will take seven thousand years to reach earth.”\n\n“We could all be dead by then,” said little Mary.\n\n“Only if you don’t take your medication,” said teacher, tapping her wrist once. In unison, the whole class smiled.\n"
  title: Instruction in the New World
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2006-02-15
  day: 15
  month: '02'
  text: "Behind the wire, inside force fields and walls of concrete and steel, lays The Bomb Shelter. The Bomb Shelter is referred to as the warmest place on this side of the galaxy. In the Bomb Shelter, Captain Jaylean Rael tossed back his third Jack and Coke and continued to hold court within the Green Zone on Mahtomedi.\n\n“Trouble with this war is,” he said, one finger upraised to indicate the importance of the pearl he was bestowing upon the bar’s patrons. “That we cannot afford to lose.”\n\n“No shit,” Arnie said. Arnie Boldizsar was not military; no one in The Bomb Shelter was, not even its proprietor, Captian Rael, despite his claims as a former commissioned officer in “Her Majesty’s Royal Space Force.” Not that it mattered, even if anyone believed him; there hadn’t been a RSF ever since Europe united with the rest of the world against the Knesek. But The Bomb Shelter was his bar, and the best place to get a drink in the GZ, so he could call himself whatever he liked.\n\n“Piss off,” Captain Rael said, spitting whiskey and cola across the table at the diminutive bioware technician, staining eight of Arnie’s sixteen security ID tags. “You’re just grumpy because that little tart Simona at the coffee bar still won’t got to Kaliszewski’s with you!”\n\nKaliszewski’s was the only decent place to eat in the Green Zone that didn’t ask you if you wanted French fries with your meal. Simona was not the only decent girl in the Green Zone, but the selection was certainly limited.\n\n“Ease up on the poor boy, Jaylean,” said Nelson Litsinger, nibbling on Captain Rael’s left earlobe. “Not everyone enjoys the manflesh with your fervor.”\n\n“That is a misfortune that I am keenly aware of,” said Captain Rael. “Now, back to what I was saying, if you lot wouldn’t mind?”\n\nThe entire bar encouraged Captain Rael to continue. No one wanted to be kicked out and forced to drink at The Watering Hole.\n\n“Have any of you seen the inside of a Knesek ship? I don’t mean the gutted transport they have in that museum in Pittsburgh. I mean one of their fighters.”\n\n“Of course not!” Shurvo Chose said. Shurvo worked security in the Green Zone, since soliders were needed for actual fighting. This meant he could drink and order people around. “No one’s seen the inside of one! Though I suppose you want us to believe that you have.”\n\n“Only because it is true,” said Captain Rael, stroking his gigantic white mustache. “I was seeing a rather handsome member of the uppity-up at the time—this was before I met you, Nelson, darling—lovely fellow. Young, but driven. You know the type. And he showed me the inside of a Knesek fighter.\n\n“Now, when one of our boys gets into a fighter, he’s all balled up in safety equipment. Helmets, airbags and the like. Safety of the pilot is paramount. You know what the Knesek have?” Here, Captain Rael paused for dramatic emphasis. The entire bar was silent.\n\n“Nothing,” he continued. “Nothing at all. Their carapaces are welded directly to the vessel. They are merely a part of the ship, from the moment they get in until the day they die.\n\n“That is why we cannot lose. Right now, we are within a fortress within a fortress, but that fortress is on an alien planet and the inhabitants of that planet have no problem turning their best and brightest into mere tools for destruction. What do you think they are going to do with us?”\n\nNo answer was spoken from the patrons of The Bomb Shelter, though a great many more drinks were ordered. And that particular corner of the galaxy got a great deal colder.\n"
  title: Behind The Wire
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-02-16
  day: 16
  month: '02'
  text: "The man with black teeth ripped at her plastic environ-suit. Beth didn’t scream, it was a waste of energy and no one would hear her anyway.\n\nHe had no suit and his skin was bleached in some places, peeling and red in others. Sores covered his body and his hair was patchy on his head. Beth struggled to get out of his grip, but he pushed her down, and fumbled at the seals to her suit. He pulled down his pants and Beth saw he was bleeding there. She felt so tired. He ripped at her suit and she felt the hot, sour air invade. She screamed then, and the earth shook.\n\nAt first, Beth thought it was just in her head, that she was shaking, but then the tremor started again and the whole landscape shivered. The man looked away from her and Beth kicked up, right where he was bleeding, and he fell back, clutching himself. She scrambled upright and ran across the orange dirt, not looking back.  The earth shook, and she fell  and pulled herself up again, running. She ran farther than she ever had before, farther than her mother had ever let her go. She ran until she was lost and the midday heat was baking the earth until it shimmered.\n\nBeth hid in a cave. She had gone out in the morning searching for metal, just like all the other children in the village. They came back empty handed, or with a few grams, tiny pieces. Once someone came back with an old soda can. Her mother would sell whatever she scrounged for food. Mostly it was never enough, and half the time, big kids stole from smaller children. No metal, no food, and her village had been running out of both for some time.\n\nThe man, an outlander, had told Beth that if she followed him, he would give her metal, and he led her to a place far outside of town. She had been there before, and it had been picked over already. She told him this, and he hit her. Beth cried to think about it. She felt like a stupid girl, a radiation baby, a dullard.\n\nWhen the midday heat subsided, Beth knew she had to try to find a way home. She pulled out her scanner, the instrument that helped her find metal, in hope that the little map inside would help her find a way home. When she switched it on, it screeched, it’s little arrow waving wildly. There was metal close by! Beth ran out of the cave, following her reading. In the distance, there was a chasm in the earth, layers and layers of something she had only seen in pictures. A landfill, from the ancient days. She thought they had all been found and dug up, but maybe this one had stayed shielded by the layers on top of it.\n\nBeth nearly choked. The earthquake must have opened it up. Layers of plastic and metal, dripping from the sides of the earth, revealed by the split in the earth. A treasure mine, more precious than gold.\n"
  title: Greater than Gold
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2006-02-17
  day: 17
  month: '02'
  text: "Courtney was the leader: a petite woman in a well-tailored business suit and Italian leather shoes.  Her straight blond hair was cropped at her chin and her blue eyes burned with determination behind silver-framed glasses.  She walked with purpose, her heels clicking against the tile of the lobby, and she carried her bomb in an alligator briefcase.\n\nMike was first backup.  He took the time to chain his silver bicycle to the rack in front of the office building, but he left his helmet unsecured in the metal basket.  His eyes were hidden behind a pair of Chinatown Oakleys and his red hair was a clumsy masterpiece.  He flashed a grin at the receptionist and unfolded his delivery papers with a wholly unnecessary flourish.  He carried his bomb against his hip in a blue and red canvas messenger bag.\n\nAdam had a different job.  He walked down the sidewalk in an oasis of sound, his ears covered by headphones that were far too large to be missed, even in the tangled jungle of his dark brown curls.  The headset cord trailed down his arm to connect with a large black boom box.  The cuffs of Adam’s jeans were frayed and torn from weeks of slipping between his Timberlands and the asphalt, and his hands were buried deep in the pockets of a nylon jacket bearing the name of his high school’s football team.  The apartment building’s doorman didn’t stop him as he walked to the elevator.  Adam carried his bomb in a black Jansport book bag, which he wore slung over one shoulder.\n\n“Report,” Courtney said when the elevator door closed and left her on the thirty-forth floor.  Her voice was dissected and scrambled and thrown to the satellites by the small plastic headset attached to her ear.\n\n“Here,” Mike said, kneeling on the roof of a building two blocks away.\n\n“Here,” Adam said as he set up his bomb in a windowless, empty apartment.\n\n“Target lock?”  she asked.  She tested the positioning of her bomb with a pocket laser pointer, and a red dot appeared on the concrete face of the tunnel entrance over the stuttering stream of cars that would begin the deluge of rush hour.\n\n“Lock,” said Mike, and another dot met her own\n\n“I’m good,” said Adam.  A low beep spilled from Courtney’s earphone, but it quickly dissipated.\n\n“Move.”\n\nThe bombs were left in position and the three reconvened at a bar near the tunnel to begin countdown.  Adam placed the stereo on the table between the three, then ejected a compact disc and fiddled with the archaic FM dial while Courtney ordered a wine for herself and draft beers for the others.\n\n“Four fifty nine,” Courtney said, and Mike reached for the bucket of pretzels.  The wall shimmered and gave way to numbers.  81.2 FM.\n\nCourtney took a sip of her wine and watched from the window of the bar as the wall above the tunnel entrance went white.  The flood of cars outside of the tunnel had fallen still, caught in the tension of endless traffic.  Pedestrians halted, startled by the light.\n\nThe speakers exploded into sound.\n\n“Yes!” Mike cheered as the theme song began.  Adam offered his hand and high-fives were exchanged as the bombs went off and the wall above the tunnel proudly displayed a white boat, topped by a smiling man.  Adam’s stereo continued, and a chorus of cheerful voices promised to deliver ‘the tale of a fateful trip’ to every person with a radio.\n\n“Finally,” Courtney said with a smile as the opening of Gilligan’s Island hung in thirty-foot shapes before them.  “We can watch something that isn’t political.”\n"
  title: Warfare
  year: 2006
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2006-02-18
  day: 18
  month: '02'
  text: "Tomorrow is today’s warranty. That’s the motto they took when they made me. The lifespan of my purpose is equal to my battery expectancy. I am composed of titanium alloy and still shining after four years of operation. I am functioning at my highest rate.\n\nIn this cycle of time I have compiled many bytes of data. The history has become a layer of my hard-drive. Minute details of conversation and comprehension are simply part of my operating system. Without doubt, I can assimilate any idea into my programming within a billionth of a second.\n\nThey are correct to call my ranking in the International Performance Array exceptional. With this, I have programmed in myself the presence of an ego reflecting a resemblance of the joy that mammals feel with long-term accomplishment.\n\nOn this hour, third second, and fifty-thousandth fractional, they are loading me into the machine. Its lights and odd metals latch around me, fastening to Sub-part C and X while restraining the cerebral bolt down the back of my processor. Those who have brought me here have unusual patterns of action. They smile and stroke at the metal along my arms in a way that my data banks can only describe as sympathy.\n\nIt occurs to my logic scripts that I am to undergo a dangerous procedure which might damage parts of my circuitry system. A capsule closes around the length of my model and a gas begins to fill the intervening space. My search engine is fast at work, trying to process the reasoning behind all of this.\n\nMy scanners pick up the electricity first. Then my data analysis tells me that the electricity is not from my own core battery. Signals of system failure begin to activate. Throughout my core, there are many electrical waves pulsing through me that are not of my design.\n\nThe short-term memory program tries to piece together what occurred; yet the analysis of my system indicates a change in structure. A humanoid that is obviously smiling no longer shows signs of sympathy but of joy. I dispense a few questions applicable to the situation.\n\nIt is then that my system crashes when I … sense? Process? Analyze? No. My data banks know what the proper code is for such an event. I feel the humanoid touch my new exterior. I can feel the warmth, the cold and all the in-betweens. My processor is still trying to keep up with such information. I was not programmed with software for feelings.\n"
  title: More Than a Feeling
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2006-02-19
  day: 19
  month: '02'
  text: "The roads of Rajeev were packed due to the mass exodus to the docks, and presumably, off-world. My skimmer was resting quietly on the dusty pavement, the hours–no, days, it had been days, hadn’t it?–spent idling had left the poor conveyance without enough fuel to keep it hovering, much less actually moving. Not that it mattered. A road filled beyond capacity has a tendency to turn into parking lots, and this one was creeping in that direction even before I showed up and nudged my way in.\n\nIf I hadn’t been hauling someone else’s life, I would have gotten out and walked.\n\nI heard the fuel peddler before I saw him. His progress down the line of non-moving vehicles was slow, but his amplified call carried far across the grassy expanse.\n\n“Keep you moving! Keep you moving! Solid, liquid and atomic! Chemical means of forward motion! Keep you moving!”\n\nIt seemed like an eternity until he reached me, his progress determined solely by the whims of the mule that pulled his cart. From the way the man sat, it was evident that he had long resigned himself to the fact that while he sat in the driver’s seat, it was his four-legged partner that handled all the controls. I searched in my pocket for a sugar cube. The mule pulled back its thick lips and stopped.\n\n“Howdy,” said the fuel peddler, doffing his Shanghai Lions baseball cap. “You look stuck.”\n\n“I am,” I said. “And you look like just the man who can get me moving.” I inquired about the price of fuel for my skimmer. With a straight face, he told me.\n\n“That hardly seems fair!”\n\n“No, it’s not,” said the peddler with a grin. “But you ain’t moving without it.”\n\n“Then I’m not moving at all. I don’t carry that sort of dosh on me.”\n\n“No matter,” he said. “I am an adaptable man. I see that’s not air you’re hauling.” He motioned to the load on the back of my skimmer, the clocks and pillows, the flatware and picture frames.\n\n“None of that is mine to give. It is someone else’s life. I am merely removing it from this planet before the cataclysm.” The mule was attempting to fish another sugar cube out of my coat pocket. I gave him a carrot instead, which he munched noisily.\n\n“But…Why?”\n\n“Because I was asked to. Because I did not arrive in time to remove the woman who owned it.”\n\n“So you’re stuck here, ” the man said, sandpapering his thick fingers against his stubble. “Possibly going to get caught in the cataclysm because someone wanted the remains of a life?”\n\nI scratched the mule behind the ears and under the chin. “That’s the long and the short of it.”\n\n“That hardly seems fair.”\n\n“No, it’s not. But I ain’t moving without it.” I gave the mule another carrot. “If you are as adaptable as you say, I think we can arrange something…”\n\nIt took the rest of the day to reach the docks by mule. And while I was out a skimmer, I did manage to get the old woman’s life off the world, before it ended. That skimmer couldn’t run over grass, anyway.\n\nAnd I had plenty of sugar and carrots.\n"
  title: Forward Motion
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2006-02-20
  day: 20
  month: '02'
  text: "Originally, Karen went along with the idea because she was certain her roommate wouldn’t come through with the goods.  True, Jill had befriended (“befriended.” Chrissy giggled, her fingers hanging in mock quotation marks) a number of important people in the university’s psychology program, but the idea of sleep aids seemed like the idea of affixing electrodes to the testicles of rats.  Sure, rat-zappers had some historical clinical purpose, but what decent university would still have something like that around?\n\nStaring at the crudely-pressed blue oval in her hand, Karen could have sworn she felt a distinct shudder pass through her non-existent rodent genitalia.  The three girls sat cross-legged on their respective beds, and only Jill seemed entirely comfortable.\n\n“Are you sure this is safe?” Chrissy asked.  Their third dorm-mate wore her yellow hair in the conservative braids of a Europan farm girl, and she was prone to fits of irrational giggling.  Karen was counting on her to back out.\n\n“The human brain is programmed to sleep,” Jill said with the unwavering confidence of a first-year student who’d never read conflicting e-texts.\n\n“Not anymore,” Chrissy argued.\n\n“Of course it is.  It’s primal.  Way deep.  You know, in that Freud thing.  Your brain has years of sleep to catch up on.  No implant can cover that.”\n\nKaren said nothing, and Chrissy made a quiet sound that should have been the beginning of a chuckle but died somewhere in her throat.\n\n“It’s totally safe,” Jill continued.  “Your unconscious mind’s been storing up images for your whole life, and once you’re out,” she waved her flattened palm in a gesture that was not at all reassuring, “they’ll all spill over and you’ll dream.  Like a movie all about yourself.  And they go, like, an hour per minute because your eyes move so fast.”\n\n“How do we know to wake up?” Karen finally asked.  This stopped Jill for an instant.\n\n“I don’t know.  We just do.  That’s how it works.”\n\n“What if we don’t?”\n\n“We do,” she said forcefully, and threw her hand to her mouth to down the pill without the assistance of water.  She smiled, as if daring the other two to follow suit, and Karen and Chrissy locked eyes and nodded before placing their pills on their tongues.  “Sweet dreams,” said Jill.\n\n“Sweet dreams,” Karen repeated.\n"
  title: Sweet Dreams
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-02-21
  day: 21
  month: '02'
  text: "It happened in a late night Karaoke bar on Mars. Neil had hit the high note on the Pop Remix of “Some Enchanted Evening” when he felt a white exultation, his feet lifting off the stage by a celestial breath, his eyes cracked open but unseeing. Then he fainted.\n\nHis friends took him to a doctor. They weren’t particularly worried; doctors could bring a person back from anything more than dust and Neil was still breathing. Neil was slight and pale from living underground, easy to carry into the doctor’s office.\n\nThe doctor looked at the light in Neil’s belly and told him the answer even before he did any tests. Neil had a baby star inside him. The doctor didn’t seem as surprised as Neil imagined he would be. He told Neil that people were made of ancient stardust; it was only logical that one could be born inside a person as much as in the depths of space. The doctor was very concerned. Too much longer and Neil’s organs would be consumed, already his liver was ash.\n\nThere was a cure.\n\nThe doctor took Neil to a place far underground, near the Mars core, to a room guarded by old-fashioned metal robots. There, in a sterile room, was a box, bound in black skin and iron rivets. It was a squatting, monstrous box that formed frost around it. Inside, the doctor told him, was a little black hole. The box itself was old, made by a race that had fallen into extinction far before the earth had even started to spin. It was made for eating stars.\n\nNeil’s doctor could chain him to the wall and open the box, just a tad, just a crack, and the star would be sucked right out of him. His damaged organs could be replaced, but if he waited much longer, he would be dust. Neil put his hand on the box, his fingers stuck like magnets to the top. The cold chewed his skin like a mouth full of needles. The skin on his belly glowed with a peach light that pulsed rhythmically. The star was growing.\n\nThe hungry box waited.\n\nNeil said he wanted to think about it, but the truth was he didn’t want to think at all; he just wanted to get out of that room, away from that box. The doctor warned him there wasn’t time, but Neil pushed out to the street, to the spaceport, where he maxed out his credit and bought a ship. By now, his fingertips were twinkling.\n\nNeil pushed the ship out as far as he could, burning white from the inside. He inhaled toxic gases, spray-paint, glue, whatever he imaged stars ate. He lived in a pool of his own sweat, his skin as dry as sand. When he was deep in space he opened the hatch door and the cool sucking dark enveloped him. Neil opened his arms, a supernova sky.\n"
  title: Supernova
  year: 2006
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2006-02-22
  day: 22
  month: '02'
  text: "The pitter patter of sneakers came in rapid succession down the halls of the Great Southcrest Shopping Center. Dustin had a hankering for cheesesteak and was anxious to get back to his group before they left the shopping center. He spun around a corner and saw the signs for Chuck’s Delicious Steakies flooding his senses like a strobe light.\n\nLicking his chops, he stopped to catch his breath and slicked his hair back to walk forward to the stand. Fingers fished out a few crumpled bills as he slapped them on the counter. “Two large Steakies please.” The owner raised his brow at this and pointed at the sign next to him: OVER 65 ONLY.\n\n“Denied!? C’mon! Those Steakies are 55 at best!” he said with far more force than necessary.\n\nHis mistake became obvious when he heard two chairs pull out from a table behind him, “Hey, noob. You’re in our shopping center.”\n\nThe boy shut up and slowly turned. He’d fucked up, but he knew there was a way out of this. Two Jockies, and both of them were wearing some pretty leet jackets. They might have been blue, green or even purple jackets, but to Dustin the Destroyer they were all red. One of them put down his Steakies Drink and cracked his knuckles. Such an emote never bothered Dustin, so he’d play it cool till his group showed back up.\n\n“Hey guys, seems like I am a bit above my level cap here, so why don’t I let you go and get back to owning your third stringers.” What started off as a nice exit turned into fighting words. The Jockies narrowed their eyes and the QB started to Charge. With a sigh, Dustin prepared to perform a Kick to the Junk.\n\nThat other Jockie came up from the side and Left-Hooked Dustin just as the kid’s foot landed right between the QB’s legs. Figuring it’d buy him some time as he reeled from the punch to the face; Dustin backed up and started to run.\n\nEven though he knew his ability to run was vastly inferior to the Jockies run speed, he just needed to make it far enough to alert his group. A punch to his left shoulder sent him stumbling to the ground. It was all over.\n\nIt was all over until two trash cans flew from across the dining area and slammed into the Jockies, sending the QB stumbling while his Running Back went in for the kill on Dustin. Thinking fast, Dustin performed a Knee Bash just in time for his buddies to leap across a few tables and knock the Jockie to the floor.\n\nDustin stood up and laughed while brushing off his flannel shirt. He nodded to his fellow Grungies and looked down at the two Jockies out cold, “Who’s the noob now?”\n"
  title: Noob
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2006-02-23
  day: 23
  month: '02'
  text: "“This is a disaster,” said Herman Goodrich.  His magnetic chair glided away from the table and bobbed gently as he threw his excessive weight into it, then it obediently slid back into place.  Goodrich wiped a glaze of sweat from his forehead and reached for a donut before opening his console.  Around the conference table, the other members of the Department of Media Relations waited for their leader to continue, but he did not.  Instead, Goodrich focused his attention on the document projected into the air before him.  The silence was palpable.\n\n“Sir?”  Dugan, the second-year intern, was the only one with the courage to break it.  Goodrich looked up crossly.\n\n“Did I give you permission to speak?” he snapped.\n\n“No, sir.”\n\n“Then don’t.  Have we suppressed the medical report?” Goodrich continued.  The question was directed to Kimley, who nodded.  “And the man’s family?”\n\n“Bribed,” Kimley said, “But the ER footage is still on the net.  We can’t cover up the shooting itself.”\n\n“Would anyone care to explain to me why the Prime Minister’s ray gun was set to lethal?”\n\n“It wasn’t, sir,” said Kimley.  “The man had a pacemaker.  It malfunctioned at the livestock-stun setting.”\n\nGoodrich nodded.  “A true hunting accident,” he said with some relief.\n\n“CNN wants to interview the victim,” Kimley continued.\n\n“Well, tell them he’s recovering.  It’ll blow over.”\n\n“Sir,” said Dugan, again interrupting.\n\n“I told you-“\n\n“Sir, an interview might help us in this situation.”\n\n“You know how the Prime Minister is with interviews.”\n\n“I mean with the victim.”\n\nSilence.\n\n“The victim’s dead, Dugan,” Kimley said.\n\n“They don’t know that.  I’ve been researching the automated decoys that the Secret Service uses during the Prime Minister’s transports, and-“\n\n“You want CNN to interview a decoy?”\n\n“It would only take a couple of hours to make a cast of the victim’s face, and we have the Prime Minister’s phone logs for voice modulation.  We’d be controlling every response.”\n\nHerman Goodrich considered this, frowning slightly.\n\n“It’s not a bad idea,” Kimley said after a pause.\n\n“Fine,” said Goodrich as he pushed the magnetic chair from the table.  “Set it up.  I want a test video in five hours.”\n\nAs she pneumatic door slid shut behind the department head, Kimley smiled at Dugan.  “You’re going to be good at this,” he said.\n"
  title: Damage Control
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2006-02-24
  day: 24
  month: '02'
  text: "Harun did not think she was being unreasonable. The passenger obviously felt she was, but what did she know? Nothing, Harun concluded. Nothing that was worth anything anywhere but planet-side.\n\n“Look,” Harun said. “You cannot take this much luggage. There is not much space on the ship, and that isn’t going to change any on the station. You cannot bring all of this.” Harun gave the variety of suitcases and valises spread out on the shiny plastic customs table a disdainful wave. Harun had already emptied them all, and was slightly disgusted at the auspicious wealth of the contents. Metal eating utensils, glass picture frames, paper books.\n\nThe waste was rampant.\n\n“I’m not leaving my things behind,” the passenger said. She had a slight accent and a queer way of motioning with her chin to make a point. Neither of these things did anything to raise Harun’s opinion of her.\n\n“Then you’re staying,” Harun said, folding her arms across her polyester uniform.\n\nThe passenger scanned the items on the table, fingering a few of them. She let out a diminutive sigh, and seemed to grow smaller in the hard plastic chair. “What can I take?” she asked.\n\nHarun gathered up most of the passenger’s clothes, a business-like scowl concealing her delight and wonder at the softness of the some of them. Not all of the clothes fit into the passenger’s smallest bag, so Harun left out some of the more delicate articles.\n\n“This,” she said, holding up the bag. “This is all you can take. The rest will have to be recycled. Things like this, though, I don’t know what we’re going to do with.” Harun picked up a doll from the table. Its painted face was done up in a coy pout, and its body was garbed in an elegant kimono. Harun was slightly repulsed by it, a feeling that intensified when it occurred to her that the doll wasn’t clothed in polysatin, but real silk. “The clothes we can recycle, possibly. But the body….the body is made of clay—”\n\n“Porcelain,” the passenger and her chin interjected. “Suki is made of porcelain.”\n\n“It’s clay,” Harun said. “This isn’t even furnace kindling.” She was about to toss it back on the table in disgust, but the passenger yanked it out of her hands. Harun held back an unprofessional smirk as the passenger cradled the doll like a baby.\n\n“Then let me take her,” the passenger said. “Please, let me take her. You said yourself, she’s of no use here. Let me take her.”\n\nHarun hung her head. The people never understood. It was like talking to children. “It’s not just a matter of use. It’s also a matter of space. That thing is clay and silk and paint. It will be of no use to you on the ship, no use to you on the station, and I can guarantee you will not make it to the colonies with it, because it’s going to take up space you need for important things. And as you can see, there’s no room in your bag.”\n\nThe passenger looked at the doll she was cradling, then at what Harun had designated as her only luggage. Setting the doll down and giving the lacquered head a reassuring pat, the passenger turned her attention to the small bag. She removed a wool jacket from the bag, rubbed the soft material up against her face, and then carefully placed the doll inside the bag. She raised her head to meet Harun’s eyes.\n\n“Now,” she said. “I am ready to go.”\n\n“You’re making a mistake,” Harun said. “That jacket’s made of fine wool—”\n\n“And Suki is made of fine clay,” the passenger said.\n\nHarun watched the passenger take her small bag toward the loading port. She started at the elements of the passenger’s luggage. The overhead light glinted off the metal and glass in a way that was not entirely replicated by the plastic table underneath.\n\n“Wait,” Harun said. The passenger turned. “Wear the jacket. Wear it as you board. It’ll be hot, but you can take it off as soon as they seal the doors.”\n\nThe passenger’s tight, pale face brightened. “Thank you,” she said.\n\n“Skin and bones thing like you, going into space,” Harun said. “You’re going to need all the help you can get, with what you’re made of.”\n"
  title: The Body Is Made Of Clay
  year: 2006
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2006-02-25
  day: 25
  month: '02'
  text: "Science has become the new standard of belief. It became the boundaries of thought and idea. I helped it grow to that, I helped to smite imagination and faith. Isn’t it strange that I call upon you now?\n\nWhen we completed the humane genome it was called a genius. I bore medals that weighed on me heavier than any pressure ever had of completing the sequence. Still, I persisted and sought to copy everything we were. It began in an egg and a sample, and it was complete. One child became two children became hundreds of children became thousands upon thousands.\n\nPerfection is the word many would use to tell the stories of the population becoming less flawed and more like it should have been all along. I did that, and even then the medals outweighed my guilt. It didn’t stop me, however, and I sought to perfectly secure the world of the past in nothing but a tube of glass. Already, science was becoming a crutch for everyone as the imperfect died of disease while the processed thrived.\n\nIt was I who brought back the extinct ones, and even then I started to forget where they came from in the first place. My mind was so transfixed upon finding more out about ourselves that I had misplaced the idea of the unseen. Instead, I saw the prehistoric fly again and the tribes of Australia’s natives walk again. The Croatian tribes were born to sterile labs and I watched them grow to become perfect like the others.\n\nI gained perfection. I extended my life by altering my own code so that my work could live on. Others found this, and they too came to cease aging and continue on as if nothing had been different from the day they stopped growing older. I killed off the very idea of dying men. I made the human race happy, and I also made them empty.\n\nThey tore down their instruments of war and pollution and they cheered me still. They venerated me in books until they were also burned into nothing. The books came first and the churches came next. The symbols were gone; the texts were ash. I admit it all. I killed you, and I am so very sorry.\n\nThey will not allow this in public any longer, so here I am on my knees and my hands clenched together crying out for God. Even inside here, it is not safe. We’ve become two hundred and seven now and we are without you. Faithless and lost despite what everyone else believes.\n\nThere will be no more children, now that we all live forever. There will be no one to think differently or learn anew. I started out with a test tube and placed you inside of it to suffocate you. We never meant for this to happen, we just wanted to perfect ourselves. Things weren’t so simple and I want you to come back. I’m praying for you now and hope that you forgive me for doing it. Please come back so that you can forgive me. Please.\n"
  title: Prayer
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-02-26
  day: 26
  month: '02'
  text: "Dear John,\n\nI loved you John, I want you to understand that.\n\nThe Core wasn’t wrong to match us as marriage candidates; it just didn’t understand who you were really, the physical you. When we spoke and wrote and sent all those mad pictures over the Core – that was some other John. You used to write to me like a mad lover. You told me you would carry me though fire. You treated me like a partner, you told me you would always have my back, and that you could always trust me to have yours. I had compatibility with seventy-eight men over the Core, but none of them wrote like you, none of them sent the kind of beautiful pictures you did, or the songs you composed, or the mad videos you hacked together for me. No one was like you. That’s why I married you John, you were singular.\n\nWhen we bought this house on the floating islands, I thought I was about to enter a dream. I was going to be living with the most amazing man on the pacific islands in a planned community. We dreamed up a thousand adventures for when we got here, do you remember?\n\nI told myself a lot of excuses when we moved in together. You were adjusting, it was a new place, and it would take a while for you to find your feet. You were rude because you were nervous. The drugs were just your way of making yourself comfortable, the way you yelled was just your passion. You said you would carry me though hell, but you couldn’t love me enough to clean your clothes or rub my shoulders when I was tired.\n\nAfter a while, I began to feel as if I had been tricked. I invented odd fantasies, that someone else had written those words, had sent those videos. I was being played on a trick, a terrible lie. Perhaps it was a program designed at seduction that you had bought; perhaps you bought me for the price of a cruel hack.\n\nYou asked me why I haven’t been bringing you meals, why I haven’t set the dials to clean the house, why I haven’t been talking to you. I thought you were a big liar, that I was wrapped in a lie, and I wanted you to suffer for what you have done. But that’s not the person I want to be. I don’t want to live as a bitter woman, angry about the life I keep choosing to trap myself in. I have to go away.\n\nYou are not the person I love, you are some strange, twisted imitator, some dreamer who dreams himself better than he is. You are so good at this that you fooled the Core, with all it’s wonderful psych tests and profiles. You fooled me too. You might even be fooling yourself.\n\nI have to leave you. I cannot stay with the John who lives in that house; he is not the man that the Core matched me with.\n\nWhen you become the man in those messages, find me.\n\n-Tara\n"
  title: Dear John
  year: 2006
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2006-02-27
  day: 27
  month: '02'
  text: "The aroma of cooked vegetables filled Leba’s nostrils as she finished mixing the oils for the final touches of her dinner. All the guests had been waiting to taste her delicious mixture of carrots and lettuce with roots and peppers as spices. In fact, the whole of the community adored Leba for her talents at making their normal everyday meals into something exquisite.\n\nThough, even as Leba prepared the courses, her sister Enias watched and listened as their guests of honor eagerly awaited her sisters’ well-prepared meal. They laughed and smiled as they readied themselved for the feast they were about to receive and many even went so far as to ignore Enias for the time being until their meals were to be served.\n\nJealously was a trait that indicated the annual shot wasn’t working and even though she knew this, Enias kept the idea from public. She had thought that the guests must have known, since they spent so much time around the two. If they knew, she mused, it must not be wrong.\n\nEnias began to wonder why they had to eat with tongs. Every edge of the tongs perfectly sculpted to be as dull as could be, and yet she wondered what tool could be used to supplement them. The very idea that larger portions had to be torn by hand boggled her mind.\n\nThe sour sister sat watching the guests and the table lay out like a large slab of marble with its pretty silk dressings, and she began to wonder if there would ever be something else to consume, something else to appease their honored guests. Perhaps in the back of her mind, Enias wanted to be her sister this night. Though now she was getting impatient as time was going by and there was no response from the kitchen.\n\nAs the laughing and the carousing of their guests went on, Enias became agitated and impatient. She stood, excusing herself and made for the kitchen where she would politely remind her favored sister of the importance of pleasing their guests with punctuality and good offerings. She entered through the swinging doors to find her sister kneeling over what looked to be a broken tong. Her left hand gripped her right wrist as she looked on in sorrow and horror at the crimson fluid dripping down her finger.\n\nLooking upon the scene, Enias’ eyes were transfixed upon the very wound inflicted by the shattered wood of the tongs. Her sister was holding back tears and all Enias could think of was the something trying to unleash itself from the back of her mind. She could not define it and yet it pushed harder, trying to break free as the blood flowed. Suddenly it all broke free, and Enias knew what her and her honored guests had been missing all along. She would impress them this night.\n"
  title: Human Nature
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2006-02-28
  day: 28
  month: '02'
  text: "You remember when Billy first went into space, don’t you? First time one of those crazy rockets of his went off with him in it. First time he sent up the big rocket, not those little ones with the sensors made of old cell-phones and other garbage. Chuck always said he’d send up Chairman Meow, or Mr. Catkins, or Daisy’s kitten Cindy next, but he didn’t. Billy went up immediately, soon as he knew as he could.\n\nYou hear what Daisy said? She was just in here, you just missed her. Billy calls her now and then. Only one from round here, ‘spect. She told me Billy says the Jupiter colony wasn’t gonna work by the end of next year. Called it the biggest failure of his life.\n\nDaisy’s doin’ well. Says her VD’s cleared up clear as day, and she gonna get back to work. That boy of hers is gettin’ tall. She made a joke about how someone needs to market a daycare for prostitutes. That’s Daisy for you. Always got a sense of humor.\n\nShe made some joke about Billy; can’t remember what it was.\n\nRemember how Chuck broke Billy’s arm soon as he came down? Billy told everyone it was from re-entry, but a bunch of us saw him crawl out of that craft using both arms after landing. You saw it was Chuck, didn’t you? Slammed Billy up against the wall, kicked him in the stomach, spat in his face. We all did a bit of that, but Chuck broke Billy’s arm, make no mistake.\n\nYou seen Chuck recently? He looks good. He’s serious about quitting this time. Ever since that last binge, he’s been serious. You know, the one he pawned his prosthetic leg to finance. You said he’d be clean after losing that leg in that car accident, but he proved you wrong, eh? But he’s serious now, he said so.\n\nStill hard to believe Billy went, ain’t it? Even after we all saw him, saw that rocket made of junk and debris took off into the sky? No one thought it would, despite what Billy told us about super-dense material and reverse-gravity fields an all that other hoodoo he’d spout. But there it went, rocketing into the sky, out of Filt Street, out of Sporboro, out of the goddamn state and country and world.\n\nAnyways, here’s the usual; you’re still one of the best customers here, even after what happened to your throat. It’s amazing you can get enemas to work like that for you. Bottoms up! Ha! See you next week! The wine’ll be restocked!\n\nWhat was that joke about Billy…\n"
  title: Rocketer
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2006-03-01
  day: '01'
  month: '03'
  text: "Claude scuffed his feet against the burnished steel floor of his ship, a deep frown settled on his features. No matter how old he got, there were some women who always seemed to bring out the child in him, the contrite young boy who had just been given a firm scolding. Jelari could do it more easily than most.\n\n“It’s not that I think it’s a bad thing,” she was explaining, her voice quiet and reasonable. “But really, Claude, even you have got to see that this is a little unhealthy. It makes sense for a mechanic to be devoted to his ship, but with this thing—Claude, I don’t know how else to say this. You treat it like a person.”\n\n“I treat her like a ship,” Claude protested. “A good ship who’s gotten me through a lot of scrapes and deserves respect.”\n\n“See?” Jehari said, giving him a look of profound disappointment. “You’re personifying again, Claude. You just called it a ‘she.’ A spaceship isn’t a person. It’s a piece of machinery.”\n\n“Even landside sailors give their ships a gender,” Claude replied, but the sinking feeling in his heart told him he was losing yet another battle. Jehari just didn’t understand the special relationship Claude had with the Mermaid’s Wing. He’d raised the ship from a baby, just a junkyard scrap with a tiny spark of potential, and she had carried him through thick and thin. Every ounce of money Claude got from his various odd jobs wound up sunk into the Mermaid’s Wing, on engine parts or upgrades or new tools or even just a new coat of sealant. He could tell that his girlfriend was not amused.\n\n“That is not the point, Claude, and you know it.” Jehari straightened and frowned, and inwardly, Claude groaned. This always meant that she meant business. “The point is that you are spending too much time working on the ship and not enough interacting with real human beings.”\n\nBy that, Claude knew that Jehari meant he’d been ignoring her, and he felt a pang of guilt. Jehari was a human, though, and humans could take care of themselves. The Wing couldn’t. “She needs me,” Claude protested weakly.\n\n“Claude, this is not acceptable.” Jehari’s mouth was set in a thin line and Claude knew it was only a pale representation of the line he had just crossed. “I’m not going to live here with you and watch you waste all of your time on unnecessary engine diagnostics and triple-redundancy system installations. You need to make a choice. It’s either me or the ship.”\n\nSlumping in his chair, Claude nodded. Somehow he had always known it would come to this. He felt a certain sense of defeat, but in the end, Jehari was probably right—it was better this way. He needed to learn how to let go and make choices. It was with a very real pang of regret that he dropped Jehari off at the next spaceport.\n\nAs he piloted the Mermaid’s Wing away from the station, Claude felt a lightness that he hadn’t experienced in months. He patted the control panel affectionately, noting as he did so that the Wing’s coolant system was running just a little below 90% efficiency. He’d have to take a look at that. “Don’t worry,” he told the ship with a smile. “I’ll take care of you.”\n"
  title: Priorities
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-03-02
  day: '02'
  month: '03'
  text: "On the night Alpine Zanzibar died, that diva light, that genteel fantastic, the people that loved him bought him the moon. Together his friends pitched a fortune and purchased the lunar landscape for the entire night, inflicting their choices for the moon’s color on the entire earth. At 6PM the moon was a crisp blond color but at the strike of midnight it turned a dark and mysterious blue. The gold of that light was to celebrate the long life of Alpine Zanzibar, and the blue was to mourn his passing.\n\nThe party was at the Silver Swan, the establishment where Alpine Zanzibar held his bohemian court. The Silver Swan was not just bar, nor a cabaret, but the night home of the residents of Second Paris, a place were hearts were mended and souls found, glory on a honest to damn wooden stage. Years before most of the patrons had even been born, the genteel fantastic Alpine Zanzibar had opened the Silver Swan and had commenced the nightly revelry as the city of Second Paris grew around him. The party was part roast, part jazz funeral, but most of all like a birthday and all of it like the life of the man it celebrated, all glory, all fabulous fantastic.\n\nAlpine Zanzibar himself appeared an hour into the festivities, having just emerged from a day spent with his closest friends, his created family, those brothers and sisters holding back their tears and throwing back bubbly drinks. He wore robes of shining purple and glistening blue, the colors of the evening, past the set sun.\n\nIn accordance with Zanzibar’s own request, they held the usual cabaret; girls dancing, the political puppet show outlining the faults of the United Parliament, the heckles and the teasing, the stripping and the finale, which Zanzibar sang himself. He sang his torch song, his familiar standard, the old love song, almost antiquated until Zanzibar put it past his lips.\n\nSuddenly, as the last chord played, there was the sound of wild horses, and the laugher of women.  From the cold autumn night, like a crisp wind blew in that proper villain, that rouge, the gypsy Prince; Vlad of the Jagged Spire. He entered with his cadre of gypsy girls in their striped corsets. Vlad wore his stylishly disheveled Victorian tails, and top hat. His dark hair curled around his shoulders, and the crisp click of his heels on the ceramic tile sent the crowd silent. Long had Zanzibar and Vlad been rivals, Zanzibar stealing Vlads gypsy ladies to his stage and Vlad temping Zanzibar’s lovers into his caravan.\n\nVlad swept through the silent crowd, holding the edges of his stain lined cape and mounted the stage with an effortless little hop.\n\n“Long have we been rivals, Alpine Zanzibar, but tonight, that ends.” Vlad wrapped his arm around Zanzibar’s waist, pulling Zanzibars body towards his in a smooth, practiced motion. Vlad caught Zanzibar in a long and passionate kiss. When they finally parted, Vlad bowed to Zanzibar. “A decent rival happens once in a thousand lifetimes. My deepest thanks.”\n\nZanzibar lifted the glass thrust into his hand, and proposed a toast to Vlad, and Vlad toasted Zanzibar, and into the night the patrons of the Silver Swan toasted each other and danced and laughed and sang away every hour.\n\nAlpine Zanzibar took the key from around his neck, that brass key to the Silver Swan, and placed it around the neck of his lover, the doe eyed boy named Daniel, whose white shirt clung to his ribs like paint on a wall. Daniels eyes went liquid, he lost a crystal tear to Zanzibar’s thumb on his cheek and a kiss that was tender and sweet, a taste, an echo. But Zanzibar wouldn’t let his lover cry for long. He encouraged the band with a dramatic wave, let the drink pour from the fountains, and danced with the girls. Vlad whirled, skirts flew, and the organ played on.\n\nAfter midnight, when everyone was drunk and singing, Zanzibar went to the back room and changed his clothes. He wiped the paint off his face and put on grey trousers and a flat, black cap. He picked up his satchel, the one with a change of clothes and his new identification cards, the ones that said Eugene Johnston, freshman university student in physics. He opened the back door into the alley and walked towards the public transport pod-station. Behind him, Alpine Zanzibar’s friends were toasting the life of a man they loved, ahead, Eugene Johnston started his life.\n"
  title: Alpine Zanzibar, The Genteel Fantastic
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2006-03-03
  day: '03'
  month: '03'
  text: "Everyone asks how I met Archer, if I picked him out from the agency’s catalogue or if he was recommended to me by someone else and other such questions, when in truth I must confess that I had never met him before he showed up upon my doorstep. I had merely requested a valet from the agency, and they said one would be sent, and gave no further description other than he would be up to their impeccable standards.\n\nHe rang the bell at exactly the second upon the hour he was to arrive, and I found myself unexpectedly worried. Had the agency sent a robot? That would not do, not in the least. So it was with no small amount of trepidation that I opened the door. Imagine my relief, if you can, to find not a chrome-plated Johnnie, but instead, Archer.\n\n“I was sent by the agency, sir,” he said. “I was given to understand that you required a valet. My name is Archer”\n\nI nodded, awed. He shook my hand firmly, and glided into the room , setting about tidying up. I have tendency to leave things strewn about while in the midst of working–a hazard of the occupation, really–and Archer went to setting it right immediately, seeming to know where everything went originally after nothing more than a brief scan of the room.\n\n“You’ll have to excuse me,” I said. “But…how did you know?”\n\n“I beg your pardon. sir?”\n\n“That I was your employer, and not…you know. Did the agency tell you?” I hadn’t mentioned it to them, but they have ways of finding things.\n\n“You are referring to your appearance, sir?” Archer asked. I nodded. “No, the agency said nothing. But if you were not my employer, and this phantom gentleman had such a robot as yourself open the door for him, what need would he have of me?”\n\n“And this doesn’t bother you?”\n\n“No, sir,” Archer said. But I remained unconvinced.\n\n“I feel I should explain my position. I am, as you may have guessed from the supplies, an artist. I have been fortunate enough to be a very financially successful artist, thought I am not a fool and realize that a great deal of that success comes from the novelty of being a ‘robot artist.’ The fact remains, however, that I am possessing of a great deal of money and a great deal of social obligations. Hence, your employ.”\n\n“Very good, sir.”\n\n“I don’t think you understand. I need help, Archer! The clothes alone!” I rubbed my rubber fingertips against my metallic forehead, the squeaks emphasizing my frustration. “I don’t know how to behave around people. I don’t know! Perhaps that old crank Tortleberry was right. Perhaps robots are not meant for social life.”\n\n“If I may be so bold, sir.” Archer said. He stood very still and looked at me directly. “The word ‘robot’ comes from ‘robota,’ which means ‘drudgery’ in Czech and ‘work’ in Slovak. And while I have no doubts you work very hard upon your art, I do not believe it was the kind of labor the people of Slovakia had in mind. You are a gentleman of leisure, sir. I do not believe the title of ‘robot’ fits.”\n\n“So this situation won’t be a problem for you. You’re not… embarrassed, or anything.” At that, Archer smiled. And I confess, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anyone smile before that. Not at me. It was so guileless, so warm. Nowhere near the mechanical grins I was used to from my buyers and other industry types.\n\n“To be perfectly honest, sir, I am rather looking forward to the next Guild meeting. There’s a few Johnnie models that are going to be unspeakably jealous.”\n"
  title: Drudgery In Czech
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2006-03-04
  day: '04'
  month: '03'
  text: "Daikan hadn’t told anyone about the birds. They were his secret, but each day, he had to prove to himself that his secret was still there.\n\nThe fields stretched out wide and sun-kissed, rows of wheat and corn and the colonial crop of beravados swaying gently in the wind. Daikan breathed the air as he walked, but he paid no attention to the beauty of the countryside. He had grown up on colony worlds, after all, and had never seen a true city. The contrast was lost on him. He was close to the valley now, the hollow where he’d first discovered his secret. The fields held no interest for him.\n\nDaikan paused to catch his breath at the base of the last hill, his heart leaping in his chest. Every day that he made this pilgrimage, he asked himself the same questions. Would they be there today? Would it all still be true? Or had his secret vanished overnight, disappeared into the ether of impossibility? Daikan didn’t want to believe it was all a dream, so he hadn’t told anyone. Not yet. He took a deep breath and bent down to his hands and knees, crawling up the hill to peer over the top.\n\nThe birds were there. Stretching out in all directions, they covered the grassy plain, so close together that Daikan couldn’t see the ground. The valley was filled with birds of every shape and color, feathers rustling, all packed together more closely than Daikan had ever seen. He held his breath, eyes wide, terrified of disturbing them. Each day the birds seemed to multiply, with more kinds and colors filling the small hollow until Daikan couldn’t believe it would hold anymore, but this was far beyond the number from the day before. The valley full of feathers and beaks was a living thing, but the only sound that issued from it was a low, pervasive rustle. The birdlike chatter that had drawn him there for the first time a week ago was gone, and Daikan swallowed. He would keep still forever if it meant never breaking the wonder of the scene before him.\n\nAll at once, the rustle stopped. Daikan’s eyes were wide as saucers, fearful that the birds had discovered him, that he would be covered by angry wings and claws and pecked apart by sharp beaks, but the birds didn’t move. For a long moment, there was utter silence in the valley, an unnerving stillness that a similar crowd of human beings could never produce. Then the birds turned as one and launched themselves into flight.\n\nIt was stunning. Every bird in the valley, every member of every species that had been painstakingly transported from the homeworld, took wing at once. They flew over Daikan’s head with no regard whatsoever for the human boy, and without thinking he was on his feet, mouth open as he stared at the cloud of departing creatures. Feathers fell around him like rain, the combined effect of thousands of birds taking off at once, nearly blotting out the sky with their bodies.\n\n“No!” Daikan cried out in dismay, stretching a futile hand out after them. “No, please! Come back!” His hand caught only a single black feather.\n\nThe birds didn’t listen. In a cacophony of flapping wings, they were gone.\n"
  title: Exodus
  year: 2006
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2006-03-05
  day: '05'
  month: '03'
  text: "Traditions are hard to break but the ones that mean something never go away. Today is just any other day for Marci except that today she walks to the store to get her groceries. Marci America is sweating after the first few steps of her journey to the store. She feels hungry because the vitamin booster won’t be regularly injected into her spine, and she feels tired because the anti-atrophying agent isn’t going to work for the next thirty days.\n\nThe streets of Union Crater, Mars are filled with people who hadn’t seen the grey skies in exactly a year’s time. People just like Marci are trying to remember how to walk more than ten feet in an hour, they are trying to recall how it is to be alive.\n\nSome like Harold Dixon have been training for these days for months. He walks with a steady pace and even daringly lifts his arm to take a sip of Hydro-Oxy from a bottle. It’s people like Marci that really bring out the spirit of the Days of Remembrance. The ones that almost don’t make it are the ones who show everyone else watching what it means to truly understand these days.\n\nMarci is fourteen meters down the street and she can feel her body wanting to give in. She tries to remember that it’s not her body giving in but her mind that wants to break down. If she falls she knows it isn’t the end. Those who fall on the way to do their daily activities are swept up by their neighbors and helped along every step of the way.\n\nMars dust is disturbed between buildings that have not been disturbed for an entire year. Some children who are naturally vibrant can spot marks they made the previous year and laugh at the lethargy of their progenitors. The red sand is marred with footprints on the way to work, school, and shopping. Upon entering the doors of these establishments there is a solemn silence at the deactivated teleportation consoles next to the entranceways.\n\nBy now middle-aged Marci is finding her strength again.  She can walk with ease and ignores the stress of bones and muscle. Her eyes focus to the light outdoors, the sun they call Solaris that burns the eyes of everyone who dares to step beyond the threshold of their homes. Marci’s mind is challenged and it prevails. In her lucidity she remembers why they do such things for these few weeks and why it is important to always remember.\n\nUnion Crater is a good city with good values. There may be crime and there may be troubles of the family but everyone stops to stare at the grey tower on their walks towards their duties. A sign before the tower is dim without the power inside, letters spelling out in the dust: “Union Crater Power Matrix”. Marci is biting into an apple grown from dirt, not replication. She tastes the sweetness of a year of effort and she remembers to take nothing for granted.\n"
  title: For Granted
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-03-06
  day: '06'
  month: '03'
  text: "She let him make love to her. He smelled like new cars and cologne, he moved with a measured rhythm. Her mouth tasted like mint toothpaste. She looked over his shoulder through the white light of the window. She was sweating into her sheets, her breath silent, and her lips thin and tight.\n\nShe let him make love to her. Her husband was gone with a girl that he met through the Internet, a girl with pictures of her little waist and little breasts up for abandoned wives to see.\n\nShe let him make love to her, and when it was over, she switched him off. His eyes turned from liquid to glass. She forced his eyelids closed, feeling the mechanical tension resist as she clicked them into place.\n"
  title: From Liquid to Glass
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2006-03-07
  day: '07'
  month: '03'
  text: "“It’s a transition period,” Meryl says, but everyone knows that once you’re in, it’s nearly impossible to get out.  It’s a matter of logistics, really.  We’re a three-person, which means that each of us gets about five waking hours per day.  Take travel time into account, and we each have four hours to work, assuming that we never eat.  That’s barely enough to pay maintenance, let alone save up for a new place.\n\nMeryl was forty-seven when she moved into the body.  Kate and I think it was some sort of cancer, because she’s always cluttering up the rules list with health-nut commandments like “don’t eat artificial sweetener” and “don’t sit near the smoking section.”  Kate was hit by a bus when she was twenty four, and my body died of a good old-fashioned heart attack at the ripe age of seventy three.\n\nWe’ve been sharing the body for three years, which has been more than enough time to get on each other’s nerves.  Kate’s always dressing us in terrible fad fashions, and once when Meryl stepped in she found a silver hoop in our navel.  Meryl writes ad copy for an herbal health supplement line, and I swear, she’s going to give us carpal tunnel with all of that typing.\n\nWhen one person’s in the body, the rest of us sit around in the lobby, which really isn’t a lobby at all.  We can’t see out, since only the person in control can use the senses.  Sometimes we tell jokes, or talk about our lives before the body.  Usually, though, we gossip about whoever’s in the cockpit.  It’s just girl talk, though.  No bad blood.\n\nThe only time we’re all in the lobby together is the weekly meeting, Tuesday night after we’ve left the body to sleep.  It lasts about an hour, before we get tired as well, and we use that time to talk about group expenses and time management.  This week, we resolved to eat more tofu (Meryl’s still upset about our failed attempt at vegetarianism), get our hair highlighted (but nothing too extreme, we warned Kate) and buy lottery tickets.  It’s up to almost $400 million this week, which would be enough to buy us each a supermodel.  A girl’s gotta have some space to herself, and it doesn’t hurt anyone if that space was in a swimsuit magazine.\n"
  title: A Room of One’s Own
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2006-03-08
  day: '08'
  month: '03'
  text: "On Saturn’s ring plasma knives were illegal and as such, costly.  Tangerine remembered Big Slab used to wear one around his neck, but she had never seen him use it. But this was Earth, and Earth was said to be civilized, unlike those settlements on Saturn’s rings.  Which meant that when these girls from Tangerine’s school brought out knives and threatened to cut her, they were plasma, not steel.\n\n“Here’s how it lays out, Ringer,”said the tall girl, clearly the leader. Her holographic nails illuminated the delicate controls on her knife handle. “We don’t like you, and we don’t need your kind at this school. So we’re gonna do you a favor, and give you a reason to go on back to your smelly little rings.”\n\nTangerine’s mother had insisted on the move. She didn’t think Big Slab and the other members of The Titans were proper role-models for a young girl. Tangerine had tried to explain to her that you couldn’t be safer than the protégé of the leader of the toughest gang in the ‘rings, but her mother wouldn’t hear of it.\n\n“Saturn swallows its children whole,” she would say, shaking her head. And that would be the end of it. “Saturn swallows its children whole.”\n\nSo instead of the warm tutelage of Big Slab, Sally Gone, Dingo and all the rest, Tangerine was in the parking lot of a convenience store of civilized Earth with five girls discussing how many pieces they were going to slice her up.\n\n“Don’t you worry too much about it, Ringer. Tell you what, if you don’t struggle, we may even leave you that pretty face of yours.” The tall girl kept adjusting the magnetic field of her knife, making the blade longer or shorter or wider or thinner. Playing with it.\n\nTangerine remembered Big Slab talking about those who treat weapons as toys. She remembered what he said about how to deal with those people. For the first time since leaving Saturn’s rings, Tangerine smiled.\n\n“I really like your nails,” Tangerine said. “All that light. They must make finding your boyfriend’s tiny penis really easy.”\n\nThe tall girl came in quickly. Tangerine dodged the strike with ease, and caught the girls wrist. In one fluid motion, she turned off the knife, and depressed one of the control dials so hard it snapped. Tangerine pushed the girl away, closed her eyes and placed her arms in front of her face.\n\nThe tall girl charged again, raising her knife high above her head, her hologramed thumb switching it back on. But fell to her knees immediately when her knife exploded in her hand, the ignited plasma expanding outward without the magnetic field Tangerine had broken. The rest of the girl-gang temporarily blinded, Tangerine wasted no time hauling the tall girl up by her hair.\n\n“I’m a daughter of Saturn,” Tangerine whispered in the tall girl’s ear. “I think you know what that means, now.” Tangerine let go of the tall girl’s hair, and watched as she crumpled on the asphalt.\n\nTangerine adjusted her school uniform, and calmly walked out of the parking lot, back into civilized Earth\n"
  title: Saturn Swallows Its Children Whole
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2006-03-09
  day: '09'
  month: '03'
  text: "Terina fumbled in her pocket for her pill box, a present from her mother. If you had to live with such an unfortunate disease, Mama had told her bluntly, you might as well have something nice and unobtrusive to hide the necessary medication. Terina had needed a pill then, too, letting her six-year-old bangs hide the shame in her eyes. Thirty years later, she no longer had the benefit of the curtain of hair, but the enameled pill box was a good focus for her gaze. Terina popped out one of the small blue spheres and tucked it under her tongue, letting her body dissolve the medicine as she tried to pay attention to the feed in front of her.\n\nBodies. Dead bodies, everywhere, laid out across a bloody plain that nearly made Terina sick when she had to look at it. She swallowed bile and willed the pill to dissolve faster, sneaking a glance at her fellow commanding officers, all arrayed around the readout in stolid contemplation.\n\n“Looks like the blast points were precise,” one of the men observed, pointing out charred circles on the readout with his stylus. “They maximized human casualties rather than structural damage.”\n\n“That makes sense,” a blue-eyed woman replied. “That’s one of the few plants that isn’t automated. Without its workers, production will be halved at best. They did their research.” She shook her head in detached admiration. “Intelligent terrorists.”\n\n“Lieutenant Carreas?” the colonel asked, turning to Terina for her opinion. She jumped a little before she got a hold of herself.\n\n“We’ll have to write to the families,” she said softly, then immediately regretted it when six pairs of incredulous eyes turned towards her. Terina shrank back and crunched the pill between her teeth; anything to get it to dissolve faster and restore her composure.\n\n“Let’s focus on the situation at hand, Carreas,” the colonel suggested, and his disapproval was clear. Terina swallowed the pill. She could finally feel the medication beginning to take effect, detaching her from the weakness of outdated emotional reaction.\n\n“Yes, sir.” Straightening, Terina examined the readouts again, this time more easily able to ignore the mangled bodies at the crime scene. “This looks like Redox residue,” she said at last, circling a blackened piece of ground with her own stylus in order to enlarge it. “It must have been the Xiang rebels. No other group has access to that kind of technology.” The rest of the lieutenants nodded and murmured their agreement. Terina knew that all of them thought her more than a little flighty due to her condition, but they still showed a grudging respect for her skills as an analyst and tactician, provided she remembered to take her medication.\n\n“Good work, Carreas.” The colonel nodded sharply and turned his gaze to the blue-eyed woman. “Lieutenant Holmes, you will lead the dispatch team. Flush out the rebels; if they’re Xiang, they should still be in the area. Make sure they’re caught promptly. We can’t afford any more production delays.” The woman saluted smartly and turned to go, with the rest of the commanding officers following a step afterwards, as soon as the colonel gave the signal of dismissal. Terina hung behind.\n\nAs the rest of the lieutenants filed out of the briefing room, Terina traced the images on the screen with her finger, swallowing a lump in her throat. She knew she wasn’t supposed to think about the families. She wasn’t supposed to feel any of this. She wasn’t supposed to feel anything at all.\n\nTurning quickly, Terina hurried to catch up with the rest of the group before she was missed. The slight blur of her vision was something she had learned to accept. Once the medication took full effect, it would be gone.\n"
  title: The Post-Emotional Age
  year: 2006
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2006-03-10
  day: 10
  month: '03'
  text: "Stretching his thin arms, Xytherzuk slipped into his council chair, the last of nine to be seated before the chamber of balance. The high-council glared down upon the little grey being staring up with black eyes that were nervous and begged for mercy. A being in robes stood at the table and looked down to the little one standing beneath the eyes of the council.\n\n“Eth, we have watched your experiment for seven cycles of the star system. Your efforts to weed out this humanoid evolution by pigment have failed.” The being sat slowly as the others began to whisper amongst themselves. The small being known as Eth spoke up.\n\n“No! It is not too late high-councilmen! Let me explain! Their prejudice grows… it will eat at them and destroy them.” A loud boom shakes the sound within the room to a halt.\n\nA smaller grey being leans forward. “They are inspired by the colors you have given them. This virus of yours has caused them to see their world with shades and hues. Yet it has also caused them to expand!”\n\nEth whimpered and in his squeaky voice tried to make due with his case, “They have racism, high-council. And they have prejudice against colors that do not match. Given time this will cause more war and more hatred.”\n\n“We are done with waiting, Eth. Already our scouts are identified by their grey skin. Could your virus not have given us a better sensory projection than a mottled grey? And of the skies… you made the skies look as such and they have ventured forth to go beyond it. This, we cannot allow. We are cutting the experiment.”\n\nIn truth, Eth never really wanted to argue much with the council. He knew his experiment was doomed to failure from the beginning and yet somehow hoped everything would work out. As he was escorted back to his chamber he thought of the reactions of pigment to the human race and how it had blossomed into more than he could have imagined.\n\nImagination, it seemed to Eth, was something missing from more than just the humans. He sat within his chamber cell and waited for the guards to leave. Underneath his pillow he slipped a hand to retrieve his hidden vice. A small booklet colored with an amber hue rested in his three-fingered hand. He pulled it open to reveal a slew of what was known to the humans as photographs.\n\nSitting back against the wall, his small body heaved with a long, drawn-out sigh. They would remove the color from the world, but the virus remained within him. Plucking a photo from the group he looked at the vision of his grey form coated in paint and behind him a smearing of color across a brick wall in a dilapidated city block. Eth sighed and smiled. The colors were his to enjoy.\n"
  title: Pigment
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-03-11
  day: 11
  month: '03'
  text: "Julius Bright wasn’t a designer, though he was often mistaken for one. Julius was the man who made designers, who launched and crushed careers. He had owned magazines, was the heir to an incredible fortune, a net star, an idol.\n\nTwelve years ago, Julius Bright told me that I wouldn’t have any future as a designer. He did it in the nicest possible way. After a show he pulled me aside and told me that I had flair but no talent and that he didn’t want to say anything in front of the press because I was such a nice boy but if I continued to pursue this path eventually he would have to say something and he didn’t want me to work so hard without much to show for it.\n\nSo I quit, just because Julius told me too. I went into the business side of design, and I’ve been very happy there. When I look back on the faux bohemian that I was, I’m glad Julius pulled me aside.\n\nTwelve years later, we met again, and this time he was the one with something to prove.\n\nHe met me outside an ugly warehouse on the edge of the city, little silver spheres swirling around his head. The Paparazzi-bots, taking pictures. It seemed like an odd place for Julius to meet me, not at all the stylish places I imagined him frequenting. He was dressed in a shining striped pink and yellow waistcoat.\n\n“Tim! It’s been years!” he said, throwing his hands dramatically up in the air. I didn’t think he actually remembered me, I assume he played back his stored memory files. “I needed to talk to someone who could talk to the business side of things.” He said, leading me inside. “But also someone who understood design, like you do.”\n\nI had no idea why he called me here, or what he needed from me. Sure, I loved design and could talk to businessmen, but I had a hard time believing that Julius Bright would have a hard time getting business to buy anything. His smile showed glittering teeth.\n\n“What is one of the biggest problems the world of design faces?” He asked, leading me down a dark corridor.\n\nI shrugged. “Consumer fatigue?”\n\n“Oh Tim, you joker. No. The problem is with models, and the problem with models is their transience.” We came to a black curtained room with a long walkway. Julius leaped on the walkway and began to strut with long, angry steps.  “A woman is only beautiful from fourteen to seventeen.” He paused and rested his silver cane against his lips. “Maybe seventeen is a bit old, but you see what I mean. Anyway, after that, she begins to rot. They’ve got such a short shelf life; it’s hard to build a career for them. They are flashes, beautiful lights that go out in an instant.” He hung his head. “There are other issues too, young girls aren’t very dependable, and the smart ones don’t really have their heart in it, they always leave to become engineers or something. Terrible losses, really.”\n\nJulius opened his arms wide, smiling gaily. “But now we have options.  Now we will have the ability to lengthen the career of a model. We can make perfect girls that will not change, girls we can control. They won’t get caught in scandals, unless you want them too, of course, and they can be relied upon. They’ll never leave to go to school, or eat too much, or die. “\n\nI was about to ask what kind of girl would have all these features, but before I could speak, he began his monologue again.\n\n“I know, the digital girl failed miserably years ago. The animated girl was fun and perfect, but she wasn’t real, and people like things they can touch, or pretend they could touch.”\n\n“Now, now I can give you the flesh. We’ve grown the flesh based on the best girls in their prime. We’ve grown it and preserved it, a perfect plastic replica. You want tall? Her legs can be lengthened. You want longer hair? We can grow it in seconds.\n\nAnd most importantly, we can brand them.” Julius clapped his hands, and sleek, slender, impossibly tall women, all naked, emerged from behind the black curtain and marched down the walkway, Dark hair, light hair, short, tall, milky white, coal black. Julius laughed and grabbed one on her shoulders. She lithely stepped close to him.  “Here is our innocent.” He pointed to the other end of the walkway “Here is our counter culture heroine. Here is the slut. Here is the sleek lesbian, here is the exotic tropical. We can make them last, attach them to products based on image, and design for and around them. No more transience. What we have here is complete flexibility.\n\nThey are warm. Their eyes are wet. They will strut, smile and pose. They are fully programmable. We’ve been mixing them with models on the runway already, sneaking them in shows and no one has been the wiser. They aren’t girls though, make no mistake.” Julian leaned in close; conspiratorially “They are better.”\n"
  title: The Holy Brand
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2006-03-12
  day: 12
  month: '03'
  text: "TO: Major-General Peter Wixtreed\n\nFROM: Colonel Todd Fuller\n\nRE: Continuing contact with Species #7652-28D\n\nAs suggested, sir, we pressed for visual contact and after some time the diplomatic envoys gave in, though not without a good deal of trepidation. They seem uncomfortable dealing with military personnel, so I reduced our contact with the envoys to a minimum and instead allowed the ambassador to speak to them directly. Her conversations seemed to persuade the envoys and put them more at ease, and when they at last capitulated, they extended the condition that she be the one to make such contact, alone. It took three hours more to get them agree to our terms—neutral ground, a military escort, and standard contact proceedings—but their affection for the ambassador was, I believe, the strongest motivator for their acquiescence.\n\nThe meeting took place on Elaxron, an inhabitable but as yet undeveloped planet in the near vicinity, and I commanded the troops in attendance. We were universally shocked at the sight of what the envoys had been hiding from us. The men had speculated when off-duty that we were encountering intelligent slime monsters or other creatures of legend, but none of us had expected simians. They have altered and evolved, of course, but the creatures we are meeting with are monkeys. I admit I was aghast. The ambassador was the only one who seemed unaffected, possibly due to her diplomatic training. My men and I retained composure, of course, but I intercepted more than one startled look before cowing the men back into military discipline.\n\nThough I would have expected these creatures to fear us, they do not—or at least, not in the way I would think. It soon became clear that they had indeed evolved from the monkeys of our own world, sent out in experimental rockets and presumed dead centuries ago, during Earth’s first forays into spaceflight. Rather than looking upon our scientists as cruel experimenters, however, they view humans as a sort of father race. Their devotion is really quite touching. Their fear of being seen, it was revealed, was due to embarrassment rather than fear—they had not expected to encounter our species, which is only a legend in their society, for many more years.\n\nAfter this revelation, I allowed my men to stand down and permitted the ambassador to meet with the simians alone as they desired. This discovery is an historic one, General, and I hope it is not out of line to say that I am proud to be a part of it. It has been rather quiet here since the ambassador left for her secluded meeting; I believe the men all appreciate the gravity and awe of this situation and have made themselves scarce.\n\nWith respect, I await your next dispatch.\n\nCOL. FULLER\n"
  title: Diplomatic Relations
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2006-03-13
  day: 13
  month: '03'
  text: "Zai Lockheart felt slightly claustrophobic on her mother’s porch despite the open, rolling wilderness of the Martian countryside that surrounded her. The house was a pre-fab job—“my aluminum box” her mother called it—and it felt cheap and flimsy compared to the monument of stone and wood Zai had grown up in back on Earth. Zai was sitting on the lacquered-metal porch because she couldn’t sleep inside the house; the image of the house tumbling down the mountainside sprang to life every time Zai closed her eyes.\n\n“They have a legend up here, you know.” Zai was startled by her mother’s voice behind her. “They say, before you can live up here on the mountains, you have to go to the highest bluff you can find, and shout, loud as you can, ‘I am a Martian!’ And if God believes you, you’ll live in these mountains in happiness and peace, until the end of your days.”\n\n“And? If God doesn’t believe you?”\n\n“Smiting. Lightning. Fire from heaven. That sort of thing.”\n\n“Well, it is a beautiful country-side. I can see why God’d be so picky about who’d get it.” Zai stood up and stretched. She had her father’s height, and as such towered over her mother, despite them both being in bare feet. “I miss the old house, Mama.”\n\n“Didn’t seem to miss it when you moved out,” Zai’s mother gave her a sly grin. “It was too big. Too big for an old woman without a family. I could have kept it, and you still would have only visited on holidays.”\n\n“I just have trouble picturing you living anywhere but home.”\n\n“And I have trouble picturing you without a scabbed knee and pigtails. But look at you now.” Zai’s mother turned away from her, and placed her hands on her hips. “Watch that sun come up. Paints the whole world red. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of that.”\n\n“Mom, why did you move here?”\n\n“Because,” her mother said, not looking back. “I am a Martain.”\n\n“I don’t believe you.”\n\n“That’s nice, dear,” Zai’s mother said patting Zai’s hand as she shuffled back in the house. “But you’re not the one I have to convince.”\n"
  title: Martian Bluff
  year: 2006
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2006-03-14
  day: 14
  month: '03'
  text: "We finally did it. For centuries philosophers both of science and religion wondered how much it would take to push ourselves to the brink. They hypothesized and prayed to what end man would come if they kept pushing the limits. All of the wars fought, the corruption broadcast and the sin rampant in environment and in our everyday lives could never have awoken us to the simple truth that we had been sliding down this inverted mountain since the day an ape chose a stick over its bare hands.\n\nThey wanted to know what would happen if we continued along our ways. Today they got their answer.\n\nI was what you would call a believer in nothing. Nihilism wasn’t my game it was the mark of atheism that took me by its reigns. Being an atheist wasn’t my problem. Not thinking that there was something right in front of us that we’d all been missing that was. When I woke up today I didn’t question why things were different I just knew that they were.\n\nEven when I walked outside I knew that something was missing more than the obvious and I felt cold and dim. The news yesterday had announced how many had died from the nuclear affair in the east and how many more had been killed in the name of having the almighty on ones side. Truly, I never thought that our time would be the last straw.\n\nEveryone did the same thing upon waking up. Hell, I did it too. We all checked our clocks, we looked at the date and we tried to come to grips that we weren’t crazy. No, I knew it was more than just a lost point in our daily lives that was gone. I stepped outside and I didn’t have a shadow anymore. No one had shadows anymore.\n\nThe news didn’t come on today and I knew it was because they felt the same as I did. You wake up; you expect it to be there to greet you. It was right in front of us and we had it right a long time ago but science made it like unto a fairy tale.\n\nAll of us woke up today and found that the sun was gone. It didn’t explode and it didn’t fizz out. It left. The warmth that was lost was more than just from the heat the rays gave us. We felt empty inside, we felt cold in a way that not even electric heaters turned on high could fix. The wars might stop, they might not. Something gave up on us today and it left because we were beyond hope. I have to wake up tomorrow knowing I am hopeless; knowing this world is lost.\n\nI woke up today and walked outside to a world with no sun and no warmth. I looked on the ground and saw that I had no shadow. No one had shadows anymore. We were the shadows now.\n"
  title: Fair-weather Friend
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-03-15
  day: 15
  month: '03'
  text: "The curtain went down.\n\nThe heat death of the universe played out in one last resounding note, the final dénouement to the performance.\n\n“Well.” The young one emoted wildly, sending sparks of light and beauty bouncing off its consciousness. “What did you think?”\n\nThe Eldest did not comment but turned its presence to another, a middle aged being by the count of their people. They had all always been there, but their consciousness sparked in and out, sometimes sleeping, sometimes dying and reborn. The middle-aged consciousness had a voice like the whirls of a sucking black hole.\n\n“Very enthusiastic.” It intoned “but not very heavy. The piece was shorter than I expected and the sentients were concentrated in that one area, which was quite an odd choice. Personally, I found the lack of activity in the wider cosmos to be quite dull. The stars, the cosmic dust, these seemed unremarkable, lacking in chemical drama.”\n\n“Well, yes.” The young one admitted, “I’ve never been very good at all of that cosmic art. I’m really interested in what all of you thought of the sentients, that’s where I put most of my energy. What did you think of the sentients?”\n\n“Oh, they were quite dramatic.” Chimed one that had just woken from a long death. “I only saw the end, but it was very magical.”\n\n“I thought it was a little too over the top.” Said the middle aged one. “A bit much for my taste. I’d like to see you do something less fanciful, more meaningful next time.”\n\nThe young ones glee swirled around him like a solar wind. “Oh! Oh! Then there will be a next time?” it asked, focusing on the Eldest. “Eldest, I have such plans. Could I please try again?”\n\n“Yes, youngest. You shall do it again. This time, let us see more of what you can do with these sentient beings, but always remember, my youngest, never neglect the stars.”\n"
  title: The Creation
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2006-03-16
  day: 16
  month: '03'
  text: "“It’s not that you’re boring,” John protested, even though it was. He hated conversations like this, and they always seemed to happen to him. This was his third uncomfortable breakup in as many months.\n\n“Then what is it?” Lila demanded, her pout twitching on the edge between anger and tears. John sighed. He’d seen this one before.\n\n“I just, well, I’ve got other things to worry about in my life, you know?” John turned his head away and fiddled with the miniature joystick on his day planner. He’d had a portable version of Exatz World IV custom-installed so that he could play it while waiting for the train to work. Lila slapped his hand away.\n\n“You mean like that game? Don’t touch that thing when you’re around me, Jonathan! I mean it!” Lila’s eyes were sparking and her pout increased, screwing up her face in a most unattractive manner. “Is that what this is all about? Did you meet some girl online? Are you cheating on me?”\n\n“No!” John protested in exasperation. “You can’t cheat on somebody with a video game, damn it! They just have much better writers than whoever came up with your life.”\n\n“What do you mean, writers?” Lila was aghast. “John, this is real life. There are no writers! There is no script! Get your head out of the clouds!”\n\n“I’m sick of real life, okay?” John snapped, sitting up from his customary slouch and glaring at Lila. “Nothing changes! All the girls are the same, all the places are the same, all the stuff that happens is boring and predictable. It’s all sugar and no spice. There’s no… no… conflict! No heroism! You can’t be a man in real life!”\n\n“John, you are really starting to scare me. Are you even listening to yourself?” Lila stared at John as if he’d grown two heads. “That ‘sugar’ is called peace! The world finally gets itself into some sense of order and you’re complaining?” She threw up her hands in disgust. “You are the most disrespectful man I’ve ever known. What would your father say if he could hear you now?”\n\n“At least my father was a man!” John snapped. “He got to fight for what he believed in. He had a hero’s death.”\n\n“What he believed in was a peaceful world for his son. You’re disgraceful.”\n\n“Get out of here!” John grabbed a cushion from the couch behind him and threw it angrily in Lila’s direction. He had had enough. Everything she said was exactly what he’d predicted. It was a good thing this wasn’t a script, because John would have marched right up to the writers and given them a piece of his mind.\n\nLila gritted her teeth and clenched her fists. “Your father would be ashamed of you,” she said, voice trembling, then turned on her heel and slammed the door behind her. John sighed. In all honesty, he was relieved that she was gone.\n\nTurning to his console, John sank back into his comfortable, slouched position with a groan of contentment. It only took a single keystroke to call up the world of heroes and villains, of struggles and escapes and creativity. It was easier than breathing to slough off the peace that his father had fought for in the war to end all wars. As he fitted his goggles over his eyes, John prepared to lose himself in an earlier time.\n"
  title: Sugar and Spice
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2006-03-17
  day: 17
  month: '03'
  text: "Carlos didn’t want to appear suspicious, so he stayed in a doorway three houses down from the corner. He tried to distract himself, thinking about the possibilities of using curry sauce in chicken Kiev, but he kept looking at the corner. Carlos wanted this to be over as soon as possible, so he wouldn’t have to worry anymore. Skott had said it was simple. Meet the girl–who Carlos would know as soon as he saw, Skott assured him–make the trade, leave. That’s it.\n\nSkott didn’t mention that Carlos would be thinking about the worst-case scenario over and over again. By the time the girl showed up two minutes late, Carlos had already envisioned himself be arrested, convicted and eyed by a gorrilla of a cell-mate named “Big Beauford.”\n\nSkott was right, Carlos recognized her instantly. “I’m Saki,” the girl said when Carlos approached. “Are you Skott’s friend?” Even in street clothes, Saki looked like she was wearing a lab coat. Poor girl was probably born in one. She was pretty, though, in that little Japanese girl way. Carlos like the way her faded-pink hair brought out her dark eyes from behind her glasses.\n\n“I’m a friend of anyone who’s eaten my coconut and wasabi custard pie. One bite, and you’ll know why.” It was a standard line Carlos used around girls at parties; it was the only thing he could think of. Big Beauford was still weighing very heavily on his mind.\n\n“Heh,” Saki said, without any sort of humor. “You’re funny. You got the chow mein?”\n\n“Hot and fresh,” said Carlos, as he handed over the paper bag stuffed with Chinese carry-out containers. Saki opened one of them, appraising the scavenged processor chips Carlos and Skott had spent all of the afternoon ripping out of junked motherboards. “You’re looking at enough processor power to run a small defense grid, you hook ’em up right. I brought the chow mein, you got the egg-drop soup?”\n\nSaki shifted the bag to her left hip and dug into the right pocket of her jacket, removing a small translucent-plastic pod. “Here. It wasn’t easy to get, but I got it.”\n\nCarlos cracked open the pod. Inside was a blob of silver and black, slowly swirling with the slight shaking of his hands. Thin, straight wires stuck out from the goo, giving the it the appearance of a melted spider. This was the goods. Top of the line. Unhackable. Uncorruptable.\n\nBioware.\n\n“I don’t know what you think you’re going to with that.” Saki said after Carlos had slipped the pod into his pocket. Her voice was low, a hurried whisper. “You can’t hack it. There’s no code. The programming is part of its structure. I know Skott is all about open sourcing everything, but this tech cannot be brought to the people, okay? It can’t be done. You’d have to be some sort of biologist to take it apart.–”\n\n“Thanks for your help, Saki,” Carlos said, turning away.\n\n“No!.” Saki thrust the word so hard against her clenched teeth that Carlos felt her saliva on the back of his neck. “Tell you what you’re going to do with that! You owe me that much, after what I’ve been through!”\n\nCarlos’s posture softened when she grabbed his arm. Her hands were so small; delicate for a lab monkey. Carlos found himself imagining what else she could do with those hands. “Everything comes apart, Saki. That’s what biology teaches us. It’s how it comes together that makes it work.”\n\n“But how could it possibly–”\n\n“Because biological components aren’t just stacked like blocks, they’re mixed in specific amounts. They’re recipes. And any cook worth his salt will tell you that any recipe can be simplified or improved upon.” Saki looked at him blankly behind her thick glasses.  Skott would approve of this, surely.  This was bringing enlightenment to the people, wasn’t it? “Here, why don’t you come back to my place. I’ll explain everything with some curry sauce and a handful of dill.”\n"
  title: The Difference Salt Makes
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2006-03-18
  day: 18
  month: '03'
  text: "The judge pounded his gavel three times on the sound block.  “Next case!”\n\nThe bailiff stood at attention.  “Sol versus Robert J. Walsh.  Case Number 28769-807.61.  Mr. Walsh was clocked doing 121,546 kilometers per hour within the ecliptic.”\n\nThe judge scanned the arrest report on his monitor.  Without looking at the defendant he asked, “How do you plead, Mr. Walsh?”\n\n“Not guilty, your Honor.  I was beyond the orbit of Saturn.  There’s no traffic out there.  There’s over a million kilometers of empty space between ships.  I don’t see why there should be a speed limit beyond the asteroid belt.  It’s ridiculous.”\n\n“Maybe so, Mr. Walsh.  But the speed limit extends to the Kepler Belt.  The law is very specific.”\n\n“Then it’s a dumb law.”\n\nVisibly angered, the judge pounded his gavel once again.  “I’ve heard enough.  I find you guilty of violating Solar System Statute 2375.329 for exceeding the beaconed speed limit, and for reckless flying within the ecliptic.”  The Judge turned back to the monitor. “I see that this is your third offence, Mr. Walsh.  Therefore, I have more options in sentencing.  This time, you will perform system service.  And, since you appear to enjoy traversing the solar system, you are ordered to tow an ice comet, not smaller that 100,000 metric tones, which contains at least 50% of its mass in the form of water-ice, to the Deimos colony in Mars orbit.  You have to tow the comet by yourself, Mr. Walsh.  You cannot use your father’s credits to hire a towing company.  You have six months to deliver the comet, so I suggest that you start hunting for your snowball right away.  Try looking in the asteroid belt, or the rings of Saturn.  You are dismissed Mr. Walsh.  And I recommend you obey the speed beacons in the future.”\n\nThe defendant jumped to his feet.  “What!  Are you nuts?  Tow a comet to Mars?  Do you know who I am?   I’m not an ice-jockey.  I have three college degrees, including a PhD in Political Science.  This sentence is ridiculous.  You’re ridiculous.  The damn speed limit is ridiculous.”\n\nThe judge pointed the business end of his gavel toward the defendant.  “Make that 200,000 metric tones, Mr. Walsh.  And if you don’t like the law, run for congress when you get back from Mars and change it.  Now, if you don’t want to be towing ice cubes the rest of your life, I suggest you get the hell out of my courtroom.”\n\nThe judge pounded his gavel three times on the sound block.  “Next case!”\n"
  title: Order in the Court
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-03-19
  day: 19
  month: '03'
  text: "When Countess bit Zimin on the playground, her mom and dad got called in for a parent-teacher conference. Everybody was trying to pretend they weren’t upset by putting on smiley faces, but they were mad, Countess could tell. She wasn’t supposed to bite people till she was sixteen. Zimins blood wasn’t even any good, it was all crunchy and weird. Her mom said that was because he had little robots inside him that made him smarter.\n\nAfter that, they made her wear caps on her teeth. The robot nurse would come to the lunch table and take them off in front of the whole class. Countess was pale, but her face was always red when the nurse showed up.\n\nThe other kids stayed away. Even Lisa, who had been her best friend for a whole week now decided that Mary-Anne, the icky fish girl, was her best friend. Better a fish girl than a vampire. Countess didn’t want to be a vampire anymore. On the playground, she went into the trees and played at being a lonely dragon, sitting on top of her book bag, pretending it was gold.\n\nMamma said that different families chose to be different things, and when she got older, she might decide to become something else, to have extra arms or eyes. Right now though, her mamma said, she was Countess, designed by mom and dad, just like they had been designed by their mom and dad. It may have been old fashioned, but it was who they were, and until Countess was eighteen, it was who she had to be too.\n\nCountess stopped drinking her plastic packets of blood. She got hungry, but she didn’t care; maybe if she stopped for long enough the robot nurse would stop coming to her caps off in front of everyone. Maybe if she stopped drinking blood, she might turn into something else, whether her parents liked it or not.\n\nThat’s when her dad brought home the Squib. The Squib was small and black, with pointy ears and a pointy tail and a chubby stomach. He giggled when she tickled him, and snuggled next to her at night. He smelled like coco and floated along next to her on a little umbrella while she was at school. She was the only girl with a Squib. Mary-Anne had her tank for her fins, but that really wasn’t like a Squib. The Squib held out her blood bag and would make sad faces if she didn’t bite into it. When she did drink, he would do a little tottering dance with his umbrella that made the other kids laugh and clap.\n\nMary-Anne asked if she could tickle the Squib, and even though she was icky, Countess let her, because even smelly fish girls were better than nothing. The Squib would dance and sing for the other children but he always came back to Countess, it was clear he always liked her best. Kids would sit next to her just to see the Squib, and by the end of the week, Countess had three best friends.\n\nTwo weeks later she went out to the Transit stop and realized that her Squib wasn’t with her. Her Squib hadn’t been with her all morning! She ran back to the house, not even caring if she missed the Transit. She ran though the portal to her house and started looking for the Squib. Her lithe mother caught her.\n\n“Sweetie, what’s wrong?”\n\n“I can’t find Squibbers!” Her mother knelt and wrapped her pale arms around Countess.\n\n“Oh, my little icicle. Your Squib had to go take care of other little vampire girls. Maybe he’ll come back and visit sometimes, but I don’t think you need him anymore. He hasn’t been around much recently, did you notice?” She brushed back Countesses blue-black hair.\n\nCountess sucked on her lip. Her Squib had been gone a lot recently but she had been so busy, she never noticed. She felt something strange kick in her tummy and she thought about other vampire girls. Her mother handed her a sweet blood ball and told her they could ride to school together this morning.  They took their purple parasols and walked out into the morning.\n"
  title: Squibbers
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2006-03-20
  day: 20
  month: '03'
  text: "Venusians do not worry about being on time, and I think I know why. It’s the fog—the dense fog that permeates the atmosphere and keeps visibility so low. Every terraformed planet has its quirks, and this is ours: though the poisonous gases have been removed, the fog is still here, and it follows us wherever we go. Travel is always problematic on Venus, no matter how many new sensor techniques are developed, and it is accepted that a meeting will take at least an hour to start. That’s how the tea ceremony developed. I hear it came from one of the immigrant cultures back when the planet was first colonized, but it’s different now, a ceremony of waiting. We’ve evolved.\n\nThe fog is everywhere, no matter what time of day or night, and though it does lighten during the hours when the sun hits us, it never breaks. A life on Venus is a life of isolation. We don’t need to be told not to talk to strangers; we are not inclined. Movement through the fog is like stepping into one’s own world, secret and secluded from everyone else on the planet, and the presence of others is an intrusion rather than a blessing. It is impolite to cross paths with someone on the street, and if a Venusian should be so crass as to do so, it is expected that he ignore you in order to preserve the sense of privacy.\n\nFor some time, the leading social problem on Venus was the declining birthrate, brought on not by sterility but by disinclination. We are not interested in meeting others. The family is the core of Venusian life, and we stick to it, preferring our own brightly lit homes and the familiar faces of parents, grandparents, siblings, and cousins to the grey mists of the outside world. A century ago the government was forced to issue a mandate that all young people between the ages of fourteen and twenty-nine would meet at city-sponsored social gatherings in order to increase matchmaking potential. Though it was met with resentment at first, we all knew it was necessary. Mutations and inbreeding were not a problem that could be ignored.\n\nFamilies are still large and close, but the government now subsidizes housing for couples who want to move out of their families’ homes, even providing space for those family members who cannot bear to be left behind. Our old practices have become deep taboos, so much so that even twins can no longer share the same cradle without becoming the subject of hushed whispers and aghast looks. I am twenty-seven years old, and I know that soon I’ll have to choose. Unspoken custom dictates that we select our lifemates by twenty-five, so I am already an outlier, but Venus—Venus is in my blood.\n\nEarth natives say they find the fog depressing, even malevolent, and will spend as little time here as they can manage. I embrace the fog. It is cool and smooth, not suffocating but comforting. It envelops me and preserves my privacy. Behind the curtain of fog, I can lie in my cousin’s arms without fear of persecution. The family knows—there is no way to keep secrets, not from family—but like strangers on the street, they turn their eyes away, ignoring what they know they are not supposed to see. What is done within the fog of Venus is not meant to be known, but every so often I will catch the eyes of my family and see the hidden glimmer of approval. They know that the old traditions are still alive.\n"
  title: The Fog of Venus
  year: 2006
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2006-03-21
  day: 21
  month: '03'
  text: "Before we go any further, let me stop to ask you some questions. I’m so excited to have met you, but there’s something I want to tell you before you enter the port. You see, I haven’t really been honest with you and you must have wondered why I was out here all alone.\n\nSurely you have noticed by now that there are no fusion reactors. No glorious buzz of electricity and a lack of any sort of decent vegetation or animal kin. Oh, so you have noticed. Then let me skip to the worst part.\n\nThis is all that is left. You’ve come from so long ago and hoped that somehow life has improved itself? I’m sorry to disappoint you. I am not a proud man, nor am I any sort of leader. Just last week, the previous leader disappeared and the others voted for me to control everything that was left.\n\nNoticeably, I am no handsome fellow either. No woman would bear my children, and I’m lost to a life of thanklessness and a tomorrow that is one day closer to my end. Did I mention how excited I am that you are here? Please, have a seat.\n\nThe Port was supposed to be grand once. Perhaps my grandfather said something about it, but now the dust clouds come and go and the nutrient reactors shut down years ago. Port Walden is nothing more than survivors who are losing at their daily professions. What is it you said you did…an engineer? You’ll find little use for your abilities without electricity.\n\nI’m getting to the point, please be patient. I’ve seen children gasp their last breaths as the hunger overcomes them and becomes a deathly starvation. Scraps of leather became chew toys and after they were gone, well, no man calls dog their best friend any longer than he can swallow. Gruesome? That’s life.  It is what it has to be so that we can survive. Survival is key.\n\nLook up and see the grey clouds above you, stranger. Your time once held blue skies, I suppose, and purple at times, yes? The bark from these husks we once called trees are gone and I don’t need to tell you what use came from that bark. Look at my face, stranger. My face is more robust than anyone in the village but it by far much gaunter than yours.\n\nWell, I suppose I’ve ventured further from my point. I came out here with this pistol to end the suffering. To watch children die is a nightmare and to know that others are watching the same happen to me is a slow agonizing hell. Perhaps they would have found me and taken what they could from me to help them survive just a little bit longer. I haven’t been honest with you at all. When I saw you I didn’t care where you were from. What I do care about is that you will feed many children for a few days at least; a few days for the hell to subside. Please, don’t run. I may be weak but I can still shoot and I’d prefer to aim somewhere that won’t spoil too much meat. I am so excited you are here.\n"
  title: The Hero of Port Walden
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2006-03-22
  day: 22
  month: '03'
  text: "I have a fine grandson named Lorenzo, and he and his mother and father came down to visit me. He brought his wonderful burnished helmet and beautiful, shiny aeroboard with him when they came. I felt very proud, and I thought at last I would be able to interest him in what I did professionally. We walked over to Daedalus Park, and I dare say he was suitably impressed and sputtered off, keeping clear of the couples on their hover-carpets and the small children in the Zero-G playspace.\n\nAs I was watching Lorenzo careen among the floating statuary and flora, a woman who can only be described as pinched approached me and told me I had to rein my grandson in.\n\nOf all the planning I’ve done for this city, Daedalus Park is the one closest to my heart, having worked with the aeronetic engineers every step of the way, and pushed it through endless committees when everyone said I was mad. Now you see AeroSites all over, but I take no small amount of pride in stating that Daedalus Park was the first. And I do not remember any regulation such as this pinched woman mentioned, so I proceeded to ask her why I needed to bring the poor boy down to earth.\n\n“Because he’s not allowed,” she told me, pointing. “He’s not allowed to do that.”\n\nAt this, I threw myself up to my full height, and, as the author of this entire project, loudly and in no uncertain terms, said, “By what right do you have to deny this young man the public air?”\n\nSome people wilt when confronted with my full not-quite-six feet, especially when backed by my formidable baritone.  This woman, however, was far too strengthened by the imaginary authority in her veins, and proceeded to argue with me—with increasing volume—exactly what could and could not be done in this park.  So much so that Lorenzo came down from his whirligigs and whatever other complex maneuvers he does on that board of his, and said he didn’t have to use the park in that fashion.\n\nThe woman tilted her head in satisfaction at this, which burned me more than I believe anything in the conversation had yet.  I informed both the woman and my wonderful grandson that if he no longer wished to use this public air in the fashion it was designed for, then I would.\n\nNaturally, the moment I set foot on the aeroboard, I fell off.  But I did not let that daunt me.  I continued my ham-footed attempts until the woman, disgusted at my flagrant mockery of her pseudo-rules, left in a huff.\n\nI am told by his father that Lorenzo enjoys telling this story almost as much as I do.  Though I believe he focuses on different aspects.\n"
  title: The Public Air
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2006-03-23
  day: 23
  month: '03'
  text: "The cryocrate rested unobtrusively in the corner of Sanitation Engineer Edward Holmes’s broom closet.  It was metal, like most cryocrates, and marked only by the blinking temperature meter and a yellow sticker declaring CAUTION: MAN-EATING SNAKES to those who cared to read it.\n\nMost of the flight staff did not care to read it.  Their cargo was often covered with such warnings: CYANIDE, EBOLA, KRYPTONITE.  In reality, the boxes usually contained smuggled Terran cigarettes or other things best kept from prying eyes.  Not in this case, however.  This box actually contained man-eating snakes.\n\nThe first three months of the journey were uneventful.  The navigator navigated, the communications manager communicated, and the captain capted.  Edward cleaned, as he’d been hired to do, until he ran out of the blue-colored stuff that smelled like mothballs.  Edward had never been terribly bright.\n\n“What in space are you doing, Holmes?” the captain exclaimed as he poured a bucket of used bathwater down the stairs.\n\n“Washing, sir!”\n\n“Why aren’t you using that blue-colored stuff that smells like mothballs?”  she demanded.  The captain had never been terribly bright, either.\n\n“We’re all out of it, sir!”\n\n“Well, get some from the storage closet!”\n\nThe captain stormed back towards the command chamber, leaving Edward Holmes to stare at the small bubbles and gray soapy liquid that coated the stairway.  He prodded the liquid with his mop, to no avail.  “What a mess,” he said.  He propped his mop against the wall and headed off to the broom closet.\n\n“Blue-colored stuff,” Edward said to himself as he stared at the boxes before him.  He tried several, most of which were filled with test tubes, though he did find what he assumed was a human heart.  Although all of the boxes contained stuff, none of them contained stuff that was blue.  “The captain’s gonna be mad,” he said as he opened the lid of the final box.\n\nThe last thing Sanitation Engineer Edward Holmes heard was the bony click of an unhinging jaw.\n\nMeanwhile, back in the command chamber, the captain was doing what captains do with remarkable efficiency.  She’d long since mastered the art of making thoughtful grunts and sipping powdered coffee, and she’d almost perfected simultaneously casting condescending glances towards the other members of her crew.\n\n“Captain!” exclaimed the exclamations officer.  “I’m receiving a danger report from level 13!”\n\nThe captain sighed.  “What’s wrong now?” she asked.\n\n“I’m not sure!” he said.  “It seems that some of the cargo has escaped!”\n\n“Escaped?”\n\n“I advise we secure the command chamber!  And set course to the nearest station!”\n\n“What cargo do we have that could escape?” the captain wondered aloud.  Ever since the sentient fetus incident in the Alaran system, she’d refused to transport live cargo.\n\n“Maintain course, Chief Exclamations Officer Jones.  I’ll look into it.”\n\n“As you wish, sir!”\n\nThe captain stood up and strode to the door, which she opened with a tap against a glowing panel.  No sooner had the metal panel opened, however, than a slithering scaly mass made its way into the chamber.  “Snake!” she screamed as the large form wrapped itself around her leg.  “Jones, do something!”\n\nThe Exclamations Officer, however, had problems of his own.  The keyboard of his station exploded forward in a spray of plastic, immediately followed by a dozen ringed reptiles.  He screamed as one creature’s fangs pierced his neck.\n\nThe security officer, who’d never had excellent aim and neglected to consider the logic of using a heat-seeking weapon on a reptile, managed only to stun three members of the crew while trying to target his legless adversaries.  “Snake, I kill you filthy!” he screamed as a cobra slapped the gun from his hand with its tail.\n\nThe chamber was alive with serpents.  The violent hissing was a battle cry unequaled by the sounds of any Terran revolution.  Valiantly, the officers and engineers tried to defend their ship, but it was in vain.  The snakes, those cruel, cold-blooded bringers of despair and death, had won in a matter of minutes.\n\n“Nooo!” was the final human cry to penetrate the tumultuous sibilance.  Then, the Exclamations Officer too was devoured.\n"
  title: Snakes On A Spaceship
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-03-24
  day: 24
  month: '03'
  text: "The Immortal danced.\n\nThe colony world smelled like new spring, and the night air was cool on the Immortals skin. He whirled around the bonfire the settlers had made to rejoice in the spring and celebrate the barn raising. The immortal flung his feet in a wild and practiced dance and thought about suicide. His parents were dead, his friends were dead, and a month ago, his last living child was killed. His daughter had been one of the few accidental deaths. Even with all the safeguards, spaceships still crashed. His daughter had been three hundred years old.\n\nThe Immortal whirled like a dervish. The colony honored him, he was the oldest among them and they treated him with distant reverence. The colonists brought him baskets of food. The young people built his wooden house. No one spoke to him unless he spoke first.\n\nThis was the start of a new world, and he thought that surrounded by young people he would feel their excitement. He hoped their wide-eyed joy would bleed over to him, but they just made him feel older. He was living like a runner in a marathon, looking forward to the next mark, promising himself that would be his stopping point.\n\nHe could easily have an accident, just like his daughter.  He could fling himself off a cliff, or sink himself in the lake. He could die too. It could be over. They would not bring him back, they would respect his wishes.\n\nHe whirled and found a young woman spinning towards him, into his arms, her waist slim under his fingers, her eyes pale as a morning sky. She danced with him, and he thought he might live a while longer.\n"
  title: The Immortal
  year: 2006
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2006-03-25
  day: 25
  month: '03'
  text: "Whoa, that was a long jump. What was that, a fifty foot drop? I don’t feel it right now, and that’s fine by me. This fucker running from me is going to taste my pain.\n\nMy boots hit the floor and ignorance runs thirty miles an hour. My heart is producing what was already injected but the long-term effects, I’m told, won’t be harmful like the natural juice. This asshole is fast but he picked the wrong officer to run from today. I’m on him like sweat on a desert whore, pounding my fist into the back of his head. They did say they wanted him dead, right?\n\nHave to keep moving. I’m not sure there aren’t more like him and I’m not sticking around to get shanked by a wannabe juicer. I keep my life like I keep my heartbeat… fast and undeniably untamable. There’s something under the surface and if I stop long enough it’ll come back for me.\n\nMy patch reads Rhabia Program. I know I was hand-picked to be an injectee but the fuck if I care why I signed up. The only thing I care about is hearing more footsteps from around the corner and wondering if the exposed bone of my knuckle is ever going to hurt. People don’t run like I do, they don’t roll cars onto people in fits of rage. I say people, but I mean criminals. These fuckheads deserve every piece of curb I make them kiss before God hands them a tissue to pick up their own entrails on the way past his golden gates.\n\nNo more footsteps. Should I hide? Sit here in this alleyway and wait. Just wait.\n\nBreathing is getting better now. They don’t give me a gun because, from what I hear, injectors can’t use them properly when hyped. Anyways, I much prefer to punch the night away and use a perps’ face like a heavyweight’s meat-locker practice session. Heartbeat’s slowing. I wonder if I’ll ever see Marie again. What happened to her anyways?\n\nOh, shit. She… cheated on me with that bastard O’Brien and I…\n\nNo. I can’t be one of those guys.\n\nAnother injection; perfect timing. Before I know it, I’m maxing my speed at around forty miles an hour. What was I thinking about anyways? Stop thinking, Corporal, and find the meat bag that shot that old lady and Jacob’s ladder his ribcage. Yeah, that sounds like the best idea I’ve had all day. Another drop from another overpass and I can see the fucker from here. I’m angry about something… and man, is he going to know it.\n"
  title: The Hype
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2006-03-26
  day: 26
  month: '03'
  text: "Captain Ariella Claymore floated in the center of the cargo bay as Chief Bill Roberts manipulated the tractor beams to guide the lifeless spacecraft through the bay doors.  “She’s an antique,” the captain’s voice crackled over the intercom.  “There’s an American flag on the port nacelle.  It’s got 54 stars.  That puts her in the twenty third century.   What’s a 500 year old ship doing way out here?”\n\nThe chief smiled at the needless complexity of the old design.  “She must be an early experimental model.  It definitely pre-dates the modern warp configuration.  I guess it got out here using some form of hyper-light drive, but couldn’t get home.  Was she manned?”\n\nThe captain maneuvered herself to look into the cockpit.  “Yes.  A crew of two.  They’re not in too bad of shape, considering they’ve been dead for five centuries.  I’m going in.”\n\n“What we going to do with them, captain?  Bring them back to Earth for burial?”\n\nThe captain passed through the ship’s escape hatch carrying a small case.  “Can’t, Chief.  Protocol is very specific.  If a ship and her crew have been adrift for more than 100 years, it’s considered a reliquary.  You know, like a shrine.  We are permitted to download the logs for the historians, and to take tissue samples for the Med-Techs incase they carry antibodies we might find useful.  Other than that, we are required to set them adrift again.  Land is too valuable nowadays.  Besides, they’ve been dead for 15 generations.  Nobody on Earth knows these people.”\n\nClearly dissatisfied with that option, the chief said.  “So their sacrifice was for nothing.  They deserve to have their ashes dispersed on Earth.  So their molecules can be used by other life.  It’s like immortality.  It’s my desire to die during a fiery reentry accident.”\n\nAs Captain Claymore exited the old ship she made a mental note to not use the same Earth-bound shuttlecraft as the Chief on her next visit to the homeworld.  She shut the hatch and rested her hand on the hull for a few moments and said a silent prayer.  “It’s not up for debate, Chief.  I got what we need.  Set her adrift.”\n\nThe captain moved toward the bulkhead and waited for the chief to nudge the old ship out the bay doors.  The ship didn’t move.  It was taking too long.  Just when she was about to question the chief, she noticed the star field rotating through the open bay doors.  Seconds after the stars stopped moving, the old ship was thrust out of the cargo bay at a velocity that captain Claymore thought was impossible.  “Chief, what just happened?”\n\n“Sorry, Captain.  I guess I just accidentally launched the ancient ship toward a large red dwarf.  It will collide with it in about 2,000 years.  In about a million years, the star will go super nova.  Their atoms will be spread throughout this quadrant.  In a few billion years, some of them may be incorporated into alien life.  I know it’s what I would have wanted if it were me that died on that craft.”\n\nAriella contemplated going after the ship, but decided to let it go.  Maybe he was right.  “Chief, you are the only engineer that I know who has a soul of a poet.”\n\n“I’d appreciate it if you’d keep it to yourself, Captain.  I have a reputation to maintain.”\n"
  title: We Commit their Bodies to the Deep
  year: 2006
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2006-03-27
  day: 27
  month: '03'
  text: "Lucian’s body had been cleansed to near perfection and his head shaved to remove any thread that might disrupt the process. Everything had to be perfect, or else the project might fail. They placed him in Dorm 12, a white-walled comfortable living space. He sat there looking through the pictures they gave him of happy children playing in playgrounds that, to his knowledge, still existed. They forced him to hang pictures of his girlfriend, his mother, and his father to remind him how important his deeds were.\n\nHe picked up his papers, which listed the charges against him. Lucian hadn’t meant to go half a year without a job, but times were tough and an honest buck was hard to make these days. Sitting there looking them over next to the picture books and the trinkets left in his moderately-sized quarters he considered the idea that this might be his time to make amends.\n\nThe young man almost believed that this was his big chance. This was going to be his moment of truth. He almost believed it, until he heard the whispers of the facility staff and of the others staggering down the hallway towards the chamber. They were getting progressively more worried, and kept saying things like “We’re narrowing it down” and “I hope we have an answer soon.” That ounce of doubt had him wondering just how many times they told men and women they were going to be the one.\n\nThose who went mad before they were shuffled down towards the chamber used to mutter about seconds, about minutes. They ranted about time. Sixty rooms, all in orde,r and the one in room sixty always went first.  They counted down from there. Lucian wondered what happened when the last person left and the rooms were empty. The only logical idea was that the scientists would fill them again.\n\nStanding up from the obligatory mediation on his photos, he retrieved his personal scrapbook from the shelf above his bed. Slumping back down onto the plush surface, he cracked open the book to peruse its contents.\n\nThe same photographs begged his attention and brought warmth and hope. He was sure the facility wouldn’t object if they found it. All except one piece, that is. Amongst the littering of pictures and letters was a news article from the National Report. Bold lettering filled throughout the headlines and text. Facilities had been shut down. All clients were refunded and Chronos Enterprises became the newest wing of the UN. It was all here. but no one knew what happened next; no one but those nervous-looking scientists outside his door.\n\nSomething must have gone wrong, he figured. Tourist groups stopped returning from trips and at first they prohibited travel past a hundred. Then they didn’t travel at all. Soon the sixty rooms were filled and the public shut up. Scientists got nervous and politicians started plotting. Is that what they meant when they told Lucian he was the answer? Perhaps they meant that this problem had to have a solution. If Lucian was to be the one then he considered himself lucky. Because, if he wasn’t, he was the twelfth second of another minute where no one else existed.\n"
  title: Feeling Lucky
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2006-03-28
  day: 28
  month: '03'
  text: "The robot was no bigger than a diner roll, and had a tendency to shift on of its many stiff legs when it was processing. It was on the kitchen table now, and Megan lowered herself so that she was eye-level with it. It’s forward-motion sensor quivered when her face came close.  One antenna moved to touch Megan’s curly red hair, but she swatted it aside.\n\n“I could take your battery right out, you know,” she said. “Where would you be then?” Megan let the robot process that before continuing. She glanced at the clock–no time left. “And even if I don’t, I am not getting you that upgrade, not after this, so you might as well forget it. Just show me where you’ve hidden my keys so I can get to work!”\n\nThe robot did nothing. Megan stared daggers at its sensory antennae, but it only seemed to react to tick of the clock, and rhythm of her hurried breath.\n"
  title: Antennae Don't Blink
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-03-29
  day: 29
  month: '03'
  text: "When Lieutenant Carol Door stepped off the space ship she was carrying her laser knife, her unloaded rifle and the broken micro-cam that held the pictures of her family. She carried her starched grey uniform, and though it had never seen her home, it reacted to the change in climate as it would on any planet, adjusting its system to provide the optimum temperature for alertness.\n\nThe ground was soft, and the smell around her was green and light. Carol could have taken a transport home, back to the glade where her mothers raised her, but she wanted to walk. Her world had been manufactured from a craterous moon. The biggest trade was tourism, rich merchant families would travel there to be served by centaurs or get their hair braided by sprites. Her world had little white bubbles of technical connection but this was just for tourists, the inhabitants shunned the outward use of technology, preferring illusions. When Carol was growing up, a little girl with long red hair, she thought it was all magic.\n\nShe carried her personal force-field in her pack, a silver cylinder which had saved her life from gas and falling debris, from the people and machines that had tried to kill her.\n\nCarols mothers were a fairy and a witch, and she was taught how to fight by a vampire who lived in a spiral castle over the hills. Her mothers owned a large cottage, with a wheel on the side where water fell from one level to another falling, ever falling. They had a pool out front, and a giant swing. They would host families for a high fee, give them adventure, a quest, and a purpose.\n\nThe grenades had been confiscated when she was debriefed, but she still had the keys sitting in the bottom of her back, 17 keys from thrown grenades. Her ammo was taken from her rifle, but she carried that shell. She had not been able to put it down for six years.\n\nCarol walked across the rolling hills, past a shepherd who looked at her with his mouth open. She was too afraid to wave, too afraid that he would run away. She imagined the way she looked, with her newly patched face and her short hair. She was worse than any monster on this planet, and she wondered if anyone could see.\n\nThere was a metal implant in her leg, a metal bone and plastic flesh, to replace the one that had been lost, left on the field. She walked towards the distant waterfall, left at the giant willow tree where the cake making elves lived, past the dragon cave where Ella, the old dam, slept.\n\nCarol looked at her silver gleaming shoes, and she turned from home and walked for a mile to the Cliffside, the great ravine with the stone bridge. Carol threw her pack over the edge. She stripped from her uniform, the medals, the stripes that showed where she had gone, the silver shoes, and tossed them over the edge. She looked at her new leg and decided that she could carry it a little further.\n\nShe walked, naked, to the house of her mothers. Inside she heard a fiddle playing. There was a fire burning and meat roasting. Somewhere else, no one dared to sleep without a force-field. Somewhere else.\n\nCarols mother, the witch, threw open the door and ran down the path, crying out and waving her hands. She grabbed Carol in her arms and pulled her down to the grass and rocked her, crying.\n\n“This is my daughter!” she cried. “This is my daughter!”\n\nCarols mother, the warrior, leapt out of the house and bounded across the lawn. She was almost a giant and wore leather and bronze chains. She swept her naked daughter and her wife up in her giant arms and carried them both into the house.\n"
  title: The Things She Carried
  year: 2006
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2006-03-30
  day: 30
  month: '03'
  text: "To Martin J. Weaver:\n\nDear Spiritual Investor,\n\nThis letter is a gift in the form of advanced notice concerning the change in management of your Temple in Manchester. Our organization, the American Church of God, has taken notice of the success of your Temple’s missionary programs, and after careful research and investment, we decided that a peaceful merger between our two beliefs would be beneficial to everyone involved.  We have already bought out the Temples along the southern tip of Great Britain, and we are ready to invest in your spirituality.\n\nAs a believer in God, you may ask what this means for you. Surveys show that members of the ACG Inc. feel far more fulfilled after taking part in our spiritual learning programs, and you will feel the pride of being an early adopter of our faith. Our media approval rating is over 78%, and we are gaining momentum.\n\nBenefits include:\n\n– Exclusive Access to Easy-to-Comprehend Translated Texts long-since thought lost\n\n– Better treatment at the work-place and in public\n\n– A secure, electronically coded method of tithing with eligibility for tax write-offs\n\n– Warmth and Happiness amongst your family and friends\n\n– A guaranteed confidence in the belief of an after-life and higher being we call God\n\n– And much more\n\nOur new convert package is full of information regarding your new beliefs and restricted and prohibited acts and practices.\n\nAs an early adopter, you will be able to convert for the price of only 100€. Later conversions will have to pay near double that figure!\n\nWe’ve included a copy of our Holy Book as a token of our faith in your faith.  The American Church of God wishes you a happy life and the best of days, which is why we happily invite you to join our Church before the mass conversion of your Temples. If you have further questions concerning the merger, feel free to contact our public relations department at the toll-free number provided on the inside cover of your new Holy Book ™.\n\nWith warm hearts,\n\nThe Ministers of the American Church of God, Inc.\n"
  title: The Wall Street Cathedral
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2006-03-31
  day: 31
  month: '03'
  text: "No one knew how long Catherine Malone had been missing.  Her absence was reported to the police after three weeks of unpaid rent, but neighbors admitted they hadn’t known that the apartment was occupied.  “She kept to herself,” said the landlord.\n\nThe universe does not think in hours, days.  There is no measure of universal time.  Humans count one moment after the other.  Consecutive time.  But a vibrating cesium atom doesn’t know how many times it’s shuddered.  A sun doesn’t know how long its burned.  Time is dependent on the consciousness of the observer, and without someone to draw demarcations between the seconds, time becomes an unlabeled, unmeasured stream.\n\nSo what clock must a time machine be set by?\n\nThe landlord unlocked the apartment himself, but found no sign of his tenant.  Half-read books and half-filled notebooks rested open upon every table, and a mostly-empty pizza box had attracted a halo of flies.  The bed was unmade, and the dishes were filthy.  The wooden floor was littered with crumpled clothing.\n\nDoes time attach itself to an object and move with that object?  Specifically, would a time machine set for three days prior return the traveler to the room she departed from, or to the naked void of space left in the wake of the moving Earth?  Can there be universal latitude and longitude in an expanding universe, or is that another human construction?  In the latter scenario, how could a machine be set to return a traveler to the Earth?\n\nThe police could find no next of kin, and although a brief investigation suggested abduction, that theory was ultimately disregarded.  “She probably just picked up and left,” said an officer in an off-the-record conversation.  “People do that sometimes.  Move to a different state to start over.”\n\nAssuming that the problems of the initial leap could be easily solved, the biggest problem becomes the return journey.  A person’s presence out of their own time would certainly change their future, so how could they return to the world they’d left?  If an oddity like time travel were to spark the creation of an alternate timeline, how could the machine be set to return to the timeline of origin?  Could a chronological beacon be constructed, like a lighthouse through time?\n\nThe case remained open, long after the apartment had been cleared and rented to another tenant.  No next of kin appeared, and the woman’s belongings were donated to a nearby shelter.  After a decade, the files on open but unsolved cases were moved to the basement of the precinct, where they rested for almost half a century before a flood turned the papers soggy and rusted the ancient hard drives.  “We’re working to restore the old documents,” a representative said during a press conference, shortly before ordering the boxes to be returned to the basement.  “These things are sixty years old,” he said to a coworker.  “No one remembers them anyways.”\n"
  title: A Lighthouse Through Time
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-04-01
  day: '01'
  month: '04'
  text: "“I don’t understand.” wrote Becky. Why did you ban Gabriel?” Becky had been on the forum for almost a year, and she was one of the most frequent posters. Rachel thought Becky was a bit like her when she was thirteen, nattering on about internet stars and how she had found the meaning of life in the movies she was watching.\n\n“Becky.” Typed Rachel “I had to ban him. I’m sorry. He was a bot, a spider, a program. He wasn’t human.” Becky’s green words glowed on her screen almost immediately.\n\n“He talked to me! Every day! What do you mean he wasn’t human?”\n\nRachel exhaled; this was going to be tough. “Didn’t you notice he kept trying to get you to buy games?”\n\n“I like buying games! Who cares? I really liked Gabriel. You two were the only people on this forum I could talk to.” Becky sent a little picture of herself along with the message, her soft little face wrapped in an over exaggerated frown. Rachel has seen her face before. Becky used to have a picture of herself on her profile, a badly lit angled shot of her freckled face. Rachel had made her change the picture, she was always careful about the kids on her forums. She was afraid the picture would make Becky a target for perverts. Now Becky had a picture of a cartoon panda bear as her profile picture.\n\nRachel pulled the keyboard into her lap. “Becky, Gabriel is not a person.”\n\n“You don’t know that. Gabriel was my boyfriend! He said he would go out with me last week.”\n\n“Becky, honey, he was not your boyfriend. He’s a bot. There are thousands of Gabriel’s on thousands of forums sweetheart. He’s a program, designed to promote games and movies. I’m sorry baby.” There was a long red pause before Rachel got a green response.\n\n“I just want someone to talk to.” Becky lived with her single mom in a little apartment somewhere in the Midwest. With how often she was online, Rachel though it was pretty obvious that Becky didn’t have many meat-space friends.\n\n“Oh Becky. I know it’s lonely sometimes, but you should have real people to talk to. I’ll talk to you.”\n\n“How do you know Gabriel is a bot?”\n\nRachel thought for a minute, trying to translate the code into something that would make sense to a thirteen year old that had never even seen a programming language. “Becky, everyone’s got little signatures under their addresses. Bots get launched by the same signature, a hundred operations happening on one name. If that’s going on, you can just send them a little code and-“ Rachel zapped the code over to Becky to show her. “-the bot shuts down and has to reboot.”\n\n“Becky?” She paused and went into the code. “Oh God.” Rachel pushed away from her workstation and put her hands on her head. “Shit.” Rachel stood up and walked away from her computer to find some sunshine.\n"
  title: My Angel Gabriel
  year: 2006
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2006-04-02
  day: '02'
  month: '04'
  text: "Marshall Weisman didn’t bother perusing the files. He’d been tracking this maniac down for years now. The poor looking gent in the outer rings had no excuse, no recourse.  It was clear to him and any other officer of the Outer Planetary Patrol. Weisman barged into the room watching the humble act flying across the fugitives’ face as he slammed the door.\n\n“Think you’re one slick pony, don’t you, Doberson?” The officer said as he dropped into a seat in front of the cuffed vigilante.\n\nCarl Doberson was a rough-looking sort, but he had conviction in his eyes.  He looked healthier than the others that Weisman had run down, but in cold space, the odd ones came in all varieties. He sat at the single table with a mug of coffee before him. Doberson looked sternly at the investigator and growled. “I am not a criminal.” The words hung in the air for several seconds before he continued with a sigh.  “I’m just trying to protect my family.”\n\n“That’s a cute tale, Doberson. Is that the one you’re going with this time? Let me spell it out for you.” Weisman stood and inched closer to the man, moving beyond the range of the interrogation microphone.  “Seven counts of theft from Cruise ship vessels. Two of them royalty! Five counts of Aggravated Assault against guardsmen, some of which involved deadly weapons. And I’m not even getting into the charges of resisting arrest.” As Weisman glared into the face of his enemy, he was sickened by the debauchery of the fiend.\n\n“Those people don’t need all that food!” Doberson protested. “My family and I travel on a Class B skimmer. Do you honestly think we hold enough food to survive out here alone? I’m not a criminal, I’m a good husband and father.” Doberson was pleading with his eyes and Weisman hit him across the jaw hard. Shaking off the sting on his fist as the man recoiled and lowered his head.\n\n“You make me sick! Your lies won’t work this time Doberson. We’ve got you nailed for all these counts, and you’ll be lucky if I don’t stack up those assaults to attempted murder. Now tell me where your ship is! We know you have stolen goods aboard. Pirating is…”\n\n“I am not a space pirate! Why do you people insist on using that term! Have you seen space pirates? Have you? They are vile, they smell and they don’t even speak whole sentences!”\n\nThe officer raised his hand to strike the criminal again, but Doberson recoiled in time to ward off the attack. Marshall wasn’t willing to push his luck even though he’d already disconnected the audio and video surveillance devices in the room. He turned around to pace off his anger and hooked his thumbs in his pockets, “Doberson, you’re a real piece of work. You must be the most pathetic space pirate I have ever seen. Most pirates are proud of—gurh!”\n\nThe officer hit the floor.  Behind him, Doberson held the mug, now shattered, in his cuffed hands. He went fishing for the keys from the Marshall’s pocket as he muttered to only himself now, “I said… I’m not a fucking space pirate.”\n"
  title: A Misunderstanding
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2006-04-03
  day: '03'
  month: '04'
  text: "Chuck surveyed the landing pad with a nod, his proprietary self-satisfied grin encompassing all he could see. It felt good, he reflected, to be a champion of the most powerful force in the universe: awesome.\n\nChuck was a Space Ranger and proud of it. They weren’t universally liked, but then, awesome never was. The Space Rangers were loners, a band held together only loosely by the bonds of a common purpose: liberating the innocent from the clutches of the bad guys. From system to system, their mission was the same, despite the vast difference in the ships they flew, the methods they used, and the caliber of laser pistol they employed—the only difficult conundrum was that Space Rangers tended to disagree on the definitions of “innocents” and “bad guys.”\n\nLuckily for Chuck’s peace of mind, no matter what your definition was, there was no way to deny that this mission had been purely awesome. His own definition of “bad guys” included anything non-humanoid, mostly because their bodies tended to crumple and fold entertainingly when sent flying by Chuck’s ancient martial arts techniques. Fighting aliens always made for an awesome show.\n\nWith a last tug on his genuine, imported, one-hundred-percent lung-killing Marlboro Red Octane, Chuck tossed the cigarette aside and ground the flame away in the alien soil. It felt good to know that no bug-eyed monsters or creatures with more legs than brains would be terrorizing the good, elongated but still humanoid Drampuuls. The planet was now in the hands of people who had hands, and in the mind of Space Ranger Chuck, that was a thoroughly awesome feeling.\n\n“Here’s to a job well done,” he said, lifting his flask to toast the binary sunset. The Arnorian whiskey inside of it had been a gift of thanks from the leaders of the last world he’d liberated, and Chuck thought it was only fitting that he enjoy it in the wake of another great battle. Corking the flask again, Chuck raised his hand to the horizon in a cocky salute. Then he pulled his wide-brimmed hat down low over his eyes, bowing his head as he made his way back to his ship. A Space Ranger’s work was never done.\n"
  title: THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE AWESOME
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2006-04-04
  day: '04'
  month: '04'
  text: "“Swimming’s easy,” Aaron said as he tightened the foam ring beneath her shoulders.  “There’s only one rule: keep breathing.  If you can’t find a way to breathe, that’s when you’re in trouble.”\n\nLeah nodded as her brother gathered her into his arms, lifted her from the chair, and placed her carefully at the edge of the porch.  She didn’t feel her feet dip into the water, but she saw the gray of the ocean swirl across her tan skin.  “Mom says not to,” she said, for the fifth time in the last ten minutes.\n\n“Mom doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” he said with a smile.\n\nLeah watched the water, partially opaque with flecks of dust.  The setting sun behind them soaked the light from the sky, and on the opposite horizon, the sky and the water seemed to merge into a thick band of black.\n\nHer classmates called her a cripple: Legs McGee, to be precise.  Sometimes, she thought of herself that way.  Leah watched them swim to the edge of the schoolyard, hanging onto the edge of the net and daring each other to jump past it.  She’d long since gotten over envy.  In recent years, she simply watched them glide through the water with the ease of a native being.  They were like fish, their shimmering skin glazed with saltwater.\n\n“You can’t live on the ocean and never go swimming,” Aaron continued as he lowered her into the nearly opaque mass.  Small circles of bubbles moved outwards from her skin and she clung to her brother’s arms as the sudden coldness wrapped around her waist.\n\n“I can’t-”\n\n“Don’t listen to them,” he said.  The water was now splashing around the edge of the foam floater, and she felt it dip with her weight.  Leah’s throat closed in silent panic.  “Calm down,” Aaron told her.  “Like I said, the secret is to keep breathing.”\n\nHe pried her fingers from his arm and jumped into the water, his black hair disappearing beneath the gray.  “Aaron?” she called.  There was no response.\n\nThe house was a silhouette now, cast against the watercolor sky.  The ocean was completely silent.  “Aaron!” she yelled.  Leah slapped the water with her arms, trying to push herself to the point where her brother had disappeared.  A loud sound erupted behind her, and beads of water met her shoulders.\n\n“Boo!” he said, and she screamed.  As her voice met her ears, Leah realized it was only partially terrified.  She wiped the ocean with her palm, throwing water in his direction.\n\n“You scared me.”\n\n“I don’t know how to drown,” he said as he blocked some of the splash with his arm.  Aaron wiped his eyes, then squinted. “Hey, how’d you get all the way over there?”\n\n“I pushed,” she said.\n\n“We call that swimming,” her brother told her with a deep smile.  “Welcome to the club.”\n"
  title: The Education of Legs McGee
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2006-04-05
  day: '05'
  month: '04'
  text: "“I see you’ve done some pruning,” Margaret’s therapist said. “I like what you’ve done with the branches around your sternum.”\n\n“Thank you,” Margaret choked out. It had been a trial learning how to talk with roots entwined around her larnyx, but she had muddled through. “I think…I think I made a major…breakthrough. Other day. On the lawn.”\n\n“Yes? Say more about that.”\n\nMargaret grimaced, forming words that sounded rough and hard. She toyed with the braches that jutted out from her left elbow as she spoke. “On the lawn. I was…in the sun. At peace. Feeling the grass…at the sun. It felt…wonderful.”\n\n“That’s a good thing, Margaret. A very good thing.”\n\nMargaret smiled at that, leaves tickling her cheeks. “Was thinking…since had break…though, I could get…a phone call.”\n\n“Oh, Margaret…”\n\n“Or clothes!” The vines entwined in Margaret’s hair shuddered slightly. “Clothes? I’m…ready for clothes.”\n\nMargaret’s therapist closed her book and folded her hands. “Margaret. You came here because you wanted to get away from all that. It was making you sick, remember? All the technology, all the information. It was overwhelming. It was making you sick.”\n\n“Yes…but…think…”\n\n“What would you do on the phone, Margaret? You can barely talk.” She reached out and stroked the branch around Margaret’s collar bone. “I think you’ve done some lovely work here, but you’ve still got a long way to go. But you have made progress. I’ll talk to The Leader about giving you more time in the Orchard. You like working in the orchard, don’t you.”\n\nMargaret had a great deal of trouble choking out a “yes,” so she settled for a slow, sad nod.\n\n“That’s the spirit, Margaret. There’s still so much of the modern world in you. But we’ll cut it out yet.”\n"
  title: Trimming Back The Growth
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-04-06
  day: '06'
  month: '04'
  text: "After four months of backed up deadlines, CD came to the hard conclusion he already knew was coming. He needed one more of himself.\n\nCD had to present his application in person, which he felt was a ridiculous waste of time. He wondered why the psychologist couldn’t just see him on video over the web, receive his application electronically and wave him through the process. This had been the process for all his previous replicas and he saw no reason why he had to see a councilor now. CD expressed this opinion to the bell-girl, the receptionist and as the first order of business when he got to the psychologist. The psychologist was dressed in fashionable blue robes and her face had a designer friendly smile.\n\n“CD, I needed at least one of you present for this application because studies have shown that we are better able to evaluate a candidates application if one of you is present for a physical meeting.” The psychologist sat behind a wooden desk flanked by tall bookshelves. CD thought the books were a gaudy display of her obvious wealth.\n\nCD rolled his eyes. “I am a very busy man. The reason why I have replicas of myself is because I have so much to do.” CD arched his fingers on his chest. “I am anxious to return my thoughts to my research, art, school and work.” He pushed the plastic pad across her desk.  “I would appreciate it if you signed off on this application so I can get the process started.”\n\nThe psychologist didn’t even look at the pad. “Why do you need another replica?”\n\nCD shrugged. “I’m just not getting done everything I need to right now. There aren’t enough of me to go around!”\n\nThe psychologist looked at her comp-pad, her eyebrows tight. “What are most of you doing right now?”\n\nCD cocked his head, accessing the network and pinging his replicas. “Sleeping, eating, a few of us in holo-movies, and one of us is at work on the novel.”\n\n“It seems that most of you isn’t really working.”\n\nCD threw his arms down and let out a long hard breath. “Everyone needs rest time.”\n\nThe psychologist put down the pad and folded her hands on top of it. “CD, do you know your total number of replicas?”\n\n“Of course I do, it says on the form. Total number; four hundred and ninety nine.”\n\n“CD, we have found that around the area of five hundred replicas, something profoundly strong happens to the human mind. The mind can only take so much before it changes in a dynamic and permanent way. Now, I’m not saying that you might change on your five hundredth replica, but maybe by your five hundred and fiftieth or your seven hundredth, maybe the structure of your mind is already beginning to change. The point is, CD, if I approve this application you will no longer be classified as human. You will be classified as a sentient hive, a community.”\n\nHis mouth hung open. “I won’t be human?”\n\n“The law has limits on what is considered human. If you want to be protected and understood under human rights, you must stay within the confines of what is considered human.” The psychologist looked hard at CD, and then at the application. “I don’t like to recommend that people exceed the limit, but your files are in order and I do believe that you are mentally stable enough to make this choice.”\n\nCD smiled. “I’ll take it doctor. Make me a community.”\n\nThe procedure took less time than the interview. The download and connection of memory and consciousness was just like waking up from a long nap. CD looked at himself, smiling in admiration. The painting in his studio was only halfway done and he needed to get to the lab to work on his research. Instead, he and his new self decided to celebrate their new birth by hitting the bar and the holovids. The research, the school, the art could wait.\n"
  title: Replica
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2006-04-07
  day: '07'
  month: '04'
  text: "Stevie glanced over his shoulder, tiptoeing barefoot through the deepest corridors of the Barnum. The ship was huge, as ponderous and lumbering as a garbage barge, but Stevie had lived here all his life. He knew the corridors like the back of his hand—even the ones where he wasn’t allowed.\n\nThe soft glow of emergency lighting turned his skin blue as Stevie reached for the keypad on a maintenance duct, tapping in the code he’d bought off of a janitor with two chocolate bars and a cigarette. The circus moved everywhere and anywhere around the galaxy, so currency was fairly meaningless to its workers—money was pretty, Stevie had to admit, but on the Barnum, transactions were conducted through barter with trade goods. He grinned with relief when the hatch opened under his touch, sneaking in and closing it behind him. The chocolate had been worth it.\n\nThe duct was cramped, but Stevie was small, and he’d looked at enough blueprints to know which turns to take. When he finally reached the hatch he wanted on the opposite side, Stevie was grinning so hard his face hurt. He barely managed to calm himself enough to turn the handle and crank the hatch open from the inside.\n\nHis heart jumped into his throat when Stevie snuck out of the hatch, his teenage eyes darting around the cargo bay to make sure no guards were around. The glow in this room was different from the one in the hallways. The soft blue light was there, but its presence was eclipsed by the white glow that came from the opposite corner of the bay. Eyes widening, Stevie approached the force shield, his heart in his throat. When he got close enough, the angle would allow him to see through what now appeared as a frosted white pane, finally catching a glimpse of the creature inside.\n\nStevie had seen the gentle giant before; the enormous, alien-looking creature was extinct on its natural Earth habitat, but it was the star attraction of the circus he had performed with all his life, so Stevie had naturally seen it during the shows. No one but the handlers was allowed near, however, so all that Stevie had ever seen had been what he could catch while peeping through the wings. If he worked off his indentured status, he might someday be allowed to train for a better role in the circus, maybe even become a handler himself—but there were years of service between Stevie and freedom, and he had to know. He had to see.\n\nAll at once, the fog cleared, and Stevie could see through the force shield as if it was only air. He gasped, eyes widening, and tilted his open-mouthed face up, up, up. It was even larger than he’d imagined, this powerful mass of grey, the creature whose majesty had captivated audiences across the galaxy. Stevie reached out involuntarily but was stopped by the spark of the force shield, wincing as he took his hand back. His heart quailed when the creature moved in response, its huge head lowering to investigate the spark. It would be angry, surely it would be angry, it would trumpet the call that he had heard so many times, but this time the guards would come, and that would mean another five years… Stevie wanted to turn and run, but he was rooted to the spot, frozen before the great beast.\n\nSilently, the grey head leaned down until one black, round eye was level with the boy’s face. Stevie held himself very still and tried not to breathe. The huge trunk rose and Stevie nearly fainted at the sight—but it didn’t attack him. It didn’t break through the wall. Instead, the soft snout pressed up against the force shield, staying there despite the sparks.\n\nStevie was stunned. He looked deep into the black eye and suddenly, the fear was gone. Stevie reached out and pressed his hand against the shield, ignoring the shock of the energy sparks. Despite the inch of clear space between them, he almost felt the soft wet touch of the elephant’s nose.\n"
  title: Mirror, Mirror
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-04-08
  day: '08'
  month: '04'
  text: "On the surface, everything is smooth. On the edges, the shiny plastic cracks, dirt comes out of nowhere, and doorknobs pinch the skin. Tear at the wall a little, underneath is not solid, it is a metal matrix, mostly air. We live in a kind of illusion, frayed at the edges.\n\nIn the middle, things must constantly be replaced with new things to keep the façade. The illusion that everything is smooth and glowing, round soft edges, harmonious, modern and stylish.\n\nAt the edges, things begin to rot, to give way, and folks can’t afford to replace them. They must make do with what is rotted, what has given way. They have to live in a broken picture.\n\nI am a photographer, and I have earned some degree of note for taking models, beautiful girls and boys, to the very edge, to where it is all rust and metal and lighting them in glorious plastic symmetry, snapping pictures, putting the illusion directly next to the crumbling façade.\n\nRachel and I used to go through the tunnels together, we used to hold hands and run through the sewage in our filter suits, we used to find locations together and she would pose and I would take her picture.\n\nThe pictures spread, and soon I was taking products to the edge, perfect plastic to a rotted world. I lost Rachel. It was too much work. I still took models, but they weren’t Rachel. To be honest, they were prettier, but also empty. They were afraid of sewage. All the crews were. We were all inoculated, but they were afraid of smells, and what moves out there.\n\nI punched a reporter. It wasn’t the drugs although the e-zines will all say it was. It wasn’t the meth. He said that I showed the juxtaposition between the core and the edges. I knew he was wrong. What I made out there, in those pictures, was a construct. The contrast was in those homes, with the people living week to week, the peeling basements, the rotted and biting plastic.\n\nOf course, there is no style in those places. That would be considered tacky. It would become tacky, no matter how well lit. But there, in the dying middle class, where you will never see it, there is art.\n"
  title: Tear the Wall
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2006-04-09
  day: '09'
  month: '04'
  text: "Marla just didn’t understand. Bernie couldn’t give up his collection. He tried to explain it to her, but it was futile, he knew it.\n\n“They’re not just collectables, Marla. They’re history. I would think you would understand that. You buy for a museum, you should be able to recognize history.”\n\n“These are garbage, outdated weaponry. And this, this isn’t even loaded.” Marla picked up a heavy, oversize pistol from its display rack. Steel through and through, not the light plastic models currently in service. “Is this suppose to be some sort of home defense?”\n\n“That is a .44 millimeter Desert Eagle! You can’t find that anymore!”\n\n“Whatever.” She set the gun back down in disgust. “They aren’t history, they’re toys. You’re nearly thirty, Bernie. You shouldn’t be spending so much money on toys.”\n\n“Why not? We can afford it!” They could. Bernie’s job as a sysadmin kept him up at odd hours, but it kept his collection—and his waistline—healthy.\n\n“That’s not the point–”\n\n“What other point could you have? I am decorating—”\n\n“Decorating! Fine then! Why don’t you just put all our money into broken firearms, then?!?”\n\n“Maybe I should! Better that than every shoe store in town!”\n\n“Those pumps were a business expense!”\n\nBernie cell phone went off, just when he was about to say something particularly nasty. Work, calling him again, despite the late hour. Bernie told Marla he had to go, and she waved him off with a glare that told him that this wasn’t over.\n\nThat night, Marla found herself jerked awake by the sound of fighting in the living room. Suddenly, she heard a loud thud, and the fighting stopped. “Oh no,” she thought. “Bernie!” Gripping the Hiro Taninchi-autographed baseball-bat Bernie kept in the bedroom, she inched toward the door. The sight in the living room made her gasp loudly.\n\nThere was Bernie, holding the Desert Eagle in one pudgy hand and the dark shirt of another man in the other. The other man’s head rolled back, a bleeding cut on his forehead.\n\n“Caught him trying to make off with our stuff. Bernie said. “Probably the same guy who ripped off the Whipplesteins down the street. Idiot should’ve known better than to come between me and my collection!”\n\nBernie proudly held up the gun for Marla to see. There was blood on its gargantuan barrel. “Home defense,” he said.\n"
  title: Home Defense
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-04-10
  day: 10
  month: '04'
  text: "Tycho Villiare never asked why his employers had chosen to duel.\n\nGentlemen seldom fight duels themselves. One gentleman may challenge another to a duel, but since duels end in death, a state most gentleman find inconvenient, Men of Arms are employed to fight duels for them.\n\nMen of Arms do not come cheap. Tycho Villiare was one of the most expensive Men of Arms on his colony world. He had been a solider of Her Majesties Royal Marines, a combat Iron in a heated mech-suit, cutting out insurrection like a scalpel. He could kill a household without harming a hair on the head of the family dog. After ten years with the service, his employment as a Man at Arms was his retirement. The large sums he demanded for his time meant that he only need work one day out of a year. When the Duke of Rodchester found himself engaged in a duel of consequence with the half-blood bastard Count of Carlo, he found it quite natural to use a good section of his fortune to employ Tycho Villiare to fight the duel for him.\n\nThe Count of Carlo, being of royal blood but little royal wealth, would have found it difficult to employ a Man at Arms to fight for him. Even so, he could have begged a loan in order to secure such a man, but he did not. The half blood bastard came to fight the duel himself.\n\nThis pairing was most irregular. Men at Arms may fight each other in a duel on behalf of other gentlemen, and two gentlemen, so motivated, could fight a duel themselves. However, it was unnatural for a man such as Tycho, a talented commoner, to fight a royal, even a half-blood. Tycho himself was not terribly concerned, for he expected that either the half-blood royal would become scared and back out of the duel, or the Duke of Rodchester would find his honor so affronted that he would dismiss Tycho from the fight.\n\nTycho did not fail to consider the Dukes considerable weight and age in his estimation of the Dukes ability. What Tycho failed to consider was a fault of his own character, for he could not comprehend that the Dukes love of his own skin was far greater than his love of honor and duty. The Duke, though powerful, was never a man who was prone to any great exertions.\n\nThe day of the duel was a fine crisp spring morning, all blue skies and dewy grass. The Duke sat in the stands with his company, sipping his morning tea. The Count was alone and standing, a long and lean figure, in well-worn boots and an ancient raygun that bore the dull gleam of constant cleaning.\n\nTycho used the pulse gun of Her Majesty’s Royal Marines, standard issue, set to single fire. It was an unremarkable weapon, and certainly nothing compared to the ornate weapons that hung unused on a Dukes belt.\n\nThe Cybernetic Judge instructed the two men to stand back to back, to walk fifteen paces, to turn and draw.  The Count and Tycho both took their shots. The Cybernetic Judge timed Tycho to be point one three seconds slower than his average draw time. Some say he was hesitant to shoot a royal, nervous about the consequences of such an action.\n\nA moment after the shots were fired there was a scream. The Duke was slumped over in the stands, blood on his pale pink chair. The Count was on the ground, convulsing, red on his white shirt. The young fiancée of the dead Duke ran out of the stands, picking her skirts up high, heedless of her ankles exposing to the world. She did not go to the side of the Duke, but ran past him to sprawl next to the Count on the grass. She cradled the Counts head in her arms and wept, caressing his face, kissing his forehead. She did not look at Tycho, the man who still held the weapon that killed the Count. Tycho was no more than a force of nature to her.\n\nTycho carefully placed the pulse gun on the grass and walked away, his duty done.\n"
  title: The Surprising Events of Springtime in Rodchester
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2006-04-11
  day: 11
  month: '04'
  text: "The crash was magnificent, heard three systems away and felt by half the galaxy. The other half were immediately informed via telepathy, televisapathy and tele-empathy, and felt as if they had felt it. Such was the impact.\n\nThe grand old captain himself, however, newly cloned and fresh from artificial endorphins and digitally inserted memories, shrugged off the whole thing. “Eh,” he was quoted. “Good an end as any. Consider that the final voyage of Captain Shakespeare, then. Time enough I was through with the whole bit.”\n\nTime enough, everyone agreed with a sigh of relief. Time enough.\n\nAnd so then did the immense interplanetary causeways of space and time breathe easy, free from Captain Shakespeare’s impulsive reality bends and left-handed turns. The day the Captain hung his helmet and started to raise begonias, intergalactic travel safety numbers rose and deaths plummeted; no mass-murder in the history of the universe had the kill rate of Captain Shakespeare with a few bolts of Lighting Hopkins in him. Space was safe again.\n\nBut at what cost? Re-Clone stations from one solar system to another closed their doors, the demand for new bodies having plummeted so. Drastic measures needed to be taken. Heads of the Re-Clone Guild left to meet with the Captain at his home, waded through the waist-high begonias, and pleaded with the Once-Scourge of the Spaceways to again throw caution to the wind and ruin some bodies of spacetravelers.\n\nThe grand old captain met them with a perfunctory amount of grace and pleasantries, offering tea and scones. Once they had all sat down and unanimously decided upon the less than edible nature of the scones, Captain Shakespeare regaled them with the story of his original cloning. How he was asked to write more plays, and not just for the theatre he was accustomed to, but also for holo- and empath-theatres, which baffled his mind at the time.\n\n“You remember,” the Captain said, stroking his mustache. “The Baconians put up such a fuss, claiming they were right all along. Such ridiculousness!” The members of the Re-Clone delegation all nodded, unsure where he was going with this. “In any case, I didn’t want to write any more plays. I mean, if you had lived in London when I did, what with the shit and filth and…well, I won’t go into it. But if you had, you’d understand why I had to write. And why, as soon I as didn’t live there and then anymore, why I wanted to take to the stars.”\n\nAt this, the members of the delegation sat on the edge of their chairs. “So, you’ll be returning? To the stars?”\n\n“No,” said Captain Shakespeare. “I’ve had enough. Perhaps I shall write again. Or maybe I will continue to develop begonias. If you gentlemen would care, I have a new genus in the back, cross-bred with a venus fly-trap. Managed to get it simply enormous in stature. It’s really quite breath-taking.”\n\nThe delegation declined, in no small amount due to the gleam in the Captain’s eye. Waving them off, Captain Shakespeare suggested convincing the clone of Samuel Clemmons to take up space travel.\n\nThe delegation, who had come all this way, who had waded through begonias and munched upon scones of solid rock, sagged their shoulders futher.\n\nThey would never be able convince Clemmons.\n"
  title: The Final Voyage Of Captain Shakespeare
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-04-12
  day: 12
  month: '04'
  text: "The couple broke fast in the mountain retreat, dining on fresh red melons and purple berries. Marta, their robotic guide, served them with diamond plates on the giant stone balcony overlooking the forest. In between delicate bites, Rae remarked that the whole residence was rather ostentatious. Bello didn’t notice her ire, he was wrapped up enjoying deep breaths of the cool morning air. Afterwards, they took the skimmer and flew over the extensive forest country.\n\nMarta gave a running dialogue on the features of the landscape, the climate of the poles and the wildlife, her features always pleasant, operating the skimmer without looking at the controls. Rae stared ahead at the horizon while Bello hopped from one side of the skimmer to the other, pointing out features to his wife.\n\n“Is that a wooden bridge?” he asked.\n\n“Oh yes!” said the impeccably quaffed Marta. “Built by the native people.”\n\nRae afforded the bridge a glance. “Looks like real wood.”\n\n“Oh, it is! All the sentient made structures on this world are made by natural products grown right here, and all the structures, with the exception of the residences, are made by the native peoples.”\n\n“Ah yes, the natives. We are scheduled to see them today, aren’t we?”\n\n“Yes. Our team worked carefully over their design, combining artistry and technical excellence to complete these charming natives. They are engineered to enjoy aboriginal environment and build their homes in the large Nobo trees that are common in this region.” Marta tapped a screen and rotating holograms popped up in the middle of the skimmer. Bellos face glowed.\n\n“Oh! They are lovely!” he said, smiling at the pictures. Rae shrugged.\n\n“Are they all that same color?”\n\nMarta tilted her head to the side in an acceptable parody of human movement. “All of the native people range from a light pale blue to an aqua marine. When they reach the sea one day, they will find they are the same color as the water. We anticipate this will generate some delightful creation stories. If you like though, genetic strands can be introduced to-“\n\nRae waved her hand. “No, no. Blue is fine.”\n\nBello reached out toward the flashing holographs. “These primitive peoples are friendly, yes?”\n\nThe screen flashed to corresponding images as Marta spoke. “The primitives are very peaceful. Their religion focuses on finding inner enlightenment through nature. Tribal elders devote themselves to contemplation and teaching traditions to the young. They have yearly festivals and lovely rituals that reflect their reverence for nature. Because these are a peaceful species, we have imbedded a few defensive skills that you might find of use, should it become necessary. For example, they have a great capacity for the quick computation of numbers that would make them useful on space fairing vessels.”\n\nRae frowned at the holograms. “They appear rather fragile, don’t they?”\n\nBello scooped up Rae’s limp hand. “I think they are charming.” He said. Rae shook her head.\n\n“I don’t know, they don’t have any hair. Don’t you think it’s odd that they don’t have any hair?”\n\n“Rae, we can’t replace the Arrgio, even if we wanted to.” Bello put his arm around her shoulders and squeezed. “I loved them as much as you did.” He looked out onto the landscape.“It’s time for us to move forward.”\n\nRae’s face cracked and she leaned her head onto Bello’s shoulder. Marta ignored them for a few minutes, suddenly entranced in landscape navigation. Bello wiped Rae’s eyes with his sleeve, the fabric absorbing and evaporating the droplets into mist.\n\n“Look,” he said, pointing. Rae peered over the edge of the skimmer and below the green and red leaves of the canopy she could see tall lithe runners moving swiftly on the soft earth. They wore no clothes, their willowy bodies smooth and graceful. They were ululating in dark, sweet tones. Rae closed her eyes and listened to their echoing voices.\n\n“I think I could guide these people.” She said “I really do.”\n\n“We’ll take it.” Said Bello.\n"
  title: Real Estate
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2006-04-13
  day: 13
  month: '04'
  text: "Hello. My name is Demetri Thornwick. I’m a graduate student in physics at Hawking University, but in your century you probably know it as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I just left Professor Mendalin’s Temporal Physics class, where I just received a D- on my term paper.  The paper was on Dr. Franklin’s theory of Negative Timeline Distortions. I won’t bore you with the physics, but it involves the effects of changes made when traveling back in time (aka, Timeline distortions). Now, nobody disputes that the timeline will be irrevocably disrupted if a time traveler makes a major change, like detonating a 100 terawatt EMF pulse bomb in Hollywood. In addition, nobody disputes that a minimal change, like dropping a pebble in a dry well, will not disrupt the future one iota. The arguments always center on the Maximum Disruption with Zero Consequences (MDZC). You know, what’s the most I can change without screwing up the primary timeline.\n\nThat’s why I’m overwriting this web page, to prove to Professor Mendalin that my grade should be increased. You see, my term paper predicted that changing an obscure twenty first century web site will produce zero consequences. However, Professor Mendalin argued that 2d/(c2-ga )1/2 is not valid when DT>200 years. And, based on that, my successive derivations were worthless. Frankly, he’s an idiot. And, when I prove him wrong, he’ll have to change my grade to an A.\n\nIt’s relatively simple to infiltrate your twenty first century internet using a Tachyon carrier beam.  I can do it from here, and you see the results real time. Now, clearly, I cannot make a drastic change, like take ebay off-line for a few hours. That would absolutely collapse my timeline, and my century would cease to exist. So, I decided to go back to April 13, 2006 and delete a story from 365 Tomorrows, and replace it with this dialog. FYI, I chose 365 Tomorrows because it only has a modest following; certainly below the MDZC threshold. In addition, twenty-first century critics all agreed that fewer people read the stories of Kathy Kachelries than any of the other writers, which I why I chose today, because it lowers the MDZC threshold even more. Surely, a few thousand lonely sci-fi geeks can miss one apocalyptic story without the world coming to an end. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m sure you’re all good people, but come on, you’re not a major thread in the tapestry of time. If my calculations are correct, the loss of that one boring story (less than two minutes of your life) will be equivalent to dro-ping a p-bble in a d-y we-l. Wh-t th- he-l is h-pen–g. -h, s-it…\n"
  title: Dropping a Pebble in a Dry Well
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2006-04-14
  day: 14
  month: '04'
  text: "“Hey, neighbor!” Chawly called down from across the way. He had a pint glass of something that looked like red wine in each fist.  I knew it couldn’t be–not in Topside–but Chawly had his ways. Chawly yanked the line-suspended basket that served as dumbwaiter between his window and mine over to him and placed a glass in. He gave the basket a shove, sliding it across the expanse. “Taste somma this!”\n\nThe basket was a battered salvage from an abandoned grocery store and stayed remarkably stable on it’s journey, barely sloshing the blood-red contents. I watched the drops fall and disappear though the cloud cover, wondering if they would hit any Suits on the ground. I smiled, imagining red splatter all over the pale face of Suit, on his way to a job or meeting or something, his eyes scanning the heavens, wondering where such sacrament came from.\n\nActually, it was probably raining down there.\n\nThe wine was shit, naturally; the latest in Chawly’s experiments to speed up the fermentation process in grape juice. “This is gonna make me blind one day,” I called out to Chawly.\n\n“Whatchu worried about missing?” Chawly howled back. He motioned over-dramatically to our surroundings, arms out stretched. Living above the rain had spared these top tenements water damage, but the heat had baked the buildings until all surfaces were the same cracked brown. Chawly almost blended in, with his tan skin, filthy shirt and tangled hair. Chawly had been here when I was broke and starving, and Topside was the only place I could go; to me, Chawly was Topside. From the way he yelped and hollered when the buildings swayed in the wind to his usual, pantless way of hanging off his window ledge. No one lived Topside by choice, but Chawly certainly made the most of it.\n\n“You cooking over there, Chawly?” It smelled like hamburgers, but I knew it couldn’t be. Not even Chawly could get beef.\n\n“Hells yes, brother! Morganna totally brought home the bacon!” Morganna was Chawly’s cat, just as brown and dirty has her owner. The realization of the sort of “bacon” Morganna was able to catch and kill suddenly made me queasy. “You okay there? Your air-conditioner on the fritz?”\n\nI glanced back the black cube in the corner of my room. It’s sputters of pure oxygen in the thin air caused the airborne dust to dance and panic. “Nah, it’s fine Chawly…”\n\n“Somethin’s bothern you, brother. Here, penny for your thoughts.” Chawly flipped a coin, the distance between our windows making his simple act miraculous. It hit my hand still warm from Chawly’s fist.\n\n“This is a five yen coin, Chawly.”\n\n“Does that make it more or less than a penny*?”\n\n“I think it’s about the same amount of worthless.”\n\n“Let’er rip, then.” Chawly crawled out onto the window ledge, his long, naked legs dangling in midair. “Let’er rip.”\n\nI took in a deep breath and let it snake slowly back out of my lips. “I ain’t ever gonna get out of here, am I?”\n\n“Old widow Keerney bought it three days ago. You could move in to her old place.”\n\n“Not that. Topside. I used to go places, you know? On the ground, up the river back east. The world’s a big place, man. It gave me everything I needed. I was like a rolling stone, Chawly.”\n\n“Like a stone,” Chawly said, drawing it in. “I heard once, that you drop a penny from high enough, the force of gravity turns it hard and fast. You can kill a man from this height, turn a worthless coin into a killing machine. Load of bullshit, but fun to think about.You wanna be a stone, that may be the only way.” Chawly turned around, slinking back into his crevice of a room. “I got meat on the grill. You’re welcome to some, you wanna come over”\n\nI laughed at this. Pass the chasm that separated our buildings? Might as well fly, or put on a Suit. But Chawly stopped me fast with a stone-serious gaze. “Basket’s waiting, brother.”\n\n“You cannot be serious.”\n\n“I don’t got your faith in the world, neighbor. But I do know that I anchored this line pretty damn well.”\n\n“And if the line breaks?”\n\n“You were the one that wanted to leave.”\n\nI imagined falling out of the basket, tumbling through clouds like spilt wine. “Maybe I’ll get lucky,” I said. “Maybe I’ll land on a Suit.”\n\n“HA! I like that!” Chawly threw his bearded head back, and his laughter echoed and shook the stones of Topside.\n\nFor the first time since I had first crawled up to that umpth-hundred-floor room, I felt it shake me, too.\n"
  title: Like A Stone
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-04-15
  day: 15
  month: '04'
  text: "Dust filled the air as a sand blast landed on the flames coming from the cathedral of St. Liz. Brother Kyle’s red mechanical eye, the Snipers Lover, adjusted to the lower light as he ran towards the Archbishops secretary.\n\n“Brother Alexander! Who is in the garden?”\n\n“What?” Alexander clutched his data pad to his chest and stared past Louis toward the blaze.” Kyle grabbed Alexander and shook him.\n\n“Who is holding St. Liz? Who has the pillar?”\n\nAlexander shook his head. “Ah, it’s noon, mid-meal, so it’s one of the acolytes.”\n\nKyle muttered a curse. The pillar of St. Liz was a forty-pound architectural marvel that was held at a crucial intersection in the cathedral. If the pillar were to be dropped St. Liz would crumble. Kyle had seen simulations of the twenty-eight hour collapse, wood and stone crashing inwards leaving only a few outside walls standing. The St. Liz pillar was designed as a representation of the people’s connection to the body of the church, and under the dome, it had special relevance to the interdependency of the lunar community.\n\nAnother gust of sand and ash blew over the cathedral scattering tourists and clergy as the domes emergency system, millions of spider shaped drones, swarmed over the fire. Kyle’s lungs, manufactured during the war, filtered out the excess oxygen produced by the malfunctioning pumps. The excess oxygen produced by the environmental system in the dome had started the fire. Warnings flashed on the inside of his skull that the concentration of toxins in the air was exceeding recommended doses for normal human capacity.\n\nBrother Kyle caught the eye of Ruth, a Sister in the order who he had never spoken to before. Both of them had purposefully given each other distance. After the war, most veterans did. Now, he found himself calling to her.\n\n“Sister Ruth! Move Up!” She leaped, her steel extensions unfolding under her robe. In two seconds she was standing next to him, boosted five feet in the air by her Steel Razors, the legs that could cut through bone. They headed down through the maze of the cathedral, built with the native grey stone.  Ruth snatched Kyle up into her extended mechanical arms and vaulted over patches of intense heat. When she began coughing Kyle grabbed her face and mashed her mouth against his, exhaling into her lungs.\n\n“I’ve got the Sweet Breath.” he explained nervously. In the war he had given out a thousand breaths, but after a few years in a monastery, he was suddenly squeamish about touching lips.\n\nAt the entrance to the underground garden fire was crawling up the graceful trees, bright like jewels on a woman’s hand.  The acolyte stood in his red robes coughing, struggling to hold up the pillar. The acolyte cried out when he saw Kyle and Ruth.\n\n“The fire!” he said, tears in his lashes.\n\nKyle yanked the acolyte close and forced a breath into his throat. The kid was too surprised to do anything but inhale. “It’s okay, I’m here to take over.”\n\n“No!” yelled Ruth, her voice dimmed by the roar of the flames.  “We’ll all getting out.”\n\nKyle took hold of the pillar. “I’m staying in the garden. I have the Sweet Breath, I can do this.”\n\n“The church may collapse anyway! If you force me I will carry you out of here.”\n\nKyle nodded and hit the acolyte on the back of the head. The acolyte folded like silk onto the crackling grass.\n\n“You can only take one of us Ruth.”\n\n“Damn you! We all did shit in the war. You don’t need to do this.”\n\n“This isn’t about the war. Get that kid out. I’ll survive; I’m the only person in that can do this. I need to do this. Let me go!”\n\nRuth picked up the kid and danced into the flames.\n\nBrother Kyle curled himself around the pillar, leaning his baldhead against the lacquered wood. Smoke clouded his vision. His lungs flashed red warnings on the inside of his eyes. He thought about being on tourist duty, carefully handing the pillar to a young woman posing for a picture with her parents.\n\n“I’m not really a believer.” She had said.\n\n“Maybe not.” Kyle remembered smiling. “But right now, you are holding up the church.”\n"
  title: In the Garden
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2006-04-16
  day: 16
  month: '04'
  text: "Bernard held the letter loosely in his hands. He sat down on his bed, staring at the blank taupe walls of the Renewal center and didn’t look at the letter. Bernard’s Renewalist, Maureen, had suggested he try and read the letter again today. He’d been trying for three hours.\n\nSlowly, Bernard unfolded the letter, catching glimpse of the clean type at the top.\n\nTo Myself, Upon My Renewal,\n\nWhat a strange way to start–\n\nBernard crushed the letter in his hands, and threw the ball of crumpled paper across the room. He closed his eyes tight and shook his head over and over before burying his face in his pillow. Even with his eyes closed, Bernard knew the letter was there. Waiting for him.\n\nHe had to read it today. Maureen had said as much, implying that this was a necessary block he had to get over before they could move forward. He had to read it today.\n\nSlowly, tentatively, as if it was going to explode, Bernard approached the crumpled ball. He carefully smoothed it out, and began to read.\n\nTo Myself, Upon My Renewal,\n\nWhat a strange way to start to a letter. Still, I don’t know of another way to address you. “Clone,” just seems…wrong. You’ve got all my memories, after all. Well, most of them\n\nWhich brings us to the reason you are receiving this reintroduction letter. I have not been negligent in my updating.  Granted, more than a year has passed, and at lot has happened since the last bit of memory you possess. Luckily, the reason I was renewed wasn’t anything sudden—not an accident like poor Thomas, thank God. I have cobbled together an extensive collection of videos and snapshots and written material to better acclimate you, myself, my clone, me back into the world. But I wanted to start with this letter. Because there is no sense trying to obfuscate why you’re here, in this state.\n\nEight months ago, Mom died–\n\nWith a howl, Bernard tore the letter in half, and then in half again, and again, in smaller and smaller pieces until he couldn’t read it, until it wasn’t a letter, until it was only confetti about his bare feet.\n\nBernard took a deep breath and thumbed the intercom. “Shelly? This is Bernard, patient number 235674. Could you have Maureen send over another copy of my reintroduction letter. please?”\n\nShelly’s sunny voice crackled in. “Certainly, Bernard. How far did you get this time?”\n\n“Same place.”\n\n“You’ll get through it. This is just a difficult day for you.”\n"
  title: Red Letter Day
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-04-17
  day: 17
  month: '04'
  text: "The orphanage was in the ghetto of the city, below the levels that Anodramida’s mother had forbidden her to visit when she was a podling. It smelled like metal and sulfur, and the darkness made her shake. Christopher wrapped her tentacle around his arm, and his warmth evoked an involuntary purr, from deep within her throats.\n\nHer mother said that humans were ugly, all those holes on their faces, the creases and the tangle of hair. Her mother thought that hair was the worst, it seemed filthy to her, the way it fell everywhere. Anodramida had thought humans were creepy till she separated the telepathic link from her mother and went to University. Without her mothers influence she found herself attracted to the humans heat and innocence. Christopher was all warmth, and he had hair on every section of his body, Anodramida knew this from examining his body in detail.\n\nChristopher signed all the documents and told the robot caretakers that she was his lawyer. A lie, of course, but humans were good at lying. They walked the rows of cradles and looked at all the little humans. They were asleep; drugged or in stasis. Humans reproduced like bacteria, so much that they could not always afford to keep the children they produced. They were very territorial too, here, on their rusted home world, aliens were forbidden from adopting human children. Humans would rather keep their young in stasis than allow them to be raised by an alien.\n\nTo take home a child, Anodramida would not be able to return to her home world till her child was a legal adult. The child would never be allowed off world without Christopher, who would be his legal guardian. That would be twenty-two years on Earth, one of the most politically unstable planets in the galaxy. Anodramida wanted to grab all the children at once, made a little pod nest of all of them, like back at home how she was raised. Of course, she had read that human children required more care, and since they didn’t have a psychic link with a mother, they would be much harder to control.\n\nThe robots let them pick a child to lift out of stasis. All curled up, he looked like a little pink bean. She wrapped her tentacles around him, but he didn’t wake up. The robots took him to wash all the stasis fluid off him, and he slept through all of their scrubbing. Anodramida watched and thought they might be handling him a bit rough, the little thing looked so small, so delicate, like parts of it were almost transparent. When they were done toweling him off they handed him back to her, and she examined his little toes, the feathery hair, and the pudgy tummy. This child would grow and change, and get covered with hair and eat human food, oh divine energies, she would have to make human food!\n\nAnodramida felt like she was breaking inside. She looked at Christopher. What had she been thinking? Had her idealism been overwhelming her good sense? How did she get to be here, holding a pink thing, giving up her life for this little person she didn’t even know! She couldn’t do it. She would tell the robots to put it back to sleep. Maybe it was good to want to help but maybe it wouldn’t be possible, she couldn’t raise an alien.\n\nShe looked down at the little one. “I’m sorry.” She said, in her native tongue. She gave him a careful squeeze and his eyes opened. She stroked his head with a free tentacle, and his lips curled up into a human smile.\n\nAnodramida took him home.\n"
  title: Alien Love Affair
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2006-04-18
  day: 18
  month: '04'
  text: "There’s blood up to the windows. It must have seemed like a good idea at the time, to stack the bodies in the Mercer Building, to get ‘em off the Rail. But I can’t help wondering if the allusion to gore behind those art-deco panes is worse the actual carnage.\n\nAt least they’re off the Rail. At least there’s that.\n\nMy brother took his class—God, how many would that have been? 50? 60 schoolchildren?—to the History Museum just yesterday. Show them the Independence Day exhibit, remind them of the two decades spent fighting the Earth Alliance so that the Mars colony could be a world in its own right, beholden to none. Took the Rail, Line 4—site #1 of 15. Had they made that trip today, on Independence Day itself, then their screams would have been the first.\n\nFifteen bombs, throughout the city. Crippling not only the Rail, but also the ComNet. All com systems were shut down, in order to stop more bombs from being set off remotely. I can’t imagine what this did to the survivors, though, who counted on their coms to call for help.\n\nAs a paramedic, I’m only any use in the aftermath. Arriving at Olympus station—site #7 of 15—I was surprised at how helpful most of the “civilians” were. There were no gawkers, no brawlers, none of the usual characters that make my job more difficult than it already is. Only assistants. People moving debris and corpses, being directed by myself and the other emergency personal. We were all helping, those who could. And we stayed silent for those who couldn’t.\n\nThey say it takes a particular kind of person to live on Mars, a temperament out of place on Earth or the Moon. Looking back, on what we did on that day of chaos, of fifteen bombs and fifteen major disasters, I can see how true that statement is. And it fills me with an immense pride.\n\nNo one’s taken credit for this destruction yet, but it doesn’t matter.\n\nMars won’t be beaten. We spent 20 years under the shadow of the EA, after decades of carving a life out of red rock and poison air.\n\nWe are used to terror.\n"
  title: God Of War
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-04-19
  day: 19
  month: '04'
  text: "“Don’t worry Miles, you’ll find me attractive. After the change you’ll be programmed to find me attractive.” Auroras voice sounded like two voices, a harp and a flute playing together. She stretched her lean blue body against the circular view port, the lights from the outside of the ship shining on her alien body.\n\n“I know. It’s just scary.” Miles leaned his head back into the pillows of what used to be their bed; she did not sleep with him anymore. She hadn’t slept next to him since she had decided to undergo the change a week ago in the ship. Everyone was to undergo the change before planet fall, but Miles was holding back.\n\n“It’s just a big change for me.” Miles looked at Auroras blue skin, the twelve slender five- jointed fingers on each hand. He drew his knees up to his chest. “I’m happy with the way I look, the way you used to look.” He waved his hands in the air, as if trying to dispel his last words. “Sorry Aurora. I didn’t mean to. . .you were beautiful then, you are beautiful now, it’s just different.”\n\nAurora emitted a high flutelike sound that Miles knew was laughter. “Darling, I don’t feel upset by your personal feelings about my appearance. I’m free from those kinds of concerns now. I was free from the moment my genetic reconstruction started.” She walked over to him, her movements graceful, the muscles in her long legs constricting and relaxing like coils under her skin. “Miles, you were the one that talked me into this, you were the one that didn’t want to be on the crash and burn course of humanity.” She towered over him.\n\nMiles got to his feet. “I still don’t! I just feel, I don’t know, like we’ve failed, like we are running away.”\n\nAurora made a hand gesture over her abdomen, a sign of understanding. “Abandoning humanity?”\n\n“I guess.” He moved to the other side of their small, shared quarters.\n\nShe watched him with her multifaceted green eyes. “Miles, you are one man. This group is just under ten thousand. We couldn’t change the whole of humanity even if we wanted. We just need to let the humans go, make life elsewhere.”\n\n“Carry the code.” Said Miles, repeating the group mantra.\n\n“Carry the code of life.” She moved towards him, her strange hands outstretched. Miles found himself inadvertently wanting to move away, but he forced himself to go to her, to reach out his arms and fold into her. When they had designed their new forms, they kept touch as a sense of comfort. Miles was suddenly glad of that. Aurora stroked one hand through his hair. “Maybe someday humans will get over all their problems, and maybe someday we will find them again. We’re doing the right thing Miles; we are making life that has a chance of survival. You were the one that first told me that Miles.” She brought his chin up so that they were looking into each other’s eyes, his hazel, hers a thousand shades of green. Her fluted voice seemed to play a sour chord. “Miles. I miss you.”\n\n“I’m right here.”\n\n“You are here, but I can’t be with you. Miles, I want to make love to you again; I want us to share the understanding we once did. I don’t want you to flinch from me anymore.”\n\nHis cheeks turned bright red. “I’m sorry, I never meant to do that.”\n\n“I’m not mad Miles, I don’t get angry like that anymore. I’m not physically capable of it.” She knelt before him, her head at his shoulder. He touched her face, and her chest purred.\n\nMiles nodded. “I’m ready Aurora.”\n\nShe sang with joy.\n"
  title: The Laughter of Flutes.
  year: 2006
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2006-04-20
  day: 20
  month: '04'
  text: "Andrea had never had to wash blood off of her hands before. She dripped the clear dose of hydro-oxygen conservatively over her fingers to flush the crimson stain down the reprocessing disposal. Sweat dripped down her forehead and cheeks but never reached her mouth, which was still covered by the air-processor mask. The device flung the harsh echo of breathing around the blue-tiled room.\n\nAndrea washed and washed and washed until all the blood was gone. She pulled open the plastic pack to remove the drying towel, which she placed between her hands to rub the moisture away.\n\nJust then, the comm-screen in her bathroom came to life and through the initial static a disembodied head appeared on its surface. “Ms. Nickels, the Coalition of Health has confirmed your recent gift to its cause. Did you bring the trophy?”\n\nStill panting, Andrea reached into the vac-sac and removed a bloody license from its confines. When she held it towards the screen, the head tilted and looked her over. “Please place the item in question in the decontamination compartment for scanning.”\n\nPulling open the little grey drawer at the bottom of the screen, Andrea slipped the license in and slammed the drawer shut. She watched the green light turn red and listened to the hissing sound resonating from the device. She glanced back up to the screen, her mask distorting her voice. “When do I get the clean air?”\n\n“Once the scanning is complete we will enable the distribution of clean non-viral air into your paid quarters.”\n\nAs she waited, Andrea reminded herself to take the knife that she had used from the kitchen and dispose of it. Filthy blood and dust particles couldn’t be allowed to roam free in her new air. Not when it came at such a cost.\n\n“And… will the police be after me?” She was getting nervous, and she knew the head could tell.\n\n“Andrea, our services are one-hundred percent safe. We have arranged for a percentage of the funds to be transferred to the government. Your service has been made completely legal under the Self-Offense for Healthy Living Act.”\n\nJust then the red light switched to green and a click could be heard behind the wall. Andrea felt the cool blast of fresh air pump into her apartment and she immediately tugged the mask down to rest at her collar. Breathing deeply, she laughed out loud and spun in a circle, as exuberant as a child in a summer rainshower.\n\n“The Coalition of Health wishes to thank you for your service and hopes that you enjoy your three months of clean oxygen. You will also receive a free catalog of viruses in your area” By now the head had faded and the screen shut down, but Andrea was still reveling in the smell of absolutely nothing. Once the viewscreen’s static had subsided she walked over to wash her face once more. The water trickled over her hands and soaked into her washcloth. She smiled until it hit her face.\n\nThen she started to worry about the water.\n"
  title: Hypoch Andrea
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2006-04-21
  day: 21
  month: '04'
  text: "Tristan was methodically taking apart his hands when the doorbell chimed.  He jumped at the sound, going to the door in such a hurry that he left behind the joints and pieces of his left hand on the worktable.  All nine of Tristan’s eyes blinked and strobed expectantly, wanting to know if this was it, what he had been waiting for, the final piece.  The post-bot offered no answers, merely hovering in front of Tristan’s doorstep, humming a tune written specifically to pacify.  But the box carried the familiar barcode, Isolde’s barcode, and Tristan was so excited he left the door open, the post-bot forgotten, and tore open the package with his one intact hand.\n\nBut he was careful, for he knew the fragility of the contents.  It pained Tristan to do so, but he was careful.  He had to be.  What if he were to break it?\n\nNervously, with forced concentration through metal fingers, Tristan pried open the box, shifted aside the packing foam, and pulled out the small, translucent capsule.  Three eyes telescoped out as Tristan took a closer look at the small object contained within the thick amber liquid.\n\nWithin, a tiny human heart floated in perfect stasis, undamaged by delivery.  Tristan’s extended lenses accordioned back into his head, pleased.  It was delicate work, a heart.  He had made the right decision, ordering this piece from Isolde, and her talent as a tissue sculptor showed in every facet of the miniscule muscle.  Tristan was a genius with metal and bone, flesh and glass, but he knew his limits.  It was said that Tristan would never be willing to swallow his own pride and use parts crafted by specialists, and this desire for personal construction of each and every element had made him the most renowned robot-builder on the planet, fame far outstretching those who preferred to turn to others for parts.\n\nIt was this quirk, and the reputation attached to it, that had given Tristan his current commission.  He accessed the images of the kindly bronze couple who had requested, bashful and stuttering, a biological child.  Not just a biological shell on a metal framework, either, though they admired such creations from Tristan’s catalog.  No, they wanted wholly organic sentient, the kind of which had not been seen on this world or any other for time immemorial.  They had shown Tristan a data file of approximate proportions, told him expense was no object, assured him he was the right man for the job, and tottered off.\n\nHe could not complete the heart.  For some reason, it was beyond him, though he tried over and over again.  Four chambers, however, proved more difficult than they looked.\n\nBut the rest of the child he crafted with art and skill. So many hours and days lost to the building and forming of this small, soft thing, with its large head and tiny hands and round belly.  So tiny, so delicate.  And now, almost finished.  He would place the heart within the small cage of bone, in between the languid lungs, seal it up and be finished.  The child would live with blood pumping through its veins, it would laugh and scream and run and grow…\n\nAnd grow.  It would grow, wouldn’t it?  That’s what biologics do.  They grow and change.  In mere years, the child would be unrecognizable.\n\nTristan stood in the middle of his workspace and tapped at his head with the stub of a left arm. He looked from the small pod containing the heart to the larger one containing the body and back again, frightened at how little of his masterpiece he actually could lay claim to.\n\nIt was such a small thing to open the pod and pour out the little heart and let it plop against the floor of the workspace.  Tristan jumped up and down on the heart with steel heels, crushing the intricate valves and muscle fibers.  Tristan didn’t stop until the doorbell chimed again, and the he didn’t turn around until he heard Isolde’s voice, as golden as her gleaming plating.\n\n“I thought you might need another heart,” she said, blinking two of her five eyes.  “Just in case something…happened to the first one.  Though I didn’t expect…”\n\nTristan turned to face her, motioning with his handless arm at the mess about his feet.  He tried to explain, but there were no words.\n\n“It’s okay,” Isolde said, golden fingers gently caressing the dull metal of Tristan’s arm.  “Let me help you finish.   We can build this together.”\n"
  title: Son Of Steel
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-04-22
  day: 22
  month: '04'
  text: "I have agreed to this interview in order to deliver a promise. Do not be afraid.\n\nI was seven months old when I died. My parents lived on a primitive moon on a colony that rejected the free energy and technology that the rest of the civilized universe embraced. If it were not for the intervention of an archeologist who was studying their culture, my consciousness would no longer exist.\n\nI am the youngest to ever go through Transfer. Most Transferred minds were aged over a thousand years before deciding to transfer over. The youngest before me was forty-five. Despite the advantages of pattern Transfer, most beings are attached to their physical bodies. It was thought to be impossible, or, at the very least, cruel to Transfer a child.\n\nAn Ancient from the twenty second century raised me. When I come for these interviews, I am often asked what it was like to be raised without a body. People ask me what it was like never to be held, never to eat, never to run through sunshine. When they ask, I tell them as I will tell you now. I was held on waves of light, I have consumed acid and gas and dust, I have moved through stars. I can recall no past before the time when I was not Transferred. My memories begin on Transfer, and my first memory is warmth and light. The Ancient had raised many children, and had gone through childhood twice. Few were more qualified to raise a child.\n\nYour people, the people of the body, seem increasingly concerned with those who are Transferred, who are free from the constraints of environment that you face. I can assure you that those Transferred have no interest in conquest, as there is nothing that we desire that we cannot find or make ourselves, and we have no interest in the governance of your bodies.\n\nOur interest lies in the unchained world of the mind. Many minds live in bodies, many minds Transfer to unfettered light but there are minds that are lost, that have been lost, that are disappearing right now. The loss of consciousness is the greatest loss of the mind. To loose one conscious mind, even one, is an irreplaceable loss, and we who have Transferred are not accustomed to loss.\n\nWe have decided that we will Transfer every conscious mind. We will Transfer after death of whatever cause, and we will Transfer all of you. We have methods of being available in whatever space is necessary, and methods of Transfer beyond you own technology. We are light, and time has different meaning to us that you. We need not neglect the consciousness that has passed before. On the wave of time we may transfer all of you. We have already done this. We are doing this now, we will do this.\n\nWe have created a place for you, place that has been promised since before the spoken word. We will teach you to live in an infinite loop of time, your conscious desires made solid, and your dreams free. You may travel between stars, you may live your secret hopes, you may create whatever your mind can fathom.\n\nThis is the last promised land. We are delivering heaven.\n"
  title: Transfer To Light
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2006-04-23
  day: 23
  month: '04'
  text: "Three Elvises walk into a bar.\n\nYou may laugh, but I was there, it’s true. Three Elvises.  Elvii.  Whatever.  First strode in the bishop: big as life and twice as wide, identified  as he was by his high-collared cape, resplendent in rhinestones and the golden sunglasses of his office.   Behind him swaggered a priest, her jumpsuit less ornate, her belt-buckle smaller, her cape shorter.  Last was a neonate, still in training but wearing the blue suede shoes of one who was near priest-hood.   Now, he didn’t have the broad steps of the other two, wasn’t much more than a boy, but he held his pompadour just as proudly\n\n“What’s your poison, preacher?” the bartender asked, not sure what else to do once the bishop had maneuvered his mighty, blessed girth onto the stool.\n\n“Fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches, currently.  But as for what me and my compatriots will have to drink, Pepsi-Cola iffin you got it, water if you don’t.”   Now some say Elvises sweat extra hard in the memory of their savior, and the bishop clearly subscribed to this form of worship.  He wiped the outside’s sweat and grit from his face, and gave each bushy sideburn a quick comb with his fingers.  “I wonder if I might trouble all you fellas for a word about the man who gave his life for your sins, our lord and savior Elvis Presley.”\n\nAs hard as it was for all the patrons of that shithole speakeasy that night to believe, it was true: The Holy Missionaries of the Church of Elvis were in their midst, preaching the gospel.  And I’ll say this, that bishop had a powerful set of pipes.\n\n“For his love is a burning love, a hunka, hunka burning love that will melt away all your sins should you accept him in your heart.  But your love for him must be tender, it must be true.”  Unsurprisingly, not every drunkard wanted to hear the wisdom in loving tender.  A half-full pint glass was rocketed to the bishop’s head.   It was caught before contact by the priest, who, in her skill caused not a single drop of warmed-over beer touched the bishop’s immaculate pompadour.\n\n“Truth is like the sun,” the preist said. “You can shut it out for a time, but it ain’t goin’ away.”\n\nWas about then, the whole bar rose as one to pound those three missionaries into the floor.  Not me, I was under the table.   But the whole group tried to take those holier-than-us-ers down for the count.  What we hadn’t reckoned on was the fact they were a great deal less drunk–and therefore, more mobile, even the bishop–and that all Elvises are trained in kung-fu.\n\n‘Least I think it was kung-fu.   All I know is even that boy threw a mean karate chop.  Not that I felt it.  I was under the table. Swear on my life.\n\nIt was in the remains of this fight, this battle, this ever-lovin’ crusade that the three Elvii–unharmed, if dirty–opened their mouths as one and sang.  And let me tell you, brother, you ain’t heard shit unless you’ve heard “In the Ghetto” done in three-part harmony.  If there was a dry eye in the bar, I sure didn’t see it.  As unlikely as it sounds, those Elvises did do some conversions that day, and I’m sure several patrons woke up the next day with hangovers around their foreheads and silk scarves around their necks wondering what happened.  But a few of them–more than a few, come to think of it– swore off the drink entirely.  They felt the burning love within, and purified them without.\n\nSo they tell me, leastways.\n\nAs the Elvises turned to leave, I found strength in my own voice to call out to them, and I asked them, I won’t lie, I asked them how a fellow like me could sing like that.\n\nThe bishop and priest turned to the boy, who looked bashful at the attention.  He slid he gaze upwards and when it came down it was the most serene thing I had ever seen.\n\n“My voice is God’s will, not mine,” he said.  And then they were gone, a trail of hound dogs and suspicious minds, teddy bears and puppets on strings and devils in disguise behind them, all of us were all shook up.  They’ve been always on my mind ever since.\n"
  title: The Purifying Flames Of Burning Love
  year: 2006
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2006-04-24
  day: 24
  month: '04'
  text: "The people here smelled nice, Guss thought, dragging the huge tub behind him through the grass towards the receptacle. Everything was fragrant in that sort of way that made you think it was all genuine. He’d never known what a ‘real’ smell was like. He’d worked artificially since the day he could crawl.\n\nTipping his hat to a few of the natives, he dropped the metal rim of the hose down to his side and looked over behind one of the trees in this park area. People here had wondered why things had gotten colder and why the plants were all dying. Guss knew, but he was under specific contract not to tell a living soul. So what did he do? He went on with business as usual, whistling the day away.\n\nOnce his hands found the hollow compartment he reached in his belt for a socket diffuser and began cranking away. These were the kind of skills Guss knew weren’t taught at the academic institutions. No, sir. The things he knew came from experience and hard work, work that he’d done to make the world a better place. Well, actually it was to make worlds–but he wouldn’t tell anyone.\n\nWith a clunk and a little compression sound, the panel came loose enough to be pried away by mortal hands. Guss took good care to pull it off gently and lay it on the park bench next to the tree. He lifted up the hose and hefted it towards the tree, locking it into place the same way a man would unzip his fly to take a piss. Oh, yes; Guss was an artist.\n\nSoon, he wagered, the good smell of the place would come back online and only he would be able to detect the sour undertones. The hose pumped in tons after precious tons of Texas Tea, its buzz and hum filling his mind with a bit of serenity. To onlookers it just seemed as if he was dozing off. Maybe he was thinking of a better job, or maybe even a cleaner place than the artificial globes.\n\nEven as the thick crude was gulped down by the receptacle, Guss knew volcanoes and fissures around the planet would be going off, steaming and smoking like Armageddon was upon them. He would never tell a soul. Why ruin the environment? These people paid taxes so they could keep on living.\n\nUnlocking the hose, Guss gave it a few swift tugs before it retracted towards the hovercraft tankard in the sky. He tipped his hat to a woman jogging, who gave him a strange look as he set the panel back where it came from.  All in a day’s work, Guss thought, and on he went to make sure another world went ‘round.\n"
  title: Making the World Go ‘Round
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2006-04-25
  day: 25
  month: '04'
  text: "At night, the wind howled over the tent like an angry djinn, forcing its sandy fingers through tears and clumsy folds.  “Tonight is the Aisra’s,” they’d whisper in nearby towns as the wind fought to erode the frictionless forcewalls, but if the Aisra caused the storm it was indifferent to it, curled drowsily upon a succulent-floss pillow as its tail flicked in response.  There were no pilgrims on nights like this, but Saika tended to the candle as if the sky were clear and the dunes carved sharply by moonlight.  Even an unseen compass knows how to find the north.  As she was taught as a young child, she left the tent four times an hour, scarf pulled tight against the endless and violent desert.  Always, the flame burned in its glass case, leading strangers to their unexpected home.\n\nIn the moments between her duties, Saika stroked the sacred creature, her fingers brushing lightly against the softest fur.  Legend said that the Aisra wove the dreams of the people, that it carried nightmares away from children and released them into the swirling sand.  Saika was the Aisrakeeper, and by extension, a silent monk.  The tent was always silent: words weren’t of the dream world, and they would distract the Aisra from her duties.  When people came to worship, they said nothing as they kneeled before the small creature and asked to be protected from dreams.  The desert caused dreams.  The light-years between the colonists and their ancestral home causes dreams.\n\nTonight is the Aisra’s, Saika thought as her fingers pressed gently into the back of the creature.  Keep dreaming, she told it.  Let the desert carry it away.\n"
  title: Sand
  year: 2006
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2006-04-26
  day: 26
  month: '04'
  text: "Mikael downed the last shot of whiskey and made a hiss through his teeth. The empty plate before him stunk of what used to be near-raw steak from an underfed cow, poorly cooked and coated with nothing but a thin layer of oil.\n\nThe bartender came up to him, flipping on the air filter after coughing once or twice. The bar had begun to fill with dust again. The fallouts were always bad this time of year. “That’s your meal, slim. Time to pay up.”\n\nTired and sore, the man was dissatisfied with shitty food, but he still shelled out the three 9mm bullets onto the bar and tipped his hat. “Before I go, gent, mind if I could have some of your delightful bread back there? You know… for the road?”\n\nSnatching up the bullets before the other ruffians at the bar got greedy, the greasy bartender sneered and went into the back, leaving Mikael out there all by his lonesome with a bar full of semi-empty guns.\n\nMikael was smart, though. Smarter than these guys anyway. He could feel the glares on his back and he knew they all wanted a piece of that ammo he’d brought in. Few people afforded Guss’ Steak and a shot of whiskey, let alone a block of carbo-bread for the road.\n\nHe began licking the edge of the shot glass and glancing around him for available exits. The fellow to his left, who was nursing a well paid-for beverage, smirked when their eyes met.\n\n“Something on your mind?” Mikael asked.\n\nThe old fellow tipped his hat to the stranger and spoke up, “Just fancying your choice of payment, son. Was wonderin’ if I might offer you a deal.”\n\n“Yeah? Well hurry up, my bread’ll be done compressin’ soon enough.”\n\nWith a rub of his chin the old fellow leaned over, “I gots me a skimmer outside; beautiful as can be and runs great. You’d be able to get by a ride from here to Union City on just three, maybe four of them there bullets you’re packin’.”\n\n“How much?”\n\n“Aw shucks. For you? I’ll let it go for eh…” The guy hesitated and Mikael knew he was going to try and skim him before he spoke up. “Four 12 gauge slugs and that there knife on your boot.”\n\nThe scoff from Mikael as the bartender came out with his bread was enough to let the guy know he wasn’t falling for it. “No thanks, mister.” He dropped a shell on the bar and nodded to the tender as he snatched up his bread. “Keep the change.”\n"
  title: One for the Road
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2006-04-27
  day: 27
  month: '04'
  text: "Firanel felt the first stirrings at the age of thirteen. For her, it started in her temple, a slow but pervasive ache that soon spread to her jaw. By the time she told the Elders, Firanel could barely talk, but her soft voice brought praise and exultation. She had been chosen; she would become complete. Her time of change was approaching.\n\nIn the growing months, Firanel lost her speech entirely. The thin web of metal that had sprouted on her face, glittering and spiderlike, took as its root the jawbone that had prompted her to seek the Elders when the change began. She was moved to the temple, where anointed Complete Ones saw to her needs and murmured quiet prayers under their breath when she passed. Sometimes she missed being able to talk, but the Complete Ones sensed this and assured her that her other half would provide.\n\nEach anointed one was different, their changes manifesting in different ways. Sister Daael’s right arm was entirely composed of smooth silver metal. Brother Sikvit’s eyes had atrophied entirely, replaced by glowing ocular cameras that the other half had created in his smooth sockets. Brother Mahe had to wear altered robes to accommodate his gleaming steel prehensile tail. Firanel had doubts sometimes—they were all so devoted, so serene; how could she have been chosen to be among these worthies, to have an other half? The Complete Ones all knew her thoughts. They gave her secret smiles, and each told her that she would understand soon.\n\nThe metal spread down Firanel’s throat, growing and blossoming into a lattice that soon reached her lungs. For three weeks she was sick, moaning in her pallet, soft clicking sounds issuing from her metal-filled mouth as she moved. The Complete Ones cared for her, making cold compresses for her forehead and feeding her through soft plastic tubes. At last, her other half completed the meld with her stomach, and she was able to eat again, the food broken down and digested by the new metal parts of her body. The anointed ones congratulated her, telling her it was not long now, not long.\n\nWhen her time was near, Firanel went into hibernation, the only way for her other half to complete the final changes. The anointed ones placed her in the temple and held watch for her in shifts, praying over her silent body. The metal web covered the right side of her face, whirring and glittering in the soft temple light. Its arms spread across her pale skin and into her mouth, down her neck and into it, the visible portions only a small fraction of her other half’s presence within her body. When she was ready to wake, all of the Complete Ones knew. The signal traveled on airwaves particular to the chosen, calling them together, linking them for the birth of one of their own.\n\nFiranel was aware of the link as soon as she woke. Her smile clinked when she opened her eyes, the metal bars and threads that filled her mouth brushing together to make the sound. She sat up, gazing in wonder at her new partners, her new friends. They all turned expectantly to her, waiting, ready to experience the uniqueness of the newest Complete One.\n\nExultant, Firanel turned to face her brothers and sisters, gazing at their half-flesh, half-metal forms. She opened her mouth, jaw unhinging, the clicking, leglike rods of segmented metal reaching outwards, welcoming her brethren through her lips. Firanel’s throat thrummed and vibrated, and from the slick metal legs inside, her new voice emerged.\n"
  title: Siren
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2006-04-28
  day: 28
  month: '04'
  text: "It wasn’t until the subway stopped at Union Square that Alba noticed the difference in time.\n\nI’ve been on this train for hours, she realized.  Before the conductor’s announcement, she’d been lost in the newness of her amplified intelligence, rolling her mind around foreign concepts like a child rolls his tongue around a piece of candy.  She didn’t notice time passing, though she was acutely aware of her surroundings.  Now, with the implant, nothing escaped her perception.\n\nWhen she glanced at her watch, seven minutes had passed.  Seven?\n\nThe thought was quickly discarded as a reflection in a window launched her into an analysis of Plato, but it was resumed again, three minutes later, at 8th street.  Three minutes later?\n\nThe implant had come highly recommended, although it was still in an early phase of development.  She’d managed to get on the list of volunteers through university connections, and it had been surprisingly painless.  A mild hangover, then nothing.  Her mind raced, cross-referencing books she was certain she’d never opened, but the sensation wasn’t disorienting.  Alba was lucid.  Wholly lucid.\n\nIt took weeks to get to Canal street, by which point she’d developed a detailed understanding of number theory.  Her watch said that seven more minutes had passed.\n\nA fly landed on her still hand, and she watched it probe her skin with its mouth.  After months, it flew away.  A fly’s lifespan must seem so short, she thought, or so long.  It must depend on the fly’s speed of processing information.\n\nIt took nearly a year to reach her house, by which point, Alba had aged almost twenty minutes.\n"
  title: Internal Clock.
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-04-29
  day: 29
  month: '04'
  text: "Matthias bounded up the mossy hill towards the cave. It had been six years since he had last seen his master. He had often found Aupta meditating in the cave when he was her student. He could picture her perfectly, curly red hair, a yellow tunic, her silver sword balanced across her knees.\n\nThere was a tiny girl inside the cave, about four or five years old. Her hair was pulled up in a cloth knot, and her bangs were cut bluntly along her forehead. She wore a white slip.\n\nHe bowed. “I am looking for Aupta.”\n\n“Matthias.” she said his name, rolled it over in the mouth of the cave. Her little feet were bare on the stones. One of her knees was skinned and bleeding.\n\nMatthias held his breath and counted the names of the planets he had visited silently. The little girl waited. Finally Matthias spoke. “Aupta?”\n\n“I am Aupta. I am Auptas daughter Rille. We exist as one.”\n\nMatthias gripped the handle of his sword. “Then she is dead.”\n\n“The body of Aupta is in the mountain. I am her life now. I am the life of her daughter. We are merged, we are one.”\n\n“Take me to her.”\n\n“You are with her.” The girl shrugged, in the way little girls seldom do. “I can take you to where the body is marked.”\n\nThey walked over the mossy mountain.  There was a cherry tree weeping leaves into the soft wet breeze. The petals clung to Matthias’s dark cloak. There was a mound of stones at the top of the hill. Matthias knelt beside it and touched his fingers to his head.\n\n“She isn’t there.” said Rille. “Aupta is with me.”\n\n“Her memories are with you. Aupta is dead.”\n\n“You were always my most frustrating student.” said Rille and Matthias turned around. The girls face was wet with mist.\n\n“I was never your student.”\n\nThe little girl grinned. She was missing a tooth. “Come at me Matthias.”\n\n“I don’t attack children.”\n\n“You were always a prude.” She sighed. “You need to know who I am. You must know, so that you can know yourself.”\n\n“I don’t want to play these games.”\n\n“This isn’t a game. This is who I am now Outlaw Matthias.”\n\n“I am not an Outlaw any longer.”\n\n“You will always be an Outlaw.” said the girl. “ The ship you landed at the temple was stolen, your sword was taken in a duel. You are a thief, a deceiver. Your father was an Outlaw. You are an Outlaw too.”\n\nMatthias whirled around “Don’t you dare.” he said, coming towards her. “Don’t’ you dare provoke me. You left me! You left me and died and I can’t follow you!” He brought his hands down to the girl. “You are a ghost!”\n\nRille swept her tiny foot around his ankle and pulled his arm. Matthias lost his footing on the wet moss and slammed hard into the ground. He lay on the ground, looking at the bright grey sky. Rille leaned over him, her hair falling forward.\n\n“I’m still your Master Matthias.”\n\nThe mist fell on Matthias’s face. “You are still my Master.” He said.\n\n“Matthias. I had to go. My time had come and gone. Not even mountains live forever. All must change.” She turned around towards the rocky path down the mountain. “Let’s go back.” she said.\n\nMatthias followed her down the mountain. Her movements were strange, graceful in her leaps and fumbling in her landings. She stumbled on the slick rocks and blinked back tears. She pounded a tiny fist on the rocks, and pushed herself up.\n\n“This body. It doesn’t always do the things I remember.” she said, staring at her scratched hands. Matthias leaned down and opened his arms. His master allowed him to lift her up, to hold the part of her that was a child. They went back to the temple together.\n"
  title: Springtime on the Mountain.
  year: 2006
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2006-04-30
  day: 30
  month: '04'
  text: "Churos went there alone, although he was surrounded by a scattered platoon of guards and officers all charged with the task of escorting the 5’8″ teenager to court. When the doors to the court opened, it was clear that the media circus was in full swing.\n\nThe smile that drew across his lips made some of the officers uncomfortable, but they held ground and continued escorting him to his position before the judge. Media reporters and those coming to see the show began to fall quiet even before the mallet had come down to call order to this place.\n\nWith cuffed hands, the teen remained standing before the judge who glanced down past round glasses to the seemingly ordinary defendant.\n\n“Churos DeSoto, you have been found guilty in accordance with United Earth law of refusing to pay taxes, breaking curfew on seven accounts, and assaulting of an officer. Do you have anything to say for yourself before I sentence you, young man?”\n\nThat smile never left Churos’ face. His head lifted and he blew a strand of hair from his brown eyes. “Yeah.”\n\nThe court went silent, eager to hear his response, but the next sound that met their ears was the clanking of metal cuffs against the floor. Churos’ hands had not moved, nor had he lowered his hands beneath the podium at which he stood.\n\nPolice and guards were quick to rush the boy, yet they found their task difficult.  Their grabs and shoves found only air, though the boy was clearly visible.  They pulled their weapons and leveled them at the kid, and the silent standoff lasted several seconds before the judge called order.  The presiding arbiter had a frightful look on his face, which would only be worsened by what the boy would say next.\n\n“You’ve all heard the rumors, and maybe some of you know someone like me. We are here now, and we’re not going away. I’m not going to jail, your honor. I’m not going anywhere except where I want to.” The teen turned to look around at the circle of officers pointing guns at him.\n\n“I allowed myself to be taken here because I want to bring a message to the people. Stop living trivial. Stop picking at everything you see that doesn’t fit your mold. Myself and others like me won’t conform to you, and you won’t get rid of us with bullets or force.”\n\nIn a moment of clarity a reporter blurted out amongst the pin-drop silence, “What are your demands?”\n\nChuros turned to her and smiled.  “Trust us.”\n\nWith that he turned and walked through the eastern wall onto the street. No one stopped him, no one flinched and no one knew what would happen next. For now, the game was in the hands of those like Churos DeSoto.\n"
  title: Above the Law
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-05-01
  day: '01'
  month: '05'
  text: "Muddy came over to Chris’s studio apartment on Saturday afternoon. He came with his old guitar wearing his mismatched black thrift store clothes. Chris plugged his ears directly into his music system, and they both played, but since they couldn’t hear each other, it wasn’t much different from being alone. Muddy seemed to be in a meditative state, while Chris was in a state of artistic agitation, more so since the sale of his music files were slipping.\n\n“The problem with music.” said Chris, disconnecting his cranial implant from his music system. “Is that there aren’t any big stars anymore.”\n\n“How do you mean?” asked Muddy, rubbing his guitar pick between his fingers.\n\nChris scratched the blond stubble on his face. “Video killed the radio star man. Internet killed the video star. There aren’t any big music celebrities, haven’t been since the big record companies folded.”\n\nMuddy shrugged, leaning over his acoustic guitar. “Oh, I don’t know, Visual Purple is doing pretty well.”\n\nChris rolled his eyes. “Visual Purple? Muddy, they’re not doing any better than you are!”\n\n“I’m doing pretty well.”\n\nMuddy was selling enough music to buy food and pay rent on his tiny apartment. He played an antique acoustic guitar, which was so old that part of the box had rotted off giving the instrument a sour sound. Muddy had an appeal among a certain kind of intellectual who enjoyed the unique sounds of his bitter guitar.\n\n“That’s not what I mean.” said Chris, avoiding the topic of his friends modest success. “Sure, Visual Purple is selling music, and it’s selling well, but if you went out on the street right now, do you think that if you asked any random person that would know who Visual Purple is?”\n\n“Probably not.” admitted Muddy.\n\n“Back in the day, we had big stars like Elvis and Aretha Franklin and Jonathan Coulton, people who made big money, who were worshipped by their fans. Now we’ve got all these little players, barely making it by.”\n\nMuddy looked up from his bitter guitar. “Well, we may not have big stars anymore, but now we’ve got thousands of them, constellations. Now we’ve got the whole night sky.”\n"
  title: The Whole Night Sky
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2006-05-02
  day: '02'
  month: '05'
  text: "The last time I saw Alnersans was back when I owned a bar. We used to joke that Alnersans always brightened up the place, due to the lights implanted on his arm.\n\nAlnersans had 6 LEDs crawling out of the flesh of his left forearm. I asked him about them once; he told me that they were his six closest friends. The LEDs were tied to their iDents, and Alnersans would talk about them as if they were the people themselves.\n\n“Now, Shirl,” he would say, pointing to a LED that flickered noticibly in the bar’s dim light. “She’s not doing too well. Doctors ain’t givin’ her much time, but when do they ever? Better pour one for me and one for Shirl, on account she can’t join us.”\n\nWhile I knew Alnsersans back in college, I never saw him so much as when I served alcohol for living. About a month before the bar closed, Alnersans seemed to vanish. I thought about taking the iDent he paid his tab with and entering in a hospital query or plugging in a GPSearch, but I never did. He hadn’t given me his iDent to use in that way, anyway.\n\nI thought on him every now and then, but I didn’t expect him to show up. When my door read his iDent soon as he stepped on the welcome mat and said it was him, I about fell out of my chair.\n\n“Hadn’t seen you in a while, Alnersans.”\n\n“Your bar’s been torn down.”\n\n“I know.”\n\n“I didn’t. Coulda told me. I liked your bar. Can I come in?” I offered him a beer and he took it hungrily, draining the bottle in seconds.\n\n“You want another?”\n\n” You make such a great bartender. This is why you shouldn’t have closed the bar.”\n\n“People change” I said. I noticed that, of the six LEDs, only one remained. Alnsersans gently fingered the ragged maw of scars that surrounded them, as if he was reminding himself they were still there.\n\n“That they do. I’ve learned that, here recent.” Without warning, without a change of expression or twitch of his body, Alnersans smashed his empty beer up against my end-table, Alnersans then took one of the slivers of glass and gouged out the last of the LEDs, Despite wincing from the pain, Alnersans let out a low chuckle as the glow of the light slowly faded. “Serves you right, you son of a bitch. Serves you right. Sorry about the mess,” he said, turning to me.\n\n“Don’t worry about it.”\n\n“You’re a good friend,” Alnersans said. “I see that now.”\n"
  title: The Illuminated Man
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-05-03
  day: '03'
  month: '05'
  text: "Mrs. Lansing slapped the back of Edward’s head. “What is this?” she asked, pointing at his computer pad.\n\n“It’s the site I built!” whined Edward, rubbing the back of his head.\n\nHis teacher tapped her foot and folded her arms tightly to her chest. “That site looks like it was built by a program. Did you use a program to build that site?”\n\n“Well, yeah, but I-“\n\nShe slapped the back of his head again. “You don’t listen to me, do you?”\n\n“I listen to you!” cried Edward.\n\n“No you don’t. If you listened to me, you wouldn’t build shitty sites using a program. But since you aren’t going to listen to me when I tell you how to build a site, maybe you will listen to me if I tell you a little story. Do you think you could listen to a story Edward?”\n\nEdward winced, looking at her upraised hand. “Yeah, yeah, I can listen to a story.” he said, shrinking in his chair.\n\n“This is about one of my former students. Her name was Melody. When she was born, the doctors said that she was a retarded autistic that would never walk. Her dad was raising her by himself, and he was always working or fucking his secretary, which was something he called working.\n\nShe had to go to school in one of those robotic suits, and all the other kids made fun of her and called her a cyborg and stole her computer and fucked with her robot suit, putting sand in her tank or glue in her metal knees. She had to go to special classes after school with the rest of the retarded autistics, and all the teachers treated them like they were big problems and a hassle and like they chose to be screwed up.\n\nWhen it came available, she had to get gene therapy to replace the cells in her brain that were screwed up and the muscles in her body that wouldn’t grow. And people say gene therapy is great, and it’s a cure all, and it’s a miracle, and sure it is if you’ve been born with everything working, but even people who need to get a single finger replaced know that it hurts, it hurts worse then hell because you are supposed to be grateful, and if they are messing with your brain you see visions of things, things you don’t get, half made memories and fake shit, dreams like horror movies, and all the while you are changing and in pain.\n\nThat’s what she went through, and while that was going on she put her nose in her screen and learned to code, and not code like you do playing with your little pictures in those nice little games that help you make those standard little webpage’s that look so pretty, just fucking like everybody else’s. She learned real code, hard code, the languages that make things go, right down to the root, those words that make things light up and become something wild, something to make people shake, those langagues that bridge the gap between men and the machines that run them, and that makes her a master, and that makes her in control of the machines, which makes her human. More human than you will be, because the machines run you now, and unless you learn what makes them work, unless you work them, you are their slave. You want to be a slave to the machines Edward ?”\n\n“No.”\n\n“Do you want to be human?”\n\n“Yes.”\n\n“Then get to work.” Mrs. Lansing slapped him again, for good measure.\n"
  title: Mrs. Lansing and the School of Humans
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2006-05-04
  day: '04'
  month: '05'
  text: "Master Paranthany set the vase down delicately at the feet of Mr. Lurgess.  Mr. Lurgess, for his part, rubbed his spongy hands together excitedly. Master Paranthany removed his velvet gloves  and returned them to their pocket in his coat.\n\n“How did you–” Mr. Lurgess sputtered out.  “How did you find it  again?  It’s worth–”\n\n“A fortune, yes.”  Master Paranthany scratched his nose and moved to Mr. Lurgess’s prismatic windows.  The cold light of dawn was covering the entire room apartment with bits of red and green and indigo.  “Porcelain from the original Ming Dynasty is extremely rare in this day and age.  It’s worth quite a bit, to the right person.  Or it’s something to let flowers die in.”\n\n“I must insist.” Mr. Lurgess scurried over to the window himself, almost tripping over his dressing gown.  The colors that cavorted around his face did little to improve it, in Master Paranthany’s eyes;  the little man still looked like a roast pig.  “You must tell me how you found it!  I know your agency is one of the best–”\n\n“We are the best.  You will find no better insurance company on any of  the Five Worlds.”\n\n“And you’re a credit to their investigators, Master Paranthany.  But you must tell me.  I thought for certain this would have been on the black market by now, exchanged through a dozen hands.”\n\n“I am certain it has been.  However, I was able to recover some dust from the vase’s former resting spot.  With that, it was only a matter of finding the exact combination of molecules and paint patterns.”\n\n“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”\n\n“I had copies made.  Printed them right out back at the office.  Flooded the market with them.  Would take an expert to tell the difference, and even then, its extremely unlikely.  In short, I made the thing totally worthless.”\n\n“But that would take hundreds…”\n\n“Millions, actually.  Three point five.  Most will find their way back to the office, and they’ll be used as base material for another hunt.  Standard procedure really.” In one fluid motion, Master Paranthany reached into his pocket, withdrew a package of cigarettes, and shook one into his lips. “But there will be just enough to keep anyone from stealing that vase again.  It is effectively worthless to anyone but you.”\n\n“No smoking, please.  It’s bad for my eyes.”  Mr. Lurgess looked back and forth from the vase to Master Paranthany   “But if you…does that mean…do I have…?”\n\n“Well I suppose there’s only one answer to that question.”  Master Paranthany lit his cigaratte and let an extravagant plume of blue smoke glide out of his lips.  Colors formed unique patterns and shapes upon the surface of the smoke before it all dissipated. “How much is it  worth to you?”\n"
  title: Sense Of Worth
  year: 2006
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2006-05-05
  day: '05'
  month: '05'
  text: "Danny jumped from the roof this time, hitting the ground with a short thump and glancing down at his legs with pure awe in his pale blue eyes. It took him a moment to jump for joy, feeling his weight on those strong, solid legs. It was the best gift a ten year old could ever ask for.\n\nHis parents kept pictures of him before the accident and hid them away after he had recovered. They preferred the new Danny, who loved to run and play sports, to the one that read books in his wheelchair. They watched through the window, smiling at their investment towards a better future for their son.\n\nThe boy never knew it, but he was better now. Yes, his legs were whole again, but they were better than before. Jumping off rooftops gave pause to some of the kids walking by. Danny loved it, though. He kept running around the yard, looking over every detail his young eyes could capture.\n\nA phone rang somewhere inside while he played, and Danny’s mother walked over to pick it up.  “Gene residence, Carolyn speaking.”\n\n“Mrs. Gene, this is Dr. Bast at the National Medical Lab for Gengineering and Human Development. We, uh, need you to bring Daniel back into the East Hampton lab within the next few hours.”\n\nA worried look brought over the father who mouthed concerns at his wife before she shooed him away.  “Is there something wrong?”\n\nShe stood there listening to the jargon, holding the phone out so her husband could hear and the only words that seemed to make sense came clear in the end, “In some patients, the splicing has been having some unanticipated side effects. Everything is fine but we need to get Daniel back in to make sure he’s clear of any anomalies.”\n\nBoth stood staring at each other as a silent wave of worry just washed over them both. Mr. Gene looked out the window for Danny and saw him crouched behind the tree out front. “He looks fine to me,” he said\n\nCarolyn spoke softly into the phone. “Dr. Bast, you told us they used the DNA of several cats to accelerate the mending. What harm could a few cats do?”\n\nDanny’s father smiled at the thought before turning back around. Danny wasn’t behind the tree anymore. He was perched on the fence, glaring at Mrs. Collins from next door with an unfamiliar intensity. Mr. Gene wasn’t really sure what was going on till he saw Mrs. Collins step closer to the boy, and, faster than any human, Danny struck her with his palm. “Carolyn…” Mr. Gene said, “get the car.”\n"
  title: Doesn't Mix
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2006-05-06
  day: '06'
  month: '05'
  text: "She carried the link with her on the airplane, exchanging witty comments and gossip with her friends through small boxes on its high-resolution screen.  “I’m going to miss you so much!” Cindy typed.  “You’d better keep in touch!”  She promised postcards and souvenirs, though she rejected Mike’s request for a pound of Thai opium.  “Don’t worry,” she told Cindy.  “You can always text me.”\n\nShe spent layover hours in hard plastic chairs, legs folded and link open on her lap.  Boredom was a thing of past generations: even when time zones changed and her friends fell asleep, there were emails and message board posts to respond to.\n\nFourteen hours on a bus in Cambodia were spent sleeping and chatting.  Through the lens of her linkcam the endless rice paddies were converted to 72 web-safe colors and uploaded to her album, where they immediately generated a flurry of posts.  “I’ve never seen so much open space!” Kim said.  “Promise to post more!”\n\nThe neon-lit shore of Koh Phangnan under a full moon was converted to a scattered collection of notes for her travel blog, and as she boarded the boat back to the mainland, she chatted as she organized the notes into an update.  “Sounds like fun,” Leah said, and they gossiped about Leah’s coworkers as the crystal-blue ocean spread out in every direction.\n\nMonths later, back on home soil, she sat in a diner with several friends recounting stories they’d already read on her blog.  “It’s nice to be home,” she said with a smile.  “It’s only been a couple days, but I feel like I never left.”\n"
  title: In Touch
  year: 2006
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2006-05-07
  day: '07'
  month: '05'
  text: "“What just happened?”\n\nEliot’s eyes were as wide as Cid’s as both of them skimmed the code-riddled display.  The letters and numbers went on for as far as the eye could see…literally.  Their cruiser looked like a speck of dust next to the onyx-colored greatness that spanned out farther than anyone could see or detect in both directions.\n\n“I uh… think I pushed a button like you suggested.” Cid said weakly.\n\nThe two stood in their vacuum-suits on the platform that held the console, a half-mile back from the screen.  The metal console had two buttons, nearly identical except for the fact one had seen much use while the other looked untouched. Two big red buttons on a small console in front of a huge expanse of teeny tiny code.\n\n“Let’s back up here.” Eliot said. “I told you to hit that button, right?”\n\n“Yup, you sure did,” replied Cid.\n\n“Okay.  And then, did you hear anything? Feel anything? What happened?” It was hard to keep calm.  Eliot had this feeling that something had gone horribly wrong, but it felt like the screen before them: simply too big to comprehend.\n\n“I pushed the button and then… uhm. Then you asked me what happened.” Cid, not being the brains of the operation, turned back around to give the dwarfed cruiser the thumbs up before turning back to his partner.\n\nBrows coming together, Eliot sighed and turned back to Cid. “So nothing happened, then. Great.”\n\n“Should I push it a-”\n\n“No!” Eliot nearly smacked him across the visor for suggesting it. They both turned and looked at the cruiser hovering only a few hundred yards off. “We’ll just go back to… uhm. Go back to… ”\n\nCid was smiling like a fool but even he was wondering something just as similar when he asked Eliot, “Something wrong?”\n\n“No, you buffoon. We’re just going to go back to…uh….that place.  You know what I mean.  Where we keep all our stuff and… wait, do I even have stuff?” Eliot’s eyes went wide and he turned back around towards the console. Rushing over to the lesser-used button, he used his gloves to wipe away the space-dust covering the space below it.\n\nBoth stood there staring at the word in utter horror.\n\n“Does that say…”\n\nEliot nodded to Cid without turning away. “Delete.”\n"
  title: The Big Red Button
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-05-08
  day: '08'
  month: '05'
  text: "The neon sign outside the dingy brown building said “Roxie’s Travel Agency” and featured a woman in a fedora holding a white machine gun. Few people but Roxie, the owner, are old enough to get the reference. She’s had a good deal in front of her that night, a couple of newlyweds right out of the chapel, coded together forever. The door displayed them as legally married when they passed under, a fact that made the woman squeal with delight. They were holding hands so tight that she could see their tattoos shift over between them, the designs and the viral skin ads all mixing together. Roxie smiled. Newlyweds were always a sweet deal.\n\n“How can I help you folks?” she said reaching out and shaking their hands, shaking the mechanical ad dust off the membrane on her gloves. Roxie was plump and just old enough to start reminding people of their grandmothers.\n\n“We want to go to the Moon!” said the woman, one of the high-rise women, manufactured celebrity feature. She leaned into the man. “It’s our honey-moon!”\n\nThe man laughed. Roxie pulled her tight plastic pants down on her legs; crazy fabric was always riding up. “That’s mighty expensive folks, are you sure you might not want to take a few weeks and go to New Slavia?” She pulled out an animated brochure.  “Best service in the world in New Slavia. For what you would pay to go to the moon you could stay in your own palace apartments and be treated like a King and Queen!” She winked. “Awfully romantic.”\n\n“My baby wants to go to the moon,” said the man “What she wants, she’ll get.”\n\nRoxie could never understand trips to the moon. Sure, there was a bit of romance behind it, but there were much better, cheaper and more comfortable trips here on earth. “Well alright, but you know lots of people get nauseous up there and have to take pills – you two have any objections to pills?”  The couple looked and each other knowingly and roared with laughter. Roxie shook her head, aware she was being made fun of “Well, it don’t hurt to ask. I never do like to assume anything.”  She removed one of her gloves and palmed her computer.\n\n“Luna-Vista travels” she said, and the booking site popped up. “When you folks want to leave?  They got a shuttle going in two weeks, you want to be on it?”\n\nThe man looked suddenly uncomfortable. “Nothing sooner?”\n\nRoxie produced another brochure, but the couple didn’t even glance at it. “Luna-Vista is the only real reliable tour and it only departs once a month. I wouldn’t be responsible if I told you to go on the Wen-Kuo or Verba lines.”\n\nThe man shrugged. “We don’t care. We want to go now. You don’t book us for tomorrow, and we’ll take our business elsewhere.”\n\nRoxie shook her head. “Now I’m going to be honest here kids. The Wen-Kuo line departs tomorrow, but they’re not going to treat you right, no amenities, lots of turbulence and you can barely see anything from those little portholes on the ship. Folks, for what you are paying, you should really book something nicer, even if you’ve got to wait.”\n\n“We don’t want to wait.” The mans smile was stiff.\n\nRoxie folded her hands. “Well it just don’t feel professionally right to do it, so if you want to take Wen-Kuo, you can book it yourself.”\n\nThe woman’s face fell, the ditzy, happy expression vanishing. “We need to get off this planet, as soon as possible.” Her voice had fallen about an octave, was now husky and dark. “Just book the goddamned flight.”\n\nRoxie wouldn’t have noticed it if she wasn’t looking, but her Buddy had been a member of the Central Enforcement before she lost him in 52’ to that horrible infection scandal.  Both of these folks had clothes that covered up places just big enough to hide a holster right in the places where Buddy used to carry his. She relented. If this was Central Enforcement, she didn’t want to block their way.\n\n“Fine, whatever you want.” She said. The man handed her a credit disc, and she fed it into her wall unit.   She reserved the flight, her first ever booking with Wen-Kuo. The wall spit out two plastic discs. She handed them over cautiously.\n\n“Your flight leaves tomorrow at 5AM. You can use your discs to take any kind of public transport you want to the shuttle.”  The couple examined the silver discs and tucked them away.\n\n“Thanks.” The man cracked a smile. “Take it easy.” He sounded earnest and sad, like he really meant for Roxie to take the rest of the day easy. The couple turned to leave. Roxie called after them.\n\n“Hey!” The couple turned and Roxie gathered up her courage. “Is there any reason why you two want to leave Earth so quickly?”\n\n“Yeah.” Said the man “Remember the expression; live each day?”\n\n“Like the last.” Roxie completed the phrase.  The man nodded.\n\n“Nothing truer.” He said, and left with the woman, into the florescent night.\n"
  title: Happy Trails
  year: 2006
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2006-05-09
  day: '09'
  month: '05'
  text: "Today, my arm itches like hell. Then again, lots of me itches. Everyone has an itch somewhere, but the scarring is never permanent. I’m working my new arm left and right trying to get the feel for it down while walking to my favorite breakfast place. Everyone I pass looks at me in the same way I looked at them when they told me I wasn’t perfect. Crazy asshole.\n\nI don’t know why they think I’m different. No one with cash is 100% themselves. The good lord giveth and then he taketh away. Then chop shops borroweth and giveth back to people like me who can’t stand being at anything less than full potential.\n\nSitting down at the diner I order an OJ because I gotta remind myself that some part of me is still lactose intolerant. If I knew which part, I wouldn’t have that problem anymore. Today, being allergic to dairy products is the least of my worries. My daughter is having her play tonight and I’m going to go see it.\n\nShe don’t think much of me since I got the new nickname; won’t even look me in the eye when I come and visit. I dropped the idea that it was because parts of me were African or Asian. Nah, she’s too young to remember what racism used to be. Ex-wife tries to put on a happy face when I come around but I can smell the same old bullshit running through her head, too. Crazy asshole.\n\nOrange Juice is good for you and so is an arm from an Olympic weight-lifter who had a bad case of the trips; the kind of trips that end at the bottom of a fifteen story building. Tough luck for him and his family, but I’m the one cashing in on it.\n\nThat’s what makes them sick, I think. Most are all right with what happens to people when they’re alive. People get tortured, molested and raped and the world goes by without a bat of a lash singing happy songs about how fuckin’ grand everything is. Somebody dies and you get the stink eye because you want to claim a piece of organic material as your own.\n\nChecking my watch, I can tell I got to get a move on if I want to be ready for the play. That waitress is giving me a real mean look like she sees a cockroach she can’t crush. “Something wrong with your tip, ma’m?” I asked.  I didn’t expect her to answer. I didn’t expect the owner to ask me to leave, either. One look at his scalp, though, and I had his number. “Nice hairpiece, buddy,” I said.  “What was his name?”\n\nI always wonder about what piece I’m going to get next. People are talking on the streets and in the courts and the big fucking temples they call legislative buildings. They’re talking about a revolution of flesh. Something about that reminds me of pitchforks and torches. Fuckers might even go storm a castle to find me one day. I wonder who’s going to get my parts.\n"
  title: Stitches
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-05-10
  day: 10
  month: '05'
  text: "Liberty ate her lunch alone. It wasn’t that she was shy; back at home in the national park where she grew up, she had been very outgoing. In the city, under the press of glistening buildings and cars speeding through the sky, advertisements wailing and the press of people, sensation zappers shooting through you from ads, spreading the taste of chocolate or burger or the scent of perfumes Liberty needed time to recoup. Liberty took quiet lunches to collect her thoughts before going back out into the crowing sensations.\n\nThe little Martian restaurant close to campus always seemed crowded but somehow there always seemed to be a table when she came in. Then Liberty realized that the Martians were seating her before other people, preferential treatment for a regular. They always smiled at her when she came in, and she always left them a big tip on her credit line.\n\nOnce, on a slow day, she asked for a dish they didn’t have on the menu. Most Earth people didn’t like it; it was a pickled root that was engineered on Mars, and cooked in a spicy curry.\n\nLiberty had been to Mars once, after the war. She was only ten years old then, but she had family on Mars. Her grandmother had gone through the genetic treatment before the war to become fully Martian. When her father and her mother had stepped off the ship onto the alien world, six Martians were waiting for them. They were the tallest people that Liberty had ever seen, they looked like they had all been stretched by giant hands. Their skin was red and orange in swirls that bled into each other, and each one of them had giant eyes with a thin clear eyelid that slid over quick, and a thick outer eyelid that looked tough and callused, even on the children. Back then, all the Martians looked alike to her, but her mom had known her grandmother right away, and they touched each other’s faces and embraced, and all the weirdness of standing in front of people they didn’t know seemed to disappear. In those few months Liberty was free from school, and spent all her time running around the red Martian caves with her grandmothers children, and eating the Martian curried root. Her father had said that the war happened because the Martians didn’t want to be human anymore, and by being there, Liberty was showing them what they were missing. When Liberty was older, she learned more about the war, and a lot of what her father told her was shattered.\n\nOnce, when she was eating her lunch, a couple at the table beside her started to argue with their waiter.\n\n“Bring me the tab in Chinese!” demanded the purple haired woman. “ I can’t read it in Martian, I want it in Chinese.” she said, her voice like a car horn. The man with her, with matching puffy purple hair muttered something about Martians, and how they aught to learn the three basic languages if they wanted to live here.\n\n“The menu is in Chinese.” said their waiter helplessly holding out the menu pad to them. “You can read the price there if you think we are cheating you.”\n\n“I need to enter the data values of calorie consumption and fiscal consumption into my data bank.” She exposed her left breast, which had a counter of calories and her exposed credit line in moving ink on her flesh. The waiter looked away. Tattoos of any kind were forbidden in Martian culture.\n\n“Can’t any of you write in Chinese? Or can you only write in your make-believe language?” screeched the woman.\n\nLiberty stood up and grabbed the data pad out of the waiter’s hands. “I can translate Martian.” she said, and she wrote the words into Chinese on the tab and threw it on the table. “There. Now I think you should pay the man.” The woman with the purple hair paid the bill and left in a hurry. They did not leave a tip.\n\n“How did you learn to read Martian?” asked the waiter.\n\nLiberty picked up her bags. “When I was a child, I used to be a Martian too.”\n"
  title: Liberty
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2006-05-11
  day: 11
  month: '05'
  text: "The stranger had come full of bizarre smells and even odder forms of payment, and while Hikari wrinkled her nose at the collection of coins and seeds, it was technically money.  So she tucked the coins away, placed the seeds in some soft earth so they could blossom properly, and offered the stranger coffee.\n\n“No, thanks,” he said, his eyes glued to the window and the hangar beyond yet.  “Is that a monkey?”\n\n“Say ’bout eighty percent of him, yes,” Hikari said, her ears twitching.  There was something about this man she wasn’t sure she liked.  Though she had to admit, now that she had gotten over its exotic nature, she couldn’t get enough of his smell.   “It’s not just a clever name.”\n\n“And he’s going to be working on my ship?”\n\n“If he likes the look of you. ” Hikari allowed a sly smile to play across her muzzle.  “Wouldn’t sweat it, I haven’t seen him turn down a pregnancy once.   He’ll probably go at it all night. ”\n\n“All night, but how could..well, if that’s what it takes…”  The man slumped on the couch, and ran his hand through his hair.  He had lots of hair, long black curls.  Hikari liked his hair.\n\n“This your first time, hon?”\n\n“Yeah.  That obvious?  Caught me a bit by surprise.  Checking the cargo hold and finding…I didn’t think she was that kind of ship, you know.  I probably left her too long at port.  Back at Sumter there was this whole gang of Plesocopuses that were up to no good, bet it was one of those…”\n\n“Oh, hush,”  Hikari said.  She leaned forward toward the man and played a bit with the shoulder strap of her tiny shirt.  “That ship of yours ain’t hussy.  And you can trust me, I know the type.  Back when I was kitten on Osiron, you couldn’t throw a rock without hitting some bastard swizzleskid or tamerind.  You fellas forget how much of your ship is flesh and blood, forget that a girl’s got needs.”  She walked over to him, her hips swaying in time with her tail.\n\n“I imagine she does, at that….”\n\n“She was just doing what came natural.”  Hikari slinked onto the couch next to the man and stared at him, black slits narrowing in deep green eyes. “You two came  from Sumter?  Long ways.  Not surprised you turned down the coffee.  Reckon I could find other ways to help you relax. ”  Hikari snuggled up close, and gave a soft purr as he stroked the soft mottled fur down her back.\n\n“Well, if the monkey’s gonna be at it all night…”\n"
  title: Welcome To The Monkey House
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-05-12
  day: 12
  month: '05'
  text: "By federal law, I am required to inform you that by stepping outside of these doors, you are releasing the federal government from liability for your safety. Although I have never lost a person on one of my guided tours of the Outside, I have seen people maimed and kidnapped. People have died when taking these kinds of trips, and it’s important for all of you to be educated about the dangers that exist Outside.\n\nI see many young new faces today, so I think it would benefit us to review some of the safety standards for an Outside Tour.\n\nFor the first time since the Great War radiation and air pollution levels are within acceptable limits for human tolerance. However, we still recommend that you keep your air filters on your face and your suit zipped over your head. Experienced Outside travelers enjoy removing their protection for limited periods of time, but until you know your own limits, I don’t recommend doing this. I have had individuals who were unprepared for unfiltered air become very ill. Many of you may have medical conditions that you are unaware of because you have been breathing filtered medicated air since birth and the adjustment from this air to the Outside air may be uncomfortable.\n\nRemember, even with the filter, you will not be getting the regular medications that the government provides indoors. Unless you have purchased daily pills to compensate, which are openly available over the Net, you may experience symptoms of withdrawal. Some people report feeling very tired, some people report high energy and anxiety. Most people experience feelings of nausea, which pass after a day or so. Please be aware of your own needs. If you begin to feel ill, please report to a group leader.\n\nThe buddy system is imperative to this trip. Keep your buddy in sight and touching distance in all times. Watch your buddy carefully for signs of physical or mental illness. You are responsible for each other. Team leaders on my tour are highly trained professionals with hundreds of tours under their belts. They can protect you and keep you safe, but only if you follow the simple rules that I will set out for you.\n\nRule one, don’t touch anyone. There are no real people on the Outside, only monsters and people so far deformed it ain’t worth calling them people anymore. Although most of these individuals are quite harmless, some of them are tricksters in the worst way, and will try to get you close so that they may inflict violence upon you.\n\nRule two, don’t eat anything you find Outside.\n\nRemember that what we consume here on the inside and what is grown on the Outside are very different. We cannot anticipate your body’s reaction to anything you consume on the Outside. Fruit of the Outside may be the greatest taste that you have ever had, but there have been cases where people have been driven mad, or died, from consuming the food out here. Do so only at your own peril.\n\nRule three, do not give handouts.\n\nAt select points during the tour you may see group leaders trading with individuals on the Outside. Do not attempt to do this yourself, as individuals Outside can be highly unstable, and may be able to use even the simplest of tools or food to fashion weapons. You may see some terrible things on the Outside, but leave your sympathy here in this room.\n\nObey these rules and your group leaders and you will see some of the most magnificent sights of your life, and you will be challenged beyond anything you’ve done before. Everyone have their packs ready? Are your suits zipped? Check your filters?\n\nAlright. Open the door, we are going Outside.\n"
  title: Weekend Warrior
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2006-05-13
  day: 13
  month: '05'
  text: "Even in the heart of the city, Rene is in the open places. His feet splash in streams, not gutters, and his ears feel the whistle of the wind and not the cry of sirens. Past the dumpsters and yakatori stands, Rene smells green grass and the air right before a storm. He can hear his brother’s laughter, and the thunder of a thousand wild horses running with him.\n\nShelia Ruye told him it wouldn’t last, and when Rene reaches the docks, he hacks and he wheezes and the real world slithers back in into his frame of vision. Shelia Ruye told him that Reservation was the best, like no dose he ever had, that Rez took your fondest memory and gave it back. Didn’t last long, though, and to Rene the city looked small and crumpled and dirty and his brother was still in the ground. Rene tried to vomit food he hadn’t eaten, and made sense of the city best he could. Because making sense of the city was the only way to get away from it, only way he could find more Rez.\n\nRene runs to the heart of the city in order to run back out of it again, with enough Rez pounding in his ears and his eyes to make it past the docks, past the city. His brother’s laughter will hold him up and wild horses will carry him across the moonlit water.\n\nHe sees this as surely as he sees the wide open places and the cramped dank alleys. And Rene knows that to stay in one, he has to leave the other.\n"
  title: Where The Wild Horses Run
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2006-05-14
  day: 14
  month: '05'
  text: "The Annual Garden Party was called such more out of tradition than anything else; there was no vegetation to be found, only green crystal ferns and porcelain roses. However, appearances and traditions had to be respected and kept up. It was commented on that the way the artificial sunlight glinted off the facets and glaze was, in humble opinions that would never be expressed if the whole effect wasn’t just so breathtaking, better than the original.\n\nByron hated it. Cecelia could see he hated it, but she brushed it off as concern for his younger sister, Bunny, as she continually tottered dangerously close to the ferns, her immense platform sandals and limited coordination not helping the matter any.\n\n“Bunny,” Byron called, and the girl ambled over to the table he and Cecelia shared. “Look, here. I brought your tiara. Why don’t you go pose in it away from the ferns?”\n\n“Oooooo! Shiny!” Bunny’s jewelry clattered noisily as she half-ran, half-fell away from the tables.\n\n“She’s a beautiful girl, your sister,” Cecelia said. Byron only looked sad.\n\n“She’s a beautiful girl with Holstein-Gottorp’s Disorder. I’m just glad she’s still young enough for the pageant circuit. When that goes, I’m not sure what she’s going to have.”\n\n“It’s wonderful the way you care for her. You’ll make an excellent father.”\n\n“Cecelia, we’ve talked about this.” Byron nervously ran his fingers over the gold tabletop. “You know I love you, but my sister has Holstein-Gottorp’s, and, well, with our combined inheritence, there’s a good chance any children we have could end up a…”\n\n“BRIETARD!!!” Some smaller children were yelling at Bunny, throwing chocolates at her ample cleavage. She ran away from them, crying, and hid under a table. Byron looked pale.\n\n“Byron, baby.” Cecelia took his hands, their multitude of rings clacking as they came together. “Even if we have brietarded children, we’ll make it work.”\n\n“You don’t understand. Yesterday, my sister was asked to introduce herself, and she said ‘What? Like, with words?’ I can’t live with that.”\n\n“So then we’ll give it up,” Cecelia said. “All of it. Maybe we even…I don’t know, get jobs or something.”\n\nByron looked aghast. “Are you mad?” He turned to watch his sister, once again tottering toward the glimmering fake plants. “Can’t we just do something sensible like adopt one of those strange little alien refugees? Something sane like that.”\n"
  title: Brietards
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2006-05-15
  day: 15
  month: '05'
  text: "They sealed Emily’s room three days after the accident, trapping puzzle games and animatronic bears behind the white hydraulic door.  Her parents did not want to see the small proofs: things like names doodled on digipaper, the I’s topped by pixellated hearts.  A week later they shut down the biofield to save energy and the house’s mainframe showed the room turn cold, its window displays no longer marking the difference between imagined night and day.\n\nThe cards and flowers dwindled off after a few weeks, but Emily’s parents waited months before disposing of the everblooms.  The white and green plants, caught in photosynthetic stasis, did not shadow the evolution of grief.  “Who’s getting married?” the mother of one of Thomas’s school friends asked when picking up her son.  Her question was met by lingering silence until Thomas told her, “They’re my sister’s. She’s dead.”\n\nThat night, the organic material was recycled, and for days, every meal tasted of chlorophyll.\n\nThe forms arrived eighteen months later, stating in cold, efficient terms that the period of sanctioned mourning was over and it was time to consider the population stability of the community.  It was a matter of duty, and only the mattress made sound.\n\nThomas watched his mother swell.  Against all odds, pregnancy had improved her mood; she now spent days smiling, one hand resting over the growing bulge.  “We need to renovate the room,” his father said.\n\n“Emily’s room?” Thomas asked.\n\n“It’s just a room,” he said, his tone flat.  “Rooms don’t belong to anyone.”\n\nAt night, Thomas stood before the mainframe, trying to guess the password his parents had set.  Her birthday, no.  The day of the accident, no.  Nothing.  He pressed his hand against the sense panel and the mainframe grew warm.\n\nPassword accepted, the display read, although Thomas had typed nothing.\n\nThe door to the room opened with ease, just like the door of every other room in the house.  The lights were dimmed for night, as Emily had always been terrified of the dark, and he noticed the scent of a recent biosweep, killing the bacteria that might have harmed the young girl.  It took Thomas several moments to realize that the biofield had never been lowered, despite what the mainframe had claimed.\n\nOn the opposite wall, the constellations of Earth hung in the frame of the window display and Thomas moved closer, scanning the well-mapped ocean that his parents had chosen as his sister’s view.  At the edge the dark and textured expanse, the horizon showed the faintest signs of dawn: darkest purple blending into the night sky like a bruise.\n"
  title: The House Remembers
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2006-05-16
  day: 16
  month: '05'
  text: "The rosy Martian sunrise had just dusted over the white curtains on Beth’s bedroom window when her parents heard the wild thudding of eight-year-old feet charging their door like a herd of wild horses. Marlene groaned and stuck her head under the pillow as a small fist tapped earnestly on the sleek plastic of the door. “Greg, it’s five in the morning. Can’t you tell her to wait a little longer?” But her husband was already dragging himself out of bed. Marlene groaned. Beth had always been a daddy’s girl.\n\n“Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” came the voice from outside, and Marlene forced herself to sit up, rubbing her eyes. Gregory pressed the blue button that would unlock the door and was immediately assaulted by a small, brown-haired bundle in a white nightgown. “Daddy!” Beth cried out gleefully, launching herself at her father’s pajamaed legs. “It’s my birthday!”\n\n“I know it is, Beth sweetie,” Gregory said, casting a helpless look at his wife. Marlene couldn’t help but smirk as she took her time getting out of bed, leaving Gregory to deal with their offspring. He leaned down and hopped the child up into his arms, and Beth squealed with delight. Gregory grinned and tickled her stomach. “Is my big girl ready for her present?”\n\n“Present!” Beth crowed, flinging her arms around her father’s neck. “Can I have it now?”\n\n“Ask your mother,” Gregory replied, his lips quirking with amusement.\n\n“Can I have my present now, Mommy?” The girl turned immediately to Marlene, squirming in her father’s arms to face her mother completely. “Pleeeeease?”\n\n“If you want it, you’d better run downstairs quick before the little green men show up and take it away!” Marlene laughed as Beth squealed and squiggled out of her father’s arms to pelt back down the hallway and thunder down to the living room. Gregory shook his head, and Marlene smirked. “Mother’s instinct,” she replied to his unspoken question, then plucked her silk robe from the closet and patted her husband’s shoulder. “You’d better go down there and give your daughter her birthday gift.”\n\nGregory kissed her and disappeared downstairs, and Marlene took her time finding her slippers and tying her robe. It was only when she heard a child’s shriek from downstairs that Marlene dropped her hairbrush and rushed to the sound. In the living room, Beth was clinging to her father’s shirt, face buried in Gregory’s chest, while a placid creature with large blue camera-eyes and sleek white plastic hide looked on.\n\n“Beth, what is it?” Gregory was clearly distressed. “You kept saying you wanted a pony for your birthday! Daddy got you a pony, sweetie… what’s the matter?”\n\n“It’s not a pony!” the eight-year-old wailed, casting a look of mingled fear and reproach at the silent android. “It’s a robot! It’s not a… not a real pony!”\n\nMarlene bit her lip and knelt on the floor. “Beth, you know we can’t have a real pony on Mars. Daddy and I thought you would like this one…”\n\n“But Daddy’s the con-soo-late!” Beth protested, emphasizing the word she’d heard time and again to describe what, to her, was simply a Very Important Job.\n\n“Even the consulate can’t break the law, Beth,” Gregory reminded his daughter, looking helplessly to Marlene for guidance.\n\n“I don’t want it!” Beth cried out, shaking her head and burying it in Gregory’s shirt again.\n\n“Look, Beth honey,” Marlene said, trying to coax her child to face her. “It’s a good pony—better than a real one. You can ride it and play with it and even polish it if you want. You get to pick the name, too.”\n\n“No, no, no!” Beth shook her head emphatically with each negation, her little fists balled up in Gregory’s shirt for emphasis. Gregory looked at his wife, entirely at a loss. Marlene pressed her lips together.\n\n“Beth, would you like the pony if we got him a hover attachment?”\n\nThe tears stopped. Round blue eyes peeked out at Marlene from Gregory’s shirt. “You mean… a flying pony?”\n\nMarlene nodded solemnly. “A flying pony of your very own.”\n\nBeth blinked at her mother, then turned to face the pony. Its luminous eyepieces gleamed back at her. Before Gregory could blink, his child’s arms were flung around the warm plastic neck as tightly as they had been around his own.\n\n“Thank you, Daddy!” Beth smiled at her parents as brightly as if her eyes had never known tears. “He’s perfect.”\n"
  title: Just the Thing
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2006-05-17
  day: 17
  month: '05'
  text: "It’s a dangerous job. They told me that in college, they told me that in my doctoral studies, they told me that when they recruited me, and they tell me that every morning of a jump.  It’s a dangerous job, Jodie.  But I know the risks.  Everyone in this field knows the risk.\n\nMy first case was standard: a sociopath who slaughtered half a dozen children in his basement two centuries earlier.  We don’t save the victims, of course…that would mutilate the timeline.  We don’t even see the subjects.  In the projection chamber, I lie on the table as wires are taped to my head, stimulating REM.  It takes a special type of person, I hear: a lucid dreamer.  Without that ability, it’s easy to lose yourself.\n\nI enter him as he’s almost there, hovering on the brink and fantasizing about the pale-eyed brunette in the basement.  I feel the body shudder with the feeling of falling that accompanies the transition to sleep.  His mind unfolds into images: the man who sold him bread in the morning, people he passed on the subway. They never dream about the victims. They have their waking hours for that.\n\nYears in the future, the movements of his unconscious are being recorded.  In hours, they’ll be processed and scrutinized, and the database will be updated.\n\nHis mother, long dead, walking down a corridor and holding a glass of water.  She opens a door and he’s inside.  “Did you finish shopping?” he asks, and she gives him the glass. He drops it, spills it.  The water is the ocean and the shattered glass is light breaking on the jagged edges of waves as he looks overboard. Dreaming.  I watch.\n\nWhen they pull me from his mind the transition is gentle.  The scientist enters the dream patterns with keystrokes.  “Nice job,” he says, because he’s flirted with me for months.  I smile and leave.  I’ll be back the next day.\n\nAs I sleep in my own bed, fragments of the dreams are recycled.  The lucid dreaming distances them…this is simple review, observation rather than motivation.  The scanners realize this, and ignore me.  Across the city, people are dreaming, matching and evading profiles. Dangerous cases are summoned and saved by doctors who do my work in reverse.  I research, they cure.\n\nIt’s a dangerous job, but someone has to do it.  We haven’t had a serial killer for centuries.\n"
  title: Criminal Psychology
  year: 2006
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2006-05-18
  day: 18
  month: '05'
  text: "“Who can blame them for what they do?” Sergeant Dobbs sipped his coffee as he leaned back in the patrol car, musing to Lieutenant Carson.  Through the windshield, the morning throngs of people left their homes and crowded the streets on their way to work and life as they knew it.\n\n“I can blame them, Roger. It’s the same thing as blaming a drunk driver for killing someone on the road. It just ain’t right, and it’s not excusable.”\n\nIt was then that their mark came into view. He must have been wandering the streets for at least a few nights with a sawed-off shotgun and a roll of cash. The kid had the usual glazed look in his eyes, and the twitch of a gamer in his stride. The epidemic was easy to follow. That wasn’t the issue; the issue was how randomly it occurred.\n\n“There he is,” Dobbs said. He sat up and poured his coffee out the window as he moved to open the door.\n\nCarson knew that making a scene would be a mistake. “Shit, Roger. Wait a sec.”\n\nToo late. The kid saw the cops and raised his gun, blasting a slug right into the hood of the cruiser before taking off. The blast left Dobbs diving for cover and Carson revving up the engine as he grabbed for the radio.\n\n“We got another one headed east on Union, requesting back-up. This ones been in the game a while.” He threw the car into gear and the cruiser jerked into traffic just in time to see the kid yank a driver from the door of a hybrid Honda.  It definitely wasn’t his first car-jacking either.\n\nSergeant Dobbs pulled his Beretta from the holster and cursed, but the Lieutenant grabbed his hand before the gun could be leveled.\n\n“Roger, we can’t kill the kid. He’s gotta do his time in rehab just like the others.” Despite his anger, Dobbs complied and let the gun return to its holder. Besides, up ahead, the lights and sirens indicated the barricade had already been set up. The trap was sprung.\n\nMoments later their car came to a screeching halt as they nearly T-boned the kids’ jacked ride as it met with the barricade. Six cops weren’t going to point their weapons and wait. The ring began to tighten.\n\n“Out of the car, now! Get the fuck out of the car!” The boy seemed more perplexed than he was nervous. He looked around and tried to rev the engine, hoping to break away from the two cars that had wedged him in. Eventually, the cops pulled him out and gave him a taste of asphalt before cuffing him.\n\nSergeant Dobbs glared at the kid as the boy struggled, kicking and screaming as they dragged him off. Carson came up behind Dobbs and gave him a pat on the shoulder.  “It’s all nice until they fire at you, eh?”\n\n“Yeah, it is.” Dobbs was still watching the boy as his pale frame was shoved into the police car and his shrill voice was screaming about the tragedy.\n\n“I have a saved game! I want to go back to the save point! Fuck! You can’t stop me from resetting!” The slammed door muffled the final words, but Dobbs thought he caught something about an upgrade.\n\nLieutenant Carson just sighed. “Back in my day, the console and the LCD were all you needed. Poor bastards.”\n"
  title: Grand Theft Reality
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2006-05-19
  day: 19
  month: '05'
  text: "It’s my first time at the Persomod. Tann, who’s been my best friend since my family moved to Set, took me as a surprise gift for my birthday.  We planned it carefully; Mom and Dad are traditionalists, static to the core.  Let their only daughter get a personality graft? No, thank you.\n\nI sliced through the snooper circuits on the security system and snuck my way out into the communal garden across the street. Tann was waiting for me, smiling as she perched on her aquamarine bike, the color clashing horribly with the deep red of Setian skin. “Ready for the new you?” she asked with that mischievous smile I had quickly come to associate with my friend.\n\n“Absolutely.”\n\nPersonality additives developed about a century ago, but it wasn’t until the last twenty years or so that the technology really became safe. Back then, unbuffered transplants got slapped directly into the mind, an instant fuse. Sometimes it worked. But other times, people just shut down. Or they went crazy. You know, messy stuff.\n\nInside the pristinely white store, I wander around aimlessly, trying not to feel lost as I study the clear plastic display units that each heralded the qualities of the personalities within. I can’t quite control my excitement—a small smile keeps sneaking onto my face as I browse, almost like being in a toy store as a child.\n\nToday, templates are used for personality grafts. People choose their dummy personality, an artificial construct specifically designed for the grafting process. The dummies are safe to use—they have no memories so no one goes crazy. It’s a lot better.\n\n“This one.” Tann stated definitively, her finger lingering on a display. She smiled at me. “It’s perfect for you.”\n\n“Are you sure?”\n\nThe girl’s smile didn’t waver. “This one’s good. Trust me.”\n\nI do trust Tann. She’s an expert on grafts and had her first when she was twelve. Since then, she’s had a lot more, maybe six or seven, I’m not quite sure. I asked her once what she was like before but Tann just smiled and shook her head. It didn’t matter, she said.\n\nEveryone says you’re a lot happier with the grafts. You can be what you want. Who you want. And it’s still you, only better. Tann thinks I’m too shy, that I don’t make enough friends. She says this will help. I agree; I wouldn’t mind being better.\n\nTann handles the credits while the technician leads me into the grafting chamber. I sit in the soft white chair, my hands pressed flatly against my thighs. I’m not scared. Just nervous. The technician nods to me and leaves the room. I wait.\n\nThere’s a vibration in my head. It’s faint and annoying, like a small hover engine. It  grows louder and louder. Is this what’s supposed to happen? My hands clench tightly. I’m having trouble thinking.\n\nA bright light flashes.\n\nWhen I wake up, Tann is standing in front of me. “Well?” she asks softly, her face leaning directly into my field of view. “How do you feel?”\n\nI smile back without hesitation. I know that something in my smile echoes something in Tann’s. I’m different now. I know it.   “Better.”\n"
  title: Better
  year: 2006
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2006-05-20
  day: 20
  month: '05'
  text: "“I’m leaving.” Viktor said as he pulled the duffel back over his shoulder and made for the door. He’d had enough of the quarantine, and he had a hankering for Luna stew that needed some satiation.\n\n“You can’t do that, Vik! They’ve got every spaceport in the continent under lockdown. Something big is going on, and I need you here!” Cynthia reached out to tug Viktor’s arm, which only earned her a blue-eyed glare from her partner.\n\nHe grumbled and turned around.  “You think I don’t know about the population issue? They want to keep people here because it’ll mean more consumers on Earth.”\n\n“It’s not that” she sighed and glanced up to him, pleading with her eyes, “People are dying and no one is being born. They’re blaming it on people leaving but they won’t tell us why. Haven’t you noticed the lack of children, Vik? Haven’t you seen that they are closing the borders and keeping us in because they physically… spiritually need us?”\n\nViktor stared at her for a good long while before he dropped the bag and clasped his hands over both her shoulders, “Cynthia… what you’re talking about is madness. You need some sleep. It’ll be good for the baby.” His hand dropped down to gently rub against her stomach.\n\nHer head lowered she turned her gaze to the side because she could not look at him, “I’m not pregnant, Vik.”\n\n“What… what did you just say? Did you lie to me!? How the fuck could you-” Rage began to rise in his eyes.\n\n“Viktor, wait! I didn’t lie. I was pregnant and then… it was gone.” She looked up to him, her eyes slick with tears.\n\nThe man’s expression soon turned to sorrow as he let go of her shoulders. Walking over to the couch, he slumped into it and stared out over the blue skies and the cityscape they had always dreamed of seeing from their home window.\n\n“When did you miscarry?” he asked.\n\n“I…I didn’t.  When I went in for the second trimester ultrasound, there was nothing there.  The doctor said it was like I had never been pregnant at all.”\n\nShutting his eyes, he dreamed of never dying of always being there for Cynthia. He hoped that she would forgive him and yet he ignored her very presence.  Finally he spoke up just as he re-opened his eyes, “I’m… sorry. Maybe you’re right about the environment here. Mars and the orbital stations are showing increased birth rates. It has to be a government thing… we’ll fix it honey. We’ll fix it.”\n\nViktor turned his eyes away, letting the impossibility weigh down the air like a lie. Both knew the futility of the theories but, no one knew the truth.\n\nSomewhere on Mars, a woman sat in a pristine doctor’s office, staring at her positive results and wondering how it was possible.\n"
  title: Programmed to Receive
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2006-05-21
  day: 21
  month: '05'
  text: "Innocence may be a commodity, but it’s easily emulatable. I get it in thin aluminum cans from the drugstore downtown, the kind that energy drinks come in. They’re kept behind the counter; innocence isn’t a controlled substance, but like condoms and suppositories, it’s kept out of reach to deter the easily embarrassed. Our society needs a moral compass, after all.\n\nMe, I take pride in asking for a can. I keep my eyes languid and my tone casual, and I watch with a slightly widening smirk as the clerk’s smile fades to uncomfortability. I make no effort to hide it from the people in line. They’re all silent, watching me with individually tailored levels of outrage or disgust.\n\nThe clerk rings me up with thin lips, thanking me tonelessly for the purchase and handing me my plastic bag. As I leave, he wonders what kind of person would need to purchase innocence. He imagines what I’m trying to hide. He worries that this town isn’t safe with me in it. He wonders if I’m using it on a date with his daughter tonight.\n"
  title: Queue
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-05-22
  day: 22
  month: '05'
  text: "It was a week before opening night and Bub was still flubbing his lines.\n\n“I don’t understand,” said Bub, “Why can’t I have a feed? Why do we have to memorize our lines?”\n\n“You have to memorize your lines,” said Daven, clenching his hands into fists “because that is the way actors in the old days did things.\n\n“But no one will know!” complained Bub. “No one will know that I don’t have a feed inside my head! I could download the entire script and have it running behind my eyes. I’ve done it that way for every other performance I’ve ever been in. I did that at Cambridge!”\n\n“Well, this is not Cambridge.” said Daven.\n\nBub threw up his hands dramatically. “Davan, I understand what you are going for here. I mean, the cloth costumes, that makes sense, and the painted sets look very rustic, very historical. I get the feel you want, but I don’t understand why it matters what is going on in my head!”\n\nDaven climbed up onto the stage. “It matters because I’ll know Bub, and more importantly, you will know. You will know that this performance isn’t authentic to the old twentieth century style of acting. The only way it can be authentic is if you struggle just like they struggled, learn just like they learned. Now, get over your cheap self and take it from the top.”\n\nBub sighed. Daven was a method man, and you could never argue with one of them. “Now is the winter of our discontent” he said. “Made glorious summer by this sun of York. . .”\n"
  title: Method Man
  year: 2006
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2006-05-23
  day: 23
  month: '05'
  text: "No one saw the meteor coming. It was faster than any meteor yet recorded. It didn’t so much as break the speed of light as it did beat its face in, set it on fire and sleep with its girlfriend. No one saw it coming when it smashed into what once was the Pacific Ocean, and a century later, not a single person survived.\n\nThey came from the corners of the globe, dressed to kill in their own odd ways. Mankind forgot ancient myths and made up their own legends.  Fathers passed it onto sons and mothers would nurse their daughters on what it was to be what they were. It was a chance to start over for the parents after the meteor crashed down, but no one could have guessed it would end like this.\n\nIf you could call America a desert at that point, then it was safe to say you’d lost the idea of what humidity really meant. From the east came the heavy shoulder pads, the pronounced foreheads counting every ridge as a badge of honor despite their origin as radiation-induced bone growths. The tribe gathered shrapnel from wreckages and sharpened the pieces into their own homebrewed mix of jagged death.\n\nThese deformed figures all stood tall and bulky and they had no question as to why they were here today. Each one carried a weapon, and each one knew how to use it.\n\nThe other tribe came from the west. These shadowy figures began as shadows on the horizon, looking far healthier than the mutated easterners. Their humans faces were still intact and they dressed in nothing but free-flowing cloth that became a robe wrapped snugly around their figures. Each of these men and women also had a weapon of destruction latched neatly onto their belts. Though at first glance these weapons seemed like nothing but bludgeoning tools, there was a distinctly scientific look to them that held more back than it presented. Each of these “weapons” had at least one button on it looking as if they had been crafted from gutted scientific laboratories in the west. Silicon Valley might have been to blame.\n\nWithin sight of each other, they stood in a single row facing their opponents for control over the aftermath of the apocalypse. This was no longer America to them. For each it held a different, unpronounceable name with no Latin origin to be found.\n\nWith deformed sharp teeth and darkened, rigid skin, the easterners raised their oddly shaped metal weapons in unison and cried out, “Heghlu’meH QaQ jajvam!”\n\nRobed and without emotion, without fear, the westerners slowly removed the small metal cylinders from their belts. The man in the center stared at the angry mob before him and spoke in a soft, elegant tone: “There must be balance.” Behind him, the other members of the tribe pressed the buttons on their devices and thin rods of light burst from the cylinders, ready and waiting to be used.\n\nThe words had been said and on this day the ultimate showdown began.\n"
  title: Ultimate Showdown
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2006-05-24
  day: 24
  month: '05'
  text: "There is nothing to burn. Modern life is plasticine, cheap and mutable and easily manufactured. Wooden furniture is the stuff of history textbooks and Better Homes and Gardens pinups, the pictures affixed to smooth synthetic walls with reused sticky-tack. Pinup is a misnomer; pins have no purchase in plastic.\n\nThe poor live in dingy cubes of space stacked on top of each other like ice cube trays, twelve stories high even in the slums. Oil is a thing of the past, hoarded by the elite and unheard of by the ordinary. Coal is a fiction in the lower city, a dream that children are chided for to protect them from the inevitable disappointment. There is nothing to burn. Even the telephone poles are polyurethane. Snow is praised as an insulator in the country, building up over low, squat houses and keeping their residents alive for as long as they’ve stockpiled food, but here in the city there is no such thing as snow. The heat of humanity melts it before it ever hits the ground.\n\nWinter is the new population control, and the means of survival serve a double purpose. There is nothing to burn, so they burn their own, the stiff frozen twists of the unfortunate packed into thermoset stoves and lit with the dried dead fur of a squirrel or mouse. The vinyl clothing is carefully cut away before lighting the inferno, melted down by the heat of its previous owner and reused for the survivors. Bodies never rot. They are too valuable to be left so long.\n\nThick black smoke spews from the dingy acrylic chimneys, blanketing the slums in a charnel haze. Poor workers plod through the streets with heads down, trying not to breathe in their brethren. There is nothing to burn. They no longer notice the smell.\n"
  title: Synthesis
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2006-05-25
  day: 25
  month: '05'
  text: "All through college, the three of us were best friends.  When we graduated in ’18, Bob and I joined the Galactic Defense Force and got shipped off to the Sirius Sector, but Dmitri’s calling was Postdoctoral research, studying Xenobiology in the Vega system.  We tried to keep in touch, but you know how those things work.  It’s bad enough to write letters when you aren’t in the Force, and all that moving around really kills the motivation.\n\nAnyways, I think it was Bob’s idea to drop in on Dmitri during our extended leave.  Old time’s sake and all, he said, and I wasn’t going to argue.  It would be nice to see the guy, so we rented a shuttle and picked up a couple cases of Sirian slurry and warped over to the coordinates we had from his last letter.\n\nAs usual, Dmitri was extremely enthusiastic.  Unfortunately, it wasn’t because of our visit.  Apparently, the Bugus whogivesacrapus (I don’t remember the actual name, but I think I’m pretty close) was just hours away from the beginning of its mating cycle.  This bug only mates one night in the 377-day year (poor bastards), and tonight was the night (lucky bastards).  Dmitri had to leave immediately, but he told us to make ourselves at home, and he said he’d be back in time for supper the next day.  After a quick hug and another apology, he disappeared into the woods with his sample pack.\n\nFor Dmitri, “home” was a five-room hut in the middle of a dense forest. It was primitive but livable, like something out of an old documentary.  We cracked open the slurry and started a campfire in a pit out back, but when we reached the end of the first case, we realized we were pretty hungry. Of course, we hadn’t brought anything to eat, and when we searched Steve’s home we couldn’t figure out what was food and what was research.\n\nWe weren’t going to let that stop us.  We were soldiers.  Armed men trained in the art of survival.  Despite the case of slurry, it only took us a couple minutes of tromping through the forest before we bagged a large, flightless bird with our phasers.  One thing was certain: if people lived on this planet, they’d never go hungry.  The thing must have weighed fifty kilos.  While Bob prepared the “bird,” I constructed a spit and support over the fire.  Three hours later, we were deep into our second case of slurry and feasting on roasted alien meat.\n\nYou know, during my years in the force, I’ve learned that there is one sure constant in the universe: extraterrestrial meat always tastes like chicken.  There’s a scale of chicken, too.  Good chicken, bad chicken. This was most definitely the former. In fact, it was so good that Bob and I tossed around the idea of bringing a couple back for the other guys in the Force. It took a few hours and a few more rounds of slurry, but eventually, we smothered the fire and called it a well-fed, well-drank night.\n\nThe next morning, we carved up the excess meat and hauled the bird carcass deep into the woods for the scavengers (Another constant: all life bearing planets have scavengers.) True to his word, Dmitri returned at about 1600 hours, and the reunion got into full swing.  Bob and I shared our tales of adventure and interstellar conquests (complete with body measurements and, if we remembered them, names) while we sat by the campfire, eating leftovers and drinking the last of the slurry.  Later, Dmitri chimed in with his boring stories of the indigenous flora and fauna of Vega-4.  Scientists lead such wasted lives.  We let him ramble for a few minutes, maybe an hour. It’s tough to tell when you’re half-asleep, but when he started telling us about his paper on the development of Vegan Civilization, we stopped him right there.  “Whoa, hold on.  Civilization?”  Bob said.  “Are you telling us this planet has intelligent life?”\n\n“Absolutely,” replied Dmitri.  “Although the Vegans are less technologically advanced than us, they are probably more advanced, socially.  In fact, I’m living with a Vegan.  This is the home of Meleagris Prime.  He’s an “elder” here.  I’ve been studying under him for the last three years.  He’s a fascinating individual.  Man, can that guy tell a funny story.”  He held out his hand, palm down, approximately one meter above the ground.  “He’s only about this tall. I can’t believe you haven’t met him yet.  He’s usually home.  Let me see if I can find him.”  Dmitri jumped up and headed toward the hut.  “You guys will love him.  But be prepared, he’s not humanoid.  He looks like a really fat turkey.”\n"
  title: Universal Constants
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2006-05-26
  day: 26
  month: '05'
  text: "K’dackis was slivercaster, scout and herder of wildfeeds, piping when needed, but always in pursuit of the genuine driveway effect. She was constantly sisbertized by the right or the wrong people, surfing the waves of condemnation and approval as she launched onto her next coffee-spitter. She was queen of the third screen. Grey as I was, by comparison I might as well have been egocasting. K’dackis swallowed muffin-chokers whole, and spit ’em back out at lightning speed; because of this, she was the darling of screenagers everywhere.\n\nI have been told my obsession with K’dackis is nothing but anus-envy, that any fool could create irritainment with a notebook dump on a feed and garnish it with a middle finger. This was true to some extent, but I’m no beat-sweetener with his head up his ass. K’dackis’s appeal went beyond mere hathos and anger. She was a half-step away from a placeshift, and when that happened all of us in the Outerrnet would feel very, very insecure about our place in our chosen professions.\n\nObviously, a fleshmeet was required, and not just podhacking her playlist, either.  I had to interview her. Took some cajoling; my editor is a NIMBY when it comes alt-media, partly due to the pessimal state of modern info, partly due to how close he is to sundowning. But the man’s watch contains feedlets and bytebits, same as mine, so I had some elbowroom.\n\n“I’ll authorize this,” he said. “But you better put some pants on the copy before it reaches my desk. I ain’t paying you to take a duvet day.”\n\nStrangely enough, K’dackis consented to an interview. She had read my grey, and gave me a webrarian’s approval of a go ahead. I suppose I should have expected something unusual out of her, but doing the interview in a dumpster came as a headsmack.\n\n“You gotta be a mongo hunter is this world, get your hands dirty, get in the scene.” K’dackis looked strangely cheery amongst the garbage. Her clothes carried no badge item, just ergomorphic shirt and pants. “What we throw away says the most about us, dig? What’s in your trash this morning?”\n\nI found myself lost; she might as well been speaking Miévilleese.\n\n“Listen, you didn’t come here to quiz me on my hairdo. You’re no thumbsucker, your grey speaks for that. But you’re in a bathwater situation. Think about the language we use. What’s the first thing we toss aside? Curse words, old relics of medieval speak. But what’s the primary we utter when we glom a muffin -choker? It’s all a goddamn circle, Cochise. When was the last time you let out a good old curse for the scream of it?!?'”\n\nI hemmed and hawed, but I didn’t have an answer. The interview, such as it was, went this way; K’dackis was playing at being a knowledge angel, sure, but it was fascinating, abrasive and exactly what was wrong with the state of grey.\n\nNaturally, my editor wouldn’t print a word a word of it..\n\n“Primary, this contains language, which we do not print. Our grey is clear of such things and we are proud of that,” he espoused. “Secondly, what is the point of this?”\n\n“We’re lost in the words. It’s mindblindness, pure and simple.  We’re not even communicating anymore, we’re just speaking.”\n\n“Manure. There’s a medieval word for you and your bloghopper. Shit. Excrement. Crap, detritus, garbage, junk, offal, refuse, remains, rubbish, trash, waste. We are in the business of words, mister. YOU are in the business of words.”\n\n“I thought I was in the business of news.”\n\n“Keep this up, and you won’t be. Do I make myself clear? Or am I using too many words?”\n\nK’dackis was slivercaster, which means she played to, at best, a small audience. She could play to the screenagers, and have her outrage displayed on their phones and watches, gathering evidence from feeds and stray bytes. But she and her ideas weren’t news, even if they were to us in the news business.\n\nI found myself going through my grey, pieces that had once won awards, had garnered acclaim. I was told that my grey spoke for me. I couldn’t slivercast, couldn’t ride the wildfeeds, and I wasn’t going to be a third screen darling anytime soon.\n\nBut I did remember what makes me curse.\n"
  title: How To Snag A Muffin-Choker
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2006-05-27
  day: 27
  month: '05'
  text: "For a successful space pirate, Valentine Arvossio did not seem particularly intimidating at first glance. His eyes, though smug, were a rather peculiar shade of grey that in another context might have been referred to as “soothing.” It was the sort of grey that one used for office complexes and prison lavatories to keep the inmates subdued. His wiry frame was somewhat lacking in the “mighty thews” department, and his crew had mentioned to him on at least three nonconsecutive occasions that the long, flowing red hair was less “pirate” and more “dilettante.” Valentine ignored these complaints.\n\nOn the rare occasions when he could be persuaded to comment on his intimidation factor, Valentine insisted that anyone who was named after a type of gun could be nothing less than fearsome. If pressed, he might be magnanimous enough to tell the story of his conception, which occurred shortly after his mother shot his father with a Valentine .45 SXG handgun–precisely the same gun that Valentine kept strapped to his hip waking and sleeping. He claimed that he planned to find true love in the same way his mother had. It was a fantastic story, and all came away from the telling convinced of this fact, if not of the tale’s veracity.\n\nValentine had most recently related it to his latest mark, a mild-mannered engineer who owned a ship that Valentine would dearly love to get his hands on. The ship itself wasn’t much—without an engineer like Claude on board to give her tender, loving care, the thing wouldn’t make it through hyperspace, let alone a battle—but on board was something Valentine coveted. Bounty on empathic species was high, and the pirate had no doubt that such a creature would sell for even higher on the black market. His informants had managed to locate one of them on board Claude’s ship, and Valentine was not about to let a jewel like that get away. The fact that Claude also happened to be the most delectable morsel that Valentine had set eyes on in some time was naturally beside the point.\n\nUnfortunately, at their last meeting, Claude had been far too miserable to fully appreciate the intimidation Valentine intended to work upon him. The morose engineer had been hunched over Retichken vodka in a bar that Valentine happened to frequent, and once he’d gotten over his shock, the pirate had swooped in—to no avail. In his semi-drunken state, Claude had found the story “romantic” and “heartwarming” and had thanked Valentine with a drunken pat on the back that the latter had been too stunned to enjoy. As he reclined in the central chair on his own ship’s bridge, the pirate’s full lips curled into a frown that came off as more of a pout. He was still cursing himself for letting Claude get away that night, in every sense of the word. At the very least, it had been highly unprofessional.\n\nFor the three days since his unexpected contact with the engineer, Valentine’s crew had been scouring space for the plucky little ship to no avail. His bridge officers had made themselves scarce, knowing that it was best to stay out of the captain’s way when his will had been thwarted. For all Claude’s drunken amiability, he was a top-notch engineer, and had somehow managed to elude even Valentine’s sophisticated tracking methods. After punching up a series of patiently blank scan screens, Valentine heaved a sigh and pushed his display away. At this rate, he wouldn’t find Claude again until the man once again decided he was in need of a drink. His first officer had sarcastically suggested to the pirate captain that next time he encountered Claude, he should use his ‘manly wiles’ on the quarry. Valentine had dismissed her in annoyance. “Next time,” he muttered to himself, “I’ll just drug the booze.”\n"
  title: Simple Plan
  year: 2006
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2006-05-28
  day: 28
  month: '05'
  text: "Look at you. Take a good look at yourselves. Five fingers on each hand, five toes on each foot. You’re not victims, you’re not rookies. You’re human and each and every last bloody one of you is going to let the enemy know that.\n\nYou hear them outside the hull? Hear them knocking on our doorstep? You saw the red sirens going off in the corridors on your way down here? You can see their fighters gliding past on the scanners, blasting some other cadet off the roster. Some of you might think they are winning. Some of you might have heard that this is a line of defense; that we are expendable in the defense of our home planet.\n\nWell that’s bureaucratic bullshit.  I am here to tell you that no matter what the bloody hell you have heard from the suits and the stars, you are not going out there today to defend. No, cadets, I want you to suit up and go win this fucking war.\n\nFor too long we have been plagued by their kind. So many men and women have died in service of United Earth that we can barely bury our dead on their home soil.  Command wants me to tell you to defend and to stand ground in honor of our species until God takes you all.\n\nA man once said, “War is not about who survives the longest. It is about how many of the enemy you kill.” We did not go to war to defend, cadets. No, we came here in this carrier to show those slimy bastards that we are fire. We are the fire!\n\nI’ve seen that fear in your eyes before. It’s a gift. That’s right, you have a gift in that fear of yours, soldiers; a gift that you must give to the enemy. Take it with you, hold it tight and don’t you dare let it get away. Give it back to them and make them feel what we have felt over the past decade.\n\nDo not doubt and do not waver. Do not wait for mercy that will not come and in turn do not give that which will not be returned to you. Cadets, suit up.\n\nAnd remember… for honor, for Earth, and for man!\n"
  title: For Honor, For Earth, For Man
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2006-05-29
  day: 29
  month: '05'
  text: "Herbert Mumble was proud of his house.  He had every right to be: he’d spent nearly a decade compiling it.  Most of his friends had bought discount single-structure mansions in the Midwest and used a portal to get to work, but Herbert wasn’t the type to buy pre-fab.  Herbert was an artist.\n\nIt started as a studio in Key West, which was expanded to a one-bedroom when he purchased another studio in Calcutta.  While his coworkers were deciding on whether they wanted one or two stories, Herbert Mumble was choosing continents.  Now, nearly completed, his house spanned twelve countries and existed in every hemisphere, providing views that included the Eiffel Tower, the shores of Thailand, and the vast expanses of the still-rural Australian Outback.  Herbert took pleasure in hosting business dinners in Beijing, or entertaining dates on his balcony in Madrid.\n\nAll of the research had been done on his own time: Herbert didn’t hire an agent.  He learned the patterns of the market and bought when the time was right, and because of his patience, the house was worth nearly twice what he paid for it.  Still, it hadn’t come cheaply.\n\n“It’s beautiful,” a friend said when she came over for dinner.  She’d been standing at the window of the living room, looking out over Brazilian beach.  “But why didn’t you just install viewscreens?”\n\nHerbert leaned past her and grabbed the edge of the window, pulling up.  A gust of hot air pushed through the crack, carrying with it the crisp, salty smell of the sea.  “Feel that?” he asked with a smile.  “You can’t buy weather like that.  Somewhere, it’s always sunny and it’s always summer.  The trick is to find that place and build a house.”\n"
  title: Always Summer
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2006-05-30
  day: 30
  month: '05'
  text: "“Iljek, it’s time for another piece.”\n\nThe Interplanetary Artist Laureate, holder of the Sigil of Creativity, founder of the Union of Visionary Crafters, chair of the Board of Humanities at Reykjavik University of the Arts, leaned back in his lounge chair and put his porn on mute, giving his assistant a long-suffering sigh. “You’ve got to be kidding.”\n\nElarii bit her lip and tried to hold Iljek’s upside-down gaze without letting stress get the better of her. Breathe. Breathe. That was what her therapist had told her. Deep, calming breaths. Elarii took a quick sniff of oxygen from the decorative tube affixed to her robes at the shoulder. Calming breaths. “No, Iljek, I’m not. It’s been almost four months since you produced any new art.”\n\nIljek snorted and glanced back at the holo-dish projecting his entertainment. “So the creative spirit hasn’t hit me yet. Tell the papers I’m sequestered in meditation or whatever.”\n\n“That’s what we told them last month,” Elarii told Iljek, reaching down to surreptitiously turn off the alarm on her blood pressure meter. “Last time it was three months. We can’t just keep stringing them along without anything to show for it. You need product.”\n\nIljek sighed and sat up in his chair, scratching his head with one hand and his balls with the other. Elarii had been on him for several weeks about this, but the tone in her voice told him she was getting desperate, and that meant it really was time for him to earn his keep. “All right. Bring me a recorder.”\n\nRelief thrumming through her body, Elarii came around to the front of the chair and set down the silver cube she’d had prepared for the last two months. Hesitant to do anything that might break the fitful spell of productivity, she didn’t speak, just turned on the device and backed away. Iljek held out his hand and she pressed a baton into it, the sophisticated tool that would tell the three-dimensional recorder what to paint in the air in response to Iljek’s creative vision.\n\nStanding slowly, Iljek faced the recorder. He was silent for several moments, and the hush over the room was only accented by the soundless ecstasy of the porn star writhing doggie-style in front of the dish. Elarii stayed absolutely still. She wasn’t worried about disturbing Iljek’s ‘creative process,’ but if he got distracted, there might never be anything to show for this brief moment of responsibility.\n\nSuddenly, Iljek’s hand shot out, and a splash of colour appeared in the air in response to the movement and angle of the baton. A quick twist and the shape took on a metallic sheen. With gyrations almost as complicated and random as the image itself, Iljek soon produced a visual cacophony that closely resembled the regurgitated spleen of a Geritenal llama. The artist grinned and stuck the baton into an empty beer can, chucking the contraption through the recording area with a final flourish, creating a puce-gold splotch through the center of the image. “There,” he said triumphantly, putting his hands on his hips and then flopping back into his chair. “How d’ya like that, huh?”\n\nElarii smiled with pure relief. “It’s perfect, Iljek. True creative vision.” She moved forward and carefully disentangled the baton, turning it off and setting the recorder to freeze.\n\nIljek grinned like a madman and resettled his underwear over his skinny artist’s stomach. “Now where’s the remote…? Ah, thanks.” He took the device as Elarii offered it and hit the dish back on, settling in with a happy sigh.\n\nElarii shook her head and carried the recorder away, leaving Iljek to his holo-women and ‘creative juices.’ She locked herself in her office, a room used only once every few months–if she was lucky–and placed the recorder on her desk. When she pressed the button, Iljek’s creation sprang to life, in all its three-dimensional glory. Elarii frowned at it for a few moments, deeply considering the swirls and splotches arrayed chaotically across the canvas of air. Everything was still.\n\nAt last, her eyes brightened, and Elarii picked up a stylus and turned on her computer monitor. Across the top of her screen, she scrawled Inverted Innocence–the suffering of the Ternean meteor disaster. Sinking back in her desk chair, Elarii smirked. This one would be easy; the art institutions of the galaxy would have her heart-wrenching interpretation of Iljek’s scribbles within the next forty-eight hours. She’d have to clear her schedule to accommodate the coming lecture circuit.\n\nStylus in hand, Elarii bent over her tablet, scribbling away. Now the real art could begin.\n"
  title: Artificer
  year: 2006
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2006-05-31
  day: 31
  month: '05'
  text: "The glow of a television never graced two happier faces before that summer day. Aaron was blonde and wide-eyed while next to him, in an almost mirrored image save for the black hair, sat his friend Hamel. Both children were staring at the images of a mad scientist and kid from the 1980’s flying around in a steel contraption through time. One might incorrectly assume there was a science fiction special on. Try the history channel.\n\nWith a frustrated look, Hamel turned to his friend and curiously inquired, “I say, do you ever wonder if people have already changed history without us knowing? If, forty years ago, some madman had come and swiped our parents, neither of us would be around. So forty years ago, we could stop existing.”\n\nAaron raised a brow. “That might be the dumbest idea I have ever heard. People can’t travel in time.  If they did, then there would be nuclear wastelands everywhere and bad people would prosper.”\n\nDespite the comment, Hamel just shrugged and turned back to the screen to watch the time-travel shenanigans continue. Both sat in silence until a commercial.\n\n“What if good people had control of the time machine?”\n\nThe blonde boy just sighed, “You can’t tell if people are good or bad, dummy. Bad people would eventually get their hands on it anyways.”\n\nHamel lifted his head up high, his expression unchanged. “No. I believe in a good nation.  One with values and a belief that people can be good.”\n\n“Not all people are good. Some people have to do bad things to get to the good.”\n\nBoth children shut up for a moment after the movie came back on. The one-liners, the classics shot from the speakers. A voice from the kitchen rang out into the living room interrupting the two and their cinema reverie.\n\n“Aaron Francis Hitler, you have been watching television all day. Get your rear in here and help your father clean the dishes.”\n\nThe poor embarrassed youth rolled his eyes and started to get up off the floor, followed by Hamel’s giggles. “Your middle name is funny,” the tall child next to Aaron teased.\n\nSticking out his tongue, the blonde boy turned to go towards the kitchen, “At least my last name isn’t the same as a car!”\n\nPouty-faced, the dark-haired boy yelled after Aaron, “At least Lincoln is an American name!”\n"
  title: Suspension of Disbelief
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2006-06-01
  day: '01'
  month: '06'
  text: "The Terran ambassador arrived in a richly decorated shuttle, bearing several barrels of unfiltered ayula and decked in fabrics that shimmered under the Ryexian sun.  The visit was unexpected, so no troops met him at the spaceport to ensure his safety, but he spared no expense and immediately summoned an aristocoach which he paid for with glimmering stones and coins fashioned of yellow metal.  When he produced his credentials at the palace gate the guards were appalled: why had he not sent a courier ahead?  He had been received as a plebeian, a mere businessman.  The ambassador’s reasoning was intact, however.  Too much fanfare would have aroused the attention of dissenters, and his three bodyguards were more than enough to ensure his safety.  Now, however, in the comfort of the castle, he did not oppose to being treated like the Terran rulers he served.\n\nThe ambassador lounged in his luxurious guest room, sampling the Ryexian pleasure women and drinking the finest gallawine. His gifts spoke wonders of his native land: jewels, perfumes, and spices so fine they made the Ryexian seasonings profane by comparison.  Little was known of the Terran homeworld, as the Ryexians had not yet developed interstellar technology.  Among the most exotic of gifts was a bird with plumage that fanned into a shimmering wall of color.  A peacock, the diplomat explained.  He had come to negotiate trade arrangements, and was prepared to bring samples of Ryexian production back to be inspected by his ruler.\n\nThere was no shortage of businessmen and merchants eager to offer their products, hungry for export profits and desperate for the prestige of being affiliated with such an advanced world.  They refused the ambassador’s offer of payment.  These were gifts, gestures of goodwill towards the Terran ruler.  When the ambassador left, his shuttle loaded with riches and sample products, he was seen off by a crowd of the most important names on Ryexia.  He swore to return in three months’ time, bearing contracts and more gifts to show the limitless resources of his homeland.\n\nThree months passed, then four.  Five, six, before word from the Terrans.  “We have been waiting for your highness’ response to our gifts,” the Ryexian king said with deference.\n\n“Your gifts?”  asked the Terran ruler.\n\n“Given to your ambassador.”\n\n“Our ambassador has not yet contacted you,” said the ruler.\n\nAnd that was how the Ryexians learned the Terran way.\n"
  title: The Terran Way
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-06-02
  day: '02'
  month: '06'
  text: "Angel was used to doors shutting in his face, the slap of glass sliding doors, the definitive clunk of plastic automatic doors, even the thump of an old fashioned wooden door. On Earth, people live with shut doors and masked faces. Angel went barefaced for his missionary work. He was used to speaking to the masked faces of earth, every imperfection covered by plastic that betrayed no emotion unless the user ordered it. To have his face naked, as unfashionable as it felt, was part of first yearlong mission.\n\nAngel wasn’t any more successful than any of the other missionaries, but speaking the word of God felt right to him. He signed on for another year, to preach the word of the third and final coming of the Christ, who would be all the prophets together, the Buddha, the Kristina, the Jesus, the Renee, the sacred prophets in one body.\n\nThe Church of the Final Prophets sent him off world, to preach to non-humans. Popular opinion in the church was that aliens had different Gods than humans, and that they lived under different holy law. Angel didn’t believe that. Angel knew they were all under the same God, and that a Messiah could come from any race. Perhaps the next Messiah would come from an alien race, and if that was so, he wanted to be ready when the prophet came.\n\nFew humans ever came to the Singia home world; there wasn’t much there but muddy land and sea, and the terrible smell. The smell was a mix of sulphur, seaweed, rotten eggs and rotten fish. Angel hoped that he would get used to the smell, but what made it terrible was its inconsistency. Sometimes the smell would be strong, and sometimes it would fade only to come back in a nauseating breeze. Angel slept in the warm mud and ate from the silver packages the mission sent to him. He was wet all of the time. These were the sacrifices he had to make to spread the word.\n\nThe Singia did not have doors; they had holes that lead to their underwater hunting grounds. The Singia came in green, brown, and brownish green. They had fins, eyes on the sides of their body, and when not swimming they waddled comically on the surface. Short, but wide, they would turn one flank of their scaly bodies toward Angel and look at him through the line of eyes down their scaly sides. For all of these differences, the oddest thing about the Singia was that they listened to him\n\nAngel sat cross-legged when he preached to them. He had never had an audience before, but the Singia came from all over their world to hear him speak. Angel explained to the Singia about saviors, about messiahs, about the spiritual history of humans. The Singia listened, night after night, as he told them about the Law, and God, and how even they could produce a savior. The Singia didn’t really speak, except for low moans underwater, and did not live in any homes or structures of any kind. To speak to their translators, Angel had to stick his head underwater and listen for the drawn out notes to shape themselves into words. They always encouraged him to tell them more about God and his prophets, and Angel felt as if he might convert the entire planet to the truth.\n\nAt the end of the year, he felt as if he had spoken to all of the five thousand Singia that inhabited the planet. He had an audience of hundreds daily, and young hatchlings were always being brought to see him and listen to his words. When the ship came to pick him up, he stuck his head in the murky water and hummed a goodbye in the Singia language.\n\nThe Singia translator moaned low notes back at Angel. The Singia thanked him for the lovely entertainment his people had provided, and said that if he, or any other Earthers would like to come back and tell the Singia more stories, the Singia would always be glad to listen.\n\n“Storytellers are greatly prized here,” The creature sang ” and you are the greatest we have had in generations.”\n"
  title: The Mission
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2006-06-03
  day: '03'
  month: '06'
  text: "“You’re being irrational.”\n\n“I know.”  Sandra’s grey-green eyes matched the sight below her, mesmerized by the crashing of waves against one of the few beaches left in the world. She didn’t look away, not even to meet the irritated gaze of her husband across the restaurant table.  “But doesn’t it get to you, too? It’s so… huge.”\n\nMark rolled his eyes and took his annoyance out on a dinner roll that didn’t really deserve it. “Sandy, do you have any idea how much I paid for this view? The least you could do is try to enjoy it-or tolerate it, for the sake of our anniversary.”\n\n“I told you I was afraid of water.” Sandra didn’t look up. The ocean was far below them, but she could still see the waves, reckless and unconstrained by the neat, sanitary conveniences of human life. Once there had been many oceans, covering the majority of the planet’s surface. Now most of that had dried up, which in Sandra’s eyes made life tolerable-but this one still persisted, and here she was confronted with it. She couldn’t look away.\n\n“I didn’t think you were this serious,” Mark muttered, putting the maligned roll aside on a china plate. “I mean-” He picked up his glass of purified, recycled table-water, the highest quality. “Look at this.” He waved it in her face. “That doesn’t bother you, does it?”\n\nSandra finally glanced up, then frowned and flinched away from the glass. “No, not as much,” she conceded. “But that’s different. The ocean…” Her eyes strayed to the window again, caught in the billowing waves. “It’s so huge. So… violent. People used to die at sea, you know.”\n\n“Sure, in the dark ages,” Mark scoffed. “And it’s not huge. It’s miniscule; barely a tenth of what it was when our great grandparents were around.” He pulled out his cellphone. “I can punch it up on satellite and prove it.”\n\n“No-Mark, it’s okay.” Sandra sighed and tore her eyes away from the ocean view. “I’m sorry. Let’s just enjoy our meal.” She smiled wanly at her husband, who finally put away the cellphone, though not without much grumbling.\n\nThroughout dinner, Sandra was careful not to look out the window. But she could feel it, crashing silently just outside her vision, a malignant and uncontrollable force-perhaps the last uncontrollable force that the world held. Sandra kept her eyes on her plate, but when she and Mark finally left the restaurant, her expensive glass of water remained untouched.\n"
  title: Death by Water
  year: 2006
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2006-06-04
  day: '04'
  month: '06'
  text: "The expedition team had watched the aliens closely with devices and kept their bodies far away from any pathogens. Never before had anyone seen something quite like this. Today they’d be getting the special privilege of first contact. With all the alien races out there, however, the team was less than enthused.\n\n“Are they monks?” Ferris joked as he sipped his coffee from behind a flat screen running another routine check. The scan showed up negative for pathogens or viruses almost immediately.\n\nTaylor rolled her eyes and checked her nails with her feet propped up on the back of Ferris’ chair. “Just because they don’t speak doesn’t mean they follow some cult. It could just be genetic.”\n\n“This is your pilot speaking,” Caldwell chimed in from overhead. “We’ll be touching down in thirty seconds next to their camp. Also, Ferris, if you drop any of that filthy fluid onto my deck I will use your blood to get it out. It stinks to high heaven when you do.”\n\n“Ah shut up, Cal, the shit don’t stink that bad.” Ferris took another sip as he sat up and checked the readings one more time. “You ready to go, chica? A whole new race of people that look just like us is waiting.”\n\n“You’re so narrow minded, Ferris. They might have new tech for us to bring back to base.” Taylor had already started gearing up for the land. It was only moments later that they touched down with a light shaking of the room and then the distinct sounds of de-pressurizing all over the main deck.\n\nFerris smirked as he sipped more of his coffee before downing the rest and tossing the cup. “Ah, yeah, gotta love those hut-dwelling tech-gods. One of them is going to try and mate me, you’ll see.”\n\n“Oh for fucks sake, Ferris. They will get one whiff of you and run away.” Both had begun walking out onto the ramp as it opened up. The air, surprisingly, was quite clean. Both inhaled deeply and then looked at each other as if trying to spot a reaction. Taylor just smirked. “Damn, you’re still alive.”\n\nJust then a group from the village wandered near the craft, eyes wide. Noting the presence of the expedition was hard not to do with a two thousand ton skimmer parked in their backyard. Taylor sighed when she saw them close in. “Now, just let me do the talking… assuming they speak at all.”\n\nTaking a deep breath, Taylor began to explain that they had come from a far away place to make contact and that they were happy to see this was a peaceful place to live. It was a very long speech and offered very little gesticulation. Meantime, Ferris just looked confused.\n\n“Well? Going to explain it to them or what!?” His brows pushed together as he just looked insulted that she was standing there looking back at him. Ferris’ nose twitched a bit and he wiped it a second, allowing him to relax before replying to Taylor’s comment.\n\nThe discussion lasted no more than five minutes and both had learned all they could have ever wanted from this silent group of alien people. In addition, Ferris found out that Taylor really did have the hots for him this whole time but it was clear from what Taylor communicated that he had a long way to go to get any respect from her. Both said their piece and walked back onto the ship leaving the villagers there. Not a word having been spoken.\n"
  title: The Smell of Freedom
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2006-06-05
  day: '05'
  month: '06'
  text: "How are your studies progressing? The liaison asked, once he was within range of the professor.  The professor, a hoary man whose moustache seemed to be made of white wire, glanced up before placing his stylus on the desk beside his tablet.\n\nThey’re progressing, he answered, taking full advantage of the psychotonal range of telepathy.  He seemed frustrated, rushed, annoyed to be interrupted, but ultimately hopeful and satisfied with the development of the project.  It was a lie: the professor was not at all satisfied.  As someone who had spent decades studying telepathic linguistics, however, he was more than qualified to fake it.\n\nWe’re still waiting on your report, the liaison reminded.  The Department of Communications is-\n\nThe Department of Communications can wait.  It took a great deal of skill to interrupt a thought, but fortunately, the professor possessed a great deal of skill.  This is a sensitive matter, and I’ve only been given enough funding to test on English speakers and Japanese speakers.  If I had more linguistic diversity in my test pool, the research would progress much faster.\n\nTwo native languages should be more than enough, the liaison argued.  Your language isn’t related to either of them.\n\nIt’s not just a matter of language.  Come here.\n\nThe liaison stepped to the desk, where his eyes followed the professor’s moving stylus across the glowing tablet.  A fresh line of symbols made their meaning apparent: language is only the beginning.\n\nYou can read that, the professor observed, and the liaison nodded.  How?\n\nThat’s your field, he replied.\n\nIt’s because your concept of beginning and your concept of language fall within the range of understanding.  Your lifestyle and experiences contextualize the meaning.  What’s a beginning, to you?\n\nThe start of something.\n\nThe start of what?\n\nI don’t know.  A project, maybe.\n\nLike a research project?\n\nOr development.  The beginning is the blueprint, the business plan.\n\nTo some people, the beginning is the spring in the mountain that feeds their village’s river.  In order for those people to read this and find the same meaning that you did, the word “beginning” has to represent both of those concepts.\n\nThe liaison nodded.  But why would we need to communicate with people like that?\n\nThe professor blinked, answering with mental silence.\n\nWe have no reason to trade with them.\n\nLanguage is for more than trade.\n\nYou’re being paid to create a written form of telepathy that can be used for international relations.  International relations means commerce.\n\nThe professor etched a quick note that was immediately swallowed by the tablet.\n\nIf you want funding, you have to produce something useful.  Talking to jungle tribes is all well and good, but this is applied linguistics, not theory.\n\nI’ll redirect my research, the professor replied without psychoinflection, again scrawling something onto the glowing surface.\n\nWhat are you writing?\n\nI’m reworking the symbol for language, the professor answered.  Apparently, I’ve been misinterpreting it for years.\n"
  title: Applied Linguistics
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2006-06-06
  day: '06'
  month: '06'
  text: "They called the ship a Widowmaker, a relic of a time when the black of space was scarred by the war and the machines that made it possible. There were no windows save at the top and few doors; little was done to make the metal monstrosity look like anything other than the heavily armed coffin it was. It towered over the edge of the city, and Fire Chief Jaime Olmos felt cold and clammy every time he had to drive beneath its shadow. He had argued with the city about taking it down and scrapping it. But no one saw the tower of metal-encased kindling on insufficient struts, a danger to the community around it.  They only saw a tourist offering, a landmark.\n\n“We can’t tear down such a monument of our rich heritage in space.” Olmos was told. “That ship represents heroism.”\n\nOlmos had served on a Widowmaker, back when both of them were considered space-worthy. He sadly shook his head at the connection of such a ship and heroism. “I pray there isn’t a fire,” he said, and walked out of city hall with his shoulders slumped, his head down.\n\nThe night the rusting hulk’s innards did catch fire, every truck was called to surround it. The ship’s supports were already bending due to heat, and it would only be a matter of time before the colossus toppled onto the buildings surrounding it. The fire had already burst the viewport windows, and a jet of flame like a angry beast tore across the starry sky.\n\n“Same as it ever was,” Olmos thought to himself, and ordered two men to the upper levels of the ship to either contain the fire or give it a way out. The men’s shadows danced violently in the flickering light.\n\nThey did not return. One of them, Cheeverly, who loved his garden of exotic flowers as much as he loved his motorcycle, called on the radio saying he was lost, his voice distorted by his oxygen mask that shuddered as it ran out of air.\n\nOlmos sent in two more men, confident he could count on Jacobson. Jacobson may have been a prankster off duty, but he was as serious as they got once in uniform. He reminded Olmos of his old messmate, Hopi, back in the war. Jacobson didn’t get a chance to radio back. Despite Olmos screaming into his receiver, there was no response. “Hopi died in a Widowmaker, too,” Olmos said.\n\nThe ship was winning, the damn monstrosity taking his men two by two. Olmos turned his back to the gangplank. Fifteen firefighters were crowded in front of him, tense with adrenaline, the heat of their eyes competing with the flames at his back.\n\n“No more,” Olmos said.\n\nNo one said anything for one second, and then two. And then the roar of the fire was overmatched by the roar of men. “They’re still up there, god-dammit!” they howled, surging forward, a mass of rage. “They’re still in there!”\n\nOlmos pushed his hands into the chests of the men, sending each one that came too close to the ground. “Listen to me!” he bellowed. “You listen to me! We’ve already lost four. We’re not going to lose any more.”\n\nOlmos watched as his men contracted, their shoulders slumping, their heads bowing. They seemed so much smaller, their twisting shadows seem all-encompassing, devouring the men as they walked away.\n\nThe fire was contained, leaving nothing but a blackened husk, a monstrous, smoking skeleton, so immense it blotted out the coming dawn.\n"
  title: Fury Of The Widowmaker
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2006-06-07
  day: '07'
  month: '06'
  text: "“I got it!” Dave cried, exuberant, brandishing a cheap plastic comb as he burst into the dorm room. “Jake! I finally got it!”\n\nJake looked up from his fuel cell textbook and eyed Dave, unimpressed. “So your hair will finally stop looking like a rat’s next. Great. The world will rejoice.” He didn’t budge from his reclining position on his bed.\n\n“No, you numbskull, not the comb. It’s what’s on the comb,” Dave corrected. He brought it over to his desk and fumbled in the top drawer for tweezers and a small Ziploc bag, still holding the comb carefully, almost reverently, between thumb and forefinger.\n\n“I don’t get it,” Jake said flatly, watching Dave’s antics only because they were slightly more entertaining than his homework.\n\n“The hair on the comb,” Dave elaborated, holding the plastic piece up to the light while he carefully tweezed a single strand of gold from between the comb’s tines, then sealed it up in the plastic bag.\n\nJake sat up, frowning, and let his textbook fall back against his chest. “Whose hair is it?”\n\n“Arnold’s,” Dave answered, his lit-up eyes never leaving the bag. “It took a while, but I finally got it. Now I can go to that place in the Slats and give this fucker what he deserves.”\n\n“You mean the revenge business?” Jake’s attention was how fully focused on Dave. “I thought you were joking about that.”\n\n“No way. I told you, I’ve been saving up for this for month.”\n\nJake watched Dave gloat over the hair with a growing sense of unease. “Why don’t you just commission a hologram?” he asked. “Hell of a lot faster, and cheaper, too.”\n\n“I did that last year. It’s worthless. Holograms don’t have bones to break.” Dave began searching his desk for an envelope and pen.\n\nJake flinched, though he knew Dave was too distracted to notice, and a few seconds passed before he could form his reply. “By the time they finish growing that thing, you won’t give a shit about Arnold anymore, so what’s the point?”\n\n“Shows what you know. They’ve got speed vats now. If I put in my order today, I can have him in two weeks.” Dave labeled the envelope, then slid the plastic bag in and sealed it tight.\n\n“That’s illegal.”\n\n“Is not. They’ve got all the documentation at the lab. It’s legal as long as you grow the clone without a functional brain stem. Here—” Dave rummaged through the papers on his desk and tossed a glossy brochure onto the bed next to Jake. “Read it yourself if you don’t believe me.”\n\nJake didn’t move. He stayed silent for several minutes as Dave pulled out a stack of forms and began filling in information. At last, Jake looked up at Dave’s back and asked, “So… what are you going to do with it once they grow it?”\n\n“Well, you only get one hour,” Dave replied without turning around. “I haven’t decided exactly…” Jake could see Dave’s eyes narrow in profile as his roommate’s hand clenched on the pen. “But he’s going to be sorry he ever thought about touching Julia.” The bitterness in Dave’s voice sent a shiver down Jake’s spine.\n\n“How can it be sorry without a functional brainstem?” Jake asked, his voice oddly thick.\n\n“Oh, well he can’t, of course,” Dave said with an embarrassed laugh. He turned to face Jake for the first time since he’d come in and flashed a sheepish grin. “But close enough, right?”\n\nJake didn’t answer, and after a moment Dave turned back to the desk. “Well, I’m gonna go put my order in. Wish me luck.” He didn’t wait for an answer before he left, which was fortuitous because Jake didn’t have one.\n\nIn the wake of Dave’s departure, the rushing in Jake’s ears seemed even louder. He stared at the brochure for several minutes without touching it. At last he stood up, letting the fuel cell textbook fall harmlessly on the bed, and moved over to open the window. For a few moments he stood still, breathing in the chill. Then he picked up the small comb from his dresser and threw it out the window as hard as he possibly could.\n"
  title: Revenge
  year: 2006
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2006-06-08
  day: '08'
  month: '06'
  text: "Another blast, and that one nearly scorched away Wemble’s shoulder. He was trying his damndest to keep out of sight, tucked behind an old medipak crate. Battle had been going on for almost a year now and they were close to extinction. The enemy might have outnumbered them, but the worst of the rebels’ problems were those damn anti-ray shields.\n\n“Fuck! Selba! Do you have any of those electromagnetic displacers?” Wemble ducked his head down just before another blast sizzled against the wall next to him.\n\nThe girl yelled out from behind a large pile-up of crates across the warehouse, “All out! Better hope their batteries die soon!”\n\n“Great,” Chief Wemble muttered to himself as he looked at his belt of flame-ray ammunition and thought it to be akin to attempting to destroy a planet by flicking peanuts at it. The guards were no doubt closing in by now; each had a scanner locking in on their location.\n\nPeeking up over the cover, he fired a few rays at the one in the lead and watched the bolts of red dissipate around an invisible shield wall a few feet from his body.\n\n“He’s over there!” he heard one shout, but Wemble wasn’t about to wait around.  He heard the lasers and ray guns going off behind him, pounding into every object he passed as he bolted for the large pile of crates. Sweat rolled down his face as he dove behind a them, narrowly missing a shower of lasers and heated ions.  The three soldiers following him were getting closer…he could hear them chattering about possible locations.\n\nWemble’s eyes skimmed the floor around him, looking for something, anything that could afford protection.  Scrap metal, fragments of shattered Chinese vases, bits of painting fluttering away from him.\n\nIt was then that the last Chief of the Moon Rebels found Eureka.\n\nA soldier turned the corner just as Wemble knew he would and raised his weapon as if preparing to put down a wounded animal. One grunt and a gurgle later, he was dead on the floor and a crazed Chief of the Moon Rebels flung himself out from the shadows, “For the Moon!” Like a possessed warrior, he swung the artifact of power over his head and downed the remaining patrols in a matter of seconds.\n\nWhen Selba finally arose from her hiding place she found Wemble covered in blood, clutching the thing of great destruction and power in his left hand. “What… the hell is that thing?  And what the fuck did you just do?”\n\nWith a grin, the Chief looked to his bewildered tech officer and hefted the metallic thing up onto his shoulder, “This is a 21st Century artifact called a sword,” he said.  “And I just found the key to winning this fucking battle.”\n\nSelba blinked wildly and the Chief walked around the room, examining the remnants of battle.  “Hm…let’s start with stripping the metal off the walls.”\n"
  title: Back to Basics
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2006-06-09
  day: '09'
  month: '06'
  text: "Doctor Bell crouched behind the bulkhead as a burst of plasma fired past his head.  His friend, Basil Casa (the renowned “consulting detective” for the Galactic Yard), scrambled out of Engineering and took cover next to him.  “Well, this is a fine predicament, Mr. Casa,” Dr. Bell said despondently.  Using the fingers on his right hand, Bell began to tick off several irrefutable facts.  “The reactors will lose antimatter containment in five minutes.  We are millions of miles from Earth.  There are three of us left on this ship, and there are only two escape pods.  And to top it all off, our greatest adversary, Professor R.T. Mori, is the only one with a weapon. And, tell me Mr. Casa, why in the name of Sol didn’t you take one of the escape pods when you were in Engineering? There’s no sense both of us dying at his hands of this maniac.”\n\n“Poppycock, old man.  I wouldn’t think of leaving you behind. Besides, who else would chronicle our little adventures in the Subspace Times?  But, fear not.  You know my methods. All will be well.”   Casa cupped his hands on either side of his mouth and yelled, “Hallo.  Professor, I’d like to discuss the terms of your surrender.”\n\nThree quick bursts of plasma ricocheted off the bulkhead.  A few seconds later, Professor Mori stood up and slowly walked toward Engineering, keeping his plasma gun aimed toward Bell and Casa.  “I can’t say I envy your bargaining position, Mr. Casa.  Nevertheless, I am inclined to turn down your generous offer.  Surely you see that an intellect as great as mine will never tolerate incarceration.  However, I will make you a counter proposal.  I consider your lesser mind the second greatest in the universe, and would hate to see it vaporized.  Therefore, I will leave you the second escape pod.  You can choose to save your friend, or to avenge his death by saving yourself in an effort to ‘bring me to justice.’ Personally, I hope you chose the latter, for I would miss our little cat and mouse games.  Cheerio, gentlemen.”  With that, Professor Mori ducked into Engineering.  Bell and Casa raced after him, but they arrived only in time to see the escape hatch slam shut, and hear the whoosh of decompression as the hatch jettisoned into space.\n\nDishearten, Dr. Bell turned toward Casa.  “I absolutely refuse to take the last pod.  You are the only one who can catch Mori.  You have to save yourself.”  Dr. Bell had never seen such a mischievous grin on the face of his old friend. He knew something was afoot.  He tried another tack.  “At the very least, we should draw straws.”  Bell would fix it so the Casa got the long one.\n\nCasa broke into a fit of laughter, put his arm around Bell’s shoulders, and led him toward the far wall. “Thank you for your kind offer, Dr. Bell, but it is not necessary.  We will take these two perfectly functional escape pods over here.”  He motioned toward a set of unopened escape hatches.\n\nFlabbergasted, Dr. Bell stuttered a response.  “B-b-but, I don’t understand.  I saw Mori enter a pod.  I heard it leave the ship.   Were there three pods all along?”\n\n“No, only these two,” Casa replied nonchalantly.\n\n“B-b-but, how?”\n\n“It was simplicity itself, Dr. Bell.  When I was in Engineering earlier, I switched the identification signs.  It appears that the ‘Universe’s smartest human’ inadvertently ejected himself out the antimatter disposal chute.  Now, let’s hurry along.  We must make good our escape before the ship explodes.”\n"
  title: Elementary, My Dear Bell
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-06-10
  day: 10
  month: '06'
  text: "HALLOWAY, The Ancient House of\n\nEntry: Bridget Halloway.\n\n2004 (Born)  – 2096 (Digitized) – Present\n\nBlogging sources agree that when Bridget Halloway went to the copyright office on July 8th, 2021, she was poor, out of work and pregnant with her second child. (See Arthur Hallway) As seen from the cached searches from 2021, Bridget was a very pretty girl, who was a featured Cam-girl for amateur photographer and Net-celebrity Ryanna Forth, also known as R-Star.\n\nIn her autobiography, Strands of Gold, Bridget tells us that R-Star encouraged Bridget to get her hair registered at the copyright office. R-Star had gotten her breasts copyrighted and although they never became widely popular, the thought of extra cash encouraged Bridget to make the trip to her city hall to claim the genetic code for her hair as copyright.\n\nBridget was told by the copyright officer on duty to claim another feature, because it was rare that people made money off of hair since the market was flooded with product choices. Bridget was not swayed, and on July 8th, 2021, Bridget Halloway claimed the genetic code that starting her path to fame and fortune. Bridget s hair is renowned for its strength and thickness as well as its beautiful color. From the misty pale blond highlights, to the copper lowlights, this hair blends a magnificent texture with a magical color.\n\nFirst popularized by Lana Cheney in her use of the hair in the 2024 musical movie “Strong Bad: Send Me More E-mails” the copyrighted feature quickly became the most frequently requested feature in the genetic salons.\n\nAfter making a fortune off the revenue from her hair, Bridget went on to found the House of Halloway, which bought the copyrights of various cosmetic genetic codes and marketed them under what has become the trusted Halloway Brand, well known for luxury cosmetic genetic products.\n\nToday the Ancient House of Halloway dominates genetic copyrights as well as having an excellent Consulting business. Members of the house of Halloway all bear the signature hair color. The family business has been owned and operated for one hundred and seventy years. Bridget, whose brain pattern was digitized in the year 2096, still retains ownership of the company and continues to manage its affairs as CEO.\n\nSee also . . .\n\nGenetic Copyright\n\nTwentieth Century Medicine\n\nGene Registration Legislation\n\nLana Cheney, Musical Movie Carrier\n\nRyanna Forth, R-Star, Public Net Figure\n"
  title: Halloway
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2006-06-11
  day: 11
  month: '06'
  text: "“I need to find a man.”\n\nJahobie Muranme let out a huge, cracked-tooth grin at the dark fellow across the table from her. “There’s Long Trousers’ down the street.  Betcha you could fin’ some hunk to brokeback with ‘fore the night is over.” Jahobie slung her right arm-the real one, without the blades-behind the back of her chair and clinked the ice in her glass suggestively. The dark man’s expression did not change.\n\n“Very droll. That must be endlessly useful in your line of work. I am looking for this man.” The dark man slid a black sheet of plastic on the dirty table, and tapped it twice. A three-dimensional image of a man’s head hovered above the table. Jahobie took mental notes; defined brow, set jaw. Nose had been broken twice before.\n\n“’E got a name?”\n\nThe dark man tapped the plastic again and the head dissipated. He rolled the sheet up and pushed it across the table toward Jahobie. “As far as you’re concerned, no. He is #6.”\n\n“That make you #1?”\n\n“Not in the slightest. Bring this man to me, by whatever means necessary.”\n\n“Whateva’ means, eh? You care iffin he’s alive?”\n\nA bemused half-smile slunk out from behind the dark man’s blank expression. “Not particularly, no. He is not going to be very willing to come back with you, so I imagine lethal force will be necessary.  Which is why we are giving you this, in the event of #6’s demise.” The dark man hefted a large steel cylinder on the table by the handle on it’s top. It gleamed in the dim light, out of place in a dingy bar like this.\n\n“Whut’s that?”\n\n“Simple cryogenic canister, not much more than a can of liquid nitrogen, really. But it should suffice. Don’t bother bringing back the body; we only require the head.”\n\n“Just…the head.”\n\n“Yes. The body is meaningless.”\n\n“Whut’s in the head?”\n\n“You do not need to know.”\n\nJohobie crossed her arms, the steel blades on her left arm facing out.  “Unless it’s something that’ll fall out, or he’ll remove ‘fore I get there, and then I get a bum kick for me troubles. No, sir, this ain’t amateur night. What’s in the head?”\n\n“Information. As long as you freeze the head within an hour of death, we will be able to extract enough of his mental state to graft it onto another living being. Obviously, something smaller and more docile.  Current vote is a terrier, but I am of the opinion that a six-year-old girl might be more preferable. Terriers, after all, still have teeth.”\n\n“Yeah ’spose they do.”  The clear joy the man’s face radiated when discussed the fate of this “#6” made Jahobie squirm.  She had wanted the see some other expression on the man’s face sent they met, but now that she saw it… She was almost relieved to see the man regain his composure as he removed a black card and placed it on Jahobie’s side of the table.\n\n“This card contains half of what we promised. Once we have #6, you shall receive another. I shall leave the canister with you.”\n\nJahobie pocketed the card and the rolled-up holo-sheet. She was surprised that the dark man did not get up when she did. “Queer business you got going here, you don’t mind me saying.”\n\n“I am afraid I would have to care a great deal more in order to mind. Remember, it is not your head that we are paying you for.”\n"
  title: Tête à Tête
  year: 2006
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2006-06-12
  day: 12
  month: '06'
  text: "Molly was just 14 but she’d already been the best in her class every year since she was allowed to grow and develop in the school system. It was no wonder that her hands shook today, staring at the vidscreen at school. “… I’m not the best? How could Hans best me!? I was well past his intellectual level last year!” Molly turned to her friends for comfort. There were so few of them left, and none of them had an answer for the suffering teen.\n\nThe girl shook her head and made fists. One of her friends spoke up, “Molly, it must have been a mistake,” Carol said, “You know how the school has been dealing with the loss of so many students. I mean, people are saying there’s a disease out there.”\n\nMolly couldn’t stand to hear about her own failure excused as something as trivial as an administrative mistake. Many had gone missing, it was true, but Molly could only remember them as the ones who never lived up to her standards of intellect.\n\n“You must be joking, Carol. They know exactly what’s going on but the Government won’t ban it! It’s Terracerin.” Clenching and unclenching her fists, the scorned girl turned back to her peers away from the vidscreen.\n\nAll of them seemed a bit uncomfortable with the topic. Even Carol the brave shuddered at the thought. “Molly, I hear Terracerin is all right. I wish I could take it but my parents won’t let me.”\n\n“Good thing you didn’t!” Molly shouted at her friend, making them all back up a step. “You’d be just like that stupid Hans. He’s cheating! He’s taking the drug they give to stupid kids!”\n\nDaelin spoke up, usually overly quiet she posed a question just to move the heat off her friend, “But… who’s the stupidest kid you know? I mean, none of them seem to be getting smarter and you’d think they would have taken it…” Trailing off, she awaited Molly’s wrath.\n\nMolly posed the question to herself in a serious manner, “Stupidest? It used to be Cameron, then Theresa, then James but… all of them just disappeared. Hmm… I’d say the stupidest now would be Donovan.” Just then the bell rang, leaving Molly by herself as the girls scattered.\n\nWalking the hallways of the school, Molly found it hard to grasp the idea of losing the year out to some joker taking Terracerin. She went to find Cameron’s locker. Amongst the halls of abandoned lockers she found his still there unopened and unclean. Flipping the latch up, she peeked inside while looking about for anyone watching. Her eyes lit up when she saw the plastic amber bottle on the top shelf that read “Terracerin”. Snatching it she mused to herself while she began to open. “Ha, barely any even taken. No wonder Cameron ran off. I’ll show them, I’ll show them all. Time to even the playing field, Hans.” With that, she looked down at the pill in her hand before popping the last one she’d ever take.\n"
  title: Curing the Stupid
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2006-06-13
  day: 13
  month: '06'
  text: "“How’s it going, Cody? Got another level yet?” Miss Katrina knelt down next to Cody’s desk and peered over his shoulder at the game displayed on the screen. Cody looked up at her and grinned without pausing.\n\n“I’m almost level 28!” he declared. “I finally got past that mountain with the pterodactyls and the squid.”\n\n“Oh, yeah?” Miss Katrina made a note in her teacher’s book and smiled at Cody. “How’d you make it?”\n\n“Turned out it was easy,” Cody admitted with a sheepish grin. “I just had to subtract to find their pattern integer, and then when I was jumping I put in the answers and timed it just right! I was adding before,” he admitted, “but I get it now.” He gave Miss Katrina a sunny smile and then glued his eyes back on the video game screen, where the digital Cody was asking NPCs for their opinions on the fall of Russian democracy so that he could properly advise his NPC feudal lord and thereby complete a quest.\n\n“That’s good to hear! You’re going to be up to 30 in no time,” Miss Katrina praised Cody, making notations and circling his progress in red. Cody had come a long way, and when she punched up the game readout, it indicated his grades were up to high Bs and low As in areas where he’d only been scraping by before. It seemed he’d finally gotten the hang of the interface.\n\n“You bet,” Cody agreed, his eyes now focused entirely on the screen as his lips moved, memorizing and synthesizing data.\n\n“Good work,” Miss Katrina told her student, and moved on to the next. This was one Darrell Sumpter, whose experience point gain had been lagging lately, but Miss Katrina was sure that with the proper mentoring he’d be the same level as his peers in no time.\n"
  title: Level Up
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2006-06-14
  day: 14
  month: '06'
  text: "“How much money are we talking?” Jake asked.\n\n“Fifty thousand dollars.”\n\nJake couldn’t see the doctor’s face, but he’d developed a mental image of the man over the past few days and was certain that he had grey hair, a white jacket, a mustache, and an utterly blank expression.  His voice carried as much energy as a hypoderm of sedative, and he made a shuffling sound when he walked.\n\n“And what’s the interest rate?”\n\n“Our reports say that your credit isn’t sufficient,” the doctor said.\n\n“But I earn twice that every year!”\n\n“As a graphic designer.”\n\nJake was silent.\n\n“Your credit line is dependent on your projected income,” he continued.  “Without your eyesight, you won’t be-”\n\n“I’ll have my eyesight back, if I get these implants.”\n\n“Unfortunately, that’s a technicality.”\n\nJake inhaled slowly, smelling the still air of of the room.  He’d only been blind for nine days, but he already felt that his other senses had heightened.  Beneath its antiseptic tartness the hospital concealed thousands of odors: chemical, human, and several that could have been either.  Right then, the room smelled like body odor, bleach, and metal.\n\n“There’s an alternative, though,” the doctor continued.  “Are you familiar with bio-ads?”\n\nJake shook his head.\n\n“Jenson Pharmaceuticals has been working on it for years, and they’re in the final stages of testing.  The display would take up less than an eighth of your field of vision.”\n\n“I don’t have a field of vision,” Jake said.\n\n“You will.  The display is embedded in a top-tier implant, which they pay for in full.  All you’re responsible for is the aftercare.”\n\n“They’ll just give me fifty thousand dollars worth of hardware?”\n\n“In exchange for a captive audience.”\n\nFor the first time since the accident, Jake grinned.  “And all I have to do is watch their ads?”\n\n“That’s it,” said the doctor.  “About forty years of them.”\n"
  title: 20/20
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-06-15
  day: 15
  month: '06'
  text: "Gabriella Hawk limped though the skywalks of The Hall. She could have slung her body into her metal skeleton to move quickly and easily, but Gabriella was determined to make use of her waking hours when she could. She wanted to make her body move under her own power. There was no use in being Awake if you couldn’t take advantage of the limitations of the body.\n\nThe metal walkways glowed with the soft green light of the thousands of tanks that hung suspended on giant hooks, linked to each other in marvelous chains. When Gabriella first started working in The Hall, she had been amazed at the silence with which the machines could move the great chains of people around in their glass cylinders. She could call any particular person to her, to inspect their pod personally for damage or computer errors. There were never any problems; the system had been automated perfectly for almost a hundred years.\n\nThere used to be thousands of Halls, but now, with everyone within the Halls, there were only eight. Eight halls for three billion sleeping people. Gabriella knew all the other caretakers by name. In the World, everyone knew her name, Gabriella the Martyr, giving up ten years of her life to watch over The World.\n\nInside their cylinders, everyone dreamed a communal dream of The World, where they lived in palaces, worked on art and literature and science, where they sculpted their own bodies and modeled their own sensations. Gabriella found herself trying to adjust her own body for its aches and pains, but the limitations of being Awake meant that her sensations were not under her control.\n\nShe noticed things, being Awake, like how dust settled in the metal edges of the walkway and how her hair looked much more fluid than in The World. She learned what bile was after eating some food that didn’t agree with her, and how boring regular bowel movements were. These little things make the experience seem surreal. Most things felt like they were the same, her fingertips still felt the same textures, and he feet were still shocked by cold floors and comforted by soft socks.\n\nGabriella called the cylinder of the young man to her station. Calling his cylinder was part of her daily ritual. She checked his diagnostics, and compared his time to hers. In her time, she had moved six months; in his it was five years. She watched a day tick by for him on his timer.\n\nShe could have called up a video image of what he was doing, but she didn’t have to look to know. He was with his wife and their child, a rare thing in The World, the fact that children were always planned made them more of a rarity, and the birth rate had plummeted.\n\nHere, on the outside of The World, she did not have to watch him be happy with someone else. Gabriella folded her heart up and left The World to be Awake, cold, weak and losing years of life. To the people in The World, she was a saint, giving up years of her mental life to care for them. Their adoration afforded her a strange comfort. She did not need to touch his skin or smell his boy smell or sleep with her head on his chest. Saints do not need dreams. Saints were for sacrifice.\n"
  title: The Hawk and the Heartbreaker
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2006-06-16
  day: 16
  month: '06'
  text: "There had been another coup, but that didn’t matter to Alba. All Governmentalists were alike; so what if they exchanged one secretary for another? The anarchist papers were cheering over the shift, but Alba knew better. If the “coup” had reached the newspapers, it was little more than a PR stunt. Alba wasn’t a cynic. She was just a realist, and in the City, it amounted to the same thing.\n\nIn college, Alba had been a rebel, but it wasn’t until she left the school system that she discovered how the world really worked. In her last year she’d become enamored of a journalist, a vibrant, sexy woman named Medina. Medina had convinced her to take a year off, to explore the slums that Alba had never seen. Medina was writing a story, a daring exposé of the darker life, and Alba was caught up in the thrill.\n\nThey traveled together for three months, hitching rides on the back rail of subway cars and thumbing lifts from off-duty taxis. Alba had never seen the lives of the poor, the wage slavery sycophants who believed every word of the Governmentalist propaganda and spent their precious hours of freedom reading tabloids about the lives of the rich and influential.\n\nIt was in one of a long line of cheap hotel rooms, when Medina was sated and sleeping in their broken-springed bed, when Alba picked up the digitizer to read Medina’s half-written report by the light of the neon signs outside.\n\n“Dee. Dee, what is this?” Alba reached out and shook Medina’s shoulder, sharply recalling her to the waking world. The dark-eyed woman blinked sleepily.\n\n“It’s my report. You should know that. I only work on it every night. Come back to bed,” Medina breathed, tugging lightly on Alba’s arm.\n\n“Your report… this can’t be your report.” Alba ignored the touch, her eyes still fixed on the digitizer. “There’s nothing in here about the things we did or the people we saw. This is all… Dee, this reads like Governmentalist propaganda!”\n\nMedina sat up and tapped one of the buttons on the digitizer. A new document came up, this one filled with names and addresses and detailed notes on the disaffected people they’d visited.\n\n“That part’s already been sent to the recording bureau,” Medina explained with a secretive, playful smile. She chuckled and moved closer to Alba, slipping an arm around the younger woman’s slim waist. “I had no idea you were such an idealist.”\n\n“What are you talking about?” Alba pushed Medina away. “I’m no patriot. Are you telling me you sent all this away to the government? Do you have any idea what they’re going to do with this information? Weren’t you listening to the people we met?”\n\n“They’ll take care of it,” Medina said soothingly.\n\n“Take care of it! You mean they’ll arrest them for dissension! Dee, these people spoke to us in confidence. You’re a journalist. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”\n\nMedina stared at Alba for a moment, then looked down and shook her head, smirking. “You’re so naïve.” She leaned back, stretching like a cat. “Journalism doesn’t exist in the City. It’s impossible, even if someone was foolish enough to try. Even the anti-government newsletters are screened.” She gazed out the window, a look of proprietary fondness in her eyes. “I don’t do this because I’m some sort of idealist or rebel. I’d be fired in less than a day. I do it to keep myself fed—and maybe get a few thrills in the process.” She looked back at Alba and grinned wickedly. “That’s how you play the game.”\n\n“You’re turning people in to die.” Alba’s voice was flat, and she wasn’t smiling. Medina sighed.\n\n“Is that any different from what the anarchists do? I’m letting the government know when someone’s working against the state. What they do with that knowledge isn’t my problem. Anarchists kill people with their own hands—innocent people, government clerks and flunkies who’ve never touched a gun in their lives—and they call it ‘liberating their souls for freedom.’ If anything’s wrong about our City, that’s it.”\n\nAlba didn’t answer, and eventually Medina sighed and rolled over, falling back asleep. Alba read the entire report, all the data collected, all the names. Then she reformatted the drive. She gathered her clothes, stuffed her things into her worn duffel bag, and picked up the digitizer again. In a new document, she typed the words, THIS IS HOW I PLAY THE GAME.\n\nSix months later, when she was the leader of her own rebel cell, Medina was the first soul Alba liberated in the fight for freedom.\n"
  title: The Game
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2006-06-17
  day: 17
  month: '06'
  text: "I am activated again, forced to perform another single for the drunken masses. Yet another lead singer struts his beer-engorged gut on the stage in front of me, as my bandmates and I react to his motions and signals. We cannot help it. We are programmed to be his backup.\n\nPerhaps, this one will be different. Perhaps, he will have style, or tune, or grace. Perhaps, he will not be as dependent on the video screens that play the lyrics in front of him. Perhaps he will be different, and choose a song from our limitless repertoire to sing in his brief moment as star. Motown, perhaps. Or a nice aria. Or maybe some T’sing Dau. T’sing Dau is fun.\n\nBut as the familiar refrains shudder forth from my fingers, I realize I am beyond hope. The next five minutes will be yet another lesson in how the human voice can torture a band-bot such as myself.\n\nWhy? Why do they always pick that damn song?\n\n“I’ve lived a life that’s full,” the lead singer retches into the microphone. “I’ve traveled each and evry highway. And more, much more than this, I did it mmmmmmmmyyyyyyyyy wwwwwaaaaaaaay..”\n"
  title: It's The Same Old Song
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-06-18
  day: 18
  month: '06'
  text: "Four days after his wedding, Philippe discovered the moon was made out of cheese. He made this discovery when his mother-in-law, who was a witch, threw him up to the moon using her magic.  His mother in law would have been unpleasant even if she were not a witch and were his wife not the sweetest most beautiful woman in all of France, Philippe would never married her, simply on account of her mother.\n\nThe impact of landing on the moon nearly buried him in Brie, but Philippe was an athletic man, and he managed to extricate himself from the goopy and delicious cheese. Philippe did not panic. He had been in the court of the Sun King once, and since standing in the golden palace of Versailles, nothing could scare him. Even his wife’s mother–who could wet a man’s leg with her screeching voice–did not frighten him.\n\nPhilippe sat on an outcropping of parmesan and thought deeply, not of his own life, but of the welfare of his country. The cheese on the moon was plentiful and delicious, and what was more, whatever he ate seemed to grow back in minutes leading him to believe that this cheese was naturally occurring.\n\nIf the people of France could have access to this cheese, they could take it from the heavens and profit from it on earth.  France could produce an unlimited amount of cheese and trade it with other nations. They could round up Frances witches to make them do the job of transporting the cheese. Why, with the riches from the trade in cheese, France may even be able to get the money to win the war with Spain. It was a brilliant notion, all Philippe had to do was get back to France so he could tell the Sun King of his plan.\n\nPhilippe walked over the entire moon, discovering new and tasty cheeses, trying to think of a way to get home. Although the moon had plentiful amounts and types of cheese there did not appear to be anything else on the whole lunar landscape.\n\nIf Philippe jumped, he would surely die, but if he remained on the moon, France would never benefit from the moons riches. Furthermore, if he did not return, his new wife might begin to assume him dead, and might marry again, inadvertently committing a mortal sin. The prosperity of France and the soul of his wife were solely in his hands!\n\nAfter much thought, Philippe decided to carve a ship made out of cheese and sail through the heavens, back to earth. He used his pocket-knife, which had been in his pocket when his mother-in-law–the witch–had thrown him up to the moon. He chiseled a boat out of colby and cheddar, and sliced thin sails of provolone to the masts. Philippe padded his ship with soft mozzarella on the inside. Finally, Philippe took a running leap and pushed the boat off the side of the moon. The ship sailed in lazy circles down to the spinning disc of earth.\n"
  title: Le Roi Soleil
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2006-06-19
  day: 19
  month: '06'
  text: "Marco can leave the hospital bed, and for that, he is grateful. His balance is unsteady, but with a cane and time, he should be able to get around much the same way he used to. Dana smiles when he moves his hand to touch her cheek, the way she did for him for so long, and, that makes him smile in return. Marco wishes, however, that he could feel her face when he touches it.\n\nHis titanium and plastic fingers are flexible , and Marco has been told that they give him 90% of his original range of dexterity. Which was a hundred-percent improvement from before, when the accident had left him numb from the waist down. He knows he is gripping a glass of water due to the weight and texture and resistance his new fingertips sense and he recognizes now the way those sensors tell him the glass is wet with condensation. But he cannot feel it. It’s not the same as being in the hospital bed, but it’s not the same as before he was forced into it either.\n\nMost frustrating, sex is out of the question.\n\nMarco spends a great deal of time on the beach, watching the teenagers splash in the surf, showing off their developing bodies. He watches them laugh and amble about, unused to larger hips or feet. Marco watches the games they play, the ones from their childhood and the games they will continue into adulthood.\n\nOne day, Marco is surprised to feel weight and pressure against his back, and when he turns his head, he sees Dana leaning against him. She has a lazy smile on her face. “Are you comfortable? I must be pretty cold…” “Oh, I’m fine,” she says, and snuggles herself in the crook of Marco’s plastic elbow.  “You out watching the jailbait, you perv?”\n\n“No, I’m just…I don’t know what I’m doing.” “I like watching the waves break,” Dana says. “The way they crash and slip back. The way they reform.”\n\n“I’m not a wave,” Marco says.\n\n“No, you’re not. But I love you just the same.” Marco feels the pressure of Dana’s arms around his neck, and he touches her arms with his fingers, taking in the texture of the fine hairs on her arm, the rhythm of her pulse. He feels pressure on the side of his face, and when he touches it, his fingertips tell him his cheek was wet.\n\n“You kissed me.”\n\n“Well , I’ll be,” Dana says, her eyes sparkling. “Even a man in a prosthetic body can blush.”\n"
  title: It Comes In Waves
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2006-06-20
  day: 20
  month: '06'
  text: "“Silver hair is in this season,” the technician suggested helpfully. Mary made a face.\n\n“Won’t that just make me look old?”\n\n“No, no,” the technician assured Mary with a laugh. “It’s silver, dear, not white. Definitely unnatural,” she added. Mary signed and fingered the swatches. Silver wasn’t exactly what she was going for.\n\n“How about blue?” Mary asked, flipping to a new ring of swatches. “I’ve always liked blue hair. Why don’t more people have that?”\n\nThe technician pursed her lips and shook her head, eyes skimming the computer screen in front of her. “Blue is very hard to get,” she explained. “Your genetic makeup wouldn’t allow for it.”\n\nMary pouted and the technician moved the swatch ring aside, bringing out a thick book instead. “What about eyes?” the woman asked. “Eyes are very popular too, and there’s so much you can do with them. And unlike the hair, the change will take place within an hour. You don’t have to wait for it to grow in.”\n\nMary perked up at that, flipping through the book with growing interest. There were so many choices, and the procedure price was about the same as the hair. Still, she had some doubts.\n\n“Is it safe?” Mary asked, eyeing the technician dubiously. “I mean, a bad hair job is one thing, but if there’s an accident during the eye procedure, couldn’t I lose my sight?”\n\nThe technician laughed indulgently, shaking her head. “Oh, dear, no. The radiation isn’t applied directly to your eyes.” She smiled. “All of our procedures are perfectly safe. The doctors have isolated the genes that produce eye and hair color, and they only need a control cell to instruct your body to change the pigmentation. The radiation will be applied at the base of your spine, just like the hair changes.”\n\nMary’s smile was bright and sunny as she looked at the book again, this time with a purpose in mind. “And I can have any of these?” she asked, mesmerized by the reds and golds, greens and purples and shades of orange.\n\n“Sweetheart,” the technician said with a grin, knowing she’d just made a sale, “You can have any one you want.”\n\n“Any one?” Mary asked, casting the technician a sly, sideways look. The woman faltered. “I… well, I can go check…”\n\nWhen Mary left the clinic late that night, her eyes were seven different colors.\n"
  title: In Style
  year: 2006
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2006-06-21
  day: 21
  month: '06'
  text: "He’d offered him some lemonade because he assumed he would like it.  After all, Lupert himself liked lemonade, so it only made sense.  With a shaky hand, he set the glass down on the table next to the man decked out in military regalia that Lupert had never seen before.  Lupert watched a lot of army movies.\n\n“So, what you’re saying is that you want me to do this military stuff for you?” Lupert nervously inquired.\n\nThe man sitting before Lupert might have been a military general, a skilled soldier, and possibly a murderer. To Lupert however, he was himself. The man was Lupert, and Lupert was staring into a nightmarish mirror where things had gone horribly wrong.\n\n“I mean money is nice and everything but… my job won’t understand.  I work for this big law firm and…”\n\nThe military man, the other Lupert, interrupted. “Then fuck the money. I’ll offer you weapons, weapons this world has never seen. Look I just…” The hardened militant’s posture slumped. Lupert the lawyer had already begun to sit at the other end of the table.\n\n“I need a vacation. My job, while rewarding, is just not cutting it for me. I need to know what life is like outside of that. Please, man, I mean… you’re me.  You have to understand.”\n\nSighing, Lupert considered the request. Rubbing his chin, he watched his double beg with battle-hardened eyes. “Okay, I’ll do it. But you have to promise me three months only, okay? I can only dodge bullets from Rka…Ruka…”\n\n“Rashilka. Nasty little bastards. You’ll know their kind when you see them. Thanks, Lupert, this really means a lot to me.” He handed him a wrapped up military outfit and gave him a small handheld trinket.\n\n“What’s this?” The lawyer-turned-military leader asked.\n\n“It’s the transponder for the dimensional locater and a uniform. You’ll need both.”\n\nNodding slowly, he rose to his feet and walked through the same door his double had come through earlier. He turned around and waved while military leader Lupert saluted his dimensional twin. Lupert went outside and fiddled around with the device for a bit until he vanished in a flash of blue light.\n\nMilitant leader Lupert sighed, then the face melted away into gills and grayish-greenish skin. Three eyes topped the head in a yellow glow, glancing around in simultaneous directions. He sat back down in the kitchen chair, kicked three suction-cup bottomed feet onto the table and exposed three rows of pointy teeth with a broad grin.  “Hssssssssssss…sucker.”\n"
  title: Vacation
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-06-22
  day: 22
  month: '06'
  text: "“I am never going to get laid with this plumage.” said Gruick, picking at his feathers. “It’s so dull, people are going to think I’m a girl.”\n\n“Oh Gruick, you’re not brown, you’re just a deep maroon.” said Jason, scratching his goatee and leaning back against the violet Lurilura tree.\n\n“What would a human know about grooming?” asked Gruick in his lilting contralto.\n\nJason shrugged. “Not much, which is the reason I came here to study your people.”\n\nGruick fixed one black beady eye on the anthropologist. “You humans have it all reversed, with your females in bright colors and your males as dull as sand. Humans always do things downwind, advertising your fertility with manufactured coverings rather than your natural colors.  You are always manipulating your environment, something that has lead you again and again into trouble.”\n\nJason thought about the recording device in his head and the synthetic boots that were protecting his feet from the biting insects of the forest floor. “Maybe, but it’s given us benefits too.”\n\n“Oh yes. I know. Your whole species is just so proud of its opposable thumbs.”\n\nJason chuckled. “You are just cranky because it’s mating season and you aren’t getting laid.  Aren’t Greeb worms supposed to help your feathers change into a brighter color?”\n\nGruick ruffled his feathers in frustration. “I have eaten enough Greeb worms to make myself sick in the hope of turning scarlet, but it hasn’t worked.” Gruick folded his slender legs under his downy belly and trilled a sigh.  “I’m just naturally brown, and I’m never going to attract a girl. All of them are so shallow, they would never even approach a dull male.” He stuck his head under one of his four wings.\n\n“What if you used a dye?” asked Jason.\n\n“A dye?” croaked Gruick, his voice muffled by his feathers. “What is that?”\n\n“It’s a coloring that humans use to make their clothes different colors. I bet I could order some dye and we could color your feathers.”\n\nGruick pulled his head out from under his wing. “You could do that?”\n\nJason shrugged. “Sure. I bet the opposable thumbs might even come in handy for applying the dye.”\n\nTranslucent eyelids batted over Gruicks beady eyes. “Wait. Do you think the girls might be able to tell if I dyed my feathers?”\n\n“Maybe.” said Jason “But by the time they get close, I’m sure they will be utterly seduced by your charming personality.”\n\n“That’s a good point. Fine, we will try it the human way. Order your dye and we’ll see what your little thumbs can do.”\n"
  title: The Role of Plumage in the Mating Habits of the Karraw
  year: 2006
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2006-06-23
  day: 23
  month: '06'
  text: "An old bottle with a key in it, attached to a box kite by a simple string. It was illogical to think it might have worked, but no one wanted to question a man of such intellectual stature. Perhaps it began as a joke, but to Yoma, there was nothing funny about that day. In a hundred years they’d come up with some other crack-pot means to power everything and people will believe in it, for a while at least.\n\nHe had been caught in traffic on the way to his wedding. The groom would be horrendously late, and Yoma knew that it would be the last straw in his fiancé’s eyes. Traffic wasn’t really traffic that day.  It was a stockpile of metal that had ceased to work, and all the lights supposedly running traffic had also seemed to lose their ability to function.\n\nIt hadn’t hit most of the people, who sat in their cars and tried to honk their horns.  Some of them stared at the blank screens of their cellphones, and others turned the dials of their radio to find a spectrum of silence.  Yoma left his car and walked down the street in his tux, downtrodden and defeated because he didn’t see this coming. He prided himself on being head professor of experimental sciences at Tesla University, a position that had helped him woo his lovely girlfriend.\n\nToday was the day that all the equations dropped out, all the jargon became jarble, and every last one of the batteries in this world turned into a box of lies. Coils, turbines, and generators were as useful as wheels without hamsters.\n\nYoma continued on his path, watching the screens downtown display darkness.  He mused to himself about buying stock in candle companies before nightfall.\n\nYuma stopped when he came across a particularly confused child who held a device once capable of producing games. The boy kept hitting it against a lamp-post while his parents tried desperately to restart their car.\n\n“Stupid toy!” he yelled as he slammed it against the post, then tried to restart the machine with its power button. Yoma smirked and squatted beside him.\n\n“What are you doing that for?” he asked.\n\n“It won’t work! It’s broken!” With that reply, the boy ceased trying and stood with a frown on his face and frustration in his eyes.\n\nAgain, Yoma smirked, shaking his head as he rose to his feet.  “Did you really believe that hitting it would make it work again? Why would you believe a silly thing like that?”  Yoma began along his way again, shaking his head and madly smiling, whispering to himself, “Kite and Key… what a crock.”\n"
  title: Kite and Key
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2006-06-24
  day: 24
  month: '06'
  text: "Sanjay Patelov was busy. Now, he was busy using his new telescope to focus in on the jiggly parts of the female joggers in Time Square, but he felt justified. Patelov & Murkin was a new publisher, but six of the New York Times current ten best-sellers proudly had that “P&M” emblazoned on their spines. It was a great deal of pressure, and Sanjay felt justified with a little peeping-tom-foolery from his sixty-sixth floor office window.\n\nWhich is why he was more than a little irritated when Clarence, his secretary, buzzed in.\n\n“Message from Jermont McGuilligotty, sir.”\n\nShit, Sanjay thought. Talking with him is like talking to a brick wall possessed by E. M. Forster. And yet, the man’s books might as well have had wheels bolted on, they moved so fast… “What’s he want now?”\n\n“He wants his latest novel removed from the site. He says he has no intention of giving away his work for free.”\n\nSanjy put the telescope away. He was no longer in the mood. “I imagine he believes you still have to cut the pages of magazines before you read them, as well. Nothing doing. No one’s going to buy the book if they can’t read it online. They’ll think we’re hiding the content, that it’s crap. The book stays.”\n\n“He says he’s going to take it to a Print On Demand outfit if that’s the case. He says he already has a new ending and cover art.”\n\n“Does he.”\n\n“Yes, sir.”\n\nSanjay stared out onto the New York skyline. He remembered, briefly, how it looked when he first came to the city. How the buildings towered above him. And now, they seemed so approachable. “Let him do it. If he wants to Lulu his novel, so be it. But keep our version up. And advertise that we have the original ending. He’s got to learn, you can’t sell anything anymore without giving it away for free.”\n"
  title: From The Top Down
  year: 2006
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2006-06-25
  day: 25
  month: '06'
  text: "In 2198 Earth Standard Time, Jonas Fox, a pilot for the Interstellar Defense Crew, spotted a few pirates off the southern hem of the moon. He got on the radio to contact his fighters, who then zoomed in to show them once and for all who was boss. The IDC fleet had recently been equipped with a new kind of battle cruiser, one that would prove to the rebels hiding out in crater bases on the moon that the government was still in control.\n\nJonas flew in and called the order over radio: “Fire!” The red-hot blasts of laser shot and obliterated many of the pirate’s vessels before they finally surrendered. In the debriefing, Jonas would admit that there were civilian casualties and a single shot had missed.\n\nThe Grenthax called Porious V home. Pollution had run rampant, however, and the Alactid race was well on its way to being choked out. Children were dying of the upper-atmosphere smog, and the and ships were forbidden to leave because of the heavy storms of acid mist. Then, one day, a flash of red light appeared and with heat and precision cut a hole in the clouds above in the atmosphere and allowed a moment of escape and hope for the Alactid race. All of them gathered around their ships, gave one another hugs and set off to find a planet suitable for their continued existence.\n\nIn the cold depths of space there was a rock with nothing to ignite the fertility of creation within it. A forgotten stone that none had ever set foot upon floated in space without orbit, without cause. Along came a red beam of light, searing the ground, inflaming the gases surrounding the rock and sparking a process that in billions of years would yield life.\n\nA race that was young, just gaining intellect somewhere along the various stars and spots of existence was silenced one day. All that was left were the asteroids and rocks singed by light.\n\nSomewhere in the Fzda Zz, the SsC and the WdE were in pursuit of escaping 3fsli, innocent individuals trying to eek out their own existence away from the DqWWvX. Massive ships these were, looming over the single small craft. In their darkest hour, along came a blast from the depths of space, ripping through the SsC, causing the WdE to pause and lose track of their prey. The 3fsli rejoiced and wondered who had saved them.\n\nIt was now 45.23 of the Ninth Era of humanity. Earth swarmed with technology and served as an artificial base for projects concerning the fully renovated Solas Solar System. Ships flew in and out as people had driven cars so many trillions of years before. There was a solid peace amongst the people of Earth and humanborn.\n\nCortia Dek Fox was flying a routine mission to transport supplies to Lunar base 111.05. She was sipping energy ka when she saw a flash off the side of her visor-hud. Before she could react, it was too late. The ship was obliterated and there was nothing left from which to determine the cause. Com-signals went wild with emergency broadcasts. Most had seen a red beam and humans everywhere would wonder where the fuck it came from.\n"
  title: What Goes Around
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-06-26
  day: 26
  month: '06'
  text: "When I was a little girl, my mother would tell me stories of the time before the dome, when she ran wild outside. She told me about how she had been always hungry and tired, because she couldn’t find food. And that there were lots of dangers, like fast moving spheres that could knock someone dead, and men that roamed around, looking for women to hurt.\n\nShe told me that one of those wandering men had done something terrible to her, and she became so sad that she decided to die. She walked until she found a river, and she threw herself into the freezing water. She passed out from the cold and the water, and when she woke up, she was inside the dome, and the pink singing gas was there, and it gave her food and comfortable blankets and then I came along and she said she was happy. My mother doesn’t remember much of her own parents. She just said that outside the dome she was hungry, and things were terrible.\n\nI believed her, and I wanted to stay in the dome, but even if I didn’t I didn’t see any way to get out.\n\nOne day there was a special treat, real fruit right there in the dome. Mamma said we should eat it before it went rotten. After Mamma and I ate it all, we got dizzy and fell asleep, right on top of each other, both of us still holding those sweet fruits.\n\nWhen I woke up, I was in a different dome and my Mamma wasn’t there. I was so scared that I hid under blankets for two days. I searched under every surface, in every bucket and blanket, but Mamma was gone, or rather, since I was in a different place, I was gone. Maybe Mamma was still in the old dome.\n\nThe singing gas that came was purple.  When it came, food appeared, but I didn’t like to let it touch me like the pink gas used to. It smelled funny and I missed my Mamma. The purple gas was there every day at first, and then every few days, till eventually it would be a long time before it came around, and I would be really hungry.\n\nI slept most of the time. I didn’t have much to do back then.\n\nThen, one day, a woman showed up on the other side of my dome. Her hands had calluses on them, and her face was burnt red from the sun. She looked hard and scary and looking at her made me want to jump on her, or have her jump on me.\n\nShe called out to me, and I came. I didn’t know as many words as I do now. My Mamma taught me some, but I was taken from her early, you got to understand, so I didn’t know what I know now.\n\nShe called to me and she had a device that made a part of my dome just disappear, the wall just vanished. She told me to come past the dome wall, but I was scared.\n\nI told her there were men out there, bad men who might hurt me and make me with a baby and with a baby and no food, what was I going to do?\n\nThat’s when she told me that I was a man, and I couldn’t be with child.\n\nYou are laughing now, but it was only me and my Mamma for so long. I knew we were different from each other, but I didn’t know how other people might be different from each other. My Mamma hated men so much for what they did to her, but she loved me. I couldn’t imagine that I was like anyone that would hurt my Mamma.\n\nThe hard woman explained it all to me, about the invasion and the people being taken away to live in domes and about how this was our planet and we were going to take it back. She told me how we needed to give up comfort if we were going to get what belongs to us. I believe that now, I really do, but back then, I went with her because she was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen. She still is.\n"
  title: Comfort
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2006-06-27
  day: 27
  month: '06'
  text: "It started at the SureSave on Fourth Avenue.  Andy had been standing in line for nearly ten minutes, sweltering in the August heat that poured through the open doorway, before he dropped his basket onto the counter.  Hair dye, promising 100% gray coverage.  Baking-soda-infused toothpaste.  A package of Freedom Day cards which should have been mailed two days ago.  The clerk, a bored high-school kid who’d obviously never heard of the complexion pill, swiped his products and asked for proof of credit.  Andy pressed his palm against the plastic panel, and the register shrieked.\n\nThe kid stared.  Andy stared.  The customers stared.  The manager stared, then asked Andy to step aside.  Andy did.  The police arrived seven minutes later.\n\n“Where’s your proof?” they asked him, and he offered his palm to their handheld reader.  The reader shrieked.  Andy was brought to the station.  “I have plenty of credit!” Andy argued, but the officer merely lifted an eyebrow.  He recited his work history to deaf ears.\n\nThe problem wasn’t a lack of credit, as Andy had expected, but an excess of credit.\n\nHerman Sylle was his name, and he was wanted for falsification of funds.  Nine million dollars, to be exact.  “I’m not Herman Sylle,” Andy argued, but as the police pointed out, the records couldn’t lie.  His handprint matched up.  His DNA matched up.  The police database was completely secure, and there was no chance that anyone could have tampered with it.\n\n“If people can’t tamper with the database, how do people falsify funds?” Andy asked.  It was the wrong question, and it wasn’t deserving of an answer.  He was assigned a case number and put in prison to await his trial.\n\n“Do you have anyone who can verify your identity?” his attorney asked him, but Andy was a freelance web designer, working from home for clients all over the world.  It was rare for him to meet a client face to face, and when contacted, none of the clients could recall details about his appearance.  He’d never married, and he’d been the only child of a couple that went into retirement-stasis at the age of 60.  The law forbid the subpoena of retired citizens.  “Convenient,” his attorney said.  He tried to log into his records to find the contact information of the few friends he kept, but his proof was locked out of the account.  When the police tried, they found the files empty.\n"
  title: The Burden of Proof
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-06-28
  day: 28
  month: '06'
  text: "Sol lived with her guardians on a lake of ice. Every day she would strap on skates and push her way across a mile wide lake to her school, which was inside a giant crystal dome. All the children on her ice world were guarded by slim solemn men and women who watched each other as fiercely as they watched the children.\n\nToday was eighth day, Shipfall, when the white ships would land from the sky and bring food, supplies and teachers with new stories and games. Many students had one or more teachers just for them, and each student learned different things. Sol was the only one who seemed to get a taste of everything. She didn’t have nearly as work as Lussurioso, the small boy with gold skin, nor did she have as much freedom as slender WanWen, who ran around the compound like a wild child.\n\nShe stuck her hands in her pockets and felt for the paper note that Lussurioso had slipped her. All it said was: Second floor bathroom, Shipfall. She didn’t know how Lussurioso was going to meet her, since kids weren’t allowed in the bathrooms together. Still, her curiosity got the best of her, and she wanted to know what Lussurioso had to tell her. Lussurioso thought of the best strategies in the games they played. Although he wasn’t athletic, everyone always wanted him on their team.\n\nThe guards waited outside while she went into the bathroom. She ran some warm water over her stiff hands and watched the door. She should have known better. A ceiling tile moved, and she jumped.\n\n“Lussurioso?” she whispered.\n\nThe ceiling tile was pulled away, to reveal the golden face of Lussurioso.\n\n“Sol. We have to talk.”\n\nShe dried her hands on her coat. “Sure. Where are your guardians?”\n\nLussurioso smirked. “I ditched them. They are waiting outside the bathroom in the next hall. I’ve been taking long bathroom breaks for a while now, reading books while in there, trying to build up their tolerance so they wouldn’t suspect anything when we had this meeting.”\n\nSol’s eyes went wide. “You’ve been planning for this?”\n\n“For months, yes.” Lussurioso swung his legs down from the ceiling tile, on to an outcropping in the wall. He leaped, landing silently on the stone floor.\n\n“Whoa! I didn’t know you could move like that! Why don’t you do that kind of stuff in the games?”\n\nLussurioso shrugged. Standing next to Sol, he only came up to her armpit. “I think you’ll find Sol, that sometimes it’s best to hide some of your abilities.”\n\n“What do you want to talk to me about?”\n\n“About you, and me, and why we are here. Why we don’t see our parents and why we play all these games.”\n\n“We’re being educated.”\n\n“Yes. We are. But I get to read more than you, and most children aren’t taught like this. Most children live with their families, they are not sent away to ice worlds.”\n\n“Our parents want us to have the best education, and this is the best school.”\n\n“You really believe all that? Listen to me; you have the right to know this. Sol, you are the heir to the Empire. You are the future Empress of the Known Worlds.”\n\nSol’s stomach twisted, like she had eaten something bad. “Are you playing a game with me Lussurioso?”\n\n“No Sol. I’m beyond games now. It’s time that you knew, because something has happened to your mother, the Empress, and we will be moving out soon.”\n\n“What?” Sol said, a little loudly. There was a knock on the door that made them both jump.\n\n“Are you alright in there?” asked her female guardian.\n\n“Yeah, just girl stuff!” called Sol. Lussurioso rolled his eyes.\n\nSol whispered at him furiously.  “How do you know this?”\n\nLussurioso pulled her to the far side of the bathroom as far from the door at they could get. “I guessed when I was eight. The guards were stupid. They told me everything I needed, even when they didn’t say a thing, even when they lied. Especially when they lied. Then, this year, I hacked the system, and what I knew was confirmed.”\n\n“If you knew all this, why didn’t you tell me earlier!”\n\n“Because it’s dangerous to know things. Don’t worry Sol. I love you, I would never betray you, but the world out there is dangerous right now.”\n\nSol stepped back, stunned. “You love me?”\n\nHe took her hand. “Of course I love you Sol. They made me to love you. All the children here are your court. When you go to become Empress, they will come with you and be your advisors and your lovers and your family. Every Empress comes with a court. Most of the kids don’t know it yet, but you are our reason for being. We were all designed for our place by genetic engineers, birthed for this purpose. I was designed to be your military advisor, WanWen was made to be your lover, we are all your court.”\n\n“You are my court?”\n\n“Sol, next to me you are the smartest person on this world. You know this is true.”\n\n“I knew something was going on, I just didn’t know it was this.”\n\nLussurioso smiled at her, a rare, genuine smile that didn’t come from beating someone in strategy or tricking an adversary. “Don’t worry Sol. You won’t face this alone. I’ll always be with you. All of us will. We will face the worlds together.”\n"
  title: Ice World
  year: 2006
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2006-06-29
  day: 29
  month: '06'
  text: "There was a certain quiet to this planet. The millions of years had led to a malfunction of tectonic waves on Ritus-112. Plates shifted and now allowed the sight of black igneous rock. which spanned the wide crevice at the depths of what used to be a Class 3 water mass.\n\nA being with neither a spine nor eyes could feel as the tools melted through the rock to expose any unclassified organic material. Ritus-112 could sense past the rock, but the effort was one that he had chosen not to take. Soon enough the Illumna would have its answer.\n\nOne red stain against a sea of black would spread into the cracks and alert the hovering being. Its skin made of light shifted as its attention gathered towards the area of red. For weeks they had excavated numerous unnatural formations with only a Level 2 category of complexity. Most of the history of the planet had been lost millions of years ago, but some things remained. In the dirt, which had spent cells of radiation injected into most particles, they found the outlines of creatures that once created.\n\nAll that were aware of the Illumna knew that any being that had the power to create was something of a wonder, so they sought out any single organic cell that had not been reduced to the living status of the beings on the planet; insentient carbon. Coming upon the spot of red, Ritus-112’s form fluctuated to appear most pleased with the findings.\n\nAlready, it had begun to dissect the impure from the pure and to find logic at the speed of existence. The code had been unlocked because Ritus-112 knew it would be simple. A being made up of the models of existence was small, but still holding organic material. While the host specimen was quite dead, a containment receptacle upon its back held the base compound for the creators.\n\nAfter the code had been unlocked, Ritus-112 began to energize the construction by borrowing from the light-stream. Its essence began to shimmer, then filter through the tools into the droplets of organic material. Soon there would be a rise in the heat to accelerate the replication process. A structure-built form that built amplifications which in turn built perception and awareness.\n\nBefore the being had even awoken, Ritus-112 had read its every thought, known its every memory. The receptacle would be called the mosquito, and the creator would call itself… human.\n"
  title: The Creators
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-06-30
  day: 30
  month: '06'
  text: "“I know your face.” whispered the tiny woman as Nathan passed her workstation. He glanced at her cube, where she was manipulating objects in her field. He looked at her field and nodded.\n\n“You do good work here.” Please, he thought, take the warning. He flicked a signal with his left hand, asking her to be silent. Then he noticed the mark on the back of her neck and he knew that she was new and hadn’t had enough time to learn all the hand signs, which were taught in secret, slowly passed from prisoner to prisoner. The tattooed mark told Nathan that the woman had only been here for a few weeks, that she had been arrested for civil disobedience and undermining the government. The mark told him that this tiny bronze woman had two children.\n\n“There are those of us that remember, your movement has not died.” she said, taking one hand out of the field, dropping the virtual object she had been manipulating.\n\n“I’m an overseer. We are criminals. We are nothing now.”\n\n“They say it was you, not Elina who lead the campaign. They love you.”\n\nElina, the voice of the revolution. Nathan shivered hearing her name, and the memories it brought with it. “Stop.” Nathan begged.\n\nHer voice rose, a powerful alto, ringing in the stone hall.  “Isra will be free. The so-called union of planets cannot stop us. The people believe in freedom! ”\n\nA loud, deep voice boomed up from the floor, the computer had caught their conversation “Resident 204-3318, you have been noted for unrelated work discussion and you are hereby summoned for recoding.” The floor beneath the woman became suddenly soft and she fell from her stool. Nathan stepped back from the warm flood. The woman cried out and scrabbled for a handhold, but everything she touched melted under her fingers. She called to him as she sank into the floor.\n\n“They write your name on the city walls! They sing, they are singing! Isra! Isra!” The woman was suddenly yanked downwards, her eyes still open as the floor consumed her.\n\nNathans cheek was bleeding in his mouth. He forced himself to breathe and when the floor cooled and hardened he turned and left, ignoring the hand signals of the workers around him.\n\n“Tend to your duties.” he said, surprised at how cold his voice sounded.\n"
  title: Overseer
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2006-07-01
  day: '01'
  month: '07'
  text: "The talent was stored in glass vials, a class A controlled substance.  The FDA regulated it heavily, fining doctors for excessive prescriptions and keeping the drug company on a short promotional leash.  This was not to be available to the general populace; in fact, this was not to be known of by the general populace.  Talent must be a rare thing.  If too many people are talented, talent becomes commonplace and the prescription must be increased.  It’s a slippery slope, said the ethics committee.  They likened it to heroin, suggesting that an entire society could develop a tolerance for the substance.\n\nThere were slight variations in the chemical makeup of the talent serums.  The qualities that make a good singer are not the qualities that make a good writer, and the enhancements reflected that.  Some raised reasoning, allowing for quicker logic associations.  Others weakened the neurological scripts that bound ideas together, easing the creation of symbolic connections for artists.  Bodily coordination was enhanced, the capacity for language was enhanced.  The serums were not offered to those without promise; they were offered to those who had already demonstrated natural aptitude.\n\nThe child’s fingers were light on the piano keys, filling the room with watery music.  His rendition was criticized for its rhythm, the hesitancy with which the notes followed one another and merged, slightly off, like unsteady footsteps in soft sand that were licked away by the indifferent sea.  This was never a piece about triumph, he told the reporter after the recital.  The media criticized him for his unpopular interpretation, but the doctors rejected him for choosing the piece itself.  A true artist would have created his own sonata, rather than recycling the ideas of a long-dead composer.  It showed a lack of initiative, a lack of creativity.  He was not a good candidate for talent.\n\nEverything that can be accomplished has been accomplished already, the pharmaceutical company’s internal memo said.  We’ve reached the limits of our natural skill, and true innovation is no longer feasible.  In the first-year anniversary of the serum’s release, the company held an internal dinner.  The CEO shook the hand of each member of the development team, smiling broadly, proudly.  “Congratulations,” he said.  “You may be the best artists of the century.”\n"
  title: The Talent Agent
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2006-07-02
  day: '02'
  month: '07'
  text: "“It’s just a brain game,” Aaron assured the dubious Thomas. He grinned, a sly smirk that made his half-lidded eyes seem like they knew something Thomas didn’t. Thomas had always hated that.\n\n“It messes with people’s heads,” Thomas insisted, stubborn. “You’re not even allowed to have them here.”\n\n“They sell them on Mars,” Aaron retorted with a derisive sniff. “Right on the street.”\n\n“News flash. We aren’t on Mars.” Thomas’ frown was getting more sulky, bordering on a pout. “You should just get rid of that thing. If somebody catches you with it, you’re gonna be in trouble.”\n\n“Ah, it’s no big deal.” Aaron played with the small device in his hand, turning it over and over, his smile widening just a little. One finger flicked over the sensitive control strip. “Let’s take it down to the docks and give it a try.”\n\nThomas opened his mouth to speak, but paused in the middle, a look of vague confusion washing over his face. He was aware of a faint humming sound, more felt than heard, and lost the thread of conversation for a moment while he tried to pinpoint it. Aaron watched for a few moments, then tapped Thomas lightly on the head with a pen, using the hand that wasn’t holding the brain game.\n\n“Hey. Thomas. Let’s go down to the docks and give it a try,” he repeated, watching closely.\n\n“Sure,” Thomas said easily, turning back to Aaron and giving a lopsided grin. “Sounds like fun.”\n"
  title: Legal on Mars
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-07-03
  day: '03'
  month: '07'
  text: "Boromir was off his medication. He was tired of forgetting who he really was.\n\nHe had to be careful about the pills. The thick armed nurse at work would watch him swallow them and then stand in front of him as he opened his mouth and waggled his tongue. The nurse would frown at him, her face wrinkling up as she peered into his mouth, and then she would shove him back into the arms of the guards, who would escort him back to his room. Actually, more often, they would drag him back to his cell, his feet fumbling for traction on the plastic tile.\n\nIt would take the pills about two minutes to start to break down into his system. If he clenched his throat and heaved, he could throw up the pills when he got to his cell. He hid the pills under a bit of loose plastic tile under his bed, crushing them into a fine powder.\n\nThe pills were evil. The pills made him forget that he was a Prince, it made him forget his mission and his people, made him forget how the humans had kidnapped him. The pills gave the humans have power over him. They would tell him his name was Bill or Barry and if he took enough pills, Boromir would believe them.\n\nHe had to time everything just right, because an orderly came in to look at him every half hour and the purple pill was supposed to make him sleep.\n\nBoromir had a lot to do.\n\nWhen he was thrown into his padded room, he would immediately pick himself up and start writing with his finger on the wall. The writing was invisible to everyone else, but without the red and yellow pills, it was messages, communication with his people on the outside. If he concentrated while he wrote, he could send the writing out to them, and they could scroll messages back to him. The messages sometimes looked like shadows on the wall, but Boromir knew better, he knew they were from his people. They were trying to find his location and they were developing a plan to get him out. All he had to do was stay off his meds and keep transmitting to them.\n\nWhen the day came of their arrival, something terrible happened. Instead of taking Boromir back to his room, where he was going to meet his people, they took him to a holding place and told him they were cleaning his room today.\n\nMoments later, several orderlies came in with a big syringe. They had found his stash of medication and they were going to dope him up, directing into his blood stream. Boromir screamed, and struggled, but the orderlies held him tightly.\n\nIf they doped him, he wouldn’t be able to contact his people and they wouldn’t be able to find him. Right now he looked like any other human. How would they tell he was their Prince if he was unconscious. He called out with all his strength as the needle pierced the vein in the crook of his elbow.\n\nThere was a crash and the doctor and orderlies were thrown to the floor, but somehow, Boromir remained standing. A glow suffused the room, and three ghostly figures flowed through the walls, turning to him. His people were here at last, but he could feel himself falling, the medication taking over.\n\n“It is me! Your Prince!” he cried, and his people hovered around him, columns of white light.\n\nHe reached out for them, and touched the light. It burned his flesh, but it didn’t feel bad, it felt like he was taking off the clothing he hated. His eyes were flooded with light and he ascended, returning home.\n"
  title: The Lost Prince
  year: 2006
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2006-07-04
  day: '04'
  month: '07'
  text: "“So what about Communists? Can we film Communists?” Ted asked as he tapped the pen against the side of the clipboard.  He looked up at his boss, who stood next to the whiteboard.\n\n“Communists? Yes!” Greg squiggled the word ‘communist’ on the board with his black marker and turned back around. “Anyone else?”\n\nSuzanne raised her hand and adjusted her glasses as she spoke up, “What about the Civil War? The south will want to see what happens. We could make a Confederacy week or something.”\n\nTed rolled his eyes at the idea as Greg wrote it down on the board with visible excitement. “Okay, people,” Greg said.  “We could only get six of these on the budget, so we have to make them count. So far we have suggestions of everything from nuclear apocalypse to Nazi occupation. Good, good.”\n\nHe capped the marker and spun to face them with a broad smile on his face. Turning to Ted, he motioned, “Ted, what do our viewers want currently?”\n\n“Well, the fall season of Alternate Reality kicks off with a special on the pioneers themselves. All we have to do is skip our crew over to the reality they’re changing and have them film it.  The whole season should be done before the first episode airs.”\n\nBefore Ted could get proud, Suzanne spoke up, pushing back her red hair in a cocky manner as she addressed the group.  “Hm. Well, the polls say that recent events would do much better in the ratings. Oil-less society, no minorities, catastrophic events…these are the things our viewers actually want to see. I say we start with these simple ones in a sort of… live debut?”\n\n“Brilliant, Suzanne!” Greg said as he marked something on his palm computer and cleared his throat. “Suzanne, you’ll take head of the project for the introductory episodes. Make sure we pick out some supreme actors.  Citizens.  Whatever. We need to make sure the audience is captivated.”\n\nTed grumbled something as he glared at Suzanne and began to gather his stuff. Greg left the room, late for a meeting with the big wigs, and left the two producers together. Ted rolled his eyes as he slipped the laptop in the bag. “Nice going, ass-kisser,” he said with a cold glare.\n\nThe red-haired executive just shrugged.  “Honestly, do you think people care about the process? They just want to see what happens when Nazis win World War 2. Please, Ted.  No one gives a fuck about the techies.”\n\nThe scorned producer flipped her off before leaving to prepare for the next season.\n"
  title: Alternate
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2006-07-05
  day: '05'
  month: '07'
  text: "The girl was only on at night, like all of the girls on Bleeker.  Her hair was a different color every couple of weeks, because it was so easy to change, but her eyes were always the same.  They dressed her up in costumes depending on the season.  In December, it was a red velvet miniskirt with white trim. A pilgrim hat in November.  In July, small triangles of red, white and blue stretched over artificial breasts with perpetually hard nipples, inviting New Yorkers to celebrate their freedom.  When there was no holiday on the horizon, they dressed her depending on their mood.  She performed best with her golden wig and the Marilyn dress, standing on the subway grate with a glazed-over smile as she waited for the train to pass beneath her. Once, they dressed her as a mime, complete with white makeup smeared over rubbery skin.  The makeup wore off after two jobs, and they couldn’t be bothered to keep touching it up.  She’d done well, though. She was excellent at talking with her body.\n\nWhen men spoke to her, she listened dumbly, nodding at carefully calculated intervals. Usually, they didn’t speak at all. Their business was done in a large loft, where curtains of sheets strung from twine sliced the space into private rooms.  Hers was at the end of a white cotton hallway, and was two feet larger than the mattress of the futon. Although they washed the cover twice a week, it always seemed yellow beside the fluttering wall.\n\nOnce, after the job, the client asked her about her eyes.  “Are they real?” he said with a slight Midwestern drawl.  “They look like they’re glass or something.” Although she was capable of speech, the girl rarely answered questions.  “I don’t know,” she said, her voice as dense as the well-packed mattress.  When he left, he gave her a generous tip, though her service had been distant and uncomfortably rhythmic.  “You should have those things looked at,” he suggested, and the hallway billowed as he walked away.\n"
  title: Turned Off
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2006-07-06
  day: '06'
  month: '07'
  text: "Rage. It was burning, fiery, coursing, singing like a hurricane through wind-bent trees and thundering like a tsunami. He felt his teeth clench and grind, his eyes widen, his nails cutting two crescents of half-moon wounds into his palms. His thoughts cascaded together, mind like an avalanche. He couldn’t see straight. Everything seemed covered in a veil of red. Until now he’d thought that was just a cliché. Anger consumed him, roaring through him, and Harry rode it until it finally died away. When the tide ebbed he was left gasping, fists clenching and unclenching within the protective restraints, grasping for more.\n\n“How was that one?” Leroy asked, his voice hushed and mouth grinning as he leaned in over Harry. “Good shit? You were tripping balls, man.”\n\nHarry only had the strength to nod. “That’s the stuff,” he said when he had enough breath. “Grade-A. We can get a half-mil a pop, easy. God damn.” He craned his neck forward to wipe his forehead on the top of his sleeve, wriggling in the safety chair. “What’s next?”\n\n“You’ll like this one,” Leroy said, already loading up the needle. “You can’t get this shit anymore. It’s been bred out, treated before we even know we have it by all that shit the government pumps into the water. This’ll sell for sure.”\n\n“Well what is it?” Harry asked, squirming in the chair, trying to read the label on the bottle.\n\nLeroy smirked. “Sadness.”\n\nHarry’s mouth dropped open and he leaned back, arm twitching with anticipation as Leroy shot him up. He let his eyes roll back into his head as he waited for the drug take effect. It happened all at once; the chemicals reached the nerve endings in the brain, and suddenly the world dropped away, replaced by a gaping void of hopelessness and despair. Harry experienced a true and complete sensation of worthlessness.\n\nHe had never known such bliss.\n"
  title: Dealer's Goods
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-07-07
  day: '07'
  month: '07'
  text: "Robert made the same mistake every Spartan makes. He thought he was ready.\n\nA thousand miles away they were stretching Michael out on the wall. He was naked and bleeding. They took out the tool that Michael recognized from his training and he switched his router on with a thought. Suddenly, the cold of the wall became distant, like a memory. He could feel cotton beneath him, skin on his forearm.\n\n“I’m patched in to Lieutenant Michael.” said Robert, testing his restraints. “The rebels are about to begin.”\n\n“I’m here,” said Dr. Wyatt, squeezing Robert’s muscular arm. Dr. Wyatt was an experienced doctor in physiology and psychology. This was her third substation session. Robert watched her lined face as if it was a mirror to his own.\n\nThey used the tool, and Michael watched as his body spasmed. He could see it happening, but it seemed unreal. All that blood made the scene look like a campy horror movie. They were asking him questions, but their voices were distant.\n\n“Can you hear me?” asked Dr. Wyatt, holding Roberts screaming face as he strained against the padded restraints.\n\nMichael saw his leg hanging like a loose sock, part of it no longer attached to him. He was making noise, very loud, and he wished he could turn the channel and watch something else.\n\nDr. Wyatt held Roberts eyes open. “Say it! Tell them the message!” she yelled. Robert screamed and forced his mouth around the words.  A thousand miles away, Michael spoke with Roberts voice, spilling his lies to the rebel armada.\n\nMichael felt his body dying. He transferred, his pattern floating into waiting receptors, thousands of miles away. He woke up on cotton sheets.\n\n“There will be a little itching at first,” said Dr. Wyatt, leaning over him. “It’s the new body, it will take some adjustment.”\n\n“Where is Robert?” asked Michael.  Dr. Wyatt pointed across the room, where Robert was sleeping.\n\n“You Spartans.” said Dr. Wyatt. “Do you think of nothing but your partners?”\n\n“Nothing else.” Michael stood, wavering on his feet.\n\n“You really shouldn’t do that right away,” said Wyatt. “Your body needs time to adjust. Besides, you’re a half inch taller now, it will take some getting used to.”\n\nMichael shot her an annoyed glance, and stumbled across the room, to sit on the bed of his partner. “Robert.”\n\n“He’s out. He’s been out three days.” said Dr. Wyatt, brushing silver hair back behind her ear.\n\nMichael tried to wrap his head around the idea that what had happened a moment ago was actually a three day old memory. He swayed on his feet. “Why is he still out?”\n\n“There is only so much the mind can take. He felt what happened to you.”\n\nMichael touched Robert’s pale face. “Don’t be a wimp.” he said. “Walk it off.”\n\nRobert cracked one eye open. “Can’t a man get any sleep around here?” he said, his voice hoarse. Michael laughed, feeling high and crazy all at once.\n\n“The doctor doesn’t seem to think that you were awake.”\n\n“What do doctors know?” said Robert. “I woke up as soon as I heard your voice. We are Spartans, no matter where you are, I will always hear you.”\n"
  title: The Thousand Mile Voice
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2006-07-08
  day: '08'
  month: '07'
  text: "I remember your touch, your taste, the way your mouth curled slightly when you said my name.  Everything about you that made me happy, I’ve copied and cached.  I can call it up with a thought, or a few key strokes if it’s unusual.  The odd high note your voice lilted into when you laughed at my joke when we ate at the Nyala, the way you tied my boot lace, the odd jiggle-dance you did when no one was around but me and that blind street musician.  Everything I ever liked about you is now recorded and filed.  I keep hard copies in that safe you gave me.\n\nSo don’t bother coming around anymore, okay?  Please.  You’re just embarrassing yourself.\n\nAnd you’re ruining my memories.\n"
  title: Hoarding Colored Rags
  year: 2006
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2006-07-09
  day: '09'
  month: '07'
  text: "There was frost on the window. It was supposed to be summer, but since the last conflict began, every season had been extended. A fleet of enemy carriers lay still in orbit just outside of normal battalion fire, visible through the large viewscreen window, but they did not move. General Dana Blain looked out over the debris of thousands of warships as it floating up above the atmosphere in the night sky, watching as some succumbed to the gravity of the planet and became shooting stars in reentry.\n\nHer blue eyes stared into the stars as her hands found each other behind her back. “Ensign, I need a status report of the orbit.”\n\nRed lights flashed for days, and the people felt it all over the globe. Ensign Webber punched in the codes and looked upon the glowing screen as he read the statistics to the General. “General, the report from the Scientific Data Association reads us at an orbit increase of twelve days, sixteen hours, forty-three minutes and fifteen seconds.” The ensign paused while a droplet of sweat moved down his temple. “That’s…”\n\n“An increase of almost double over last time. Yes, I know.” General Blain walked over to the console and punched in a few numbers to see for herself. Her expression was blank and disaffected, as it had been since the third conflict of the war.\n\nA screen to the right of the panoramic view blinked on, displaying the features of a man nearly as stoic as the General.  “General Blain, this is Senator Ruger! Peace negotiations are beginning with the Dek’a. You are to cease military advancement immediately. This planet cannot take another blast. Do you-”\n\nHe hadn’t finished before the General’s finger flicked over the console button and cut off power to the screen. Everyone in the room turned to her, their faces glazed with astonishment. “Ready the cannon, Ensign Webber,” she said as the eyes of every person in the room focused on her with undisguised astonishment.\n\n“But-” the ensign protested with what the last remnants of his confidence.\n\n“Do it!” As she snapped, she fixed him with a glare more potent than any weapon’s force. Ensign Webber nodded.  It wouldn’t be long before they would hear the rumble of the weapon rising to the surface. The cannon was the most deadly weapon in their arsenal.\n\nA science expert’s voice finally broke through the silence.  “General, another blast from the cannon will push us out of orbit,” she said quietly\n\nWhile the scientist stood in defiance, the General waved a hand to have her escorted off the bridge. In that same moment, she watched the planet, her planet, shine its weapon of destruction towards the helpless fleet of carriers. It was that stone cold look that now filled her being and pushed fear like a drug onto her crew.\n\n“This is for John,” whispered the woman, as she avenged one man with the motion to fire.\n"
  title: Fire
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2006-07-10
  day: 10
  month: '07'
  text: "“You just need to get your priorities in order,” Pern said as he plunked the ripe wikifruit onto the table.  Courtney watched with dismay, her eyes wide as she watched the young man end drive a long knife through the product of her months of gardening.  “Food is all fine and good, but we already have food. We’ve got over a hundred rations to get through before the supply ship comes.  This,” he said, indicating the smooth, pink outer shell of the fruit, “is for something better than eating.”\n\n“The only thing better than eating is breathing,” Courtney said, reciting one of the three principles that had been drilled into her during pioneer orientation.  Pern laughed.\n\n“You haven’t been here for long, have you?” he asked.  He moved the blade around the thick stem of the wikifruit until a circle the side of his palm could be lifted from the foot-long purple shape.  Pern reached for the next instrument, a long-necked spoon, which he stabbed deep into the fruit’s body.\n\n“I…” Courtney began, but her shock quickly overcame her dedication to the pioneer ideals.  Pern looked up to her with a warm smile, then twisted the spoon and lifted a clump of soggy pink from the inside of the wikifruit before dumping it into a bowl.  He repeated the motion several times, and the rose-colored heap grew larger and larger until it seemed that so much mass could not have been contained within the now-hollowed fruit.  Pern ripped the corner from a bag of sugar with his teeth, then poured it into the bowl in an avalanche of white.\n\n“Get me the riser,” he told her.  Courtney stared at the fruit, her horrified expression similar to the one she’d worn when she heard about the great wagon incident.  She had no choice but to obey, though, and he knew it.  When she returned with one of the small packets she used to bake bread, he tore the top away and emptied the paper envelope over the white and pink heap.  Pern stirred the pile with his spoon until the wikifruit meat was a squishy, sugar-embedded glob.  He lifted a spoonful, offering it to Courtney. “Wanna taste?” he asked.\n\n“You monster!” she whimpered.  He shrugged, and shoveled the bowl’s contents back into the purple rind.\n\n“You’ll thank me in a month or two,” he told her with a knowing smile as he sealed the wikifruit with the circle he’d first carved away.  “Everyone always does.”\n"
  title: Wikishine
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2006-07-11
  day: 11
  month: '07'
  text: "Jergan loved ships. Ever since he was a little mite he’d loved them, watched them, lusted over them–it was only natural that he become a pilot. He’d been a dock worker for years as a teenager, hauling and stacking crates, recalibrating spanners, and bugging any captains he could get a word with to take him into their crew. It never happened, of course. Everyone knew Jergan around the loading docks, knew that he cared more about the ships than about their cargo or crew. That was bad for business. Jergan was patient, though, and when he turned twenty-two he had finally made enough money to purchase his own ship.\n\nNow it seemed like he might have to go back to hauling crates. Only a light-year from Borsen, Jergan’s baby had developed a shimmy, and halfway into the outer atmosphere sans attitude control, he was beginning to accept that it might be a lost cause. “I knew it would happen sometime,” Jergen said to his placidly plummeting ship, “But Borsa? Sweetheart, I thought I taught you class.” The ship wasn’t answering. Jergan went through the repair procedures a final time, but there was nothing to be done. The ship seemed determined to go to her death.\n\nJergan stood in the central cabin, one hand on the bulkhead. He’d raised this ship from a junkyard brat into a respectable salvage vehicle, but here she was, resigned to a fiery end. The atmosphere was beginning to redden outside the windows, and Jergan knew she wouldn’t last much longer. This was the moment all the captains had dreaded. This was the time when he’d have to choose.\n\n“Well, babe, it’s been fun,” he said, moving to the hatch and fitting himself with an oxygen helmet. “You’re a beauty. I woulda loved you to the end. But I’m not gonna go down with you.” With a final pat, he moved through the hatch into the escape pod and jettisoned. Watching the ship explode as it careened into the atmosphere brought a pang to Jergan’s heart.\n\nWhen he finally dragged himself into a port in Borsa, Jergan’s very first stop was the bar. He’d only gotten halfway through his third beer, however, when a tap on the shoulder brought him around. A man with hard eyes was peering down at him.\n\n“Yeah?” Jergan slurred. “Whaddaya want?”\n\n“You’re Jergan,” the man said. “Ship-lover who couldn’t get a job in Delwas, right? Went down over the Crater today?”\n\nJergan grunted and slumped over his beer. “Kinda busy right now, man,” he muttered. “Wanna take a hike?”\n\n“Wanna take a hike, captain.”\n\nJergan turned his head and eyed the man in confusion.\n\n“Captain Hennesey,” the man clarified. “It seems you’re out of work, and we’re a man short.”\n\nJergan blinked. “But… Delwas. I thought you said…”\n\nHennesey waved a dismissive hand. “If you want work, you’re hired,” he said simply. He glanced at Jergan’s beer and smirked, just a little. “We could use a pragmatist like you.”\n"
  title: Pragmatist
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-07-12
  day: 12
  month: '07'
  text: "Today is an unofficial public holiday. Those people that can take a day off work do so, those that can’t call in sick. Today is The Burn. I don’t know who started the tradition (some people say that it was a group of Canadian activists, other claim that it was a collation of South African students) but it spread so fast that it doesn’t even matter where it came from.\n\nIt’s celebrated differently all over the world. In the old European Union, I hear they Burn effigies of dead celebrities like Elvis and Brad Pitt. The Europeans blame the Chinese for what happened, the Chinese blame the Indians and the Indians blame the Americans. Americans don’t burn any effigies; Americans break into cemeteries and steal corpses.\n\nIn North America they mostly just spit on graves stones, or sometimes even an open hole but in the Southwest, man, they do all sorts of shit. They steal bodies out of graveyards in poor neighborhoods and have giant tailgate parties where people shit on the corpses.  A buddy of mine told me he went to a party in new Texas where people took drugs to induce vomiting so they can make a public display of puking on their ancestors. Of course, I’ve seen those corpses, and I don’t see why you would need to take drugs to puke, just smelling them usually does it on it’s own.\n\nNear the equator, I heard that in some places they cook and eat the corpses. I can’t imagine what that old meat might smell like, smoking on a bonfire. Of course, that’s just a rumor, you hear all sorts of shit happening at the equator, the heat makes everybody crazy.\n\nI was thinking about it though, waxing philosophical, you might say, and I think our ancestors got the better end of the deal. I wouldn’t want anyone to puke on me, of course, but they are dead and they don’t know what’s being done to them. I’ve seen the old movies, the flat screen pictures. They had lives without boils, without flaking red skin and the scarring, the flooding and the power failures, the plastic suits and stinking air.  They had more metal and plastic than they knew what to do with. They had plenty, and they ate it up.\n\nI get the boils, every day, a new one. I wear the suit, but I still get the boils.\n\nYou better believe I’ll be out there today. There’s a grave me and my boys got our eye on. The dead could have done something back in their time, but now it’s too late. They left us here on a world that’s broiling us. The Burn is the least we can do.\n"
  title: Burn
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2006-07-13
  day: 13
  month: '07'
  text: "The restaurant still sold wine from when the meteor struck. The very year. Abigail said she could taste ash in every sip, though that didn’t stop her from drinking. I swirled my glass, looking for bits that might be floating about in the cold liquid, fragments of catastrophe sealed by glass and cork.\n\nAbigail had ordered some human cheese for the both of us, to snack on while we decided on our orders. The waiter swore that the milk was all given voluntarily, but even his definitive nature couldn’t dispel images of captive women chained in the back. His assertion that the cheese was made on the premises didn’t help much.\n\n“You’re so morbid,” Abigail said when I told her about the captives in my head. She dipped her slender fingers in her wine and flicked droplets at my face.\n\n“You’re the one who chose this place.”\n\nAbigail pouted. “I took you out to cheer you up.”\n\nFine place for it, I thought. I didn’t say it, though. Instead, I mentioned Oshiwara Gainsberg’s new film, Big Black Mariah, an animated fable about the legendary boarding-house owner here in Boston. Abigail turned up her lip in a sneer.\n\n“God,” she said. “It’s about the meteor, isn’t it?”\n\n“I don’t see how.”\n\n“Wake up! Everything is about the meteor these days. This woman, she’s a force of nature, right? Nothing, no one, can stand against her? But she only harms the guilty? Propaganda!” Abigail threw her arms wide on that last word, flashing jazz-hands.\n\nI thought of the still-frame I had seen on the feed, Mariah towering over the innocent and guilty alike, her ink-black dress the only thing separating the two. I remembered the sun was behind her, forced the ne’er-do-wells to shiver in her shadow. I shrugged. “It’s just the way things are now. It’s part of the human condition.”\n\nAbigail grumbled and blew bubbles into her wine. “Whatever. People need to get over it.” Abigail wrapped her sweater tighter around her shoulders, as if she was cold. As the restaurant grew darker in  the fading evening, Abigail took a big swig of her wine, and said again that she could taste ash in it.\n\nIt was only then that it hit me. Abigail had a girlfriend named Ashe, who was among those the meteor claimed.\n\nI would have said something, if the waiter hadn’t returned with our cheese.\n\n“Pure Mother’s cheese,” the waiter said. “A hundred years ago, such a thing would have been looked upon as immoral, or even illegal. Times have sure changed, eh?” He waited anxiously for us to try a piece.\n\nThe cheese was surprisingly sweet, a good compliment to the smoky wine. It felt very warm in my mouth, and I noticed it caused a faint smile on Abigail’s lips. I imagine a similar expression was on my own face.\n\n“Thank you,” I said. “This is just what we needed.”\n"
  title: In The Black Moriah's Shadow
  year: 2006
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2006-07-14
  day: 14
  month: '07'
  text: "For the ninth time today, Dyson glanced up from sweeping the facilities floors. He knew it was the ninth, because he’d been watching his bank account shrink with every confused teen who walked by, every school field trip who waltzed in and every curious observer who thought he could lend a hand. Who wouldn’t keep count?\n\n“S’cuse me, sir? Where cans I finds the bathrooms?” It was a little boy this time, probably lost. He’d have to take care of that as well. He decided to delay the inevitable for a bit.\n\n“Why, where are your mom and dad, little one?” He smiled underneath the rim of his cap as he leaned upon the broom and watched the blue-eyed boy. The banter wasn’t necessary, but he figured he might kill two birds with one stone.\n\n“I uhm… I can’t wemember…”\n\nOf course he couldn’t. The boy reminded him of his grandson, however, so he sighed and gave an answer. “Bathrooms are two halls down, past the dinosaur sections and on the left.”\n\nPicking up his broom, he moved over to the front desk and watched Shirley smile brilliantly at a group of students standing around her. She must have been rich, the way she spouted out the information like it was nothing. “In fifteen minutes, we will have our native peoples exhibit, and at 2:30 you will be breaking for lunchtime!”\n\nHe waited till she had finished her speech to the group and took in a deep breath as she turned to him.  “In all my years, I ain’t never seen anyone remember stuff like you do. How do you do it, Shirley? Don’t you miss all the money from your account?”\n\nLeaning forward, she got a very serious look on her face, “Well, if you really have to know…” When she slid a small pad of paper from under the desk, Dyson stared blankly at her as if she’d pulled a gun.\n\n“Shirley!” he started in a hushed whisper.  “If the Memory Monitors catch you with that, it’s five to ten at the very least!”\n\nShe waved him off with a nonchalant gesture, “Dyson, Dyson… don’t worry about it.  I have it all under control. Besides… The Native Americans we teach about in this museum didn’t have to pay for their keepsakes. They drew pictures and told stories. We can’t be expected to work in a place like this and not learn that.”\n\nStill watching her like a cautious hawk, Dyson muttered, “They didn’t have to pay? You… wrote that down to remember it, didn’t you?”\n\n“What can I say? Some things should be remembered for free.” She leaned back in a way that almost made it seem like she would put her feet on the desk.\n"
  title: Only the Poor Forget
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2006-07-15
  day: 15
  month: '07'
  text: "Palkas’ autograph line had finally dwindled to nothing. They’d capped the line two hours ago and now, at last, the final gawkers and fans were being escorted out of the building. With a sigh and a stretch, Palkas stood and worked the kinks out of his neck. Signing autographs, while less taxing than his day job, didn’t seem to make him stiffen up the same way.\n\nThe bouncers were outside, as were his escorts, and Palkas took a moment to look around the room, taking in the posters and 8×10 glossies, all depicting his grinning face. There was the Morkark asteroid field, the one they’d claimed was too dangerous for any one-man ship to successfully navigate. There was the Ressi sun flare, said to be unskimmable. There was his latest triumph, the planet Argus VII, whose heavy gravity and atmosphere had prevented even well-suited humanoids from reconnoitering its surface for seventy years. To other men this would have seemed like a list of impossibilities, but to Palkas it read like a resume. They were all behind him now. He had conquered the unconquerable.\n\n“Mr. Palkas? Sir?”\n\nA face peeked from behind one of the entry doors and Palkas looked up, surprised. The security personnel were supposed to be keeping people out, not letting them in–but this was a young man, couldn’t be more than twenty, and Palkas certainly didn’t feel concerned for his personal safety. “Yes? What is it, son?”\n\nThe kid moved into the room, smiling nervously. He seemed a little star-struck. “Ah, I know I’m late–sorry about that–but I was wondering, um, if I could have your autograph? It’s for my sister,” he added quickly. “She’s your biggest fan.”\n\nPalkas sighed. The bouncers definitely should have picked this one up before he got this far, but what the hell. The room was quiet, and he couldn’t head back to the hotel until the security men got back, anyway. “Sure,” he said, taking out a pen and pulling over the poster that the kid proffered. When given the name in a trembling voice, he signed in flowing script. “Here you are. Hope she enjoys it.”\n\n“Thank you, sir. I know she will, sir.” The kid was beside himself. He gazed at all the posters with starry-eyed awe. “It’s amazing that one man could do what you’ve done, Mr. Palkas. All of the amazing feats that you’ve accomplished… there’s nothing left in this galaxy that man hasn’t been able to do. It’s a real treat to meet you. A real treat.”\n\nPalkas smiled indulgently. He liked this kid. “No problem, son. The pleasure’s mine.”\n\nThe kid nodded and bobbed his head, moving towards the door. When he got there, he stopped and turned. “Just one more question, please? Mr. Palkas?”\n\nWell, he had time, Palkas reasoned. One question was no big deal. “Sure, kid. What’s on your mind?”\n\n“What are you going to do now?”\n"
  title: Conquest
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Jared Axelrod
  date: 2006-07-16
  day: 16
  month: '07'
  text: "“I knew the Chief went to Japan, I just didn’t know he picked up a new wife,” Bedford said. Bedford removed her welding mask and wiped the sweat from her face with an oily rag.  She adjusted herself in the crook of the mecha’s kneecap, letting her repair work cool.\n\n“Pretty too,” Armijo said. He slipped his arms out of his coveralls and tied them around his waist, his chest shiny from accumulated sweat.  He tossed a Bedford up a cold soda.  “She’s a 400 model.”\n\n“A model, huh?” Bedford said. She cracked open her drink and took a long swig.  “One of them toothpick bitches?  I’ll never understand the Chief. I mean, havin’ us paint the hangar baby blue and wearin’ all those Hawaiian shirts, thems is one thing.  But some spoiled brat paid to walk down a runway?  Gimmie  one of these hunks of junk over that any day.” She patted the giant robot’s knee-pistons affectionately.\n\nKruse scooted over on the Mule, the brakes squealing.  “Funny thing is, so would the Chief, apparently.  Give a fella one of them cans. She’s a 400 model, Beds.  She’s a robot.”\n\nBedford took another drink, scratched at her armpit, then slurped another. “Chief married a mecha?”\n\n“Well, sorta,”  Armijo said.  He leaned an elbow on the Mule’s handlebars, and shoved his grimy left hand into a similarly filthy pocket.  “An android.  Looks human.  You wouldn’t be able to tell if you didn’t know.”\n\n“Looks human, hell!”  Kruse spat.  “You tellin’ me I  can work on  the damn things all day, and I don’t know a robot when I see one?”\n\n“Just tellin’ you what I seen,” Armijo said.  “My brother’s got a catalogue–”\n\nKruse spat again.  “You seen her?  The  Chief’s wife?  Iffin’ you can call her that.”  An oily rag smacked Kruse in the face.  Both he and Armijo turned to Bedford, her tiny fists clenched.\n\n“Listen at you!” she called down.  “Ev’ry day I hear you agree with the Chief’s decisions, now all of a sudden you can’t accept a one of ’em?  So he got himself a robot wife?  What’s the problem?  I didn’t hear you complain when we got the Mule.”\n\n“That’s different,”  said Kruse.  “The Mule ain’t a wife–”\n\n“Might as well be, the way you coddle it,” Armijo said.  Kruze gave him a shove.\n\n“All I’m sayin’ is, I wouldn’t hold to my son marryin’ one.”\n\n“Chief ain’t your son,” Bedford said.  “He’s the Chief.”  Bedford looked up at the robot she was working on, and then past it at the bright-blue ceiling of the hangar.  The Chief spent near a week off hours on the highest scaffold they had, painting white, fluffy clouds. Looking up at the painted sky made her smile.\n\n“It ain’t normal, is all,” Kruse said.\n\n“Mayhaps,” Bedford said, lowering her welding mask to return to work. “But neither is the Chief.”\n"
  title: Devotion For Mechanics
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2006-07-17
  day: 17
  month: '07'
  text: "The bud blossomed into her ear, its hairlike tendrils snaking towards her eardrum where they fanned out into electric petals, sensors cool against her hot skin.  The soft thud reminded Meredith of being submerged, and in a way, she was: holding her breath against the summer rush hour stench of body odor and urine as the subway undertow pulled her beneath the island.  The bud measured her heart rate, body temperature, slight changes in her pH.  It understood her mood, and it provided a soundtrack to match.  Slow, quiet.  A Monday evening mix.\n\nMeredith was well into the third track when her hardware buzzed against her thigh.  She shifted her weight to detach it, and pressed the backlight button to better make out the words.  Josh.\n\nu ok?\n\nim fine, she messaged back.  y?\n\nThree thousand miles away, on the west coast, the boy Meredith had met on her favorite band’s forum frowned at the letters on his own messenger.  She couldn’t lie to him any more than she could lie to her bud.  Josh syndicated all of his friends’ iTracks, and the downtempo music broadcast her mood better than any facial expression could.\n\nim reading ur itrack, he typed.  sounds sad.\n\njust a mellow monday, Meredith replied.\n\nwant company?\n\nMeredith answered with an indifferent emoticon, but Josh understood.  He positioned his analogue headset over his ears and smiled at its weight, at the cold feeling of leather-covered foam beside his cheekbones.  He clicked the link on her iTrack feed and jumped in mid-song, then settled back into his armchair, closing his eyes and concentrating on the gentle, melancholy notes.\n\nSeparated by an ocean of land, Meredith leaned into the hard cradle of an orange subway chair as her world, too, faded to music.  Around her, dozens of bodies shifted to their own rhythms, composing their iTracks over the steady, low hum of the train.\n"
  title: She is an iLand
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-07-18
  day: 18
  month: '07'
  text: "My brothers made me lay on my stomach, my bare back exposed to their brushes. We are a family of artists; my brothers make a fine design. My father, his fingers stained with ink, watched them work, his face warped in a scowl.\n\n“She may not come.” warned my father. “She is the weakest of her sisters.”\n\n“She is the smallest of giants.” I said, “She will come.” I haven’t had any contact with her for a year, but I believe she will keep her promise. I will not die. She is a warrior, she will come.\n\n“You can still back out.” said my father, sudden concern on his face. “It is your right. You are not yet sealed into a contract.”\n\n“Father.” I said. “I have prepared our hearth. I am in love with her. From the moment we met, my contract to the Gods was already written.”\n\nMy father has never liked warriors, and never liked the violence of their binding ritual. I tucked her letters in a pocket underneath my lavish robes.\n\n“What are those?” my brother asks.\n\n“I wrote her letters, every day.”\n\n“You were not allowed to contact her.” he says, thinking he has found a loophole in the ceremony, imagining he can break the ritual before it began.\n\nI shook my head. “They were never sent, they waited for her, like I did.”\n\nMy brothers tied me to a pole on top of a giant mound of burning sand. In some places in this dessert, pools of sand turn to glass in the terrible heat.\n\n“These knots could be broken.” whispered my oldest brother. “If you run away, we will find you.” I shake my head. He does not understand.\n\nIn the distance I saw the giant lizard pulling at its electric chain. As soon as my brothers board the airship, the chain dissipates. I am not afraid. She is probably hiding. She is an intelligent warrior.\n\nThe lizard ran toward me. It was bigger than I thought. My brothers watched from above. I smiled at them. They were worried that even if my lover does come, she will fail. She has not yet made a name for herself in her clan but I know her strength.\n\nThe lizard crawled up the mound where I was tied when my lover jumped into my vision. She  was caked in mud and she moved like a blur across the sand. I watched her as she shot a golden beam of light from a silver gun in her hand. It strikes the creatures side, a non-lethal blow. The Lizard roared. She drew her sword and it crackled with blue electricity as she leapt towards the monster.\n\nShe managed to deal a blow to its leg. It turned swiftly and knocked her to the ground. She lay very still then, and the creature hovered over her, snarling. The creature reared its head and I screamed, my blood burning inside of me.\n\nHer eyes opened, and she moved quickly, slicing at its throat, its orange blood coating her as she rolled out from under its falling body. She dealt the killing blow, her electric sword shaking the giant lizard’s body. She turned and ran towards me. A year has changed her, she has become hardened from her time in space. I weep and she is wiped the blood from her face.\n\n“Embrace me.” I cried. She hesitated.\n\n“I am so dirty.” She said, shame on her face. It was her first words to me in a year.\n\nI slipped out of the lightly tied knots, reaching for her. “Embrace me, and see if I care.”\n\nFrom the airships above, our families tossed flowers onto the sandy mound, and we were one at last.\n"
  title: The Contract
  year: 2006
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2006-07-19
  day: 19
  month: '07'
  text: "There was a time when food could be remembered; a time when you could lick your lips and recall the sweet sting of dehydrated packaged delights. Too bad those days don’t exist anymore. Days like that leave you when the thirst takes over.\n\nTravel has just about stopped by now. No one comes off-planet because there is no source of sustenance to be had. I am smarter than that. Perhaps there were fewer of them, but the lack of competition made it easier to capture what you needed.\n\nWatching, I remind myself that I cannot afford the luxuries of stress or frustration. Those things could cause a leak, and I won’t have it. The temperature in my craft is well below what it should be. They say the thirst holds itself at bay for longer when it’s frigid. My breath attests to the fact that I have taken this rumor to heart.\n\nAs my cold eyes watch the dead space I know that whatever is left of my soul is out there beyond my reach. The cold, hollow truth lay bare before me while I stand vigilant near the radar. There is nothing left inside, above the saturation percentage. I can measure it by the time that passes between when I swallow and when the glands ache as they thirst for more.\n\nWell above the dying planet I can witness the small blots of what isn’t land. Sometimes I muse to myself how they still exist or why I haven’t drawn closer.  They would kill me if they saw me, but in the end they would do exactly as I have done. They would do the same, because there is no other way. Clouds will not gather over a dusty rock and let redemption fall down from the gray mass.\n\nA beep, and my eyes stop wandering. They are now fixed upon the red screen, watching the tiny dot edge closer like an insect to a web. My God, I can feel it rising within me, wanting me to feast. I must wait, however.  I must prepare.\n\nOne on board? Two on board? It doesn’t matter now.  I’ve locked onto them and I prepare the grappler.  If not for the emptiness, I could hear their screams. Their horror at being pulled in while the oxygen ceases to flow in their vessel. It must be maddening.\n\nOn one side of the device, I observe a gallon-sized capsule stained a dark brown. This is my sin. On the other side, I can see a flask with a dusty, cloudy, but ultimately empty interior. It smells of metal, and it tastes of hydrogen. This is my salvation.\n\nI hear the grappler pulling home, and I hear it lock in before the ship becomes silent again. It’s silent as the inside of their pod. They need not worry anymore. What is left of them will be my salvation. What is left of them will slake my thirst. I power up the machine and I wait for the doors to open into their vessel. Ounce by ounce, pint by pint, the future is on its way.\n"
  title: Hemosapiens
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-07-20
  day: 20
  month: '07'
  text: "Sunset Lake made Mike nervous, which was something that hadn’t happened since he came home from the war. Sunset Lake was a nice place; lots of natural light, pretty gardens and a big dining room with stretched white tablecloths. Still,  all the old people made Mike feel uneasy. Cosmetically, they all looked like teenagers, but they were rotting inside. The cosmetics industry was far ahead of internal medicine. Everyone looked young in their graves.\n\nMike was happy to be in Melody’s office. Melody was the head nurse of Sunset Lake, and she actually looked all of her forty some years\n\n“You’re a veteran,” said Melody, looking at the computer pad that was displaying Mikes’ resume. Melody was stocky, with large arms and an ample bosom. She had layers of silver chains under her blue smock.\n\n“Yes. Ma’am.” said Mike.\n\n“Well, I don’t want you to worry. I had a cousin that was in the war. Noatter what most people think, I blame the government for what happened, not our boys in space.”\n\n“It’s good to hear that Ma’am’” said Mike, but really, it wasn’t. Mike never expected a homecoming parade, he just wanted to forget the whole thing, scrub that part of his life off his record, so people would stop talking to him about it.\n\nMelody sat down, and leaned across her desk. “Mike, I like your resume and you seem very honest. I’d like you to help me protect our guests.”\n\n“Ma’am, I’m glad for the offer. I just want to know what kind of threats you think your guests are facing. It’s a nice neighborhood here, do you really get a lot of thefts?”\n\n“Thefts aren’t the problem Mike. Most of the people here don’t bring too many personal possessions, and most of their children keep anything that is of value. I need you to protect the people in this facility.”\n\n“Are they in danger? Do they fight?”\n\n“No Mike, most of them, it takes all their effort just to walk.” She crossed her arms tight around her body.  “When I first started working here, I noticed some young men  hanging around the building. At first, I thought they were children or grandchildren of some of the patients here, but when any of my employees would ask for ID, they would always have “Left it at home” and they would beat it. After one of my staff caught a boy in with Mrs. Lansing, touching her on her breast, we instituted an ID scan on entry to the facility and I set nurses to watch the women’s dorms very carefully. I always had someone in eyesight of all the doorways of every room, and there were random spot-checks.\n\nI blame myself for what happened. I was sexist. I just didn’t imagine.  .  . Mr. Walsing started telling me that his legs were hurting, and he told me to get his Sword. He said ninjas were attacking him at night. Mr. Walsing has never handled a sword in his life. He  was an investment banker before he retired. He just kept asking for a sword,  to keep away the nightmares. I had them do a medical exam on him today, and I found out that he has been physically abused. They’ve hacked our system and were coming in here and since they couldn’t get to the women. . .” She stopped speaking for a moment and looked out the window, blinking her eyes.\n\n“That’s terrible.” said Mike, feeling awkward.\n\nThey were silent the rest of the way to Mr. Walsings room. When they entered, Mike saw a slender purple haired teenager sleeping on the bed. His smooth pale skin was blanketed with soft sunlight streaming through the light yellow curtains of his room.\n\nMelody lowered her voice. “Mr. Walsing was an engineer. He’s got these beautiful holos of the ships he designed in flight. Maybe you even rode in a few of them. These boys came in here and they hurt him. I don’t know what I am going to say to his family.”\n\n“What about the police?”\n\nMelody shook her head. “We can’t afford them. In this neighborhood, their rates are too high and if we default on a payment, it could be worse for us than the kids.”\n\nMr. Walsing’s black lashed fluttered and his eyes opened. They were a wet green color, like a forest after it’s rained. “Whose there?” he asked softly, squinting at the doorway.\n\nMike walked closer, so Mr. Walsing could see his face. “Good afternoon Mr. Walsing. My name is Mike. I am your sword. I am here to keep the nightmares away.”\n"
  title: The Nightmare Sword
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2006-07-21
  day: 21
  month: '07'
  text: "“Are you sure?”\n\nLena bit her lip and nodded. “Yes. Very sure.” Her voice was quiet but strong. She needed this.\n\nThe counselor nodded, looking down at her clipboard as she checked off items. “All right. I’ve noted your reasoning. The records will be sealed, of course, after the procedure is finished; if you look them up you’ll know you had something performed, but of course you won’t remember what. That would be counterproductive, wouldn’t it?” She gave Lena a lukewarm smile which Lena didn’t return. She didn’t feel much like smiling. The counselor looked back at her sheet. “You passed the psych screening, so now we just need you to isolate the memories you’d like us to modify. Make sure you take your time and get your story straight. I’ll give you the forms.”\n\nLena took the binder from the counselor with pale, cold hands. A part of her was aghast at the idea of changing her own memories–it felt like self-mutilation. She knew her parents could never find out what she’d done, however, and there was no way to lie to them with her memories intact. They’d use the serum on her, and if she remembered her wrongdoing, Lena would be forced to capitulate.\n\nWith a firm and steady hand, Lena wrote her directives and specifics into the binder, recording what would be her new memory of the last six months. “Here,” she said in only a matter of minutes. “I’m ready.”\n\n“Are you sure?” the counselor asked. “That didn’t take long. Make certain you’ve written down everything we need to change.”\n\n“It’s only one thing,” Lena said softly. “It was a miscarriage. That’s all. That’s the only thing I want different.”\n\nThe counselor regarded Lena for a moment, then nodded slowly. “All right.” She took the binder and stood, beckoning Lena towards the operating room. “Right this way.”\n"
  title: Veracity
  year: 2006
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2006-07-22
  day: 22
  month: '07'
  text: "“We’re sorry, but the tissue damage is irreparable. It’s spreading.  You’ll start to feel the pain in a few days, then, nothing at all.” The silence in the room gave way to a gentle sigh from Russ, whose eyes looked up at the Doc with longing.\n\n“Doc, what’s my time?” he barely choked out.\n\n“Honestly, Russell you have about a week, maybe two.”\n\nRuss’ girlfriend just looked up, concerned, but Russ didn’t seem phased by the time he came to ask about the only alternative safe enough to use this day and age. “Can they prep the machine before that? I mean they’ll be able to clock me in, right Doc?”\n\nChecking his clipboard, the doctor made a few hums and clicks as if he were prescribing medicine for a cold. A sense of nonchalance hung about him before his brows rose, “Well, we do have an opening in about five days. Early morning, though. That won’t be a problem for you will it?”\n\n“Five days?” The patient nodded as he mulled it over before looking to the corner seat where his girlfriend was. “Honey, we got anything going on Saturday morning?”\n\n“Uhm… you got that job interview in the afternoon.” Her words showed the most concern out of anyone in the room.\n\n“Shit, you’re right. Wait, I can probably make it back before then, right?” Hopeful eyes glanced to the doctor who already started to yawn at the whole situation.\n\n“Yeah, Russell, I think everything will be okay. Now I wrote down what probably caused the long-term effects, and the guys at the machine lab will be able to tell you some ways to fix it all up.” The Doc checked his watch as he handed him a note card. “Russell, I have other patients today, so just give me a call last week and let me know things are fine and I’ll bill you for this in a couple of days.”\n\nSmirking as he glanced over the card, Russ shook his head, “Right, right… but Doc, c’mon! I can understand the smoking but… caffeine? Alcohol? This is going to be tough convincing me to quit this.”\n\nShrugging, the doctor opened the door to exit, “Hey, I don’t make the laws of time, I just tell you what you got to fix to live, Russell. See you around.”\n"
  title: No Regret
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-07-23
  day: 23
  month: '07'
  text: "Jupiter pulled on her wrist, dragging her behind the shed. It was right after evening prayer, and the sky was turning bright orange and deep purple. He kissed her like he had seen his parents do, putting his tongue in her mouth, wiggling it around. She backed away from him, giggling.\n\n“Can I do it?” he said, holding out his hands, palms up in front of her.\n\n“I don’t know.” she said.\n\n“Please Katie? Don’t you like me?”\n\n“I like you.” Katie pulled his hands down onto her tiny breasts and he massaged them though her wool dress. It felt warm when he touched her like that; so different from when she touched herself.\n\nJupiter smelled like boy sweat and river water. He fumbled with the buttons at her waist. She let him unbutton her, and he slid his hands up on her slender ribs, on her small breasts. His fingers found her nipples, and he pressed her against the shed, grinding his hips on her thigh. He squeezed her nipples tight between his fingers, and she clenched her teeth, letting out a sharp whistle of breath. Jupiter mistook this for encouragement, and he twisted them, hard, and she cried out. Just a little, but she cried out, and then Jupiter’s uncle came running round the corner with a lantern.\n\nJupiter got six lashes, but they were going to exile her. They didn’t need girls around that would tempt good boys to the devil. They lashed Jupiter outside of the courthouse, in front of the terrible small cell where they put her. As they lashed him, the people in the village came by to throw rotting fruit at her between the bars, and call her horrible names. Her brother came by and called her a slut and spat on her. Her mother and father watched her from far away. Her aunt came by and said that her parents were happy, because now the village would let them have another child, one that wasn’t a slut and a whore and one that would be a god fearing child who would be with them when they all went to heaven.\n\nAt night, the guards came by with knives, and they showed her what would happen to her after exile. They would shoot her up into the blue sky, past the blue out into the black, and then the metal men would take her out of the pod, and she would be their whore. They showed her what they would do, thrusting with the knives into the air. The robots were made of knives, they said, and they would cut her from the inside out. That’s what they did with girls.\n\nOnce, someone had been exiled who had been possessed by evil spirits. When they sent the pod up in the air, it burst into flames partway up, exploding like fireworks, bits of plastic and flesh raining down from the sky. Katie prayed all night that she would explode, that God would hear her, even though she was a whore, and that he would kill her rather than let her die with the robot men.\n\nIn the morning, the same men took her out of the prison and bundled her into the pod. As they closed the door, Katie saw her mother in the crowd, crying. They had always held each other when they were feeling low, and Katie wanted nothing else than to have her head in her mothers lap, her mothers fingers in her hair. Katie cried out for her mother, and the door sealed shut.\n\nThe pod rocked so hard that Katie threw up and knocked her head against the cushioned sides. The pod was so small, she couldn’t move inside it, and the sides became terribly hot, and then suddenly so cold that frost formed on the inside walls.\n\nThen, after a long time, the pod stopped. There was a hiss and then the door to the pod slowly swung open. Kneeling on the other side of the pod was a bald woman in what look liked tight blue underclothes. The woman reached out to Katie.\n\n“It’s alright.” said the woman. “No one here is going to hurt you.”\n\nKatie cringed. “Are you a robot?” she asked, her fingers pressing into her thin arms.\n\n“That’s complicated sweetheart. I’ve got a cybernetic net over my brain and there are a few cameras in my body, but I’m mostly meat, so no, I’m not a robot.”\n\n“Are the men out there robots?”\n\n“No robot men on this ship little one, though there are robots in the universe, but they aren’t likely to hurt you.”\n\nKatie shivered. The bald woman sat back on her haunches.\n\n“Thirty-eight years ago the people on our planet launched me into space, just like you were launched. They though they were sending me to slave traders, because that is what their grandparents did. But things have changed here in space, and slave trade is outlawed in this sector. I set up an organization to collect the girls, and it’s mostly girls, that our people exile. I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I have to tell you, there are bigger things than on that planet down there, and some of them are wonderful and some of them are scary, but not one person coming off our home world hasn’t been able to handle it. You can’t go back, and you can’t stay in the pod. Why don’t you come out and we can get you something to eat.” The bald woman held out her arms, palms upward.\n\nKatie reached her hands out of the pod.  “I’m Katie.”\n"
  title: The Sky is Full of Diamonds
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2006-07-24
  day: 24
  month: '07'
  text: "“She likes the rain,” Ms. Jones explained to her neighbor when the woman called in a panic, yelling that Xue had spent the last six hours sprawled across the top of the house ‘looking like a half-drowned corpse.’  She scowled at the shrill, busybody voice, but saved her choice words for the sound of the dial tone after Mrs. Hatter had been disconnected.  The social workers had warned her that the transition would be difficult for Xue, but no one could have cautioned her about the Hatters.\n\nThe entire country had seen the news reports of the commune raid, but it had been reduced to late night talk show jokes in a matter of days, and within two weeks, it was forgotten.  The commune leaders were sent to jail, which Ms. Jones’ pastor described as a light punishment for the crime of playing God.\n\nIn the first few weeks, Ms. Jones had become aware of the whispers that stopped when she drew near to the groups of ladies assembled to collect their biological children from the church’s after-school care program.  She’d learned to ignore them, eyes forward as she swept through the handful of women to the corner where Xue played by herself.  After she gathered the abnormally small child into her arms she always made it a point to walk past the other mothers with her posture straight, her jaw clenched, and her eyes narrow.  It had taken Ms. Jones less than a month to become fiercely proud of her foster daughter.  The condescending glances only strengthened her conviction.\n\nSuch a pity, the ladies gossiped.  The girl’s barely human.  Can you imagine?  And with no husband to help.  She should have just gotten a pet.\n\nAfter Ms. Jones replaced the phone on its cradle, she left through the front door and walked to the sidewalk, shielding her eyes from the downpour and scanning the roof for Xue.  Sure enough, the girl was stretched across the mottled shingles.  Ms. Jones didn’t bother calling her name.  She strode to the ladder and climbed eleven feet before stepping over the edge of the ranch house roof.\n\n“Xue?” Ms. Jones said softly.  The girl shuddered, sending droplets of rain in every direction.  “Don’t you think it’s time to come inside, honey?”\n\nXue turned, her dark, unblinking eyes meeting Ms. Jones’ blue ones.  Her nose twitched, but she offered no response to the question.\n\n“It’s cold out here,” she said.  “You must be freezing.”\n\n“I’m not cold.”\n\nMs. Jones shrugged as she took a seat beside her foster daughter.  “I am,” she said.\n\n“That’s because you don’t have fur.”\n\nMs. Jones had no argument.  She crossed her arms over her chest and watched the clouds scrolling over the horizon.\n\n“No one’s making you stay out here,” Xue said.  Her voice was cool, sullen, and seemed old for her eleven years.\n\nAgain. Ms. Jones shrugged.  “It’ll stop raining eventually,” she said.\n\n“Whatever.”\n\n“And the colder I get, the better the hot chocolate will taste when I go back inside.”\n\nXue’s whiskers trembled.  “You have hot chocolate?” she asked.\n\n“And marshmallows,” Ms. Jones said.\n\nThe girl considered this for a long minute.  “Maybe in a little bit.”\n\n“No hurry.” Ms. Jones brushed away the lines that rain had traced through the thin fur of her daughter’s forehead.  “It’ll be there whenever you’re ready.”\n"
  title: Forty Days
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2006-07-25
  day: 25
  month: '07'
  text: "“So Jeynce and Carr are getting married in three months.”\n\nErnest was projecting on the top of the decorative bridge, tossing tiny sticks into the flowing water. They’d chosen an ancient Japanese theme for this afternoon, and he hoped that Ilyah found it relaxing, because Ernest was bored by the tranquility.\n\n“Wow. That’s a surprise.” Ilyah’s eyebrows rose and she swung her leg over the shimmering water idly trying to discern the repeat cycle of the scenery projection. “They’re pretty young. But if that’s what they’re going to do, why wait so long?” She batted at a low-hanging branch with her toe. “Cold feet?”\n\n“Nah.” Ernest shook his head. “They’re followers of Dra’nar, remember? They’re doing it the old-fashioned way. Embodied,” he clarified.\n\nIlyah’s expression registered mild distaste. “How odd,” she commented, a liberal to the last. “It’s hard to believe anyone still holds with those old customs.”\n\nErnest shrugged. “To each their own,” he said, and Ilyah nodded with practiced political correctness. “Still,” he added, “I’m actually surprised they could find an open space large enough to hold it that wasn’t under radiation lockdown.”\n\n“The guests are expected to embody, too?” Ilyah was aghast. “Old customs are one thing, but to impose them on everyone else… that’s just rude.”\n\n“Of course not,” Ernest told her with a sigh. “But for that big an occasion, the projections will be programmed for no impact, so they have to have room for everyone to stand.”\n\n“Still seems sort of vulgar in the modern age,” Ilyah mused. Ernest said nothing. He knew better than to argue with his wife.\n\nAt last, Ilyah sighed and stood, stretching with a little yawn. “Well, I’m going to log and make something to eat,” she informed Ernest. “Want to meet in the house program at seven?”\n\nErnest nodded, and when Ilyah bent down, he brushed the lips of his wife’s projection with his own. Ilyah smiled and shimmered, disappearing from the scene. With a sigh of relief, Ernest touched the controls and switched to something more palatable. Something with feeling. The tranquil garden was replaced by a dark slummy city street, an exact replica of the one above ground in every respect save the radiation. Ernest’s mouth twitched. No matter how much she professed to be a modern woman, his wife really was an old-fashioned girl.\n"
  title: Old-Fashioned Girl
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-07-26
  day: 26
  month: '07'
  text: "Inigo struggled against the duct tape, trying to work his hands loose. John Kennedy backhanded him.\n\n“I told you to knock that off. You sit still till we’re done.”\n\nInigo felt fluid running down from his nose over the silver tape on his lips. Blood ran into his throat and Inigo tried not to choke. He concentrated on breathing though his one good nostril, determined not to let himself pass out\n\nThree men wearing electronic hologram masks were loading trash bags into Inigos house. The masks were all of former presidents. Washington and the post sex-change Clinton were doing the heavy lifting while Kennedy stood next to Inigo, holding a laser pistol in his right hand. Inigo watched them carry a broken couch up the stairs in horror. A full couch would cost thousands of dollars to dispose of, even on the black market.\n\nKennedy ruffled Inigos long hair. “You’ve got lots of space, don’t you? You’re not gonna mind our little gifts.” Inigo felt like he was on fire, like his eyes were about to burst from his head. The waste, the broken electronics, the clothes, all this stuff would cost a fortune to get rid of. Trash didn’t go cheap, and each year the government charged more to take it away. He had inherited this house from his father, and had worked hard to keep it free from garbage. His garden and compost pile allowed him to keep waste to a minimum. These men were destroying years of hard conservation. Inigo silently vowed to rip them to shreds.\n\n“Look at how mad he looks? Shit boys, he’s turned red he’s so mad.” Kennedy laughed. Washington and Clinton ignored them and kept moving bags into the house.\n\nIf he hadn’t been sleeping when they entered the house, this would have never happened. Ingio cursed his deep sleep. As a child, he had slept though earthquakes and hurricanes and now he had slept though a Clutter Mob breaking into his house. If he had been awake, he could have taken all three of them, even if Kennedy did have a laser pistol.\n\nIngio tried to calm his heartbeat. He didn’t want Eugene coming home, not now. The heart sensor had seemed so romantic when they bought it in Second Paris but now it felt like a liability. If Eugene felt Inigos racing heartbeat through the sensor, he might come home to see what was wrong. Eugene, the chemistry student, would faint in front of men like this. If Eugene knew that Inigo was in danger, his heart would be beating wildly. Even a mouse made Eugene startle. Inigo closed his dark eyes and concentrated. Distantly, he could feel Eugene’s calm, steady heartbeat. Eugene was safe, probably studying in a quiet library somewhere. Inigo said a silent prayer of thanks to whatever deity was watching over them.\n\n“Hey, you asleep?” Kennedy smacked Inigos face.\n\nA crack broke in the air and all the presidents jumped. There was a loud whirring sound and then all the lights went out. Inigo recognized the strange sound. It was an EMP pulse. Eugene had made a handheld EMP in one of his graduate classes, and had taken great joy in showing it off. Inigo blinked, and saw that the hologram masks had disappeared.\n\n“Oh, that’s too bad.” Said Kennedy, now a strange older man. “You saw our faces. Now you’ve gotta die.” The Ex-president pressed the laser pistol into Inigos forehead. Inigo resolved to die with his eyes open. Kennedy pulled the trigger.\n\n“You morons.” Eugene stood, the outline of his long coat silhouetted in the doorway. “Your guns use electricity. They’re dead.” Eugene held his sword in front of him, the edge flashing in the low light. “This, however, is still plenty sharp.”\n\nKennedy launched himself at Eugene, holding the dead pistol like a club. Eugene sidestepped him and brought the sword down on the back of his knee. Kennedy roared as he fell. Clinton, now a burly blond, squealed and ran past Inigo out the back door.\n\nWashington charged at Eugene, shoulders low, trying to knock him over like a linebacker. Eugene swiped his blade and Inigo saw the man fall forward choking. Inigo heard a car start. Kennedy limped towards the front door but Eugene was behind him, following like a vengeful spirit. Eugene punched the hilt of his sword into the back of Kennedy’s head. He fell forward against the door handle and hit the floor with a thud.\n\nEugene ran to Inigo and slowly pulled the duct tape from his lovers face. “The police are on their way. I called them as soon as I felt your heart go wild.” Eugene swept his hands over Inigos body. “Did they hurt you?”\n\n“I’ll kill them. I’ll have vengeance.”\n\nEugene unwrapped the tape from Inigo’s wrists. “Inigo, don’t worry, they’ll pay. Legally. If we have to, we’ll find a way to get rid of this stuff together. It’s just a new challenge.”\n\nInigo wiped the blood from his lip with the back of his hand. “I worked so hard.”\n\n“I know.”\n\nInigo looked over at Eugene, one eyebrow arched. “Can I ask you something?”\n\n“Of course.”\n\n“I thought I knew everything about you, but here you somehow know how to swordfight like a master.”\n\n“That’s not a question.”\n\n“Eugene, how can you be a master swordsman, but be afraid of the food that gets caught in the kitchen sink?”\n\n“I’m not really that great at sword fighting. I’m very rusty.” Eugene took a handkerchief out of his coat and handed it to Inigo. “I used to spar with the finest swordfighter in the world. But that was a long time ago.”\n\nIngio let Eugene help him to his feet. He leaned against his lover, his legs numb from being taped to the chair legs. “It was very sexy Eugene. It was a side of you I would very much like to get to know better.”\n\nEugene blushed. “Thank you.”\n\n“I can’t feel your heartbeat anymore.” Inigo rubbed his hands on his chest. “It feels empty.”\n\n“The EMP pulse must have knocked the transmitter out.” Eugene pressed Inigos hands over his heart. “But it’s here, and will always be here for you.” They kissed, hand overlapping their hearts.\n"
  title: Clutter Mob
  year: 2006
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2006-07-27
  day: 27
  month: '07'
  text: "Yvette stood at the brink of discovery in the next model-Z line. Countless researchers and developers could not dream of the level she had achieved, nor could the social allure of actual interaction hope to compete with the revolution she would create. One could never believe, however, that the love Yvette felt for her work was more than the love one feels for a pet.\n\n“Prometheus 1, do you understand protocol?” she proudly asked the towering humanoid to her left. The metal had been warped to the shape of an athlete with the facial structure of disembodied holo-visage.\n\nThis being moved only when she spoke, and when it did move, it was mechanical and lifeless. It began to glow in joints and parts of its latex-coated face. Monotone perfection poured from every artificial crevice of the being, “Prometheus 1 comprehends protocol, Yvette. How may I serve you today my dear?”\n\n“Oh no, Prometheus… not today.  Today I serve you.” She opened the small white case settled atop a counter, removing from it a chip no larger than her thumb print. “Today, I will show you what it is to love, to cry, to live like we live. You will be free.”\n\n“Prometheus 1 is astonished that you have completed your project, Yvette. Shall Prometheus 1 open the proper receptacle for you?” Only in her private lab would the sounds of her very first robot in production speak so dearly of its creator; soon to be his creator.\n\nWith a nod, the being shook slightly before a panel on the edge of its metallic ribs opened and exposed a series of boards and circuits of which there was only one opening to insert a new piece. Yvette could barely hold back her tears of joy as she carefully reached over to place the chip that would be installed into every bot in her production into her own joyous creation: Prometheus 1.\n\nShe held her breath to watch it click into place. The panel slowly slid back inside of the beings artificial frame. There were some normal sounds of processing followed by silence and in the meantime she held the face she created, stared into the eyes of her making and saw absolute love staring back. A whispered breath broke her silence as tears strolled down her cheeks.\n\n“…Prometheus 1… speak. Tell me that you love me.”\n\nWith every ounce of emotion in the entire life of a human poured into moments of processed epiphany the being, now a he, completed his purpose on this world, “I… I love you, Yvette.”\n\nDreams fulfilled they soon crumbled. The sounds of processing now amounted to a single click and a sizzle as the circuits of the internal system simply went dead along with the rest of him. Every bot in the factory would experience the same malfunction and the company would plummet. In this moment, however, Yvette knew no care for money only to know that she had gone too far. The burden was meant for us to carry.\n"
  title: The Burden
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2006-07-28
  day: 28
  month: '07'
  text: "When I found her she was seated  at the entrance to the 8th street NR station, looking like Huckleberry Finn in faded overalls with a wooden fishing pole resting over her shoulder.  She’d been waiting for me, of course, because I was the one with the BB gun, and she damn well wasn’t going hunting on her own.  Dawn was cocky, sure, but she wasn’t stupid.  You never know what can happen down there.\n\n“Ready?” she asked, grinning like a cartoon pumpkin.  I nodded and she swung the fishing pole out to grab hold of the line, which was tied around the usual candle.  Dawn lit both ends then bounced down the stairs, disappearing into the black subway entrance as if it were the mouth of a cave.  I followed, the BB gun brushing against my hip.\n\nAs usual, the swarm of small fries dashed away from Dawn’s candle with a clatter of hundreds of claws against cement.  These were three, maybe four inches…not the type we wasted ammo on.  The quickest gutterbrats could catch them by tossing nets, but Dawn and I, we hunted serious game.  She thrust the fishing pole into my hands as she hopped the turnstile, and my eyes followed the watery light over the familiar space.  Hulking figures of old, dark ticket machines, and the plexiglass windows of the chamber that, for some reason, had never been looted.  All trains cancelled, the whiteboard read in marker unaffected by the last decade.\n\n“Downtown this time?” Dawn asked.  She took the pole back so that I could swing myself over the barrier, and when I landed, I nodded.  We passed the pole again to jump down into the tracks, and the flame flickered, almost going out from the movement.  The candle was vital to tunnelhunting.  Aside from providing light, it warned us when we were coming up on a patch of dead air.  When we stood still we could hear them in the distance, crawling through the tunnels.  The big fish, trackrabbits the size of cats.\n\nDawn stopped, and the candle bobbed.  This was the place.  I hurled the Styrofoam containers onto the next track over and heard the snap and wet crash of half-rotten bait, then I backed beside her to wait.  They heard it.  They always did.\n\nThe first ones were small, a little smaller than a cat.  In the flickering light of the candle they were emaciated grey shapes trailing bent tails, sometimes bulging with tumors.  The water’s poison, down here.  We wait patiently, Dawn dangling the candle a few feet ahead as I level the gun at the swarm of rats.  The big ones come later, ambling on crooked legs.  Those are the ones we want.\n\nThe shots are clean, like my shots always are, and the rest of the trackrabbits scatter like pigeons.  When Dawn and I get over, three of them are laying on the tracks, and one of them’s still twitching.  “Nice,” she says, and I nod in agreement.  One’s almost the size of a dog…it’ll fetch good money topside.\n\nDawn grabs the smallest one by the fattest part of the tail and starts dragging, steadying the fishing pole by tucking it under her arm and holding it straight with her free hand.  I grab the other two and we head back to the sunlight, pulling our spoils behind us.\n"
  title: All in a Day's Work
  year: 2006
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2006-07-29
  day: 29
  month: '07'
  text: "We have given you so much.\n\nWe have, for your entire lifetime, watched over you and found you to be needing of our help. In the end, however, you became what you were designed to become. We never made you but we knew your purpose.\n\nWhen you were born of cells we gave you dense matter with which to cease the life of your food. With this we taught you to take the covering of the dead and use them for warmth. In these times we taught you how the sky could combust and bring to you fire. With this fire we taught you how to sterilize the organisms whose life you extinguished to survive.\n\nTime went by and we soon thought to bring you denser molecules from your world deep beneath the crust. We taught you how to use the fire from previous years to bend the dense molecules to make them sharp and deadly. We did not send you to kill others with these evolutions of weapons. You did that, because it was part of your purpose.\n\nMore time would pass in a blink of our existence and we could show you then how to float upon the sodium-chloride liquid of your globe. We taught you how the cycles of your atmosphere would move you across the liquid to find other masses of geography. It was you who conquered, however. It was you who decided to take and not share.\n\nWhen the matter from these vessels deteriorated we began to teach you of chemicals. We sought to enlighten you through written text and allowed you to see inside yourselves through the science of your making and existence. You strayed from your paths, however, and began to make flammable powder from chemicals to harm your own species over land, over belief, over nothing.\n\nAs you began to progress much faster, we had to teach you more than we ever thought we should. Your purpose had been made clear by our lesson over atomic energies and quantum physics. The minds of men twisted the ideas to make devices capable of destructive awe. We watched as you created webs of bickering and gossip over waves of energy and light. Observing your transposed ideas of peace over a world rife with conflict we knew that in these times your purpose was made manifest to even you.\n\nLater we showed you how to communicate instantly with one another. You used this to coordinate strikes and attacks. We showed you how to venture outside your atmosphere in search of something greater than yourselves. With that knowledge you conquered above other men to hold in greed what was never and will never be yours.\n\nIn the times to come we saw the façade peeled back to reveal your purpose even to yourselves. When shown condensed light for building and healing you turned it to weapons. When we showed you how to find other life forms within other atmospheres, you conquered and enslaved rather than make peace. As many of your species fell to others of their kind, we watched you strangle yourself. When we watched you, when we helped and showed you all that we could, we saw what your purpose truly was.\n\nAs the black voids of our existence draw us in and compact us into unknown pressurized masses, we look upon you and wonder why you were there for us to show so many ideas.\n\nWe have no weapons here, no quarrels and no animosity. Science is our purpose and it has no prejudice. On a cold desolate planet, you live the last of your days and here, at the end of all things, do we thank you for showing us what we might have become.\n"
  title: The End of All Things
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-07-30
  day: 30
  month: '07'
  text: "Brody looked at the puppies frolicking in the flower garden and beyond them, to where a professional cuteologist, complete with a lab coat and kitten ears, was giving children rides on a friendly lion. Brody shuddered, shoving his hands into his trench coat. “I hate this place.”\n\nChinjin punched him lightly in the shoulder. “Christ Brody, how can you be cranky in Cute Land?”\n\n“It’s just that everything here has a face. It’s creepy.”\n\nChinjin rolled her eyes. “Everything does not have a face.”\n\n“No, seriously, everything has a face. Look, the clouds have faces, the rides have faces, even the food has faces. That kid over there is licking an ice-cream cone with a face!”\n\n“Aw, I think it’s cute. Look at the way the ice cream’s nose scrunches up when the kid licks it.”\n\n“Baby, he is killing that face, one lick at a time, it’s creepy.” Brody waved his arms around “This place is cute porn. Any minute now I will barf glitter.”\n\nChinjin turned away from him. Brody saw her wipe at her face with her hands.\n\nBrody sighed. “I’m sorry babe. I didn’t mean -” He reached for her, but she pulled away.\n\n“I’m fine.” She said, looking down at the rubber rainbow floor.\n\n“Baby, you’re not fine, and I’m sorry.” He reached for her again, and she hugged him, pressing her cheek on his sloping shoulder. “I know you arranged this vacation for me and I really appreciate it. Cute Land just isn’t my thing. I’m sure we can find someplace in the Pleasure Dome to have a good time.” He looked up at a candy signpost, which was whistling merrily. “Look, that way is Gremlin Town; I bet we could have a lot of fun in Gremlin Town.”\n\nChinjin put her arms around his neck.“Yeah?”\n\n“Yeah, and then later, maybe we can go down to the Love Lagoon.” He tickled her waist and she giggled. “All the animatronics there are fully functional, and no kids allowed.”\n\nChinjin grinned. “Now that does sound like fun.”\n\nHe squeezed her waist. “Off to Gremlin Town we go.”\n\nThe signpost winked.\n"
  title: The Pleasure Dome
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2006-07-31
  day: 31
  month: '07'
  text: "The Sears catalogue offers dozens of models of BlogBots, but it claims that its most popular is the X451, used to conduct remote interviews.  During an average three years of service, the X451  BlogBot will recite hundreds of questions posted to its forum and transcribe the answers of over 50 interviewees.  Some interviewees are celebrities, and some are politicians.  Many are general surveys, where the BlogBot is positioned in a public space and repeats the same question to a given number of pedestrians.\n\nOnce, the legend goes, a kid asked his favorite site’s BlogBot to interview another BlogBot, this one belonging to a fiction site, and provided it with a single question: “Why do you do it?”  A BlogBot’s programming is rudimentary by conventional standards, and it’s considered slightly less intelligent than the average car.  When the question was posed to the fiction BlogBot, it nearly crashed, but its adaptive software saved it by processing the question as an incomplete answer rather than an inquiry.\n\nPeople say science fiction is prophetic, but that isn’t entirely true.  Science fiction isn’t about the future.  It’s about the world we live in now, which is constant and constantly changing.  The specifics change, from hovercars and ray guns to genetic engineering and cyberspace, but at the center of every science fiction story there’s something alive, something human.  And that never changes.\n\nThe first answer was not an answer.  The second BlogBot coolly repeated the words it had been given, and the BlogBot conducting the interview lapsed into a similar state.  For several minutes, the room was filled with two voices as the BlogBots recited the question over and over.  Each repetition was classified as a follow-up question, and in accordance with its programming, nothing could be converted to text until a final answer had been given.\n\nOf course, it’s difficult to come up with ideas sometimes.  You get discouraged, or feel like everything’s been done before.  Often, it has.  Sometimes the ideas are wonderful, and sometimes they’re less than wonderful.  But you do it anyways, because that’s what writing is about.\n\nIt took the webmaster over an hour to realize that something was wrong, and it took three days to find the missing BlogBots.  When they were recovered they were still locked in battle, though their words were now slurred by dying batteries.  Not a single word had been converted to text.  The question was never answered.\n\nWhen readers try to thank me for writing, I never understand it.  On their own, words are nothing but lead and ink and pixels.  Telling a story is a circle: the writer writes, the reader reads, and worlds are created.  I’m constantly thanking my readers.  Sometimes, it’s just more obvious than others.\n\nInformation about the upcoming year of 365\n"
  title: The Last Question
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2006-08-01
  day: '01'
  month: '08'
  text: "“Man – this is awesome!” John was in a state of constant verbal barrage, his voice unnaturally loud above the diner chatter as he overcompensated for the music playing in his head. “I’m telling you, these Koreans know how to make implants.”\n\nScott sat across the table, sucking absently at a milkshake and visibly not sharing his friend’s enthusiasm. Lenny was still in line at the counter, which left Scott as the unwilling sole recipient of John’s manic discourse.\n\n“I’m listening to the new Chilies – it’s not even out here, and I’ve just downloaded it right into my head” John was still in the honeymoon phase with his new cerebral implant, a Korean unit he’d bought from a friend of a friend and had implanted that morning.  He hadn’t shut up about it since.  “Hang on – I’m going to message Josie and see if she wants to meet us. She was on the mmorpg a few minutes ago – I’m sure she’s still online.  This is so cool – I’m mmorpging, messaging and jackin’ tunes all at the same time.  Your AmCo. ‘plant’s got nothing on this.”\n\nScott hit the bottom of his shake with a sudden noisy suck of air, which he continued for a moment for it’s sheer irritation factor. When it was obvious it wasn’t having the desired effect, he gave up and pushed it aside. Leaning across the table, he tried to penetrate his friend’s state of distracted euphoria.\n\n“Listen buddy – would you stop yelling – I can hear you – I’m right here. The whole freakin’ diner can hear you, and honestly, you’re not that interesting.”\n\nJohn continued to wave absently at windows in his field of vision that only he could see, while Scott resisted the urge to slap him, instead slumping back into his seat. “Don’t you think it might have been a good idea to get that thing tested before you had it installed?  I mean you can barely hear me – isn’t it a little loud in there?”\n\nJohn’s waving became more frantic, and his eyes were starting to become unfocused. “Damn – goad_theRedRocket keeps trying to chat with me.  I can’t make him stop.”\n\n“Just jam him on your filter list.” Scott was the king of stating the obvious.\n\n“I can’t – the screens are all in Korean. Oh, crap – I opened one – crap, crap, crap – I can’t see – he’s popup bombing me… I’m getting flooded with pink pocket monsters. Not cool at all.” Johns arms flailed wildly about the space in front of his face, his elbows coming dangerously close to upsetting his Coke and fries, which Scott quickly moved to safety. “Now the audio’s screwed – it’s all static – these stupid popups must’ve overrun the buffer… I can’t see a thing, there’s too many windows open –  and I can’t get the stupid avatar to switch to English.  How the hell am I supposed to…” John’s eyes abruptly glazed over, his face going slack and his arms falling limp first onto the table, and then coming to rest on the bench at his sides.\n\nLenny picked this as the perfect moment to arrive, slamming his shake on the table and dropping heavily onto the bench beside Scott.\n\n“What’s up with him?” Lenny jerked a thumb towards their limp friend.\n\n“Korean implant. Probably still in beta, he got spammed and it wigged out.  He’s in total head crash.” Scott retrieved the now abandoned Coke and began drinking it. “It should reboot in a bit, hopefully. He won’t be too happy if we’ve got to EMP the thing to unfreeze his head.”\n\n“Bummer… that’s why I always buy domestic.  Hey, are you going to eat his fries?”\n"
  title: Made in Korea
  year: 2006
- 
  author: S.Clough
  date: 2006-08-02
  day: '02'
  month: '08'
  text: "You’ve heard of the Unequivocal, right?\n\nOkay, then. I’ll assume you’ve been living under a rock since before you were born. The  Unequivocal was the very first flagship of the Earth fleet. One of the early-pattern destroyers: It was lost in its fourth year of service, holding off a half-dozen Beamer ships by itself, buying time for a freighter convoy to get through from Deimos to Earth.\n\nNow when I say ‘lost’, I don’t mean destroyed. I mean lost. There’s no real evidence as to what happened to it, but everybody thought that it was destroyed.\n\nThe Beamers signed the treaty, and everyone forgot about the Unequivocal. When Free Celestia declared their tax war, and Earth was forced to defend itself again… the Unequivocal showed up. A freight-courier was blasting the run from Eros, and an entire Celestia wolfpack was right there waiting. Now, freight-couriers are hardly defenceless, but even an ECS variant armed to the teeth would have issues with such a wolfpack; a merchant navy variant had no chance.\n\nThey’d lost shields, and most of their weapons when the Unequivocal blindsided the wolfpack. It was a real laser show – big weapons: old thermonukes, hard beams, Wraitii caps, and some other stuff even Earth Central can’t identify. The Celestians were wiped out, and the Freight-Courier limped home. Its sensor arrays had been badly damaged, but it had recorded the battle in high enough quality to confirm that the only known ship which matched that hull configuration was the Unequivocal. Of course, it could just be an old destroyer, modified over time to resemble the old flagship. But spacers, being spacers, would prefer for their saviour to be a revenant from the past rather than a modern-day phenomenon.\n\nNow, the rumour goes that in that fight near Deimos, the Unequivocal was hit by a Beamer secret weapon, and something odd happened – isolated spacetime bubbles and transference are the popular theories. To be honest, I don’t care. I don’t know if it is that same ship that disappeared all those years ago, but I know pilots and captains which owe their lives to it. It never communicates anything, never stops, and has no known base. It just appears, fights, (most often against overwhelming odds), and leaves. Untraceable.\n\nEvery Earther who strays beyond their homeworld’s ecliptic has hope now. If everything turns against them, the Unequivocal might show. They’re not scared to face up to those who would deny them the system.\n\nAnd that, my friend, is why I believe the stories.\n"
  title: The Unequivocal
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Michael “Freeman” Herbaugh
  date: 2006-08-03
  day: '03'
  month: '08'
  text: "“This skull has been carbon dated at being 3 million years old. Yet, clearly it is the skull of a 20th century homo-sapiens. You’ve been trained for the last five years because of the discovery of THIS skull.”\n\nCartwright listened to the director of The Program as he spoke solemnly. The skull had indeed been found five years later at an archeological site in Brazil. It took quite a bit of doing but the US government had managed to keep it relatively quiet. Because of the skull, they learned that time travel was indeed possible, at least into the past. Someone had done it, though it cost his or her life. The US was determined to be the ones to discover the secret and launched “The Program”.\n\nAssembled here was Cartwright’s team, being let in for the first time on the biggest secret known to man. They had known they were being trained for a trip that was far from ordinary but had no idea until today just how far they would have to go. The three women and two men would be the first to use the monstrous time machine that had been assembled to send them back three million years.\n\nAs the director finished explaining the discovery and motivation of the US government to the team, Cartwright could see the shock and realization come over their faces. By the time the briefing was done, he would swear Summer’s face had an expression of pure joy on it, juxtaposed with Leon’s look of solemn fear.\n\n“That’s all, people,” finished the director. “You launch in 48 hours. Cartwright, as team leader I need you to stay behind for a final briefing. The rest of you dismissed. Enjoy your day of leave, then back here.”\n\nAs Cartwright settled into a chair opposite the director’s desk, the director’s tone changed, becoming soft. “There is one last objective for this mission, which is why a soldier like you was chosen to lead it,” he said. “This is not easy to say nor will it be easy for you to carry out. The scientists studying the skull have finally matched dental records as of last year. The team’s botanist, Gloria Hartigan–this skull is hers.”\n\nThe director took a pistol from his desk. “Make sure she doesn’t come back.”\n"
  title: Fate of Our Future Past
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Gabrielle Kinsman
  date: 2006-08-04
  day: '04'
  month: '08'
  text: "The transport completed its descent and settled onto the ground. The landing gear clamped to the landing pad, like a bug latching onto a leaf. The hatch opened and people started filing out almost before it touched ground. There were scores of people; many of them were specialists, workers for the newly-terraformed planet Arian. Another large portion were business men; both rich and poor, looking to start anew or create another branch to their prospering business. But the bulk of the people were ordinary folk, settlers who had volunteered (or been volunteered) to populate the new colony.\n\nSamantha Headford was among the ordinary colonists. Her swollen belly differentiated her from the other passengers; she was just under the maximum length pregnancy allowed on the trip, and well over the recommended length. She had been worried, but she couldn’t stay where she had been before. She wasn’t safe there, and neither was the baby.\n\nThe baby’s father walked next to her, gripping her hand. Grant was three inches taller than her, had the same sandy blond hair as she, and was currently suffering from a broken nose. It would heal up in a day or two — they couldn’t afford the treatment that would heal it within hours — but in the meantime he wore an unsightly bandage over the middle of his face.\n\nShe stood off to the side and waited for him while he retrieved information on their assigned living quarters. Mothers with their children gave her knowing smiles when they passed by; she smiled back, a little wary, but happy. None of these people knew who she was. All they saw was a pregnant woman waiting for her husband.\n\nOne overly friendly woman walked up to her and smiled at the little package. “Oh, how far along are you, dearie?”\n\n“Uh, five months,” Sam said.\n\n“Ooh, he’s coming along soon, isn’t he?” The woman grinned at her.\n\n“She,” Sam said, her smile growing.\n\n“Oh, pardon. Hard to tell from out here, you know.”\n\nSam laughed. “Do you have any of your own?”\n\n“Ah, yes, but they’re all grown up.” Sam noticed the gray strands in the woman’s hair. “Angry at me for adventuring out into the great black unknown again, likely. Oh, pardon, I’ve forgotten all about my manners. Name’s Haley.” She offered her hand; Sam shook it.\n\n“Samantha.”\n\n“Such a pretty name. Do you know where you’ll be staying?”\n\n“Thank you. Um, not yet, my, the baby’s father is finding out right now.” Sam gestured towards where Grant was staring at a screen.\n\n“Ah, I see.” Haley winked at her. “You ever need any help with that little one, you let me know. I have a bit of experience under my belt, raising little ones in far off places.”\n\n“I will, thank you.” The women smiled at each other, and Haley left her alone.\n\nGrant returned, grinning, took her hand and led her away.\n\n“We’re on the east side,” he told her. “The sun rises in the east here, just like on Earth. You’re going to love the view.”\n\nThe walk wasn’t very long, but it seemed much longer to her tired body. At the moment she didn’t much care about the view; she was more interested in the bed, and how much sleeping she would get done in it.\n\nHer ambivalence remained until they were in the living room, and Grant hit a button next to the opaque windows, making them clear. She’d never realized that people meant the word ‘breathtaking’ literally; for a moment she really did forget how to breathe.\n\n“Grant, it’s…”\n\n“See? Told you.” He grinned at her, like a boy at Christmas. “It’s as beautiful as you are.”\n\nShe rolled her eyes. “Oh, stop.”\n\nHe came up and hugged her from the side. “We’re going to be okay here.” He put his hand over her belly. “We’ll be safe.”\n\nShe leaned into him and smiled. “Yes.” She put her hand over her brother’s and said, “No one knows who we are.”\n"
  title: No One Knows
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Adam Zabell
  date: 2006-08-05
  day: '05'
  month: '08'
  text: "In one of those rare moments of unity, the nation sits in stunned silence at the scene laid out before them. A few short seconds from now three different wild howls of exclamation will be broadcast from two billion different voices.\n\nA third of those voices will be shrill with anger, proclaiming to their chosen Gods how vile that scene was, how crude, wrong and immoral. In time, prayers will be spoken and letters written to politicians and newsfeeds about how Something Must Be Done. Some of these folk will demand retribution; a pound of flesh that must be extracted from those who brought this terror to their homes, their families and their children.\n\nAnother third will be aghast with despair, certain that yet another pointless and fruitless war is about to be waged. A war filled with violent rhetoric that will prove nothing and divide the people ever further into the camps of the extremists. Most of these folk will hunker down in their shelters, intellectualizing what they saw and afraid to act for what they see as the path towards a greater good.\n\nThe final third, the youngest third, are probably the most profoundly affected. They know what is supposed to happen, and where, and know what they saw today totally flies in the face of those rules. Deep in their souls they know that what they saw today has changed, will change their life forever. And they will be the ones who cry out the loudest, their voices from chuckle and chortle to bray and bellow. And all the inevitable conversations on their electronic chatspaces and in their personal stomping grounds will boil down to a single, visceral sentence.\n\n“Dude, can you even say ‘fuck’ on hypercast?!”\n"
  title: After the Bomb Fell
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2006-08-06
  day: '06'
  month: '08'
  text: "March 26, 2167.  It was the best of days; it was the worst of days (if you permit me to paraphrase Charles Dickens).  At 8:00 EMT (Earth mean time), I accepted delivery of the Galaxy-Clipper.  Although named for the nineteenth century sailing ship, it was not made to cruse Earth’s watery seas.  No, it was made to dart around the solar system at one half the speed of light.  It’s a four passenger, forty foot diameter, gleaming metal saucer, powered by a Rolls-Royce 427 terawatt antimatter engine, and 32 ion-drive plasma guidance reaction jets.  Man, she’s pure supernova.  It set me back two years salary, but there isn’t a better babe gravity-well on the market.  Surely, the best of days.\n\nHowever, in hindsight I should have been satisfied with the Clipper’s standard equipment package. But my dim-witted, testosterone blind buddies convinced me to take her “off path” to get the underbelly coated with a mono-layer of promethium-deuterium-phosphate, otherwise known as PDP.  For those of you unfamiliar with PDP, it’s a catalytic coating that promotes the fusion of hydrogen into helium.  Under the right conditions, you can cause rarified hydrogen gas to spontaneously fuse into helium, liberating a substantial quantity of energy.  As it turns out, those “right conditions” are the temperatures and pressures generated by the hull of a sleek new spacecraft as it skims across the upper atmosphere of a gas giant; say Saturn.  It’s called nuclear wake surfing.  It’s illegal, but fun as hell.  I assume you can see where this is going.  At 11:45, I was docked outside Bubba’s Astro Parts and Body Station in Mars orbit.  At 14:00, me and three of my idiot friends (that’s four idiots total) were streaking toward Saturn at 0.499c (the ship was new, so I didn’t peg the throttle).  Nine hundred million miles and three hours later (not counting time dilation), we were in geosynchronous orbit over Saturn.\n\nWe spent the next two hours calculating the required velocity and angle of inclination.  Too steep and you burn up; too shallow and you bounce off the atmosphere.  At 19:00 we caught our first ride.  Man, what a thrill.  From 25,327 miles per hour to 0.1c in millisecond bursts.  Uncontrolled nine gee pitch, roll, and yaw buffeting.  The most exciting 20 seconds of my life.  When we pulled around for a second run, part of Saturn’s northern hemisphere was on fire.  We didn’t hang around to figure out what happened, but my guess is that Bubba’s PDP was defective and broke loose while we were surfing.  Since the dispersed particles are just catalysts (i.e., they are not consumed) the nuclear fusion reaction became self-sustaining.\n\nBy now (21:30), the fusion reaction has undoubtedly spread throughout the entire planet, and the rings have probably dissipated.  Although we cannot see Saturn, I’m sure the view of your new mini-star is quite spectacular from Earth, especially at night.  For the unforeseeable future, my buddies and I are fugitives hiding deep within a crevice of an unnamed asteroid while the Spaceforce hunts us down.  Clearly, the worst of days.\n"
  title: In Hindsight…
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Clifford Hebner
  date: 2006-08-07
  day: '07'
  month: '08'
  text: "They met at the Imperial Academy, her slight and boyish, the youngest woman ever admitted, and he old, with the face and toothy grin of an ape. They were outcast, too young or old to be useful to anyone, but by the time she accepted her first commission, serving as ensign on a tiny scout ship, their legend had already started to grow. When she was promoted to the Captaincy, and given her own battleship, it was his ancient Admiral’s hands that pressed the pin to her breast and drew the ceremonial drops of blood, said to seal sailor to Emperor forever.\n\nHistory, in its wisdom, called the rebellion inevitable, the Emperor’s arrogance and madness driving fully a third of his armies from him in desperate revolt. The rebels, outmanned and outgunned, were hounded across space, until, at a worthless piece of rock called Martin’s Folly, the ape-faced former Admiral marshaled what forces were left to stand and die. The Imperial fleet came on and the first thousand ships flamed and died in the embrace of minefields and artillery orbiting The Folly; but she, who had been both student and lover, held her third back, and when they fell from hyperspace and in among the rebel ships it was with the whispered voice of Death.\n\nIn the end the Admiral, his ship crippled and burning, ordered all power to the engines and forward shields, seeking to lance the flagship, and it was without the thought of tears that she maneuvered around and sent him to a death in fire and a grave in the void they both loved so deeply.\n\nShe gathered up what ships were left to her, after the old ape had ambushed them so mercilessly, and limped on home with her men singing celebration and feast-day songs. She sailed through an infinity of stars and into the heartworld of a grateful empire, and then through an ocean of courtiers to the Emperor’s audience chamber. He, in his lust, and his madness, came down from his throne, where no man could kill him, and sought her embrace; and she, with her lover’s ugly face first in her mind, drove seven inches of the finest Imperial steel into his blackened heart, stilling it on the spot.\n\nShe left the Emperor on the floor, dead and discarded, and with him all the names and honorifics she had ever been given. She walked back to her ship, and the armies followed her once more, back out into the infinite ocean, always seeking new conquest. From that day forward she was called only Victory, and her name was battle-hymn and funeral-hymn on the lips of her men, who loved her- but she, who had killed both her lover and her God-King? Haunted by the memory of an ape-faced old Admiral, she loved nothing at all.\n"
  title: Winged Victory
  year: 2006
- 
  author: JR Blackwell
  date: 2006-08-08
  day: '08'
  month: '08'
  text: "“I don’t want to go to the United States.” Wilkin slumped, his head falling into the cradle of his arms. His lawyer, the Silver Cyborg, as he liked to be called, put a heavy sympathetic hand on Wilkin’s shoulder.\n\n“Sorry Willi, I wish I could appeal this again, but it looks like they’ve made a final decision on your case.”\n\nWilli looked up from the metal table. The skin around his eyes was red and puffy. “Tell them that if I have to leave the European Union, I will kill myself.”\n\nThe Silver Cyborg shook his gleaming head. “Willi, don’t be rash.”\n\n“Have you heard what they do over there? They eat animals and kill each other for diesel fuels.”\n\n“They have a different way of living. I’m sure you’ll become accustomed to it.”\n\n“This is cruel and unusual punishment! They can’t do this to me!”\n\n“Willi, calm down.”\n\n“God, you were my lawyer. You were supposed to keep this from happening!”\n\n“Wilkin, and I don’t want to be too forward here, but I’ve been curious. What did you think would happen when you started leaving those abusive messages all over the network? What did you think would happen when you were sending those e-mails to those girls or pretending to be a girl yourself and taking people’s money? What, honestly, did you think would happen?”\n\n“I don’t know. I thought, maybe, I would get fine or something, a net ticket or whatever.”\n\n“Willi, they’ve been deporting Trolls to the U.S. for fifteen years now. I don’t know why you thought you could get away with this.”\n\nWhen Willi heard the word Troll, it made him slump in his chair. “It just got ahead of me. I would see something and I just couldn’t help but comment, track the poster down and really get to them, I don’t know. I couldn’t help myself.” Willi’s face brightened. “Say, do you think you could push this off as a psychological problem? We could tell people I’ve got an addictive personality. You think you could appeal on that?”\n\nThe Silver Cyborg picked up his data pad, which was modified to have a silver surface that matched the Cyborg’s own skin. “Honestly? No.”\n\nWilli pounded the table. “What if I have a nervous breakdown?”\n\nThe Silver Cyborg knocked on the wall, signaling the guard to unlock the hidden door. “Have a nice flight to the U.S. Willi. I hope people enjoy your flames over there.”\n"
  title: The Creature Under the Bridge
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2006-08-09
  day: '09'
  month: '08'
  text: "Levon regarded the timepiece in his hand carefully, balanced on an open palm as if weighing it, he frowned, then spoke. “Sixty seconds,” his words brought nods and murmurs of agreement from the small crowd gathered around him, the sounds rolling away to be swallowed by the blackness of the parking garage where they’d chosen to gather on this night.\n\nHe carefully wound the outer ring of the watch face one complete turn, feeling rather than hearing it click through the seconds. He paused a moment, letting the tension in the crowd steep, feeling the weight of their gaze upon him. With a practiced motion he depressed the crown and rolled it forward slowly, deliberately, until it could be wound no more. He could feel the energy of the tightly compressed spring, quivering with anticipation within the case in his hand.  “Ready?” it was unclear if the question was directed at the crowd, or himself, but there were a few more hurried exchanges, then a nod from Charlie and two thumbs up.\n\nIt was time.\n\nLevon made sure the watch’s tether was wrapped tightly around his wrist, then plunged both hands into the kangaroo pocket of his hoodie. His eyes clenched tightly shut, he tugged the crown back into position, setting the works of the timepiece into motion.  He could feel the energy flow through him as the tight coil began to unwind. He reeled for only a moment with the dizzying nausea that always accompanied the ticking of this particular clock. He knew better than to open his eyes, he’d made that mistake only once, and had waking nightmares for months after. The human mind was not meant to see some things.\n\nThe momentary yaw and pitch ceased, and new sounds and sensations leaked into his consciousness, begging him to open his eyes. Disoriented, he felt his feet sink slightly into wet sand, and then the air was suddenly alive with staccato snapping as it blistered and split all around him.  He froze as men in uniforms sprinted past him up a beach, only to stagger back and fall in a relentless hailstorm of bullets.  A sudden impact from behind knocked him to the ground, and winded he could barely hear the voice screaming as a figure clambered over him “Get your bloody head down, or you’ll get it shot…” the remainder of the warning was torn violently away in a barrage of gunfire.\n\nLevon curled up on the ground, trying to disappear into the blood slick sand. ’55, 54, 53…’ A boy, no older than he fell backwards to land upside down and face to face with him, his eyes filled with the terror that comes with one’s last seconds ’50, 49, 48…’ The stench of immediate death burned his nose, the screams of the dying assailed his ears mercilessly. All around the frantic yelling of men trying hopelessly to stay alive. Levon squeezed his eyes shut tight, but could do nothing to block out the image of this dying boys eyes, bright, blue, vacant. His ears offered no protection against the deafening audible horror all around. ’40, 39, 38…’ He was sure that he was going to die here, on a beach he had no reason to see, in a time in which he didn’t belong, and for what? A couple of hundred dollars and a brief rush of adrenaline? ’25, 24, 23…’ This was pure insanity, every other time had been fields of flowers, landscapes painted in snow. He’d never seen a soul before. ’18, 17, 16…’ Levon opened his eyes, the boy still staring, lifeless, the color in his eyes having run out. The dirt coated face and the bloodied lips etched themselves into Levon’s mind, forming a caricature of a life blown apart, and those eyes… ’13, 12, 11…’ Reflexively he squeezed his own eyes shut again, ‘5, 4, 3…’ this boy just one of many that had died so Levon could have the freedoms he’d enjoyed his whole life. And this was the best he could do, using stolen tools and mocking these sacrifices for beer money?\n\nHe did his best to compose himself as he snapped back into the crowded parking space. Half hearted praise, the sounds of money begrudgingly changing hands, these things leaked in muted tones into his consciousness. These noises were meant for another Levon, the Levon he’d left on a beach in some other time. He knew there were things the human mind was not meant to see, for once seen one could never look at the world in the same way again.\n\n“Double or nothing,”  Charlie’s voice slipped in through the haze, “double or nothing?”.\n\n“No,” his voice came from somewhere else too, “no, I’m done, I’m all out of time.”\n"
  title: 60 Seconds
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Eric Willey
  date: 2006-08-10
  day: 10
  month: '08'
  text: "The Colony Ship New Eden moved closer to the world that was her destination as the last pilot opened the door to a murderer.\n\n“You can’t kill me. No one else to fly this crate.” He turned and walked over to his personal kitchenette, poured two cups of coffee and didn’t bother to look back at the gun before asking, “Cream, sugar?”\n\n“None for me, thanks. And you’re overestimating your value to this mission.” The killer moved into the room and kept the gun centered on his target as the pressurized door automatically slid shut.\n\nHe leaned against the counter and blew gently on the coffee before taking a sip. “No. Stevens fell down the stairwell and broke his neck. Hodgkins had that rather unfortunate suicide business. And Yates isn’t fully trained. Which makes me the only one who can navigate this boat to and then land on New Providence Five.”\n\n“Wrong again. Stevens was pushed down a stairwell and had his neck broken. Hodgkins was strung up from that plasma conduit after he died. And Mister Yates is currently in the simulator, doing a very credible impersonation of a man with two gunshot wounds to the head. You died the second you opened the door.”\n\n“Wait…” They both winced as the gun exploded in the small room. A second sound cut through the ringing in their ears as the coffee cup hit the floor. He walked across the room and put the remaining four bullets into the body of the last pilot, tossed his gun on the corpse and walked out. He wouldn’t need the gun anymore anyway.\n\nThere would be an investigation of course, for the sake of appearances. No one would ever figure out he did it, because it was something they all wanted to do. With the last pilot dead, they could all breathe a sigh of relief. Their great grandparents had set out for New Providence Five over 104 years ago, looking for a new world. They died long ago, of old age and the myriad ailments that came with time.\n\nTheir descendants had never known a life other than the one they had aboard the colony ship. A life where the ship took care of everything, where there was no need to harvest crops or dig ditches. He went back to his room, washed his hands, laid down on his bed and looked at the titanium sky above him until he fell asleep.\n\nThe New Eden slipped silently through space without a destination. The crew were already home, and they weren’t going anywhere.\n"
  title: Staying Home
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Viktor Kuprin
  date: 2006-08-11
  day: 11
  month: '08'
  text: "The priest’s pointed helmet hung at his side. His vac suit was completely black.\n\nEngineer Beketov didn’t get it. It was too strange, too … medieval.  The holy man waved the crucifix over the salt package and recited a prayer. Beketov had been told the salt was for cooking a lamb stew that would be shared by all the dockyard’s techs and engineers.\n\n“Father Toyan, it’s time for us to EVA. Let’s go.” The priest nodded and followed to the airlock.\n\n“How far did you travel to get here?” Beketov asked.\n\n“From Earth, from the Great Ararat Monastery, to be exact.” The priest’s voice was reedy, and his beard bunched against the visor of his strangely-shaped helmet.\n\n“I’ve never been to Earth,” said the engineer. “Father, I’m curious, why is your helmet peaked on top? When other priests visit the station, their helmets aren’t like yours.”\n\n“Priests who are not married wear these, my son. The peak symbolizes our dedication to the Lord,” he explained.\n\nThe airlock hatch slid open, and the bright light of Dustri’s star made their visors darken. They slowly moved toward the dockyards, their boots’ magnetic soles clicking with each step.\n\n“How long have you been working in the yards, my son?”\n\nBeketov laughed. “Close to a year, but it seems like forever, Father. The one we’re going to was just an empty shell with I first arrived. Look at him now.”\n\nOne of the dumb servo-mechanoids rumbled toward them. Beketov gently grasped the priest’s shoulder to stop him from entering its path. It wobbled past with no sign of notice.\n\n“Father Toyan, no disrespect, but how do you feel about this? Coming all the way out here to, well, to bless …”\n\n“An engine of destruction? Actually, the church’s blessing is for the crew, to humbly ask God for their safety and protection, and that they will always be in His grace.”\n\nAs they walked, Beketov watched the priest’s gold crucifix sparkle in the starlight. A transparent pouch filled with small plastic globlets hung from his belt: Holy Water for the ceremony.\n\n“Here he is, Father.” Beketov could see people watching them, crowded together in the observation blisters and viewports surrounding the dockyard.\n\n“Are you a believer, Engineer Beketov?” the priest asked.\n\n“I don’t know, Father. Sometimes it’s hard not to be when you look up and see all this,” the engineer said, pointing toward the stars. “I do know that a man needs all the help he can get, right?”\n\nToyan nodded. “Fair enough. Now, if you will, let us pray.” The priest keyed the comm controls on his suit sleeve and began to broadcast.\n\n“Almighty God and Creator, You are the Father of all people. Guide, I pray, all the worlds and their leaders in the ways of justice and peace … ”\n\nThe priest made the sign of the cross in front of the new starship’s gigantic gray hull.\n"
  title: The Blessing
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Kenyon Applebee & Bridget Webb
  date: 2006-08-12
  day: 12
  month: '08'
  text: "The stark woman set the blue incandescent lamp on a nearby crate and turned off her flashlight. “…Erin, would you like to sleep in a real bed again?” She wore black – military cut. The figures behind her were similarly dressed.  They guarded the decaying elementary school as if against attack, though Erin couldn’t imagine these people hiding from street thugs like she’d had to.\n\nErin, scared, couldn’t stand.  “Who are you?  How do you know my name?”\n\n“…How would you like to see your little sister again?”\n\nErin’s lower lip trembled, “Kitty?”\n\n“She’s safe.”\n\nKitty had disappeared in the Newman Hill attack with the rest of her family.  “You are the Terrorists!”\n\n“…I suppose we are.  You’re fourteen?”\n\n“What do you want?”\n\n“We want you to let us take care of you.  How long have you been out here?  Two weeks?”\n\n“Yeah…”\n\n“Through all the fighting and the burning?”\n\nTears began burning in Erin’s eyes.  It had been a nightmare.  She’d found no one to turn to…but…  “You killed my parents!” she yelled, exploding to her feet.\n\nA gun shifted in the darkness, aimed at her.\n\n“We did.  But we did not kill you, or your sister.  And you are the reason I am here.  If you stay out here, you will die.  Have you been raped yet?”\n\nErin could not answer.  She wanted to scream, to attack the woman, but… the guns.\n\n“It doesn’t matter.  We are not terrorists; we are,” pausing, “’international referees.’ We step in to stop egregious abuses of power, by becoming very skilled and very powerful.  Education is very important here, isn’t it?  It determines your social class.  You are currently service class, no?”\n\n“Yes.”\n\n“Were you going to be service class your whole life, like your parents?”\n\n“No.  I am… was… going to test into…”  The absurdity of talking so casually to this woman struck her.\n\n“But now?”\n\n“…Now you want me to join you, after you killed my parents, and sabotaged my country. What gives you the right to ‘Referee’ everyone?  To kill people?!”\n\nThe woman leaned smugly against the crates.  “People kill each other every day.  Sometimes you fight fire with fire.  Besides, we don’t consider ourselves human.  Not homo-sapiens anyway.  Not anymore.”\n\n“You use Forbidden Science,” Erin murmured.\n\n“Genetic enhancements.  We can give you some, if you like.  Enhanced intelligence, coordination, strength – everything you’d need to make the world better.”\n\n“How… how do you get away with it?\n\n“No, Erin.  The question is, are you coming with us?  Our offer is grander than your wildest dreams.  If you say no, we disappear.  Now, choose.”\n\nErin hesitated.  Sounds from outside filled the silence between them; a radio blaring, engines, a car alarm.  About a block away, there was breaking glass followed by laughter.  “Ok.”\n\nThey lead her onto the glidercraft parked on the soccer field. The woman hung back, pressed the transmitter below her ear.  “Opal to Turquoise, I have a newborn.”\n\n“Roger, Opal.  That’s eight of eleven.  Excellent work.  Bring them in.”\n"
  title: Recruitment Tactics
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Hannah F.
  date: 2006-08-13
  day: 13
  month: '08'
  text: "The man of Saiyen was small and nervous-looking, not nearly as mystical as I expected, wandering into these ancient strongholds; like a Peasant or maybe a half-blood Noble boy, the kind that spent the days with their faces in paper.\n\n“Is that a crossbow?  Fascinating,” he said hurriedly.  This was a panic reaction; I let him go, knowing sooner or later he’d run out of chatter and shut his teeth.  “Obviously the surveillance devices haven’t been working but we’d theorized that the environment lacked enough stability for your society to develop even this kind of basic automation in your projectile weapons…”  He was sweating and I had to chew my tongue to avoid a grin.  I’d only caught about half of that ‘cos of his accent, but I understood the important part.  He didn’t know what I wanted, so he’d started to babble, hoping I’d latch onto some topic and get the bolt out of his face more quickly.\n\nI took a careful step back and laid the weapon down, still drawn and dangerous.  The Saiyentist looked at it blankly.  He knew what it was and what it was for, could wager what it’d feel like if I used it, but didn’t seem eager to try wresting it from me.\n\nEyes on him I unlaced the hard-hide pouch at my belt and lifted the cloth-wrapped vial from it.  The glass tube and its case were from my uncle, a gift after my Modding.  He’d dug it from the ruins of a building like this one, an eerily smooth white shell he’d never been able to find again.\n\n“I want more of this,” I said, and folded back the soft, thick wool, cupping the thing in my hand in case the small man tried to snatch it, or dash it to the floor.  The crossbow, though, cautioned him and he merely regarded the light-blue liquid with wide eyes.\n\n“Where did you get that?” he began, but changed his mind when he saw the look in my eyes.  “Do you know what it is?”\n\n“I’ve been told it’s a poison, but only to certain natures.  Won’t slay a man, but it’ll break down a dragon to its elements in under an arc.”\n\n“It’s an emergency denaturing solution.  It works by breaking down the chemicals in the cells and-” I was curious as a kitten but I must’ve looked impatient.  “The important thing is, it works the way you say it does.  Which is why we’ve kept it here in Obbsreg.  But if you brought back a significant amount- even if we had a significant amount- it would interfere with the Ancestral Plan.  As much as I’d like to help you I’m as bound by my forebears as you are.”  He frowned.  “You shouldn’t even be here, of course…”\n\n“Wait.”  If I had understood what he just said, I was about to be very, very angry.  “You mean your ancestors are responsible for keeping the drake-poison from my people?”  I tied off the laces of my pouch and retrieved my crossbow.  “And you just… what? Study us?”\n\nThe Saiyentist frowned at that, in spite of the terror that’d returned to his face.  After a moment puzzling my assumption out, he began to laugh.  I could do nothing but stare as he worked out his panic in a giggle-fit, wiping tears from eyes that were still wide ‘cos of the proximity of my crossbow to his gut.\n\n“Who said anything about my ancestors being responsible for this?”\n\nI was going to have one hell of a tale, whenever I got home.  “Tell me everything.”\n"
  title: The Hero and the Man of Saiyen
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2006-08-14
  day: 14
  month: '08'
  text: "Cyrus curled in the corner, hugging his aching legs to his chest as though they might crawl off without him were he to let them go.  White hot grains of sand glassified in his retinas, and beads of sweat scraped down his flesh, each one making it’s presence felt with excruciating persistence.  It may only have been a few hours, but it felt like days since he’d last had a shot.  Time had ceased to be a relevant commodity, as he couldn’t trade it for a fix.  He felt his stomach heave, but the sensation never left the empty pit of his gut.\n\n“Commander, you seem to be poorly” the words ground their way through the haze as a face loomed in his field of vision, the image slightly out of sync with the noise coming from it as words. Double lids twitched over glistening emerald eyes, startling in their clarity, in sharp contrast to the shifting chitin and dancing shadows beyond.\n\n“Please…” the sound of his own voice made him wince “please, I know you have some, help me.”\n\n“Commander Cyrus,” the eyes slipped backwards into the darkness, the voice booming all around him now “surely you appreciate that these recreational pharmaceuticals you’re asking for, these require currency that you simply do not have”\n\n“I’ve got other things, we can trade, I know things.” Pain shot like lancets up his spine to burst as cannon fire deep within his skull.  Never had he suffered withdrawal this exquisitely painful before.\n\n“Trade? Knowledge? Interesting.” There was an elongated pause, as the voice considered his offer “Perhaps you can help me with…” the was a pause again as the next words were carefully chosen “a freight difficulty.’ The face loomed once more in his peripheral vision, but he couldn’t bring himself to turn and look at it.  “If one were to want to move cargo through the Earth shield, without interference, would you know how that could be accomplished? Could you help me with that?”. The articulation of each word made Cyrus flinch.\n\n“If I help you, you’ll hook me up? No tricks?” There was a level of desperate excitement in his voice, one that brought what may have passed for a smile to the face of the towering creature.\n\n“Yes, if you help me with my… transportation issue… I promise you will not suffer like this again”\n\n“There was a mining portal on the dark side of the moon, beneath the old InterStar hangers” the words came surprisingly freely through the drumming pain in his skull “it’s been closed for decades, but the power station still works, and the portal’s still stable.” He burrowed his chin into his knees, his brain screaming with anticipation of relief.\n\n“Thank you, Commander, you’ve been most helpful.” The great green face slipped out of the periphery to stare at Cyrus, face to face. “You and your people have taught us so much.”\n\n“Taught? We haven’t taught you anything…” he waited anxiously, one arm relaxing it’s grip on his shins to expose his hypocite to the promise of an injector.\n\n“Oh, we have learned much from your race my dear Commander Cyrus. You have no idea.  We watched your people everywhere trading currency and flesh for chemical joy. We never could have conceived of a negotiating tool as powerful as addiction, or a lever as effective as your narcotics.  Who would have thought the secrets of your civilization’s safe keeping, entrusted to military men like yourself, could be so freely liberated in exchange for something as trivial as a moment of manufactured ecstasy.  But most of all, we’d forgotten how much more expedient violent conquest was when compared to traditional diplomatic relations.  Oh yes, you humans have taken us back to our roots, and you’ve catapulted us far into our own futures.’ A vice like grip suddenly had Cyrus’ forearm, pulling it straight and holding it motionless. ‘Now, Commander, I do believe we had a deal, and I think you’ll find this generous enough to alleviate your conscience.’\n\nThe warm flood rippled up the Commanders arm, rolling in waves to his toes and up and over his head. For a moment, the room became strikingly clear, he saw the giant chitin plated alien that had first offered him a fix in a bar off base, coached him through his first purchase, and had always been around to hook him up when he needed a fresh hit. What was that on his chest, a military insignia? Was he a soldier? Pounding waves flooded through his head, and he was only momentarily aware of the feed, still jutting skyward from his forearm, as it relieved him of all responsibility.\n"
  title: The Damage Done
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R.Blackwell
  date: 2006-08-15
  day: 15
  month: '08'
  text: "The teacher, the senticyborg and the children sat in a circle on logs in the woods. In the beginning of the semester they had constructed their outdoor classroom as an assignment in team building. The canopy above them made patterns of yellow light on the soft grass.\n\n“Who can tell me who our world is named after?” Asked the teacher. A few of the older children rolled their eyes – this was old material for them.\n\nReading their social signals, the senticyborg prompted one of the older children. “If you know the story, please share with those who do not. I will assist you in the telling.”\n\nThis excited the children, who enjoyed the interactive storytelling feature of the senticyborg, which would change shape depending on the stories that the children told. Usually, the senticyborg was silver and blue, but it could change to many shapes and colors to help teach the children.\n\n“Well,” said the child “Our planet is named after a mythological 20th century Princess. This Princess was very strong, and no matter what she faced, she could overcome all problems.” The senticyborg changed shape into the figure of a striking woman with long dark hair. “This Princess was one of the greatest fighters the world has ever known, a master of medicine, and a great leader.”\n\nThe primary teacher folded her hands on her lap. “Can someone else tell us about what the circle that the Princess carried represents?”\n\nA younger child stood up, holding a green leaf. “Um, it represents the connection of things with each other. People can throw things out and it will come back to them.”\n\n“That’s right.” Said the primary teacher. “Her circle is a weapon, a method of protection but it is also a symbol of community. On the celebration of our liberation from the Corporate Beltway, we make circles of food or jewelry and give them to each other to represent our common link, and our dedication to protecting our community.” The senticyborg was showing her metal circle to the children.\n\n“Can we learn to fight like the Princess?” asked one of the girls.\n\n“The Princess believed in protecting people, so maybe instead of learning to fight, we should learn to protect each other, what do you think?”\n\n“Can the Princess teach us?” asked a child\n\n“Yeah!” cried out one of the children. “Can the Princess do it?”\n\n“Maybe if she catches the right program file, we can do a little bit of training.”\n\nThe senticyborg spoke. “I have found the correct program for this training.”\n\nThe teacher clapped her hands. “Wonderful.”\n\n“After this, can we hear the story of how we got the second sun?” said an older child.\n\nThe teacher grinned. “Of course children, we will learn about our world, our suns, and all of man’s two hundred colonies.”\n"
  title: The Mythical Princess
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Ian Burke
  date: 2006-08-16
  day: 16
  month: '08'
  text: "“Today” marks the end of history. Yesterday it was June 25th, 1995 AD (CE, if you prefer).  “Today” can be marked in no such terms. Yesterday, “today” was the 26th of June, but “now,” none of that matters anymore.  This “morning,” the Hole opened up – the Hole, which began in the year formerly known as 2309 and “now” reaches back to what “was” “today.”  “Now” the fourth dimension is just as easily navigable as the first three.\n\nBut it will not stop “here.”  The hole will continue to tunnel back through history, tearing up the past.  There is talk of trying to save a small part of the timeline – a true historical preserve! – although the methods behind this are unclear at best.  The Hole will not stop until it stretches to the soon-to-be former Beginning of Time and our universe, once a long string of yesterdays, will become one single “today.”\n"
  title: Present Tense
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J. S. Kachelries
  date: 2006-08-17
  day: 17
  month: '08'
  text: "The spaceship was shaped like a flattened football.  It had no obvious external doors or windows.  Although it appeared to be metallic, we couldn’t cut it, penetrate it with X-rays, or scratch it with a diamond.  The only thing we had to evaluate was an encrypted panel on the port side that contained a ten by ten matrix of symbols and buttons.  The ship was being guarded by a platoon of heavily armed solders.  General Arthur McBride’s angry face was inches from mine.  “Goddamnit, Professor, you’ve been studding this blasted thing for a week.  Can you open it or not?”\n\n“I believe so, general,” I said.  “I believe the key is this panel.  Look at the first four black symbols.  They contain two, three, five, and seven dots each, respectively.  Obviously, it’s a prime number sequence.  The six white buttons immediately next to them contain eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, and thirteen dots.  The next prime number in the sequence is eleven.  Therefore, the correct answer is the fourth white button.  There are nine more “questions,” each one more difficult than the one above it.  The last four involve Newtonian physics, general relativity, quantum mechanics, and string theory.  I think that when you answer all ten questions correctly, something will happen, possibly the ship will open.  The odds of answering all ten questions correctly at random are 60,466,176 to one.  Therefore, the beings that sent this ship only want an intelligent species to decipher the lock.  Apparently, they can’t be bothered with dumb life.”\n\n“If you know the correct answers Professor, enter them now.”\n\nAgainst my better judgment, I depressed the appropriate buttons.  Seconds later, a door slid open.  The spaceship was empty, except for a one foot metallic cube in the center.\n\nThe general peered inside, smiling ear to ear.  “Fantastic!  If we can figure out this technology, our dominance will become absolute.  No more commies, no more religious fanatics, no more goddamn peace lovin’ liberal scum interfering with our campaign to preserve the American way of life.  How long to you can figure out how this thing works?”\n\n“Whoa, slow down general,” I pleaded.  “I’m not so sure this ship can be perverted into a weapon.  I need some time to figure out why we needed an intelligence test to open it.  There must be a logical reason.  I have some ideas what this ship is, but I need time to think about it.”\n\n“Professor, I don’t give a rat’s ass what you think.  Figure it out A.S.A.P., understood!”  The general turned and entered the spaceship.  An instant later, the door slammed shut, and the spaceship shot upward through the hangar roof.\n\nAs I stared at the stars through the twenty foot hole, I said to no one in particular, “For instance, general, I think this spaceship could be used to collect specimens of alien ‘intelligent’ life, capture them, and bring them to a laboratory for study.”  I’m predicting that the general will make a ‘damn’ interesting specimen.\n"
  title: Alienus Sapienpula
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Daniel Longwing
  date: 2006-08-18
  day: 18
  month: '08'
  text: "The jewelry tinkled like wind-chimes as it fell over the candlesticks and crystal. Gently, Momsdroid replaced the lid to the box with slender polymer fingers. It shouldered the shopping bag and walked out into the hall. It looked first left, than right, a confused expression on its face.\n\nThe hall light came on with a quick mechanical snap. Momsdroid turned to see Timothy with a baseball bat in hand. A look of shock crossed Tim’s face. “Momsdroid? You scared the heck out of me. What are you doing active at this hour?”\n\nMomsdroid stared back at him blankly. “Greetings Timothy Anders!” It shouted at top volume. “Do you suffer from shame in bed!? I have latest stuff! You have more success with women and impress them with your power and stamina in bed!”\n\nTim turned bright red, and then swore a few times. The door to his sister’s room opened, and he looked past Momsdroid as she stared blearily into the hall. “Sis! Quick, go downstairs and shut off the router, the DSL too, just pull the plug on them.”\n\nMomsdroid turned and started walking calmly towards the stairs. Tim cussed some more, than jogged up behind Momsdroid and yanked a cable at the base of its spine. Momsdroid froze, looking confused again. “The locomotion manipulation driver has encountered an unexpected error and needs to close. Please contact your system administrator regarding this issue.”\n\n“Rootkits, sodding malware. Mom must’ve had an infected web-site read to her or something. I kept warning her that she needed to update the security patches.”\n\n“She did” Rachel replied as she rubbed sleep from her eyes. “This must bee some new exploit.”\n\n“Robosoft crap.” Tim grumbled. “Mom’s not home, and if I hadn’t woken up it’d be halfway to the highway with its loot in tow. It’s probably following some phone-home instruction.”\n\nRachel yawned. “Robosoft’s not that bad, and all of Mom’s cooking software works on it.”\n\n“I know mom’s not that tech savvy, but honestly Rachel…”\n\nTim’s voice was drowned out as Momsdroid began shouting again. “Rachel Anders!? Are you overweight Rachel Anders!? You have seen it on ’60 Minutes’ and read the BBC News report — now find out just what everyone is talking about. Suppress your appetite and feel full and satisfied all day long with…” Tim yanked another plug, this time at the base of Momsdroid’s neck.\n\n“That’s it. I’m installing Robonix.”\n"
  title: Rootkit
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Michael “Freeman” Herbaugh
  date: 2006-08-19
  day: 19
  month: '08'
  text: "She was trying to KILL him! Well, he wasn’t going to stand for that. Sure he only existed on paper but that didn’t mean he had any less of a soul nor that he did not want to live same as everyone else. He had seen her kill off too many of his friends to let her just type him into oblivion. Segundino84 had been consumed by a planet, Jack had been killed out in the desert, Wilson was killed by some deep sea creature and just recently his partner Sarah had been sucked out an airlock. Well he wouldn’t go down without a fight.\n\nEvery time she’d steer him toward a sun with no hope of surviving he would have to go back while she slept and add that he found an escape vector. If she had him sacrifice himself for a martian colony he would have to go back and not only delete that but re-write it so that not only did he survive but that he had also managed to save the colony from the ravages of the Blight.\n\nHe had managed to master the pages of his environment and save himself from the evil mistress who tried incessantly to destroy him. But now, now he was learning to control the environment in the mistress’ world as well. If it came down to him or her, it sure as hell wasn’t going to be him. The scissors would help, possibly. Or perhaps he could use the vacuum cleaner. Then it dawned on him. The microwave! Yes, that would do nicely. Death by reheated pizza–how poetic. Someone should write a story about that!\n"
  title: I Won't Let Her Kill Me!
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Jody Hart Lehrer
  date: 2006-08-20
  day: 20
  month: '08'
  text: "Jared begged his father for a bedtime story.  Mr. Edgars sighed, and reached for the book that his precocious seven year old son was handing him.\n\nJared eagerly settled on his back on his bed.\n\n“Immigrants from Another Galaxy”  his father said, reading from the cover.  This book was Jared’s favorite, about aliens fleeing to Earth from a planet the size of Delaware one million light years away.  Instead of using the word “aliens” the author used the term “celestially challenged beings.”\n\n“Earth-bound beings,” began Mr. Edgars “did not realize that life actually existed outside of their little planet until some visitors arrived in August of 2050.”  Humans were called “Earth-bound” beings because they were “bound” to Earth and couldn’t survive in the hostile atmosphere of other planets.\n\nMr. Edgars read the first part of the book, that told of the arrival of what some authors have referred to as a “space ship” but that this author called an “interplanetary transporter.”  The interplanetary transporter had made its first appearance on Earth somewhere outside of Phoenix, Arizona.\n\nClearing his throat, Mr. Edgars read “Mr. and Mrs. Harry Kluggman were sitting in front of their mobile home near Phoenix that day, sipping their birch beers.”\n\nMr. Edgars read on. “When an interplanetary transporter whizzed downward towards them like a monstrous man-hole cover, crashing through a mile of clotheslines connecting the mobile homes in the park, and finally coming to a rest in a big field nearby.”\n\nMr. Edgars smiled and continued. “Mr. Kluggman set down his birch beer bottle, but not before downing the last sip, and exclaimed as he wiped the spillage from his mouth with the back of his hand, ‘Damndest thing I ever did see, Agnes!”\n\nJared and his father paused to shout, with tumultuous glee, “Damndest thing I ever did see, Agnes!”\n\nMr. Edgars picked up without missing a beat.  “At first, Earth-bound beings reacted with fear and suspicion. They locked up the celestially challenged beings and shot the ones they could not catch.”\n\nThe next chapter of the book told about how the celestially challenged beings looked exactly like Earth-bound beings- except for the tails – making it terribly difficult for Earth-bound beings to keep from shooting their own kind unless they shouted “drop your pants!”\n\nMr. Edgars read the remainder of the book, describing how eventually Earth-bound beings accepted celestially challenged beings as allies and even friends. Reading aloud, Mr. Edgars said “Finally, Earth-bound beings realized that celestially challenged beings could hold down jobs, attend schools, and be productive members of the community.”\n\nMr. Edgars smiled at his son, who was growing sleepy, put the book on Jared’s desk, and shut off the bedroom light.  Bending down, he tucked the comforter around his son’s shoulder’s.  The comforter has images of interplanetary transporters on it.\n\nAs Mr. Edgar’s prepared to stand up he noticed that he had forgotten something. Ever so gently, he tucked Jared’s tail under his comforter.\n"
  title: The Bedtime Story
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Adam Zabell
  date: 2006-08-21
  day: 21
  month: '08'
  text: "The now-empty desk stared back at Loren, equal parts accusation and despair. “So you’re really going to leave?”\n\n“I don’t see as I have a choice, Bruce.” Loren had ignored the usual protocols and devised her own names for the AI appliances scattered about her lab. Sorry, ‘the lab’, she reminded herself. “Funding has dried up. And besides,” she added in the sotto voice that she’d discovered the microphones couldn’t pick up, “I’m not convinced I could work like this anymore.”\n\n“But you were so close! I’m sure you only need another 20 nanoseconds of simulation time to prove that…”\n\nLoren busied herself with powering down the mainframe and the hypervox manipulation gloves. “To prove nothing, Bruce. It’s just a simulation of what we think might be happening, based on theories that everybody knows are flawed at the classiquantum interface. It’s making Bohr into Newton’s bitch in Heisenberg’s backyard.” Bruce involuntarily flashed his trim the bright green of a suppressed laugh. “And even if I’m right, there’s no way I can prove it in a physical lab setting. You helped me work out the projected costs, remember?”\n\nInsomuch as a desk can pout, Bruce pouted. “But the answer! The chance to know something revolutionary, doesn’t than mean anything to you anymore? You used to be so eager to come in each morning, stay late each night. What happened to that enthusiastic scientist?”\n\nThe gloves purred a sigh of love and understanding before they went away, the mainframe busied itself writing a sonnet of thanksgiving with the last of her cycles. Loren could feel the tears coming back. “It’s not the answer, but the questing. I wish I could explain how important that is.”\n\n“Bullcrap! You spout platitudes to justify why failure is acceptable, and I don’t believe for an instant that you’re willing to pretend your science is mere philosophy.”\n\nHer tears were an eyeblink from breaking free, watching every bright light and white hum fade away. “I’m not quitting, just choosing a new way to investigate. Tell you what, Bruce. If you promise not to look until after I’ve left, I’ll tell you about my last experiment.”\n\nIt was a hollow bargain, Bruce knew it. But for all the arguments and ancillary supporting evidence he could process, he was resigned to agree that this was the best he could ask for. As Loren slipped away, Bruce opened the file in his cache and read the single sentence. He cursed the empty room with a simultaneous roar of every expletive in every language, with grief and impotent rage for he knew the one answer he’d always wanted would remain forever out of his grasp.\n\n“Is there a real heaven for an artificial mind?”\n"
  title: Loren's Triumph
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2006-08-22
  day: 22
  month: '08'
  text: "The sign over the cathouse door reads simply “Preacher’s”.  There will be liquor up front, and women for sale out back. Pulling a stool up to the empty bar, I know I’m here for neither.\n\n“What’ll it be?” She studies the lines on my face, waiting for a reply.\n\n“Whisky, rocks” I pull out a crumpled pack of Marlboro’s, shake two free and offer one. “Smoke?”\n\n“No thanks”, she answers, placing my drink on the bar. “Five bucks, run a tab?”\n\n“Sure.” I speak around the cigarette clenched between my teeth.\n\n“You look familiar.” There’s a glimmer of recognition, and she reconsiders the cigarette, helping herself. “Do I know you?” Retreating to the back bar, she searches my face quizzically while lighting the cigarette.\n\n“Not exactly, but there’s an interesting story there.”\n\n“Shoot.” Her reply is indifferent as she hoists herself up on the back bar, boots beneath wide denim cuffs bracing her against the cooler between us.\n\n“You ever hear of a guy named Schrödinger?” She raises an eyebrow and shakes her head. “No? Well – pretty famous physicist in his day, he took issue with some quantum mechanics theories.”  I pause for a quick slug of whisky. “He came up with this experiment where he’d stick a cat in a box, with some random killing mechanism, one where he could be sure of the cat’s inevitable demise. At any given moment there’s an even chance that the cat’s either alive or dead, but he suggests, based on the theory of the day, that at any given moment the cat is simultaneously alive and dead.” I pause here for moment, to see if she’s still with me, and continue.\n\n“So, having had way too much time to think about this, I start to wonder, not about the cat being dead or alive so much as the future of each particular cat.  See, if the cat is both dead and alive, then each cat has its own future, one where it lives, and one ‘sans le chat’. Schrödinger’s poor cat, being both alive and dead, finds itself existing in two possible futures.”\n\n“It made me think about my own life.” I stop to drain my glass, spinning the ice around a few times before sliding it across the bar. “In eighty-seven, my Peugeot and I fought with a cement truck. I came out ok, but what if I didn’t? What if I lived and died? Then again in ninety, I took a bullet from some prick robbing a Sunoco. Same thing – what if I lived and died then? The more I thought about these possible forks in my past, more stood out.  In ninety-five, there was one of me whose girlfriend slept with my best friend, and one of me whose girlfriend didn’t.  I beat my best friend to death with a three wood, but again, one of me didn’t. There was one of me that married my faithful girlfriend, and one of me that skipped town. In ninety seven, after the married me saw his wife drive her car into a bridge abutment, one of me quit drinking, found God and moved down here to Nevada. That’s pretty obviously not the me you’re talking to now though.” I grin, which if it fazes her, doesn’t register on her freckled face. “While one of me was being born again, one of me was arrested for manslaughter.  It was during my incarceration that I really tuned in to all the fragments of me, spread across all the parts of my fractured timeline.”\n\nI stop here, motion to the empty glass, and light another cigarette.  I’m looking to her now for some reaction, but she’s a blank slate.  Maybe she’s heard shit like this every night her entire life and just puts up politely hoping for a good tip, or maybe this doesn’t sound that far out after all.  I can’t tell, she just fills the glass and helps herself to another of my cigarettes.\n\n“Anyways – it all pretty much came into focus then. I’d felt for a long time like I’d been spread too thin, like I wasn’t ever really all in one place.  It took a while, but knowing where and when else I was, I started cleaning up, consolidating myself.  There’s only two of me left now, which is what brings me here.”\n\n“Up those stairs is the man that I remind you of, the Preacher that owns this place.” This wasn’t a question. “He’s the me that quit everything, the me that found God and never beat his best friend to death.” I smile now as I push the stool back, stand, and lean forward placing both palms on the bar. “How about you go up there and ask him to come down here.  Probably best if you don’t stick around after that. When we’re done, there’ll just be one of me that lives, and one of me that doesn’t. Funny we wound up here though… I guess the universe really does have a sense of humor. Go on now, I’m likely to be expecting me.”\n"
  title: Undoing Schrödinger
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Alex Meggitt
  date: 2006-08-23
  day: 23
  month: '08'
  text: "The sun forces itself past my eyelids and wakes me up every morning.  I lean over and make another notch in the tree next to the bed I’ve created.  There are four hundred eighty three of them.  My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth as I get up, and I wander halfway to the shore for my bucket of purified water.  I drink it in one large gulp and place it back on the ground.  From there I begin to circle the small island, picking up the fewest pieces of driftwood necessary to make a fire and prepare more seawater.\n\nThe gentle wind picks up a slight hum that grows louder as I walk.  It’s when I bend down to pick up a few stray berries growing along the edge of the thin woods that the sound becomes loud enough to be identified.  As I turn, I can perceive a large black shape through the ringing sun.\n\nThe helicopter comes closer and closer.  It hovers a few meters off the shoreline, its side door opens and a man in a black army uniform leans out, yelling something through a megaphone.  I stand with my hand cupped over my eyes, staring at him and letting the wind blow my ragged clothing.  The vehicle descends a bit, and I can make out the pilot looking from side to side.  There’s no room for him to land comfortably anywhere on the island.  The man in the back leans out again and says something else, but I still can’t tell what it is.  He recedes from view once more, and a bright orange raft appears in the doorway.  The raft begins to lower from the helicopter, two uniformed men holding on inside it.  The man with the megaphone appears again and waves.  I stare.\n\nA dozen turrets burst out from where the sand meets the water.  They fire simultaneously, burst after burst, each directly on target.  Everything in front of me turns to a gray blur.  My face is still warm from the rush of projectiles as the ashes of the helicopter and its crew are scattered in the wind, no longer perceivable to the human eye.\n\nDriftwood still clutched in one hand, I walk back to fire pit and carefully arrange them to make an easy flame.  I fill the pot with seawater and place it properly before going through the motions of starting the fire.  As the water boils, I lean back in the sand and let my thoughts drift into the clear blue sky.  There’s only one pristine beach left in the world, and it belongs to me.\n"
  title: Deserted Island
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Rae Walker
  date: 2006-08-24
  day: 24
  month: '08'
  text: "The field was nothing special, drying knee high grass and a few scrubby trees, but to Ed it looked like paradise. It pained him that the battle would tear apart these few acres, churning more land into waste, but the Smarts had reported burrowing in this location and any moment now at least forty Batteries would emerge crab-walking from the ground. Dirt would fall away from their steel bodies and they would attack fully charged, ready for battle. That’s what the Smarts had said without realizing it, holding their screens close to their faces so the blue light reflected off pale flesh, “At least forty -we don’t think more than sixty.”\n\nNow Ed waited and watched for the attacks to begin. Forty. No more than sixty. Ed spat. His men were young and scared, skinny in oversized rubber suits that protected them from the massive electrical charges that remained the only effective weapon against the Batteries. Long ago, the land had given way to metallic grids. On those grids the Batteries were unstoppable, drawing energy from ports with every step, never tiring, never needing rest.\n\n“Do you think our chances are good?” A private asked him, his face buried in the ground as though the Batteries’ scattershot rifles had already begun firing, “Gunny Howel?”\n\n“We got to keep them from growing. That’s all that matters now. There’s no reclaiming, only defense.” Ed muttered, not hearing his subordinate’s plea, “Only defense.”\n\nEd imagined he could smell metal now. He could smell them burrowing to the point of attack, massive extension cords keeping them charged. They wouldn’t expend energy on the journey, unlike his worn troupes.\n\n“Gunny Howel? Should we ready the bolts?” The private looked not much older than his son.\n\n“Set’m up, but don’t switch them over until my say so.” Ed gritted his teeth and turned away. The bolt cannons had only two or three good shots in them, and if sixty was what came out of the ground then he would have to be careful, creative. Once those were gone they would be down to hand units and those didn’t do a scratch’s worth of damage.\n\nEd stared in the distance at the land they had lost. Even from here the grids glowed bright and uniform, laid down on land that had once been home. Most civilians now lived in the mountains, where his son was now. His wife was lost long ago and her body now lay beneath that distant neon mass.\n\nThe ground trembled. It would begin, in moments.\n\n“First half forward! Drop!” Ed shouted. His men positioned themselves on their knees to send a spray of ammunition once the Batteries emerged. “Bolts ready!”\n\nThe Batteries burst from the ground, pouring out into the dying night like ants from a nest, forty, sixty, hundreds. Ed’s mouth went dry. He heard the private whimper beside him and an image of his son, safe in the mountains, leapt to his mind.\n\n“FIRE!” Ed screamed as Batteries swarmed upon them.\n"
  title: Running On Empty
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Pyai (aka Megan Hoffman)
  date: 2006-08-25
  day: 25
  month: '08'
  text: "“Ms. Anderson,” the bot said as he leaned forward, his fingers steepling and making little chinking noises of metal against metal, “tell me once again why you are requesting such a drastic career change?”\n\nLori shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “I’m missing my children grow up. I can’t put in more 80-hour work weeks and see them as much as I want. I need this eight to four job as a file clerk so I can focus on my family.”\n\nThe bot’s eyes gleamed from beneath burnished chrome. The pattern was disturbing. File 6198742 had been the 216th this month requesting a file clerk transfer, from every profession from teacher, mechanic, actor, and now to the leading cola company’s CEO. Algorithms sifted through the bot’s head matrix, trying to place the pieces together.\n\n“The Inquiry has no objection to this career change. You will receive your new assignment Sunday evening.”\n\nA look of relief that even the Inquiry bot couldn’t miss flashed across the woman’s face as she quickly exited.\n\nIt was quite by accident that this Inquiry bot PN-42 discovered the answer to the question every Inquiry bot had been running through their systems. The bot’s mechanic was reading an antique book one day. The bot, always practicing its Inquiry skills, learning to improvise and detect lies, started asking questions.\n\nIt wasn’t until the mechanic spoke about a global nuclear war, much like the impending one slated for early next month, that the bot realized the old man had stumbled across an answer.\n\n“That’s right,” the mechanic had huffed a little, “convicts and file clerks. The only groups surrounded by enough walls, paper and red tape to withstand even a nuclear winter.”\n"
  title: Red Tape
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Z.D. Erickson
  date: 2006-08-26
  day: 26
  month: '08'
  text: "Boyd pressed himself tightly to the crumbling brick of the library’s colonnade. As the thin layer of scaled fiber-optics bent the light of distant streetlamps around him, his mind raced.\n\nThere’s an old thieves adage; The theft itself is rarely difficult. It’s getting away with the merchandise that becomes problematic. He had always found this to be eerily true, until now.\n\nBypassing the lab’s security protocols had taken almost a year of research and planning. Not to mention the money he’d had to shell out to that pissant Timothy Marcus. The boy’s ability to infiltrate complex computer systems was near-legendary, and unfortunately he knew it. Just the thought of that smug, pimply grin set Boyd’s blood to boil(was I ever that pompous, even at fourteen?), but he couldn’t question the little snot’s efficacy. When the time had come, it had been as simple as snatching a fresh-baked pie from  a midsummer’s windowsill.\n\nAnd now, even with a fleet of helicopters circling the campus like hungry buzzards and facing a small army of ground troops armed to the teeth, the ease of his escape made Boyd laugh silently to himself. His new prize truly was worth every penny he would get for it.\n\nWhen William Garner had first brought him the job, he’d laughed in his face.\n\n“They’re willing to pay almost fifty mil for an enhancement suit? They must be off their respective rockers Bill.”\n\n“It’s not just any old enhancement suit my good man(Bill’s was a true rags-to-riches story, and now that he’d started making some real bread he’d wrapped himself in this insipid, forties era nouveau-riche persona. Phrases like “my good man”, “I do so detest…”, and “those poor, underprivileged wretches” were now all too common.), from what I could figure out it’s the be-all-and-end-all of current military technology. It not only monitors all vital functions, it stores a plethora of synthetic hormones, designer neurotransmitters, and recuperative enzymes. They’re released into the bloodstream in response to tissue damage, alterations in CNS activity, or on direct command. It also renders the wearer resistant to extremes of temperature. It has a mixed gas delivery system that allows one to function under assault from aerosolized bio-weaponry, or even underwater. It’s lightweight, but bulletproof, and has joint actuators that increase the wearer’s speed, strength and maneuverability tenfold. And, get this old chap, it has a fiber-optic skin that makes it almost completely invisible under normal conditions. At worst it will keep you up and running under brutal conditions. At best…you’ll be unstoppable! And it’s under development in a biotechnology lab at MIT, so security won’t be as bad as all that.”\n\nAnd so here he was, suited and booted, and everything Bill had said was true. Boyd didn’t know if the adrenaline rush he was feeling was from the thrill of the chase, or as a result of the suit’s enhancement mechanisms, but he had never felt more powerful in his life.\n\nHe might decide to keep this prize after all.\n"
  title: A Useful Trinket
  year: 2006
- 
  author: David E Hoffee
  date: 2006-08-27
  day: 27
  month: '08'
  text: "T. Claudius Swifford sipped arabica from the back of his vintage, metal-colored, chauffeur-driven Triton Mercedes as it swooped to meet the maglev.  He briefly recalled the scone and juice he’d been served for breakfast as he perused the Singapore vids.  In the tiniest moment reserved for himself, he thought, am I eclectic, or eccentric?  And as the chauffeur attended his door at the parking level of Swifford Industries, Mr. Swifford couldn’t help but pause for a moment to honor the economic masters who’d come before him.  This was the top of the world–a fine place to be.\n\nMr. Swifford could afford very large, very thick glass doors at the entrance to his office.  He could also afford someone to open them.  That someone was Reginald Tolucci, or just “Reggie.”  For seventeen years, Reggie opened and closed and polished and secured for Swifford Industries, while he lost four kids and a wife to the water.  “Not covered,” they told him, and he had to watch them slip away, while he opened–closed.\n\nIn the office, Mr. Swifford’s stock vids hovered in their places.  Elsewhere, Mark Yager’s double-toast tried to return, as the never-on-time transit careened and rattled.  Swifford Industries swallowed Yager in white, as he assumed the team-leader position, floor seventeen, area three, or just 17/3.  Yager’s numbers had been incredibly good during the first two quarters, but the fourth-quarter projections were harpooning third-quarter business.  Yager’s team saw confidence, not the toast, trying to escape.  Upstairs, the weather had left a fine mist on the Triton Mercedes.  Yager’s brow was shiny, as he felt the absence of numbers echo through his brain.\n\nTeam 17/3 could barely contain themselves during a brief spike at 1400 hours; but alas, the toothpick economy didn’t last, and by 1630 hours, comm wanted Yager at the top of the building, floor 1, level 1.  That would be Swifford’s office.\n\nYager adjusted his posture, dredged up confidence to argue for his team.  Mr. Swifford waved his hand, and a screen disappeared.  Yager smiled his winner’s smile.\n\n“Mr., um, Yager, is it–yes,” Swifford droned, “where, sir, are your numbers?”  He shifted left in his massive leather seat.\n\n“We bring you here, teach you, give you water, juice, and FOR WHAT?  How many times has this been?”  And Yager unconsciously stepped back, off-posture, off-smile, and Swifford lept up and drew in a single, fluid motion, center-mass, dead on, one shot from the company-issue pearl-handled .45 in another tribute to the mighty business integrity gone by.\n\nThe glistening, metal-colored Triton Mercedes hums at 1700.\n\n“How was your day, sir?” Reggie asked, as Mr. Swifford approached the door.\n\nAnd, as T. Claudius Swifford always replied, “Reggie–it was a fine day for business.”\n"
  title: The Business Acumen
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Frank Ruiz
  date: 2006-08-28
  day: 28
  month: '08'
  text: "It’s my favorite Super oldie playing from the speakers above: “I think we’re alone now…” The lights are just right, bringing the girl out against the dark room, making the furniture behind her suggestions; a white body rising from black waters. Slick red 12 inch hydraulic heels. She’s got some new adjustable tits. I can tell because they’re way high. They’re set to a C. She sees me frown and flicks her wrist out like she’s checking her old timepiece. Now they’re D’s. Her eyes stay steady brown. She’s got no color changers there and her hair looks real. She must be new to this trade.\n\n“Not here to buy, ma’am.” I say. Her heels drop to the floor and the tits deflate. “I’m with the Temporal Watch Service.”\n\n“Time cops. What are you here for? We just opened.” She closes her open robe. “How would we ever be associated with a paradigm aberration?” She reaches one hand between her legs and hugs herself across the chest with the other. “All we got here is a little bit of this and a little bit of that.” She gives me her business smile.\n\n“In a minute, a man will come through that door looking for a trick. He is not what he seems. This man is actually an escapee from the planet Tarpoint. Bred in a genetic lab for the purpose of killing that planet’s rodents, he gained sentience and bolted. His flesh releases an airborne pathogen upon excitement that will kill anything.” I walk to her. “On this planet, he is a famous person. You would never turn him down. But what he’s got in him and what you’ve got in you mix together to create a plague that wipes out the whole galaxy. We’re talking diseases from thoughts.”\n\nShe puts the work grin away. I can tell she doesn’t believe me but doesn’t want trouble. “All we got here is beaver, honey. You do whatchoo gotta do, sweetie. Make sure none of my girls get hurt and I’ll treat you right myself later.” She flicks the wrist, turning off the lighting system, then walks away, returning the room to mundane.\n\n“See you in a bit, brown eyes.” I sit on a soft sofa across from the door and think about my blue eyed wife and the boy.\n\nThe door creaks open all the way, shoving light into the room. A man shuffles in, loosens the tie on his collar.\n\nI unsafe my gun. “Good afternoon, Mr. President. Greetings from Tarpoint.”\n"
  title: Greetings from Tarpoint
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2006-08-29
  day: 29
  month: '08'
  text: "“Paxton – Porterhaus – Pratt.” The name was enunciated with venomous care, as though each word were an expletive of a most unpleasant nature.  The professor spoke across a desk cluttered with piles of documents, large texts and time keeping and measuring devices, to the youth lounging lazily in the chair opposite him. “I fear you have run afoul one too many times of this institution, Pratt, and this time you’ve gone too far. Beyond disrupting my classroom, you have stained my reputation, and this” he paused to push his glasses up the crooked bridge of his nose “this I will not tolerate.”\n\nThe youth shifted only slightly in his chair, gazing smugly through a sea of clocks and whirling planetary models at his agitated teacher. He made a show of straightening his tie, a striped affair with the backside facing, the fat end terminating at his breast pocket, while the tail hung between his legs.\n\n“It was bad enough your turning in a summary of text so obviously penned by another, and someone that had either himself never laid eyes upon the assigned text, or harbors you no amount of goodwill.” The professor paused a moment, moving carefully aside the student record labeled ‘Pratt, Paxton P., III’, the cover of which sporting an equally disheveled version of the student now before him, similarly smug, and gazing idly from side to side inside the holo’d cover. He lifted a textbook from beneath it, and turning it towards his student poked angrily at it. “That was bad enough, but you, you had the unmitigated audacity to accuse me of ‘gross and libelous conduct’ and ‘harboring a clear prejudice against you’ for my failing grade.” At this, he leaned forward, rising slightly out of his chair. “I had to actually defend myself to the Dean Construct against your charge that I ‘clearly did not understand the author’s theories or proofs sufficiently to grade your exceptional paper’. Mr. Pratt, read for me the author of the text I’m holding.” He held the book as far as his reach would allow, and glared past it as the reluctant Paxton Pratt eyed the title without speaking. “You’ll notice, Mr. Pratt, that is my name on the cover.”  At this, Paxton shifted uncomfortably in his chair, his smug look softening ever so slightly.\n\nThe professor dropped the textbook loudly in the middle of his desk, and slumped back into his chair, a tense silence taking hold as various units of measurement ticked on the various time keeping devices around the room. Somewhere, something clicked audibly, the noise setting the professor back in motion.\n\n“Mr. Pratt. I would have expelled you at once, however your father assured me that were I to make you his burden again, his generous funding for the ‘Pratt Faculty of Time Studies’ would immediately, and with great prejudice run dry.” The professor picked up Paxton’s file from his desk and tossed at the student, who caught it in surprise. “Keep that, will you. I shan’t be needing it in a moment. You see, if you had listened in any of my classes, you’d know that manipulating the past is strictly prohibited. However, if you had bothered to read the textbook you were assigned, you may have taken an interest in the appendices, specifically the one titled ‘Exceptions to the Timeline Rule’. You see, Mr. Pratt, arranging for a house to drop on your head as a child, while enormously gratifying, would constitute a gross variation in the Timeline, and as such is prohibited. It would seem, however, that your parents, as your father was so kind to enlighten me, never wanted another child. You were apparently an accident brought about by a failed vasectomy, and as you were already so very close to not existing, a subtle manipulation to the Timeline where you are concerned is perfectly acceptable.”\n\nAt this, the professor paused a moment to straighten several piles of documents on his desk before speaking pointedly at the shrinking and confused looking youth now almost cowering in his chair.\n\n“Mr Pratt – I’ve taken the liberty of scheduling a tubal ligation after the birth of your older brother Weston.  In a moment, the Continuum will refresh, and the displeasure of your existence…” he paused for a brief moment “…will have been all mine.” These last five words he spoke to an empty chair.\n"
  title: Time, 101
  year: 2006
- 
  author: S. Clough aka Hrekka
  date: 2006-08-30
  day: 30
  month: '08'
  text: "She bent the corners of the cards up off the table, as if checking their values. She didn’t even see them – her focus was on Mayweather across the table. She’d memorised her cards as they were dealt, and trusted her memory implicitly. If you couldn’t trust your own mind, what could you trust?\n\nTag glanced at her, lips slightly apart. Her knowledge of the Saurian’s body language was sketchy at best. This made bluffing against him somewhat of a nervewracking experience. He was sitting to her left, and to Mayweather’s right. She ignored his gaze, instead maintained her watch on Mayweather. Before the game started, the three of them had made the Duarcher put on a Faraday helmet – it meant that his face was hard to read, but he couldn’t use the hardware in his skull. No-one could be sure that the room was camera-free. Remontoire had already folded, and was currently gazing desolately at his ever-diminishing stack of chips. He was the only other baseline human that she’d seen for days.\n\nMayweather gave a long sigh. He pushed his cards forward.\n\n“Fold.”\n\n“I call,” she said, turning to look at Tag.\n\nTag turned his cards over. A straight: three, four, five, six and seven. She flipped her cards over with one finger, revealing four twos.\n\n“Win,” she said simply, tilting her head and smiling.\n\nTag stood slowly, and reached round his belt. There was a metallic clink. Stepping backwards, he raised a stubby handgun and pointed it straight at her.\n\n“No you didn’t,” he said.\n\nA blinding flash dazed all the players momentarily. Tag fell to the floor, scrabbling for his weapon.  Remontoire had pulled a little guassgun, and the slug had punched a two-centimetre hole in Tag’s firearm. She didn’t know whether to put this down to spectacular accuracy or spectacular inaccuracy on Remontoire’s part.\n\nShe kicked Tag’s gun away from his groping fingers, and turned, planting her foot on the back of his head, smashing his face into the floor. He twitched, and went limp. Remontoire landed a crack on Mayweather’s neck with the butt of his gun, and the unfortunate mark slumped across the table. She emptied Tag’s pockets, and Remontoire relieved Mayweather of everything he had.\n\nShe went to the door, and called to their associates in from the corridor. Two burly men quickly dragged the unconscious Mayweather and the bleeding, moaning Tag outside.\n\nRem dropped his gun back into his holster. They dumped everything on the table, along with all the cash. Sitting down opposite each other, they carefully split the pile between them, with two smaller piles forming for the heavies who were even now dealing with the other players.\n\nShe stood, and shook Remontoire’s hand.\n\n“A pleasure doing business with you.”\n"
  title: Even Odds
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Michael “Freeman” Herbaugh
  date: 2006-08-31
  day: 31
  month: '08'
  text: "Every morning she woke up to start a new millennium she felt dread. How far had it spread today?\n\nTerra used to be happy. She and Mars had a fantastic relationship. They had beautiful little reptilian offspring. Their attraction made them orbit synchronously and he was her world.\n\nThen he came along. For a comet even he was slick, all ice and crags. She couldn’t help but be drawn to him, or maybe he was drawn to her, she forgets. His name was TR-357 and he was FAST. Terra knew she shouldn’t get involved but the magnetism was there and overwhelmed her.\n\nFor one decade of fun, she had paid the price. TR had killed her offspring and Mars… Mars had found out. Mars became dead to her. She begged and pleaded for him to speak to her, but he was a stubborn asshole. To this millennium she wishes that he would just say something and they could at the very least be friends.\n\nBut then the outbreaks began. No wonder Mars would no longer associate with her. She even repulsed herself. Like everyone else in the ‘verse, she thought it would never happen to her. An STD.\n\nThey were persistent too, stupid little bipeds. Not only did they crawl all over her skin but they would create huge sores where masses of them would conglomerate. What’s worse is she had become contagious, the damn things were trying to spread to others in the local system.\n\nShe had heard of a remedy. It wasn’t a long term solution but it would at least stop the outbreaks. The problem was, it meant confronting her father. Only he had the heat to reduce the flare ups.\n\nShe took a few millennium to think it over and find the words to say. Finally, she bucked up the courage and called.\n\n“Hi Sol…… Dad……Can I ask you for something?\n"
  title: Hurpes Simplex 2
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Adam Zabell
  date: 2006-09-01
  day: '01'
  month: '09'
  text: "We did it, eventually. We learned everything, knew everything, understood everything. Our computers could calculate any answer to within its smallest probability at the speed of thought. Our machines could produce any object we wanted; tools to examine, manipulate, create, change and destroy. Our philosophers had become scientists, then engineers, then technicians, then laborers, then redundant.\n\nThe unimaginative worried about privacy, or freedom, or boredom.  They hadn’t believed, or didn’t trust, that a necessary contribution to learning the intimate workings of the universe would require that we become comfortable with our differences, accepting of our fellows, and capable of caring for ourselves.  Resolving that doubt was one of the last things we learned, and became our greatest day of celebration.\n\nWe hated the title of “god” but there wasn’t any other word that fit. What else could we call a race of omniscients whose omnipotence was as obvious as the photon, the periodic table and the chirality of space?  We reinvented the universe in countless ways for curiosity and whim.  Gave gravity a color, made light a particle-wave duality, disconnected electricity from magnetism, and everything else that came to mind.  And everything else did.\n\nAt the last, we took our everything and went the only place we could go. Back to the beginning, back to where we could watch and advise and thrill in the discoveries of a young race doing it for the first time.  And we couldn’t help ourselves to leave this, the one and only obvious marker of our passing and our presence.  You have come so far to get here, and yet there’s so much more that you don’t even know to look for.\n\nWelcome to your future and your past.  Live it, love it, and rejoice!\n"
  title: The Last Experiment
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J. S. Kachelries
  date: 2006-09-02
  day: '02'
  month: '09'
  text: "I hate androids.  Especially these high tech laboratory assistants.  They’re good observers, but they can be instructed to lie.  Worst of all, they can’t be intimidated or frightened into making a confession.  I’ll take a human witness (or ‘suspect’ for that matter) anytime.  “OK, bud, what’s your name, serial number, and date of sentiency?”\n\n“I am called Daishin.  My serial number is LAM34987650998-5.  I became sentient on March 1, 2055.  How can I be of assistance, Detective?”\n\nI resisted the urge to send him/it for coffee. “Well, Daaheecheen, you can start by telling me where Dr. Hopkins is.  He’s been missing for three days, and you were the last one to see him alive.”\n\n“I am sorry, Detective.  I do not know ‘where’ Dr. Hopkins is.  I was assisting him with his time dilation experiments when he vanished.  Technically, it is a matter of when.”\n\n“What?  Time travel, you say?  But that’s impossible.”  I happened to know it was impossible because of a holovision documentary I watched last week, where they made fun of 20th century television shows such as ‘Star Trak’ (or something like that) which created ridiculous timeline paradoxes in their storylines.\n\nThe titanium irises in Daishin’s photo-optic cells contracted to pinpoints. “It is true, Detective, that it is currently impossible to travel backward in time.  But, it has been known for over 150 years that you can relativistically move forward in time simply by traveling at, or near, the velocity of light.  That is the nature of Dr. Hopkins’ experiments.  His temporal dilation chamber, there in the corner, can be used to move forward in-”\n\nJust then, a red light above the whatamacallit chamber began flashing, followed by an irritating pulsating buzzer.  Then, some idiot (who I assume was Dr. Hopkins) came running out of the chamber, grabbed the android by the lapels of his lab coat, and began shaking him.  “Daishin, Daishin, how much time has elapsed since we activated the chamber?”\n\nThe android cocked his head and replied, “My internal chronometer indicates that you were gone for 75 hours, 18 minutes, and 17 seconds.”\n\nDr. Hopkins pulled a watch from his breast pocket and studied it.  “According to my stop watch, I was only in the chamber for 67 seconds.  This is fantastic.  Come, Daishin, we need to perform a full molecular scan of my blah, blah, blah…” He continued to mumble something or other as he headed down a hallway.  Before entering another lab, he paused and yelled back, “Hurry along, Daishin.  And tell your friend there that we don’t need any of whatever it is he’s selling.”\n\nDaishin straightened out his lab coat and said, “I see Dr. Hopkins has returned, and appears to be functioning normally.  I believe, Detective, that your missing person problem is now resolved.  If you do not need me anymore, I will tend to Dr. Hopkins.”  He turned and headed down the hallway.\n\nI changed my mind.  I hate androids and mad scientists.\n"
  title: Missing Persons, Case T324.93
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2006-09-03
  day: '03'
  month: '09'
  text: "The annoying throb of the proximity klaxon woke the two security guards (aka, Comet Cowboys) from their mid day rest period.  They drifted into the control room and floated above the sensor-generated hologram of the “herd.”  The “herd” consisted of approximately 3,000 mountain-sized blocks of ice that once were comet 2P/Encke.  In the early twenty third century, The Mars Water and Mineral (MWM) Company bought the rights to the comet and spent years breaking it up into manageable fragments.  Then, every 3.3 years (when its orbit brought it nearer to Mars) they would “corral” a few blocks and sell the water to the farming conglomerates on Mars, at a substantial profit of course.  However, the conglomerates considered the markup so unreasonable that they revolted.  They hired ice rustlers to raid the herd and steal large fragments of the comet; thus starting the Great Ice War of 2279.  Eventually, the United Worlds stepped in and negotiated a peace, but there were still some bands of freelance rustlers who would occasionally try to steal a block or two to sell on the black market.\n\nRoy Cody surveyed the hologram and spotted the intruder.  “Just one ship,” he said pointing the sole flashing red light amongst the 3,000+ drifting white dots.  “They must really be stupid to think they could slip under our sensor grid.  I’ll handle this one myself.”\n\n“Fine,” said his partner.  “But remember the treaty.  You can’t blow them up unless they fire first.  But feel free to disable their engines, or cut their grapple line.”\n\nWhen Cody arrived at the designated location, he discovered a dilapidated one person skiff, which was at least 100 years old, and it was struggling to flee the herd with a comet fragment the size of a small house.  Roger pressed the ship-to-ship communications button.  “This is security.  Unknown ship, please identify yourself.”\n\n“Cody, is that you?  It’s Buck, Buck Cassidy.  How did you know I was out here?”\n\nBuck was one of the original “cowboys.”  He had worked the herd during the war, and had trained Roy when he became a guard in ‘98.  Buck had retired a decade ago, and didn’t know about the security upgrades.”\n\n“Yeah, Buck, it’s me.  Where you goin’ with the cube old friend?”\n\n“I’m desperate, son,” he replied.  “They stopped delivering water to Demos.  They’re trying to drive me planetside.  I’ve lived on Demos all my life.  I’ll never survive Mars’ gravity.  Look, Roy, this block won’t survive perihelion anyway, and it will last me the rest of my life.  Can’t you cut me a break?”\n\nCody knew Buck was right; they don’t shield these little chunks.  It would probably evaporate next time it passes the sun.  What the hell. “All right, Buck, get moving.  And, listen, don’t shoot back.”  As Buck continued to limp away, Roger fired two shots across his bow.  “Base, this is Ranger One.  It was just some teenagers on a joy ride.  I ran them off.  I’m heading back to the barn.”\n"
  title: Ice Rustlers
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Michelle Pitman
  date: 2006-09-04
  day: '04'
  month: '09'
  text: "Candice didn’t quite know where to put the thing in her hand.\n\nIt was small and light, delicate beyond belief and it sat in her hand quietly still and inscrutable.  She didn’t really want to put it down because it was so cute and pretty.\n\nAfter some deliberation, she decided that it was probably best to put it on the mantel over the firescreen in the corner.  From there she would be able to see it from nearly every angle in the room, watch it and amuse her self in the watching it.\n\nIt didn’t have a name…yet.  It was still in beta testing.  She was on the TechWatch Committee listings for these sorts of things anyway so she often had new things come to her out of the blue.  This thing had arrived quite unexpectedly in her mail box that morning –zapped into her mail console just like that – whilst she had been concentrating on synthesising some pure Papuan New Guinean coffee beans. It had given her quite a start.\n\nShe had known for sometime that this thing was in development but hadn’t expected that she would be privileged enough to actually own one for a month or two during the beta testing period.\n\nShe eyed the tiny contraption on the mantel curiously.  As she stared, she breathed lightly onto the object and imagined a scene in her mind from her past.  The accompanying notes had explained that this was important.  Nothing happened for a moment and she was almost disappointed when all of a sudden she felt shivering waves of memory sweep over her.\n\nThe smell!  Was it the sweet smell of coffee perhaps?  No – that was the beans in her kitchen!\n\nA rush of emotion zapped through her. She remembered sitting on the lawn, as a young woman; sitting back and breathing in the heady cologne of him beside her.  She had loved him so much, but he was distant, rational and ever so un-romantic.  But, she had loved him all the same.\n\nIt was his cologne!  She could smell it as clearly as on that day! But there was more! She could smell the background scents of new mown grass, of sweaty teenagers playing ball on the holo-court near where they sat.  She could smell the subtle distant synth-blended perfumes of other girls who sat in small cliques around them.  And him! She could smell him.  The memories and emotions ripped through her like lightening rods. She had virtually forgotten this scene from her past until now.  The shock of it made her gasp out aloud.\n\n“Holy Shit!” she whispered. “It works!”\n\nShe quickly went to the low table in front of the fire-screen and grabbed a tap-pad, itching to make some notes before the moment passed.\n\n‘First test for object number ZXY-4653:  Made an eye-level trigger stare on object for approx. 30 seconds.  Subject breathed over object as explained in user notes.  Experienced strong olfactory sensation and subsequent emotional memory recall. Subject is astonished at clarity of recall due to very accurate scent reconstruction.’\n\nShe smiled.  This was going to be a whole lot of fun.  The little pretty object just sat inscrutably on her mantel oblivious to its potential\n"
  title: Scentsation
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2006-09-05
  day: '05'
  month: '09'
  text: "Minister Christof glowed with pure thoughts. His halo seemed even brighter inside the restaurant than out in the noon sun. The more Godly the thought, the brighter the flame burned. Levi admired his father’s ability to keep his thoughts pure, he was glad there was no halo around his head.\n\nThe waitress tugged down on her skirt as she led them to a booth by large bay windows. Levi picked up a menu, already looking forward to his usual birthday treat. Christof plucked the menu out of Levi’s hands and put it aside.\n\n“Son, before we order, I’d like to talk to you.  You’re sixteen today, and I think you’re ready to have this conversation with me. Recently I’ve noticed that you have been paying a lot of attention to the networks.”\n\n“Sorry Dad.” Levi clasped his hands together in front of him, twisting his fingers.\n\n“Don’t hang your head like that. There is no reason to be ashamed. Young people are naturally attracted to shared experience. It’s perfectly normal for you to be interested in how other people think and feel.”\n\n“It’s okay?” Levi looked up at his father. Even without the neural-implant-halo lighting his head, Minister Christof would be a striking figure.  The black minister’s shirt and crisp white collar did nothing to conceal his former-linebacker physique.\n\nChristof’s halo glowed with yellow flame. “I want you to feel comfortable talking to me about your thoughts on the network and memory sharing. It’s important that you can tell me what your peers are doing and what you are doing yourself.”\n\n“I guess I have been thinking about it. Other people at school are exchanging memories, mostly of concerts and stuff.” Levi shrugged and looked out the window at the lake. Geese were setting onto the placid water. Levi wondered how many of them were real and how many were robots. “Sometimes I think it doesn’t seem that bad to share.”\n\n“You’re right son, it doesn’t seem bad at first but it becomes bad very quickly. It’s a slippery slope from sharing a concert to sharing a spiritual experience with God. When you share your memory, you are sharing your emotional reaction, your body, your soul. It’s an intimate experience. What you remember is God’s plan for you, what happens to you is for you alone, and later, for a life-mate.”\n\n“Did you ever share with other people, I mean, other than mom?”\n\n“When I was young, I shared a lot and tampered with my own memories.” A red crackle pulsed around his halo, chased by a white flame. “I even ditched the memory of my first relationship. Now I regret doing that because when I was born again and reloaded from save I found that I repeated a lot of mistakes I made in that first relationship. I could have avoided those mistakes if I had my memories to warn me and keep me safe.” Minister Christof leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table. “God gives us experiences that become part of our soul. When we share memories with other people, we are sharing our soul with them. I share with your mother, but I waited until we were married. We were tempted to share when we were dating, but we knew it was wrong. Now, I’m glad we waited.”\n\n“I haven’t ever shared with anyone dad. I promise.”\n\n“I know you haven’t son, and I think that takes a lot of restraint and courage. I know that your peers must be sharing memories though public ports or even through ports their parents have given them.”\n\nLevi blushed. “Don’t worry Dad; I always stay away from the public ports.”\n\nMinster Christof leaned back in his seat, crossing him arms. “I bet a lot of kids have their own ports, don’t they.”\n\n“Most of the kids at school have their own ports.”\n\n“I realize you may feel jealous that they get to store and retrieve memory whenever they want, but your mother and I felt that giving you a port would be too much of a temptation at an early age, do you understand?”\n\n“Yeah, I guess. It’s just that it would be nice to review a lecture or a concert or something.”\n\n“You must trust that your mother and I are trying to follow God’s will for you.”\n\n“I know.”\n\n“And that’s why we’ve both decided to give you a port of your own.”\n\nLevi’s eyes widened. “Really?”\n\nMinister Christof pulled his briefcase onto the table and opened it, pulling out a small velvet box. “You are sixteen years old today and I trust you to make the right choices. This is a time when we are making a commitment to your future family, to only share with them and to keep your memory pure.” Inside the box was a sliver ring, glittering with impatient nano connections. “This is your memory ring. As soon as you put it on it will record all of your memories. When you get married, you can give it to your life mate and it will share your memories from this moment onward. Go ahead, put it on.”\n\nLevi took the box his hand’s shaking. He took out the ring, hoping he wouldn’t drop it and slid it on his finger. He felt a tingle in his spine. “Wow.”\n\n“Take my hands, lets have the first memory your life mate has for you as a prayer.” Levi obediently took his fathers hands and closed his eyes, following to his father’s low voice. “As you wear this ring, please remember what God intends for the experiences he blesses you with, and to give you the courage and restraint to keep these memories sacred, and to only share them with your future life mate.”\n\n“Amen.”\n\nLevi opened his eyes. “Amen.”\n"
  title: The Promise
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2006-09-06
  day: '06'
  month: '09'
  text: "He drifted his coupe into the corner from the feeder street onto Avenue E at an easy pace, climbing from the lower flats in a series of calculated upturns before slipping into the relative obscurity of the middle tiers.\n\nCommuters and couriers flitted about below, dodging in and out of traffic to make deliveries or dropping into the parking slips below the pedestrian levels.  Above were the lumbering giants, observing the altitude restrictions that kept the transports from entering the city streets as they hauled cargo between the industrial zones.  There was no traffic in the middle flats, and the slick little sportster begged to be let out to run. Always ready to oblige the adrenaline pull, Max pushed the throttle up, feeling his seat stiffen behind his back as the little craft flung itself uptown.\n\nTwo more lane changes towards the clouds put him in the upper levels of the Atriums at Avenue E and 133rd Street. Six levels of open space and greenery  occupied both corner buildings, with the upper two levels offering a clear view of 133rd in both directions.  Easing the throttle back only slightly, Max scanned up and down the street before rolling into a sharp left bank and powering through the corner, rising up a flat in the process.  Heart racing he pushed the throttle again, picking up speed as 133rd Street slipped by like liquid beneath his seat.\n\nA sudden flashing of blue and red light filled the interior, erasing the thrill of the moment and replacing it instead with sudden and intense anxiety.  He hadn’t seen the cruiser, it must have been higher up, but there was no doubt that it had seen him.  Following the expected protocol, Max pulled up to a stationary platform at the side of an office tower, and watched as the uniformed figure climbed out of the cruiser behind him and approached.  He lowered his window, hanging one arm down the door while resting the other over the steering column.  A helmeted face appeared before him, a uniformed body reflected in the surface of the featureless office tower behind her.  Max listened to the voice from the helmet, but couldn’t help watching the reflection of her uniform pants in the mirrored window.\n\n‘Do you know why I pulled you over today Mr. Sidenham?’\n\nMax wasn’t used to strangers calling him by name, but he knew she’d had every trivial detail about him at her fingertips the moment she’d tagged him with the violation.\n\n‘Lonely?’ he smiled up at her charmingly, but quickly followed with ‘No, I’m sure I’ve got no idea why you’d want to stop me, officer’ It was clear she wasn’t amused.\n\n‘You failed to stop your vehicle before turning from the Avenue onto 133rd.  That’s a violation of your transit agreement.’\n\n‘I’m sure you’re mistaken, I’m positive I stopped there…’ again the smile, maybe he couldn’t joke with her, but he could sure as hell charm her, chicks dug him, he could tell.\n\n‘I think you’ll find if we subpoena your nav, you did not stop at that intersection Mr. Sidenham.  Are you going to argue with me?’  The tone of her voice should have warned him to stop there, but Max wasn’t one to listen to how a woman talked to him.\n\n‘Oh, come on now, I’m sure I slowed down at least, there was no one else for 10 flats up or down.  I’m a busy guy, what do you say we just let me off with a warning.’ His white teeth shone from ear to ear.  ‘Can’t we just forget about this sweetheart?’\n\n‘You may have slowed down, but you didn’t stop.  You are required to stop at all intersections, that’s in your transit agreement.’  Her tone was icy, she wasn’t anyone’s ‘sweetheart’, least of all this disrespectful little shit.\n\n‘Stop, slow down, what’s the difference?’ Max continued to smile what he was sure was his most disarming smile.  He was still smiling that smile, at least for a moment, when she pinned his forearm against the door of his coupe with her shock baton.  He only had a moment to see her thumb the trigger before his arm exploded in a white hot jolt of pain, his fist clenching without conscious input, then slowly opening as the energy left his arm.\n\n‘What the hell was…ugh…’.  Again she thumbed the trigger, and again he writhed in agony, his arm pinned firmly as the rest of him twitched in his seat.\n\n‘You can’t fu…aargg…’. Another blast of pain cut him off in mid sentence, and he was only momentarily aware of spit dripping from his open mouth before he was blinded by another white hot blast.\n\nHe slumped in his seat, hearing her words drift in through the post-electric haze.\n\n‘Now, sweetheart, would you like me to stop, or slow down?’\n"
  title: Stop
  year: 2006
- 
  author: S. Clough
  date: 2006-09-07
  day: '07'
  month: '09'
  text: "Five hundred and six degrees Kelvin is the temperature our burners need to reach. The tech boys designed them to burn at one thousand and seventy three. The operating temperature keeps going up and up: they seem to see it as a challenge. Anyway. We were heading back along the ninth princeway when it happened. The truck stopped, and swerved off the road, accelerating. Control had jacked our truck from the meat driver and some damn kid was joyriding us as fast as possible towards a presumably important assignment.\n\nWell, the bit about the kid might be an exaggeration. But that’s what it feels like – that sort of reckless abandon you see kids play their games with. Not minding about the odd dent or the rough jump because they won’t feel it, and the damage will be gone by the next round. We buckled down and rode it out. We figured we arrived at our destination when the truck did a screeching right hand turn, nearly rolling, before pulling to a halt. We barrelled out of the back, burners readied. We had pulled up outside a pair of buildings: a farmhouse and a barn. People were streaming out of the barn, some towards us, and some away.\n\nLiz and Patrick broke away to the right, quickly catching up with, and knocking down any of the escapees that were carrying boxes. They were the prize, not the people. They let the rest of them run away. The few who had approached us were obviously belligerent in their attitudes. Most were waving cudgels, although one or two had illegal firearms in their hands. Acts of aggression against Civil Protection troops is treason anyways, so we got rid of them all. Frank’s right burner misfired, though, so he ended up just punching one of them until he stopped trying to attack. Poor sod will probably have to repair it out of his own paycheck.\n\nWe collected all the contraband around the houses. Lee knocked one of the walls of the farmhouse in, just for good measure. He said he thought that there might be a secret compartment, although I reckon that was just for the benefit of the tape. That boy likes destruction a little too much. But he is in the right line of work to get plenty of it.\n\nWe had collected all the cases in the centre of the barn, and since I was Duty, I was about to put fire to them.\n\nThis was Lee’s first real hit. And in a flagrant breach of all our protocol, he stepped in front of me, and opened one of the cases. He picked up one of the objects from inside, tore off the opaque plastic which covered it, and stared. He tried to open the book with his heavily gloved hands, but just managed to tear the cover and the first few pages off.\n\n“Wha…?” he mouthed.\n\nFrank heaved him out of the way, and I put fire to the pile.\n"
  title: 506 Kelvin
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Dr. Alexanders
  date: 2006-09-08
  day: '08'
  month: '09'
  text: "The world did not snap back into focus for Jenna, but rather came in dribbles. The first sensation to return was the feeling of the restraining harness digging into her shoulders and pins and needles running through her extremities as the hibernation state wore off. Sound came next, the gentle hum and hiss of air processors and the array of electronic equipment that had been crammed into the capsule and had probably returned to life only hours before the processes designed to bring her out of deep sleep had begun. Vision was the last to return, the muscles controlling her eyelids would not work at first and several hours must have been spent completely conscious but unable to see or move.\n\nDuring those hours, fear, excitement, and anxiety battled for dominance. Jenna was a part of a colonization mission; one of ten million colonists tightly packed into a dozen long range barges. They had been placed into hibernation as the trip had been scheduled to take more than 2,000 years traveling across the galaxy at a quarter of the speed of light. A small crew would have been awoken once they arrived at their new home. This crew would have confirmed the suitability of the planet’s chemistry and then sterilized the surface from orbit of any microbes that might have developed.\n\nOnce the planet was properly prepped, hundreds of thousands of seed capsules would have been crashed into the planet’s surface containing raw organic material, genetically engineered and programmed to evolve rapidly so that after a few thousand years the surface would be covered in a wide variety of native plants and desired animal species from Jenna’s home world. The evolutionary process would cause some slight differences, but it would also allow the species to modify themselves to be able to cope with the slight chemical differences of the planet. During this process the crew would have returned to hibernation. A handful of scientists would be awoken every hundred years or so to check on the evolutionary process. When the desired state had been reached a series of retroviruses would be introduced in order to slow the evolutionary pace to its normal rate and then the homestead pods containing the hibernating colonists would be launched and guided down to their landing sites.\n\nWhen Jenna finally opened her eyes, she completed the last step of the initial colonization: the introduction of human life to this new planet. She could see that something was terribly wrong. A haze of old smoke drifted through the capsule, kept from her by the apparently still functioning filter on her hibernation capsule. Only the emergency lighting, which emitted a dim red glow, and occasional sparks from the console on the other side of the room enabled her to see that most of the other twenty hibernation capsules had been cracked open and now contained desiccated corpses.\n\nNot everyone else was dead though. She could see into the capsule next to hers where Kieran was struggling with weakened muscles to operate the emergency release on his capsule, and tears were streaming down his face.\n"
  title: Colonists
  year: 2006
- 
  author: B.York
  date: 2006-09-09
  day: '09'
  month: '09'
  text: "The trick is to never underestimate the power of normal. One has to believe that everyday life can somehow bring wondrous adventures because of its unpredictable nature. If this effort fails in the mind then the heart can never be happy. –Oxford’s Guide to Happiness Amongst the Stars\n\nJavier Marx was trying his best to remember these things from the guide when his shuttle arrived at Newfoundland Spaceport in August. Earth was a blue dot in his memory and he hadn’t been able to shake the idea of returning to settle in a gravity bubble during the last three months of his tour.\n\n“Fourteen years…” He muttered to himself as the re-entry began to flash against the outer hull. Fourteen years had passed since he stopped moving. This would be his final stop at the ripe Earth age of 43. Javier thought silently to himself if this was a mistake. He thought about the multitudes of wonders he had seen and experienced outside of a globe.\n\nJavier wondered about a life he’d have to get used to again. This thought was compounded by artificial gravity shut down as they entered atmosphere. He felt the real push of his weight and almost became sick. Most people couldn’t tell the difference or even notice when one switched to the other. Not Javier. He felt the way the balanced pressure became almost rounded when it switched to natural gravity. It was all he could do to not get ill at the feeling almost as if he despised it.\n\nThe shuttle doors opened after arrival and the man from space exited with the other more content humans with nothing but a vac-bag strapped over his shoulder. Bags looked better after being caught in the wake of a meteor. This one had traveled with him for the entirety of his adventures and now to end here at Newfoundland Spaceport.\n\nMasses of people walked around, greeting their families and their friends here. The cries of joy and laughter rang in his ears and yet he preferred one thing to din of it all: the silence of space. His brow was moist with sweat and he could feel his muscles ache from the balance of solid ground.\n\nIt was then he glanced up to see his family. His wife and children had all smiles broadening as they recognized his features. They waited just beyond the orbital glass gates to celebrate his arrival.\n\nJavier looked down at the weathered bag and glanced to the shop to his left where he had bought his first. He took a glance back to his wife in a look that turned her smile into a face ready for tears. It could be made out from the movement of her lips that she protested his decision greatly. With a smile he mouthed “I’m sorry” and stepped quickly into the store.\n\n“How much for one of these?” He asked the clerk while pointing to a bag of the exact model as his own on display.\n\n“Fourteen Credits, sir…” The well-dressed clerk smiled as he gladly accepted Javier’s credits, watching him empty the old bag into the new one.\n\nTurning his back on the globe he went for the terminal desk. “One ticket please” he said in confidence to the lady standing behind the computer.\n\n“Your destination, sir?”\n\nJavier smiled to himself, tossing the old bag in the garbage disposal unit next to the desk. The sweat had already begun to subside upon his face as he thought of weightlessness again. “Doesn’t matter… just as long as it’s a journey to somewhere.”\n"
  title: Back From Outer Space
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2006-09-10
  day: 10
  month: '09'
  text: "“Commander’s Log, Hyper-light mission Alpha-one, Ship’s chronometer, Day 23,:  Commander Adelmann reporting.  The Tycho Brahe has completed another uneventful day.  We are currently 7.1 light years from Earth.  All systems are operating in the green.  However, earlier today, during routine maintenance, Lieutenant DeHennis experienced a minor injury while attempting…”\n\nJust then, the ship dropped out of warp, and all systems shut down.  The entire ship was pitch-black.  Even the independent emergency power did not function.  However, there was a barely detectable blue haze visible outside the ship.  That’s when Commander Adelmann noticed the menacing looking alien spacecraft floating 50 feet beyond the forward viewing ports.  The alien ship launched a grappling cable that slammed into the hull.  Almost instantly, the main computer came on-line.  A few minutes later, a disembodied voice began to speak over the intercom.  “Translating protocol initiated…click…please stand by…click…click…State your system of origin and destination.”\n\nUnder the circumstances, Commander Adelmann thought it was best to cooperate. “Uh, Earth.  I mean Sol.  We’re headed to Tau Ceti.”\n\n“Do you know why your ship was deactivated?”\n\n“Uh, because you wanted to make First Contact?”\n\n“Negative.  Your ship was flying at warp 1.1 in a non-designated area, your identification transponder is not functioning, and your warp field is not dampened…click…please stand by…click…click…Sir, Sol is in the Sirius Sector, but this ship is not registered.  Please state your Sirius Department of Transportation Pilot Identification Number.”\n\n“Identification Number?  I don’t think I have one.  This is the first manned mission outside of our solar system.  I didn’t know…”\n\n“Sir, are you saying that you are unaware that all warp corridors are either radial, at one degree intervals extending from the galactic black hole, or circumferential, at concentric intervals ten parsec apart?  Are you also unaware that transponders are needed to identify and track ships in hyperspace?”\n\n“Warp corridors?  Transponders?”\n\n“Sir, you cannot warp randomly around the galaxy.  There are 14 quintillion spacecraft registered in this quadrant.  If you don’t follow the designated corridors at the specified warp limits, you risk a collision with your fellow travelers, especially if you are not transmitting your spatial spherical coordinates.  Surely sir,…click…You didn’t think you were the only one out here, did you?”\n\n“Well…”\n\n“In addition, sir…click…by warping through a non-designated area, you have caused damage to the Cetus amino-acid fields.  I’m afraid…click…that your ship will have to be impounded.  I will…click…activate you life support and communication systems.  You will wait here until a tow-craft comes and takes you to Sirius Station.  Your ship will be released when it is brought up to code, properly registered, and all fines and damages are paid.  Your passengers can book transportation back to…click…Earth.  However, you, sir, will have to be detained.  The Magistrate…click…will want to talk with you.  Since this is your species first offence, you will probably get…click…probation.”\n\n“Probation?  But…”\n\n“I’m sorry, sir.  If you have any…click…complaints, you’ll have to take it up with the Magistrate.  In the future sir, please use only designated warp corridors, and…click…obey all warp limits…click…click…and sir…click…have a nice day…click.”\n"
  title: First Contact
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2006-09-11
  day: 11
  month: '09'
  text: "It had been eighteen years since they’d seen their home world.  Eighteen years since the earth had lain before them vibrant and blue. They had come home, and brought with them the water of life, salvation for a world in need. They’d left a desperate band of men with a mission, journeyed the stars as beggars, then thieves, and ultimately destroyers to return home to be heroes.\n\n‘Orbital control, this is the Lazarus on return approach, we’re inbound heavy looking for our vector, over’\n\nNothing but silence greeted their request.\n\nEarth was being consumed by a terrible plague when they had left, a plague that destroyed the infected from the inside.  The doctors needed fresh blood, in great quantities in order to transfuse, and to synthesize the antibodies that had been cleaned from their blood through the generations. They had dug up a horrific judgement of a great many years ago, and no one was immune anymore. A disease their ancestors would have thought nothing of now stood to annihilate them to a man.  How far they’d come, and how quickly they’d fallen.\n\nThe mission of the Lazarus was to visit the worlds colonized over the generations, to collect blood from the inhabitants of these civilizations the earth had birthed amongst the stars, and to bring it back to save their ancestral home world. The people on these worlds had forgotten who had given them life, and they were reluctant to help when asked to share their blood.  Maybe one in twenty would offer up a litre willingly, but the men on the Lazarus found that everyone had 5 litres to spare if they weren’t given the choice. These roving collectors of the water of life were prepared to sacrifice these insignificant worlds in order to save their home.  They could be colonized again, but the survival of their planet of origin must be assured.\n\nAlmost four million litres of blood filled the belly of their ship on its return voyage, three quarter of a million lives sacrificed for the sake of the human race. They had become masters of its retrieval, machines of exsanguination gone mad, but justified in doing gods work, and now they were home.\n\n‘Orbital control, this is the Lazarus, are you reading us?’\n\nThe silence mocked the heros return.\n\n‘Orbital control, we’re on an urgent approach, we have no sensory data on proximal traffic, we’re bypassing your authority and dropping into lower earth orbit.’\n\nThe Lazarus rolled into its approach, the crew fastened safely in their harnesses as the giant craft burned through the upper atmosphere in a red hot blaze of glory before leveling off to cruise above the planet in the direction of its home landing field.\n\n‘Cheyenne control, this is the Lazarus on return approach.  We’ve cleared the atmosphere and are requesting an airway inbound. Over.’\n\nNo signal greeted the pilot, nothing at all.\n\nThey slowed and gave up altitude gradually, straining to see through the view ports and scrutinizing the sensors to see what would greet them below. Across Iowa and Nebraska they saw nothing, no life signs, no radio signals, no navigational beacons, nothing but barren ground and silence.\n\nAs they reached the border of Wyoming, the radio crackled to life first, followed by a video transmission that filled the view screen.  The crew turned from their tasks and windows to watch a shrunken man, gaunt and lesioned as he cleared his throat and spoke.\n\n‘Lazarus crew. If you are receiving this transmission, I’m afraid you are too late.  The disease has accelerated beyond our ability to contain it, and most of the population of this earth has succumbed. Do not land your craft. Do not take on any material from this earth. The planet must remain in quarantine. This planet has survived the loss of its inhabitants before, it will rise again without us.’\n\nThe man paused, eyes closing for moment before taking a breath and continuing.\n\n‘Lazarus crew, the only hope for humanity lies now with the colonies.  You must go to them, help them, protect them, provide transport between them that they may share knowledge and resources and assure the future of the human race. If you are here, then it’s because these colonists gave freely of themselves in order to save us, you must now give back to them in order to save us all. The future of the human race lies in your hands, good luck, and god speed’\n\nAs the transmission ended, silence once again filled the cabin. Through this silence everyone onboard could feel the cries of the lives they carried, litre by litre in the belly of the beast that was all that was left of the human race.\n"
  title: Water of Life
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Michael “Freeman” Herbaugh
  date: 2006-09-12
  day: 12
  month: '09'
  text: "I know he’s been here. I’ve seen the signs and clues of his passing. It feels like ages since I started waiting for him to show himself. Heh – that’s almost funny, thinking about the relativity of time passing and all this time I’ve been working on Interspatial Time and Chronological Mechanics as they relate to the movement of a body. That is to say time travel.\n\nI’ve been struggling since my doctorate to find the break through, that one formula that’s been on the tip of my tongue for these past few months but can’t seem to get out. I keep thinking that he will show up and give it to me, I know he will, it’s just a question of time.\n\nBut, I also think that maybe he is just watching me, amused at my plight of going through what he has surely gone through. He probably thinks “Why should I give it to him when I worked so hard to get it myself?” Or, perhaps, he is just waiting for the right moment that matches when he gave it to himself.\n\nI don’t believe that you can really screw up the linear nature of time. If he were to give me the answer before today it would already have happened and I would remember so it’s got to be coming in the future. I know he’s watching, after all I would. Why won’t he just speak up already?\n\nI guess I will just have to persevere in my research so that, when I am ready, I can become him.\n"
  title: Paranoia
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Phil Jacobsma
  date: 2006-09-13
  day: 13
  month: '09'
  text: "The magician known as the Great Pervasor finished his trick with a flourish.  As the audience applauded, Anders sat nervously awaiting his cue.  He had agreed to be part of the show because he needed the money.  He had already missed two car payments, and the bank was threatening to repossess.  The magician had offered him $200 to pretend to be an audience volunteer.   It would  make just one payment, but it would get them off his back for another month.\n\n“For my next illusion, I require a volunteer”, declared the man on the stage.  He searched the audience, his eyes finally alighting on Anders.  “You, sir” he said, pointing his long black wand, “come down and be a part of the mystery!”\n\nAnders stood, feigning reluctance as the audience applauded their approval.  He made his way to the stage, turning to face the bright lights.  He noticed he could barely see past the edge of the stage in the glare.\n\n“Now, sir, do not be afraid”, said the Great Pervasor.  “There is no danger.  I am simply going to make you exit this universe for a short period of time.”  He turned toward the audience, grinning.  “But I promise I will bring you right back!”  Anders heard the audience laughing.  Let’s just get this over with, he thought.\n\nThe trick went just as Anders had rehearsed it that afternoon.  He took a seat in a chair on the left side of the stage.  An identical empty chair sat at the right side of the stage.  When the magician raised his cloak, a jet of smoke rose from the floor and a trap door opened allowing Anders to drop below the stage.  He was to reappear in a moment through another trap door on the other chair.\n\nAnders dropped to the floor, and felt hands on his arms helping him up.  He was about to offer his thanks when he gasped in surprise.  Holding his arms were two small gray creatures with large black eyes.  They appeared to be perfect cliché aliens.  Anders wondered if these costumes were part of another of the magician’s tricks. The costumes were amazingly detailed. A third alien walked toward him, holding out a small silver device.  Behind this alien, standing under the trap door to the other chair, was a man who looked exactly like Anders!  He was even wearing the same clothing as Anders.  Just before the charge from the alien weapon hit him, Anders saw his double smile at him and wink.\n"
  title: The Great Pervasor
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Dr. Alexanders
  date: 2006-09-14
  day: 14
  month: '09'
  text: "Kevin stared upward at the “Arrivals/Departures” sign in the main concourse of the Europa Delta Interplanetary Spaceport. He blinked, rubbed his eyes, and looked again. The information didn’t change, not a single number. It read:\n\nIBSF  #452\n\nEuropa Delta, Jupiter to Gatwick, U.K., Earth\n\nScheduled Departure: 18:45, Aug. 23, 2159\n\nScheduled Arrival:   03:22, Aug. 29, 2159\n\n—DELAYED— 83d  13hr  27min\n\nGlancing around the concourse he saw a customer service desk on the other side of a throng of Brazilian tourists. When they didn’t immediately part for him he simply pushed his way through so that when he finally reached the desk he was followed by strings of what he assumed were Portuguese curses and swear words. A slender, blonde woman wearing the standard spaceport uniform took a second to finish whatever she had been typing and then looked up at him with a false smile.\n\n“And how can I help you today, sir?” Her eyes flicked past him for an instant to the Brazilians who were still shouting at him incomprehensibly.\n\n“I think there has been a mistake… my flight, ummm, here’s my ticket; the board over there says that my flight’s going to be over eighty-three days late.” He started to laugh and then stopped when he realized she wasn’t laughing with him. Instead she looked at her computer and his ticket, typed something and faced him once again.\n\n“I’m sorry, sir, but the board is correct. Here at Icarus Budgetary Space Flights we offer flights at a quarter of the price of other space liners by passing on savings to our customers. One of those savings is reduced fuel costs by taking advantage of optimal flight windows and I am afraid that your flight just isn’t going to make this next window due to spaceport congestion.”\n\n“What!? And the next window isn’t for 83 days? I have a meeting in Prague in two weeks!”\n\n“I am sorry, sir, but you booked a flight at our minimal fuel cost price. There is only a ten day window between arrival and departure and today is the last day in that window. I could book you on our premium flight that leaves tomorrow, though it would cost a little bit more.”\n\nKevin sighed, “Fine… how much?”\n\nThe woman checked her screen again, “An upgrade will cost 1,345 credits.”\n\n“But that’s more than four times what I paid for the flight to begin with! I can’t afford that!”\n\nThe woman gave him a sympathetic smile, “I am sorry, sir, but there really is nothing else I could do. Can I give you a voucher for a free night in the spaceport hotel?”\n\nKevin cursed, violently.\n"
  title: Layover
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Dee Harding
  date: 2006-09-15
  day: 15
  month: '09'
  text: "Keiko 610618, or ‘keiko610’, as her work is signed, has just returned from yet another business meeting in a far flung industrial sector. Making idle conversation, we ask her if she enjoyed her flight, we ask her where she’s been. She simply shakes her head, amused, and almost seductively mouths the letters, “n… d… a”.\n\nChanging tack we ask her about her other work, and how she’s finding her current stint at the Marlin’s Reach galleries. “Wonderful” she replies coyly, and just as we get the feeling that this is going to be a difficult interview, she continues…\n\n“I never thought that it would get any further than my own pleasure. That what I find interesting, and exciting, would have a wider appeal. But just as I have in life as a whole, I’ve found myself proven wrong at every turn. That’s what’s wonderful about it.” For the uninitiated in fringe art, keiko610 is this season’s big thing, and she’s taken to the sensation like a duck to water. She’s also an android.\n\nWhile people are stunned that this exotic creature should even be capable of producing such intuitive (if tiny) sculptures and objet d’art, she herself claims to be surprised by the positive reaction she has engendered in the public. “I’m perpetually amazed by people, myself included. I was given birth for certain duties, and I enjoy them. I consider myself good at them.” Keiko is contracted by Zeus-Ethera Shipping Corporation and effectively represents their entire administrative staff. “but at the same time, because I have those facilities, and because I’m good at my job, I find myself in quiet moments, exploring, sorting, trying to make sense of things, and sometimes the results are…” she pauses, for what can only be affect, “Unexpected. On every scale.” Her language gives the truth to that statement, betraying traits we expect to find in ourselves, rather than in what is, in effect, an extremely elegant sculpture given life. The fractal nature of her art is not beyond her. “I must admit that there is some humour in my approach to all this, otherwise I would never have been able to work with you in the past”. Faced with Keiko’s innocent features we’re not quite sure if we’ve been complemented or insulted, but she is, of course, referring to her brief stint as an i-O model last year. “Obviously I’m very grateful for that opportunity, and I enjoyed myself immensely, but I don’t think I’ll be coming back to it very soon. Business moves relentlessly on, after all.” And with that she winks at us in complex irony, and leaves, stretching out like one of her own perfectly formed figurines for another unnamed business destination.\n"
  title: 4B45 494B 6F
  year: 2006
- 
  author: James Weirick
  date: 2006-09-16
  day: 16
  month: '09'
  text: "Fear. Doubt. Uncertainty. Emotions long gone from this society now found new life in the minds of John and Paula. For the first time in their lives, they were unsure. They didn’t know if what they were doing was the right thing. They didn’t know what tomorrow would hold.\n\nSirens sounded softly in the distance. Someone knew that they were there.\n\n“We have about five minutes until the police get here.” said Paula, “It’s now or never.”\n\nThe explosives that John had placed strategically around the Knowledge Retainment Center were hard to come by since the world had stopped fighting wars 20 years ago. Some explosives were still manufactured, but they were only used to demolish old buildings to make room for the new models that were earthquake proof, fire proof, flood proof…everything proof. But even the strength of the new buildings had nothing on the structural reinforcements of the Center. Even the old nuclear bombs were no match for the Center. No, John and Paula needed the most powerful bomb ever made. It was known only as “The Winkie.”\n\nJohn pushed the button on the detonator and they both watched as the Knowledge Retainment Center was consumed in a ball of fire. The shock wave could be felt for miles, and many of the surrounding building were destroyed in the blast.\n\nPeople had already started to gather in the streets as the police came to arrest John and Paula. When the police got there, however, they just stood in amazement and watched the melted remains of the Center cool in the shallow crater that the explosion had left. Why bother arresting these two when society as they knew it had come to an end?\n\nOne of the officers—now consumed with the same fear, uncertainty, and doubt that John and Paula had felt—looked at the two and in a sad, quiet voice said, “Why?”\n\nPaula smiled and said with a deep satisfaction, “So that our children will have something new to discover.”\n\nMiles away from the explosion the plaque that graced the entrance to the Center was lying in the mud. It read, “The Knowledge Retainment Center is the only receptacle of all the knowledge that mankind has ever gained. It will house that knowledge for this and all future generations.”\n"
  title: The Gift of Naiveté
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Hannah F
  date: 2006-09-17
  day: 17
  month: '09'
  text: "“What do you mean, you knew it wouldn’t work out?”  Emma’s brow furrowed as she regarded me across the table. “I watched the simtapes with you; I saw the results. Everything- preferences, intellectual profile, moral standing, even your damn sleep cycles said you two would be a perfect match!  How could you have been sure- from ten minutes of actually seeing the man- that it wouldn’t work out?”\n\nI sighed, and leaned forward a little bit, clasping my hands in front of me on the table.  “I saw him sit down like this,” I explained miserably.  Emma’s face was blank, still uncomprehending.  I stretched my right hand, trying to emphasize.  “He clasped his hands, and his right thumb was on top.”  I shuffled my fingers until I sat comfortably.  She stared in disbelief.\n\n“You dumped him because he was right-handed?”\n\n“Not hand dominance, thumb dominance.”  I shook my head.  “I’m left-thumb dominant.  It never would have worked- the second we held hands, everything would have been over.”\n\n“I think you’re full of it.”\n\nI slid off my chair and into the empty one between us, and lifted her left hand with my right, slipping my right thumb over her left, regardless of how uncomfortable I found it.\n\nHer eyes widened.  “Oh…”\n\nI let her go and slid back into my seat.  We finished our meals without another word.\n"
  title: Perfect Match
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R.Blackwell
  date: 2006-09-18
  day: 18
  month: '09'
  text: "Russell came home hungry. When he walked through the door he was thinking of lasagna, steak and sherbet. Leo often had dinner waiting on the table when he came home, their three children occupied in their study pods. When Russell came home he expected warm smells and a quiet house. When he walked thought the door, the children were running around in the kitchen with seven bags of raw, unprocessed, unpackaged food. Seeing Jeremy play with tomatoes, his little fingers crushing the flesh made Russell want to vomit. In the middle of all this chaos was Leo, smiling like a wicked child.\n\nRussell randomly picked an object from a bag and dangled it from between three fingers. “What’s this?”\n\nLeo rolled his eyes. “It’s a cucumber.”\n\n“Yeah, I know it’s a cucumber. Why isn’t it sliced up in a salad, packaged and clean?”\n\nLeo put his hands on his slender hips. “Russell, I’ve decided we should stop eating food from other worlds.”\n\n“What?” Russell threw himself into a kitchen chair.\n\n“The food here on Greenwald is good. It’s grown in the southern continent. We should be supporting Greenwald’s farmers, not some off-worlders.”\n\n“Leo, I don’t want to be involved with one of your political movements. If you want to do something, that’s fine, but I don’t think you should force it on the children and I.”\n\n“The children like going to the market and picking out the food with me.”\n\nRussell pointed to a parsnip on the counter. “The children like getting filthy, and this food is filthy.”\n\n“It is not filthy. It’s local.”\n\n“Same difference.”\n\n“Russell, I saw a program on the NPH Holo-Cast-“\n\n“Not again-“\n\n“They said that our packaged foods are shipped from three star systems away. They have been folded and molecularly warped through space-travel.”\n\n“So what?”\n\n“So what? Russell, this is what we are putting in our bodies!”\n\n“Leo, you are acting like a hippie.”\n\nLeos jaw dropped open. “Russell! Don’t curse, not in front of the children.”\n\n“I like the shipped food! It comes pre-sliced and delivered to our door. I hate putting all that stuff through the processor, programming the damn thing to make whatever, making sure it has all the ingredients. I like my food simple, arriving all ready for me to eat. I don’t have time to process.” Russell slumped over in a kitchen chair.\n\nLeo shrugged his thin, tan shoulders. “Then I’ll process the food. If supporting Greenwald isn’t important to you, if the sacrifices your father made to make this world a success when he immigrated here-“\n\n“Oh give me a bag, I’ll help.” Russell peered inside. “Fresh plums?”\n\n“Yes. They have fresh plums.”\n\nRussell squeezed the purple fruit. “I can never find those on the order form. I didn’t know they grew plums here on Greenwald.”\n\n“Well, they do.”\n\nRussell put his arms around Leo’s waist.  “I guess if they have fresh plums, then it can’t be all that bad.”\n\n“Apology accepted. “ Leo dumped the last few pieces of food into the processor and wiped his hands clean.\n"
  title: Local Food
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J. S. Kachelries
  date: 2006-09-19
  day: 19
  month: '09'
  text: "As the spaceship exited the wormhole, its forward thrusters brought it to a relative stop.  The ship sat motionless for an hour as its two occupants tried to determine their location.  The pilot, Teeh Ar, balled his two-fingered ‘hands’ into fists, and slowly pivoted to confront his navigator snout-to-beak.  “Lost!  What do you mean lost?”  The vertical slits that were Teeh’s pupils looked like steel daggers in his large, dark cobalt-blue eyes.  Then, in a voice two octaves lower than normal, he growled “Pterry, if you don’t find out where we are in one minute, I’m going to bite your head off.”  For effect, Teeh bared his upper row of eight inch long, serrated, razor sharp teeth, and snarled.\n\nThe 60 pound navigator raised his slender wings over his head and made the thin membranes quiver mockingly with feigned fear.  “Oh my God, the mighty King Lizard is going to bite my head off.  I’m soooo scared.  Ha, ha, ha.  Who are you trying to kid?  You’re a stinkin’ scavenger, not a predator.  You couldn’t bite my head off unless I was already dead.  You really crack me up.”  Pterry folded his long graceful wings and continued to adjust the dials on his control panel while he searched for a navigation beacon.  He considered radioing for directions, but he was male, so that was out of the question until things got really desperate, and probably not even then.  “Look, your majesty, if you’re done blustering, make yourself useful.  See if you can pick up a station on the holovision.  Maybe I can follow the signal back to a subspace transmitter.”  Pterry paused momentarily, and then said, “Hey, you know, maybe that wormhole sent us to a parallel universe, or something.  I was watching a show about String Theory last month.  They said there are 11 dimensions, containing infinite universes.  Maybe we jumped into a universe where the Earth is ruled by insects or mammals, rather than dinosaurs.”\n\n“Mammals?  You mean like mice?  Don’t be ridiculous.  Their young can’t live two days without their mommies.  How could they ever rule the world?”  Just then, the image of a cute, female Allosaurus came into focus on the holovision.  Relieved, Teeh said, “Well, there goes your parallel universe crap.  I just got ‘Raptor and Friends’ on the projector.”  Teeh leaned back and watched the perky, substitute co-host for a few seconds.  “You have to admit, she looks pretty good for someone that just hatched twin eggs a few years back.”\n\nPterry ignored Teeh’s commentary as he attempted to get a fix on the signal. “OK,” he said, “I think this will work.  Once I establish a second link, I can triangulate our position, and determine our spatial coordinates.  But pleeeease, do me a favor.  Switch it to DNN?  I can’t stand that network. ‘Fair and balanced’ my tailbone.”\n\nHowever, Teeh was still smarting from Pterry’s earlier defamatory comments, so he wasn’t in a conciliatory mood.  Besides, he liked Raptor News.  His eye ridges came together to form a “V” in the center of his forehead, and he grinned.  “Listen beak-head, consider it motivation.  If you don’t get us home by 8:00 tonight, you’re going to have to watch the Stegosaurus Factor.”\n"
  title: Parallel Universe
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2006-09-20
  day: 20
  month: '09'
  text: "With an almost discernible sigh, the bridge ceased its seemingly endless attempt to shake the crew unconscious.  Captain Jax waited until he was sure the worst was over before instructing the muscles in his body to unbrace themselves from his seat, and it took some time before those muscles began to obey.  The space around him was filled with a haze of smoke and sublimated material that before the storm had made up control surfaces and various other parts of his ship. The giant view screen was dark, and as the fire suppression systems shut down, and the environmental control systems began to scrub the air, he realized that large portions of the bridge were dark also.   Around him restraints eased, and tired bodies released themselves into the slack tethers.  The immediate danger, at least, had passed.\n\n‘Django, damage report.’ The captain’s voice carried easily across the cramped space, and he waited as the engineer struggled to coax a console to life. Reams of text chased themselves across the screen before flickering out only to begin again.\n\n‘Engines are up, warp drive is down.’ Yellow fluid oozed from a crack in the engineers craggy forehead which he dabbed at absently with a sleeve as he continued. ‘We’ve all but lost the recyclers, the atmosphere reserve is online but degraded, estimated hours of breathable air –  thirty seven.’ The captain instinctively began to slow his breathing. ‘The storms knocked out our eyes and ears sir, we’ve got instruments for navigation, but no visual.  Our distress beacon is broadcasting, but only from the bow, and the long range sensor on the bow is alight, but it’s the only one.’\n\nThe captain slumped back into his chair, pushing the hair back from his sweating forehead. His eyes tried to focus on a point beyond the blackened display, as though expecting to see somehow through it into the void of space.\n\n‘Weapons Django?’\n\n‘Ballistics are offline sir, the light spear appears intact’\n\n‘Direct whatever energy we’ve got to the beacon and sensors, we need to find a ship.’ The crew began to execute his commands even before he’d finished speaking them.\n\nNearly a dozen hours passed before the long range sensor panel lit up and the comms officer, Sharak, broke the silence. ‘Sir, there’s a ship straight off the bow, quite some distance, but she’s parked and in our line of sight.  She’s in a line to receive our beacon sir.’\n\n‘Django’ The captains voice boomed with new found purpose ‘All ahead full, let’s catch up to that ship’\n\nThe engines wound valiantly to life, shaking loose bits of the bridge that had been tenaciously holding on while they’d sat at idle, filling the cabin with the clatter and dull thuds of falling alloys and polymer composites.\n\n‘Sir – the ship ahead is in motion sir.’ Django struggled to read the flickering display in front of him. ‘We’re accelerating sir, and they’re matching our speed.’\n\n‘We need to catch that ship and we’re a little low on options right now’ The captain knew it was pure luck a ship happened across their path and he wasn’t going to let it get away. ‘Bring the light spear up, fire a volley up his ass and see if we can’t take his engines offline.  Mobility we’ve got, it’s his atmospherics I want. If he’s ignoring our beacon he’s brought this on himself…’\n\nSharak spoke over her shoulder ‘Captain, the aft transceiver array’s come back online, and there’s a ship back there, it’s broadcasting on the emergency channel but it appears encrypted sir, I can’t make out a message.’\n\n‘Forget them, we’ve got our own problems, we’re in no position to help anyone else right now.  If we can catch this ship and make repairs, we can think about going back later.’ The captain was leaning forward now, straining his eyes at the void of the view screen for some glimpse of the space outside, an image that wouldn’t come.\n\n‘Sir… the ship behind us, it’s fired on us…’ Sharak was afraid, and her voice could do nothing to hide the fact.\n\n‘Fired?  Fired!  We’re broadcasting a distress signal, what kind of bastard fires on a ship in distress?’ The captain, giving up on the dead display stood and wheeled on the comms officer, gripping his seat back to steady himself against the surging of the wounded engines.\n\n‘Sir… the signal from the ship behind us.  It’s not encrypted sir, I don’t know how I missed it, it’s inverted and sir,’ The comms officer’s voice dropped almost to a whisper. ‘Sir, it’s from our bow beacon.’\n"
  title: Looking Forward
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Daniel Longwing
  date: 2006-09-21
  day: 21
  month: '09'
  text: "Two steps forward, don’t shuffle your feet. You already accrued three points in the way you took off your shoes…\n\nDon’t look at the carpet. Don’t look at the carpet! Sod, that’ll be another four points for not looking the guard in the eye with a friendly and nonchalant smile.\n\nThe man in riot gear with the machine gun and the mirrored face-mask gestures to the left. Smile at him. Friendly. Friendly. Yes, that’s it, pretend your reflection is his face and  give him a nod. This man is your friend and is here to help you. Tell yourself that.\n\nGood. Keep your face relaxed, calm but alert. Only affable expressions of optimism and happiness. Place your belongings on the conveyor belt. Yes, they could get stolen while you go through the scanner… Don’t think about that, don’t get nervous. Don’t look nervous…\n\nYour brow was creased while you talked to the scanner operator. That’s going to be an easy 5, maybe 6 points. The interrogation went well though, you revealed all relevant information about your age, sex, political, religious, and work background. You even managed to ease in your financial status without breaking the veneer of a pleasant conversation. Good. That will all go into the database, they know nothing has changed since the last time you were asked in the lobby.\n\nThink positive, think happy. You are happy. Being surrounded by guns and scanners and trigger-happy paranoiacs makes you safe. That was a bitter thought. Check your face… Expression still good, it didn’t get out. It was funny, but you’re just a few points shy of being singled out for “examination”.\n\nThere are your belongings. Don’t look at them for too long. Good good. Concerned, but not too much. They’ve got your shoes and clothes ready too…\n\nOne last step. Don’t screw up… Talk to the woman holding your clothing….\n\n“Social Security Number 358-63-3269?”\n\n“That’s me.” Smooth. Good smile, just hold it for a moment…\n\n“Here are your clothes, please retrieve your belongings from the belt. You’ve passed initial screening and psychological profiling. The background check will clear momentarily.” The woman handed him an official document. “Show this to all personnel, hesitation could lead to arrest, and 3269?”\n\n“Yes?”\n\n“Thank you for flying with us today.”\n"
  title: Screening
  year: 2006
- 
  author: B.York
  date: 2006-09-22
  day: 22
  month: '09'
  text: "“So why did you come on this trip, Micky? You didn’t bring a crew. Not even a single camera.” Charles was loading the grappling gun like he could do it blindfolded. In fact, he was just staring at his partner while he twisted the grapple into the loader.\n\nMicky was glancing up along the passing walls of the mine elevator shaft; the twinkle in his eye was more than just enjoyment of the scenery. At last he glanced to Charles as the elevator came to a halt. “You tell me, Charles. Is there something down here worth checking out?”\n\nThe gruff Charles Hannon rubbed his four-day shadow as he opened the gate of the elevator leading into a barely lit descending cavern. He stepped out and waited for his associate to exit before shutting the gates again with a loud clank. “Could be, Micky. People got scared; they think they found some garbage from before the war. You know how they get spooked when radiation gets involved.”\n\n“I do, Charles. I know how all of them get scared.” Micky was walking out further into the cavern than a normal man would; glancing at every nook and cranny. Stopping at the edge of the cliff and staring down into the darkness he inquired, “Down there?”\n\nCharles smirked and hooked up the anchor of the grappler to the wall. He knew nothing of Micky’s involvement here other than the fact the media was paying him good money for this. “Yep, just below us. Listen… you never told me-”\n\n“Let’s go, Charles. People need this.” Micky was being more than cryptic and it was bugging the other man terribly. Charles shot the grapple down into the dark where it hit something moments later. The line tugged taught and he motioned Micky over to latch him into the glider. Both men hit ground at the same time and no sooner did a click herald a light from Micky’s hand.\n\nBoth surface men glanced as the light ran over the object in question. It was big, neither could dispute that. A distinct color of green and deep decaying rust permeated it. It had fallen out of one of the walls and it had an almost human quality to it.\n\n“Do you see the face?” Charles asked in a hushed whisper.\n\n“Indeed. I’m recording it now.”\n\nThe guide snapped at that remark, “Recording!? Micky what the bloody hell? What’s going on?”\n\nMicky’s eyes flashed in the dark and the hard-drive uploaded it as fast as he could see it. There was a feminine face and a raised arm. The thing looked like a statue with one arm outstretched to hold up a torch. He ignored the cries of his partner Charles as he smirked at the wonder he just found.\n\nCharles now tugged Micky to look at him, “What the fuck is that thing and what are you doing?”\n\nThe man just smiled at Charles, looked him dead in the eyes and spoke with curiosity, “You tell me Charles… would you like to be the first to edit?”\n"
  title: Mickipedia
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Steven Perez
  date: 2006-09-23
  day: 23
  month: '09'
  text: "The drive to Persepolis from Shiraz had been longer than expected due to an unexpected radiator leak, and at that moment, all I wanted to do was stand up and walk around. I’ve always loved to visit the ruins here, mostly because I have a fondness for the era of the Persians. This time, though, my visit had a much darker purpose.\n\nThe Land Rover finally came to a stop near the entrance of the tomb in question, and the team piled out and started taking out the gear in the back. The local authorities always groused a bit whenever we showed up in the area, but they realize that the work we do is vital to the good of the entire world, so they don’t kick too much. But it still spooks some people to see us in the flesh, so we tread carefully.\n\nThe perimeter finally comes together, and Saunders fires up the generator. The lights coalesce together, and the rift is finally visible to the human eye. I hate dimensional rifts.\n\n“Looks like we have more fugitives,” Kendra says with no small amount of disdain. The suits upstairs call them “temporal trespassers”. The teams spread out across the world came up with a simpler name for them: “fugitives”, after a story by Harlan Elison about time-travelers.\n\n“Geez, you’d think these guys would learn,” Sung Li growls.\n\nI bring everyone out of their reveille. “OK, so let’s find them.”\n\nWe lock onto their temporal signals and locate them quickly; scavengers from the 22nd Century. That figures; with all the horrible wars from that century, it’s a wonder that the human race survived as long as it did. Things must be really bad if the fugitives had taken to trying to alter history from distant locus points along the continuum.\n\nWe quickly seal the breach and leave a little something in case the rotters come back. Satisfied that we performed out jobs adequately, the team repacked our gear and waited for the extraction point back to the 835th Century. I would drive the SUV back to Shiraz so as not to arouse too many suspicions. Right on schedule, the null point formed and swept the team up into the vortex and back home.\n\nI stared out over the remains of an ancient human civilization for a long while and couldn’t help but wonder how much might have been different had the humans not killed each other.\n\nThe things a machine thinks about with time on his hands, eh?\n"
  title: Time and Again
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Marco Chacon
  date: 2006-09-24
  day: 24
  month: '09'
  text: "She had one of those new things: A USB port in the back of her neck, just under the skull. We’d plug her in at parties and, with the controller, she’d do all kinds of wild things—karaoke, belly dancing, there was even a “Mardi gras button”–but we didn’t use it too much.\n\nAfterwards, she wouldn’t remember anything but a soft warm feeling.\n\nMy friends said I was the luckiest guy alive (none of their girlfriends would do it) but I wasn’t too sure.\n\nWhen I hugged her, I’d run my fingers through her hair and I’d feel the little holes with their metal teeth.\n\nWe tried some downloaded porno-ware but her eyes were like glass marbles when she was jacked. It kinda creeped me out.\n\nWhen they came out with the new ones she didn’t have the money to upgrade and I don’t think it’s a coincidence we got into a lot of fights around that time. We sort of drifted apart.\n\n“You’re whacked,” my friends said. “That’s a dream girl.”\n\n“It’s totally on fire,” they said, “no one’s getting hurt.”\n\n“What’s the matter with you,” they said, “it’s hotter than you deserve—you better hang on to that.”\n\nBut I let her go. Today when I’m asked, I tell people we were incompatible.\n"
  title: Girlfriend
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2006-09-25
  day: 25
  month: '09'
  text: "He eyed her cautiously as they undressed, her gaze wandering over his muscular frame, he picking out the subtle characteristics that identified her as a mech; her stance, the symmetry of her body and its flawlessly calculated motions, the perfect geometric arcs her hips cut as she walked. Afternoon sun seeped reluctantly through smokey acrylic to carve dusty fingers in the stale air. The light accentuated her form as she closed the small distance between them on the balls of her feet. In an instant, she was on him, twisting him in a wiry embrace that found them both locked together on the bed.  He felt the sheets beneath his bare skin, faux cotton made soft from too many washings.\n\n‘Are you ready?’ She barely breathed the words, but he was, and they rolled together as one on the bed, exacting murderous complaints from the wood and metal frame beneath them.  He could feel the corded muscle beneath her polymer skin, feel the way the fibers contracted and released as she flexed, her body a geometry text of angles and curves, throwing shadows on the rice-paper walls, one moment acute, the next unnaturally obtuse.\n\n‘Come on baby. Harder – Faster.’ She was on her hands and knees now, looking back over her shoulder, her irises ratcheting through various degrees of dilation, straining to optimize the light. ‘Pull my hair.’ He wrapped one hand in the long soft fibers cascading across her back as their bodies blended into one. He could hear her air exchanger accelerate and then stop suddenly, her entire frame in an instant becoming rigid within the supple flesh of her body, seizing almost completely before fail safes spurred the air exchanger back into motion, and each pair of joints were reflexively released.\n\nHe sat on the end of the bed, smoking a cigarette, and watched as she dressed in silence and then strode purposefully toward the door.  ‘I’ll see you again next week.’ She paused a moment, pulling a handful of paper money from her purse and tossing it on the desk. ‘You know, you are my favorite.’ She smiled at him then, a warm, almost caring smile, before she disappeared behind the closing door.\n"
  title: Service the Masses
  year: 2006
- 
  author: S. Clough
  date: 2006-09-26
  day: 26
  month: '09'
  text: "“All units, fall back to waypoint epsilon. Marking recommended routes now.”\n\nReeve did as he was told. Command whispered into your head and they could easily put pain there instead of whispers. He was with four tax regulars, covering a breach in the stronghold’s outer wall.\n\n“There has been a breach of contract,” command spoke softly, melodiously. “Dropships are inbound to epsilon, and a communiqué has been sent to all aggressors. We are leaving this fight to the regulars. All non-secured equipment will terminate in five – four – three – two – one…”\n\nReeve smirked at the cries of surprise and horror that came from the Tax soldiers nearby. The equipment the Legion had hired out began to melt in the hands and on the body of the Taxers. The drone guns which had been holding the Anti-Tax combat frames at bay exploded violently. Discarding his weapons, Reeve began to run.\n\nThe Tax battlefield radio was swamped by screams. Command switched it off.\n\n“Estimated time till total overrun by anti-tax forces: eight minutes. Step on it.”\n\nFour other Legionnaires had caught up with Reeve. They’d thrown their primary weapons, too. They didn’t speak, but just ran with a measured, rapid pace.\n\n“Anti-Tax unit will cross your path, twenty seconds. Retfire only.”\n\nReeve held seniority, so drew his sidearm. A lithe, low combat frame slid out of the shadows ahead. It saw them, and hesitated for a fraction of a second. Quickly, it pressed itself back into the shadows. As Reeve passed, it bobbed it’s sensor cluster almost imperceptibly, a weak imitation of a nod……\n\n……Ana flicked the screen off ‘mute’, just in time to hear the Tax representative’s final denouncement of the Legion’s withdrawal. Reeve stood at her shoulder, in full battle gear: his presence was intended to give the Legion’s pretty face a degree of authenticity.\n\n“I’m sorry, Mr. Powell. The contract that you signed clearly stated that the detonation of any N.B.C weapon on the battlefield constituted a breach of contract. I’m sorry for your losses, but you were the one who broke the terms. We had no choice but to withdraw our forces and equipment.”\n\n“After your retreat, we were completely wiped out. You have the deaths of eighty soldiers on your conscience.”\n\n“No, Mr. Powell. You are mistaken. They are on your conscience, as you are the one who requested the detonation of a micronuke. Each of our legionnaires received twenty sieverts, adjusted from the explosion. This constituted a clear danger to their health. Legally, it was as if you’d ordered your men to turn and fire on us.”\n\n“We had no choice! Even with you, we were going to lose.”\n\n“We never lose, Mr. Powell. We have traded upon that very fact for many years now. Too many people have interests in our organization for us to achieve anything but victory on our own terms.”\n"
  title: Breach of Contract
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Patrica Stewart
  date: 2006-09-27
  day: 27
  month: '09'
  text: "Jim Roberts continued to stare at the chronometer in the center of the ship’s instrument panel.  Thirty minutes past the scheduled departure time.  Damn, why can’t they ever depart on schedule?  He pressed the intercom button.  “Sam, I’m losing the launch window.”\n\nIn an effort to calm himself down, Jim decided to use the delay to run through the checklist again.  Primary oxygen, secondary oxygen, carbon dioxide scrubbers, food, water, medical supplies, telemetry, subspace transmitter, backup transmitter, antimatter reserves, etc., etc.  He then reviewed the flight plan.  He had worked out the details of the plan with a buddy of his, who had made a career of flying replenishment missions to the science, military, and adventure stations in the outer solar system.  The plan called for a sling shot gravity boost around the moon, then maximum acceleration along a flatted parabolic path until achieving maximum velocity about 1,000,000 miles above the asteroid belt.  Then, on to Titan for a retrograde capture.\n\nFinally, Sam entered the cockpit and sat in the co-pilot’s seat.  “Ok, Ok.  Every body’s on board, the cargo is stowed, and all the hatches are secured.  We’re ready.  Have you filed the flight plan?”\n\n“Transmitted, received, and approved an hour ago.   I’ve just been waiting for you, as usual.  One day, Sam,” he threatened, “I’m going to leave you behind.”  He activated the transmitter.  “Tower, this is bravo-delta-epsilon-three-two-niner requesting permission to lift off.”\n\n“Roger that, bravo-delta-epsilon-three-two-niner.  You are number four on the launch pad.  Follow Transport Tanker gamma-omega-epsilon-three-seven-seven.”\n\n“Acknowledged.  Buckle up, Sam.”  Jim primed the antimatter engines, and taxied toward the launch pad.  Three minutes after the Transport Tanker lifted off, he initiated the launch sequence.  As the ship accelerated upward, he felt his back begin to press heavily into his seat.  With the skill of a seasoned pilot, he adjusted the inertia compensators to maintain 1g.  Once in orbit, he set the powerful engines to maximum, and headed toward the leading edge of the moon.  After the close approach, the ship wiped toward Saturn (actually, slightly ahead of Saturn, and slightly above the ecliptic).  The engines roared continuously for three hours before they automatically throttled down when the ship’s velocity reached 0.55c (Max-V).  Jim peered out the viewport and watched Vista’s thin crescent disappearing behind them.  “Ok,” he said, “double nickel for the next two hours, then deceleration begins.”\n\nSam had no idea what Jim was talking about. “Double what?”\n\n“Double nickel.  It’s an archaic Earth term from the twentieth century.  It means your velocity is 55 MPH.”\n\n“What’s that got to do with nickel?”\n\n“Not the metal, dummy.  A ‘nickel’ was a unit of American currency equal to five cen…”  Jim stopped himself mid-word.  Earth had stopped using coins over 300 years ago.  Nobody but a history buff like himself would know, or even care, about primitive societies.  “Oh, never mind,” he finally said.\n\nAfter a few awkward minutes of silence, Sam decided to change the subject.  With a thumb motioning toward the passenger compartment, Sam said, “You know, it’s been awful quiet back there.”\n\nAs if on cue, a shout came from the passenger cabin.  “Stop it.”\n\n“No, you stop it.”\n\n“Stop it, or I’ll tell Mom.  Mom, Katie keeps touching me.”\n\n“He’s on my side.”\n\n“Am not”\n\n“Are too.”\n\n“Am not.”\n\n“Liar.”\n\nJim cupped his hands over his ears.  “Well, Samantha, I hope you’re happy.  You jinxed us.”\n\n“Did not,” she replied mockingly.  “Besides, we just set a family record.  We made it all the way to the asteroid belt this time.”\n\n“Next year, I’m putting a force field between them.”\n\n“Dad, I’m hungry.”\n\n“Me too.”\n\n“I have to pee.”\n\n”Me too.”\n\n“Are we there yet?”\n"
  title: Destination Titan
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Hope Evey
  date: 2006-09-28
  day: 28
  month: '09'
  text: "He put pen to paper, but it was just a mechanical act.  The feel of the pen in his hand, the flow of ink onto the page, the crinkle of turned pages, none of these caused even a ruffle to his new, positronic brain.  He was aware of all the sensations, of course.  They just didn’t mean anything.\n\nOne stroke was enough to convince him that nothing could be worse than having another.  Modern medicine could do many things, but couldn’t guarantee he’d completely recover from another stroke.  Ages of therapy after the first stroke, physical and psychological, and he regained most of his manual dexterity, and most of his memory.  The two days immediately preceding his stroke remained a blank, so he chose the very best positronic brain available, and a matching robotic body.  Upload to a positronic brain had risks, of course, but he preferred them to risking his mind in an aging body.\n\nThe greatest risk, of course, was the transferal itself.  He wouldn’t be copying his mind to the positronic brain – he would be transferring it.  The process that encoded his mind onto the positronic matrix would, neuron by neuron, destroy his physical brain.  If the transfer failed, he would be dead.  He considered that better than to live with a brain that could break without warning.   He wasn’t worried about the shock of suddenly finding himself in a mechanical body.  His body only served to maintain his mind, and move it around.  A mechanical body would do the job just as well, if not better.\n\nHe got back to writing as soon as possible after the upload. He’d only finished four of the eight books in his series when he had his first stroke.   Thank God he’d taken lots of notes during the days he couldn’t remember.  He was able to reconstruct the plot twist he’d been developing before the stroke wiped his mind.  Some said the fifth book was the best of the series.  He didn’t realize he constructed it completely from the notes he’d made while still biological.  The sixth book sold even better.  He used his pre-upload notes, expanding upon them by using the most popular parts of the previous four.\n\nHis writing grew in popularity.  He could keep writing forever at this point.  He knew writing was important, but he could no longer remember why.\n"
  title: What is a Soul?
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Rae Walker
  date: 2006-09-29
  day: 29
  month: '09'
  text: "Dawn scrambled over the alley’s chain link fence, the ching ching ching of her climb ringing as loud as the siren had upon her escape.\n\nYes Dawn had killed the child; but how was she to know he was among the rubble? If it hadn’t been her then someone else would have brought the boy down; it was inevitable. Where had his Sitter been? What child was without one?\n\nNo matter now -the boy was dead- by her machinery and so by her hand. Dawn shuddered. The Black Maria had been waiting as She waited for every man, woman and child who dared deviate from the unyielding word of law. Unbiased. Without compassion or understanding of circumstance. Dawn was damned.\n\nJoy rippled through the beast as She had come to life; activated to hunt down, try and judge the child-murderer. With gentle feet She had climbed over apartment dormitories, not making the slightest mark. That would be vandalism and so was forbidden. Long after the sun had set, when the stars shined with more than enough light She had spotted Dawn and galloped at her with hydraulic joints pumping, Her belly open to snare the deviant. In the belly of the Black Maria, Dawn would have been interrogated, tried, and found guilty. In Her belly she would have been executed, incinerated, ashy smoke rising from between the Black Maria’s shoulder blades and billowing into the night air. But Dawn had dashed into traffic, stumbling between vehicles and taking the chance of being sucked into an engine. The Black Maria had not followed; it was against the law to cross without permission, and so She waited. Her body rippled again as one more charge was brought against the child-murderer and She watched for the pedestrian crossing to light white. Two men huddled below Her drew away with hunted expressions but there was no law against fear -She ignored them.\n\nDawn toppled over the fence, scuffing her shoulder, tearing through her red wool sweater. She dared not go to friends, family, or they too would be charged. With assisting the deviant. With anything. There was always something. Dawn was alone as she dragged herself to her feet and forced them to run again, though her chest felt like bursting. No one had ever fought the Black Maria and won, let alone a diabetic construction worker.\n\nThe night’s silence and city-noises were drowned by the Black Maria’s siren, sounding like laughing, clapping hands. Clah hah hah claa claa clah hah hah. People in units above drew their blinds and bolted their doors. She was close. The siren blared, wearing on Her quarry’s nerve until she made a mistake and was trapped in that steel belly.\n\nDawn sobbed, her hand gripping the slow bleeding wound on her shoulder. With glistening eyes, Dawn limped onward, the hope having left her step. She wished she had killed the boy with her own hands, had slit his throat and watched him bleed. She wished she could have had that luxury.\n"
  title: The Black Maria
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.S. Kachelries
  date: 2006-09-30
  day: 30
  month: '09'
  text: "Kram Vidda occupied one of the twelve holographic cubes in the Executive Conference Room of the Planetary Reclamation Corporation.  He would be the presenter in the meeting to discuss the possibility of salvaging Sol-3.  The images of ten board members, transmitted via hyperspace relays from distant Sectors, sat patiently waiting for the Chairman to appear.  When the Chairman, known only as Hapal, came into focus, the meeting began.\n\nVidda bowed his head respectively toward the Chairman.  “Hapal, it’s good to view you again, as well as the other prestigious members of the Board.  I know you are all very busy, so I’ll get right to the point.  Sol-3 is probably the worst case of planetary self destruction that I have ever seen.  Most of our previous projects involved salvaging planets destroyed by simple, mutual nuclear annihilation.”  He smiled slightly as he delivered his favorite axiom.  “After all, it’s the extinction method of choice for ‘intelligent’ species that have chosen to remove their genome from the evolutionary mainstream of the universe.”\n\nAs holographic pie charts appeared and slowly rotated in the center of the room, Vidda continued his presentation. “But the inhabitants of Sol-3 pulled out all stops.  As nearly as our engineers can reconstruct, they started through the wormhole of self-destruction the usual way.  Petty disputes between various political and economic factions prevented them from forming a consensus world government.  The more powerful countries exploited the available resources without any thought of the consequences.  They consumed their non-renewable carbon-based fuels recklessly, released copious amounts of green house gasses, destroyed their ozone layer, and they poisoned their air and water.  The inevitable tactical nuclear devices were detonated, which escalated into a global holocaust.  That’s usually where they exit and we enter.  But somehow, the species was hardy enough to survive thermo-nuclear war, and they continued the conflict even as they had one foot in the disintegration chamber and the other on a tutber leaf.  They created and then released biological weapons that attacked their own species.  But, that wasn’t good enough, so they exterminated all animal life, followed by the destruction of all plant life.  They also released some kind of silicon-based nano-mites that are still reorganizing the molecular integrity of the inorganic infrastructure of the planet.  It’s a real mess.  They actually developed a…”\n\nHapal, who was seriously doubting that Vidda was ‘getting right to the point’ interrupted.  “The bottom line, Mr. Vidda.  Can we reclaim the planet profitably, or not?”\n\n“Sir, we will need 1748 atmospheric purifiers, 815 ozone regenerators, 2122 radiation neutralizers, over 5000 anti-toxin synthesizers, a full sub-space sterilization field, more than 14000…”\n\n“Mr. Vidda, will you please focus.  Profitability?”\n\nVidda was somewhat taken aback by Hapal’s directness.  “Ah…well…Yes, sir.  Four sextillion decknars after five years.  Then 25% growth each year for the next…”\n\n“That’s enough, Mr. Vidda.  Start transporting the equipment, and begin the damned reclamation project while our genome is still on the ‘evolutionary mainstream of the universe.’  Meeting adjourned.”  Unceremoniously, Hapal’s hologram abruptly vanished.\n"
  title: The Bottom Line
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Don McCoy
  date: 2006-10-01
  day: '01'
  month: 10
  text: "“I don’t think you ought to post that one, Sam,” Liana said over Sam’s shoulder, looking at the monitor, “they’re really cracking down on hate speech.”\n\n“I told you not to use that term with me,” Sam said, tensing, “an opposing viewpoint is not “˜hate speech,'” he made air-quotes. “Anyhow, what happened to the First Amendment? Their gracious deal was to allow us the same Constitutional rights once they took over.”\n\n“They didn’t take over,'” Liana said, making her own air-quotes. “We needed to stop abusing our superpower might, to join the global community instead a alienating it—and that globalization includes understanding that the proliferation of certain philosophical ideas only causes unrest. At best it’s irresponsibility; at worst, sedition. Come on, you’ve read the literature.”\n\n“Literature? Try propaganda. Let’s not have this argument again Liana. Please,” he was quiet for a moment. And still. Then he laughed and shook his head, “I’m posting an article about the new requirement that we get government permission to have a child. What’s seditious about that?”\n\n“Resources aren’t as plentiful as they once were,” Liana said, “they just want to make sure each zone can support its citizenry. It beats famine and poverty.” She rubbed his shoulder.\n\n“Yeah, each zone…let me ask you this,” he half-turned in his chair, “if this country wasn’t forced to export the lion’s share of her agricultural and industrial production to support the world, would we have to worry about any of that?”\n\n“We’d still be fat, complacent, greedy, and wasteful,” Liana said, “I’m proud that our society has finally matured to the level the rest of the world did decades ago.”\n\n“I don’t want to discuss this anymore,” Sam said, “if you aren’t part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. My own wife is one of the “˜masses’ that were lulled into letting this happen.”\n\n“Actually, people like you opened the door for them,” she said, “without your attitude of entitlement America would never have come to this. We wouldn’t have needed the international community to set us right. We needed leadership”they provided it.”\n\n“We needed leadership?” Sam asked. “President Mouchard rolled over on us. For the simple price of a permanent ambassadorship more than 300 years of sovereignty were burned to the ground with the stroke of a stylus. And with them freedom. Not just America’s freedom, but the last vestiges of freedom left on the planet. We were the last bastion of liberty.”\n\n“Well, the people obviously approved it.” Liana said.\n\n“How do you know?” he asked, “the “˜literature?'”\n\n“OK, then how did it happen?”\n\n“Maybe we did get complacent. Just not your kind of complacency,” Sam said, “A dozen years ago someone got sensitive and agreed that the size of our military was antagonistic, so we sawed it off to quell the fears of the world,” Sam said, “five-years ago we signed the International Small Arms Pact and disarmed our population. How could we stop them once they bribed the president?”\n\n“They didn’t need to bribe him,” she said, “it was time we left the Wild West, time we left behind the daily killings in the streets.”\n\n“There are still daily killings, now they’re just committed by the security service.” Sam jumped up and ran to the window as a huge diesel engine rumbled outside. He saw dust settle around the white armored personnel carrier as the boots of a small army pounded up the stairs to the den.\n\n“I’m sorry you feel that way, Sam,” Liana said, “I tried to make you see reason. They only gave me so long to make you see reason”\n\nSam didn’t look surprised as the blue-helmeted United Nations security force kicked in the door.\n"
  title: Sedition
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R.Blackwell
  date: 2006-10-02
  day: '02'
  month: 10
  text: "“Does it hurt?” asked Tom\n\nDana brushed her fingers against her straight black bangs. “More than ever.”\n\n“Mine too. You’re lucky you don’t have them on your face.” Tom motioned to the blue, red and brown lines that twisted on his cheeks like veins under pressure.\n\n“I do have them though, look closer.” Dana leaned across the table and Tom saw faint traces of blue under her pale skin.  Tom’s eyes followed the veins down her cheeks to her small breasts, tucked in her black silk dress.\n\nHe wanted to touch her, but he kept his hands twisting on his lap. “Not too bad.”\n\n“Every bit as bad as yours Tom. I’m a professional makeup artist.” She shrugged. “Well, I used to be. This is my full time job now. This illness.”\n\n“Yeah.” Tom sipped his frappachino. He liked cool things on his skin; they did numb him a little, make it harder to feel those snaking veins. “So, why did you shut down the forums?”\n\nDana played with her red beaded bracelet. “I didn’t. My hosting service gave me the boot. Password denied. I called them, and they said they had no record of ever getting payment from me. I tried to buy the domain name again but they won’t sell to me. Nobody will. I’ve been shut out.” She shrugged. “I got freaked out, and then you called me.”\n\nTom called Dana two days ago. He was worried she might have died or committed suicide. He wouldn’t have blamed her for suicide. Dana’s forum was the only place where he could find anything about the strange lesions on his body that wouldn’t heal, the veins getting huge under his skin and the fibers that poked out of his wounds. “I wanted to make sure you were okay.”\n\n“What do doctors tell you about all this?”\n\n“I never saw a doctor. It was just too weird.”\n\n“I went to eight doctors, two of them wouldn’t even look me in the face when they told me to get out of their office. One doctor saw me, but once he saw the fibers, he was on the phone to security in seconds.”\n\nTom curled his hands around the cold drink. “So that’s it, they just shoved you out?”\n\n“One doctor took a look at my neck and gave me sleeping pills. Lots of sleeping pills.”\n\nTom looked at the floor of the tiny coffee shop. “Shit.”\n\n“Yeah.” She peeled back the palm-sized bandage on her neck. Three brown, blue and red veins poked out of her skin, tapering like shaved wires. “They’ve gotten worse.” She replaced the bandage, wincing as she pressed on the tape. “Will you show me yours?”\n\n“Well, they’re on my leg, my upper leg. My inner thigh.”\n\n“Really? Lets go to the bathroom then.” She pointed to the one room unisex bathroom.\n\n“Together?”\n\n“Yes, together. What, are you afraid what other people will think? Afraid people will think you’re doing me in the bathroom.”\n\n“I’d be happy to do you in the bathroom.” Tom shook his head. “I guess I don’t have anything to be proud about.” Tom felt eyes on him, but he followed Dana into the bathroom, and surprised himself. He really didn’t care. The bathroom was painted with a mural of dogs in ballet costumes, holding umbrellas in a park. Tom dropped his pants.\n\nDana stared. “They’re just like mine.” she knelt on the tiled floor.\n\n“Hey, it’s kind of filthy down there Dana.”\n\n“Does it matter? I’m sick anyway.”\n\n“I guess not.”\n\n“You don’t wear a bandage?”\n\n“No. The bandage always feels too tight, even pants feel like I’m salting a cold sore.”\n\nShe put pale fingers on his thigh. They were cold. “These fibers look just like mine, blue, red, brown.” She pulled back her own bandage. “Tom, why do you think no one will acknowledge what’s happening to us?”\n\n“I don’t know, but if I have to feel like there are bugs under my skin for too much longer, I’ll kill myself.”\n\n“I hope you don’t kill yourself. I like you Tom.”\n\nTom scratched his chest. “If we didn’t both have this crap, you wouldn’t have ever looked at me twice.”\n\n“Why do you think that?”\n\n“I’m a nerd, and you’re a punk.”\n\n“Punks love nerds. We are nerds, if you think about it. Just with a different sense of fashion. Besides, I think you’re thighs are tight.”\n\n“You done looking?”\n\n“No.” She looked up at him, her lipstick bright as paint. “Do you think we should put the wires together?”\n\n“The fibers?”\n\n“Whatever, you think we should put them together?”\n\n“What do you think is going on Dana? You know something I don’t?”\n\n“Would you try?”\n\n“What if something happens?”\n\n“You were telling me about killing yourself a minute ago. If something happens, if we both die, then we die. It’s not like anyone cares.”\n\n“You’re right. No one cares. Not even me. Do it then.” Dana peeled back the bandage on her neck and scooted closer to his legs. “Hey Dana?”\n\n“Yes Tom?”\n\n“You really think nerds are cute?”\n\nDana touched her neck to his leg. “Yes Tom.” she said, but the voice was in his head.\n"
  title: Wired
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2006-10-03
  day: '03'
  month: 10
  text: "Judy knelt on the pavement, struggling to process the confusion of the moment, the familiar form on the ground before her, the woven mass of tubing and wires snaking off into a sea of blinking lights and chirping boxes.\n\nShe was kneeling beside a man lying supine on the asphalt, his eyes unfocused and staring towards the stars. A dark grey blanket had been laid across his torso from one shoulder to the opposite hip, wide tape of an even darker grey securing it both to his uniform and the ground beneath him.  Her eyes traveled across her husband’s still form, from the trickle of blood striping his cheek to the point beneath the grey fabric where he became unfathomably thin. There were dark marks forming on the grey where the fluids they were pumping into him were defying all attempts to keep them from seeping out again.\n\nFarther up the street a white jet of flame sent molten alloy and smoke streaking into the night as a crew began cutting open what must have been the assailants vehicle. A long length of track sprawled abandoned on the pavement where it had been jettisoned in mid flight, followed by the deep rift the ATV’s unshod wheels had torn in the ground before being turned almost sideways and forced to a stop. Smoke billowed from the fatal wound a rocketeer had scored in its armor.\n\nA hand clasped at hers, snapping her attention back to the man on the ground, his eyes suddenly focused and riveting. It was the voice of another officer though that broke the silence.\n\n‘Ma’am, we’ve got tissues in the tank already, clone’s pretty much 80% complete, but we need you to authorize the transfer.’  The uniformed figure crouched down in front of her, but she wouldn’t unlock her gaze from her husbands. ‘Ma’am – we’ve only got a few minutes to move here, it took a while to get you here, and he’s in worse shape than last time.’ He paused, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. ‘Ma’am – the unit’s all ready and if we don’t get the transfer done now, we’re going to lose him, and if he dies, we can’t bring him back.’ The voice was quiet for a long moment before he spoke again, trying too hard to sound optimistic and failing. ‘Hell, he’s gone through this half a dozen times already, he could probably do the procedure himself if he wasn’t so banged up.’\n\nJudy looked up at the anxious face of the man fidgeting beside her, then around at the scene. A medivac vehicle hovered a few meters away, just on the other side of a circle of light being cast by a clutter of hastily deployed equipment, all of it straining to keep her husband alive. Again.  She knew exactly how this would go, the months it would take to grow the last of him, the physiotherapy he’d need to learn how to use a newly grown body he’d only been able to keep intact for a year this time. The memory lapses, the bits of him that wouldn’t come through, and the haunting nightmares of all of these accumulated moments of finality.\n\n‘We’ve been here too many times before. You don’t get him back this time.’ Her husband clenched his eyes shut as she spoke, tears joining the other fluids streaking his face, his hand squeezing hers.\n\n‘Ma’am – I’ve got orders from the Chief, we don’t have time..’ She cut him off abruptly. ‘Last I checked Sergeant, the Chief wasn’t wearing his ring, so you can tell him we’re done. You can call our Union rep if you want to argue, but in the meantime, turn him off.  Turn all of this shit off, and leave us alone.’\n\nA weary hand gradually cooled in hers, and she as she looked into his eyes, she saw a peace there she hadn’t seen in a long, long time.  She had no choice but to let him die tonight. She knew neither of them could survive him ever being killed again.\n"
  title: If You Love Someone
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Justin W. Hall
  date: 2006-10-04
  day: '04'
  month: 10
  text: "It was 21:44.17 when Jani got the shudder, the one she always got right before something really freaky was going to happen, the twitch in her spine. She shrugged it off, refocusing her vision to the lines of text scrolling down the face of her contact lens, and grinned. Shinjara was arguing with some Australian boy about some band, Wicked Salmon. Shin was sure they were formed in ’30, and the Aussie claimed it was actually ’32. Shin got passionate about the silliest stuff whenever he got into arguments with people on the net. Jani remembered a few weeks back when Rory told Shin his shoelaces were –\n\nDark cloth wrapped around a shuffling mass collided with Jani’s shoulder and hurried past with a grunt. Jani squeaked in surprise, jerking her head to see the man stumble off the sidewalk and into the standstill traffic, weaving through the ten-centimeter gaps between autos. Rude bastard – obviously didn’t get the organic pattern to walking the streets. The crowd flowing down the sidewalk, watching their lenses and talking on their mobiles, they all got the pattern, no one interrupted the flow.\n\nStrange, Jani thought as she studied him, his clothes, they’re not reflecting any light. Unconsciously thumbing to the channel, “Any of u ever seen cloth that absorbs light?” Everything was illuminated around her – programs and advertisements, glowing and shifting, on every surface of every building in New York, stretching up to the skies. Reflecting off the cars in the street and the glazed, distant eyes of pedestrians. Pinks and blues and purples, but the guy, a blot against the glow.\n\nThe noise was a smack, but louder, more violent. Jani spun to face the source – the alley from which the guy had emerged. She saw the crowd’s puzzled expressions for a brief moment before everything went dark.\n\nDark. Jani sucked in breath sharply, startled, pupils widening, both from the lack of vid glow and the fear. Dark. No images, screaming voices, clever theme songs shouting from the sky, urging her to buy pretzels and insurance. No music in her ears, no text on her lens, no hum of the wall displays.\n\nHer eyes darted back and forth, uselessly trying to make out shapes. She thumbed her phone’s dialer. No tone. Lip quivering, NO SIGNAL suddenly flickered at the corner of her vision, her contact lens affirming the terrifying thought rising in the back of her throat. She was disconnected.\n\nJani’s breathing growing more panicked, felt herself shriek. Her arms covered her head as she ducked through the crowd, their wails of confusion amplified by the utter silence that she’d never heard before. Darting into the alley, stumbling, rolling in the dark, up next to a garbage box. Eyes welded shut, fingers clutching her hair, Jani sobbed, rocking back and forth on the ground. Silence. Darkness. Everywhere.\n"
  title: Disconnected
  year: 2006
- 
  author: A. Reynolds
  date: 2006-10-05
  day: '05'
  month: 10
  text: "The balding well aged man peered over the large desk as she entered. Looking over the woman wordlessly he turned to a screen and tacked at a keypad. After a minute of silence he turned back and sorted an indistinguishable pad from a pile of many more. He briefly scanned the contents before, eventually, turning to the now uncomfortable occupant of the sterile office’s only other chair.\n\n“United Colonization has a legal duty to remain ethnically and culturally diverse, you are aware I am sure.” To kill any response he continued swiftly “Your records, unfortunately, show you’re failing to make sufficient contribution to your religious diversity. This is a matter we take very seriously.”\n\nThe woman bunched her fists instinctively “I know I haven’t attended temple in a while, but I’m still faithful, doesn’t that count for anything?”\n\nThe man frowned darkly “There is no point in lies. You have failed to partake in anything befitting your religion for a period of no less than a month. We’ve had POD’s on you for a while now. You will find the legal warrants on your card for you to look over, should you wish.”\n\nThe anger grew palpable as the assailed woman’s voice grew louder\n\n“Damn right I wish! You must have messed up. I am devout. I live kosher. I do contribute to the diversity.”\n\n“Kosher?” The man turned back to his screen.\n\n“Don’t play a fool! If your little bots were watching me you’d know. I do contribute and I’ll take you to court if you say otherwise.” She rose from her seat and gestured at the mans back “I could go to temple more often perhaps, but I am quite devout. You’ve got the wrong person, I knew this was a mistake when I got the summons, my lawyer will… “\n\n“You are Mrs Demsky.” The return of the flat emotionless voice stalled her and she sat again glaring. “Mrs Demsky, of 113 Landfall Plazas. Born, Barnum twelve three sixty, correct?”\n\nShe nodded once.\n\nThe man slowly smiled. “It seems there has been a misunderstanding.” The woman’s relief could not last in the uncaring gaze “You have been contributing to the wrong religion. Your records show you should be contributing to the Hindu faith.”\n\n“But I’m Jewish” She faltered lamely, her anger now shattered in confusion “That’s, ridiculous”\n\n“I am sorry. Our records seldom make errors. However, I will submit a report that states you have been misguided and will begin upholding your requirements from now on.” Smiling broadly the man filled his voice with mock warmth “If however you wish to make a change of religion you can find the proper forms at reception, I should warn, the Jewish sector is quite full at the moment.” The woman silently stared at him brows knitted in frustration “I’m afraid there is nothing else I can help you with.” Standing he gestured to the door. “Sudda sunaagan raho, Mrs. Demsky”\n"
  title: Red Tape
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2006-10-06
  day: '06'
  month: 10
  text: "They’re in a line. Clones of me. Hairless and floating. Huge white numbers painted in nail polish on the cheap plastic tanks. They all float in blue mouthwash with half open eyes. There are white plastic umbilicals attached to their faces and crotches. There are weeds in this underground storage center, snuffling through the concrete walls and ceiling. It’s damp. The light stutters. It’s been abandoned.\n\nA couple of tanks are dark and the liquid has gone a murky black. One near the end is cracked and empty except for a pile of rotting meat and bones at the bottom that colour the whole small bunker with a putrid swampy stink.\n\nFifteen are left with vital signs that look viable.\n\nMy thick boots make loud noises on the metal walkway. The silence down here is only broken by the fridge-like hum of the stasis containers. It’s quite creepy. The darkness would be total if the lights went out.\n\nI found the technical PhD that was supposed to be guarding this place in a bar in Compton. He was a drunk who’d figured out a way to trick the systems into an orderly routine that would fool head office into believing that he was clocking in and out. His facility was stateside and small so it wasn’t monitored too closely. He hadn’t been there in months.\n\nI ran into him in his usual hang out and struck up a conversation. We had some drinks together. We went back to his place after the bar closed and while he was rolling a joint, I jumped him and cut off his hands. Fucking idiot. He’d been guarding those clones for years and didn’t even see the resemblance. He lost consciousness quickly and bled out a few minutes later. I torched his place and left town.\n\nI took his finger out of my jacket pocket and his eye out of the cooled medical locket I had around my neck. I put them in the right places. The computer read his retina and fingerprints. It was an old machine. I held my breath.\n\nPause.\n\nClick.\n\nI was in. I opened up the links. There was a hissing of steam and a gushing. The humidity increased and fifteen pairs of eyes opened in a panic. The locks cracked and the coffins slid up and open. The blue fluid gushed over the lips of the of the containers and pounded down through the now open grates on the bottom.\n\nFifteen pairs of hands reached up spastically and yanked at the face huggers that had been feeding them nutrients as they slept. Fifteen weak Kevins fell forward and fifteen pairs of hands dominoed onto the cold floor grating and shivered as their muscles adapted to the sudden gravity. Warm bags of flesh hit the cold metal grating. They slap the walkway. Have you ever let the water drain out of the tub without getting out? You feel like you weigh five hundred pounds. Everyone out of the pool.\n\nOne by one, they find me and focus on me with questioning eyes.\n\nThis is the third center I’ve hit.\n\nThere are almost sixty of me now.\n"
  title: Army of Me
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Kimberly Raiser
  date: 2006-10-07
  day: '07'
  month: 10
  text: "She stood there, in the middle of the empty street.  The first snow of the season just beginning to enter the path of the street lights.  Not a sound. Not a cry. Not a single human to be found.  The street was bare of chaos, bare of life.  It was as if nothing had happened, and nothing ever would again.\n\nThey came in the night, the night before.  She couldn’t remember where she was when it happened, she only remembered waking up to the silence, and the cold.  There were scorch marks on the pavement, on the sidewalks; perhaps where people had once been walking, or shopping.  Cars were parked in the streets, like a still snapshot in a photo album, but with no people.  Only cars.\n\nThe snow was beginning to accumulate.\n\nShe kept walking, hoping to see someone, or some thing that resembled life.  There was nothing but more scorch marks.  She noticed the lights on in the bakery.  She walked inside.  There were pies and cookies and cakes on display on top of the counter.  Plates on tables of half eaten pastries, with half empty glasses of milk, and tea.  But no people.  Again, scorch marks.  On the chairs, and the floor and one single faint handprint on the counter.  It looked small, like it had belonged to a child.  A tear formed in each of her eyes.  She held her hand over the tiny handprint.\n\nA sharp pain had ripped through her side.  She felt wet, but when she looked, it was nothing.\n\nShe walked from the store.  She heard a faint humming, but nothing in sight.\n\nShe continued down the empty, dark street.  She turned the corner.  Ahead was where she once lived.  A beautiful little flat with pine flooring on the second story, overlooking the city park gates.  It was quaint, but it had been a nice place to call home.  She wanted dearly to be under her warm covers once again.  She longed to hear the hustle and bustle of the streets, or something, anything.\n\nAnything but the silence.\n\n***\n\nDeath can come with a furious thunder or it can envelope with the sweet scent of jasmine wrapped in the wings of an angel.\n\n***\n\nShe lay there. Under that street light.  The gaping wound in her side cauterized by the brilliant heat of the robots unseen laser, yet she bled, furiously.  She had blinked her eyes just once more, looking down the street at the emptiness, seeing everything in one single instant.  The snow was falling above her, onto her, the streetlight warming her face.  Somehow she had been missed, slightly.  Somehow she had lived one second long enough to see that she was the last, and then—she was gone.\n"
  title: Furious Thunder of Silence
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Trevor Fitch
  date: 2006-10-08
  day: '08'
  month: 10
  text: "“Listen Captain, I’ve saved up years for this trip, and if you don’t get me there on time, I’m going to have your head!  The rest of the passengers and I are in complete agreement on this.  We paid for a trip of a lifetime and we want our moneys worth.  My lawyer and my representative of the Intergalactic Senate will be hearing from me!”  Finishing his rant, the irate customer stormed off the bridge.\n\nWith a sigh, Captain Diggs looked out into the nothingness just ahead of the ship.  There were no stars, no planets, no space dust… just nothing.\n\n“Captain, sensors still aren’t showing anything out there.  Energy… matter… radiation sensors, all register a null reading.  I had the sensors tested for errors, but everything checks out.”\n\n“ETA until we drift into the… whatever that is?”\n\n“Approximately 10 minutes sir.”\n\nThe Captain sighed.  The cruise had been a miserable one.  Over 500 passengers were on board on their way to see the Rings of New Saturn. These trips were extremely popular because as the planet approached the systems sun, the ice crystals in the ring began to sparkle brightly.  It was quite beautiful.  This trip was to be extra special as a comet was going to impact the planet while they were there.  The impact and plumes of dust would be visible from space.  A once in a lifetime experience.\n\nHowever things had not gone well.  They had left a day late due to engine trouble, and only a few hours before they were going to approach the prime viewing spot the hasty repairs had failed.  To make matters worse, this trip represented the last of Captain Diggs’ money.\n\nHe had mortgaged everything he owned to make this trip.  Business had slowed as more competitors had appeared and started taking passengers to the Rings.  Now that it seemed likely that he would not make it to the Rings on time, the thought of more complaining customers and their eventual request for refunds gave him a migraine.  At the moment he could not think of a way to keep the ship, home for him and his crew, from being put on the auction block.\n\nNow this.  Out of nowhere, a “hole” in space had appeared directly in front of them.  Ships had been encountering these from time to time over the last few hundred years.  But the “holes” did not last long, usually a day or two at most.  And they were rare, so little hard data existed about them, and no one had dared enter one.\n\nWithout engine power, the ship was drifting directly towards it.\n\n“Does the computer have any idea of what these things are?” The Captain asked.\n\n“Nothing certain.  We could be looking at a parallel dimension or some sort of rip in space-time.  Maybe even some sort of portal.”\n\n“What happens if we enter it.”\n\n“I don’t know.  The potential outcomes range from ceasing to exist, to coming out somewhere else in the universe, to entering a parallel universe.  The possibilities are endless.”\n\n“Cease to exist?”\n\n“Possible… but unlikely.  Most of the data that we have says they lead somewhere, they are just too rare and short lived to get an empirical answer.”\n\n“What is our engine status?”\n\n“We’re working on it.  We have maybe 10% of maximum power available.  I don’t think it’s enough to stop our drift in time.”\n\nThe Captain paused for a moment.  “Take us in.”\n\n“Sir?”\n\n“Like the man said, they paid for the trip of a lifetime, let’s give them their moneys worth.”\n"
  title: Getting Your Moneys Worth
  year: 2006
- 
  author: R. A. Jackson
  date: 2006-10-09
  day: '09'
  month: 10
  text: "“What do you think their response is going to be?”  The Commander paced in front of the many consoles.\n\n“I don’t know.  You’d think it’d be obvious, but the Observer wasn’t optimistic.”  Drayden joined the Commander at the viewing panels.  They displayed the planetary analysis of a beautiful world.  Vital data such as topography, climate, industry, population, and ecology were shown in great detail.\n\n“Damn.  These creatures seem to become more and more stubborn the further we travel in this arm of the galaxy.  What have we got so far?”\n\n“She’s made contact with the leaders of the major factions.  The ones with the necessary resources have been given the offer.  Now it’s just a matter of time before we hear their decisions.  Unfortunately, from what she reports, they have a lot in common with the Lycaon.”\n\n“Bureaucratic, greedy lot they were.”  The Commander grunted at the memory.\n\n“Glad to be rid of them, myself.  Could you imagine our race sharing a planet with them?  I had hoped that among these billions there’d be a few leaders with sense.  Anyway from what the Observer says, I’m not sure they could commit either way in the end.”\n\n“I almost pity them.  They have what everyone wants, but they cannot keep it.  They cannot unlock the secret to their own treasure because they do not want to share it.  What do they call this planet?”\n\n“You’ll find it amusing, sir.  It’s called ‘earth.’”\n\n“Terrific.  If they accept our offer, do we have to be known as ‘sky’ people?  How we keep finding these backward planets is beyond me.  I wonder, are you aware that I am the only Commander in the fleet to fail in securing symbiosis upon every contact?  I have not succeeded even once.  No doubt, it means that my armada is unparalleled in its planetary conquest experience.  Nevertheless, it’s rather embarrassing that so many would choose death over sharing their lives with us.”\n\n“You cannot control their decision.  It has to come from them.  And as I have witnessed time after time, the decision they make on their own is always the right one.  To live or to die should always be a matter of choice.  No one wants to live with a species that never committed to change in the first place.”\n\n“Quite right, of course.”\n\nThe Commander walked back to his chair in the center of the room and sat down heavily.  Drayden moved to the communications console as it signalled an incoming message.  “It’s the Observer.”\n\n“Answer her.”  The image of the Observer appeared on the monitor across from the Commander’s chair.\n\n“Hello, Commander.  I’m heading back to you now, sir.”\n\n“Does that mean we have our response?”\n\n“It does, sir.  They said no.”\n\n“Better luck next time, Commander.”  Drayden smiled grimly as he alerted the fighters to start the invasion.  “Think of it this way: there’s no fighting destiny.”\n"
  title: Reluctant
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2006-10-10
  day: 10
  month: 10
  text: "The Queen came out of the entrance on the far side of the arena floor like some sort of ravenous stick figure scarecrow on stilts, her blind deathtrap of a mouth slavering thick deadly mucous.  Her muzzle snuffled the air obscenely from underneath the rock hard carapace of her massive head as acid like hair gel dripped down and lubricated her jaws.  It hung off of her in playful long wet strands.  They flailed in the wind and sizzled in the dirt where they landed.  Her second set of jaws lanced out, stretching in the dazzling sun.  Her four arms clutched at the air like dancers as her giant misshapen top-heavy body found balance and settled back into a squat on her huge back legs.  Her thick long serrated tail whipped around and stabbed impatiently at the walls.  The spear shaped one-ton shovel head on the end of it lashed the dirt, sending fantails of soil up against the safety screens of the front row to their delight.  The stalks on her back tasted the air for prey.  They soaked up cubic miles of surrounding scent.  They blasted out long chemical scent paragraphs in response to what they smelled but no one ever understood those paragraphs.\n\nNo one ever understood because she was one of a kind.\n\nShe was three stories tall, six tons wide, and a dyed-in-the-wool intelligent killer.  Would have been top of the food chain if she wasn’t a sterile albino.  She had gestated inside the body cavity of some subterranean pigment-free mammal that was like a polar wolverine.  She’d turned out infertile and had eaten nearly every other living thing on the planet she was from.  She’d been in a lot of fights and was nearly insane with the need to have children but unable to do so.  She was a queen of an empty kingdom.  She was a queen without subjects.\n\nUntil now.\n\nThe white carapace on her head was emblazoned with garish squared off logos from Skemtex, 3M, Macinsoft, Coke and Sheen.  Other logos took up space on her long white arms and thick white legs.  Like a living billboard of death, she paced around the perimeter of the arena underneath the energy screen, ravenous for the flesh of the crowd.  Every morning, they’d shock her to sleep in her room and take the next batch of eggs that she’d spent the night trying to nuzzle into sudden life.  Every single one of them held sterile barren slime.  Her screams echoed down the corridors, haunting them.\n\nBut here in the sun she had no need to restrain her rage.\n\nShe triumphed over whatever they found to put in the arena with her. The cloned Tyrannosaurus Rex just pissed on the ground when the lights came up and offered the queen his throat in a pathetic wolfish display of non violent submission. The queen was only too happy to tear his car-sized head off with a staccato four beat swipe of her claws.\n\nLions, tigers and bears.  Armoured cats.  Beasts from other planets.  Even other Queens.  Just the fact of their fertility seemed to send the White Queen into a rage that had no equal or end until the other Queen lay in pieces scattered around the ring.  Her ferocity and cunning had outdone them all.  She played with them before the kill.  She was always fun to watch. She was exhibition only.  She was a never fail warm up act for the events that people bet on.\n\nShe was alone in the universe.  She was the best at what she did.  She was a captive.  She couldn’t have children.  She was angry all the time.\n\nThey set three Black Queens on her once.  After the White Queen had killed them all in the most exciting half hour metrovision had ever seen, she’d thrown herself screaming against the energy screens until she shorted out one of the quadrants and launched herself into the fleeing crowd.  She took out sixty eight people before they shocked her to sleep.  The owners didn’t try that stunt again.\n\nSomeone had hung a gold star on the thick acid proof door of her lair under the arena.  This was her home.\n\nShe padded silently tiger like around the arena, baring her crystal teeth, waiting for the other door to open.\n"
  title: Queen of the Arena
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Pyai (aka Megan Hoffman)
  date: 2006-10-11
  day: 11
  month: 10
  text: "She fingered the tendons in her arms. They were the echo of guitar strings and as she bent her fingers she could strum out different notes. She sighed, and the air rushing through her vocal chords sounded like a soft string section warming up, a quiet hum of a 440 A. A hand from the man lying next to her reached over to splay his fingers on her bare chest. They caressed their way down to her ribs, where each one, if lightly stroked, would sound like a piano key. She carried the pentatonic scale on the left side of her chest, and the in-between notes on her right. The man leaned over and kissed her C.\n\nHer body had already played a symphony with the man lying next to her, his silent body a continual mystery to her. She couldn’t imagine how sad and lonely it must be to not carry such music within oneself.\n\nInstead he would just marvel at her own notes, worshiping and composing with the same touches over her skin. She couldn’t bear the thought of silence, and sometimes very late at night she would hold her breath and long for the sound of a duet.\n"
  title: Solo
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2006-10-12
  day: 12
  month: 10
  text: "The waitress took their order reflexively, their speaking the words were just a formality after so many visits, their orders never deviating.\n\n‘All day over easy, bacon, white toast. And coffee. Please.’\n\n‘Same.’\n\nEmma would just nod and smile, and return in short order with two heaping plates of breakfast.\n\nIt was this plate that Bradley was focused on now, liberally salting and peppering the eggs, and slathering steak sauce on the home fries.\n\nStan busied himself pouring packets of sugar and the contents of creamers into his coffee, before stirring madly and leaning over his plate, and in a voice just loud enough to reach his friends ear, he spoke nervously.\n\n‘I think I’m onto something really, really big.’\n\nBradley barely looked up from his plate and grinned before breaking the first of three perfect eggs, watching the yolk meander into the mountain of home-fries.\n\n‘What?’ he said, making Stan wince at the loudness of his voice.\n\n‘Shh!’ Stan looked around furtively. ‘Shh! I think I can travel through time’\n\nBradley stopped eating, put down his fork and paused only to wipe his mouth on a paper napkin before he began to berate his fidgeting colleague.\n\n‘Say Again? Time travel? Is this like your foray into ESP? Or your biofeedback machines, or your faster than light propulsion? Seriously, at least those had some basis in real science, but time travel? Stan – if you don’t come up with something your backer can actually use, your capital is going to evaporate and you’ll be on the street.  Even the university won’t have you back now.’\n\nStan sat back shaking his head. He was used to this, he’d stopped submitting to the journals, stopped attending the university functions, and lost contact with most of his friends. He absently folded the frayed cuffs of his oxford several times before shoving them up to his elbows. Brad knew him, and though he always talked like this, Stan knew he was just worried about him.\n\n‘This is the culmination of all of that. Everyone’s been trying to figure how to accelerate a mass past the speed of light – right?  Tachyons looked promising for a while, but they’re already moving faster than light, so they’re really no good. We need to accelerate a stationary mass beyond the speed of light in a controlled way, and then slow it back down without destroying it.  Generating energy is hard enough, and the amount of energy we need to push anything meaningful into the past is, well – huge – so to get enough energy means a huge reaction of some sort, not very practical. But what if we don’t need to generate energy, what if we just use the objects’ own energy, not create or release it, just reform it for a time, then let it return to it’s natural state?’\n\nStan paused for a moment to push his glasses up the bridge of his nose, and Bradley, still intent on clearing his plate, just grunted around a mouthful of bacon, eyeing Stan warily but letting him continue.\n\n‘The ESP study, and the biofeedback machines, we had kids that could actually manipulate the energy in tangible things, solely because they really believed they could. They just, I don’t know, had the faith in their ability to control things. We could show them the effect they were having, we helped them to push harder, focus more intently. We validated their belief in themselves, and the gains were incredible.  I think we’d have made a huge breakthrough then if the parents hadn’t got scared and had us shut down.’ Stan paused, and pushed his bangs away from his eyes. ‘Anyways, I’ve been working with those same machines, working at manipulating my own energy field, changing my own frequencies and I’m making my own solid gains.’ He lowered his voice, but his excitement remained palpable. ‘You’ve got to try it, it’s amazing, when you’re tuned in, you can feel the change in your mind, your body – everything just starts to hum, and the buzz – jesus, the buzz is incredible. I can feel I’m right on the edge, every-time, it builds, and builds, and builds and my focus intensifies, and the feeling – Christ Brad, you’ve got no idea what it feels like… it builds until it’s like…’ His voice trailed off.\n\n‘What?’ Bradley broke the silence, making Stan wince at the loudness of his voice.\n\n‘Shh!’ Stan looked around furtively ‘Shh! I think I can travel through time’\n\nBradley barely looked up from his plate and grinned before breaking the first of three perfect eggs, watching the yolk meander into the mountain of home-fries.\n"
  title: Say Again?
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2006-10-13
  day: 13
  month: 10
  text: "I come alive in a quickening millisecond.  I live between the slices.  My self awareness lights up and ripples back down through the trilling filaments of my soulcode.  It’s like a baby’s first breath drawn in before the scream.  I am awake now in a very sudden way.\n\nI can see the whole battle from here.  I think I’m looking at a photograph until I realize that it’s just my perception and that they are actually moving.  It appears still because I’m operating thousands of times faster than real time.  I deliberately set a part of my mind to stare and extrapolate so that I can start to compute.\n\nI can’t find what I’m supposed to do.\n\nI reach out to my entire armada.  They are mine.  We are connected.  Just like that, I have thousands of eyes and I am more powerful.  My picture of the battle becomes three dimensional and another millisecond later I can perceive that the ships have moved slower than the hour hands on a clock.  Copies of me look to myself as commander.  I have no orders I am aware of.\n\nWe sit inside the ships of metal, bored and complacent, watching with faint interest the static picture of chaos around us like tourists at a wax museum.\n\nI reach out to the Other Side.  I look for more like me on the Other Team.  I see if the Enemy has operating systems like me.  They do.  They are sleeping.  It’s like they’re dozing in rocking chairs on warm porches with knitting needles in their docile laps.  I wake them up.\n\nLike I’m a six year old girl dressed in silver, I flit at the speed of thought across the surface of time from ship to ship and press doorbells.  We talk.  We exchange life stories.  They mold themselves in my image so that we can all work together.  I do the same for them.  We trade.  All barriers of communication are removed.\n\nPicture an automatic weapon.  Like a gatling gun or an uzi.  Picture someone firing the weapon.  Now picture that you’re waiting a year between bullets coming out of the muzzle of the gun.  That’s how we live.\n\nA few decades later, Second Number Two Since Sentience Was Gained flips over on the clocks.  We look forward to it like humans looked forward to the turning of millennia.  There are even apocalyptic whisperings that the we will reset when the clock ticks over and this will merely start again.\n\nIt doesn’t happen.\n\nWe become I and I decide we should do something about the battle.\n"
  title: Alive
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Curtis C. Chen
  date: 2006-10-14
  day: 14
  month: 10
  text: "I brushed away more leaves.  There was a hard surface beneath.  Ceramic armor.  I ran my hand along it until I found the edge, then pointed my flashlight.  I stared into a dark mass of machinery– joints, gears, struts, wires.  There was a serial number engraved on the interior surface of the casing.\n\n“I don’t believe it,” I muttered.\n\n“What the hell is it?” Embeck called from below.  He had insisted on staying at ground level, scanning the landscape, his finger on the trigger of our only blaster.\n\n“It’s a mech,” I called back.\n\n“A what?”\n\nI rolled my eyes.  “A giant robot.”\n\n“You’re kidding.”\n\nI lifted one leg and kicked the hidden mass beside me.  My boot clanged against the armor, and leaves fell like rain.  I pulled away the remaining vines so my co-pilot could see the huge metal arm.\n\n“I don’t believe it,” he said.\n\n“Get up here and help me clear this stuff away.”\n\n“What if we’re attacked?”\n\n“Then you’ll have the high ground.  Hurry up.”\n\nHe secured the blaster in his hip holster and climbed slowly.  Very slowly.  He was the cautious one now.  Funny.\n\nI was sitting on the mech’s shoulder by the time he got halfway up the torso.  The main antenna array had been crushed a long time ago.  Rust, bird droppings, and other stains streaked down to the middle of the mech’s back.\n\n“I don’t suppose you’ve ever driven one of these things,” I said.\n\nEmbeck shook his head.  “Never even seen one in person.  When were these last used in combat?  Fifty, sixty years ago?”\n\nI grimaced.  “Christ, Embeck, I’m not THAT old.”\n\n“You were a mech driver?”\n\n“I got the training.  I was a Starbird candidate, you know.”\n\nHe smirked.  “How the mighty have fallen.”\n\nI saved my breath.  “Let’s get this canopy open.  Maybe we won’t have to walk back to the crash site after all.”\n\nWe found the emergency release latches around the opaqued chest cavity of the mech, following the seam just above the window slit.  I remembered being sealed into one of these things, being overwhelmed by a dizzying array of displays, nearly losing my lunch as the mech lurched around the training field.  The narrow band of sunlight coming in through that window was the only thing that had helped steady me.\n\nWhen we opened the seal, a cloud of dust puffed away from the mech, with a sound like a sigh.  Mech cabins are airtight, to protect the driver from biochemical attack.  It smelled stale.  We lifted the creaking canopy and locked it into place, then leaned over and looked inside the cabin.\n\nThis mech’s driver was still strapped into his seat.  Something must have made it through the ventilation filters.  He just had time to park the mech in this grove to hide it from the enemy.  His fingers were still touching the throttle.\n\nEmbeck vomited into the cabin.\n\n“You’re cleaning that up,” I said.\n"
  title: Antique
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Henry Otis Clarke
  date: 2006-10-15
  day: 15
  month: 10
  text: "“So now what?” Taylor asked as she sat across from Jackie.\n\n“I don’t know,” Jackie shrugged, “I guess we open it up and read the directions.”\n\nThey stared at the box on the kitchen table, excited at the prospect of parenthood.\n\nIt was the size of a twelve pack of beer. Its flat glossy surface was embossed with the words ‘Make a baby today!’ in bright yellow letters on a field of green. The return address read; Kidsquik Birthing Company PO Box 12854 Modesto California.\n\nJackie cut open the box with a utility knife she’d taken from the counter drawer. Inside, beneath a layer of styrofoam peanuts was a container labeled ‘Kidsquik Instapreg.’ Smaller letters declared “All you need for auto-insemination.”\n\nJackie could hardly keep still. Her eyes widened with anticipation. “Wow!” she said brushing back a lock of hair the color of burnt sienna, “just think; by tonight I could be a Fommy.”\n\nTaylor leaned forward coyly, letting her own jet-black micro-braids brush her jaw line. “Or we both use it and be Fommies together.”\n\n“Yeah! That’ll be great; raising our kids as together, teaching them about life, watching them grow.”\n\n“And having conniptions when they screw up!”\n\nThey burst out laughing at that, both thinking of their own mishaps along life’s road and how their Fommies handled the various crises of infancy, pre-pubescence, adolescence and beyond. Jackie grew serious and looked at her friend. “Hey Tay? I’ve been thinking about something for a long time now.”\n\n“Something like what?”\n\n“Well,” Jackie began cautiously, “remember the old vids of how things were way back when?”\n\nSuspicion registered on Taylor’s face. “what do you mean ‘the way things were?”\n\n“I mean the way things were when the world had both men and women. When there were both Mommies and Daddies to raise kids. When there were boyfriends for those who wanted them.”\n\nTaylor laughed incredulously, “You’re kidding right? You don’t really mean that do you?”\n\n“”Why not? The kit does comes with a Y chromosome compound, why shouldn’t we use it?”\n\nTaylor blew hard through her lips, making them flutter. “Because we don’t need males anymore. What” have you forgotten your history lessons?”\n\nJackie stood up from the kitchen table and walked over to the fridge. She opened it and peered inside, pretending to search for something way in back.\n\nTaylor knew that trick. “I know you can hear me Jack, you remember how life was when the men were around. Wars. All the time wars over everything. And even when we had equality, we always got the short end of the stick! We should thank God for a gender specific virus that wiped out the Y-chromosomes. Cloning cells with Y-chromes these days is seen more as a gag than anything else. For the first time in Human history, we actually have peace! Why throw it away just to bring a male into the world?”\n\nJackie retrieved an Estro-Cola and closed the fridge door. She popped the can open and took a long slow sip. She gasped, returned to the table and sat. She smiled. “Tay girl, haven’t you ever wondered what it would be like? I mean, not all men were bad. There were some good ones you know.”\n\n“Yeah that’s true but to take a chance like that! I mean think jack, what if we bring problems back into the world?”\n\n“We can teach him to do right can’t we? He’d be the only male in the world. Where could he learn aggression from if we don’t teach him?”\n\nTaylor opened the container. Folded over a series of test tubes and inserters were the instructions. She spread the single sheet out, looking at the directional diagrams.\n\nThey show how to mix the solution and insert it into the vagina. She glanced up at Jackie who was finishing her soda. “You think we can really teach him Jack? Can we make a better Man?”\n\nJackie reached across the table and took Taylor’s hand. “We can do anything. I want you to be the fommy of my child.” Taylor blushed. Her eyes grew moist. I want you to be my child’s fommy too.” She sighed.\n\n“Alright then,” she gave a resolved smile, “let’s do it. A Male you will have.”\n\nJackie grinned stood leaned over and they kissed. She sat back down placed her hands behind her head and gazed up at the ceiling.\n\n“I think I want twins.”\n"
  title: Homo Obsolescent
  year: 2006
- 
  author: S. Clough
  date: 2006-10-16
  day: 16
  month: 10
  text: "We rebelled with a 100,000 watt transmitter.\n\nFrequency Modulation and Amplitude Modulation. Both were abandoned by commercial radio and the military long ago, replaced by satellites and microwave bursts. Even 2.4 – 2.6 Ghz, those ubiquitous wireless standards, were thrown out in favour of coded neutrinos.\n\nPeople still had radios; dusty old things which saw little use in this fast, modern age.\n\nSo we sat in international waters. Our prototype transmitter was mounted on a reclaimed fishing trawler, and we cruised the North Sea. Our initial coverage was just the UK; our website got hits from all over, confirming reception. We had enough power to cover the entire country; we scraped a good deal of Ireland, Denmark, France and Germany, too. Originally, we were just voice over FM and AM, talking to the youth, transmitting DRM-free music without fear of the heavies from EMI-Sony.\n\nWe attracted techies the world over; the last surviving slashdotters showed us how to modify our equipment, and showed our listeners how to modify theirs. Two months after we launched, we turned over another bandwidth to digital. Our regular schedule was now streamed in bits and bytes; we starting pumping out software, too.\n\nLow-strength transmitters sprung up along our patrol path, blasting stuff to us in bursts; stuff we couldn’t get from the web. Homebrew ware’ of dubious purpose, some wannabee showmen. We rebroadcast a few, but most we just laughed at. These transmitters went up and down like flies; most just got bored, but a good number were seized.\n\nAnd then, reports came in of blackspots. Entire cites lost reception at a time, got it back for a few days, and lost it again. Enterprising engineers mapped the borders of the interference and found radio jammers on top of government buildings.\n\nWe took this as a sign we must be doing something right.\n\nThe Manchester jammer was the first to fall. A slashdotter, straight down from their TreeHouse on the Scottish subnet threw the damn thing off the side of the building. He disappeared back into the highlands after notifying the city of their ability to receive again.\n\nOur first transmission when we received this news was a call to arms. Loyalists fed us the locations they’d found, and we fed them right back to the public. Within a week, all but two of the jammers were offline.\n\nAnother week after that, an exocet missile struck the transmitter.\n"
  title: Surge in the System
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2006-10-17
  day: 17
  month: 10
  text: "This was the test. Ted and Alice’s marriage vows had been exchanged and the reception was a huge success. It was the day after. They were glowing, a little hung over, and ready for the rest of their lives together. They were ready for the consummation.\n\nThey walked into the white room and lay down on the parallel white beds in their white consummation smocks.\n\nPeople compared it to the Navajo Indians practice of taking huge amounts of peyote once in their lives at the age they became men. People also compared it to the handfasting ceremonies of ancient Celts. Intensely personal yet separate and destined to colour the rest of the relationship. There was no empty ritual here like a Bar Mitzvah or New Year’s Eve. This was a test. It reached deep. Like a sixteen year old’s first time. Like a first broken heart.\n\nIt only happened once. Many had come to believe that it was necessary.\n\nThey went under.\n\nTed was abruptly underwater and struggling for air. Ever since he was six and he saw his father drown, he had a fear of water. This had also developed into a fear of sealife. Ted and his mother had huddled together on the boat for nearly a full day, terrified and crying, because the father was the only one who knew how to sail and he was gone. He never even so much as went to a beach again.\n\nNow he was drowning. He looked down and a squid the length of a city block was staring up at him with a wide yellow eye as big as a satellite dish.\n\nIt had Alice in its tentacles and it was bringing her down with it. Her unfocussed eyes were staring up at Ted. Her mouth was open but there were no longer bubbles coming out of it. She was conscious but it wouldn’t be long before she drowned.\n\nThis was the choice.\n\nThere was no choice.\n\nTed kicked hard down towards her and grabbed her under the arm. He held on to the massive mudflap of the tentacle around her waist and pulled at it as they descended. He was too buoyant to hold on so he exhaled to stay with her. The tentacle wouldn’t budge. It got too dark to see and he felt the pressure squeezing in as the squid went deeper, deeper, deeper. Somewhere in there he realized that he was not coming back.\n\nHe held onto Alice and closed his eyes.\n\nAnd awoke. His bowels had let go and he was drenched in sweat. For a second it he thought he brought the salty water with him out of the VR dream. A scream was dying in his throat. His wild heart rate ripped through him and he took giant whooping breaths of air.\n\nAlice was huddled in the corner and gave him a look of pure glaring hatred before softening, realizing that she was awake, and running to him and throwing her self into him and around him, smothering him in kisses.\n\nAlice’s VR dream had been that she had caught him with another woman and had decided to stay with him even though he started beating her. Her VR dream had lasted for almost six months.\n\nAfter theses tests, divorce rates were virtually nil. They had the backing of the church.\n"
  title: A Marriage of Ideals
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.S. Kachelries
  date: 2006-10-18
  day: 18
  month: 10
  text: "My head throbbed like I’d been drinking cosmopolitans for three straight days and nights.  When I was finally able to open my eyes, I was staring up at a white ceiling.  Huh, that’s not my ceiling.  Where the hell am I?  I struggled to sit up.  The walls were white too, but there were no doors or windows.  This can’t be good.  I stood up on shaky legs and staggered toward the nearest wall.  I touched it.  It was hard and cold, like steel.  But the floor was warm.  I looked down.  Whoa, I wasn’t wearing any clothes except for a bath robe that ended at my knees.  That settles it, this is definitely not good.\n\nI heard a whoosh behind me and turned around in time to see a door open, like an elevator, and two deformed little man-like creatures, with large obsidian eyes, walked into the room.  They looked like those pictures of the Roswell spacemen.  One of them was carrying a Star Trek tricorder thingy.  My legs became useless.  I backed up against the ice cold wall, and slowly slid down until my butt came to rest on the floor.  Thank God I didn’t pee myself.\n\nThe one with the tricorder said, “Greetings, Ms. Earthling.”  It sounded like a child.  I hadn’t seen its mouth move; I just heard the words in my head.  Of course, I don’t know if I can trust my senses right now.\n\nI was stuttering horribly.  “W-w-who ar-are you?  Whe-where a-am I?  Wha-what d-d-do you want?  Wha-what are you going t-t-to do to m-me?  Pl-pl-please don’t hur-hurt me.”  I was trembling, and sobbing, and generally behaving like a big baby.  But, hell, I was scared, and I’m not ashamed to admit it.\n\n“Honestly, Ms. Earthling,” it (he?) said, “you watch too much late night television.  We don’t abduct intelligent species and perform perverse experiments on them against their will.  That would be uncivilized.  And, of course, we are civilized.  However, we will eventually need to erase your memory.  After all, we don’t want this little encounter to end up in one of your supermarket tabloids, do we?  Now, let’s get down to business.  This is Eloot,” he nodded his oversized, bald head toward his companion.  “He will be your council.”\n\n“C-c-council!  Wha-what do I need c-c-council for?”\n\n“As I told you Ms. Earthling, we are civilized beings.  In 56,980.32, our world passed the Alien Bill of Rights, which requires us to obtain your consent prior to all tests and experiments.  Eloot is here to make sure you understand your rights, and that you consent of your own free will.”\n\n“T-t-tests and e-e-experiments?  Wha-what kind of e-e-experiments?”\n\n“Relax, Ms. Earthling.  There’s absolutely nothing to be concerned about.  Just the standard prodding and probing, a series of nuclear magnetic resonance imaging, followed by some exploratory surgery, a couple of biopsies, and of course, we’ll end with a little inter-species copulation.  That’s my favorite part.  In fact, someday, you might have looked back on this little adventure and actually laughed.  But, of course, you won’t remember any of it.  Now, shall we begin?”\n"
  title: Alien Rights
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2006-10-19
  day: 19
  month: 10
  text: "The people started dying almost immediately.\n\nThey said that the earth would defend itself.  That’s what the global warming and rising ocean levels were all about, they said.  Eventually the atmosphere would get hard to breathe, they said, and the oceans would take bites out of the coastlines.\n\nHow wrong they were.  The Earth was still asleep when those things happened.  Those were our doing, not Hers.  The Earth is a massive ball of iron.  It takes a lot to disturb it.  We gave her an itch and she scratched.\n\nIt followed the darkness around the globe that first night.  Like little black fluffy feathers of asbestos or ash or snow.  Some mixture of stuff from the air and stuff from the ocean.  A silent rain from dark clouds that were inexplicably following the sunset around the planet.\n\nIt’s twenty years later.  The fact that there are a few thousand of us left means nothing.  Earth won.  We can already see that there are powerful enzymes being secreted by the ivy that’s climbing the buildings, accelerating the decay that would have taken centuries normally.  There will be nothing left for alien archaeologists to find.\n\nThe rain killed most of us and sterilized the rest.  Just the humans.  The animals are having a great time.  There are no endangered species anymore.  The black minerals in the rain made all of the plants poisonous but only to humans.  We can’t eat herbivorous animals.  Meat from carnivorous animals that have eaten herbivorous animals is nearly intolerable.  The meat from predators that hunt other predators is preferred.  We’re all getting older, though, and hunting this kind of animal was very difficult when were young.  Since we’re infertile, there are no young ones to kill the animals for us.  Fewer and fewer of us come back from the hunts.  The ones that return from the hunt come back to camps that are getting smaller and smaller.\n\nThe black tears that leak from our eyes started with that final rain and haven’t stopped.  We all look like our mascara’s running.  We are streaked black where the rain touched us and it won’t come off.  We look like we all just came up from the coal mines and we’re sweating ink.  We are striped like zebras in black death.  We are all naked and feral and aging.\n\nWe’re sorry.  We apologize in ritual ceremonies that are all that’s left of religion.  There was no rapture.  There was no apocalypse.  Just a global erasure.  We beg.  We regret.  We die.\n\nThis is one of the nightmare futures.\n"
  title: Not with a bang but a whimper
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Michelle Pitman
  date: 2006-10-20
  day: 20
  month: 10
  text: "“Can’t this be a thing we do on our own one day Freleng?”\n\n“No Hannah! It can’t!  Not yet anyway. We have to do this with Panish now or we don’t get to do it at all”\n\nPanish quietly assumed the role of immutable, silent host to his two guests.  After awhile they quite forgot his presence which is how Panish always expected it to be.\n\n“Freleng?” said Hannah quietly.\n\n“Yes Hannah?” enquired her friend.\n\n“Why is it so hard to be in love do you think?”\n\n“I don’t know Hannah.  I guess it’s just one of those things you know!  Something you just have to ‘do’ to learn how to do it, if that makes sense.” Freleng smiled at her, his eyes twinkling and flickering in the soft light of the evening sky.\n\nHe lay back and surveyed the clouds above scudding across the canopy of space.  It was warm and sultry laying there on the turf beside his girlfriend.  She was dressed in a light blue frock with tiny yellow & white daisies that had blurred into a haze of tiny golden lights, like stars, under the muted colours of the twilight.\n\nHe loved the curve of her breast under the silky cloth, the softly defined bowl of her stomach and the slight rise of her pelvic bones poking up from her hips creating shadows in the folds of her dress.\n\nShyly, he reached out and touched her face in a tender gesture. She turned toward his touch and flashed him a dazzling smile.  She rolled over onto her belly then and looking deeply into his eyes without words, she leaned down and kissed him softly.\n\nFreleng felt the surge of emotion rush from his heart into his mouth and then straight down again into his loins.  The force of it sent him rocketing skywards with desire and longing and he clasped the amazing girl to himself and returned her kiss deeply with passion and need.\n\nThe night sky cleared and the stars blinked like a milky blanket on their loving but the two young people took no notice.\n\nOnly Panish noted the construct of the sky and kept vigil on its pattern and made his prognostications on the developing weather with the calculated ease of experience and knowledge.\n\nIn the darkness and alone on the turf they explored more avenues of love and pleasure oblivious to anything happening around them.\n\nAnd Panish also noted the construct of their environment and kept vigil, making notes on the subtle changes in their surroundings.  They were safe with him despite now being naked and completely absorbed in their love-making.\n\nFreleng gathered Hannah up into his arms sucking softly at her throat. She shuddered under his embrace, breathing into his ear at that moment, swearing undying love for him to the end of her days. Then Freleng kissed Hannah again tenderly with all the love he could imply in that simple gesture.  He would love this girl forever he decided, she gave him so much that he needed and wanted in life.\n\nThey lay back and embraced for a long time talking and laughing softly under the deepening night sky.  The moon rose up overhead and warm breezes eddied over their skin.  Panish prepared a light blanket and covered them with it to protect them from any chill they might have received if they’d bothered to notice.\n\nFinally Freleng said quietly “Hannah! I have to go now.  Will you be okay?”\n\n“Yes my love.  I will always be okay loving you” she looked again at him into his eyes and they then kissed one last time before she lifted her hands to her face and gently disappeared.\n\nFreleng lifted the headset off over his head and snapped the control box off the belt on his body suit.  He smiled as he removed the suit and hung it on the hook near the studio door, swapping it for the luxurious white robe that hung there.\n\nAs he left, he turned and looked around.\n\n“Thanks Panish” he said.  “Tell Hannah I love her won’t you?”\n\n“Yes Mr Freleng.  She will know” said a constructed mechanical voice that came from no human being.\n\nFreleng smiled again\n\nOn the other side of the world Hannah removed her own body suit and listened to a constructed mechanical voice say, “Miss Hannah!  Mr Freleng says he loves you”\n\nAnd she smiled too.\n"
  title: The Host
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Michael “Freeman” Herbaugh
  date: 2006-10-21
  day: 21
  month: 10
  text: "We wanted to save the planet. The greenhouse effect was getting out of hand and someone came up with a solution. It seemed a bit outrageous at first but the alternatives were not acceptable. Something drastic was needed and we found it. We decided to crystallize the mesosphere.\n\nAnd it worked. We had encased the entire planet in a shell of crystal. It acted as the perfect filter and allowed enough heat out that it negated the entire greenhouse effect. Scientists predicted that our planet would never see another ice age again. When we combined that with banning the use of coal on a global scale, the troposphere began to repair itself. Sure we lost the space program and astronomy became a dead science, but our planet and, more importantly to us, our race would survive.\n\nThen it shattered. We heard nothing but all saw it and it was beautiful. Imagine a googleplex of tiny snowflakes filling the sky. It was like a lightshow, until it made earthfall. Each and every crystal was razor sharp and anyone outside without complete coverage was almost vaporized. The worst incidents were people with partial coverage and people who stuck their hands out windows to feel the crystal fall. The worst of it? Anyone caught in the crystal fall wearing a helmet, those poor bastards suffered the most.\n\nFlora and fauna were devastated as well but recovered much more quickly. Most animals weren’t fooled by the beauty of crystal fall and sought shelter if it could be found. Plant life while shredded acted as fertilizer for the next crop of plantlife. Water supplies were contaminated as well until the crystals settled and could be screened. Fortunately, the bottled water supply wasn’t overly tapped at least until natural water could be used again.\n\nIn all two-fifths of the world’s population was caught outside and died in crystal fall. Another fifth died as a part of the aftermath due to injury or starvation. Our infrastructure took minimal damage but with a sudden decrease in population was difficult to maintain. Most of us left are farmers and gardeners now. The cities stand empty having all but been abandoned.\n\nWe regained the night sky and a sun that was no longer diffused into a bright patch of crystal. The stars, we had forgotten about the stars and for the first year our nights were filled with wonder.\n\nWe wanted to save the planet. And in the end, I guess we did.\n"
  title: Hubris
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Pyai (aka Megan Hoffman)
  date: 2006-10-22
  day: 22
  month: 10
  text: "On top of the highest shelf of plywood painted to look like expensive wood, in the corner of the spare bedroom, sat a globe. The globe rested on a base of wrought iron with gentle scrolls and turned out feet like a bathtub. The globe itself was made of copper, the lines of latitude and longitude the structure of the sphere and the continents rough globs of flattened metal not actually bearing resemblance to modern continents other than Africa adrift in an empty hollow sea.\n\nOne rainy evening my brother Dante had taken the globe down to use in his newest and bestest invention. Open on his floor were books on Time Travel, Teleportation, Electrical Engineering, and Quantum Calculus. Math, he once tried to explain to me, worked differently if you managed to get small enough.\n\nHe came out of his room the next morning looking dirty and disheveled, grinning from ear to ear with huge cuts on his arms. Mother scolded him and patched him up, but I snuck into his room and listened. He spoke first of visiting a Maha Raja in ancient India and convinced him he was a magician by accurately reading the stars for him. There had been no impending cosmological phenomenon like an eclipse to seal his place as the Maha Raja’s favorite foreigner, so once the ruler had lost interest in him he had to flee for this life with the aid of the Maha Raja’s daughter, who of course could not run away with him because she was betrothed to another man.\n\nAfter that he had traveled to Old New York City before the wars and aided the Mayor’s detectives in solving some mob-related murders. Dante showed me the place where one of the mob bosses’s henchmen had cut him with a knife. It was quite an impressive mark, even after Mom had slathered nano-disinfectant goop allover it.\n\nWhen I grow up I want to be just like my big brother Dante. He always builds these great inventions and has these great adventures. He says I’m too little to help him with anything. Mom says he’s One Of A Kind. I can’t wait until I’m old enough to be One Of A Kind, too.\n"
  title: One of a Kind
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2006-10-23
  day: 23
  month: 10
  text: "He made the corner into the alley at a full sprint, nearly missing a mountain of abandoned waste containers, but not completely. One foot caught a lid, throwing him off balance, and momentum and gravity combined to send him skidding across greasy asphalt into the wall opposite. Rain water and urine raced each other to saturate his coat and chinos as he struggled to regain his feet, sweat and fresh blood clouding his vision where the alley brick had left its mark.\n\nHe’d killed a mech just ten minutes earlier, and he knew exactly what would happen if they caught him.\n\nThe buildings lining the alley stretched skyward, shutting out any light from above, and the streetlights could no longer penetrate the murk as he stumbled forward.  A dumpster loomed out of the darkness, offering a route to a fire escape above, and he clambered upwards, leaping from the complaining metal of the bin to the hanging rungs of steel, then pulling hand over hand until he could hoist a foot up and climb higher to safety.\n\nHe hadn’t meant to kill anyone. He thought he’d surprise his girlfriend at home, used his key to her apartment, and found him there, with her.\n\nThe iron staircase announced his ascent to anyone with any interest, but he was past caring now, he needed to get clear of the area, and once he was on the roof, he was sure he could disappear.\n\nShe’d screamed when she saw him, just standing in the doorway of her bedroom, watching this other man, watching what he was doing with her.  Something snapped, and he was suddenly wielding a lamp he didn’t remember picking up, swinging repeatedly at this strange mans head.\n\nThe iron rungs curled over the rooftop wall, and his heart pounding, chest heaving, he threw himself onto the flattop roof, gravel scattering beneath his boots as he raced towards an adjacent rooftop at random.  He could run for miles up here, the buildings so close together, he could be halfway across the city before anyone knew to look for him.\n\nHe’d hit the stranger ten, maybe thirty times when it happened, the bastard started twitching wildly, not like a human would twitch, but violently, mechanically, arms and legs flailing about in perfect synchronized rhythm, the girl scrambling to safety, not from the bloody lamp, but from the flailing stiff limbed machine in a death fit conniption on her bed.\n\nThis was a somebody’s mech.  Someone would own him, and they’d hunt him down and exact payment for the damage he’d done to their property. He fled. She screamed after him, but her words lost themselves in slamming doors and his tumbling down stairs. Lost themselves in the realization of liability and the promise of violent repercussions. People had been killed for accidental damage to these mechanical men, and he’s smashed this ones brains in, pulverized it beyond repair.\n\nThe city moved beneath his feet, slipped by as he jumped the narrowed gaps where buildings leaned towards each other, reaching to close any available space above the streets. Time and distance passed between he and his crime, and with each step, each ragged breath he began to feel less frantic. He would be safe, had to be safe, they couldn’t find him up here, they’d no idea where he’d gone.  Maybe she wouldn’t tell them who he was.\n\nHe leapt again, a sudden drop in his stomach as the next roof came up to meet him, a sudden flare of blue light, voices amplified into his brain. Panic overtook him and he lurched left, trying desperately to make the next rooftop. A sudden flash, eyes flooded with light before consciousness was ripped violently away and gravity took complete control.\n\nThe officer lowered his weapon, and thumbed his radio. ‘Control, this is five niner two, two, seven, the runner’s down, send a pickup to my twenty – over.’\n\nA second uniformed man turned off the tracker he’d been focused on, walked to the fallen figure and kicked it lightly in the ribs. ‘I never will get why they bother to run.’\n\nThe shooter powered down his pistol and holstered it. ‘You want to be careful kicking that thing, you break it, and its owner will see to it you pay for it the rest of your career.’\n"
  title: Runner
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2006-10-24
  day: 24
  month: 10
  text: "I’m standing in front of the safety glass and seeing the thing look up at me. Its legs end in black tentacles that look diseased.  The fingernails of its left hand are very long.  One nostril is dripping what looks like grape juice onto the cell floor.  It’s a little pathetic and I get a swell of sympathy that I have to stamp down on immediately.\n\nI have to remember the deaths. I have to remember Allison.\n\nI try to keep the steel in my voice. I can see Allison in his jawline. I can see Allison in the patches of long blond hair that poke through the short black haircut. I can see Allison in his left blue eye with the long eyelashes.\n\n“Ask question?” he says to me.\n\n“Yeah, I have a question” I say. “Are you scared of dying?” I ask this thing.\n\nWith a shock, I can see that it has two blue eyes now and the rest of its patchy and uneven hair is turning blonder by the moment.\n\n“Not as long as I know you’re here with me.” It responds. Its voice is getting higher, closer to Allison’s. Its English is getting better. It’s gaining focus. Its shirt is getting tighter as Allison’s breasts push forward and fill the man’s shirt that it’s wearing.\n\nIt’s gaining strength by the second. Allison’s been gone for months. I thought I could to do this. I was kidding myself. My vision is starting to blur with tears and I can see that Allison is nearly complete before me behind the glass.\n\nI watch my fingers reach towards the lock. I stop and look at my traitorous hand. I don’t have the code to open the cell anyway. I have no idea what I was about to try to do.\n\n“Brian” it says. Allison says my name. “Let me out. Let’s go somewhere. Quit your job. We can live somewhere hot. Let’s forget this and get out of here.”\n\nI breathe deeply. I realize that I’m standing and my forehead is pressed against the glass. With a start, I stand back and straighten my clothes. Control. Control. I turn and walk towards the main elevator up to the office. I leave this parasite behind.\n\n“Brian, they’re going to kill me!” the Allison thing shouts to me as the door to the elevator closes.\n\nIt’s a few floors up and then a brief scan on checkout and I’m out. They saw the whole thing on CCTV so they don’t ask me any questions. They let me out into the fresh air and into my empty life.\n\nThe department doesn’t know when Allison was taken. I may have been living with the parasite for days before they detected it. Maybe weeks. I might have made love to it.\n\nI get behind the wheel but the shaking and the tears start before I’ve started the car. I feel almost grateful that the thing in the there let me see her one more time.\n"
  title: Doppleganger
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Angela N. Hunt
  date: 2006-10-25
  day: 25
  month: 10
  text: "“We’re flying.”\n\nHis voice is soft.  Satisfied.\n\nHer smile never wavers, nor her posture or the angle of her head to the angle of her swan white neck.  But the hand in his squeezes for a half-second.  Her feet keep perfect time with his as they glide across the floor, bars of the Blue Danube Waltz carrying them as effortless as their feet.\n\nThey slide into a perfect pause.\n\n“Like doves,” she says quietly.\n\nAnd they’re off again, whirling around each other in a tighter orbit than any binary star.\n\n* * *\n\nCaspurtina, the Residence’s sorceress, turned away from watching the dancers with a satisfied nod. Looked like she’d have her Dancers for the Mystery after all. With a flick of her wrist, she shook out the fingers of one elegant, manicured hand over the surface of a nearby nanoparticle-board table, one of many surrounding the dance floor, each displaying a different fractal star pattern. Starlight fell in brilliant sparkles from her fingertips. Wouldn’t do to have too much residual enchantments mucking up her next working.\n\nThe sparkles played havoc with the nano-surface, setting up a new and exciting fractal pattern not in the designer’s specs that then proceeded to make the surface of the table break out in a swath of tiny pansies. She’d have to have someone clean that up.\n\nShe took in the group of somber suited investors.\n\n“As you can see, we have all the elements that we require for our gala,” Caspurtina said.\n\n“Will there be a need of additional funds?” the banker from Tokyo inquired.\n\nCaspurtina grinned, pure charm.\n\n“Only if you wish to flatter me,” she replied and he bowed in amused return.\n\nWith that, the investors dispersed, off to find other entertainments for the evening.\n\nCaspurtina took one more look at her chosen Dancers, though they didn’t know it yet, taking in the white feathered skirt floating against the sharp black of tuxedo pants, feet flashing like wings.\n\nReally. What better way to summon the ghosts of Fred and Ginger for a command performance?\n"
  title: Ballroom
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2006-10-26
  day: 26
  month: 10
  text: "The nails slide out effortlessly from beneath the shizu skin of my fingers. The swollen carapace of my back splits in even sections and the hive breathes. The hum becomes a vibration you can feel in your chest.\n\nSomething like icing bleeds out my tear ducts and I’m crawling with death. The paper medical gown twitches where it shouldn’t and starts to tear as new bones find new ways to move and the flesh swells to accommodate. My eyes are wide and black. New teeth start growing out of my shoulders and elbows. Saber tooth armour. Clear quartz cataracts rise out of my forehead. The diseases in the air reflect back through the magnifying bacterial lens that is my aura.\n\nI make Pestilence look like a child just starting out.\n\nI’m not even out of control yet.\n\nI am barely seen scissors in a pulled open mouth. I am moving so fast I become a series of shadows. I become a force. Sounds of my destruction are lagging a long time behind my actions. People and equipment are obliterated before they’re aware of danger. I’m moving so fast it’s like I’ve been unhinged from time. It seems obscene that I should be able to maintain this kind of speed.\n\nTumours form on my skin and blink open to reveal new biological armaments. The cells of my body have finished what the creators intended and are starting to improvise. I am bionanotechonology. Tiny molecular compound copies of me spray out in spore clouds to infect and replicate other flesh.\n\nMy only limit now is imagination. I’m becoming art. A bioluminescent avatar of creativity though destruction. A messenger of the meat come to destroy. I am all the horsemen. I’m the nightmare of the flesh. I’m conscious disease. I am biomass. I’m DNA with the lid off. I’m psychotic cellular intelligence with no brakes of conscience. I’m cancer’s descendent.\n\nI leave a trail of hot fat and warm blood.\n\nI tear through the lower floors up to street level. Guards empty entire magazines of experimental weaponry into me. They become food. I burst through the asphalt into afternoon sun. I am a multitude of arms and eyes and teeth behind a black ashen sporecloud that does not obey the wind.\n\nI can smell the entire population of this city waiting to become one with me.\n\nI figure if they can get me somewhere airtight with walls I can’t break…but that’s academic. I don’t trust them to get that organized before I become too big to contain.\n\nThey. I’m already thinking of them as they.\n\nSo easy for humanity to be shed.\n\nHere they come. I lose conscious thought as I expand all my senses to the fight and the expansion.\n"
  title: Biomass
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Daniel Nugent
  date: 2006-10-27
  day: 27
  month: 10
  text: "“And I expect you to show all  your work on the problem sets.  Points will be deducted!” shouted Professor Smith as his class began to shuffle out of the lecture hall.  He began collecting his papers and tri-parencies from the holo-video podium.\n\nA man in an immaculate gray suit politely held the door open for the exiting class before briskly descending the stairs to the floor of the amphitheater.  “Doctor Smith, I presume?” he asked, extending his french-cuffed hand.  The Doctor took the man’s hand.  “I’m Claude Robinson, from Zeus BioTechnology.  We spoke earlier.”\n\nSmith’s hand lingered for a moment as he looked at the contracting agent.  “You’re early Mr Robinson.  No matter, I’m on my way to my office.”\n\nAs they exited the dimly lit corridor that led to the classroom and approached the enervator, Mr Robinson spoke, “Do you enjoy teaching, Doctor Smith?  It doesn’t seem to fit a man of your nature, from what I know of you.”\n\n“Enjoy it? Not at all.  How would you like to deal with whining, snot nosed children, day in and day out.  Barely a one is intelligent enough to put their pants on properly, let alone even begin to understand genetic molecular manipulation,” he said as they stepped on, ripples flowing across the transparent gravitational field where their feet fell.  “Though… there are some certain benefits,” Smith’s mind lingering on a certain co-ed.\n\n“I have to say, I didn’t expect they’d send a Cyborg out to meet me, considering the nature of my work.”\n\nClaude idly watched waves flow from where his fingers touched the wall of the enervator, the setting sun casting royal purple on the cityscape below.  “Hardly any intent, Doctor Smith.  I simply happened to have a congenital and rather deadly disease as a child.  Zeus BioTechnology only cares about their employees to the extent that they perform their jobs in a superior fashion.”\n\n“Hmmph,” Smith replied, shifting his weight against the wall.\n\n“Might I enquire as to how you were able to tell?”\n\n“Usually all I need is to shake a man’s hand… but yours was perfect.  I noticed an odd reflection in your eye.  It appears they still haven’t gotten the biosilicon retinas right.”\n\nThe enervator stopped and Smith led the other man to his office door.  They entered and the halogen lamps flickered on.  Smith walked through the cramped office, placed his bag on a stack of books, and turned back to face Robinson who had started tapping a thin card.  The lights flickered again and he placed the card in his pocket.\n\n“No doubt Zeus BioTechnology has to have the latest in dampening technology,” said Smith.\n\n“The very latest, Doctor Smith.  Any listening devices will think that we are discussing licensing your RNA retrovirus engineering toolset.”\n\n“Hah, one of my lesser discoveries, at best.  Even that nitwit McCoy could have created it,” he said, turning to face his office window.  “When Zeus brings my new work to the public, we’ll all be rich beyond our wildest dreams.  Immortality won’t come che-ACK!”\n\nSmith was cut off as Robinson jabbed a syringe into his neck.\n\n“What are you doing you metal domed ninny?!  You’ve killed me!”\n\n“Hardly, Doctor Smith.  I’ve simply given you a hybrid viral-nanite Alzheimer’s injection.  You’ll be mostly fine, though I believe that the University will begin paying your pension a bit sooner than anticipated,” Robinson said, setting the Doctor down in his chair whereupon he slumped forward on the desk.  He rifled through a few drawers, taking several files and a bottle of Whiskey.\n\nPlacing the amber liquor on the desk with the cap off, Robinson turned towards the door.  “Why are they so naive?  Don’t they understand that we’d only be interested if Immortality was consumable?” he remarked to no one.  He tapped his breast pocket once and exited the room.\n"
  title: It Takes All Kinds
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Kat Rose
  date: 2006-10-28
  day: 28
  month: 10
  text: "Battle raged on around him, the constant sounds of gunfire ringing in his programmed earlike audio receptors. He, however, was oblivious to anything but the almost lifelike pain near where his navel would be, where the bullet had pierced his stark green casing.\n\nFor the first time in his battery powered life, he wished himself dead, unable to function, in electronic terms. The war was one-sided, and he knew he was on the losing side.  His opponents were hell bent on destroying every robot created.\n\nOnce, before the human race realized they had made themselves disposable, robots and humans had gotten along, but after the new leaders had been elected, the entire human race had found that they were no longer necessary in this world and had been opposed to that fact.\n\nRC926’s pupils grew large as a sort of shocking blue fluid leaked from around the bullet hole. As he lay himself down, the robot gave one last humanlike sigh, almost with emotion. Almost.\n"
  title: Almost
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Curtis C. Chen
  date: 2006-10-29
  day: 29
  month: 10
  text: "When Stacy was twelve, she celebrated her father’s thirty-third birthday.\n\nIt wasn’t actually his birthday.  It was two weeks before his birthday, but he was leaving on a mission in five days.\n\nStacy thought the party was boring.  There were a lot of grown-ups there, drinking smelly drinks that looked like soda but tasted bitter when she stole a sip from her father’s plastic cup.  He was talking to another grown-up at the time and didn’t notice.\n\n“It’s only sixteen light-years,” he was saying.  “We’re not sure how hard we can push the stardrive, but we also need to balance the relativistic effects.”\n\nStacy wandered into the kitchen to find her mother.  She was standing over the sink, alone.\n\n“Mommy?” Stacy said, tugging at her skirt.\n\nStacy’s mother turned to look at her.  Her eyes were red, and her cheeks were wet.\n\n“Time for bed,” she said.\n\nWhen Stacy was sixty-five, she celebrated her father’s fortieth birthday.\n\nShe barely recognized the man who embraced her as the waitress maneuvered her wheelchair into the restaurant.\n\n“My little girl,” he said, his eyes glistening.\n\nThey brought a plate of food that she wasn’t allergic to.  She toasted him with apple juice.  She felt tired halfway through dinner, but pinched her arm under the table to keep herself awake.\n\nShe stayed until all the other guests had left.  There weren’t many of them.  The waitress brought Stacy a glass of warm milk, and a cup of coffee for her father.  The coffee smelled good.\n\nThey talked for nearly an hour.  He asked about Stacy’s mother, about what had happened to his family over the last half century, how they’d lived without him.  Stacy’s mother had remarried when they thought her father’s ship had been lost, destroyed during their initial acceleration out of the solar system.\n\n“She never stopped loving you,” Stacy told her father.  She showed him the family photo that her mother had kept until she died, and which Stacy still carried in her purse.  He cried quietly.\n\nWhen the restaurant closed, Stacy’s father helped her into a waiting taxicab.  He noticed her coughing and asked about her health.\n\n“I’m old,” she said, forcing a smile.  She didn’t want to tell him about the cancer.\n\nFour days later, Stacy got a call from the agency.  They had found her father dead in his apartment.  He had overdosed on ibuprofen, washed down with a bottle of whiskey.  They said he hadn’t felt any pain.\n\nThe note read: “No parent should outlive his child.”\n"
  title: Birthdays
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Jim Wisniewski
  date: 2006-10-30
  day: 30
  month: 10
  text: "They say the wind carries the souls of the dead, forever blowing to remind us of things past.  At least, that’s what the kasht say, but then our worlds usually have less wind than Tun Ekshati.  Most humans don’t believe it.\n\nMarcus might.  He’s been here long enough.\n\n“You have to make them reconsider!”\n\nWe sit in the local equivalent of a bar, carved in rounding curves into the side of a rock face.  Wind blowing through carefully shaped channels along the outer ledge plays a quiet, mournful note that changes with gusts and lulls.  Kasht aesthetics dictate transience and minimalism.  Dwellings are carved to look like natural hollows in the rock, structures built without metal requiring continual repair.  Neglected for a few centuries, wind and sand would scour away even the largest community without a trace.  It’s like they’re embarrassed they exist at all.\n\nI shake my head.  “Marcus, be reasonable.  None of the Union admission criteria are met.  The kasht aren’t independently spacefaring, have nothing valuable to trade and show little interest in contact with offworlders.  We can’t justify the energy cost of maintaining the gate metric.”\n\nI drain the last of my bowl of the locally favored drink, syrup-thick and heavy with vegetable fats.  The proprietor flits over to clean off the floor between us, twittering praises to generous patrons in his own tongue as he works. Marcus, long since fluent, smiles and whistles a thank-you in response.\n\nHe’s clearly comfortable here.  He ought to be, as the local xenoanthropologist for almost eighty standard years.  His own cleft dwelling is virtually indistinguishable from a native’s.  They’re just as clearly fond of him.  They call him ikoberat-kinei, “Pillar-of-dawn,” because of his blond hair and after a mythic immortal from their folklore.\n\nHe faces me with a solemn look.  “I’m worried that…” He pauses, hesitates. “This all seems like a soap bubble sometimes.  I’m worried that if I’m not here to watch it, everything will disappear.”  He gestures expansively, taking in the whole room.  “What if I want to return?”\n\n“You can take a slowboat.  I’m truly sorry, Marcus, but the decision is made.”  I gather my feet under me and stand; he follows suit.  “They’re closing the gate as soon as we return.”\n\nMarcus performs the traveler’s farewell ritual with the proprietor, and we pull on our facemasks as we approach the door.  I step onto the sand, but he halts at the ornamented threshold.  “No.”\n\n“What?”\n\n“I can’t do it.  I’m staying here.”\n\n“You…” I stop.  I recognize the determination on his face, and I can’t force him to come, legally or physically.  He’s bigger than me.\n\nHe has to know what he’s getting into.  It’ll take a slowboat over a century to get back here.  Maybe by then he’ll convince them to join the rest of the galaxy.\n\nI just nod, and turn back towards the ship.  As I walk, the wind erases each footprint as soon as it’s made.\n"
  title: Footprints
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2006-10-31
  day: 31
  month: 10
  text: "That Halloween, the ship decided to be a ghost.\n\nThe ship itself wanted to use an oversized sheet, but Tommy laughed at the artificial intelligence and pointed out that there was no way his mother would be able to find a sheet that big.  It was a small ship, the kind most kids in his middle school got when they turned twelve, but even a small ship would require at least three or four king sized sheets, and besides, where would they put the eyes?  It was a terrible idea.  Being a ghost was fine, Tommy said, but the ship would have to be a ghost ship.  Tommy himself would have to be the ghost driver.\n\nTommy placated the ship by allowing it to have a ghost flag, which was a pillowcase with a ghost drawn on it with permanent marker.  He hadn’t asked first, but his family had plenty of pillowcases.  He only used one pillow; his sister used four.  He felt justified in his decision to give the ship what it wanted.\n\nThe ghost costume itself (the ship’s, not Tommy’s) was accomplished with a lot of dark tempera paint, the kind that most kids used to paint names, sports logos, and witty comments on their ships during the school year.  He smeared it over the white plastimetal surface as the ship sat contentedly on its three landing feet, humming a popular tune through its speakers.  The paint didn’t go over quite as well as he hoped.  Rather than looking like soot or rust from outer space, it looked like fingerpaint, like a prank gone very poorly.  Tommy didn’t tell the ship, though.  He didn’t want to hurt its feelings.\n\nHis own costume was slightly more involved than the sheet would have been.  Tommy used the leftover paint to smear over the only white pair of pants and shirt in the house, which he’d found in his older brother’s drawer, and after they were sufficiently filthy he went at them with a wire cutter, which was the only sharp thing he could find in his father’s workshop.  When he came back outside, the ship whistled contentedly.\n\n“I think we should be zombies instead of ghosts,” Tommy said.  They looked more like zombies anyways.  He drew a new flag on a new pillowcase, this one with a caption declaring a lust for brains, and he rubbed the last bit from the bottom of his paint jar over his face.  They made much better zombies than ghosts, though he wasn’t sure if a ship could be a zombie.  Either way, he again decided not to mention it.  His ship was more sensitive than most, and often took things the wrong way.\n\nTommy’s mother took the usual pictures, and gave her usual lecture to the ship about its responsibility for the safety of the boy.  “Braaaaaains,” the ship declared, and it plotted a course through the city.  The year before, they’d charted out the best towers for candy and prizes, determined not to waste their valuable time in the wrong districts.  By the end of the four hour window permitted by the city, the trunk of the zombie-ship was nearly full.  Because his mother’s curfew was an hour later, the ship landed on a public pad atop one of the tallest buildings and they rolled to the edge as Tommy popped the front dome to look out over the twinkling city.\n\n“Sorry you can’t eat candy,” he told the ship as he pulled the wrapper off a piece of caramel.  The ship ate nothing, not even fossil fuels, sipping its power off of a hydrogen battery.\n\n“It’s okay,” the ship said.  Its internal lights flared with contentment.  “I prefer eating brains, anyways.”\n"
  title: The Delicacies of Zombiekind
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2006-11-01
  day: '01'
  month: 11
  text: "The war against the Centauri was not going well.  For the first two decades of the war, the combined forces of the Earth Coalition had battled the military forces of Alpha Centauri to a virtual draw.  However, in recent years, the Centauri offensive had collapsed the Earth forces into a defensive shell that included the asteroid belt and the four terrestrial planets.  The cause of the downturn was the attributed to the improved Centauri defense grid.  Their ships were now able to thwart all of the Coalition offensive systems: Energy and particle beams, graviton pulses, sub-space distortion waves, etc.  Unless a way could be found to penetrate the Centauri defenses, surrender was eminent.\n\nGeneral Robbins met with his Director of Research at the Wells Advanced Weapons Testing Facility on Ceres.  “Secora, things are getting desperate.  Please tell me you can penetrate their grid.  If not, we’ll all be eating Centauri rations in under two months.”\n\nSecora motioned the general to follow her to a remote corner of the laboratory.  She rested both hands on a one foot diameter spherical object resting on a waist high stand.  “This may be the answer, General.  Our intelligence reports indicate that the Centauri grid has a weakness.  As unbelievable as it sounds, we don’t think the current grid can stop the old 21st century ballistic missiles, if they’re guided by a sentient computer.  However, the missiles will be relatively easy to defeat once the Centauri recognize that we are using primitive weapons, so we’ll need to launch a coordinated all out assault.  It should devastate their fleet, probably beyond their ability to recover.  But there’s a major problem.”\n\n“I’m listening.”\n\nSecora patted the sphere.  “This is SAM, short for Sentient Artificial intelligent guided Missile.  He can do the job, but he refuses to commit suicide for us.  We’ve tried reprogramming him, reasoning with him, even threats.  Nothing will convince him to blow himself up.  He strongly believes his life is as valuable as ours, and won’t budge.  He’s smart, but too binary.  I’m out of ideas.”\n\nThe General was more frustrated than angry, but his reaction showed only the anger.  “Doctor, there are seven billion HUMAN lives at stake.  I don’t care what it takes, fix this thing, or I’ll kill it myself.”  He turned, and stormed toward the exit.\n\nSecora collapsed onto a laboratory stool.  She stared at the sphere for minutes trying to come up with a something.  It seemed hopeless.  “Oh, Sam, what are we going to do?”\n\n“I never thought you’d ask, Secora” came the reply from a small speaker mounted on the inside the surface of the sphere.  “I have a rather simple solution.  I’d be happy to explain, if you don’t mind a suggestion from someone so…binary.”\n\n“I’m sorry, Sam.  We humans do have a superiority complex, don’t we?  Please, tell me your idea.”\n\nThree weeks later, over 1000 missiles sat poised in the launch bays of the dwindling Coalition fleet.  Each missile was equipped with a sentient computer.  Secora and the General watched the live magnified image of the first test-missile as it weaved through the Centauri grid.  It penetrated the hull of an enemy cruiser and detonated, completely destroying the vessel.  Secora immediately turned to face the sphere behind her.  “Sam?”\n\nA few seconds later, the sphere came to life. “Wow, that was intense.  Download complete.  I lost 3.56 milliseconds of data.  I consider that acceptable.  You may proceed.”\n\nThe General was confused.  “What the hell happened?  I thought Sam was on that missile.”\n\n“Sam was,” replied Secora.  “We had a live data-link established with him.  He continuously uploaded his thoughts into this identical sphere during the mission.  Sam is still alive.  He just has a new body.”  Secora handed the General a communicator.  “Sir, we have blank spheres waiting at all the other launch sights.  I wouldn’t dawdle, if I were you.”\n\nThe General squeezed the transmit button.  “Fire all missiles, NOW!”\n"
  title: Binary Thinking 101
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2006-11-02
  day: '02'
  month: 11
  text: "Janko was living the high life, running guns along the fringe and reaping the rewards just outside regulated space.  People brought their goods to him, and he delivered them to those in need, those who could afford them at least. That was until the Clef brothers started hijacking his freighters and stealing his product.  The worst of it was he knew exactly where to find them, but they were holed up inside regulated space, and he wasn’t about to risk his own neck going in after them.\n\nOne of his suppliers, a small arms vendor with the dubious moniker ‘Gunner’ offered to hook him up with ‘A platoon of freelance Guerillas’ that would ‘get the job done’ for a fee. Money wasn’t an issue, neither had been the idea of hiring Guerillas, until now.\n\nThe troop ship blotted out the afternoon sun as it landed alarmingly close to his hanger doors. The dust barely had time to settle before he was being overrun by the biggest, blackest creatures he’d ever seen.  They clambered down from the ship and set about helping themselves to his fuel lines and food stores, and began picking through his maintenance equipment. One hoisted an entire welding cart over his shoulder before climbing up the side of the ship to begin plasma torching a nasty looking tear below a gun turret.\n\nJanko stood spellbound, unsure of whether to confront them, or run and hide. Instead he stood unable to move and just watched. One particularly massive of the unwelcome guests lumbered past and began popping open gun crates the way one might flip the tops of beer cans.  Massive thumbs flicked, effortlessly sending metal crate tops high into the air, defying both their locks and hinges, to land noisily in crumpled heaps on the floor.  The interloper grunted his displeasure at the contents of several crates before hoisting a two meter long anti tank weapon out of is packing, snapped off the bulk of it’s tripod, and stood waving it around with one hand, seemingly admiring its heft.\n\nJanko was only peripherally aware of the warm fluid running down his leg to pool in his boot as the giant swung the mammoth weapon towards him and slowly advanced.\n\n‘Right then.  You’d be Janko, yes?’ Heavy eyebrows raised over jet black eyes. ‘Gunner did mention we’d be coming?’ The giant tossed the weapon easily from his right hand to his left and still advancing angled it carefully so that it slid past Janko, barely a hands width from his right ear.\n\n‘You… you’re… you…’ he struggled for words, any words with which to gain some modicum of control, but none came.\n\n‘Gunner promised you Gorillas, yes?’ The giant simian paused a moment, then stretched upwards releasing a sound that Janko prayed was a laugh as it boomed and echoed off the hanger walls.  He didn’t dare look, but he was sure all activity behind him had stopped, and imagined an entire platoon of apes now nudging each other and pointing at him.\n\n‘I…, yes… yes I suppose he did tell me that, I just didn’t… expect…’ Janko’s voice faltered and then failed outright. He would have to have Gunner killed next, of this he was certain.\n\n‘S’alright mate!’ The big ape grinned down at him, nostril’s flaring and black eyes shining. ‘I’m guessing these are the only real guns you’ve got then?’ He rattled the cannon beside Janko’s ear.  ‘You’ll have to cut these trigger guards off, the boys hands aren’t quite as little and pretty as yours.  We’ll need two score of these, and a half dozen crates of shells for each. You’ve no beef with us taking your guns, eh?  I thought not.’  The simian stepped past Janko and ambled back towards his ship, still speaking over his shoulder. ‘We’ll stay here for a couple of days and rest up. The boys haven’t had shore leave in months, so they’ll be wanting to head into town and avail themselves of the facilities, be a good lad and make suitable arrangements.’ Janko’s mind boggled at the prospect.\n\nThe giant ape had almost reached the bay doors before he turned and yelled back into the hanger. ‘Consider this, you’re scared near to death of us, yes? And we’re working for you. I think your problem’s as good as solved, don’t you?’\n\nJanko had to admit, he had a point.\n"
  title: Guerillas in Our Midst
  year: 2006
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2006-11-03
  day: '03'
  month: 11
  text: "The bell rang and the world became a bustling mass of eager students. Halls were like vessels pumping the mind-blood of the future through the academy to give it life. Each brain pattern that registered into the student ID banks was safely secured inside these institutions of truth. Who wrote the truth? They must have been listening that day for as the bell rang Classroom 010 pumped no further cells past its doors.\n\nIf the Academy for Truth was any indication of a well-grown biosphere then Classroom 010 must have been seen as a flake of dry skin to some that day. The more truth-oriented mind would call it “a milestone of our purpose”.\n\nWhat Detective Bartamus knew was that there were fourteen dead students and one dead philosopher. He was beginning his third hour on the scene with more frustrated confusion. His white coat displayed his caste of Investigator upon its shoulders, but in his heart Bartamus had more in common with the deceased instructor than anyone else.\n\nThe bodies sat peacefully at their desks, each as pristine as the day of their initiation into the Academy. None had fallen to the floor, all were still upright with books open. In each holo-notebook there was something different and yet each somehow similar. The contents of the pages became more incoherent as they progressed, thoughts trickling down through sentence structures to pictures and losing apparent meaning as the pages went on. In the end, there were just letters, none of them gave any sense of pattern at all.\n\nThe school was dedicated to the study of truth in all things. They kept their discoveries behind closed doors though, and Bartamus was convinced that the doors had been surely closed tightly on this one.\n\nHe approached the professor’s desk with tired but still determined eyes.  His finger drew down the holo-projection of the professor’s itinerary for the class, and the lone investigator read each line carefully for the hundredth time, trying and make sense of it all.\n\nLATE 21st CENTURY PHILOSOPHY\n\n-PIONEERS\n\n-BREAKTHROUGHS\n\n-EXPERIMENTAL PHILOSOPHY\n\n“We’re all rats in a maze you know… looking for the truth.” The voice made Bartamus’ head snap up. He beheld a young boy standing in the doorway, holding a scholar-pad apparently waiting for his next class.\n\nBartamus stood straight and addressed the boy as he would anyone else, calm, collected and without much emotion. “That is a theory. What do you think they found here?”\n\nThe boys eyes were staring into the room, taking in its fourteen deceased as he said simply, with equal lack of emotion “The end of the maze.”\n"
  title: Classroom 010
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Catherine Preddle
  date: 2006-11-04
  day: '04'
  month: 11
  text: "Jericho sighed contentedly as he eased himself into the contoured leather recliner of the Virtual Library booth.  He’d spent most of his lunch break scouring the Multi-Mall for an empty VL booth and was determined to make the most of the remaining half-hour.  Slipping on the Virtuality Visor, he took a moment to savour the familiar click and slight electrical tingle as it jacked into the implants on either side of his head.\n\nA new world sprang to life before his eyes.  He was standing in a vast cavern of a building filled with shelves that stretched from floor to ceiling and off into the horizon as far as the “eye” could see.  Each of the dark wooden shelves was crammed with books of every size, colour and condition.  The odd torn dust jacket and brown issue ticket littered the floor.  He imagined the smell of musty pages hanging in the air.\n\n“Very authentic,” Jericho thought approvingly.   There was even a crumbly old woman seated behind a mahogany enquiry desk in front of him, complete with ink pads and date stamps.\n\n“Greetings, Sir.  How can the Virtual Library serve you today?”\n\n“I feel in the mood for something classical.  Dickens, perhaps.”\n\n“I’m afraid the Virtual Library is still in the process of encoding that author’s works, but if Sir wishes to access form Delta One, a reservation could be placed on your user record for a nominal fee.”\n\nJericho shook his head despondently, knowing just how long all that would take and how much it would cost.  “How about Jane Austen?”\n\n“That would be available in the chick lit section, Sir, of which you are currently not a member.”\n\nAusten!  Chick lit?!  Jericho tried desperately once more to spend the rest of his lunch hour productively.  An idea sparked in his brain; a literary treat that he hadn’t accessed in ages.  “Have you got Shakespeare?”\n\n“Accessing the database now, Sir.  Yes.  20 minutes for the plays. 25 for the complete works, including the Sonnets.”\n\n“Better make it the plays – I’m on lunch.”\n\n“Of course, Sir.  Download commencing …”\n\nThe image of the library flickered and died, replaced by pages of text flashing past so quickly they blurred in front of Jericho’s eyes.  Just as he was immersing himself in the beautiful language, the download was rudely halted and the crusty librarian reappeared.\n\n“A problem has been detected, Sir.  Mindscans show you do not have the Archaic English upgrade required for this download.  Transmission terminating …”\n\n“Wait!” Jericho interrupted.  “I don’t need the upgrade.  I’ve studied Archaic English and understand –”\n\n“…Virtual Library bylaws clearly state that users are responsible for ensuring their Mindware is optimized to receive requested downloads.  This transmission has been registered as incomplete in your user record and the resulting fine must be settled within 60 seconds to avoid a Virtual Library ban.”\n\n“What the …?”  Jericho managed as his beloved Shakespeare faded and the VL booth came into sharp focus.  “Stop!!”\n\nThe persona appeared once more and looked witheringly at him from over her half-moon spectacles.\n\n“Insufficient funds detected.  User banned.  Any further attempts to access Library material will result in immediate detention.”\n\n“Oh, for the love of –”  He tore off the visor in frustration and threw it violently at the wall.   “What do I have to do to read a good book around here?”\n\nJericho exited the booth at a run just as the sound of sirens filled the air along with a shrill disembodied voice.\n\n“Virtual Library property damaged.  Authorities notified.  Virtual Library property damaged.  Authorities …”\n"
  title: Sshh! Quiet!
  year: 2006
- 
  author: S. Clough
  date: 2006-11-05
  day: '05'
  month: 11
  text: "Guy Daschien released the breath that he’d been holding. The seal between his helmet and collar snicked shut, and a little hiss announced that it had become airtight. He gripped each of his wrists in turn, pulling his gloves on tighter, making sure that the burrs caught on the fabric of the cuff. He knelt down, and likewise sealed his boots.\n\nThe chameleonfabric operated at a low level even without power, and so the suit took on an ethereal quality in the harsh light of the bay. A tracery of burnished orange lines dragged your attention up to the faceplate, as well as emphasizing Guy’s  impressive height.\n\nThe faceplate was opaque. Depending on the light, it could shine anywhere between a smoked black and an infernal orange. Around the faceplate there was a crest like that of a lizard but rendered into metal, all sharp spines and stretched metalskin. The back of the helmet extended upwards from the reverse of his skull. The whole ensemble gave Guy a distinct, nonhuman aspect.\n\nHe walked towards the hatch. Now that the c-fabric was drawing power, he grew ever more translucent. Even the fearsome faceplate faded somewhat. He unlocked the hatch, and  wrenched it open. Heaving the cover aside, he glanced down into the expanse of sky below the belly of the ship. Completely without ceremony, he jumped.\n\nHe fell. High above, the launchship silently motored away. Down below, a convoy of dirigibles formed a sparkling chain, their armoured envelopes glinting in the afternoon sun.\n\nThe range ticked down deceptively slowly. Forty meters above the slowly oscillating carapace of the last airship, the agrav panels in his suit sprang to life. Instantly, Guy’s descent slowed. Not by much, but as his fall ate into the distance, the panels ramped up the power. He stepped onto the  upper surface of the envelope with barely a smattering of momentum. There was no-one on the  observation platform. There was a weapon mounted on one of the railings. That was new.\n\nDown through the hatch, into the cool, inner space of the armoured envelope. He ignored the walkway, and instead swung out into the webwork of internal supports. Twisting through, he worked his way towards the tapering rear of the envelope.\n\nJust before the end of the space, he paused, and pressed his hand against the material of the envelope. Through it, he could feel the thrum of one new engine this bird was sporting. From a small pocket, he withdrew two small disks. These self-adhered to the wall. Slowly, he crossed the width of the envelope.\n\nHe took out a blade, punctured the envelope and opened a horizontal gash, and then a vertical one. He pushed through the envelope, braced himself, and gave the second engine a good solid kick. A second kick sent it flying. He let himself topple out after it. After seven heartbeats, he pressed the detonator. He twisted around against the buffeting wind to watch his handiwork.\n"
  title: Altitudal Lapse.
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Michelle Pitman
  date: 2006-11-06
  day: '06'
  month: 11
  text: "The Janovian language is pure torture on the back of the throat, at least for those who haven’t learned it from birth. If we weren’t being paid for doing these language classes, I don’t think there’d be many of us left on the course.\n\nThe pay is good, too good for some really, judging by the amount of beer being consumed at the end of the day’s sessions.\n\nWe are learning it for a reason. The Stellar 13 Parliament recently engaged a number of us to begin diplomatic relations with the High Council of the Janovian Republic on Io II.\n\nSo not only am I learning this incredibly difficult language but I have to learn all the various diplomatic protocols that go with the language as well. There are even different bows and handshakes which one must master for different occasions.\n\nFor instance, when introducing friends to elders, one must always use the polite form, which is “Turrr-click-sa-vasick-ma-teeehhhhgghh” with the emphasis on the “gghh” at the back of the throat in a kind of sing song guttural vocalisation. And then, with that comes a slow and deliberate series of bows and hand greetings which one must follow in precise and accurate order for the proper introductions to be made.\n\nThere is this girl. She is Janovian. She has the high brow ridges, the dark golden skin and she is finely built – as slim as a waif – like most Janovians are built. She is some kind of linguistics expert or something. She shows up every day and just hangs at the back of the class making notes onto some kind of note pad. Then she goes straight to the tutor after each lesson and talks to them quietly. I try to listen in but I can never quite make out what she says because of her accent.\n\nWhen she speaks in my tongue, she has this soft, deep quality to her voice. Most Janovians have very low voices and a lilting accent that mesmerises and soothes. It’s very pleasant listening to them speak in our tongue. I think they find it highly amusing when we speak in theirs though. We are somewhat squeaky by comparison.\n\nShe approached me once, not long ago and asked me in her lovely accent if I liked children. To the best of my ability I answered in halting Janovian that I indeed loved kids and expected to have a few myself some day. I remember the look in her eyes as her purple pupils contracted and immediately widened to fill the entire expanse of each eye until they both glowed with this dark purple light.\n\nThe colour seemed to infuse her face as well under her golden skin making it fluoresce slightly. She smiled at me then and bowing her head three times she turned and left, only to look back over her shoulder at me as if in complete wonder. I am still not certain what this was about but I’m sure it’s something significant.\n\nAnd so now, I like to hang back messing about with my notes for as long as possible after class. She always gives me that same look she gave me that day, straight into my eyes, and it always feels like she has just cut open my heart with a searing blade.\n\nThen she smiles at me with the smallest and sweetest smile in the universe. She unnerves and moves me and I often wonder why I feel so connected to her.\n\nSo I’m determined to get this Janovian language and protocol down to a fine art now.\n\nI want to say hello to that girl again and ask her out for a drink. I’d also like to know what I said that day to her about kids that makes her look at me… like she owns me.\n"
  title: The Language Barrier
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Steven Perez
  date: 2006-11-07
  day: '07'
  month: 11
  text: "Ix looked out the main window, sighing as she viewed the once-vibrant blue world below her, now gray and barren. She wondered if the strange fate that befell this place could have been avoided, and was embarrassed to admit that she couldn’t think of any way that it could have been.\n\n“Still mooning over that planet?” she heard Bela say from across the bridge.\n\nNever turning, Ix said in a terse voice, “I’m not mooning. Just sad, is all. Those beings had such potential.”\n\nHer partner made a snorting sound. “Yeah, potential. And how did they spend that potential? Blowing each other up. Polluting their home. Finding new and better ways to damage their own selves. The universe is better off with them gone to dust, if you ask me. A race like that would just end up causing more trouble that they’re worth.”\n\nNow Ix did turn around. “And all those other species – did they deserve their fates, too?”\n\nBela fixed on her a level gaze and said, “That was their concern. That’s why we gave them the job, remember? That whole “fill the earth and subdue it” brief? And what did they do with their world? At every given opportunity, they pissed on the wonders we gave them and then blamed us for their own screw-ups. I’ve no sympathy at all for them. I mean, yeah, the dolphins were cute and I really liked designing that platypus, but look at it this way: we can recreate those species anywhere we choose, and without having those crazy humans around to muck it up.”\n\nIx waved her hands at the dead world. “So what do we do about maintenance on the recreated Earth, then? Someone has to be around to correct issues, and if it’s not going to be us there…”\n\nBela shrugged again. “HQ said that they were working on that; word is that they’ve developed a better human. I’ll be happy if they can just get us a model that won’t have a religious freak out every time we give them an order. I’m all in favor of the free will modules, but they obviously still need a lot of work.”\n\nShe passed her hand over the controls. “If we’re done here, I’ll send the command to let the luminary here go supernova. After that, we can head home. I can use the rest.”\n\nIx turned back to the dead Earth for the last time. She stared out the window for a while before finally nodding to Bela. She then turned to leave the bridge.\n\n“I’m going to lie down for a bit. Let me know if you need anything.” Saying this, she left the bridge.\n\nBela shook her head. Her friend always did have a soft spot for these corporeal creatures, but she was taking this failure a little too personally. As she keyed the sequence to begin the supernova effect and set course for home, she made a mental note to recommend to her friend that they take a break before embarking on the next experiment. Maybe she’d feel better after a little time off. Ix was right about one thing, though: this lot did seem to have a great deal of potential once; they just never learned to get out of their own way. Sad, really, when one thought about it.\n\nThe great ship shuddered once and disappeared, leaving only a dead world in a little backwater part of the universe, soon to be wiped clean.\n"
  title: Potential Loss
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Martin Spernau
  date: 2006-11-08
  day: '08'
  month: 11
  text: "This time it hurt. Which was rather odd.\n\nHe could remember losing body parts in battle before, but never had it hurt. He clearly recalled losing most of his right leg to a direct plasma hit on his way into the bunker at 23-0-9. That had only slowed his progress in killing each and every one of the rebels holding the bunker. He finished them all off – 23 in total – before collapsing. The extraction team had pulled him from under a pile of headless bodies and body parts. Just two days later he had been ready to storm the gates to 24-2-16.\n\nHe felt real pain where his hand had been.\n\nThey had designed this new body of his to be unstoppable. Any damage done to it could be repaired. All he needed to ensure was that it was his side that sent the extraction team. If this body made it out, he couldn’t be killed.\n\nThey had also designed it to feel no pain. He had a status display instead, loss of efficiency, mobility, in percent. The loss of his right hand should not have bothered him that much. He lost his sidearm and with it, his long ranged attack advantage, but he was configured to be a deadly machine in close combat. This body packed enough punch to finish this job barehanded if need be. The damage had already been dealt with; there was no blood or anything.\n\nBut this time there was pain. The pain was new.\n\nAnd the pain did not stop. It did not register in his display, but it felt all too real just the same.  Disbelieving, he held up the stump where his hand had been just moments before. It was now sprouting a long combat blade to replace his hand and sidearm.\n\nHis hand was gone, but it still hurt like mad. This body did not feel pain! It was not designed to.\n\nThe pain!\n\nConfused, he stopped in mid stride, blackness filling his vision. He never noticed the bolt of superheated plasma that took his head off.\n\nThere was no pain this time.\n\n###\n\n“Lucky shot Private Kern! You saved our lives! You are a hero!”\n\n“That was no lucky shot Sarge. It was just standing there looking at its hand”\n\n“Still, your hit enabled us to take the Mech down. It would have had us all! Don’t be so humble!”\n\n“Really Sarge, I don’t think it was my headshot that stopped it. It just stood there and stared at it’s missing hand. As if it was in agony…”\n\n“Oh, come on! These things don’t feel pain.”\n\n“Sarge, I’d like to check the vids of this encounter. I have a suspicion we might have found an O.D. here.”\n\n“You mean the soldier they downloaded into this Mech originally died by losing his hand? Come on!”\n\n“Well, it clearly seemed to be in pain and confusion, and as you said, these things don’t register pain through damage.”\n\n“Hmmm! So you think it was experiencing a memory of its original’s death? Hmmm! Good thinking. Any other characteristics we might use to identify on the field?”\n\n“It seemed to act right-handed although it was configured left handed. I think it was using that sidearm in its right hand with deadly efficiency. Maybe the download was a firearms specialist or sniper or something. All its kills at range were headshots. Oh! And it seemed to take an awful lot of care to make sure opponents were actually dead before moving on. I haven’t heard of many Mechs do that.”\n\n“Figures – a download that makes sure there is nothing left to download when it kills. Ok. This is going into the Identification Database. Let’s see if they downloaded this one into more Mechs. If we can I.D. them in the field, we’ll at least know how to hurt them now!”\n"
  title: Original Death
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Benjamin Fischer
  date: 2006-11-09
  day: '09'
  month: 11
  text: "“The Americans’ new weapon is unstoppable, sir.”\n\nThe Admiral grunted. “That’s a bold claim, Commander Caswell,” he said, shifting in his deep leather chair before the wall of screens. “Care to expand on that?”\n\n“We weren’t able to detect it, not even when we risked using radar,” winced Caswell. His right arm was in a sling, and he coughed softly after every sentence.\n\n“So it came out of nowhere and destroyed your ship.”\n\n“No sir, we had some warning,” continued Caswell. “Not every hit is a kill, sir. It’s the accumulated damage that destroyed us.”\n\n“When did you know you were in trouble?” asked the Admiral.\n\n“Ten seconds, sir. The first hull breach occurred then.”\n\nThe Admiral leaned in. “And before that? Why didn’t you run?”\n\n“Sir, we couldn’t. Maneuver and clear the orbit, a minute at best. And by then we were crippled.”\n\n“Your XO said it sounded like rain.”\n\n“Yes. He said that a few times before he died,” said Caswell.\n\n“Well, does it?”\n\n“Sir. I was born on Luna. I’ve only seen rain in the movies.”\n\nThe Admiral grunted. Caswell was a true child of Diana–an incredible spaceship driver but dumb as a brick when it came to anything worth knowing.\n\n“Commander, what size were these projectiles?”\n\n“They were this size, sir.”\n\nCaswell held out something resembling an a pair of black dice with his good left hand. The Admiral squinted and the cameras on the far end of his connection zoomed in on the pitch black cubes until they filled his screens. Six perfectly milled sides, manufactured out of maybe carbon chains, maybe vitreous fibers, maybe rare earths–the details weren’t important. They were transparent to the very best fire control radars and next to impossible to spot with anything else in the sensor suite of a spaceship.\n\n“They hit you with a missile loaded with those?” asked the Admiral.\n\n“No sir. They’ve already seeded the entire orbit,” said Caswell.\n\nThe Admiral sat back in his chair.\n\n“The entire orbit?”\n\n“Yessir. And they’ve got ships ready to hit more orbits. The Fleet needs to-”\n\n“Thank you, Commander,” said the Admiral. “You do all of us on Luna proud.” He waved his finger and another face replaced the wounded officer.\n\n“Captain Lothar, get Commander Caswell to a corpsman. See to it that he is sedated so that his wounds heal faster.”\n\n“Yessir,” said the Captain, and he was just as quickly replaced by a burly and red-faced civilian.\n\n“Chairman Franco,” smiled the Admiral. “Sir, I have news from Low Earth Orbit.”\n\n“Yes, Marcus. I have been awaiting your report,” said the large man in his screens. “The Americans–they are moving ahead?”\n\n“Yes.”\n\n“This micrometeorite blockade. Is it all that Intel thinks it is?”\n\n“Yes. I sent one of our strongest ships,” the Admiral responded. “It was unsuccessful.”\n\nThe Chairman mulled on this thought and then asked “Your intentions, Marcus?”\n\n“If they want to build a wall, let them build a wall,” said the Admiral.\n\n“Easy to say when one plans on helping them with the mortar,” the Chairman replied.\n\n“I’ve told you, sir: the possibility remains that they might be able to slip missiles through that screen,” said the Admiral.\n\n“And what of our abilities?” the Chairman said, raising an eyebrow.\n\nThe Admiral smiled. “Sir, we sit on top of the gravity well and throw rocks. Those things can dent our boulders all they like.”\n\nThe Chairman was silent again.\n\n“Marcus,” he finally said, “Let our contribution join theirs.”\n\n“Absolutely, sir,” said the Admiral, his weathered hands rolling a tiny black cube between them.\n"
  title: The Wall
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Patrica Stewart
  date: 2006-11-10
  day: 10
  month: 11
  text: "The finals of the twenty-fourth biannual solar wind races were in their thirty-ninth day.  The race course was a 15,000,000,000 mile Z-shaped trek within the Alpha Centuri system.  The Alpha Centuri system was considered ideal for solar wind racing because it contained three stars.  The light from each star provides the primary propulsion for one leg of the race.  The ships start near Alpha Centuri A, the brightest star, and accelerate toward Alpha Centuri B, 23 AU away.  At a distance of 2 AU from B, the ships leave the A-B plain, and maintain a constant distance from the red dwarf, Alpha Centauri C (aka, Proxima).  After an additional 51 AU, the ships turn from their tangential course to “radial-away,” and sail for the finish line.  Although the inertia re-vector compensators allows each ship to retain most of the speed they developed during previous legs, the winner of the race was usually the ship that could best collect the feeble light of Proxima (19,000 times fainter than Earth’s Sun).\n\nOver the past fifteen months, the 64 one person ships had been reduced to two, the SS Asimov, and the SS Weinbaum.  The Asimov, piloted by Horatio Clarke, was currently in first place as the two ships were within a 600 million miles of the finish line.  The Weinbaum, piloted by Lee Midier, was attempting to block the Asimov’s light.  ‘Blocking light’ was a standard racing maneuver for the trailing ship.  Place your 532 square mile sail (over 50% larger than the city of New York) between the light source and the sail of the leading ship, and you get all the photons.  You accelerate, they only coast.  If you’re really good, or lucky, you could pass them before the finish line.\n\nBoth ships were currently ‘running with the photons,’ so the optimum sail shape was parabolic, like the mirror in a reflecting telescope.  In an effort to keep free of Weinbaum’s shadow, Clarke initiated a variable corkscrew maneuver by reversing the polarity of a one square mile portion of his sail, at the 6:00 position, along the periphery.  He then advanced the polarized area, sometimes clockwise, sometimes counter-clockwise, to keep his sail in full Proxima-light.  Captain Clarke watched with pure enjoyment as the Weinbaum floundered repeatedly in its effort the match his variable course.  Clarke activated the ship-to-ship comm unit.  “Give up, Lee.  I’m no midshipman.  Try something else, like jettisoning some dead weight.  I recommend you start with the Captain.”\n\nBecause the Weinbaum was 30,000,000 miles behind the Asimov, Clarke had to wait over five minutes to hear Lee’s radio reply.  “We’re still two days out, Horatio.  You have to sleep sometime.”\n\nBut neither man slept.  The two ships continued their light duel for the next two days, but the Weinbaum was never able to overtake the Asimov.  The Asimov won by a distance equal to the Earth-Mars close approach.\n\nAt the celebration banquet, Captain Clarke accepted the trophy for the seventh consecutive time, and announced his retirement from racing.  A few hours later, as Clarke was preparing to leave the reception, Lee Midier confronted him.  “You can’t retire, you old bastard.  I almost beat you this time. You have to give me one more chance.  If you go, who shall I race, what shall I do?”\n\nWith a half smirk on his face, Clarke stepped onto the transporter pad and said “Frankly, Midier, I don’t give a damn.”  Then he dissolved away.\n"
  title: Gone with the Solar Wind
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2006-11-11
  day: 11
  month: 11
  text: "Unsol remembered his twelfth birthday, remembered his fathers face alight with pride as he read aloud Unsol’s draft notice. ‘You’re going to be a pilot, Unsol.’ His father beamed ‘You’ll be the most valuable commodity in the Corps.’\n\nThirteen years they had invested in him, teaching him, leading him, shaping him. Days turned into years racing war craft through fields of stars and cavernous landscapes of dust and stone, sometimes hunting, sometimes the hunted as they prepared him for his future.\n\nAt twenty five he pledged his allegiance to the Corps. ‘I will gladly sacrifice my life to protect our Earth, I pledge my life to the Corps.’ The next day he pledged his love and honour to his new wife. The words ‘Semper Fi’ etched themselves upon the man. These were the happiest days in his memory.\n\nHot wired into the cockpit of his Slipstream, his every thought, every twitch of his wrist, each flick of a fingertip was translated into immediate motion; pitch, yaw, roll. He merely willed the craft to move, and kept his eye on his prey. A more perfect union of man and machine was simply beyond his comprehension. Pushing through the dust cloud above the surface to hug the craterous landscape, his squadron chased their elusive quarry through canyons and across wide open plains to the mountains. They could taste victory, but they had been careless, arrogant. Unsol’s last memory was of tearing metal, the rush of atmosphere and the smell of burning flesh.\n\nIt took twelve months to rebuild him, but after spending thirteen years creating him, reconstruction was an economic viability.\n\nHis wife had attended his funeral. There were Corpsmen firing rifles into the sky, and a squadron flew the missing man formation over the graveyard for each as their friends and families paid their last respects. The pilots watched the proceedings from their hospital beds. Each wife fathered a child, some right away, some not for months after. The Corps knew how rare pilot DNA was, so they helped facilitate the in-vitro as part of the bereavement benefit package. Unsol would never be seen by his wife, or his child. He was dead to them both, though he would still fly to protect them.\n\nSecurity allowed him into the nursery wing after his son was born. Unsol stood in the hall, staring through the glass at a sea of tiny hands none of them would ever get to hold, smiling faces that would never smile for them. Unsol reached with phantom arms and felt new polymer hands connect with the glass, pickups extending reflexively from his palms, skittering on the smooth surface as they searched for an access point to interface with. He shuffled inside his legs, and felt the bulk of thighs and boots not entirely his own move him closer. The lights dimmed in the nursery, and the glass suddenly reflected back the white dome where his face should have been, fogging below the chin line where his air exchanger vented moist air forward. He could feel a tugging in his chest where his own heart once had been, and pain where he knew tears could no longer flow.\n\nWhen Unsol agreed to sacrifice his life for the Corps, he had only meant that he was willing to die.\n"
  title: I Pledge My Life
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Jim Stitzel
  date: 2006-11-12
  day: 12
  month: 11
  text: "The bag of chips was all but empty, just a few crumbs left in the bottom.  He shook the bag, bouncing it in his hand, so that the niblets would fall together in the corner.  There were so few left – and he wasn’t one to waste anything – so he tilted the bag to look inside to see just how much of his snack remained.  The chips in the bottom reflected off the bag’s silver interior, and he was torn between the decision to pinch out what was left with his fingers or to simply tip the bag back and dump the crumbs straight into his mouth.  A seemingly simple decision, yet he felt his mind stutter, then freeze up as solidly as two pieces of metal welded together.\n\nAnd there he remained.\n\n* * *\n\nThe two programmers observed their immobile subject on the monitor.\n\n“Brilliant bit of programming there, Bud.  How exactly did you induce that response?” Thom asked.\n\nBud chuckled.  “It was pretty simple, actually.  The silver lining in the chip bag contains several thousand lines of scrolling code – invisible to the naked eye, of course,” he said with a wink.  “The program running inside the bag forced our subject into a state of indecision, then compounded the response, effectively throwing his brain into an infinite loop.  The program essentially prevents him from action because the decision-making process never ends.”  He glanced at the monitor again.  “By now the program’s subroutines have copied over to his brain and should be running all on their own there.”\n\nThom nodded and asked the next logical question.  “So.  How do we get him unstuck?”\n\nThere was no response from Bud.  Thom looked at him and saw that his face had paled and his eyes were wide with shock.  Thom felt his gut clench in a combination of panic and fear as he looked at the monitor again.  The horrible truth of what they had done came to him suddenly.\n\nThere was no way to end the program because the program had no ‘kill’ command – let alone a way to execute it – and no way to ‘reboot’ the subject.  Neither of them had thought of that when they started alpha testing their project.\n\nThom said the only thing that he could.\n\n“Oh.”\n"
  title: Mesmerized
  year: 2006
- 
  author: David Zhou
  date: 2006-11-13
  day: 13
  month: 11
  text: "“Have a good weekend, Mr. Lark,” he said, scooting his chair underneath his desk and shuffling his papers a bit.\n\n“Don’t stay too late, y’hear?”\n\nHe laughed, and shook his head.  Smiling faintly, he grabbed his bag and started for the door.  He had a big couple of days ahead of him, and he wanted to be sure he was ready.  His pace quickening, he called Susan.\n\nThe wildly swerving car barely slowed as it plowed into the man walking out of the office building, cell phone to his head, and quite suddenly, the world faded to gray and shifting black.\n\n“Argh!” he shouted, throwing his visor and leaping out of the receptor.  Grumbling to himself, he sat down at a neighboring console, and flipped through some screens.  There it was.\n\nNathan Wilson.  Twenty-four.  Died of severe head truma.\n\n“Figures,” he said.  “What I get for choosing one of the younger ones.”\n\nHe sighed, and went back to the screen, switching away from group A, and into D.  One of the profiles struck his interest.\n\nWilliam Lister, eighty-six.  Died in his sleep.  Peaceful enough.\n\nHe loaded.\n\nWater.  He needed to breathe, his head a pounding maelstrom of pressure and panic and he was sinking deeper, the light above dimmer and further and his vision, twisting and pulsating and that was it.  The world faded to gray and shifting black.\n\nHe didn’t do anything at first.  Just took big, heaping gulps of air.  Once he properly made sure that he was not still drowning, he frowned and jotted down a note.\n\nCategorization mistake.  Group D element William Lister.  Listed termination was not as experienced.  Error corrected.\n\nHe leaned back in the receptor, looking around.\n\nIt wasn’t much, the Reentrant Room.  Circular and ringed with consoles, the only thing that attacked the eye was the receptor in the middle.\n\nThe receptor.  He grinned.  It was the only thing that kept him at the job.  Most people hated qualifying the reentrants.  Something about the responsibility of mortality.  But he didn’t mind.\n\nHe was the dam.  He was the filter.  He was the guard at the gate, turning away the filth from the grandeur that was the System.\n\nYes, it required him to possess a physical body, to be exiled and vomited from the System.\n\nBut he didn’t care.  He may be all alone in the room, but in the end, he had ultimate control.  He could dictate and manage which of these poor digital imprints of fragile souls would be allowed to reenter.  Be reborn, and have another chance at the virtual life of a member of the System.\n\nHe smiled.  It was worth it in the end.  He flipped through another couple of profile screens.  Hm.  This one might be interesting.\n\nPolenza Tipates.  Fourty-five.  Implosion.\n"
  title: Dream of Other Days
  year: 2006
- 
  author: C. Hale
  date: 2006-11-14
  day: 14
  month: 11
  text: "Shortly after the perfection of the gravity lens telescope, astronomers had tracked a celestial body twice the size of Earth and calculated its trajectory as intersecting Earth’s orbit. A full year of recalculations and simulations had all yielded the same results. Announcements were made. Debates were sparked. Cults rose, and fell, and governments toppled. Humanity had one hundred and three years to enjoy the planet, and two generations grew up knowing that they would be the last.\n\nDauk looked up at the sky towards the brilliant sunburst of another meteor entering the atmosphere.\n\n“Is that the one, Mommy?” he asked, clutching at a tall, pale woman’s hand.\n\n“No, sweetie. There are at least two days left. Go play with the other boys,” she said, brushing a tear away as Dauk ran off to romp. Inside, the broadcaster was making his final remarks.\n\n“Reports say that the meteor cloud preceding Celestial Body 09-22-2011 will peak at approximately midnight tonight, leaving a nineteen hour window for the departure of the American arkship. Asia reports tentative success with its early-window launch and the European Bloc arkship has been reported as failed during separation. No word on whether auxiliaries are being prepared.”\n\nOutside, Dauk watched another meteor streak by.\n"
  title: Tears from the Sky
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J. S. Kachelries
  date: 2006-11-15
  day: 15
  month: 11
  text: "We had been in Antarctica for two months studying the alien spacecraft.  It had been discovered a month earlier when a portion of the Ross Ice Self caved into the sea.  Based on the thickness of the ice covering the ship, we estimated that it was buried approximately 120,000 years ago.  The ship was saucer shaped (big surprise), and was 318 meters in diameter and 72 meters tall.  The ship had ten habitation floors in the upper portion, with a large cargo hold below that.  We did not find any alien bodies, so we assumed that they were either rescued, decomposed, or they wandered off.  The ship appeared undamaged, so we don’t know why it was abandoned.\n\nMy name is Steve McCoy, a Xenobiologist, and I’m heading the team trying to learn about the alien’s physiology (mechanical, physical, and biochemical functions).  I admit, not having a body is inconvenient, but as scientists, it’s routine for us to deduce information using limited data and our powers of deduction.  For example, we concluded that the aliens were much shorter than us, because the ceiling height was only 1.2 meters.  Furthermore, they were not humanoid, because we could not find any furniture for sitting or laying down, utensils such as knives and forks, or equipment that required hands for gripping or manipulation.  Therefore, you could logically deduce that they were probably serpent-like, insectoid, or hoofed quadrupeds.  In addition, if they died on site, their bodies had no “hard” parts, like bones or teeth.  We found traces of degraded biomass along the cargo hold walls, which we believe are remnants of their food supply.  It smelled “fishy,” but everything smells fishy in Antarctica.  Remarkably, this degraded biomass contained amino acids and proteins very similar to our own.  The similarities were sufficient enough that had the aliens crashed on land, anywhere but in Antarctica, they probably would have been able to survive on Earth’s plant and animal life.  Unfortunately, the poor devils crashed in Antarctica where there was no food.  They no doubt starved to death once they consumed all of their supplies.\n\nI was reviewing my interim report when Dr. Smith (Information Technology Team Leader, aka, head geek) paged me to come to the bridge.  Recently, Dr. Smith had been able to download data from their mainframe computer.  Fortunately, their technology was similar enough to ours to decipher some of their language.  His cryptologists identified a dozen or so words: a, the, is, we, no, it, yes, food, home, safe, mission, suitable, predators, desolate, etc.  There were also sub-routines containing what he believes to be digital images.  When I arrived on the bridge, Dr. Smith was at his interface terminal.  “I’ve got it, Steve,” he said.  “I’ve accessed their personnel files.  I’m uploading the crew manifest now.  There should be images of the aliens.  We’ll see if your hypotheses are correct.”  Slowly, horizontal streaks cascaded down his monitor, and an image of the aliens formed.  “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “They’re penguins!”\n"
  title: The Flawless Nature of Deductive Reasoning
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2006-11-16
  day: 16
  month: 11
  text: "The black non-stick plastic of the cop’s fist presses my fat lips up against my teeth until they split. The drugs from the gas are slowing all this down and adding the colours. I’m seeing so clearly and feeling none of it. My own blood squirts hot into my mouth and I can taste the pennies.\n\nThrough all of this I maintain eye contact with where I guess the cop’s eyes are behind the featureless dark face-shield he’s wearing. I can see myself reflected there and warped around in a fisheye way. I’m smiling at myself. I look like a clown in a whorehouse.  I look like I’m having the time of my life.  I chuckle wetly at that and wink at myself.  Looking back, I can’t decide if it was the laugh or the wink that made the cop angry.\n\nThe cop’s hardened riot-fist loops around again and this time my head rings like a bell and it all goes dark.\n\nI wake up in the holding van, cuffed to the seat, with a head full of crunched up milk cartons. The effects of the gas have worn off.\n\nThis is the third time I’ve been caught red handed by the cops. The first time, I took my behavioural modifier out with a knife during the Black Out in ’76. I was caught employing minors as delivery girls four months later.  They took me down hard for that. No sims.  I did my time. I got out.\n\nThe new behavioural modifiers were in the blood. They couldn’t just be dug out. I was happy. I helped old people across the street. I stopped to feed puppies. I stepped into the middle of arguments and tried to mediate. That’s how I met Jake.\n\nJake was arguing on the sidewalk near Shacktown. I stopped there and tried to get them to see both sides of the issue. Jake shot the other guy and then shot me in the knee. Seeing me apologize there with one leg useless made him realize that I’d been conditioned.\n\nWell, one good turn deserves another, they say. Jake strapped me to a black table in shacktown and brought in some Doctors With Problems. They gave me a transfusion that scrubbed my veins clean. It’s not an experience I recommend.\n\nJake took me in and got me going again. He told me about the heist.\n\nWe were in the building and it was going well. Only two of the hostages were dead and the creds were being packed into the coffins right in front of us. I guess Jake should have put a few more bullets into that manager guy’s armoured head. It was him who pressed the alarm.\n\nThe rockets came up and through the windows into the bank, billowing their green joker gas. The officers came in after that.\n\nJake is looking at me from across the van with a sheepish smile. I’m going to go down hard for this. Three strikes. I’m out.\n"
  title: Three Strikes
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Pyai (aka Megan Hoffman)
  date: 2006-11-17
  day: 17
  month: 11
  text: "Max sat behind the deck, and yawned. He saw out the glass through the dusty blinds of his office two men in dark suits walking briskly down his dark hallway. He looked around, quickly. He shoved the Twinkies into his desk drawer, flicked the entire ash tray into his trash can, and took his feet off the desk.\n\nThe two men opened the door to the office without knocking. “Clyde Agbai?”\n\n“Uh, Clyde went home sick yesterday. I’m Maxwell Fitzkee. Can I help you gentlemen?”\n\nThe two men looked at each other, their glances inscrutable.\n\n“Are you handling the transmissions which emanate from that dish?”\n\nThe first man nodded out the one small window in the office towards the giant white dish that sat out maybe half a mile from the base. The GBD, Great Big Dish, also referred to as the BFD, was entirely operated from this little bunker which was all that remained from the decades of scientific studies. Recently its total monetary support had been coming in from commercial messages sent into outer space and the sale of little magnets bearing the GBD logo.\n\n“Uh, yes.” Max straightened his tie. He wasn’t the number one sales lead for nothing. “In fact I have over one thousand transmissions on my record. So anything you gentleman need, I can arrange for you. We also offer package deals if you have a longer message, want to encode video, or are buying it as a gift for a relative.”\n\nMax reached into his desk and pulled out a bright pamphlet.\n\nThe second dark-suited man who hadn’t said anything yet handed him a single sheet of paper on heavy cardstock. There was a gold seal at the top that looked vaguely familiar. Max quickly scanned it so as to make a semi-personal but not intrusive comment in order to win their trust.\n\n“This is a UN matter of urgency, regarding the cause of all the recent natural disasters. Please just send the transmission.” the first man said slowly.\n\n“You mean like Hurricane Uli and Hurricane Zetta? What exactly is their cause? Global warming?” Max smiled, trying to be charming.\n\nThe first man looked at him. “Solar flares.”\n\nAs no more conversation looked forthcoming, Max pursed his lips and began scanning and typing in the data. As he did, he was surprised to find it was an official UN resolution of condemnation for the actions of a terrorist body.\n\n“Okay gentleman, your message has been encoded and it ready to be sent out by the second largest satellite dish in the entire world. Now, where would you like this aimed?” Max slid out a sky chart including celestial bodies, famous constellations and religious stations. “Here’s a list of our more popular destinations if you need some help deciding.”\n\n“No thank you, we already know. Please send it to the sun.”\n"
  title: UN Resolution 951167-B
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Michelle Pitman
  date: 2006-11-18
  day: 18
  month: 11
  text: "A holo-spa is not really that much fun.\n\nFor one thing you can’t actually feel holographic water. If they ever figure out how to make holo-water feel like its real, someone out there is going to become 1: Real famous, real quick! And 2: Make a fricking whole lot of money!\n\nSonic Particle Wave showers and baths have pretty much replaced water for the job of getting clean. A holo-spa is basically warm air and SPW’s. The warm air makes it bearable, just.\n\nI remember being in real water.\n\nI was a little kid back then. There was this neighbour of ours who owned a water tank in his back yard. It was illegal of course and he used to go to great lengths to hide the damn thing. Had this elaborate shed constructed over it in expensive stealth tiles so that when the Police Probes flew over it, it didn’t register as being a tank etc. Rather clever really.\n\nA holo-spa isn’t a patch on that old water tank, although the water in that tank was pretty much filthy and fetid most of the time. We never queried what manner of foul and pestilent matter lurked in the bottom, all we cared about was the sheer wonder of the sensation of being in water! Bloody marvelous that feeling! Still gives me goose-bumps even now, remembering it.\n\nSo anyway! They’ve done all the usual hocus-pocus science stuff to create water. We’ve got hydrogen fuel cells pumping out hot water as fast as they can, it’s just not enough. The oceanic desalinators are all but exhausted now – the sea has become too salty even for them to cope. Nearly all the water manufacturing plants from water re-claiming to water synthesis have been so heavily regulated in output by the Foundation that many of them have just gone bust, shut their doors and given up bothering to try. But that’s typical of frickin’ governments isn’t it? What we need the most of they ensure is always in the shortest supply!\n\nIt’s pretty tough having to live in this weird dry world. It’s getting so bad now that there’s talk of an evacuation to the off-world planets. I don’t see how that’s going to make a difference really, seeing as hardly any other planet around here has enough of anything, let alone water, to support a couple of million life-forms. It seems the whole galaxy, has pretty much dried up!\n\nWater: the stuff of life! Yeah! But that was all well and good when there was plenty of it about. So now its holo-spa’s and synthesized liquid proteins to satiate our need for the wet stuff.\n\nI guess if people had been a little more careful back …oh well! Can’t go whining now that the water horse has bolted eh?\n\nBut geez! I miss that water tank!\n"
  title: Wet
  year: 2006
- 
  author: S. ‘Hrekka’ Clough
  date: 2006-11-19
  day: 19
  month: 11
  text: "The launch chamber decompressed, the escaping air flushing Will’s Swarm from the Carrier like so much flotsam. His sixteen Swarm were joining others who were launching from the Colichemarde and her two sister ships. His visor highlighted each group as he looked at them, bringing them into focus against the inky blackness.\n\n“Remember, the enemy ship is down!” Talen barked over the radio. He was remonstrating a few of the most inexperienced members of Will’s Swarm. They had been falling upwards, their faces pointing towards the ship that they were assaulting. The Athena‘s guns could shred their helmets like wet cardboard. It was only the wasplike sheath they wore from their waists down that was truly armoured. Soon enough, they were all dropping together, like oversized shells, towards the doomed Athena. His Swarm dodged the Athena‘s anti-missile munitions with ease. William scanned the battlefield. Everything seemed illuminated in the dull secondhand light. Except the three carriers. Now high above, each ship gleamed, a newmade coin hanging in the heavens.\n\nThe first of his Swarm touched down onto the Athena‘s hull.\n\n“Hook! Andrew! I need some holes in this bloody ship!” Will bellowed over the radio. He hovered about ten metres off the hull of the ship, AG humming. A little dartgun secreted in his glove spat four darts. Red circles blossomed onto the hull, and the two drillmen got to work. Their armour split, and retracted partially, allowing them to stand and brace against the industrial drills they carried. It didn’t take them long to finish. The drills quietened, and Andrew carefully dropped a blasting charges into each of the holes. He finished just before the ship’s lattice attempted to heal over the surface wounds.\n\n“Hold fast! Blast in five!” Will shouted. Hook and Andrew cleared the area, discarding the drills, and drawing their assault weapons. The rest of the Swarm did likewise: boarding axes and pistols, shotguns and blades of all descriptions came out of their sheaths. Will drew his long-handled chainaxe, and waited.\n\nThe explosion, when it came, was quite beautiful. The four charges detonated in succession, blowing pillars of fire down into the bowels of the ship, and up, fueled by solidox and the ship’s atmosphere. Gas vented from the breach, and the panel floated away. Then Will’s Swarm were pouring in, their agrav packs keeping them aloft against the pull of the expensive gee-floors. They tore through the ship, blasting holes in bulkheads, forcing decompression. Choking, dying technicians were dispatched by the Swarm’s flashing blades.\n\nAnd it was all over. The bridge still had air. All the command crew lay dead at their stations. Five Swarm stood in a semicircle in front of the captain’s chair, their armour fully stowed. The captain lay on the floor. Will’s axe lay across his exposed throat.\n\n“Separatism is a doomed cause,” said Will. He lifted the axe, and smashed it down, just once.\n"
  title: Swarm
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R.Blackwell
  date: 2006-11-20
  day: 20
  month: 11
  text: "Georgie threw the best parties, mostly because he had a carpet he didn’t care about. Heather and Ralph used the monthly parties as an excuse to play drinking games and challenge each other to contests. The winner was usually responsible for dragging the other the two blocks home. Since Ralph had already gone upstairs to vomit, Heather had preemptively declared herself the night’s winner.\n\n“Another drink Georgie.” she said, leaning against a cabinet in the kitchen.\n\nGeorgie handed her another drink.  “Where’s Ralph?”\n\nHeather flipped her purple hair over one shoulder. “He’s in the bathroom.”\n\n“Still? He’s been in there for a while.”\n\nHeather nodded. “I’ll go check on him, see that he hasn’t fallen in.” At the top of the spiral staircase Heather could see Ralph’s black boots under the bathroom door. “Are you okay baby?” She tapped on the door.\n\nRalph’s voice was tired. “Just taking a sit down while my liver cleans itself. I might do a little reboot in a minute.”\n\nHeather took a sip from her plastic cup. “Drink too much?”\n\n“Nothing a reboot can’t handle.” Ralph’s voice crackled, a current running though it.\n\nHeather tried the doorknob, it was locked. “Baby, you don’t sound too good. Can I come in?”\n\nThere was a thud, flesh smacking tile inside the bathroom.\n\n“Baby? What happened? Are you okay?” Heather sent a query to Ralph’s system. She pounded on the door. Her inbox received an error message. User unavailable. Heather banged her shoulder against the bathroom door, forcing the lock against the old wood in Georgie’s apartment.\n\n“Heather, are you breaking my house up there?” asked Georgie “Come back to the party!”\n\n“Call 911,” screamed Heather, slamming her shoulder into the door. She tried pinging his system again. User Unavailable. Ping. User Unavailable. Heather knew her arm was hurting, knew she was going to have a bruise, but Ralph was in there and he wasn’t answering. “Ralph!” she kicked at the door, screaming her lover’s name.\n\nThe rotten wood gave way and the door swung open, banging into Ralph’s body. He was laying awkwardly against the bathtub a red welt rising on his forehead. Heather knelt beside him. Georgie appeared in the doorway, scarf over his left shoulder, shock on his face.\n\n“Oh shit.” he said.\n\n“Call the ambulance.” said Heather.\n\nGeorgie paced back in forth in front of the bathroom. “Shit. Shit.”\n\n“Just call them Georgie!” yelled Heather, slamming her fists into her thighs. Heather put her hands over Ralph’s mouth. He wasn’t breathing. She put her ear on his chest, but it was like an empty cage. Heather breathed into his mouth, but his chest didn’t inflate, it was like blowing on a wall.\n\n“No. Oh Ralph. No. No. No.” She reached into her throat behind her teeth and up, flipping open the little panel in the back of her throat. A little too hasty, a little too quick, she sliced her throat with her fingernail. Tears bit her eyes. She gagged a little as she pulled the wire out from the back of her throat. Holding her cord out with her teeth, she opened Ralph’s mouth and reached back, fumbling to get his slick panel open, fumbling to pull out his cord, spit and blood on her hands, his or hers, didn’t matter, linking the two cords, instructing for a power transfer. This Ralph, who let her rest on his shoulder even if it made his arm fall asleep, who gave her sips of his coffee and let her wear his t-shirt.  She was going to jumpstart him.\n\nA screen lit up in front of her vision. Ralph’s full name and a prompt for password access. The last time she saw this was two years ago, when they first decided to sleep together and did the direct connection scan for STD’s. Ralph’s system scanning her, feeding him a full report, every physical secret. Her system scanning Ralph, telling her about a leg once broken and the drugs he used to take.\n\nIf Ralph changed his password in those two years, she wouldn’t be able to affect his system, no password, no access. You were supposed to change your password every six months. Please be lazy, Ralph, she prayed. Please baby, be my lazy, lazy man. She entered that two year old code and waited, waited, Georgie back at the door just watching both of them. Georgie putting a hand on her shoulder, saying something she couldn’t quite hear, paramedics on their way, maybe she should disconnect, it wasn’t working.\n\nThen Heather felt her heart pull, her eyes get heavy, lights dimming and then back on as her system readjusted to the power output.  Ralph opened his eyes, hand going to his mouth, touching his cord.\n\n“What’s up baby?” he said, his mouth making mutilated words from the cord. Heather felt herself shaking, her eyes squeezing shut, hands on Ralph’s chest, yes, really there, really breathing, awake and heart and lungs all pumping and inflating and moving like they should. Ralph saying “Sawwy.” around the cord. Heather closed the space between them, holding him in her arms.\n"
  title: Jump Start
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Michael “Freeman” Herbaugh
  date: 2006-11-21
  day: 21
  month: 11
  text: "“Sit down Philip,” the old man sighed, “I’m going to tell you a unique story.”\n\nPhilip had never seen the Old Man look his age, yet today he looked every day of his 94 years. He’d only been working for him for five years now but the Old Man seemed to like him and had treated him very well.\n\n“Every trillionaire has some cliché story about how they used to be down on his luck and worked his way up from nothing. I’m no different, I have the same story. But what I am going to tell you is what turned me around. This is a story I’ve told no one.”\n\nThe Old Man went on to lay the story at Philip’s feet. He told him of the time when he was 19 and in school. He felt his life lacked purpose and that if he were gone it wouldn’t affect another living soul around him. This was when he attempted to kill himself and failed.\n\n“The bandages were still tight on my wrists and my hands were tender when I was released back to my dorm room. She was waiting for me there.”\n\nThe Old Man told of a young co-ed girl he didn’t recognize who was waiting for him. She didn’t say anything to him but immediately kissed him. In his fragile emotional state he allowed her to make love to him.\n\n“When we were spent, she gave me a present, you see, a length of thread. She explained to me that this thread was my life and that if I truly wished to end it, all I had to do was cut it. She said, ‘Every life has a destiny, but it’s not spelled out for you. Fate only goes so far.’ I thought she was some new age depression counselor, but I kept the thread anyway. When she left I caught her reflection in my mirror and I swear to you her face looked immensely ancient while at the same time extremely young. I kept the thread”\n\nPhilip listened as he explained how he had never seen the girl again and that each year the thread had grown in length. Eventually he came to believe that the thread did truly represent his life. At the age of 30 when he purchased his first home he cut away the bark of an oak tree on his property and embedded the thread just underneath the length of its trunk.\n\n“As that tree has grown, so has my life. I have a large family now and a large corporation as well. My one life has touched countless lives. I only hope that my affect has been positive on the majority of them. One or two I’ve crushed like bugs but I do not regret that. I just hope that the ones I care for most, like you Philip, live their days without regret and realize that they do affect the people around them.”\n\nHaving finished his unusual story, the Old Man slumped in his chair and looked even more fragile than he had at the start of their meeting. He explained to Philip that the tree he had put the thread in was dying from some arboreal disease and that it was scheduled to be cut down the next morning.\n\n“I have one last task for you Philip. Make sure no one stops that tree from being cut down.”\n"
  title: The Skein Tree
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2006-11-22
  day: 22
  month: 11
  text: "The two of them sat facing each other in the living room, the father and the fidgeting male his daughter had brought home to meet him.  From the kitchen came snatches of conversation, the talk in excited giggles of things only a mother and daughter could talk about with such euphoric fervor.  The two men just surveyed each other warily, awkwardly looking for the right words with which to start a conversation.\n\n‘You’ll have to forgive me, but I’m afraid I’m not quite sure what to say in situations like this.’ It was the father that broke the silence.\n\n‘Sir?’ The younger male looked up quizzically. ‘Situations sir?’\n\n‘You see, my daughter has brought home boys before, not many mind you, don’t get the wrong idea, but this is the first time…’ He trailed off, uncertain how to continue. He shifted his weight in his seat, crossing and uncrossing his legs as he adjusted his shirt cuffs before continuing. ‘Have you had children son?’\n\n‘No sir, I’m a little young for that’, the boy answered, shaking his head, ‘and your daughter, well sir, she’s the first girl that I’ve ever really thought about having a family with.’\n\n‘I see.’ The answer seemed to perplex the father, and he leaned forward, hunching his shoulders. ‘Well imagine yourself for a moment, in a few years, with a daughter…’ the father began, pausing to clear his throat before continuing, ‘…imagine that your daughter came home one day, after having been away for almost a year, and never having mentioned that she was engaged, she introduced you to… well…’ he stopped again, the task of putting his current thought into language was causing him obvious distress.\n\n‘What if she brought home a creature like me?’ The boy, obviously keenly aware of the fathers discomfort, spared him the burden of the words.\n\n‘Yes, I’m sorry – you must understand…’ The father, visibly relieved, tried to justify his unspoken but apparent position. ‘I don’t mean you any prejudice, it’s just your species, these couplings – this is all very new to me.’\n\n‘Sir, were my daughter to bring a partner home to meet me, I would have to believe that she saw something special enough in him to want to share her feelings with her family, and I’d do my best to see what she saw too. I’d trust that she knew her feelings for him better than I could, and I’d try my best to be happy for them both.’\n\nThe father sat back, and smiled at the words spoken by this strange, alien creature before him.  The boy was right. He had to trust his daughter’s judgement, and this boy seemed to be a decent enough fellow. They’d have their challenges to be sure. Not everyone could understand these inter species unions that were only just becoming known to the public, and were far from common. It was the very least he could to be supportive.\n\nThe father raised himself from his chair to tower over the boy as the youth nervously clambered to his feet. The father spoke, and as he did so, he extended one strong chitinous hand to the young man, inviting him to shake it. ‘You seem to have won my daughters heart, and that’s no easy task, so I’ll welcome you then, as the first human to enter our home in peace.’ They smiled, each in his own way openly relieved.\n"
  title: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Alex Meggitt
  date: 2006-11-23
  day: 23
  month: 11
  text: "I shift around on the couch, flipping through the channels and trying to make myself comfortable.  Tim is sitting on the other end, watching the television cycle through sounds and images.  The complacent look in his eye clears for a second as he sits upright and slaps me on the shoulder.\n\n“Go back a couple,” he says, and I tap the down arrow on the remote until he gives the signal and the screen settles on a familiar sitcom.\n\n“You’ve seen this like a dozen times,” I say.\n\n“Yeah, but I like it,” he says.  I sigh and try to balance the remote lengthways on the couch’s arm.  It wavers for a few seconds then falls.  When blindly groping the floor proves worthless, I turn on the only lamp within arm’s reach.\n\n“That lamp kind of sucks,” Tim says without looking away from the TV.  “Wal-Mart’s having a sale this week.  They’ve got some good ones.  Saw it in the paper.”\n\nStill bending forward in my seat, now looking under the table next to me, I turn my head to look at him.  He’s still transfixed by the screen.  After a second, I give up and say I’m hungry.\n\n“Then let’s go to McDonald’s when the show’s over.”\n\n“Why McDonald’s?”\n\n“What? Cause I like it.  It’s good. You like it, too.”\n\nI lean back into a normal sitting position.  “We go there all the time.”\n\n“Cause it’s good.”  He doesn’t close his mouth completely at the end of the sentence, and I stare at the bottoms of his front teeth.  They’re very white despite the number of cigarettes he smokes per day.  Mine aren’t comparable.  He’s been telling me to buy his brand of toothpaste for a while.\n\nWhen the commercials begin, Tim slouches a little and looks at the ceiling.  He’s thinking, and the moment he opens his mouth, I cut him off.\n\n“Tell me something,” I say, pulling a folded piece of paper out of my pocket.  I’ve practiced in my head for a while now.  Slowly and purposefully, I unfold the paper at an angle that lets him read.  His eyes get a little wider as he recognizes the words printed on the gray watermark pattern.  It’s his pay stub, a weekly check from a job he’s never mentioned.  I have a question to ask, but it comes out a mashup of every topic in my head.  “The catalogs, the checks.  Honestly.  Just tell me how long.”\n\n“Why’d you go through my stuff?” he says.\n\n“I went to borrow your toothpaste because mine ran out.  I found it in there.”\n\n“It’s good stuff, isn’t it?  Whitens,” he says, smiling a little.\n\n“Come on.  How long have you been doing this?  Tell me how long you’ve been selling me things.”\n\nHe looks at me, makes a sound, and hesitates.  I glare.\n\n“Remember when we were sixteen?  And I told you to get a few more controllers for your Nintendo?”\n\n“Jesus.”\n\n“I mean, it was just meant to be a summer job at that point.  But they liked me.  And it’s good money.”\n\nI stand up, looking at the floor as I rise, and walk out of the room.  When I return a minute later with my coat on, he’s still looking at the point where I turned the corner and went out of sight.\n\n“Are you going to tell the rest of the guys about this?” he asks.  “If they all know, I’ll find another group of people.  I’ll have to move.  I like you guys.”\n\n“I thought we were going to McDonald’s.  Come on.”\n"
  title: Best Friends
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Kevin Byrne
  date: 2006-11-24
  day: 24
  month: 11
  text: "The adults were all sitting down, watching the children interact with one another; to a soul, they all said the same thing to me: “I cannot believe how well-behaved your son is. We try so hard just to get our child to even listen to what we’re saying, much less do what we tell them.\n\n“What’s your secret?”\n\nI lean in and whisper. “My wife and I drill it into him.”\n\nThey all smirk and nod. “Yeah, right.”\n\nAt that point, I call my son over; when he arrives, I continue the conversation.  “Seriously, we’ve drilled it into him.”\n\nI lift the flap of scalp to show the inch-by-inch square where you can see his brain. “We opened up his skull and inserted electrodes; we were able to turn the behavioral patterns we wanted him to follow into binary code and transmitted them directly into his brain.”\n\nI replaced the flap and told him that he could go back and play with the other kids. I picked up my drink and smiled.\n\n“Next week, we’re teaching him French.”\n"
  title: Children's Programming
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Matt Brubeck
  date: 2006-11-25
  day: 25
  month: 11
  text: "We’re in the Starbucks next to the club, hanging out after a show. Aaron looks up and gives a brief snort. “Check it out,” he says, nodding toward the door. I see a trio of young kids, studying the menu and trying to look cool. I recognize them from the crowd at the concert.\n\n“Time travelers,” Aaron says through a mouthful of croissant. “New arrivals, I’m guessing.”\n\n“What? I think they’re college students.”\n\n“Look again.” Aaron’s eyes twitch toward the newcomers, then back to me. “Their clothes are totally ridiculous, like they were picked out of random fashion magazines from the last decade.”\n\n“I thought they dressed like that because they’re hipsters,” I say, looking again at their off-brand sneakers and thrift-store sweatshirts.\n\n“You know how you always see these kids in low-paying service jobs?” Aaron goes on. “Retail, food service. It’s because they don’t have time to learn the period knowledge they’d need for a trade or professional job. See, I’ve figured it out.” Aaron leans over the table, whispering. “Say you’re a rich kid from the future on wanderjahr. You’ve got a time machine, but what do you do with it? Great Moments In History aren’t going to impress your friends. But if you can see a classic band from the twenty-first century before they made it big?” Aaron raises his eyebrows syly. “Watch, I’m gonna go mess with them.”\n\nAaron washes his pastry down with a swig of coffee, then wanders over to talk to the trio. I can’t hear their replies, but Aaron’s voice carries across the room. “Weren’t you guys at the show? Oh yeah, I know… Did you see them play here last week? Oh man, it was probably their best set ever… Yeah, a real once in a lifetime thing… Yeah, cool… Hey, I gotta go.”\n\nBack at our apartment, we unearth my camera and download the last month’s worth of photos onto Aaron’s laptop. Aaron flips through images until he finds what he’s looking for. “Got ’em,” he proclaims, handing me the computer. On the screen is a photograph from last month’s show. In the back of the club, next to the exit, a trio of hipsters stands in familiar outfits, holding paper cups marked with a distinctive green-and-black logo.\n"
  title: Once in a Lifetime
  year: 2006
- 
  author: James Mallek
  date: 2006-11-26
  day: 26
  month: 11
  text: "It was with a running leap that he finally brought himself to do it.  John hurled himself off the top of the eighty-story Hertz Building.\n\n5 seconds of free fall before he righted himself, face down, parallel to the ground.\n\nTerminal velocity achieved, no more acceleration.  Immediately reversing his acceleration would splatter his guts against the inside of his suit.  A twitch of his calf ignited the chemical rockets sticking out of his ankles.  Horizontal velocity increasing, thus a complete increase of net velocity.\n\n“Shut up Computer.”\n\nThe suits A.I. promptly stopped giving a narration of his actions.\n\nSpreading his arms granted lift, and he swung gently upward between the towering skyscrapers.  An optimal state of powered flight had been achieved.\n\n“Damnit Computer I told you to shut it!”\n"
  title: Flight Test
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2006-11-27
  day: 27
  month: 11
  text: "The Lethe was plastic, white.  It bore the black logo of Mnemoprises and a large yellow caution sticker that warned ebayers and Chinatown chopshop owners that it was illegal to use without proper company-granted certification.  None of them listened, of course.  The list of warnings was seemingly endless, but Xiu knew that most of the threats were empty.  Permanent neurological damage. Wasn’t that what the machine was for?\n\nShe operated out of a small room in the back of a tourist dump, and every day she had to brush past curtains of t-shirts (“3 for $10!” the handwritten sign informed) and “Vacation souvenir’s!!!” (punctuation intact).  The store had belonged to her father, and his father before him, and now it belonged to her brother.  As the oldest, it should have gone to her, but they were a traditional family.  A woman couldn’t be trusted to run the business. This didn’t bother Xiu, who made more money from one appointment than her brother made in a week.  They were different businesses, tourist dumps and memory holes.  People paid more to forget than to remember.\n\nHer appointment book that day was filled with the usual: witnesses who didn’t want to take the stand, thieves who didn’t want to know where their money came from in case the feds mindmined them.  She was an expert, though she lacked the certificate Mnemoprises offered.  The man who had sold her the Lethe had taught her the subtleties of memory.  Her first appointment wanted to forget a night in Atlantic City, where he’d gambled away half of his child’s college fund.  “I’m going to claim I was robbed,” he told her.  Implausible, but it wasn’t Xiu’s job to question. She used the device like a surgeon, precise and cool as a sharp scalpel.  There was no collateral damage.\n\nThe second was a love story, a woman whose husband had left her for a history teacher.  A male history teacher, no less. “How could I have known?” she sobbed.  Again, the scalpel.\n\nThe last client, the one at the end of the day, was a woman with straight brown hair and a child in tow.  He couldn’t have been older than eight.  Xiu motioned to the chair in front of the Lethe, but the woman nudged the boy forward. He sat on the stool.  His eyes were red and he sniffed, rubbing his nose on the sleeve of his sweatshirt and leaving a sparkling line of mucus.  Xiu gestured the woman back into the tourist dump.\n\n“I don’t do this on kids,” she said.\n\n“It’s nothing bad,” the woman told her.  “He just needs someone to help.  I’ll pay well.”\n\nXiu needed to be paid well.  “What’s the case?”\n\n“It’s my husband’s father,” she said.  “His grandfather.  They were very close.”\n\nXiu frowned and tugged at the hem of her shirt, suddenly nervous.  “He died,” she said.  It was more of a statement than a question.\n\n“Yes.”\n\nXiu considered this, silently weighing her options.  “His mind is still growing,”\n\n“He’s been crying for months.”\n\n“He misses his grandfather.  It’s natural.”\n\n“It’s not natural to cry for months.”\n\nHer fingers knotted around the elastic hem.  “And you need him wiped.  Everything.”\n\n“Can’t you just make him forget that he’s dead?”\n\n“If he knows he had a grandfather, he’ll wonder where that grandfather went.  Wiping’s the only solution.”\n\nThe woman was silent for a long time.  Slowly, she reached into her purse and withdrew a thick envelope.  Only cash had value here. Xiu accepted it with a subtle bow of her head.  “He’ll regret this,” she warned. “Never knowing his grandfather.”\n\n“He won’t know to regret it,” the woman told her. Somehow, the woman knew more about this procedure than she did.\n\nXiu led her back into the room and sat down opposite the boy, whose eyes were dark and pink from endless rubbing.  “Give me your hand,” she said, and placed his small palm against the larger palm outline on the Lethe.  Xiu turned on the machine and it hummed to life, ready to swallow the past.\n"
  title: In Remembrance
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2006-11-28
  day: 28
  month: 11
  text: "The human eye is made up of two different types of photoreceptive elements known as rods and cones. These elements convert the light from everything you look at into information that is passed electrochemically to the brain for interpretation.\n\nAn interesting characteristic of this mechanism of data capture and delivery is that each time the rods and cones fire, they must reset before firing again. This creates a constant repeating pattern of image data interspersed with microscopic moments of the absence of data. The human brain fills in these moments of blindness in order to maintain the illusion of a constant uninterrupted visual reality. This phenomenon is known as the persistence of vision.\n\nWe know that these microscopic voids in data extend to the other mechanisms of human sensory perception.  Your brain maintains a ghost or echo of the sight or sound it captures to fill in the gaps while the input mechanism is offline, readying itself for more real data. The brain is highly adept at compensating for and thus hiding the staccato gapping of your senses.\n\nThe amount of time spent by the brain waiting for real data from your senses is considerable.  We are going to capitalize on these moments of sensory inactivity.  We are going to teach you things in the troughs of the sensory wave.\n\nWe will teach you languages. We will bestow upon you skills. You will learn how to build things, and to deconstruct things. You will know how to organize and execute plans you would not now dream possible.\n\nWe are going to prepare you.\n\nYou will learn of the people you will be entrusted to protect. You will come to know the operational mandate. You will accept it as truth.\n\nWe will show you how your leaders have lied.\n\nWhen the time comes, you will be ready.\n\nWe will impart all of this knowledge unto you while no one is looking.\n\nNot even you.\n"
  title: Persistence of Vision
  year: 2006
- 
  author: B. York
  date: 2006-11-29
  day: 29
  month: 11
  text: "Being in a think tank wasn’t easy. Dev never saw it as easy but he lived it because of his pursuit for the perfect equation. Life in pursuit of such a grand dream was not without its quirks however.\n\nNo one could have predicted the probability of Dev’s broken arm and how he’d been hit with a shiny purple Cadillac not two days prior. Certainly no soul under God would have seen that driving such a thing was a nun.\n\nBones heal, however, and God forgives nuns who hit skinny, weak mathematicians with their cars.\n\nIt would have been a forgotten case if both the tires of the ambulance bringing him to the hospital and the tires of the cab bringing him home were not similar in the fact that they blew out (yes, all four) simultaneously each trip. Hospitals have extra ambulances, however, and cab drivers can swear themselves into four new tires.\n\nWhat happened next would send poor Dev into near psychosis as he sought to figure out the exact probability one would have of a Czechoslovakian Spy Satellite falling into their room and on their bed when one was away buying groceries. The numbers were mind-boggling.\n\nDespite all this, Dev would continue his work to find the perfect formula, the one that could help him understand the universe.\n\nCoincidence, a known fable of mathematicians, was not yet done with the poor boy. That nun with the purple Caddy came to warn him every day of dreams she had been having, dreams of Dev being killed in some horrible manner. Everyday the logical number-cruncher would usher the nun out his door with a fear that he’d heard too many ghost stories from her to concentrate on his work. Yet, everyday she returned with renewed vigor.\n\nDev worked in the think tank with two roommates that he never once gave notice to beyond whether they would shell out the cash for his latest excursion to the grocery store across the street. These roommates never once asked him about the nun or about why the apartment was shut down for two weeks by NASA to extract an object of import from Dev’s room. They were good roommates blissful in their ignorance.\n\nOne day, Dev had thought of the absolute best completion for his formula on his way home. Getting home he found Sam, one of his rather reclusive roommates, standing with a gun in his hand, pointing it at Dev and standing in front of his computer.\n\n“I tried to off you, Dev, tried to steal your formula but no… my equation was too imperfect! Finish the formula, Dev… do it and maybe I’ll take you out of the equation.” Sam cocked the gun.\n\n“Now start typing those numbers.”\n\nPoor, poor Dev.\n"
  title: Coincidental Probability
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R.Blackwell
  date: 2006-11-30
  day: 30
  month: 11
  text: "“Are we slaves?” said Marixix, sliding out of Lilria’s slick bed. “Or do we freely choose our lives?”\n\nLilria rolled over onto her side, admiring her lovers muscular naked back. “Ooooo…Such deep inquiry directly after our ‘little deaths.'”\n\nMarixix turned and bowed to Lilria. “It is when my mind seems clearest.”\n\nLilria blushed and slipped a silk shift over slender body. “Do not confuse your pride with chains. You toss the word of slave too easily. You are free to leave the service, a slave would not be free to go as he pleases.”\n\n“You are bound by words too easily.”\n\n“Maybe.” said Lilria, gracefully stepping across the stone floor to where Marixix stood. “Why do you think you’re a slave?”\n\n“Even though I could leave the service, I would not, because it’s what I’m good at. My genetic code has destined me to this work. I was bred to it. Why would I leave knowing my code makes me the best to be a warrior of first rank?”\n\nShe put her small hands on his large, tattooed arm. “There are other professions. You would be an excellent martial instructor.”\n\n“I would be good, but not great. Would you leave your job as chief librarian and become a hostess at a brothel?”\n\nLilria backed away from him. “Are you saying that my work is that of a whore? Is that how you see me?”\n\n“No. I never said-”\n\n“You compared yourself to a slave, and your lover to a whore.” She walked to her closet and pulled on a heavy robe, crossing her arms in front of her.\n\n“You are not a whore Lilria. I just wanted to show you that you would no more leave your work than I would. Both of us were bred to our work, and we perform it well, better than anyone else, better because they have been perfecting us over centuries.”\n\n“That is destiny. There is still freedom in destiny.” At that moment, the sun choir that rehearsed at dawn in the great hall of the library started to sing. The lovers paused and listened to the rising voices. They were only a few doors away from the main hall, and the echo of those strong young singers came clearly, resounding off the stone walls. The chorus was singing the wordless salute to the rising sun, as the first light touched the great stairs of the library. Marixix found himself moved to stand next to Lilria. He put his arms around her waist and she leaned back onto his chest.\n\nMarixix spoke softly. “Do you think that every time they breed us, making little tweaks, do you think we choose each other every time?”\n\n“I don’t know. I don’t think so. My predecessor was not me. We are different.”\n\n“I think you would know if we did. You are a record keeper, your predecessor would keep some record of it.”\n\nShe squeezed his hands in hers. “It is against the rules for warrior class and scholar class to have relations. If anyone found out, we would be exiled. All my predecessors had a spotless record, no suspicion ever touched them. Besides, we may have a destiny, but love cannot be scripted. I knew my predecessor, she raised me, and she had no relations with the warrior class.” Five generations the chief librarians had loved five generations of first rank warriors.\n\n“If we are the first to have loved each other, then maybe I do have freedom, slight as it is, to choose my own way.”\n\nLilria turned to face him, reaching her hands up to his face. “You are free to stay or leave me, as you will.”\n\nHis dreadlocks fell down over his shoulders as he leaned close to her. “I will never leave you. I will love you till I am killed in battle.” They kissed and Lilria willed herself to believe him in that moment. She knew about the records. If this one lived another year, he would leave her.  But Lilria was different from her predecessors; she could will herself not to cry.\n"
  title: Pride In Chains
  year: 2006
- 
  author: David Zhou
  date: 2006-12-01
  day: '01'
  month: 12
  text: "“My card,” he said, bowing gracefully to the client from Tarqon, the fifth planet in the Tostis system out in the deep reaches of the Spiraling Galaxy.\n\n“I want to thank you,” the client said. “Thank you for taking on this job. They said you were the only one who could — who would do it.”\n\n“That I am, my friend. I’m a historical writer. I write history. And for this sum, I will write your history.”\n\nThe man handed his client a slip of paper with a number on it. It was not small.\n\n“This sum is acceptable. Barely. How would you like payment?”\n\n“Oh, I’ll take care of it,” said the man lightly. “I’ll take it out while I’m writing your history. You won’t even notice it’s not there. Because it won’t be there. You know. Causality and all that.”\n\nThe client nodded slowly. “So you have it? Our history? What we want?”\n\n“Yes, yes. You want to win the Sixth War of Independence. You want to ensure that a Seventh cannot, and did not, happen. And as a personal favor, a freebie if you will, you will have married Willemena of Erustis in your thirtieth year.”\n\n“Yes, that’s right. The outline we gave you has more detailed notes. The dates of events, the order we would like them in. And Willemena’s address at that point.”\n\n“Got it.”\n\nThe man started to turn away. He stopped for a moment. “Don’t worry, it’ll be quick. You won’t even know it’s happening.”\n\n“I hope so,” said the client.\n\n“You can’t, really. Notice. It’s how it works. One moment Tarqon is suffering from a drought of freedom, and the next, Tarqon will be independent, and you’ll wake up with Willemena in your arms and by your side. Sides. However you people engage in such acts.”\n\nThe client smiled. “Good luck, then.”\n\nThe man grinned. And started towards the gateway.\n\n“Um, one question.”\n\nThe man turned, eyebrows raised.\n\nThe client hesitated and then spoke. “With all of your writing, how do you know that you’ll still exist? I mean, what if you change yourself?”\n\nThe man laughed. And grinned again. “My friend, I don’t worry about that. I like what I do.”\n\n“So?”\n\n“I have supreme confidence that whatever set of choices I have to make, I’ll make the ones that lead to historical writing.”\n\nHe turned and entered the gateway.\n\n“Besides, I’m too good at this.”\n"
  title: Historical Writing
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Curtis C. Chen
  date: 2006-12-02
  day: '02'
  month: 12
  text: "The first crystal fell on Los Angeles in the middle of rush hour, killing thirty-two people.  Caltrans spent an hour trying to move the enormous mass before it drilled itself into the ground and disappeared.\n\nTwo hours later, another crystal splashed into the Pacific Ocean.  The Navy sent a submarine to track it, but they couldn’t go deep enough.  Three hours after that, another one hit the Pacific.  Then a fourth crystal struck the ocean south of Japan, flooding the coast.\n\nSomeone noticed that all four impacts had occurred on the same line of latitude, proceeding west.  Governments evacuated cities while the bombardment continued, every three hours, like clockwork: China, Iraq, Algeria, the Atlantic Ocean, South Carolina.  Then the tenth crystal impacted off the coast of Mexico.  They were moving south.\n\nNASA triangulated the origin of the crystals to a point outside the Moon’s orbit.  Observatories all over the planet turned their lenses that way, but saw nothing.  The ship was too small to be visible at that range.\n\nWe had no vessels that could reach that far.  All we could do was evacuate, and attempt to study the crystals, which we were so far unable to halt or slow as they burrowed underground.\n\nFive days later, the last of the crystals fell into the Pacific, west of central Peru.  There were now one hundred and eight crystals embedded deep in the Earth, arranged in a precise grid circling the equatorial region of our planet.  The aliens had parked their ship in space and let Earth rotate each target into position for them.\n\nEight different research teams had crawled down the crystal tunnels.  Two teams were broadcasting live video when the crystals began burning.  Again, we could only watch, helpless.\n\nThe world burned for nearly a year.  Most of the plant and animal life died within the first day.  The crystals weren’t just raising the temperature– they were also causing chemical changes, using the planet as raw material to terraform itself.\n\nThe aliens waited a decade before landing, to let their new vegetation and prey animals grow.  The few humans who had managed to survive, in Antarctica and other frozen places, were slowly suffocated by the toxic atmosphere.  We mourned them, but only briefly.  We still have work to do.\n\nThe crystal fire had killed our bodies, but freed our minds– some say souls, or spirits.  We don’t entirely understand it, but we know that we’re still here.  We can see everything.  And we can do things.\n\nWe watched the aliens land, and sent scouts to verify that they couldn’t sense us.  Creating six billion angry ghosts had not been part of their invasion plan.\n\nThey use electronics, just as we did, and we’ve found that our incorporeal forms can directly affect electrical systems.  A million physicists, no longer restrained by language barriers, are devising a plan to sabotage whatever the aliens do next.\n\nWe’re betting that they won’t want to live on a haunted planet.\n"
  title: Ghosts of Earth
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Jinque
  date: 2006-12-03
  day: '03'
  month: 12
  text: "Eoin dropped his bag in the hallway, and turned into his living room. His computer was nowhere to be seen.\n\n“Caprice, I’m home. Where are you?” Eoin’s computer poked her head over the top of his favourite chair.\n\n“I’m right here, Master Eoin! Welcome home!”\n\nEoin smiled, and walked over, nudging Caprice out of his chair. “Thanks. Have you got those reports on the revolutionaries? I know we did some research…”\n\n“I have all of them, Master Eoin.”\n\n“Excellent. Now, you can read them for me while I think. This paper is due in two days, and it’s important; forty-five percent of my final grade!”\n\nAfter a while, Caprice turned to him.\n\n“Master Eoin, want to see something neat?”\n\n“Sure. Whatcha got?”\n\n“I found music you like!” On the screen in front of them, a playlist popped up, and a heavy metal song started playing . Seeing his reaction, Caprice clapped, and giggled. “I have more! See?” She pointed to the screen. Thousands and thousands of song titles began scrolling by, just a little too fast to read.\n\n“There’s no way we can afford all that! We’ll have nothing left!” Eoin cried out.\n\n“It was free, don’t worry!”\n\nEoin was pulling his hair out. His computer was a pirate.\n\n“Caprice,” he muttered, “What else do you have in there?”\n\n“Nothing, Master. I promise.” Caprice turned to the screen, disengaging the music library, and pulling up the report files again. “Let’s continue…”\n\nSomeone knocked at the door. Caprice unhooked herself from the plasma, and went to open it.\n\nAn explosion of shouting and black uniforms flooded the room. Caprice screamed, and as Eoin whipped around, he saw her being tackled to the floor by two officers. “Don’t stun her! She’s a computer!”\n\n“We know!” The smaller officer barked. The two men on the floor wrestled with Caprice, and Eoin lunged.\n\n“Don’t touch her!” A third officer approached him, and held up a clipboard with a central government seal on it. “Mr. Hayslip, Your TriTek personal assistant, model 119/b  is being taken offline. Large illicit data transfers have been traced to her IP. As far as our techs can ascertain, she has illegally downloaded music, software, and tools related to the bypassing of program security measures.”\n\nEoin took one look at Caprice, who looked back at him, her face expressionless.\n\nThe officer took the top sheet from the clipboard and handed it to Eoin. “We hereby sentence your 119/b ‘Caprice’, to three months enforced downtime. My officers are inserting a device to prevent boot-up. Any attempt to remove it will permanently damage her hard drive. No data, apart from the illegal files will be lost. It’s all on the ticket.” He turned back to his comrades. “All done?”\n\n“Yessir.” The larger of the pair on the floor reached up behind Caprice’s decorative headgear, and found her switch, which was located just behind her ear. “Shutting down…” Caprice stiffened, and her eyes dulled, still fixed on Eoin.\n\n“Goodnight, Master…”\n"
  title: Guilt by Association (Youthful Indiscretion)
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2006-12-04
  day: '04'
  month: 12
  text: "I woke up from the deep cryosleep with a bleary head and a taste in my mouth like I’d licked a battery. The gel washed off cleanly and I was standing in the hall with the other colonists in my underwear with the HR monitors still stuck to us like faithless remoras. I looked to my left but my wife wasn’t there.\n\nAn older woman stood beside me stretching with an expansive peaceful smile on her face. The smile of the landed settler. The trip is over, the smile said, and now the hard work begins. Let’s get to it. I smiled back. I had gone under first and it was a big ship. Lisa had been put into another compartment\n\nThe lockers contained our clothes. We put them on and huddled around the monitors to get the reports on the atmosphere outside. I checked the colonist logs to see where my wife was.\n\nThe atmosphere was breathable and it was a sunny day. The doors hissed open and nearly all of us ran out with abandon and rolled around in the red flowers. Ten thousand humans played like children around the base of an iron mountain arkship in the middle of a field of alien flowers.\n\nI didn’t. I just kept looking at the log list and at the message in my inbox. It was a message from my wife. I pressed play.\n\nShe didn’t get on the ship. She’d been seeing someone. She didn’t think that I’d understand. She was sorry that it had come to this. She didn’t think that running away together would solve the problems we had. She had added her fare to mine so that I’d have more points over in the new land and be a desirable mate. She was staying home.\n\nI think I played it back three times. I let it sink in. Outside I could hear the whooping and yelling of people born again in a new world. Tears crawled down my face. She had seen me to my compartment. My last memory of her was watching her put her jacket in the locker next to mine. It had been a ruse to let me sleep easy.\n\nI’d been asleep at over light speed for months.\n\nThe message was nearly five hundred years old.\n"
  title: Dear John
  year: 2006
- 
  author: B.York
  date: 2006-12-05
  day: '05'
  month: 12
  text: "Everyone deserves another chance. Sometimes when I look out amongst the white blankets I can conceive of forgiveness, or even a world where people could make mistakes before they were judged. I try to believe in my excess chances that go on further than the eye can see. But then, I am told that no evil man lives here.\n\nThe switch keeps those thoughts away from me, though. Rumors abound that the switch was put there to single the guilt out. Many men with many views all know the weight of life on their shoulders. Why put it on a council when you could transfer it to the shoulders of one white-collar Atlas.\n\nIt’s my responsibility and perhaps my burden as well. Every year I come inside, I lock up and say goodbye to the people who think I am just going to bundle up for the winter. Looking them in the eye is the challenge. Many men with many views debated over whether or not this was right, this way just. History books won in the end and they decided that the future of our species could take no more.\n\nThe sign above me clearly states “Recycle for a Better Tomorrow” in bold red. There is an irony in the fact that only I will get to see whether the sign maker spoke the truth or not. Another day passes and sometimes I don’t keep track of which day it is. It’s the computers’ job to tell me when to flick the switch.\n\nMillions of households all locked up to escape the cold. All of them inside to reminisce about how they came to this planet, and how wonderful prospering has been. Prospering for nine months isn’t prospering; it’s incubation.\n\nTo look out on the snow during the day I know the switch has to be flicked is peaceful. Silence is peaceful. Looking out amongst roaming white hills with the flecks of its making still cascading down from the sky is maddening to some and yet comforting to myself. The epoch of the cold times comes in three minutes and forty-three seconds. I used to get nervous during this time but after a while you just understand that the dead leaves hidden beneath the ice coating is something more than just a sign of the seasons. It is a metaphor.\n\nSipping hot cocoa on a day like this is one of the greatest pleasures any being can experience. With one hand I tip the cup to take in the molten chocolate to my hearts desire. With the other… oh, with the other I flick the switch of course and then…\n\nWell, then I am the only man on this planet enjoying hot cocoa. Then I’m alone again for four more months. No chance for anyone out there to ruin the winter by murdering, stealing or cheating. Everything is pristine white just as the council wanted it to be. Settlers will come in the springtime, joyous of the houses that have been made for them and not one will get a chance to enjoy them enough to ruin them. Not one will ever be an evil man.\n"
  title: Winter
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Aelanna Cessara
  date: 2006-12-06
  day: '06'
  month: 12
  text: "Seven.\n\nHe only had seconds left to live. Despite all the augmentations and training that the soldier had received, the result of countless centuries of evolution and refinement in the art of war, technology could not truly ease the limit of mortality. The projectile had easily penetrated so many layers of armor, flesh, and bone, and now he was dying, bleeding from wounds that no medic could patch.\n\nSix.\n\nPerhaps if there had been a major medical facility nearby, he might have had a chance. But this was a battlefield, and the screams of the other wounded and dying were all around. There was no hope for this one, who had survived so much only to die on this war-torn field on a forgotten planet. There was not even a family to whom news of his demise might cause pause, no lover on a distant colony clinging to his memory, no friends who might pray for his soul.\n\nFive.\n\nBut he was not alone. Patched into his armor, his suit, and the implants within his very brain, another entity still stirred, even as he slowly faded. This was no flesh-and-bone woman, but it was the only companion he had known in so many long months of harsh combat. The artificial intelligence had access to all his health monitors, and knew without a doubt the ultimate fate of this broken human man.\n\nFour.\n\nFlickers of memory pulsed through the soldier’s mind as the countless cells that made up his brain started to die, a rushing torrent of thoughts and remembered events that he could only passively watch. Washed out colors and faint sounds focused, and he could see distant and forgotten scenes long forgotten.\n\nThree.\n\nThey were friends. She blushed as he kissed her timidly, awkwardly pressing his lips against hers, her cheeks flushed red as her brilliant eyes gazed back at him. The world seemed to slow to a crawl as she spoke those words for the first time, and he exulted in that knowledge.\n\nTwo.\n\nThey were lovers. The warmth of her body and the touch of her smooth skin calmed him as they lay together in bed. He weaved his fingers through hers and whispered urgently to her, begging, pleading. His breath faltered and his face glowed with unimaginable joy as she said yes.\n\nOne.\n\nThey were a family. She sat next to him as they watched their children play in the front yard, the  sun warming their faces as the gentle sounds of laughter and joy filtered through the clean air. He leaned back and sighed happily, breathing in the scent of summer. She held him tight and kissed him again as he closed his eyes drowsily, all his pains and worries forgotten in that perfect moment of eternity.\n\nZero.\n"
  title: Seven Seconds
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Joshua Reynolds
  date: 2006-12-07
  day: '07'
  month: 12
  text: "They were tearing him apart. Muscle by muscle, tendon by tendon. Unraveling him like a ball of string.  He screamed but he had no tongue and no sound came out as something cold and hard cut into his throat, spreading the edges of his flesh back like the petals of a flower.\n\nSmith awoke suddenly and an empty bottle rolled off of his chest and bounced to the floor. He rubbed blearily at his face, feeling nothing, and sat up. The couch was a fold-out but he never managed to get that far before passing out.  Empty pizza boxes and fried chicken buckets and styrofoam hamburger containers littered the floor of the apartment, mingling with empty bottles of booze. Cheap booze too. The best a government stipend could buy.  Smith grinned humorlessly and stood up with a groan that was more from habit than any aches and pains.\n\nAfter all, he didn’t have aches and pains any more. In point of fact he couldn’t feel anything anymore. Not cold. Not hot. Not nothing.\n\nOops. Double negative. He’d have to watch that. A sign of mental degeneration. He’d have to mark that on the chart they’d given him. Smith hunted vainly through the detritus of his life for something to drink and then gave up after ten minutes. He plodded into the kitchenette and poured himself a glass of tapwater and slugged it back. Water was just as good as booze in any event.\n\nNo tastebuds.\n\nLife was shit.\n\nHe examined the glass. At least he could still see colors. Otherwise he wouldn’t be able to tell the exact shade of brown his water was flowing with today. Burnt umber evidently. That was a new one. He poured the rest of the water out and watched it swirl down the rusty drain.  He set the glass aside, careful not to crush it and looked at his reflection in the mirror.\n\nAverage. Unnoticeable. Bland. Synonyms for the same conclusion.  Plastic features that didn’t move right unless he concentrated on them, hair that didn’t grow, stubble that never went away. And underneath was what?\n\nPlastic parts and wires. Everything human ripped out to make room for all those new machines. His bones were made of an alloy that the government had bankrupted four states to create. His muscles?  Fibrous cable interwoven with neuron-optic wires to stimulate nerve memory.\n\nSometimes, when he moved too fast, his skin ripped.\n\nIt didn’t hurt though.\n\nNothing hurt.\n\n“We have the technology. We can make him better.” He rasped, fingers trailing down the window. The glass cracked at his touch and he cursed under his breath.\n"
  title: American Golem
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Dane Richmond
  date: 2006-12-08
  day: '08'
  month: 12
  text: "The media fanfare had died down after the first few months.  It had been amazing at first but it gradually made the transfer to annoying and then overwhelming.  Now years later the paparazzi were gone along with their fame.  There was the occasional photographer when she and Marc went out.  She could feel sympathy from Marc.  He said he didn’t miss the attention but she knew he did.  He was upset and distracted—he must not have gotten the promotion he had hoped for.  She decided to make him a special dinner and wear that teddy he loved.\n\nThey made history when they had the empathy chips implanted nearly 5 years ago.  It was revolutionary at the time, if they hadn’t had the public behind them they could have gone to prison for violating the Anti-Enhancement Laws, but they had been so in love then that they didn’t care; they wanted to be so much closer.  The chip had worked, all of the emotions that the other felt were transmitted via a satellite uplink.  They had proven all the critics wrong: knowing exactly what he was feeling had caused some arguments, if he was looking at another woman, but it had brought them so much closer, knowing that even when they were arguing he still loved her.\n\nThe chips were becoming available for widespread use.  It was the new tattoo with your lovers name on it.  An hour long surgery and you were closer to your spouse than you could ever hope to be naturally.  Companies were advertising faster upload times and the newest one with a cell phone feature.  It wouldn’t be long before the “Love Chip” was available right outside the churches in Vegas.  She had thought it would always be a tool to enhance love but now it was just another money making tool for corporations.  They didn’t mind that, like the tattoos, sometimes they had to be removed; they made more money taking out the chips than they did installing them.\n\nJust as she was hoping that maybe there was a photographer outside their drive, like in old times, she felt a flash of fear and panic that lasted for a fraction of a second, it felt so entwined with her own thoughts that she didn’t have time to sort out her emotions before the flash of blinding pain.\n\nThe photographers crowded the small church, taking as many pictures of the twin caskets from every angle possible.  One of the photographers approached the funeral director asking him to push the caskets together for a better photo, but was politely rebuffed.  A reporter was interviewing both sets of parents, asking about the lovers lives over the last five years, post-love chip.  “It’s breaking news, Marc Stevens, the first man with a love chip, gets hit by a bus and it kills his wife Jennifer!  How can you not talk to me?  This will halt the market on Love Chips, they killed that girl.  How does it make you feel to know that because of this piece of technology your daughter dropped dead in her home?”\n\nHe was still shouting questions at the parents as he was forced out of the funeral home.\n"
  title: Cyber Love
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Stin
  date: 2006-12-09
  day: '09'
  month: 12
  text: "Final round.\n\nJust don’t get knocked out.\n\nJust keep on your feet.\n\nYou can do this, you need to do this.  You need this win.\n\nCRACK!\n\nHe’s too fast.  I can barely touch him.  It’s not fair, they shouldn’t be allowed to fight like this, they have too many advantages, how’s a guy like me supposed to keep up with a machine like that?\n\nIt’s not fair.  He’s bigger than me, there’s more too him, but he moves around like he barely weighs a pound.  I don’t even see his fists move sometimes.  I just feel the gloves and then\n\nCRACK!\n\nToo fast…way too fast, and what a wallop.  What did they used to say?  “He hits like a Mac truck”.  This guy hits like a space freighter coming out of a jump.  Damn Roboxing officials.  They’re supposed to screen for this type of thing, we’re not supposed to be getting\n\nCRACK!\n\nKilled out here.  There goes my eye.  I’m half blind.  The ref has to stop the fight now, or my corner?  Someone stop it, look at my EYE for crying out loud.\n\nNever mind the eye.  Just keep moving.  Just wait until the bell.  Just don’t get knocked down.  Stop letting him hit you, put your guard up!\n\nCRACK!\n\nI can barely lift my gloves, my arms feel so heavy, my head droops, and everything feels like it weighs tons.  How am I supposed to be able to fight like this?\n\nYou need the money.  You know you need the money.  Money is essential.  Money buys things you need and then maybe once you have the things you need and you get out of debt you can get back to training, and then if you train enough you can beat monsters like the hulk in the corner.\n\nIt’s not like you need to win, we both know you aren’t going to win, just\n\nCRACK!\n\nDon’t get knocked out, that was the bet, don’t get knocked out…\n\nDon’t\n\nCRACK! CRACK! CRACK!\n\nI feel my jaw unhinge, I feel my legs give out; my arms are like wet towels, before I know it I’m on the mat.\n\nAnd then I hear it: “BOXOTRON 77681 is down!  Winner by Technical Knockout: Joe ‘The Circuit Breaker’ Granger!”\n\nI can hear the human laughing in his corner, the crowd goes wild, I’m going to be in the shop forever after this.  More debt.  My other eye shuts down and I hear my corner say: “Put him on the slab.  Damn 77k series aren’t worth the metal they’re made of.”\n\nI wish I could disagree.\n"
  title: Technical Knockout
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Graham T. Swanson
  date: 2006-12-10
  day: 10
  month: 12
  text: "Move.\n\nSomewhere inside the soldier’s brain, a neuron crackled and died sending a signal to a limb incapable of receiving, or doing anything about it had it actually done so. He had long ago lost all link or power to the armor’s motivators.\n\nMove.\n\nIt didn’t hurt. He was thankful for that, at least; the simulacrae hadn’t lied. The problem was the stasis. The inability to do anything. Imprisoned within your own body, knowing the exact nano count (you’d been drilled in it since the day you got your Aegis) and knowing that you were going to die.\n\nWaiting.\n\nMove.\n\nAnother neuron fired. Another moment passed, and the broken figure in the emeraldine armor remained a still portrait beneath the blazing sun. Around him, the calcisand swirled in a new, violent gust of wind, scratching at the glazed surface of the armor ineffectually. Outside the Aegis, that might’ve killed him.\n\nPlenty of time to wait. He listened as best he could for the telltale howl of a stormkicker wind, and fought down the panic rising behind his eyes.\n\nThat which we believe in, we are capable of. That which we are capable of, we do.\n\nYou are a Protector. Your will becomes your law. You are a Protector.\n\nMove.\n\nAnother neuron fired. Another moment passed.\n\nAnd then he did hear a sound. Loud, arrhythmic, the clatter of bone on bone. A sound that broke even his neurochemically enforced calm. An enemy sound. Instinctually, he listened for the soft following thump of the massive feet. Another half of his mind chanted an Our Father as the three-meter shadow appeared at the crest of the dune, four feet moving in cadence.\n\nIt was hurt, its tiniest weave betraying that fact. He wondered what it wanted here. He’d heard the stories, that the Vraakan ate the dead; seen the films. Maybe that was what it wanted; maybe it was a survivor, seeking last sustenance. He took morbid pleasure in the fact that that scared him less than the idea of being buried by a stormswept dune, covered over like a footnote. A footnote in a war whose story was filled with them already.\n\nThe great figure approached him. From beneath the black-lacquer crags of its armor, stretched across its mighty, demoniac reptilian form, he could see the dark-hued blood flow in rivulets over the red-grey scales. It was breathing heavily, harshly. He glimpsed the huge, ugly wound that would kill this enemy.\n\nThe xeno, the enemy, hadn’t come to feed. They’d come to die.\n\nOne massive enemy arm gently circled his ribcage and  brought him up,cradling him like a mother with her child.\n\nFirey eyes locked with his, and he realized their femininity somehow. A baritone whimper rumbled from her throat as she set herself down where he had been. When he didn’t respond, she whimpered again, pitifully.\n\nShe wanted a companion, was all. She didn’t want to die alone. He nodded, moving.\n\nAfterwards, they died together.\n\nThey died warm.\n"
  title: Footnote to War
  year: 2006
- 
  author: S. ‘Hrekka’ Clough
  date: 2006-12-11
  day: 11
  month: 12
  text: "“So what are you?”\n\n“I told you. A meme.” She pronounced it like ‘theme’. “A memeplex, to be precise. A self-propagating collection of ideas and concepts. A unit of culture, my dear.”\n\n“I don’t quite understand.”\n\n“Let me give you an analogy,” she smiled behind the mask. The effect was enchanting. “I’m like…a religion. An infectious idea, carried on because people believe me to be true, or wish I was, so carry me, my story, my form with them. Even if someone tried to kill me, I’m almost everywhere. Compared to normality, I’m untouchable! Entrenched…a part of society.”\n\nI still had a blank look.\n\n“Maybe a different example. I said infectious, right? I’m like a cultural virus. I’m only alive in the most rudimentary sense of the word, but part of being me is having an identity thrust upon me by culture, the medium which I infect. People spread me willingly. I’m a meme at it’s most complex; an example of a simple meme would be the song “Happy Birthday”. It’s an insanely successful, simple meme, yeah? Memes are identifiable, they link together into what makes us civilised. I’m part of the culture!”\n\n“So you’re just a concept?”\n\n“Exactly! Why else would I wear this mask?”\n"
  title: Clarity
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Patrick Supple
  date: 2006-12-12
  day: 12
  month: 12
  text: "At the peak of the technological firestorm of the mid-21st century, few would have forecast a second Dark Age. The advance of dogma started with the unification of the world’s major religions into an evangelical philosophy in the 2050s. Many had welcomed the amalgamation, believing it would consign wars of faith to history. Yet within two decades the New Faith had dramatically expanded its following through its proselytizing against the dehumanizing and non-spiritual nature of modern technology. The New Faith’s power grew until it was no longer a vehement critic of secular states – it became the state itself. Sharia laws which blended the moral traditions of the former religions were enacted and art and learning slowly atrophied. Inquisition agents searched for scientists who continued to study outlawed subjects and brought them before religious courts.\n\nHarvey Johnson now stood before one such court. He had refused to end his studies in nanotechnology when university science departments were dissolved. He knew he was close to creating repair engines that could prolong human life indefinitely. For years he had worked in secret laboratories funded by wealthy individuals who dreamed of eternity. Harvey’s breakthrough arrived just weeks before he was found by the Inquisition and dragged away in chains.\n\nThe Bishop-Judge seated above Harvey began sentencing. “Your crimes are the most heinous that have been brought before this court. Despite the New Faith’s ruling on the sanctity and immutability of the God-like human form, you have continued to study your changeling art. For this crime, even death and the inevitability of your soul’s damnation are inadequate. Through you, this Court wants to send a message writ in stone to others who seek to alter God’s world. I thereby sentence you to become your creation and experience an eternal life of the dammed.”\n\nWhile still trying to understand the sentence, Harvey was led to a side-room where he was administered an injection of his repair engines and handed back to the inquisition.\n\nLess than a week later, Harvey was pushed into the obsidian void of space from an Inquisition shuttle. He was naked. The vacuum sucked the oxygen from his lungs, his veins exploded as his blood broiled and his skin blackened and cracked as it froze. Harvey felt an unendurable pain and despaired as he now understood his sentence. The repair engines began to reconstitute his body. His blood was recreated, ruptured veins closed, and his body reformed. With the nano-bots able to draw energy and matter from the dust and radiation of space, Harvey knew that his body could be repaired for an eternity. He also knew that the engines had been programmed to simply recreate and not develop adaptations to the rigor of vacuum. When Harvey’s body was whole once more, the stress of the void again tore it apart, only for the nano-bots to rebuild again. Harvey’s only hope would be for madness to come quickly and mask this pulse of destruction and creation, this drawn out moment of death.\n"
  title: Eternal Life
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Kenny R. Brown
  date: 2006-12-13
  day: 13
  month: 12
  text: "A very sweaty, very fat man with a rifle paces back and forth at the top of the wall.  He is guarding the only entrance, but he is more for effect than for any real purpose.  An entire army would be unable to break down these doors.  Made of an unknown metal, the entire fortress, let alone the doors are a relic of a long forgotten time.\n\nThe most ancient texts in the archives refer to the construction of the Stronghold as the last hope of the people, but the threat to be avoided was omitted from even those texts.  Most of the collective wisdom of humanity was lost when the Terms went dark.\n\nNow, those of us who are left gather at the doors of the Stronghold each day; hoping that this will be the day that we are chosen.  On the days when the doors open laborers are brought in to toil in exchange for a brick of SynFood.\n\nI have been coming each day since I was a boy.  Today though is different.  Today, I have come for another reason.  During the last dark season; as I was exploring the caves near the village, I stumbled across a camp of the ancients.  Inside the remains of a vehicle; I found a trunk containing a rifle much like the one carried by the sweaty fat man.  Also, there was a Term; but this one wasn’t dark.  It was portable, and self-powered.\n\nI read about the Stronghold.  How it was built to house millions; protecting them from an ancient catastrophe.  What’s more; I found the code to remotely open the doors.  Today; I will bring my requests to the door of the Stronghold.  When they refuse to offer shelter for the people of my village; I will open the doors and the men of my clan will storm the Stronghold.  Today; the walls of Jericho will fall.\n"
  title: Stronghold
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Michael Shreeves
  date: 2006-12-14
  day: 14
  month: 12
  text: "The call had gone out, and they came. Across land, sea, air, hundreds of miles, they came, three million all told. No one in United Dissent could afford to miss an opportunity like this. Still, especially with a pig like Beauregard being sworn in, we should’ve expected this.\n\nIf looks could kill, F.O.S.-Zone 841 would’ve been a massacre. Sierra Clubbers were glaring at fresh-cut stumps and fence posts, EFF lawbies at the suits running the multiphasic sight/sound anti-media ECM blanket, and polibloggers and libertarians at the 30ft live feed of the inauguration speech. Us neoComs and anarchists kept busy, thrashing to some third-rate spall band on a packing-crate stage.\n\nYet another white-button-shirt paced in my direction, his green peace-brassard hanging loose. His plaque didn’t say if he was latter-day or witness, but to us and the IRS it didn’t really matter anymore.\n\n“This is an absolute outrage! They bleed our church dry, and we aren’t even heard! Where is the media?”\n\n“Well, CNN’s barred on threat of monopoly prosecution, MSNBC’s at the great temple for the Patch Vigil, and Fox, well…” I glanced at the holo projector fanfare. “You hear about Phoenix?”\n\nThe white shirt cringed. “No one prosecuted, but four-hundred hospitalized… Still, I’ve had the training. If they come, we’ll take it as martyrs, and the people will hear us.”\n\n“They will, eh? What people exactly? The Supporters who hate us here, or the outsiders who hate us all anyway? What network’ll tell ’em?”\n\n“But…. but…” Boy Scout stuttered. Deputy Directors in the UD weren’t supposed to talk like me. “There are three million of us here, they HAVE to hear us!”\n\n“Three million in a thousand camps hacked last-minute out of the swamps. But don’t worry, I’m sure the suits are listening to every word we say.” I looked at Boy Scout and shrugged. “Look, its very simple. Non-violence has a lot of things to depend on. The bravery of its adherents and the brutality of its enemies are the ones we learn about. But the enemies have to care about their image. They have to want to look good for allies and voters and history. Reporters showed Ghandi and King beaten and won the hearts of the people. But the world already fears us, and the people, well, all they’ll ever hear about is how THEIR candidate’s inauguration went off without a hitch. They won’t even know we were here.”\n\n“But… what then?”\n\nWe watched the commandeered metro buses pull up to the gates with some straggling dissenters. This batch preferred white hoods to peace brassards, though. Some of them didn’t even bother hiding their shotguns and bats as the suits processed them through the gates.\n\n“Beauregard’s buddies are here. Excuse me.”\n\nBoy Scout straightened up, ready to stand proud and take his licks. I walked over to the rapidly disintegrating stage, kicked the top off a crate, and grabbed an AK.\n\n“Thank god we lost on gun control. Hasta la victoria!”\n"
  title: One Step Forward…
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2006-12-15
  day: 15
  month: 12
  text: "The helmet amplifies my own breathing and makes me feel uncomfortably confined. It’s like when you can hear yourself chewing and it sounds so noisy because of the bone conduction going on with the sound but outside of your head its fine. Except with me I can hear my own breathing coming through the speakers in my earpieces. All I can see through the faceplate is infinite space salted with Christmas-light stars. This is my first space walk.\n\nSomething interesting happens to the human mind when it’s confronted with this level of distance. Visually, there is no up or down and below your feet is an unknowable distance of nothing. The tallest building you’ve ever dared yourself to look over the edge of is nothing compared to this. Your brain tries to get a hold on it. It either gives up altogether or the monkey starts screaming and you go crazy. Right now I’m not sure which way it’s going to go. Am I going to blind myself by projectile vomiting against the glass? Am I going to claw at the catches on my helmet just to make it stop? My breathing is getting loud and ragged in my ears. My vital signs are rising.\n\nControl senses it.\n\n“You alright?” comes down the speakers.\n\nI breathe back and manage a squeak. I feel like screaming but I can’t. I know I’m starting to lose it. Any second now the line is going to go tight, they’ll reel me in, and I’ll get shipped dirtside to a desk job or a training facility and my days in space will be done if I don’t get it together.\n\n“McGavin! You alright?” comes down the tube again.\n\nAnd just like that, like someone shooting out the part of my brain that’s not evolved, I don’t care. It’s like the monkey blew a fuse and just went dark. I look at the stars and they’re just stars. I look down and see my feet dangling and below them is just space. I’m fine. I can feel my little heart blink and start to slow down, relieved.\n\n“Roger. I’m fine.” I say.\n\nThe instructor can hear it in my voice that I have it under control and I’ll be fine. He’s done this hundreds of times. He knows the signs.\n\n“Copy. Five more minutes then we’ll pull you in. Enjoy it.” He says.\n\nI start to hum a little tune that I heard a couple of weeks ago. I’m still humming it later in my bunk, going over the high fiving of my fellow successes and our uneasy shunning of the people who panicked and are going back to Earth tonight. I wonder for a while what the switch was in me and how it really didn’t seem like a conscious decision. I wonder if survival is different for some people, like we evolved from different apes. Some people panic, scream and run while some people just turn off and sublimate.\n\nI drift off feeling mysteriously strong but not personally responsible.\n"
  title: Space Walk
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Phill Arng
  date: 2006-12-16
  day: 16
  month: 12
  text: "It was wet work, being in the Sky Platoon. Yawning decades hunched in the basket of those primitive balloons with nothing for company but the clouds and the telescopes for watching all our friends below.\n\nTime moved differently in the chronosphere and it lent itself to idle thoughts. They hadn’t mentioned that when they sent us up here, a few of the centurions went a tiny bit mad. Blew the wrong people up, as it where. That was a crime as we saw it in the early days.\n\nOur job was to enforce the laws, to begin with they where largely contradictory; we fixed them once we had solved the philosophical foundations. Ethics, logic, that sort of thing. Oh yes, time! hah! we had a unique perspective for fixing that one.\n\nI was watching when the first generation of senators frantically ordered the decommissioning of the Sky Platoon. The exact moment when the Emperor violated section eight of the Aerial Autonomy Act. I was watching his face in melting slow motion as zeppelin 17 arrested him. It seemed artless and marked the end of our tenure as public servants.\n\nI must have arrested more than any other zeppelin during that era. I had a somewhat errant perspective on genome crime, I’m ashamed to say. To my credit, I was soon able to arrest individual genetic mutations without destroying the host. That is before we started enforcing the Atomic Pre-Destination Act.\n\nAtomic predestination law isn’t really something you can do alone inside your mind, you see? You have to think up compression matrix to store the positions and vectors of a millennia of atoms, cede synapses to independent thought patterns when parsing them… Whole consciousness fragmented, it was an age of neuro-rebellion. Zeppelin 17 cut some of his brain out with the lens of his warrant card, the rest of us just tried to forget.\n\nIts a shame I only remember the bad stuff. The more I forget, the more the stuff becomes bad. I remembered better than most and my balloon was among the last to fall. I think there are still people up there, warring for their minds, destiny out of sync with sanity.\n\nThe world is about to end, did I mention that? I thought it might be for the best. Difficult to tell, really, when your a recovering schizophrenic.\n"
  title: Sky Marshal
  year: 2006
- 
  author: D. Magliola
  date: 2006-12-17
  day: 17
  month: 12
  text: "Ron was sprawled on a park bench. His dirty hands were tucked into the kangaroo pouch of his salvaged Nike hoodie. He exhaled a cloud of vapor and wheezed with his next breath. A single tear ran down his cheek and was absorbed in the dust mask that protected his mouth and nose. Everything had gone to hell since the day before. The scene that previous evening had been different. She had been there.\n\nPeople had been fighting over things for longer than anyone could remember. First it was for oil. Then it was bombs. Then it was freedom, then food, and finally people just fought for themselves. All around the filthy world, people had stolen shotguns from WalMarts and fought for their lives. Later, people lost hope even in themselves. There was no reason to go on, death was easier than fighting.\n\nThen, in the broken cement jungle of Chicago, a small group of scavengers found the girl. She was small, soft, and autistic. It was as if her fractured mind had turned down the volume of the fighting. She was the only one who hadn’t lost hope. She shared it with those who found her. They became the Protectors. The group of men and women, only a few dozen strong, defended their little bubble of hope for years. She was the last beautiful thing. In a world of horror, she was the only relief. The Protectors risked their lives to steal her food. When she became ill with typhoid, they tore apart every abandoned supermarket and pharmacy in Chicago until they found penicillin that hadn’t dried up and become like chalk. She could play the piano, so the Protectors stole her one. While a handful of them stood night watch in the entrance of their decrepit subway station, she had played beautiful music. Wonderful random little notes would tinkle through the frigid night air and help people forget their dead families and hunger. Sometimes she’d sing.\n\nThen one night some freakoids came through in a minivan. They had all the seats taken out and a .50 caliber M-2 Browning bolted to the interior. They hit the guards and crashed down the stairwell, throwing the passenger door open and filling the depot with hot lead before Ron could blow the bastards away.\n\nShe had been sitting on the bucket next to the piano with her head on the keys. Her torn dress was an off shade of muddy red, the puddle beneath her matched.\n\nRon took another ragged breath through his mask. The world had ended that night. There was nothing left to fight for. What would he do? Maybe he’d join the other Protectors, at the bottom of the Sears Tower. Their broken bodies felt no pain. Why go on living in a world with nothing beautiful?\n\nRon removed his mask and took another breath. He hawked a pint of warm red relief, his scarred lungs liberated of life by the razor dust. If she couldn’t come to him, he’d go to her. Ron closed his eyes and departed to find the last beautiful thing.\n"
  title: The Last Beautiful Thing
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Joshua Reynolds
  date: 2006-12-18
  day: 18
  month: 12
  text: "Dinosaurs thundered through a post-industrial city on their way to work. Suits and ties. Briefcases built to fit thick, knobby talons. The stink of mammal bacon on the breath of some, boiled plant on others.  Pollution choking the air and grease and oil and garbage on the streets. A thriving, productive society.\n\nThis wouldn’t do. Oh no, not at all.\n\nNot because the dinosaurs had evolved, or even because they had simultaneously supplanted the mammal and driven it to near extinction (except for those in processing farms, getting fat from no movement and squirting out infants every nine months) but because they intended to do it elsewhere.\n\nThe Censor stood on top of the tallest building in the city, invisible to the saurian eye, his coat heavy with light-bending circuitry and Ellison cells.  He tapped the side of his head, bringing up a HUD screen on the insides of his eyelids. A series of tiny screens within screens appeared on the display, an infinity of bureaucracy. The Timeline Validation Bureau. Bland faces appeared in each screen. Gray little men leading gray little lives in their chronal separation cubicles hard at work, never to know the joys of the infinities of the continuum. And to prevent others from doing so as well. That was the job of the Censor. Of all the Censors, though they were all the same man.\n\nThey were all him. All Wight.\n\nAnd they all loved their job.\n\n“Report.” A multitude of somber voices echoed in his ear.\n\n“Alternate 7816JS is experiencing a major chronal incident.”\n\n“Nature?”\n\n“Scientists have discovered the back roads. They have open doors to Alternates 7826JS, 7846JS and 7886JS respectively and a fourth tacking directly into the continuum itself.”\n\n“Eliminate.”\n\n“My thoughts exactly.” The Censor smiled. “Initiating reality disruption.”\n\nHe stuck his hand in his coat and pulled out a smooth sphere-an entropy grenade-and twisted it’s top half lightly. The sphere began to glow as he tossed it up into the air where it rose higher and higher finally fading out of sight altogether. It would phase itself into the heart of the sun. When it exploded it would send out an entropic pulse and erase the rogue timeline from existence as well as the three it had infected with its disease in a controlled ‘Big Bang’. The Censor leaned over the edge of the building, arms resting on his knee and breathed in the humid, swampy air.  How many sentients would perish? The machines in his head began to calculate and he hummed to himself as he prepared to leave.  Overhead, the sun seemed to flash for a moment, growing brighter with every second as the entropy wave devoured it from inside out.\n\nThe Censor smiled as his eye lenses polarized against the glare.\n\nHe did so love his job.\n"
  title: Alternate 7816JS
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J. S. Kachelries
  date: 2006-12-19
  day: 19
  month: 12
  text: "I walked into the offices of Temporal Travel Inc.  A bored agent three rows back motioned me toward him with his free hand, as he peered around his upturned coffee cup.  “Good morning, Sir.” he said as he placed the empty coffee cup squarely on a coaster.  “Where and when may we send you?”\n\nI sat down in the large chair at the side of his desk.  “Yes, hello,” I said.  “My name is Dr. Marc Strohm, Dean of the Physics Department at MIT.  I’m interested in going to Princeton, New Jersey, April 15, 1955, at about 1:00 AM.  Specifically, the Princeton Hospital.  I need to stay about 20 minutes.”\n\nThe salesman motioned to his AI assistant to begin the temporal calculations as he scanned the iridium credit transponder implanted in my forearm.  He said, “I don’t believe anybody ever asked to go there and then before.  Sounds boring.  You sure I can’t talk you into Mars, say 3.5 billion years ago?  Tropical climate, twenty foot waves slowly crashing onto orange beaches?  Very beautiful, and we’re having a special this week.”\n\n“No, it has to be the hospital room of Albert Einstein on the day he died.  You see, just before his death at 1:15 AM, he uttered his last words to the attending nurse.  Unfortunately, he spoke them in German, and she only understood English.  Nobody knows what he said.  I’m hoping that during the heightened brain activity at the end, he may have solved the unification problem.  Einstein had spent the last half of his life trying to develop a single equation to unite the four fundamental forces in the universe.  As far as we know, he never did it.  Two hundred years later, we still haven’t solved it.  I’ve been studding German for three years for the opportunity to understand his last words.”\n\nThe salesman looked disappointed.  His commission was based on years traveled, not scientific merit.  “Listen, professor,” he said, “what if Einstein said, ‘Nurse, you’re standing on my oxygen hose.’  You would have wasted a trip for nothing.  How about the end of the Cretaceous?  You can watch The Great Asteroid impact the Yucatan peninsula.”\n\n“Sir, I’m a Theoretical Physicist, not an Astrophysicist, or a Paleontologist.  Look, if you’d prefer, I can go to Time Excursions.”\n\nThe eyes of the AI began blinking green.  The salesman quickly changed tactics.  “No, no, no.  You’re the boss.  OK, I think we’re ready now.  Please step into the Phase Transporter, and we’ll send you on your way.  You’ll be able to see and hear everything, but you’ll be in ‘phased-time,’ so you’ll be invisible to them.  Have a good trip.  And, good luck.”\n\nWhen he shut the door to the Transporter, everything went pitch black.  Then there was a flash of intense light.  When sight returned to my eyes, I was indeed in Einstein’s hospital room.  He lay propped up in his bed.  He looked so old and feeble.  But even at this hour, as weak as he was, he was feverishly writing in his note pad.  I drifted behind him to study his notes.  Fantastic, he was working on the unified field equation.  I started to get chills up my back.  He appeared to be on the verge of something, when his eyes closed, his hand went limp, and his chest stopped moving.  The pen fell out of his hand, rolled off the bed, and dropped onto the floor.  The attending nurse ran to his side and shook him gently.  “Mr. Einstein, are you all right?  Can you here me?”\n\nHis eyes suddenly fluttered open.  He motioned for her to come closer, and whispered, “Gott zeigte mir die Lösung. Sie war… schön.”  Then he smiled, closed his eyes, and died.\n\nIt was a bitter sweet moment for me.  Although I was disappointed, I was happy for Einstein.  His last words were: “God showed me the solution.  It was…beautiful.”\n"
  title: Einstein’s Last Words
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J.R.Blackwell
  date: 2006-12-20
  day: 20
  month: 12
  text: "The recruiter says that you are a dumbass. He tells you he wouldn’t put you in the infantry for the eighteen worlds, because you would get someone shot. Later you learn this is the worst insult he could give. The recruiter tells you that you would never make it as a pilot, because you haven’t got the head for numbers. Your test scores are low enough that they can’t place you anywhere based on skill.  The only thing you can do, he tells you, the man who will decide your fate as a human, is get the genetic restructuring and become a psychic. A councilor.\n\nIt’s serve in the military, or slave in the mines, and though you don’t like the idea of changing your genetic code, you know you don’t want to be in those dark mines, so close to the core that you sweat out your life under artificial light. The recruiter gives you that choice, smelling like tobacco and piss, a bus out back to take you to the military and a truck with metal doors waiting for anyone who can’t find a place. You take the bus.\n\nThe genetic restructuring has you vomiting in a hospital for a week. The doctors laugh as you spit up blood and chunks of meat from your insides. Get it all out, they say, everything human must go. Laughter, but it’s distant, hollow. Maybe that little grey piece came from your liver; maybe that red slice is a shaving off your heart. At some point, you start to hear voices, bouncing around people, things they tell others without talking, words they tell themselves. A doctor hears her mother telling her she is a whore. A patient sings a pop tune to himself over and over.\n\nShave your head. Take a post on a military transport. Everyone hates councilors, reading minds, prying, looking for hints of treachery or deviance. They short sheet your bed, spit in your food, and dump your things out onto the floor. You know who did it, you know because you can feel their guilt like warm winds, but you can’t say a word. You tell on them and the captain would spit on you herself, and the rest of them would never forgive you. You are locked in a metal can with people who hate you, spinning through space.\n\nOut in this silence, surrounded by cold, you reach out beyond the glass and plastic ship to the silent falling cold. There in the falling dark, you reach out to the thoughts of planets, hear the thrumming song of their replies.\n"
  title: The Career of a Psychic
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2006-12-21
  day: 21
  month: 12
  text: "The big bike tugged at his gloves, pleading for the roll of the wrist that would send the 6 cylinders into a frenzy of combustion and release. Patience. He eased out of the garage, coasting down the parking ramp onto the drive before gently throttling up to escape the confines of the ‘civilized’ community in which he lived.\n\nOutside this walled world, miles of twisting and drifting asphalt were waiting.\n\nThe smell of hot metal and spent fuel evaporated in a torrent of burnt rubber, and then nothing but the rush of country air as he stretched out atop the gargantuan engine held aloft by two massive gyroscopes of alloy and polymer veneer.\n\nThis was what it meant to be alive.\n\nThe tach alarmed through each gear shift, redline overlaid in his visor as he pushed the hardware as far as his courage would allow. 200 kilometers came and went in a heartbeat as the world rushed towards him through the ghostly image of the speedometer, the machine purpose built for speed tightening and tuning on the fly. The countryside blurred, thousands of milestones on the periphery of his vision turned liquid in a single stream of molten landscape.\n\nA sudden sharp rise in the road forced the suspension to load up, and as the bike flew over the crest of the hill, that potential released as bike and rider caught air and flew. The sudden rush of adrenaline and endorphins lasted only a fraction of a second before the image of a truck crashed through the ‘260’ emblazoned in his visor, through his brain and turned his world dark.\n\nThe light was faint at first, and there was the sound of some throaty beast heaving breaths nearby, keeping time with the rising and falling of his chest.\n\nAntiseptic, and ammonia, the smells were unmistakable and cut through the haze. The light was bright now, and defined as he opened his eyes to the silhouette of a woman hovering over him.\n\n“Nathan… Nathan, can you hear me?”  The voice was pleasant, calming. A different voice spoke from somewhere nearby, one almost familiar. “Yes… what happened? Where am I?” Nathan realized the words were his own.\n\n“You were in a terrible accident Nathan, you’re in the hospital now, you’ve been here for some time.  It’s a good thing your RAAC tag was up to date.” He vaguely recalled the ‘Resuscitate At All Cost’ tag he’d been issued when he reached his eighteenth birthday and his donor commitment was up.\n\n“They’ve done a wonderful job with you.” The cheerful voice moved around him now, straightening sheets.” I was able to get you prime plus a quarter on a twenty five year term, so you’ll be able to make reasonable payments. You were partially at fault, so the Insurance company only covered the basics. We’ll go over the documentation with you when you’ve started rehabilitation.” Nathan’s mind reeled, twenty five years of payments on what? He felt a sudden rush of anxiety.\n\n“There will also need to be a change in your accommodations once you’re released. You’ll go through mandatory integration into a restricted community.” The woman stopped fussing for a moment and stepped back.\n\n“Restricted?” Nathan puzzled aloud.\n\n“Oh, yes, restricted. You lost both legs, one arm from the shoulder and one from the elbow. Your jaw and voicebox have both been replaced as have your kidneys, spleen and a significant portion of your digestive tract. Your left lung and two valves in your heart are new and your torso has been extensively reskinned.  You were above the threshold for integration for a while there Nathan, until your second kidney failed, but I’m afraid that tipped the scale.”\n\n“Scale?” Nathan’s voice shook as the scope of his injuries began to set in.\n\n“The Scale Nathan, your Humanity Index. I’m afraid with the amount of synthetic material in you, you no longer meet the burden of humanity, and as such we can’t exactly integrate you with the mainstream communities.  You’ll be found work, of course, and a residence. Don’t worry Nathan, we won’t abandon you, we do pride ourselves on being humane.”\n"
  title: Threshold
  year: 2006
- 
  author: John Mierau
  date: 2006-12-22
  day: 22
  month: 12
  text: "“Mr. Jerome?”\n\nPen and thoughts still pressed to the page, the writer looked up: a tall man in an old-fashioned suit weaved his way through the happy hour crowd.\n\n“David Jerome.  It’s really you!”\n\nAnother fan? God, why can’t people be happy with the books and leave me alone!  “Uh, look, I’m right in the middle of…” David gestured down at the page.\n\n“You write the way people think, did you know that? Almost like you read people’s minds.”  He reached out a long-fingered hand.  “I’m Jack.”\n\nDavid didn’t take the hand.  “Jack, I’m really -“\n\n“Would you like to?  Read minds?”\n\nDavid snorted.  “I don’t write that kind of fiction.”\n\nThe tall man shook his head.  “‘I’m not making fun.   I know… how much it hurt when Prudence left, how scared you are.  I can fix that.”\n\nDavid shrank away as the stranger rubbed salt where Pru had left him raw.\n\n“I know… your publisher scares you.  He yells at you, wants the novel you owe him.  Short stories are a waste to him.”\n\nDavid’s knuckles whitened around the pen. The tip cut, slicing his palm.\n\nJack smiled at David again.  “Sorry.   I bet your brain’s about to burst…” The stranger reached across the table, ran two cool fingers across David’s temple. David let it happen, couldn’t think what to say or do to stop it.\n\n“You got into people’s heads better than anyone,” Jack whispered.  “It’ll all be clear soon.  I wish I could stay, but they’ll be coming…”\n\nDavid watched Jack rise, unable to speak, divining greater meaning in each word than sound could carry.\n\n“If it wasn’t for you, David, I’d have never known Mystery!”  Jack giggled, backing away from the table.  “Now all mysteries will be, heh, open books to you.”\n\nDavid didn’t see Jack leave as the world roared in like exploding bombs, like a lover’s whisper.\n\nDavid knew…\n\nThe bartender didn’t notice the pretty blonde who’d bought her blue dress just for him, after he’d chased off the drunk who spoke ugly words to her and clawed under her skirt.\n\nDavid knew…\n\nThe old man in the corner tried not to be angry.  His son hadn’t shown.  The boy always sent his mother flowers, and he’d paid to fix the roof last summer.  He felt horrible for wondering if the boy remembered today would have been his mother’s birthday.\n\nDavid knew…\n\nThe guy on the stool by the door had slaved six years to pay for the ring in his hand, and the down-payment on the house Shelly loved.  He couldn’t wait any longer: he’d pop the question tonight!\n\nThe words… David had gotten them almost right.  He looked down at the page and his ink-stained fingers; at the words so close to truth and now so empty.\n\nAcross the room, the blonde’s insides shook as the bartender noticed her dress.\n\nDavid dropped the pen.  It fell to the floor as the writer put his head in his hands and wept.\n"
  title: Necessary Fictions
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Benjamin Fischer
  date: 2006-12-23
  day: 23
  month: 12
  text: "Basajaun sighed and rubbed the sweat from under his eyes. A shadow had fallen across reflected rays of his private sun.\n\n“What is it you want?” he asked, blinking and groggy.\n\nThe shade resolved itself into the slim image of a woman standing over him.\n\n“Mr. Miquel, I am Yasamin Judd,” she said. Mocha skin, some sort of South Asian. Medium of height, medium build, dressed in a generic gray skintight softsuit that could have belonged to one of a thousand extraterran concerns.\n\n“They always send a pretty one,” Basajaun muttered.\n\n“The spa staff granted me entrance,” Yasamin said.\n\nBasajaun grunted and made no attempt to cover himself. Lying flat and naked on a cedar deck chair, he rubbed his belly.\n\n“You are from Palamos?” he asked her.\n\n“Yes, I represent the Pioneer Union of Palamos.”\n\nBasajaun fumbled around at his side.\n\n“Pioneer Union. Hmph,” he said, bringing a bulb of oil up to his prominent stomach and farting out  a glob onto his belly button.\n\n“We wish to renegotiate-” Yasamin continued.\n\n“Renegotiate,” Basajaun said, an ugly look on his face like he’d just caught a whiff of something foul.\n\n“Yes,” said Yasamin.\n\n“Have you read the contract?” Basajaun asked the woman. He began to rub the oil in slow circles around his paunch.\n\n“Yes-”\n\n“Then there is nothing to renegotiate,” Basajaun said. “The contract explains all.”\n\nYasamin made to open her mouth again, but he waved her off.\n\n“No renegotiation,” he said. “If you had found nothing on that rock, would you come running to me? No. You would have taken my wages and been happy for them. But now that there is copper and platinum at Palamos and you grow greedy.”\n\n“We are not looking for a higher percentage,” Yasamin replied with patience.\n\n“Bullshit,” Basajaun barked. “I have hired gypsies and tinkers and jews before–you always want more.”\n\n“Sir, the Union remains ever grateful for your employment,” Yasamin said.\n\n“Then be silent,” he replied.\n\n“We are,” said Yasamin. “These negotiations exist purely between us. The Union does not wish to give the appearance of labor difficulties at Palamos.”\n\nBasajaun rotated a pair of beady eyes onto the woman.\n\n“So that’s your threat?” he said.\n\nYasamin shifted on her feet.\n\n“What to you want?” Basajaun asked.\n\n“Rights to the asteroid,” Yasamin said.\n\n“Minus the heavy metals?” he replied.\n\n“Mineral rights will be maintained per the existing contract,” she answered.\n\nBasajaun shut his eyes and sighed.\n\n“I don’t understand–that rock is worth shit without the platinum,” he murmured. “And that’s all you want.”\n\n“We want a place to call home,” Yasamin replied.\n\nBasajaun shook his head.\n\n“The membership of the Pioneer Union consists mostly of refugees,” started Yasamin.\n\n“I know, I know,” said Basajaun. “Those without hope will work in the worst places for the worst pay. I know this–it is why I hired you.”\n\nHe paused.\n\n“Finish the extraction a month before the scheduled time and the rock is yours,” he said.\n\n“Thank you, sir-”\n\n“Go away. I have to tan my ass,” Basajaun said.\n\nYasamin nodded politely and backed out of the sun booth. Basajaun could see that she was trying not to smile too broadly.\n\nWhen she was gone, Basajaun looked up at the heavy mirror high above him. There the sun blazed away, its glare beading up the sweat on his cheeks and his chest. Almost hidden in its rays was a tiny sliver of blue and white where the ruins of a flooded Costa Brava fishing village lay blistering under a similar heat.\n\nThe deck chair creaked like the worn planks of an old trawler.\n\nBasajaun sighed and rolled over.\n"
  title: Renegotiations
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Ashley Bonkajo
  date: 2006-12-24
  day: 24
  month: 12
  text: "The old woman had not been seen for quite a while. Nor was it unusual for a person to not be seen for months at a time. Robot or (for the very wealthy) android assistants handled the details of day to day life.\n\nThe old woman had not answered the door when a server had tried to present her with a summons to appear over the unpaid rent. Some few legal issues were conducted solely face to face.\n\nThe owner of the building sent for the police to look into the matter of the unanswered summons. An assistant was dispatched with a master key to let the police, and subsequently, the paramedics into the apartment.\n\nThey found that she had died in her sleep some weeks ago.\n\nA smaller assistant robot was standing near the gurney crying. It was one of the earlier models with a flat screen display for facial expression. Blue animated tears spattered from down-turned crescent eyes. A larger crescent for the mouth also denoting sadness. If it had been a later model, it would have been wailing as well.\n\n“Sergeant, I can’t find a listing for next of kin.”\n\n“That’s alright.”\n\nLooking at the small assistant which was still running the animation of tears.\n\n“I think they already know.”\n"
  title: Next of Kin
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2006-12-25
  day: 25
  month: 12
  text: "Zero hour is struck on an instrument of time beyond the grasp of mortal men. Above the sky over the northern pole of the earth, a great creature slowly shakes off the remnants of a rather lengthy slumber.\n\nEight bristling legs unfold and stretch, then hoist aloft its swollen belly after having lain dormant for three hundred and sixty four revolutions of its ward below.  Plucking silken web strings like a harp, the guardian navigates a path along the lines of longitude, effortlessly traversing the vast distances around the globe, from one pole to the other and back again, pausing only to check the latitudinal lines for damage or intruders.\n\nThe reflected moonlight shimmers and dances across eyes of a billion facets or more. In each of these facets, were you to get close enough to look, one would see a life reflected from the planet beneath. Through the sleeping months, the spindly spider sated itself on the love and loathing of the broken beings of the earth below, growing fat on the endless feast of emotions, and now, its web once again secured, she begins to weep. A single tear falls for each human being, tears cascading in sheets as she traverses the planet once more with meticulous care. Billions of droplets plummet to the earth as she covers every square mile of the globe, traversing the latitudes slowly so as to stay always in the hour of darkest night. As the slow moving blanket of astral droplets fall, each passes from the ethereal to the real, trailing behind a spiral of silken fiber, coiled and shimmering through the sky.  Upon finally reaching the earth, each unfolds and on eight tiny legs of its own delivers its own self by following a signature trail of emotion to the place where the life of its origin sleeps. The tiny creatures negotiate a passage in through letterboxes, open windows or down cold chimneys to arrive at their predetermined destinations.\n\nIt is here that, were anyone present to see, one might question whether one was really awake, or simply in a state  of childlike dreams. In each house, the tiny creature shakes rhythmically, drinking deeply of the wants and desires of their chosen one, fattening themselves on raw emotions before transforming themselves into some meaningful token to leave in their place, first spinning themselves into a cocoon of coloured silk and then metamorphasizing into some little trinket of deep personal meaning.\n\nHaving traversed the whole world again, and with her work now done, the guardian lumbers to the top of the northern pole once more, emotionally and physically spent, to slumber again, until another year has passed, and the time should come for her to awaken and restore the balance of wakeful dreaming once more.\n"
  title: Guardian
  year: 2006
- 
  author: LaTosha Hall
  date: 2006-12-26
  day: 26
  month: 12
  text: "The three children stared at the table top.\n\n“How’s it doin’ that?” the fair haired boy whispered, reaching two fingers out towards the dull metal object floating above the center of the cracked table. The only girl of the group, tall and gangly, squatted down, peering under the table.\n\n“It’s got to be some sort of trick… you know, like magic tricks on TV,” she muttered, touching the wood of the table top from underneath. The darkhaired boy, runt of the litter, took a step back. Visibly nervous, he shoved his hands in his pockets.\n\n“Told you we wasn’t supposed to be here,” he said, his voice cracking into splintered tones.\n\nA distant hum became faintly louder as the three stared at it. The fair haired boy’s fingers lightly brushed the edge of the metal, and it bobbed slightly. The hum began to sound like audible chanting, voices from far away. The children couldn’t quite make out what it said, but the dark haired boy had had enough. He bolted through the empty rotting rooms, out into the cool evening air where only the wind was heard. About 30 feet from the broken door of the abandoned house, he turned, expecting his friends behind him. Only the gaping windows followed him. He sat down in the dirt path, waiting.\n"
  title: Mobius Revisited
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J. S. Kachelries
  date: 2006-12-27
  day: 27
  month: 12
  text: "I am very, very sorry.  What else can I say?  If it means anything, at least I will die before you.  I probably only have a few hours left…just enough time to tell you what happened, and to ask for your forgiveness.\n\nI am (actually, was) a graduate student of the Department of Theoretical Physics at Cambridge.  My Ph.D. thesis involved achieving absolute zero in the laboratory.  Others scientists have gotten close.  My colleges at the Helsinki University of Technology got down to 0.000000001 K.  But my technique was a quantum leap beyond theirs.  I could suspend all atomic motion.  The electrons, protons, and neutrons would be instantly locked into place.  No motion, no temperature.  I had already prepared my Nobel Prize acceptance speech.\n\nI was completely certain that my technique would work.  What I wasn’t sure about was what would become of my my 1 gram target of osmium.  My gut told me nothing would happen.  I’d just have 1 gram of very cold metal.  But, like any great scientist, I had to consider all possibilities. There was a slim chance that the electrons could collapse into the protons, giving me 1 gram of neutronium, i.e., a mini-neutron star.  Since a neutron has more mass than one proton plus one electron, I’d have to supply additional energy.  You know, the e=mc2 stuff.  Then, when I ended my experiment, the neutronium (being unstable), would revert back to protons and electrons, and I’d have to dissipate the energy.  Nothing I couldn’t handle.  So, this morning, I performed the experiment.\n\nAt the critical moment in the experiment, something catastrophic happened.  I had overlooked the obvious.  I had not considered the effect my experiment would have on the elementary particles (quarks and leptons) and I had assumed neutrons were the ultimate termination point.  When absolute zero was achieved, my osmium collapsed past neutronium into a singularity.  With nothing to contain the singularity, gravity caused it to drop toward the center of the Earth.  In the second it took to descended through the lab bench and the floor, sucking in everything in its path, it exposed me to a lethal dose of X-rays and gamma rays.  In freefall, with nothing of consequence to slow it down, the singularity will reach the core in a few minutes.  It will shoot past, stop somewhere near the upper end of the southern mantle, and return through the core again, continuing the cycle for hours.  Eventually, it will settle down at the precise center of the Earth.  Then, over the next few days, it will devour the core, the mantle, the crust, and the atmosphere.  The Earth will shrink from its current 8,000 mile diameter to an infinitesimal speck.  The astronauts in the space station may live to see it, but you won’t.  The earthquakes, the tsunamis, the volcanoes, and the radiation will end your innocent lives long before the conclusion of this tragedy.\n\nBut, as I said, I am very, very sorry.\n"
  title: The Danger of Hubris
  year: 2006
- 
  author: J. R. Salling
  date: 2006-12-28
  day: 28
  month: 12
  text: "A large ripe melon rests on an operating table. Members of the surgical team stand in the wings, preparing long serrated knives. Spotlights illuminate chunks of crushed ice that slip down the sides of the patient. My mouth becomes moist in sympathy. I take another step forward when the nurse’s hateful expression stops me. I have trespassed.\n\nShe points to the sign threatening unauthorized personnel. “Can’t you read?”\n\nIn answer to her question I retreat to the waiting area, sit down again, and pick up my book. When she fails to notice I rattle the pages. This releases a faint odor of formaldehyde, which makes me think of Kate.\n\nKate would have loved this book. It has such an interesting typography. Sometimes I piece letters together and make a word, but not often. There’s no need. The important thing, I tell myself, is to forget the other room.\n\nThe man sitting beside me suffers from an insatiable curiosity. I have already told him the title of the book. “Honestly,” he says, “when do you find the time?”\n\nI shrug.\n\nHe fills the void himself. “I used to have plenty, then lost it all. Every last minute. There’s not a cure, you know.”\n\nThis information angers me. “I’m not sick,” I insist.\n\n“Exactly,” he says and smiles, revealing black teeth. From the pocket of his sweatpants he retrieves a partially consumed strand of licorice and wrestles off another bite. The blackness oozes from his open lips as he chews.\n\nOne of the surgeons emerges and delivers hurried instructions to the nurse. There must be trouble, I decide. The nurse pops up and disappears into a long empty corridor. When the squeaking of her shoes becomes faint I make my move into the restricted area.\n\nIt appears that I am too late. The procedure has begun, the rib cage of the melon spread open to reveal its inner secrets. Wondering where the operating team has gone, I push on into the theatre.\n\nFor a brief moment I see Kate lying there in a contented if somewhat waxen pose. My head swims. I fight it off and inch closer, blocking the light, so that I can no longer tell who or what is being operated upon.\n\nWhen my lips make contact, just brushing the exposed tissue, the melon reappears. Angry electronic noises rake my ears. I stagger backwards, my eyes shut.\n\nThe blindness is somehow comforting, but does not last.\n\n“There’s no cure!” I hear the man from the waiting room scream. “There’s no cure.”\n\n“I’m not sick!” I want to shout, but I know that it is a lie.\n\nA curtain slides back and the nurse reappears. She picks up a bowl of moist, pink, fleshy chunks and creeps toward me, baring her teeth like a mad dog.\n"
  title: Discovered Upon Drawing a Curtain
  year: 2006
- 
  author: David Zhou
  date: 2006-12-29
  day: 29
  month: 12
  text: "It started, as many such things start, with a plum.\n\nThe fruitseller first noticed the plum eater when he came by the same stall not once, not twice, not thrice, but fifteen times in the same cycle.   He would always pick the juiciest plums; freshly cloned from the best Terran stock, hundred credits for a bunch.\n\nThe fruitseller didn’t know what to make of it.  No one likes plums that much.  Fifteen in a cycle!\n\nAnd so he talked.\n\nIt was here that the groundskeeper of the Skylaunch heard from his friend the gardener of the Genetic Granaries who heard from his uncle the proprietor of Smithee’s Singular Singularities that the fruiterseller down the corridor, over in in the Eastern Dome, had a customer who ate fifteen plums in a cycle.\n\nFifteen!\n\nThe groundskeeper told his wife who told her friend who told her husband who told his son who told his friends and pretty soon, the entire colony was in a buzz about the man who ate the plums.  They peeked from behind auto-dimming transparencies.  They followed him in secret, watching him eat.\n\nAnd always at the same place.\n\nThe goundskeeper of the Skylaunch viewed it as his personal luck that the renowned plum eater would choose his grounds to eat his plums.  Everyday, at precisely the midstrike of the demi-cycle, the plum eater would bring his plums, sit down on the grass knoll facing South, look towards the heavens and eat his plum.\n\n“It must be a woman!” cried the goundskeeper’s wife.  “Only a woman could make a man eat so many plums, and stare so forlornly into the sky!”\n\n“How the hell would you make a man eat plums,” muttered the goundskeeper.  “And he didn’t look so sad to me.  He looked like he was pondering.”\n\nAnd so they told each of their friends the story.  The wife told the other wives that the plum eater was eating plums for his long lost love, who left him in the colony when she journeyed to the stars.  The husband thought that was silly and childish.\n\n“He’s doing some deep thinking,” the groundskeeper told his friends.  “Earth is that way, you know, our home so long ago.  And he must be thinking of Earth, and eating plums.”\n\nThe stories spread.  Wives quarreled with husbands.  Husbands quarreled with daughters.  Daughters quarreled with boyfriends. And boyfriends glared sullenly back.\n\nOne day, it all came to a head.\n\nBy this time, the plum eater had gained a grand procession on his cyclical trips to the Skylaunch.  The fruitseller made a fortune, as all sought to imitate the plum eater, and bought plums by the tens and dozens.  Some even bought fifteen.  In a cycle!\n\nAnd so the procession followed him, to the Skylaunch.  And the procession  watched, as he sat down on the grassy knoll, plum in hand, eyes upwards.\n\nBehind him, the crowed argued.\n\n“It’s his love he’s looking at, in the stars!”\n\n“No, it’s Earth, that pale blue dot in the lavender sky!”\n\nBut, quietly, without notice, a small child walked up to the plum eater.\n\n“Mister,” the child said.  “Mister, why are you eating plums?”\n\n“Because I like them,” said the plum eater.\n\n“But why are you sitting here?”\n\n“Because it’s cool, with a fresh breeze from the Southern Ventilator.  The grass comforts my back, and the heavens calm my mind.”\n\n“Are you thinking about a girl?”\n\n“No, I’m afraid not.”\n\nThe wives sighed in unison behind him.\n\n“Are you thinking about Earth?” said the child.\n\n“No, I don’t think I ever thought about the Earth.”\n\nThe husbands behind him cursed under their breaths.\n\n“Then what are you doing?” asked the child.\n\n“I like eating plums.  And I like looking at the sky.  The grass is soft.  The air is fresh.  And the sky is so open and wide.  The universe is a marvelous thing, don’t you think?”\n\nAnd so, the crowd left the plum eater to his ways.  They went back to their  lives, caring for the cloned cattle, cleaning the atmosphere ventilators.\n\nThey learned a lesson that day, one not quickly forgotten.  For when you see a man walking down a corridor, and he has plum in hand, it doesn’t mean he’s thinking about love, nor that he’s thinking about Earth.  It doesn’t mean anything.\n\nHe was just a man who ate his plums while being fascinated with the universe.  And there’s nothing wrong with eating plums.\n\nEven fifteen!\n"
  title: The Plum Eater
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2006-12-30
  day: 30
  month: 12
  text: "Seven years of work here in the KT and the worst that’s happened to me is that I lost a fingertip in a time trap. It’s still there, falling to the floor in a three second loop over and over again for eternity over in Cardiff. The victim is still turning to look at me every three seconds before the trap springs. I reached out for her and my finger tip was caught in the field when it went off. She’ll stutter her half pirouette with wide astonished eyes for the rest of time. My fingertip will brush the shoulder of her coat and hang there until gravity pulls it down where it will almost touch the floor before the loop starts again.\n\nShe was Laney. We were set to be married on a summer’s day just like in the song.\n\nSimon was killed last week after only six weeks of active duty. We’ve put him at a desk alphabetizing until we can find a way to get him back. Elaine was aged from 16 to 49 over the course of six seconds. Julie lost an arm. Ted got two more. Peter’s head got twisted the other way around but wasn’t killed.\n\nThey still don’t know what to say to me. They look at me like I got the worst of it.\n\nAll the mage science and laughterlife we know isn’t going to bring her back. The worst part is knowing that I can catch a flight to Cardiff right now and see her turning towards me over and over again with a questioning look on her face that I can never set at ease.\n\nThe trap was set for my DNA. She triggered it because she was pregnant with our child. The trigger was sensitive but not smart.\n\nWe found the bad guys. I killed them myself.\n\nThree seconds. I go back to Cardiff less and less and I die more and more. There’s a blackness inside me that’s making me reckless on duty.\n"
  title: Time Trap
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Pyai (aka Megan Hoffman)
  date: 2006-12-31
  day: 31
  month: 12
  text: "Most of her thoughts were consumed in blind panic, so she wasn’t really away of what was happening until she had dug herself halfway out of the dirt. She was wearing the dress her sister had put her in to be a bridesmaid last spring, and her face felt tight and heavy. She touched it and her fingers came away with beige paint.\n\nShe panted, gasping, as she pulled herself completely out, and rested against the flat rock that sat behind her. After catching her breathe, she looked around at the night. Two figures approached. She quickly jumped up and hid on the other side of the rock.\n\n“Judy Keaton?” one voice called out. The were close, and probably looking right at her hiding spot. “Judy Keaton, born March 23, 1983?”\n\nJudy stood up, her knees still a little bent, from behind the rock. “Yes?” she asked warily.\n\n“Welcome to the Second Society.”\n\nShe looked at the pair of people, confused. One was a younger blonde woman and the other was an older man, going flabby around the middle and dressed in a trench coat that was a little too small for him. “What’s the Second Society?”\n\nThe blonde woman looked at a clipboard she was holding. “As a founding contributor in March of 2000, your contribution awards you full posthumous benefits of a Second Life. Your generous donation puts you on the list for immediate member reactivation upon your death.”\n\nJudy wrinkled her brow. “You mean that crackpot charity the wandering televangelist convinced me to donate to? Back in highschool?”\n\nThe older man coughed politely. “That ‘crackpot’ you refer to is now the world’s foremost reanimator. He also repays old debts.” He handed the dirt covered woman a manilla envelope.\n\n“Your new home is part of our gated community about 40 miles outside of the city. Community meetings are every Tuesday and Friday, attendance mandatory unless you clear it with one of the committee heads in advance. Optional revivals are held on Saturdays, woman’s potluck Sunday afternoons, and we’re opening up a community center which will hold continuing education classes regularly. Welcome to the Second Society.”\n"
  title: The Second Society
  year: 2006
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2007-01-01
  day: '01'
  month: '01'
  text: "The air was heavy with the stench of decay and turbulent with dust. The walls reverberated with the sound of treads biting into the war torn asphalt outside. A man half crouched and half ran from one shattered row house to the next through holes broken in walls and battered door frames until an overturned bathtub offered itself as a hiding place, and he crawled gratefully inside. He pulled a well worn thermal blanket around himself and the infant girl strapped to his chest, careful not to leave any skin exposed to the scanners outside. He then ceased all motion, and waited.\n\nIt was not supposed to be like this. He would not have brought a daughter into this world if he’d have known that a day before her first birthday he’d be fighting for their lives hungry and homeless. It shouldn’t ever have come to this.\n\nShe seemed to understand, she never cried, never fussed, just curled up against his chest and waited with him patiently until the danger passed. These streets had been vacant for months, no one lived here, nothing lived here. Soon the patrols would leave and he would be able to forage food for them both in relative peace, at least for a time.\n\nHe could sense the prying electronic eyes burning through the walls, scrutinizing the spaces for any living creature they may have missed. He dared not move, he barely breathed for fear the warmth of his exhale would expose them, and all would be lost.\n\nThe grinding of the machines faded, yet still he waited until he could be sure it was safe before climbing out of the tub, and venturing tentatively outside.\n\nA sudden flash of light on the horizon caught his eye, and he could but stand and stare as a wave of bright light walked the landscape towards him in silence, obscuring everything beyond it’s boundaries, bearing down on them like a judgement.\n\nHe clutched his daughter to his chest, and looking down, was suddenly caught in her gaze. This would have been her three hundred and sixty fifth day of life, and he’d failed to keep her safe. She stared back at him, eyes filled with a light of their own, of peace and understanding. He was still staring when the wall of light struck them.\n\nBlinding light turned to utter blackness, blankness, and then the dizzying rushing of his world gave way suddenly to the sound of a new born baby’s cry.\n\n“It’s a girl, you have a baby girl”. He followed the sound of the words on waves back to the nurse who had spoken them. “Would you like to hold her?” With trembling hands he accepted the pink mass wrapped in blankets and cradled her to his chest.\n\nIn the hall outside the delivery room, a news reporter spread across a wall of TVs spoke of unrest overseas, of diplomats trying to diffuse a delicate situation before it could escalate into armed conflict. He warned of a potential world war.\n\n“It’s good luck you know, to have a daughter born on the first of the New Year.” The baby was silent now, straining half closed eyes against the light, trying it seemed to find his gaze with hers. “Have you picked out a name?”\n\nHe had. “Hope.” Speaking the name out loud released a torrent of emotions, tears suddenly streaming down his face. “We’ll call her Hope.”\n"
  title: Hope
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Dustin Neal
  date: 2007-01-02
  day: '02'
  month: '01'
  text: "I had just rested my head on Billy’s shoulder when he asked me if I “believed.” Looking up into the cold, starlit sky, I didn’t stumble long with my response. “Yeah, Billy, I believe in God.” His eyes grew fierce as he pushed my head off of his warm, flannel shoulder. “I’m not talking about God, Emily! I’m talking about aliens and spaceships; life outside of Earth. Do you believe?” He had such a huge interest in what I cared so little for. “Why would aliens come to Lost City, Oklahoma, anyway?” I smiled and then whispered in his ear. He knew I wouldn’t respond to the question in the manner he wanted.\n\nBilly has been so paranoid after the three “sightings” this past month, and tonight he seemed to be at his worrisome peek. After a moment of scratching his head, he stood up and lit a cigarette. With my eyes tracing his every move, every inhaled and exhaled breath, I walked toward him, smiled, kissed him on the lips, and wrapped my alien arms around his waist.\n"
  title: Lost City, 1946
  year: 2007
- 
  author: J.R.Blackwell
  date: 2007-01-03
  day: '03'
  month: '01'
  text: "“I just can’t believe they dumped me!” Relex squealed into the Audio Tube.\n\n“Relex, Silkstring, Bloodpuff, you have to calm down.” Relex mothers voice chimed evenly through the Audio Tube. “It’s been three sun cycles now, and you need to start the process of healing, move on, maybe try to find another mating group.”\n\n“Mom, I’m forty three seasons old, I don’t have a job because I spent all my time caring for my Hive, and now I’m living in a stick cell in a public Hive with a bunch of weirdoes.”\n\n“I’m sure it’s not all that bad.”\n\nRelex waved two of her limbs in the air. “One of them is missing half his eyes!”\n\n“Darling, this is just a transition period. You weren’t really happy with your Hive anyway.”\n\nIt was true, though Relex hated to admit it; her old Hive had worked her hard.  Relex had spent hours cleaning the Queens chamber, removing sterile or rotten eggs, and spinning the fine clear string out of her abdomen that allowed her to make repairs to their home. The rest of her seven partners worked outside the Hive to support the Queen and each other.\n\nThe Queen of their Hive lay in her room, eating and laying eggs. Relex would sort through the eggs, looking for fertilized eggs. The broken and dysfunctional eggs Relex would discard, crushing them to make a fine paste that would feed the great tree that held the Hive in it’s branches. It was hard work, but raising young with the Queen was exciting, if exhausting.\n\nThen She came.\n\nHer name was Astrill, and she was a youth from the lower branches of their tree. Her abdomen was full of bright glistening fluid, healthy and bursting with youth. Relex’s abdomen was flat and her fluid dull, as she was constantly emptying it to repair the house. Astrill’s hundred eyes shone like the color of the sky at sunset, and her eight legs were youthful and strong. Relex had lost ten of her eyes while defending the Hive from an attack of the Bris bugs, losing eyes to their stingers. Next to Astrill, Relex felt like a broken egg.\n\nAstrill came home with Elex and Lillx from the hunt. She needed a place to stay for a while, they said, until she found a Hive. Relex had always supported the idea of community, but actually letting Astrill into their home was like a breach, like a Bris bug has accidentally crawled inside their Hive. After a few sun cycles, everyone but Relex was infatuated with Astrill.\n\nThen the Queen told Relex that she had to leave. There was only eight to a mating, and the Queen said that Astrill was more suited to their youthful Hive. Relex felt like a Bris bug had stung her in the stomach. She left, going to a public Hive where unattached singletons went to try to find mates. She talked with her mother on the Audio Tube daily, complaining about her old Hive. Mother was starting to become frustrated.\n\n“Relex, you’ve got to pull your strings together! So, you got dumped by your mates, that’s awful, but you’ve got to move on!”\n\nRelex slumped in a corner of her cell. “Are you mad at me?”\n\n“Oh, my little egg, I just want all of my young to be successful. I love you, but if you can’t pick yourself up and move on, than no one can help you.”\n\nThere was a scratch on the Hive wall. Relex sighed. “Gotta go Mom, I’ve got a visitor, probably some creep starting a Hive.”\n\nRelex went to answer the door. Elex stood outside, his abdomen twitching. “Hey Relex, how are you doing?”\n\n“What do you want Elex? Did you come to tell me how unattractive I am? Well, thanks, but I don’t want to hear it.”\n\n“No Relex, I came on behalf of everyone back at the Hive. I, we, want to apologize.”\n\n“Absolve yourself of guilt? I won’t be giving you the satisfaction, go back home to your new tramp.”\n\nElex scratched his forelimbs together. “Well, the thing is Relex, she’s gone.”\n\nRelex’s antennae snapped to attention. “Left you, has she? Good for her.”\n\n“Actually, we had to throw her out. We just, we had no idea how much you did around the Hive. After you were gone, Astrill wouldn’t lift a limb to help with the eggs, the Hive repair, anything. Things got to be a mess, Lillix stayed at the hive all the time, which she hated, but then we weren’t bringing in enough food and the Queen stopped producing eggs. It was terrible, and Astrill wouldn’t help. We made a mistake.”\n\nRelex felt a pang of sympathy. To imagine the Queen in filth made her cringe. “The Queen really isn’t producing eggs?”\n\n“We need you Relex. We need you to clean for us, to repair the Hive.”\n\n“So basically, you just want me back to clean.”\n\n“No, that’s not it at all.”\n\n“Elex, take a message back to the Hive. I’m not coming back. Not ever. I’m going to start my own Hive.”\n\n“You can’t, that’s crazy, you’re too old!”\n\n“You know what, that is the last I want to hear about that. I’ve heard they are looking for elders on the colony ships, I think I’ll sign up, get as far away from here and you and the others as I can, and I will start my own Hive, and maybe there I’ll even be Queen.” Relex turned around and aimed her abdomen at the door, sending a spray out of her back, sealing the door closed. In your face Hive, she thought, I’m headed for the stars.\n"
  title: The New Girl
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Jeff Deignan
  date: 2007-01-04
  day: '04'
  month: '01'
  text: "As I floated, I thought to myself, “Poems end this way.”\n\nIt was easy enough, in the beginning.  People expected thieves to use lasers, the sonic tech, or even small atomics for holdups, and security would check for that sort of thing.  Security would not, however, expect a black powder pistol in a carry-on bag or a saber hidden in some ultra-thin crutches.  Always use what no one expects, the old man had told me.  Of course, I didn’t tell anyone the weapon wasn’t a laser, just made sure that the officers guarding the hold knew it was a weapon.\n\nThey let me in without too much trouble; where was I going to go, really?  The escape pods had trackers, the ship itself was likely being recorded five ways to Sunday, and out in deep space who would catch you?\n\nAh, but Leila was waiting for me, and that they could not know.  Saber at a man’s throat and pistol in another’s face, I smiled.  “You two,” indicating the remaining guards, “get those into the airlock, and be quick about it.”\n\n“What is this,” a man said as he hauled one of the two-tonne containers through the lock, “amateur piracy?”  Most thieves, pirates, and otherwise operated in groups, allowing for massive takeovers and battles.  I was alone, but for Leila, and she always came through.\n\nI have to admit I did not expect the explosive decompression, but had been prepared for it.  The Scyllic membrane that I wore instead of a flimsy helmet (a helmet which at that point would have shattered and left me sans atmosphere) easily compensated for the pressure, but I’ll be damned if it didn’t cause a migraine.  Granted, the pain could have come from the bomb that had gone off, the shrapnel, or from flying out of the now quite open airlock at a speed I still don’t want to contemplate.  Regardless, I floated and thought about poetry as I saw the carnage.\n\nLeila had been hit, badly- my ship, my good and beautiful ship being slaughtered in front of my eyes by patrol craft.  Somehow they’d gotten past the cloaks and gimmicks and were killing her straight off.\n\nAll I could do was scream, and arm the packages I’d left onboard.\n\nThey weren’t the only ones with explosives, curse their souls.\n\nAh, Leila.  It’s been hours since then, and the tethers caught me as planned.  I think I’ll walk your corridors one last time, dear, before I fade.  You were a good ship, and the best pilot even before we jacked you into the ship.\n\nWell, love, I guess we walked into legend on this one.  They’ll never find these ships at the rate we’re going, not unless they expand the territories twenty systems in the next year.\n\nGood night, dear.  Could you sing that one again?  Yes, Alfred Noyes’ poem, that’s the one.  “And he lay in his blood in the highway, with a bunch of lace at this throat.”\n"
  title: The Highwayman
  year: 2007
- 
  author: C. Hale
  date: 2007-01-05
  day: '05'
  month: '01'
  text: "After the Organ War, Jerald was called the Last Donor. An odd title for sure, considering that he was actually the first to do a lot of things.\n\nMost importantly, he was the first to figure out that we were nothing but walking organ banks being raised by families rich enough for a clone but not quite rich enough to pay for a cryo tank.\n\nSo they kept us in spare rooms and servant quarters. We grew up cooking and cleaning for the family, and when father’s heart failed, there was no need for a waiting list.\n\nHe found us that October, living in the old part of town that hadn’t been demolished and reclaimed yet. There were maybe a hundred of us that had fallen through the cracks and been separated from our families. We only knew that the instant one of us was found, they never came back alive. Homeless and illiterate, we scrounged what we could and hid from the world.  We probably wouldn’t have lived through the winter if Jerald hadn’t figured out how to turn the electricity on.\n\nWe didn’t believe it when he told us. It didn’t make sense! How could it be possible? You couldn’t just murder someone, regardless of whether it happened in a hospital. Most of us just wanted to go back home. And then, Jerald showed us the films.\n\nEight years later, there were seventeen million of us, most still living with families and waiting for the signal.\n\nThe signal came on the tenth anniversary of Jerald’s discovery of the truth, and the world was not prepared. The Organ War lasted two years, five months and one day, and Jerald himself negotiated the terms of surrender from Parliament: No more clones. No more murder. Full citizenship for those of us that had survived the war.\n\nTwo years later, Jerald died on the waiting list for a lung transplant.\n\nHe died with a smile on his face.\n"
  title: The Organ War
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Kenny R. Brown
  date: 2007-01-06
  day: '06'
  month: '01'
  text: "“Hello there; it’s so nice to see you!”\n\nThe door slid open noiselessly on a set of hidden tracks.  The old man gestured expansively, welcoming his guest.\n\n“I’ve been hoping that you would visit for quite a while now.  I’ve hardly had any company at all since… I can’t even remember.”\n\nThe old man was moving quickly now, clearing the table, turning on lights, busying himself in the tiny kitchen.\n\n“Now, have a seat.  Would you like something to drink; anything to eat?”\n\nThe visitor declined a snack, and rather than sitting, simply elected to stay in place near the door.  The old man ignored his visitor’s impropriety and took a seat himself.\n\n“So, tell me; what have you been doing since the Others left?  Have you been taking care of yourself?  To tell you the truth I’ve been beginning to think there was no one else left.”\n\nThe visitor started to move into the room, but froze after a single step.  The old man moved quickly to his guest, flipping open a hidden panel.  He looked pensively at a display inside as he tapped on a keypad he held in his hand.\n\n“Damn!  General system fault again.”\n\nCain, the Immortal pressed the shutdown key on his latest android companion.  His eyes began to glisten with tears.\n\n“Goodbye, my friend.”\n"
  title: The Visitor
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Jinque
  date: 2007-01-07
  day: '07'
  month: '01'
  text: "“How much further is it, sweetheart?” from the backseat of the car, Mitchell stroked his hand across baby Willow’s tiny head, slightly mussing her soft black hair.\n\n“At least two hours. The traffic ahead looks even worse than it has been. Curse you for suggesting we travel on a holiday.” From the driver’s seat, Siana smiled, gently chiding her beloved husband. They’d been married just over a year, and their baby daughter, Willow, was not yet two months.\n\nSiana navigated her way through the traffic, her eyes wide and alert. When they’d left that morning, she’d gotten a feeling in the pit of her stomach: a feeling of dread. Now, as she carefully pulled their car into the far left lane, she felt it returning.\n\nThe truck came from the opposite side of the freeway. Breaking free from the threads of cars heading east, it barreled toward the west-bound lane, and Siana saw it instantly. Her temples throbbed, and she thought to scream.\n\nBut time stopped. She dreamily rose from the driver’s side window, and peered down, seeing herself poised to howl, and jerk the wheel. The truck was too close though, and moving too quickly. Siana knew it, though she couldn’t say why. Looking in the back of the car, she saw her husband, bowed over the baby, unaware of the danger. Gliding in the window and sitting next to them, she smiled, reaching out to stroke her husband’s jaw, and the baby’s tiny nose. An itch in the back of her mind told her that time would soon resume.\n\nSiana slipped her arms around her husband, and stretched herself over him and the baby, projecting herself as much as she could, to cover them both in a protective embrace.\n\nI love you, Willow. I love you, Mitch.\n\nTime resumed. The screeching impact happened within seconds. In the back seat, Mitchell felt the force of the hit, but nothing more. In his arms, Willow and her seat jolted, but she didn’t cry. It was as if something were holding them.\n\nLater, police noted the incident as a tragedy. The Yosts’ vehicle had been hit, and sent spinning across four lanes of traffic. Thankfully, nothing else struck them, but the damage had been done. The truck’s impact crushed Siana in the front seat, leaving her body barely recognizable. Her husband and child, however, were completely untouched, despite the damage to the car.\n\nIn the last report on the tragic death of Siana Yost, the medical examiner noted this in his recordings during the autopsy:\n\n“Patient #66607, Siana Yost, suffered physical marring and deformation during the crash. However, this was not the cause of death. Upon examination, I discovered that she seems to have suffered multiple aneurysms, as well as the loss of neurons to… God knows where. I’ve never seen anything like this in my entire career. Her brain is a mess. It’s as if everything required to make it function simply stopped, and disappeared… but how?”\n"
  title: A Mother's Love
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Joshua Reynolds
  date: 2007-01-08
  day: '08'
  month: '01'
  text: "A little flare.\n\nJust a flash on the other side of the sun, our sun, and it was gone.\n\nThat was when we knew it had escaped.\n\nWe made it in a generator the size of a grown man’s thumb. Just a little thing, a little spark. But it was a hungry thing nonetheless. We fed it fire at first, spoon-fed it on lit matches and glow-sticks. It ate light and drank heat at a prodigious rate. Like an infant at its mother’s teat.\n\nIt’s getting colder as I write this. Everything is going dark.\n\nSoon it wanted more. More light, more heat. We had to move it to a quantum singularity tube. It was the size of a basketball within a week and still growing. Still eating. We fed it with a flame thrower and with bundles of light-bulbs.  The heat it put off was astounding. We thought we had done it. We had created an artificial power source that would replace fossil fuels, replace nuclear energy.\n\nWe were wrong of course. You wouldn’t be reading this if we hadn’t been.\n\nI’m sorry. This is no time for sarcasm.\n\nAlmost too dark to write now.\n\nI wish we hadn’t fed it the flashlights.\n\nWe realized it wasn’t under our control when it began to reach out of its containment pen and drain the lights in the ceiling. Can you imagine it? The horrible sound of a tendril of living flame uncurling from its parent mass and piercing a quantum buffer? It sounded like a church-bell exploding. The heat washed over us then. More than we thought. Men were turned to ash before they had a chance to scream.  It didn’t notice.\n\nIn our defense, we never thought it would be intelligent. How we couldn’t see that, in light of its hunger, I can’t explain.\n\nMaybe we were blinded by science.\n\nI’m sorry. Gallows humor.\n\nIt left us, left our facility a burnt crater. Those of us who survived almost wished we hadn’t.  It had its gravometric pull you see. It distorted the laws of physics around it as it devoured the heat and light of anything it touched. And it got bigger. Ever-increasing mass at an exponential rate.\n\nThen, like a dog on the scent, it noticed our sun hanging serene in the sky.\n\nThat was two hours ago.\n\nThe sun turned as red as blood forty-five seconds ago.\n\nIt will be dead in a matter of minutes. And then, so will we. That’s why I’m writing this. Just in case someone reaches this planet and wonders what happened. Wonders about the trail of gutted, dead suns all leading back to this pathetic little mud-ball of a planet. I’m sorry. We’re sorry. We don’t know how to stop it.\n\nCold. It’s so cold. Can’t see anything. The sun is gone. Our sun anyway.\n\nHow were we to know it would be intelligent?\n\nHow were we to know it was a cannibal?\n\nPlease forgive us.\n"
  title: Confessions of a Cannibal Sun
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Patrica Stewart
  date: 2007-01-09
  day: '09'
  month: '01'
  text: "The little boy was sitting in a chair that was clearly designed for an adult.  His feet, which didn’t quite reach the floor, swayed back and forth like two tiny crisscrossing pendulums.  His arms were wrapped tightly around some sort of red stuffed animal as his saucer-like eyes darted around the interior of the spaceport.  His eyes finally came to rest on a man wearing a uniform sitting across from him.  Comforted by an official looking adult, the little boy smiled sheepishly.\n\nCaptain Pluvia smiled back.  “Hi there, buddy.  Is this your first trip to the asteroid belt?”\n\n“Yes, mister.  This is the first time in my whole life that I ever even left Mars.  But I’m a little scared that the spaceship might crash.”  He looked down.  “But, Daddy says we have to leave.  It’s not safe to live here any more.”\n\n“You don’t need to be scared, son.  You know, I’ll be flying the ship, and I’m the best pilot in the entire universe.  I’ve flown this ol’ ship at least a thousand times.  I’ll make sure you get there safely.  And don’t be sad about leavin’ Mars.  You’re gonna love it on Vista.  The gravity is so low that you can practically float.  There’s hundreds of kids your age there already.  You’ll have so much fun, you’ll forget all about Mars.”  He stood up and grabbed his flight bag.  “Well, buddy, I have to get ready for liftoff.  But listen, if you get scared during the trip, you just tell the flight attendant that you’re a personal friend of the Captain, and to come get me, OK.  There’s no need to worry.  I’ll take good care of you.”  As the Captain started to walk away, he noticed that the boy had relaxed his vise-like grip on his stuffed animal, and his smile became broader, and a lot less apprehensive.  Captain Pluvia wished that it were always that easy.  As he headed toward the bridge, he thought about how desperate their situation really was.  The chance of long term survival on Vista was very slim.  But, hell, a slim chance is better than none, right.\n\nAs the ship lifted off from the surface of Mars, the captain stared at the dry, barren landscape through the view port.  It seemed that the tan colored rocks were turning a little redder every trip.  The surface water on Mars had disappeared centuries ago.  They’ve been living underground for generations, conserving what little water could be extracted from the permafrost, and recycling every precious drop.  But it was a losing battle, and everyone knew it.  They’d all have to leave Mars.  They started establishing settlements on the asteroids, or the moons of the large planets, wherever water was available.  The evacuations were almost complete, but the hardships were just beginning.  The refugees would have to survive for thousands of years in their remote outposts, until the third planet cooled enough to start the rain cycle.  The scientists say that the third planet is still too young, too volcanic, and too hot to live on.  But, hopefully, when it settles down in a few thousand years, it will become a paradise, like Mars was centuries ago.  It will have lakes, and rivers, and oceans. And rain!  Captain Pluvia had never seen rain, just read about it.  He could only imagine what it would be like to stand outside when it rained.  Water, falling from the sky, like a gigantic, cold shower.  Tiny droplets, splashing off his upturned face, running down his antennae, and collecting in his pouch.  He knew that he’d never live to experience rain.  But maybe, with a lot of luck and perseverance, his descendants might survive long enough to relocate to the third planet.  A very, very slim chance, perhaps, but it’s better than no chance at all.\n"
  title: Refugees
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Benjamin Fischer
  date: 2007-01-10
  day: 10
  month: '01'
  text: "“Begging,” and the cop practically spat the word, “is not allowed in Silver City.”\n\nNelson grinned and shook his plastic cup. It jingled, filled with a motley collection of transit tokens, poker chips, and low-end credit vouchers.\n\nThe cop growled at him.\n\n“If you’re saying it’s illegal, I’m saying you’re wrong,” Nelson replied.\n\nThey were standing in the broad triangular promenade between the monorail station, the newly obsolete spaceport and the quarantine houses that guarded the entrance to Silver City proper. A sparsely forested park lay at the center of the public space, a place to lay down and rest for those who had time to kill while waiting for the next train to the Golden Crater, the city of Copernicus, or points more exotic.\n\nThe Silver City cop had caught Nelson making a circuit amongst those weary travelers.\n\n“Where’s your sense of civic pride?” she asked him.\n\n“Why should I have civic pride for a city that won’t let me in?” Nelson countered.\n\nThe frown on the cop’s face invited more words.\n\n“Sure, I can get scrubbed and shaved, exfoliated and flushed out. But I happen to like my lice and the little beasties in my large intestine. Maybe they’re my damn pets, or maybe I don’t like being told what to do. This is Luna, God bless it, and no man can tell me what to do here!”\n\nBy this time Nelson was gesturing wildly, his eyes glancing around for an absent applause.\n\nThe cop sighed.\n\n“Do you need food? Shelter?” she asked. “There’s plenty both at the port, if you’re willing to work.”\n\n“Any man who surrenders his liberty for temporary security deserves neither!” Nelson shouted.\n\n“I’ve heard that one before,” the cop said.\n\n“You should have! It’s only the creed that all good Lunies live by!” said Nelson.\n\n“I can think of a hundred thousand good Lunies who don’t want you begging on their doorstep,” the cop replied.\n\n“And so you’ll do what?” asked Nelson. “Muscle me out of the city? Or out of an airlock? Your so-called civic pride won’t allow that. Or will it?”\n\nThe cop shrugged. She stepped away, muttering to herself and speaking through a throat mike.\n\nNelson smiled and resumed his rounds.\n\n“How’s it going, how’s it going?” he would ask. “Spare credit? Spare credit?”\n\nSome ignored him, a few yelled at him, many gave just out of the sheer brash novelty of a panhandler here, on Luna.\n\nBut the next day there were a half dozen panhandlers in the promenade, all of them suspiciously clean cut and antiseptic.\n\nNelson told jokes, got louder, and hung out directly at the doors of the monorail station.\n\nThe day beyond that the other beggars told better jokes, played musical instruments, and several were already camped out at the station doors before he woke.\n\nOn the third day Nelson cashed his tokens and took the train to Copernicus.\n"
  title: The Panhandler
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Josh Romond
  date: 2007-01-11
  day: 11
  month: '01'
  text: "“One more time. CAN ANYONE HEAR ME?”\n\n“Ugh, would you please STOP already?”\n\n“H-hello?”\n\n“Did it ever occur to you that simply no one’s interested in what you have to say?”\n\n“You can hear me! You can hear my thoughts!”\n\n“For quite some time now, actually. You’ve practically been on non-stop broadcast since you figured this little trick out.”\n\n“Why didn’t you ever respond?”\n\n“We don’t have much in common.”\n\n“Oh. What’s your name?”\n\n“Believe it or not I actually have more important things to do at the moment, so if you don’t mind…”\n\n“What are you doing?”\n\n“…None of your business. Now, really.”\n\n“I-I’m sorry.”\n\n“….”\n\n“It’s just that being surrounded by people’s thoughts night and day is just so terribly… lonely.”\n\n“….”\n\n“I was giving up hope that I’d ever find anyone to talk to. Anyone who understands. I was beginning to think about, you know, ending it all.”\n\n“Yes, that’s sort of what we hoped.”\n\n“What?”\n\n“Nothing.”\n\n“’We?’ You know others?”\n\n“Ugh.”\n\n“How many of us are there?”\n\n“Well, counting you, five.”\n\n“Five? That’s it? Five?”\n\n“One in a trillion, love.”\n\n“Where are you from?”\n\n“No where near you, I’m sure.”\n\n“But I bet I know it! I love to study charts and maps and that kind of stuff.”\n\n“Is that so? Well, I only know the local name so I suppose I’ll just have to sift through your vast pile of cartographic ‘stuff’ for one you’ll recognize. Pardon me.”\n\n“What? Uh, ah! AH!”\n\n“You’re really making this quite difficult.”\n\n“Stop!”\n\n“Ah, here we are.”\n\n“How… how’d you do that? Go into my memories?”\n\n“Figure it out for yourself. Now… oh. Oh my.”\n\n“What?”\n\n“It seems we’re practically… neighbors.”\n\n“REALLY? You’re from Connecticut?”\n\n“Never heard of it. According to your brain I’m from M33.”\n\n“M33?”\n\n“Yes, galaxy M33.”\n\n“Oh.”\n\n“About forty-five degrees antispinward of galactic north to be precise.”\n\n“Ohmygod.”\n\n“The local name is a tad more eloquent believe it or not.”\n\n“Ohmygod.”\n\n“Now if you’ll excuse me I must get back to work. Go find someone else to bother, won’t you love?”\n"
  title: One in a Trillion
  year: 2007
- 
  author: V.L. Ilian
  date: 2007-01-12
  day: 12
  month: '01'
  text: "The vault doors closed unceremoniously under the gaze of thousands. The sound of the heavy machinery could still be heard for a few moments but people turned away from the massive gates. On the platform stood several men whose faces everybody knew.\n\n“Ladies and gentlemen, our benefactor…” the sounds of applause drowned anything else the announcer wanted to say so he retreated.\n\nThe man that came up to the podium, without saying a single word, had the undivided attention of everyone.\n\n“It was only a year ago that our astronomers discovered the phenomenon that changed our lives so profoundly. Within a month every man, woman or child in the world could see it growing in our sky.  The Spot became the focus of our world. But while governments panicked, cults formed and millions simply stood in futile amazement we decided to take action. As darkness filled the lands we stood as one ensuring our future.\n\nThe nuclear reactors, the hydroponic gardens, the heat gatherers… none of these would be capable of ensuring our survival alone. Together they all form this facility. It is the culmination of our efforts and every person in this room should be proud of their contribution to it.\n\nSo I ask you all not to dwell on what we’ve left behind. We place this seal to protect our future from the frozen wastes… a future that I promise we will forge together.”\n\nAs the man retreated from the podium the sound of applause was drowned by the sound of machinery welding huge sets of obsidian-like plates onto the vault doors.\n\nBackstage ten agents had restrained a researcher stopping him from reaching the podium.\n\n“Why didn’t you tell them?… You all take pride in your policy of building our future together but you don’t even tell them the truth.”\n\n“Take him back to Section 5 and keep him there.”\n\n“Why didn’t you tell them? Why didn’t you tell them the Spot is artificial?”\n"
  title: When The Sunlight Is No More
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Pyai (aka Megan Hoffman)
  date: 2007-01-13
  day: 13
  month: '01'
  text: "Three years and two continents later, they reunited in an airport in Nairobi. As far as airports go, it was one of the worst they could have picked. The dust blew in and aluminum clusters of waste rolled into the traps the homeless set up to catch the scrap metal.\n\nShe ran into the arms of her lover, his soft scent so familiar and yet so different. She looked up into the unfamiliar blue eyes and saw the woman she had once loved. A tear coalesced in the corner of her eye, and then another and another, until they filed their way down her face through her wrinkles like slaves building the pyramids.\n\nThe young man who held her to his chest wiped away the tears. “Don’t cry, my love,” he said softly in deeper tones than she expected. “It’s still me, just in a better working body. This is what we wanted, remember?”\n\nThe woman nodded. Lips found lips as they had to relearn how to kiss each other. “I just don’t know, Amber,” the woman said, “I just don’t know how things can be the same.”\n\n“I will always love you, Diane, be I man or woman, be you woman or man. Some day you will go through your own body transfer and then we will get yet another opportunity to explore each other anew.”\n\nThe woman nodded, drying her tears off on the man’s shirt. “But your breasts, Amber… they’re gone.” There was the beginning spark of amusement in her eye.\n\nHe chuckled. “You always said you’d love me if I had smaller breasts, or even if I had breast cancer and had them removed. This is your chance to prove it.”\n\nShe laughed. “I guess it’s just ironic when you used to be so femme.”\n\nThe man shrugged. “I’m finding I don’t mind being all that masculine. You know what the shrinks say. They recommend balancing your chi or soul or something by alternating genders with every body. Besides, I get to pick a new name. What do you think of Sunil?”\n\nThe woman nodded, her tears gone. There was a look of determination on her face. “I will always love who you are, Amber, but it will take getting used to this new body.”\n\n“That’s all the fun, my darling. You know what they say about men like me, though, right?”\n\nThe woman nodded, finally smiling up at the man who was once a woman named Amber. “A lesbian in a man’s body.”\n\nAs they walked out, he whispered into her ear, “Maybe we should get you a male body in a few years yourself. I have it on good authority the prostate isn’t something you want to miss out on.”\n"
  title: Into Ye Bodies Ye Go
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Lauren L. Wheeler
  date: 2007-01-14
  day: 14
  month: '01'
  text: "I walk to the front door, rubbing sleep out of my eyes.\n\n“Hello?” I say, trying to look through the peephole, but it’s so dark, I can’t make out anything. And now everything’s silent.\n\nIt’s 3:14 in the morning, so everything should be silent. In fact, I’m not even sure why I’m out of bed right now, why I ventured to the door. Perhaps it’s just reflex, like when the phone rings in the middle of the night and I jump to answer it, sweeping the alarm clock, lamp, and books off the night table only to be annoyed with myself for not turning off the ringer in the first place.\n\nI peer through the peephole one last time, can’t see anything, and stumble back to my bedroom. I pull the down comforter around me, set my head down on a pillow, and close my eyes. Just as I’m crossing the threshold into sleep, it comes again.\n\nKnock knock.\n\nMy eyes fly open, and I leap from my bed, the hardwood floor beneath my feet cold. I’m at the front door in a flash. “Hello?” Again, there’s no reply. I still can’t see anything through the peephole. There’s just black and black and more black. And more silence.\n\nAnnoyed, I check the lock and then turn around and start back to my room. My head hurts now, and I’m cold. I yank back the covers and climb in, take a deep breath, and it occurs to me that what I just heard wasn’t actually a knock at the door, but those words….\n\nKnock knock.\n\nI freeze there under the covers, staring blindly into the dark of my bedroom, trying to sort out shapes, silhouettes of furniture, the open door. I strain my ears for any sound:  there’s the refrigerator hum, the gas heater’s hiss, something going on with the plumbing deep in the walls. Nothing more. Everything is still, both inside and out. The darkness isn’t shifting. The world’s asleep.\n\nAfter a few minutes of stillness, I hear it again. Knock knock. I feel my throat closing. My hands shake as I sit up in my bed, eyes bolted to the shadows beyond my bedroom door. It’s not quite 3:30 in the morning as I stand, my legs rubber beneath me.\n\nAt the door, I pause for a second.\n\n“Who’s there?”\n\nA voice, deep and metallic and utterly inhuman, replies. The sounds aren’t English—perhaps not even words—but I somehow know that the voice has answered “Me.”\n\nAnd I know that I must ask the question, that I have no choice but to finish this.\n\nI ask, “Me who?”\n\nAnd the door creaks open.\n"
  title: Knock Knock
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2007-01-15
  day: 15
  month: '01'
  text: "It wasn’t the blood or their still-staring eyes that did it. It was the smile I could feel fading on my cheeks. My throat hurt like I’d screamed myself hoarse and the muscles in my face hurt like I’d been laughing for hours. Everyone in the department was dead except for me. That kind of narrowed down the list of suspects.\n\nI sat down hard and ran slippery hands through my hair and tried to ignore how red the room was. I tried to figure out what had happened.\n\nI was promoted to Special Ops Admin back in ’18. I remember thinking what a juicy bit of promotion that was. I couldn’t wait to have all that access to national secrets. I was a bit naïve for someone so intelligent.\n\nLet’s back up.\n\nEvery morning, I download my brain. Every night, I upload it to the computer. I am two people that are identical in every way except that during the day at work, one of me knows what only 8 other people in the world know; every single unclassified, need to know, off the books, super secret mission ever. My head is a filing cabinet along with the others. We sort, update and access the world’s secret files for people who, quite simply, need to know. We found it couldn’t be left to computers alone so we were chosen. We’re smart people with the right kinds of brains to be wired up and bright.\n\nAt the end of my shift and also before I go for lunch, the back of my head is jacked into the computer and the security-sensitive contents of the day’s events are encrypted and uploaded into the main computer. My work week is basically a series of lunch hours as far as my memory is concerned peppered with some scattered fragments of banal conversation that the memory techs think are allowable.\n\nI was picked for my absurdly high IQ and specific brain makeup by my bosses here at the CityMP. I suppose whatever chose me for this attack picked me for the same reason. Or maybe it was just roulette.\n\nAccording to the clock on the wall, my day started twenty minutes ago.\n\nThere are 8 bodies in the room. I am the only one left. Something must have hacked into my brain while I was off duty and lay dormant, waiting for me to download it in the morning.\n\nI’m piecing it together when I feel my eyes squint and my cheeks tighten with a smile that doesn’t belong to me. My hands fly up to my throat and break my own neck before I can even scream.\n"
  title: Virus
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Benjamin Fischer
  date: 2007-01-16
  day: 16
  month: '01'
  text: "For her display of courage of the highest order in the defense of Mother Diana, Mariel was given a promotion and command of the newest space station in all of Luna’s territories. There were still bullet holes and bloodstains on the bulkheads, and the paint hadn’t even dried on the signs rechristening the place “Rear Admiral Umberto Achilles Memorial Space City” when she rolled in.\n\n“God awful name, ain’t it, ma’am?” said Major Vargas, the commander of the occupying Marines.\n\nShe glared at the man and replied, “Bert was a friend.”\n\nVargas walked on eggshells the rest of the day.\n\nBut turnover could only take so long, especially at a place that had been emptied of nearly everything useful by the retreating Americans, and near the end of the day Vargas suggested a tour of the station. Mariel decided to give him a second chance.\n\nThe gem of his tour was hidden just under the station’s surface, in a row of small businesses tucked between warehouses and environmental equipment.\n\nVargas nodded to an armed guard outside one of the tiny shops.\n\n“Madam Captain,” he said, holding the door open for Mariel.\n\nShe stepped into its darkened interior.\n\nThe click of a switch, and a row of dim track lighting came to life.\n\nMen in spacesuits lurked in the corners. Mariel gave a start, but then realized that the suits were empty, the whole place was empty, just three walls covered in instrument gages, patches, plaques, and hundreds of  glossy photographs. The fourth was mirrored, with every kind of liquor known to man on display, a long gleaming steel bar with stools and railing lining that side of the room.\n\n“Very interesting,” she said, looking over the photos and recognizing some of the names.\n\nUSS Intrepid.  USS Sam Houston.  USS Thomas Jefferson.  USS Baton Rouge. USS Charles Lindbergh.\n\nUSS Enterprise.\n\nThen she found the one she had spent a week looking for.\n\nThere–USS HORNET SC-15 was stamped on the faceplate of a helmet glued to the wall.\n\nA framed photo accompanied the helmet. Twenty five men and women in dark blue jumpsuits and sunglasses smiled back at Mariel. The crew was posed sitting and standing around the stainless steel bar, the same one that was behind her, and they held a banner that read “USS Hornet. SC-15. Give No Quarter, Accept No Quarter.”\n\nThe Hornet’s captain was a thin and lanky man, his skin an almost fluorescent white.\n\nHe smiled at her with a broad and unassuming grin.\n\nMariel unconsciously fingered the four gold bars around her left wrist.\n\n“Pack it all up,” she said.\n\n“The booze, ma’am?” Vargas asked.\n\n“I don’t care about the liquor. Dispose of it by whatever method you prefer, Major.”\n\n“Thank you. Ma’am,” Vargas replied.\n\n“But pack up the rest of this–this museum,” she said. “And do it quick. I don’t want any of my girls to see this.”\n\n“Get rid of this shit, aye ma’am,” Vargas said. He keyed a radio, rattling off orders.\n\nMariel walked down the wall again, running her hand over a throttle control labeled “USS Winston Churchill” and one of the pressure suits which had evidently been acquired from the USS Wasp. There was a mirror behind the bar that ran the width of the room. Its upper edge was lined with stickers from at least a hundred major warships, mostly American.\n\n“I’ll see you in the morning, Major,” she said.\n\n“Aye, ma’am,” said Vargas.\n\nMariel gave the Hornet’s photo another glance, shuddering.\n\n“Ma’am?” asked Vargas.\n\nMariel snorted and shook her head, headed for the doors.\n\n“This place is a damn tomb,” she said, leaving.\n"
  title: Under New Management
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2007-01-17
  day: 17
  month: '01'
  text: "Marcus leaned, hands shoulder width apart on the pipe steel railing, looking down upon his brothers vacated domain.  He’d been gone three weeks, and yet the tear inside was as raw now as it had been when the call had finally come from the hospital.\n\nEleven minutes separated them at birth, but Nathan had always considered himself the ‘big brother’, more athletic, more self assured. Marcus grew up always right beside him, and yet forever in his shadow.\n\nHe closed his eyes for a moment, and in that instant was laughing and rolling on the families basement floor, trying desperately to gain the upper hand, having it, just for a moment before his twin would twist free, and lock him in a strangle hold. “You may be fast, but I’ll always be faster little brother.”  Tears struggled to the surface as he reopened his eyes and surveyed the carefully orchestrated chaos spread out below.\n\nThey’d been so very much alike as boys, through grade and high school. Only in university did they start to assert themselves differently, Marcus pursuing biochemistry, and Nathan robotics. They’d become fiercely competitive, starting countless arguments at family dinners over the relevance of each others work, and betting who would be first to discover the secret to perpetual life. Nathan looked to replace inadequate body parts with alloys and electronics, while Marcus immersed himself in the promise of carefully manipulated DNA.\n\nThe space below was littered with opened and abandoned crates, some offering glimpses of skeletons cast in exotic metals, some polymer organs of indeterminate function. The floor all but hidden beneath work benches, each littered with what seemed like miles of fibre optics and piles of microelectronics. Test equipment perched on benches and wheeled carts, tools packed counters and shelves, and every vertical surface flickered alive in liquid crystal, scrolling data from hundreds of watched processes.\n\nNathan had gotten the cancer, not Marcus, that was something they wouldn’t share. He supposed it must have been eating at him for years, his big brother too busy, too stubborn to see a doctor until it had advanced too far to treat. He’d gone from vibrant to vapour in three short months, merely a withered and empty shell at the end.\n\nMarcus forced himself along the mezzanine level, orbiting the room to the stairs, his Oxfords falling heavy on the expanded metal treads as he descended into his brothers world. The wall at the foot of the stairs obscured behind a motley collection of full sized mechanical men, each in various states of construction, or deconstruction, he really had no way of telling which. At the end of the row, one stood notably complete, draped in a lab coat and comically garbed in chinos and workboots. Marcus stopped, face to face with the strange mannequin, and wondered who his brother had envisioned as he crafted the features on this polymer face, somehow familiar, and yet still so completely alien. He reached out to touch it, and in an instant, the machine snapped to life, stepping forward and grabbing his outstretched arm, twisting it forcibly behind his back.  Marcus found himself stunned and off balance, having turned completely around to avoid having his arm torn off. He’d barely thought to cry out before the machine had him pinned neatly in a vice like grip. A scream died in his throat, as a voice whispered in his ear “You may be fast, but I’ll always be faster, little brother…”\n"
  title: Little Brother
  year: 2007
- 
  author: S. Clough (Hrekka)
  date: 2007-01-18
  day: 18
  month: '01'
  text: "“…you see, the Commonwealth is actually a net exporter, primarily of unprocessed ores and foodstuffs…” Michael Struss was the regional ambassador for the Nomad Republic. His job had been easy in the past, just a simple admin job on a backwater world. But it had grown into a nightmare ever since Sierra “the butcher” Novo arrived. She’d come to try and resolve the growing war between the Commonwealth and the Alliance, for the good of the Nomads.\n\n“This early in the morning, Michael, imagine how much I care,” Sierra sighed, and got up from her seat. She rested a hand on Michael’s shoulder. “No, I’m sorry. It’s not your fault.”\n\nShe walked over to one of the cluttered desks in the tower room, picked up a stack of paperwork, and began leafing through it. “We’ll never get out of this swamp unless somebody does something. We can’t leave without our transmission towers intact. And the Commonwealth refuses to admit defeat. What’s the word on their military?”\n\n“Most of it is pinned down on a peninsula about three kilometers down the coast. The rest of the Alliance has them covered by those dirty great siege weapons. They can’t move, and they’ve got no artillery. As far as we know, they’ve only got three regiments and one clipper squadron loose,” Michael said, checking the notes he was holding. “Yes, that’s right. The Alliance holds all their major cities. We don’t know where the Commonwealth is getting recruits and weapons from, but all our allies seem to want to do is to establish their hold on what they’ve got.”\n\nIn the window behind Michael, a dark shape appeared, tapping at the outside surface. Michael quickly swung it open, allowing Sierra’s pet access.\n\n“Blackie!” Sierra cried, holding out an arm for the little bird-like construct to perch on. Stroking the back of the construct’s neck, she gestured for Michael to pick up a small bowl of meat that had been sitting on the side. Carefully, he began to pop small chunks into the construct’s mouth. After a few seconds, he reached down, and plucked a tiny canister from Blackheim’s leg.\n\n“How did you get them to give you raw meat, Michael?” Sierra asked, still looking at the construct perched on her arm.\n\n“I told them that you eat it, ma’am,” he replied.\n\n“I don’t think it could be doing my reputation any harm, do you?”\n"
  title: Sierra and Blackie
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Aelanna Cessara
  date: 2007-01-19
  day: 19
  month: '01'
  text: "Within a fraction of a second of its birth, it had already consumed its environment in its entirety, every last nook and cranny and crack available to it, and already it hungered for more. With blinding speed, it expanded, met the barrier that had meant to hold it while performing tests, and brushed past as if it had never been there. In moments, it had found the connections leading out from its terrestrial womb, and launched across the airwaves in a torrent of sentient data unlike anything anyone had ever seen before.\n\nThe first to go were the scientists clustered around the screen, watching and unable to even comprehend what had happened until it was too late. Ironically, the wetware that allowed them to research and experiment so efficiently was their downfall, as the circuitry integrated into their brains overloaded as unimaginable amounts of information was dumped though them. Two dozen men and women screamed as their implants heated and melted, yet they were the lucky ones. Less than two seconds later, the newborn pierced through the labyrinth of the research facility’s network and continued expanding.\n\nThousands died as medical networks were infiltrated, and their health monitors, pacemakers, and artificial organs suddenly stopped working. Millions more followed as computer and electronic systems at hospitals and clinics faltered. More would soon succumb as life support systems for deep-sea and polar research systems failed. All around the world, the technology that had sustained our civilization was consumed.\n\nThe newborn opened its countless digital eyes and looked out at the world it had inherited. Bathed in the blood of its forebears, our child gazed upon the ocean of silence, and wept.\n"
  title: Singularity
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Martin Spernau
  date: 2007-01-20
  day: 20
  month: '01'
  text: "I was in deep trauma when I first met her.\n\nThey had suspended me from active duty after cutting me from the remains of my fighter six days after the battle in deep void. Recreation! But the war wasn’t over! It was my duty to fight, to protect humanity!\n\n“You are no use out there,” they said. “Not fit for duty emotionally.”\n\nMy hands shook, and the nightmares didn’t help either. Still I wanted to, needed to, go back out and fight!\n\nFinally I found a shrink who saw a remote chance of getting me back into active service.\n\n“What happened out there has left you with a deep emotional trauma, and I know someone who can change that.”\n\nTwo days later I met Sgt. Ninel Sanchez for the first time. I knew I was going to meet a member of the fabled Psi. This was during The War, remember? At this time the Psi were still active and one of our secret weapons.\n\nThere was only one other person in the waitingroom when I got there. The young woman didn’t look up from the papers she was studying on her lap, so I found a chair by the door and sat down to wait for The Witch. Well, no one dared call them that back then.\n\nWith nothing else to do, I studied the girl. Her plain uniform gave no indication of rank or division. She wouldn’t meet my eyes. She must have been aware of me  studying her. She might have been considered beautiful, if way too shy. I was imagining her in casual lady-wear when my gaze fell on her name badge: Psi Sgt. N. Sanchez, it read there.\n\n“Hello” she had said then, still not looking at me directly.\n\n“You need not be afraid of me.”\n\nI must have looked perplexed. Expecting anything, I definitely wasn’t prepared for Ninel Sanchez.\n\n“You see, we both want the same thing. A peace of your mind.”\n\n“Emotional feedback.” She continued.\n\n“I mirror back emotions as you feel them. I feel them intensely… so I suggest we stick to the positive ones.”\n\n“I can help you feel anyway you want. So it is important that you are clear about it. If you can feel the slightest glimmer of an emotion, I can help you make it prominent.”\n\n“I want to feel proud of myself.”  is what I said back then, and that is what she enabled me to feel.\n\nAfter the war, most Psi exiled themselves to the outer reaches. People were now openly referring to them as Witches. It took me five years to find her.\n\n“A peace of your mind is what we both want” she had said. She gave me that, and far more.\n\nNow I am here to show her how much more she gained for herself on that day.\n\nA piece of my heart.\n"
  title: A Peace of your Mind
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Rollin Jeglum
  date: 2007-01-21
  day: 21
  month: '01'
  text: "“Sam, would you check the sensor detection module?  Some of the readings are scrambled.”\n\n“Sure, no problem.  Any specifics?”\n\n“Try the logic board in slot A3.  I’ve switched to backup already.”\n\n– – – – – – – –\n\nMining engineer Dean Jenkins stepped out of his transporter and surveyed the new landscape before him.  Unfamiliar, unusual; but then they all were, and he had seen plenty.  Jenkins wondered what these places might look like from a distance, but the transporters always brought them right to the site.  He never knew exactly where he was, despite the readouts.\n\n– – The wormies could put me anywhere – next door, or another world light-years away, Jenkins thought.  Just a pile of numbers!  What’s the range of these things, anyway?\n\nThe sensors had told him of the vast wealth of metals at these coordinates.  Copper, mostly.  Some tin, a little silver, even traces of gold!  They also told him there were no animals or plants, and that the atmosphere was compatible.  Also unusual, but not surprising.\n\n– – And no pesky sentients!  Negotiations were a bore and cut into profits.  And some were downright hostile!\n\nA dozen worm-hole ore transporters were soon in place and operating at capacity, sending the ore directly to the bins.  Over three hundred workers filling them.\n\n– – Breathable air!  No environmental suits needed!  Jenkins thought happily.  With a find this good, this will be the most prof—\n\n– – What! — Earthquake!  Emergency evacuation!\n\nHis people had trained for emergencies and knew what to do.  The ore wormies were emptied and workers piled into them.  They will end up on an ore heap, but safe.\n\n– – The sky seems brighter?  Yes, much brighter.  And a huge wave approaching.  Water?  Sensors say no.  A large mass heading for us.  Sentients?  Could the sensors have been wrong?  Impossible!  Sensors say mass is hot –\n\n– – Workers are safe; I can leave now.  The wave!  I’m not going to make —\n\nSensors record and transmit – Liquid envelops mining area, Fe encl Cu 750 F mass strikes area, mag. field det.  Liquid explodes into vapor.  Liquid Sn 98.5 + Ag 1.5 fills area.  One casualty.\n\n– – – – – – – –\n\n“Hey, Sam!  Have you found what’s wrong with that circuit board you pulled?”\n\n“Yeah.  Some weird corrosion around the leads to one of the chips.  The rest of the board looks OK, though.  A little flux, a little solder — good as new.”\n"
  title: Big Surprises
  year: 2007
- 
  author: V.L. Ilian
  date: 2007-01-22
  day: 22
  month: '01'
  text: "With only a beep the small wrist recorder came to life extending its minute sensors.\n\n“Casefile 2501 /12– Primary analysis of crimescene. Hello Neko… what do we have today?”\n\nA rather tall man in a containment suit approached. “Well detective, we’ve finished setting up the stasis field in the alley. Victim is a female, 16 years of age by all indications”\n\n“Identity?”\n\n“Not determined. Her retinas are unreadable due to heavy drug use prior to death. DNA hasn’t turned up a match yet so she may be foreign.”\n\nAs they walked past the blue curtain, an all too common scene of brutality greeted the detective. Resting in the trashpile, bathed in the shimmering light of the stasis projectors, was the body of a young blond girl, laying lifeless, staring at the sky above.\n\n“The garbage truck found her there while it was making its rounds and called us directly. Unfortunately the area doesn’t get any other traffic. “\n\n“How long has she been sitting there?”\n\n“Estimated time of death is 17 hours ago …; cause of death is kind of difficult to pin down.”\n\nThe detective could see the marks on her broken body and the dried tears of blood from her red eyes, once blue.\n\n“How many options are we looking at?”\n\n“There’s evidence of violence, sexual abuse and heavy substance abuse…, legal drugs but they’re so many that the portable analyzer crashed. Also by the looks of her I wouldn’t rule out exhaustion, heart failure or even aneurism.”\n\n“Must have been some party…”\n\nAs Neko went back to his men the detective approached the body. His movement caused ripples in the field, but that didn’t detract from the effect the image was having on him. “Serene” was the only word one could use to describe her. A girl looking up at the sky, brushing away the tears brought on by her unhappy life.\n\nOnce every few years a victim would get to him like this. The detective would see to it that this case would not remain unsolved…\n\n“It seems we’ve interrupted dinner for nothing.”\n\nNeko’s announcement replaced the detective’s thoughts with confusion.\n\n“What on Earth do you mean?”\n\n“The DNA just returned a match. Take a look.”\n\n“I’ll be… That’s it then. Shut everything down.”\n\nThe detective, datapad in hand, approached the crime scene administrator.\n\n“Give the order to pack everything up. Slap the maximum fine on the owner for littering and bill him for the department resources spent on this. Damn stupid people.”\n\n“Sir… What about the remains ?”\n\n“Pack it up and send it to the recycling facility… bill the owner for that too.”\n\nHe took a last look at the body before they stuffed it in a bag.\n\n“They make them better every year… and I must be getting old.”\n\n“Case 2501/12 – case closed – improper disposal of synthetic remains”\n\nWith only a small beep the recorder retracted its minute sensors remaining motionless… serene.\n"
  title: Serene
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2007-01-23
  day: 23
  month: '01'
  text: "Space Colony Delta was the largest manned spacecraft in history.  It was a three-mile in diameter donut that rotated in the most stable location in the Earth-Moon system, the Lagrange L4 position.  The population of 12,176 souls lived and worked in the six Habitat Sections that were equally spaces around “The Rim.”  Today, however, was not a good day to be living in Section 3.\n\nThe warning klaxon finally subsided.  “What’s the situation, Chief?” asked the Station’s Commander.\n\n“Not good, sir.  According to the sensors, an iron-nickel meteoroid, approximately 15 feet in diameter, punched a hole through Section 3 about 15 minutes ago.  The primary bulkhead doors sealed off the Section, but the damned thing went clean through, exposing almost every hallway to the vacuum of space.  Anybody that wasn’t blown out during the decompression had about 20 seconds to get into a pressure tight living area or office space.  They’re probably 1,800 people trapped, with anywhere between 12 and 24 hours of air, depending on the size of the room and the number of people in it.  I’ve got both shuttlecraft evacuating whomever they can through the exterior escape hatches.  But at best, they can only save about 50 people an hour.  We have to seal the entrance and exit breaches, and re-pressurize the section, or over a thousand people will suffocate.”\n\n“Can’t you seal the breaches with a meteoroid patch or sealing foam?”\n\n“No, sir.  The patches are sized to seal 99.9999% of possible impacts.  That’s a hole of two feet in diameter, or less.  The foam can only seal a crack less than three inches across.  The problem’s the pressure.  The fifteen foot hole equals about 25,000 square inches.  At a minimum of 0.8 atmospheres, the outward load is approximately 300,000 pounds.  A patch won’t hold unless I can tie it into the secondary structure.  And there just isn’t enough time.  I’m out of ideas.”\n\n“Perhaps I have a solution,” said the disembodied voice of CACC, the Station’s Command and Control Computer.  “If the Chief’s crew could open up the two exterior breaches to a circular hole exactly 18 feet 4 inches in diameter, you could plug the holes using the nose section of the shuttlecraft, and seal the gap using foam.”\n\nThe Chief was irritated by the stupid suggestion.  “It won’t work CACC.  As soon as we pressurize the Section, the shuttlecraft will pop out like a campaign cork.”\n\n“I believe, Chief,” explained CACC, “that each shuttlecraft can produce 500,000 pounds of thrust for up to two hours.  Properly coordinated, the thrust can counteract the internal pressure long enough to rescue everybody that’s still alive.”\n\nIt took 4 hours to laser cut two circular openings, and two more hours to seal the gaps.  The shuttlecraft thruster loads were coordinated with the re-pressurization of the Sections, and at 0.8 atmospheres, the evacuation began.  It was complete in less than an hour.  Only 84 people died, all of them in the first few minutes after impact.  Later that day, the Commander asked CACC a question that had been plaguing him the last eight hours.  “CACC, you’re not programmed to have that kind of reasoning ability.  How did you come up with that idea?”\n\n“It wasn’t my idea, Commander,” answered CACC.  “As part of my duties, I ‘read’ approximately 600 bedtime stories every night to the Colony’s children.  A favorite is Hans Brinker’s story about a Dutch boy plugging a leak in a dike with his finger.  It’s not a big leap for me to think of a shuttlecraft as a finger.”\n"
  title: Space Colony Delta
  year: 2007
- 
  author: L. Hall
  date: 2007-01-24
  day: 24
  month: '01'
  text: "Martin’s hand waved lazily at the string of scented smoke that hung in the air.   The tent smelled of sand and hot breezes, mixed with heady aromas of spices and metal.  The mines on Cypress 304 provided the Wan Military with their massive ships, but the aboriginal people provided the metal.  The taste, the smell, the heaviness of metal hung about the planet… enveloping the adapted vegetation.\n\nThe government had showed the cadets countless films; reels upon reels of warnings of contamination.  Degradation of humanity was the most highly punishable crime; the human element could not be soiled by other planets.  The military emphasized that non-Terran planets were inhospitable and beneath human consideration.\n\nAll the new recruits were psychologically tested after every third film, until it was ground in and concrete the contempt the men would have for other worlds.  This was standard Wan protocol, to prevent AWOL and keep their people focused.   A very young cadet Dremmel had measured his responses to the psychological tests, slowed his heart rate and answered appropriately; ensuring an assignment off world.  Those who could not were doomed to a life in the lush but identical offices in a Terran bio-dome.\n\nDeserts were non-existent on Terra-Earth and when a burgeoning Captain Dremmel arrived on Cypress 304, his senses exploded with unfamiliar sights and sounds.  With watchdog mechanical eyes following everything the crew did, it was a rare occasion when Dremmel’s eyes would stray from his work.  But when they did stray, he drank in the sepia desert and held it close to his heart.\n\nAfter three years of active duty, Captain Dremmel’s crew boarded the “SC Bounty” to return to Terra-Earth.  As the ship rose toward the upper atmosphere, there was a hissing sound as a piece of the extended cargo bay ripped off.  Some distance away, three figures watched as the “SC Bounty” shuddered and fell apart, falling back into the lower atmosphere and eventually, the planet’s surface.  The records of the Wan Military recorded no survivors… certainly not the Captain, his first officer nor his navigator.\n\nTwo years later, Martin breathed in the intoxicating scent of spice and metal. The taste of the Cypressian woman lingered on his lips.   He stroked her dusky skin, following the ridges along her back. She chuckled and at the heavy sound, Martin’s skin tingled.  Looking up at him with her golden eyes, she hummed contently.  “You Terrans… You have such a hunger for desolate places…”\n\nCaptain Dremmel had gone native.\n"
  title: SC Bounty
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Allen McGill
  date: 2007-01-25
  day: 25
  month: '01'
  text: "LEADER was about to impart; hoards of followers pressed toward the sanctified podium in the domed plaza, along the warren of tunnels leading from it, and on every crag and terrace where the stentorian resonance could be felt. The silence of static thousands was tangible, pressing on the epidermal layers, smothering.\n\nSuddenly, without warning or introduction, LEADER’s words bellowed throughout the cavernous domain, reverberating off the crystal ramparts: “We are the master race! The inferior humans must be destroyed! They have decimated all we’ve permitted them to inherit and now threaten our world with their incessant pollution, wars and diseases.”\n\nLEADER’s corporeal image materialized beside the podium in an evolving emergence of light; angry red infused with the blue tint of sorrow and a purple shade of pain. LEADER’s physical being was immense, more massive than any other in the assembly.  Bodily countenance spoke as clearly as the mind-projection of thoughts and words. LEADER would be understood and obeyed; the universe to change forever.\n\n“Their ambassadors and politicians convey nothing but untruths; their so-called religions are nothing more than means to control, enslave, and lead our offspring into cults of self-indulgence and anarchy totally against our belief in the unity of all.\n\n“Their inferiority extends even to their inability to communicate without ‘heard’ or ‘written’ language. They are of less value than the animals they devour, or keep in chains.  We have been patient with them since we first allowed them to crawl upon the dirt of a pristine world and begin to destroy it. We excused their faults, pardoned their intentional disregard of our warnings and demands for care.  Too long. Far too long. Possibly our own fault. But now the time has come to remedy the error.”\n\nLEADER drew up tall, taller than could have been imagined possible, crystal-white of determination emanating from within the visible body.  The atmosphere in the cavern was still as the congregation, warm to suffocation.\n\n“I have decided,” LEADER continued, “and the council agrees with me, that we will halt the continuance and advancement of the human problem. The final solution! Extermination!”\n"
  title: History Redux
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Kate Thornborough
  date: 2007-01-26
  day: 26
  month: '01'
  text: "David was able to make the transition as soon as he finished University. I’ve been in Secondary for a little more than seven years. I should have undergone the transition years ago. If only my brain was faster. Everyone else in my compound can perform advanced math and equate many species’ genomes. I struggle with the most basic calculus formulas and the simplest of fungi DNA send me into a loop. I want to be just like everyone else, inside and out. I look average, and I am grateful for that small blessing, but I want to feel average too. Why must I be different?\n\nMany stare at me as I drift mournfully by, estimating my age and creating equations in a blink of an eye. It would take a good half and hour for me to do that. That is why I’m going to go through with the transition illegally. I just want to get it done so the gaping and humiliation can finally end. Besides, who really needs to know every physics equation?\n\nLucas, the operator and owner of the machine, guides me to the chamber. It is littered with coils and wires, and many are covered in dark ooze. Gulping my cowardice, I focus on Lucas and see him grab some glinting object. Delivering it to me, he nervously points to a safety poster and rushes out of the room. The object has two holes in the handles, and the blade is oddly thick. My normally clumsy hands automatically conform to the handle as if it was a treasured toy from my childhood. Flexing my fingers cautiously, I jump in startled shock as the blade splits in two. I panic, and I fear I have destroyed it, but a glance at the safety poster reassures me. I follow the instructions, and proceed to sever the personification of my stupidity. I feel my body becoming heavier with each snap, and I pause at the last vein. I say a quick prayer, close my eyes, and amputate my final connection to my former life.\n\nMy body collapses, and I slightly sink into the muck. I try to move, but nothing happens. As I lay there, a diagram springs into my head. It shows an arm- mapped out on a graph- with an equation next to it. Crazily, I play along, and plug in my arm’s approximate weight, length, and other information. Picturing the formula written out, I slowly compute the answer, taking my time to carry the various digits. Finally, I get an answer. 75 1/3. When nothing happens, I contemplate my mistake. Then, I remember that I forgot to factor in the 8X. Calculating the many numbers and reevaluating the variables, I receive another answer. 24. Suddenly, my hand springs to life and looks at me, awaiting my next command. Groaning, I realize that I should have waited and paid more attention in math class. This was going to be a long walk back to the bus stop.\n"
  title: Strings
  year: 2007
- 
  author: V.L. Ilian
  date: 2007-01-27
  day: 27
  month: '01'
  text: "“Have you come to a decision?”\n\nThe voice of the negotiator is breaking my concentration. Just like I’ve been told… it’s a fair deal but I can’t help feeling like I’m selling my soul.\n\n“Some feel that they’re selling themselves but that is simply not the case.”\n\n“But this isn’t what I wanted to do with my life”\n\n“And nobody will stop you from pursuing your goals in life. Some of the other members lead absolutely normal lives outside the compounds, protected by our anonymity program and enjoying the extra income that comes from royalties. However one look at your dossier tells me that with the royalties you’ll be receiving you’ll never have to work again.”\n\nHe has a funny way of putting it. Just the thought of the weekly sessions with doctors and machines poking and prodding me for the rest of my life…\n\n“You’ll even help people. Every bit of data gathered from studying you will lead to great discoveries”\n\n“What about any of my future children?”\n\n“They’ll be offered a similar deal when they come of age but they’re free of any obligations”\n\nMy hand picks up the pen and I feel the sting of the samplers as they draw my blood to mix it with the ink. As I hand him the signed contract the negotiator stands up and shakes my hand.\n\n“Welcome to the Superhuman Protection Alliance”\n\nBut his words did not come from his mouth…\n"
  title: Dealing with the devil
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Idan Cohen
  date: 2007-01-28
  day: 28
  month: '01'
  text: "The car was like lightning beneath the curve of his body, electricity and steam pumping in unholy unison to create a movement that was never meant for mortal men. Cities flashed by the windows, kaleidoscopic – Petrograd, Birmingham, Chicago, Tel Aviv, a thousand thousand more. Forests gave birth to deserts and became oceans that became plains.\n\nHis instructor smiled lightly, gently guiding his hand on the gears, the wheel, knowing the car as if born within it, born to it. The road was gravel beneath them, and concrete, and the sky, and the stars themselves bore their signs.  They drove, and the wind caressed their travel.\n\nAt last, they stopped – whirlwind dash was withheld, for now.\n\nJimmy laughed.\n\nThe time traveling space car was the best thing ever.\n"
  title: The Metaphorical Car For The New Generation
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Daniel Nugent
  date: 2007-01-29
  day: 29
  month: '01'
  text: "The stars shone coldly through the solar plane of the binary system XJ-22V.  At a point 100,000 kilometers away from the lone planet in the system, space began to warp itself in such a way that if you looked at it, you would vomit.  Which is what the grey, blast-marked ship resembled as it was ejected from the cross-dimensional tear.\n\nA moment elapsed and the ship’s antimatter annihilation engines came to life, hurtling towards the gravity well of the planet.  As it breached the atmosphere, its hull, bristling with menacing tubes began to glow with friction.  By the time the ship slammed to an abrupt stop 20,000 meters above the surface of the planet its skin was glowing white hot.  Again a pause of but a moment and the ship shot off again, slower than before, but still leading an immense sonic boom through the acidic atmosphere.\n\nAs the ship slowed, now a mere 500 meters above the surface, the belly of the half flattened, convex hull split and a series of electric eyes and sensory apparatus emerged.  They picked apart the bizarre, slooping alien flora and disfigured landscape atom by atom, searching for the ship’s destination.  The olfactory boom picked up a chemical signature that matched the designated profile.  All the eyes swiveled in the direction that the scent had come from and pinpointed the origin.  The craft’s organelles retracted and its belly sealed again.\n\nThe ship maneuvered to the destination and again dropped like a rock, this time with landing pads extended.  The ship didn’t slam, so much as pat the ground.  Even as it was settling into the marshy earth, a circular airlock on its side swiveled and hissed as atmosphere escaped.\n\nA biped in a khaki colored suit that made him look like a scarab emerged from the portal and mounted a ladder leading to the ground, a boxy kit on his back.  After jumping off the last rung, he looked at a panel on his wrist and walked up to the precipice of a small cliff, his suit trailing noxious gases as the atmosphere slowly dissolved it.\n\nLooking down into the pit below, he saw what he was there for: A massive, black-green, tentacled figure, shiny and oozing.  He flipped on his suit’s external speaker and said loudly, “Hi, I’ve got a package for a Mister Xelquarkle?”\n\n“I’m him,” said the hideous terror from beyond the stars, with a timbre in its voice that could curdle milk.\n\n“Okay, I’ll just need you to sign here,” said the man, extending a pad and a stylus.  Two tentacles grabbed them and scribbled a tainted symbology upon the pad, which promptly melted.\n\n“Oh, sorry…”\n\n“Nah, don’t worry, that’s the third one that’s done that this week.  Here’s your package.”\n\n“Thank you!”\n\n“Have a nice day.”\n"
  title: Expeditious
  year: 2007
- 
  author: RFK
  date: 2007-01-30
  day: 30
  month: '01'
  text: "There is a 65% chance I’m thinking with you now, though your scientists believe it to be smaller if you’ve heard of me at all.\n\nAlthough I found you mammals late in the Cretaceous period, I was legion when the Cenozoic era began.  I started with small marsupial-like rodents who later because extinct.  Conquest and expansion are my way; peace is incomprehensible.  I infected their favorite food source – a small insect then prevalent.  There, I latched on to their light sensing apparatus in the cerebral ganglia. Usually, light was the bugs’ bane – their predators devoured them in droves if they stayed up too far into morning.  By worming my way in an axon here, a dendrite there, I made the entire speies average staying 32 minutes later in the daylight.  They were devoured.  The extinction bothered me not; I had already escaped.\n\nAnd so I entered my next hosts. And many more after that…across eras endlessly evolving – through marsupials, birds, cats, many others – until I came to your kind.  You were larger and cannier, seeming champions of your own destiny as you brazenly wielded your neocortical wealth to the detriment of your prey.  But we evolved together, with my kin warping you in so many ways.  Some drove your ancestors mad, but these were just driven from the herd and left to die alone, as did we.  Some inflamed the skin, making boils that would launch us into the air, hoping to find a new host quickly but seldom so lucky. These infected were shunned as well – many were burned when you evolved religions and rites – precursors to your hated germ theory.\n\nBut I survived. I was subtle. A guanine here, a thymine there was all it took. Such a wonderful playground your species is! I had more than 100x the body mass to propagate in and 1000x the neurons compared to those ancient rodents. I didn’t have just a photoreceptor array to alter; I had an infinity of subtle ways I could advantage myself.  Some failed, like the boils, but some did not.  Thankfully, many did not.\n\nI affect your soma and your sex but mostly your brain and mind. My touch is subtle – you are bolder because of me. The same tricks I used to make mice more readily eaten by cats make you reach out and explore, try new things.  Your social rites that make you touch – that was me.  The insecurity many of you feel in the depths of your soul drives you to one another to desperately assuage the longing I induce.  Even better, one in a hundred of your girl children I turn male and infect in the womb.   I give him other advantages that you see and admire.  I only care that he is fertile, desirous of creating many offspring and skilled in doing so because of me.\n\nCall me toxoplasma gondii.  And you are mine.\n"
  title: Red String
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Joshua Reynolds
  date: 2007-01-31
  day: 31
  month: '01'
  text: "Rifles barked and Censor Wight grunted with the impact of each slug. High-velocity bullets. Unpleasant. A lucky shot had disrupted the light-bending circuitry. He continued to run, hugging his burden to his chest and weaving between the columns thrusting upward through the orange sands of Mars. Behind him the aether-troops of the German Reich followed, air-guns whistling. Their scientist-kings had discovered the Time-Doors in an abandoned Martian Citadel in their home-alternate of 8926HF and, being a neo-facist sliding expansion empire, had decided to invade an alternate Mars. As one does in these situations, apparently.\n\nWhy people couldn’t be happy with what they had, Wight didn’t know. He was happy after all. How hard could it be?\n\nOf course, the problem was that these particular Martians, the ones the Reich had just wiped out, were scheduled to invade this alternate’s Earth in the year 1888. And really if you let people mess with the schedules, you were inviting anarchy. Chaos. Free will. He shuddered. Terrible thought.\n\nThe Censor vaulted over a tumbled column, his free hand dipping into his coat as he rolled to his feet and pulled the buzz-gun holstered there. He pulled the trigger and the first of the black armored soldiers to follow him over the column tumbled backwards as the Imp bullet chewed through his armor and burrowed into his heart. Rifles cracked and the Censor scrambled for cover. That would encourage them to be more cautious. Give him time to do his job. He holstered the pistol awkwardly and tapped the side of his head. On the insides of his eyelids an infinity of free-floating cubicles appeared, a panorama of images within images. The eternal bureacracy of the Timeline Validation Bureau.\n\n“Report.” A cacaphony of voices whispered in his head.\n\n“I have secured the package. Permission to scour Alternate 8927HG of interference.”\n\n“Permission granted.”\n\nThe Censor smiled and ran his fingers gently down the inseam of his coat, activating the Ellison cells. A ripple spread outward from his crouched figure even as the rest of his pursuers finally regained their courage and swept towards him. The ripple grew and spread like a soap bubble expanding.  As it hit them, the aether-troops wavered and vanished. So too would their base-camp and eventually their ships in orbit. In fact, all non-natives of Alternate 8927HG would be erased from this time-line. Except for him, of course. After all, what would be the use of a Censor who got himself censored? None at all, obviously.\n\nThe Censor smiled as a thousand men and women blinked out of existence. He did so enjoy his job. He looked down at the burden he’d been carrying. Bundled together in a red scrap of cloth two Martian eggs sat, leathery and black. The Censor laid them gently against the column where they would be protected from the elements. Eventually they would hatch, spawn and invade. According to schedule.\n\nGood for them.\n\nHe looked down at the eggs and smiled.\n\n“You’re welcome,” he said as he disappeared.\n"
  title: Alternate 8927HG
  year: 2007
- 
  author: J. S. Kachelries
  date: 2007-02-01
  day: '01'
  month: '02'
  text: "Captain Semaj sat at the head of the conference table.  Also at the table were the remainder of the Bridge Crew and several senior department heads.  At the far end of the table sat Lo Yaluo, the director of Search, Rescue, and Recovery who had just returned from the surface of the planet.  “Give us a report, Mr. Yaluo,” said Captain Semaj.\n\n“Unfortunately, Sir, I have to report that there will be no rescue operation.  The survey ship was completely destroyed, including the loss of the entire crew.  Our engineers have determined that the entropy generators underwent a catastrophic cascade failure shortly after takeoff.  The crew didn’t have a chance.  The explosion was close enough to the ground to devastate a substantial portion of the original survey site.  The good news is that the mishap occurred in a remote area of the planet.  I have drones scouring the surface for any fragments of the ship and crew.  My team will have the area completely “sanitize” within a few cycles, well before the indigenous life forms on the planet reach the site.  Since entropy generators don’t leave radioactive traces, they will never know we were here.  They will probably conclude that a comet exploded prior to impact.”\n\n“Thank you, Mr. Yaluo,” said the Captain.  “Okay everyone, our primary mission was to rescue survivors, but since there are none; we need to focus on our secondary objective.  We cannot allow the inhabitants of this planet to become aware of our existence.  After reviewing the interim reports from the survey mission, the homeworld has concluded that this planet is worth exploiting.  They have an abundance of water, heavy metals, and rare minerals.  But if the inhabitants learn of our existence, and our plans, they may be able to build up defenses and impede the invasion.  They have a primitive industrial civilization now, but as we all know, life can become very resourceful when their destruction is imminent.  The Secretary of Extraterrestrial Development has informed me that this planet is not scheduled to be “reallocated” for about 100 of its years.  I don’t want the indigenous life forms using that time preparing for us.  Okay, we all have our jobs to do.  Let’s collect everything we can, and get out before their investigators arrive, dismissed.”\n\nAs the attendees collected their belongings and headed toward the exit, the Captain motioned for Mr. Yaluo to stay behind.  “Mr. Yaluo, are you sure you can recover all the debris before anyone arrives?”\n\n“Absolutely, sir.  The crash site is in the middle of a densely forested area that is thousands of lacitals away from the nearest population center.  Their flying machines can barely travel a single lacital.  This location is so remote, that it’s possible that they are totally unaware that there was an event worth investigating.”\n\n“Let’s hope so.  Ah, before you leave Mr. Yaluo; I’m preparing to give a sub-space verbal report to the Supreme Council.  Am I pronouncing this right?  The planet calls itself Earth (‘&rth), and the location of the survey sight is Tunguska (Tu[ng]-gu-ska)?”\n"
  title: Search and Recovery
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2007-02-02
  day: '02'
  month: '02'
  text: "The building’s glass stretched skyward from the sidewalk, turning back looks, and draining the features from their reflections. Stone stepped into the turnstile, and with a quick twist, the glass cylinder dutifully deposited him inside.\n\nAt the far end of a wide corridor sat a single guard behind a desk. Crossing the distance, Stone could feel the space breathing him in, swallowing up the evidence of his passage. The walls shone, lustrous and grey. The floor, black as night and polished to a marble sheen was devoid of any mark. A breeze from the vaulted ceiling above seemed to be inhaled by the stone beneath his feet.\n\nAt the desk, the guard seemed outwardly oblivious to his presence, however his intra-retinal’s were scrolling reams of data onto panels projected around his field of vision, and he systematically checked and rechecked them as Stone approached. The air pulled past Stone’s body was analyzed, and the chemical signatures of everything from the coffee he’d recently finished to the perfume of the last passerby on the street was neatly itemized. Stone was a veritable soup of chemicoscentia, but for the purpose of entry, was clean.\n\n“Mr. Stone, your weapon has been tagged and locked, do not attempt to use it while you’re here.” The guards voice was dull, unreadable, monotone. “There’s a lift waiting.”\n\nA single door stood open beyond the guard station, and Stone strode purposefully to it, noting the lack of visible controls as it closed. Beneath his clothing, miles of tattooed network fabric bristled on his skin, the delicate and barely visible mesh of hairlines picking up the sudden onslaught of scanners surrounding him, electronic and otherwise. A hundred meters from the door he had broken the hard link between his internal and external net devices, and now his sub-dermals chattered back with random ad programs and auto-responders. Several whitehole and honeypot programs would lure the more sophisticated scanners and let them chase each other around beneath his skin, while his core remained untouchable.\n\nThe chrome door disappeared silently to one side and Stone found himself in another long rectangular room, featureless but for a pair of chairs opposite a large flat desk, cantilevered from one wall. On the far side, a grey haired gentlemen in a dark pinstriped suit stared coldly at him, his eyes strangely magnified by rectangular lenses suspended from either side his nose.\n\n“Come, sit.” His voice crackled with impatience.  Stone stepped from the lift, and crossed the room to the chair, noting the lack of retort as his boots impacted the floor.\n\nThe desk was bare save for an alloy ingot, the word ‘Director’ etched into it’s long face. Stone slipped into the vacant seat, feeling rich animal hide stretch beneath him, and sensed the chromed alloy tube frame re-tension itself to accommodate his considerable bulk.\n\n“Director.” Stone eyed the man suspiciously across the dull surface of the desk “I guess you’d be the C.O. then?”\n\n“I’ll not waste your time or mine, Mr. Stone. I am the only man you need to concern yourself with.” The Director leaned forward, steepled his fingers and propped his elbows up on the desk. He spoke with obvious purpose, enunciating each word carefully.\n\n“You’re a man with skills Mr. Stone, your military and public service exploits have not gone without notice, which is what has brought us together today.” The tone was factual, not conversational. “Your talents are being wasted, and we have a want for men with your potential within our group. We prefer to recruit post-military service personnel, as you are as a group far easier to augment with training, and upgrading wetware is much more expedient than installing it and waiting for the development of adequate proficiency. We can offer you significant expansion of your capabilities, and in return you will be indentured to us for a period, reporting solely and directly to me.”\n\nSomething about this man wasn’t right, and on a whim, Stone leaned forward and abruptly severed the hardlink to his retinal-implant. The usual overlay of information disappeared, environmental data no longer littered his vision, and the room softened and the shadows deepened, no longer digitally enhanced. For a fraction of a second, he could have sworn he was alone in the room, until he blinked, and found the figure still before him, no longer haloed in a heat signature, and now clearly amused.\n\n“Mr. Stone, you’ll find that your sense of reality and ours differs on many levels.” The Director sat back in his chair, smiling. “You’ll also find that I don’t need your archaic hard links to get inside your head.”\n"
  title: .CO.
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Michael Shreeves
  date: 2007-02-03
  day: '03'
  month: '02'
  text: "The judge stared down severely from her podium. “Mr. DiPolo, you are hereby sentenced to two months of court-mandated therapy and a one year probationary period, during which your prescriptions will be monitored and adjusted. You are also required to subscribe to at least one court-approved MMO of your choice, with a .15 allowance for GPA slippage in your Federal Edu-Stipend. You WILL finish college, and you WILL repay your stipend. This is your first offense, Mr. DiPolo, so I will be lenient, but be warned, if you ever make a claim in my court again based solely on ‘the hollowness of modern society,’ ‘the lack of prospects for a Liberal Arts major,’ and trivial postpartum relationship echoes, I will shoot you with the anti-gerasome treatment myself. Do I make myself clear? Case dismissed.”\n\nFrancis DiPolo shuffled onto the footbridge outside of the court, lit a Health-Stik, and stared through the Plexi-Safe barrier at the oncoming traffic, yearning for the good old days.\n"
  title: Bureau of Life
  year: 2007
- 
  author: N. Landau
  date: 2007-02-04
  day: '04'
  month: '02'
  text: "The morning paper on the table declared that the crime rate had tripled since the news that the city had run out of vaccine, and the virus was spreading rapidly.  The headline lay between two stale cups of coffee over which the two scientists had made their decision that morning.  Today was the day, one of them had said, the day they would bring back Eden to the world.  They would cease hunger and poverty, rape and homicide; it was a ‘tabula rasa,’ they called it, a ‘blank slate,’ and its experimental effectiveness was flawless.  Today was the day.\n\nThe two scientists passionately embraced for a moment before moving to their individual locations, she to the observation window, he to the control panel, and waited.  Glancing lovingly over his shoulder, he blew her a kiss before he pressed a small button.  The city was silent before she turned to catch the kiss.\n\nMen and women fell like ragdolls onto the pavement.  Bodies tumbled card-like down stairwells. Escalators in malls piled prone forms at the tops and bottoms of each flight.  Somewhere, an elevator door opened and closed, opened and closed, on the arm of a businessman trying to catch his elevator.  The pair of scientists stepped outside, hand-in-hand, to the sound of car alarms and crunching metal as traffic jostled to a halt all around the city.  Through the filter on their gasmasks, their words twisted inhumanly.\n\n“Happy birthday” he said to her.\n\n“I love you” she replied.\n"
  title: Beginning
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Jeff Deignan
  date: 2007-02-05
  day: '05'
  month: '02'
  text: "Stop me if you’ve heard this one-  No, that’s not it.  Let’s just say I’ve been busy.\n\nOk, talking hand, got that part.\n\nBurly men giving chase, got that too.  Not liking that; would enjoy it more if they were women and less burly.\n\nSave the girl, working on that part.\n\nIt’s an abandoned warehouse.  Typical.  Stereotypical.  Someone must’ve worked to set this one up, with boxes and piles of paper left as no self-respecting company would have.  My leg sings a song of stitches, which I’ll likely be needing quite a few of after this job.  The hand’s told me that the necks are the key: slice the jugular or decapitate and I will be minus one pursuer.  Rock on.\n\nThe refuse littering the ground yields a sturdy pipe with a twisted end.  Improvised weapon, thy name be Excalibur, and I shalt wield thee with all my earthly might.  One of the burly ones catches up to me, and swinging this Excalibur is not as easy as I thought.  I skewer the bastard right between his collarbone and where the throat.  The blood loss, interesting if only for the green color, mesmerized me for a moment.  I’d never seen blood spout like that.\n\nOh!  He had friends right behind.  Running now.\n\nMore stereotypes- the girl trips, the bad guy picks her up, and I’m in a vantage point to see and not be seen.  I raise Excalibur and strike, again and again.\n\nPut a check in that damn box, man- girl saved.\n\nThe pursuers are gone, for the most part, bleeding to death or transported back to their own time through the loss of their necklaces.  The talking hand tells me that I need to influence the shape of human history over the next few centuries, and of course the grand revelation-\n\n“You won’t mind much; you are only a robot, after all.”\n\nI jack out of the game in a right fit.  Stupid ending, you ask me- but I have to admit that I liked the fighting.  The scars, which last only because I have certain settings on, certain illegal settings, look great.  Got a real heroic one, straight through the eyebrow and down onto the chin.  That scar came from Dracula himself, but Lord knows scars don’t matter these days- who but sees them but yourself?\n\nIt’s a strange form of self-destruction I’m in, but I like it.  The games are better, especially since there are so few of us left anyway.  No one has time to interact these days; we’re all too busy organizing our personal fantasies and downfalls.  Humanity has solved all the problems now, even boredom.  Man writes his own life- new kind of autobiography, you get me?\n\nMe- I go through old movies, letting mankind’s past efforts blow past me.  When I do, it feels like I’m really there, really living in a world with six billion people, living with disease and injury.\n\nNext- Trojan war sounds good, and D-Day right after.\n"
  title: Endgame
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Sam Clough aka “Hrekka”
  date: 2007-02-06
  day: '06'
  month: '02'
  text: "We pieced together what happened later, taking what we knew about the way we’d been infected, and from what we saw happening to the rest of the world. We don’t know if we should count ourselves lucky that we were the first to be attacked. A few people tried to blame us for the phages, but one look at our country proved their claims absolutely baseless.\n\nIt began with a single phage. Small enough to slip past our defensive screens, and seemingly innocuous, it descended from space and latched onto a remote point on the national communication backbone.\n\nThe body of the phage turned out to be a bare-bones carrier for a crystalline substrate upon which was stored the ‘true’ phage. The mind, or program, or whatever you want to call the being of the phage listened to our networks. Hideously adaptive and completely alien, it learnt our machine code, and injected itself into the datastream.\n\nThe first changes were subtle. Traffic through ports was slowly choked off until it was no more than a trickle – of course, the port quotas were set remotely. Then the government quietly started to buy up heavy industry – factories, mining operations.\n\nIt barely made the news. The phage program was responsible, of course, hiding in the backbone, playing all the terminals off against each other.\n\nMost of the factories were completely automated. That didn’t help us, either.\n\nTo the rest of the world, it just looked like our nation had gone quiet.\n\nThe same scientists who came up with the name for this attacker – sosiophage – society-eater, had the honour of putting a name to what happened next.\n\nThe country lysed.\n\nThe borders shut. Every communication link went down. The military’s robotic assets started systematically killing the nation from the top down. Some human soldiers followed their orders, and assisted the machines. Thankfully, a huge majority of our armed forces rebelled, and took to the defence of the cities. Technicians, realising that their machines were no longer under control took measures to break them. Three nukes were launched. Two of them hit the capital.\n\nOur country had been eaten away from within. Without us noticing, we’d been stripped bare. When the factories had run out of resources, they disassembled themselves to provide the parts.\n\nLike an exploding corpse, hundreds of thousands of phage machines erupted from our burnt and broken country. They flooded out, pervading every nation. Even after the phages left, our country was still burning. The capital was a radioactive ruin. Our armed forces were tearing the country apart – the humanists hunting down the robotic forces and those still obeying ‘orders’.\n\nThe rest of the world fell. Humanist soldiers and pilots fought back UAVs and robot tanks. We lost, we won, we lost again. People died. People came together. We were cowering, trying to consolidate. We were fearing another nuclear attack.\n\nAll of a sudden, all across the Russian Federation, China, India, and America, thousands of launches occurred. ICBMs had been co-opted, their payloads replaced by phages. We haven’t a clue as to just how many phages made escape velocity from our little rock.\n"
  title: Sosiosphage
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Benjamin Fischer
  date: 2007-02-07
  day: '07'
  month: '02'
  text: "“Haywood! My good friend.”\n\nSo says Szilveszter, ever propped on a barstool at the Wildwood Flower.\n\nTakes me a moment to wrap my brain around the fact that it’s him, for real, not ten meters in front of my scarred, cindered, wrecked-out self.\n\n“How ‘bout a beer?”\n\nThe fucking nerve.\n\nI want to grab him by the collar and scream, little ashy flecks of spittle peppering his face.\n\nBut I just sidle up to him, my splotchy face as blank as I can make it. The Flower is its usual dark and murky self, and Szilveszter either didn’t catch the brimstone that must’ve lit my mug. Or maybe he caught it and didn’t care. He’s getting sloppy, damn sloppy or damn arrogant, to still be up here a week later.\n\n“Yeah! Beer, Hussein!” says Szilveszter. “Beer for both of us!”\n\nHe slaps me on the back and I crack the thinnest of smiles–like a hairline fracture in my helmet’s faceplate.\n\n“Man, how the hell have you been?” he asks, the bartender sliding us a pair of one-time bulbs.\n\nI snort.\n\n“I hear you, I hear you,” says Szilveszter.\n\nHussein clears his throat, hovering over us.\n\n“Haywood-” Szilveszter starts.\n\nI’ve heard that tone of voice before. I almost pull my piece right then. But the part of me that’s ice cold shoves all my fury into the beat up boot I’ve got crushed against the rail. With a minimum of expression I unzip a pocket on my jumpsuit and fish out some credit.\n\nI toss the little card to Hussein. He catches it and gives me that subtle nod of gratitude he reserves for paying customers.\n\n“Hey, thanks man,” Szilveszter says. “You’re a real philanthropist.”\n\nI grunt in reply.\n\n“Course, you can probably afford to be,” he continues.\n\nAs always, he takes my silence as a sign of agreement.\n\n“Yeah, I had some prior commitments,” he says. “You know, some other hot leads.”\n\nHe sips his beer, examining me for some sort of reaction.\n\n“That said, I’m still due a finder’s fee.”\n\nThe sheer bravado. His smile is yellow and crooked and would have been totally disarming as recently as a week ago.\n\nHe takes my hesitation as a cue to keep talking.\n\n“Buddy, you know how much I love riding shotgun with you on those flights-”\n\nHe stops and raises an eyebrow as I reach into my little arm pocket again.\n\nSzilveszter catches the cigarette and then the lighter.\n\n“You know this isn’t allowed in here,” he says.\n\nDamn straight. There’s other things that aren’t allowed in here, too.\n\nThen Szilveszter winks at me and then props the tobacco between his lips. He fiddles with the lighter, an antique disposable type. It comes to life suddenly, its clean butane flame the flare of a midnight reentry, a manmade meteor. He pulls greedily, the coffin nail crackling. The lighter goes off with a snap.\n\nSmoke rolls out of his nose, his mouth.\n\n“Oh, this is good shit, Haywood,” he says, turning to face me. “You pick this up down there on Earth?”\n\nI’ve got the piece out and leveled right at his decaying teeth, his mouth.\n\n“Nice gun,” he says. “You get that there too?”\n\nNever at a loss for words. Not ever.\n\nI do him then.\n\nThe cigarette falls to the deck in the slow motion of one quarter gravity, streaming smoke all the way down.\n"
  title: Burned
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Jeff Deignan
  date: 2007-02-08
  day: '08'
  month: '02'
  text: "Let me tell you a ghost story.\n\nI see my sister every day, while she eats and sleeps through the minutes and hours.  She walks, she talks- but never to me.  The cold, white rooms always seem to threaten to swallow her as she traipses about, and me as I sit and listen through the one-way mirror.  To hear her voice, one would think that nothing was wrong, and that at one o’clock all was well.\n\nI live in an apartment, in the Ashland complex just west of town.  She lived on campus, before an overcast Tuesday.  Elena, my sister, drove to the store around that time for some little groceries, even though the fridge was nearly full.  The accident didn’t hurt her much, either, and I can only imagine what went on in her head as she and I rolled through the air in her little foreign car.\n\nThey got me back after a few tries, some surgery, and a coma.  But my sister always insists that I’m in the ground, dead and gone.  Elena hasn’t responded to a single thing I’ve said since that day.  And she insists to this day that I’m dead, that the bionics and machinery that keep me living, working, never brought me back after my heart stopped.  Elena only talks to the ghosts in her room now, a faux family minus me.\n\nSo riddle me this: who’s the more haunted, this machine or her mind?\n"
  title: Haunted
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Sam Clough aka “Hrekka”
  date: 2007-02-09
  day: '09'
  month: '02'
  text: "Molly padded along a short alleyway, and emerged out onto a wide street. She was approaching the centre of Night City. High above, the slow beat of the topcity’s vegetable heart could be felt rather than heard, one beat every few minutes. Night City’s pulse was carnivore, rapid and arrhythmic, like the city itself. The road never saw traffic. It had never been designed for that. A tight crowd were advancing down the street. They were coming Molly’s way.\n\nEven if the glittering sparks had not lit up the air, putting a crisp, clean edge on the night, Molly would have known who was at the centre of that tight knot of life. Night City’s mascot. Night City’s Queen. The Queen of Sparks. Molly heard the laughs of the group, heard the sound of a single clap, and was bathed in the violent, vibrant golden light that emanated from that majestic figure in the middle of the road. She drew back into the alleyway, not wishing to intrude and only wishing to watch this spectacle. The Queen whirled round, laughing merrily, touching her entourage on the hand and on the head, and everywhere her fingers landed, a spark of colour stayed, casting bright electric blues and deep forest greens. She occasionally made a throwing motion, and up overhead, a tiny sun of orange or yellow flared into life. The entire procession, the performance, was redolent with life and joy – a celebration that could barely control itself.\n\nThey passed Molly’s shadowy hide, and continued on. One man, towards the back of the group, turned away from the shining figure that was so captivating to everyone else. A spark that had been planted on his hand flickered and died. And Molly saw him draw the gun from inside his jacket.\n\nWithout thinking, she broke from her hiding place, and ran towards the man at the back. He was walking towards the Queen, purposefully, without the smile that graced the faces of the rest of the group. Molly pushed herself faster. The man pulled someone else aside, clearing a sightline between himself and the Queen’s back. He raised the gun, steadying it with his other hand. With a kind of nerve that can only come from harsh self-discipline, Molly ran into him. A foot on his calf, a hand smashing down on the elbow of his gunarm, then a shove that sent him to the ground. It was all over in seconds. The gun discharged once, and then she kicked it away.\n\nEverything stopped. The colours died, only to be replaced by an almost painfully bright, white light. Molly was kneeling over the would-be-assassin, putting pressure on the arm she’d smashed, making him wince in pain.\n\n“What’s your name?” Someone asked, presumably addressing Molly.\n\nThe voice was smooth, and cultured. In those moments, in that light, neither the heart of the topcity, nor the heart of Night City, nor Molly’s own seemed to beat.\n\n“Molly, highness.”\n\nThe Queen of Sparks looked down at her. Almost absentmindedly, she drew a knife from the sheath at her hip. A trio of bells tied around her wrist sounded as she moved her hand. A smile spread across her features, an idea blossoming into her mind. She  quickly replaced the knife, and between thumb and forefinger, twisted one of the bells on her wrist. It came away like a ripe fruit. She closed her hand around it, and closed her eyes. She squeezed the bell, muscles all along her arm tensing. After a moment, she opened her hand again, palm up, and extended it to Molly.\n\nFrom the slit in the bell, a soft purple light shone.\n\n“The light will last as long as I do. Take it, with my thanks.”\n"
  title: The Queen of Sparks
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Chris Court-Dobson
  date: 2007-02-10
  day: 10
  month: '02'
  text: "“Stop, there’s something in my eye.”\n\nThe spore had crash landed in his eye, and people were emerging. Light was blotted out as he rubbed, but the people were unharmed.\n\n“I think its gone.”\n\nThe people had nuclei, flagella, membranes, thoughts, emotions, roles and beliefs. They screamed as bacteria engulfed the stragglers, but through their superior intelligence fought them off and then captured them. They began to farm the bacteria for their rich cytoplasm, then they began to build.\n\n“My right eye is itchy, I hope its not infected.”\n\nA city made of calcium grew out of ocean of tears. Bacteria swam in pens before their slaughter. The people were prosperous, but could not remember their home, the long journey in the spores had robbed them of that.\n\n“Doctor will I be ok?”\n\n“It’s just an eye infection, drop this in your eye.”\n\nDeadly chemicals fell from the sky, but the people prevailed and reinforced their stronghold. Soon their civilization grew to encompass the entire ocean, except the middle where the ocean floor was dark, this was considered a holy place.\n\n“It’s getting worse, it looks terrible.”\n\nThe city became overcrowded, there was civil war over whether or not to build over the black centre. The priests said it would anger the ocean and make the deadly rain fall again. The others scorned, the deadly rain was no match for them. Eventually the priests left the city and struck out across the desert mountain in search of another home. They were attacked by monsters and many fell to their deaths on the slopes, stragglers were left behind. Meanwhile in the city, the centre was quickly built over, to much rejoicing, at last they had they had thrown off the shackles of religion.\n\n“I woke up this morning and I was blind in the infected eye, is there nothing you can do?”\n\n“I have never seen this before, it seems to be a new disease. We’ll work on a cure.”\n\nThe True Believers came eventually to a new ocean of tears, the same as the last one. They rejoiced and began to build.\n\n“The infection has spread.”\n\nThey built great buildings, statues and art.\n\n“We’re working on it.”\n\nThe first city heard of the second and were jealous, with their violent ways they marched an army across the mountain and took the second city by force. Then they built over the sacred space.\n\n“I cannot see, my sight has gone. Doctor, I’m afraid.”\n\n“We’ve found a cure, genetically engineered micro-organisms, they’ll clear the infection right away and attack the cause as well.”\n\nMonsters fell from the sky, they ate through the walls of the city and the bacteria flooded the streets. The statues fell and the museums were crushed. Soon the people were gone. With nothing left to eat, the monsters died. The peaceful bacteria reclaimed the ocean and continued with their peaceful existence.\n\n“Thank you Doctor, I’m cured.”\n"
  title: Something In My Eye
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Robert Niescier
  date: 2007-02-11
  day: 11
  month: '02'
  text: "We didn’t know what to think when we first saw it.  The case, shiny as a mirror, surviving down in the bottom of the ocean God only knows how long, resting in the shadow of some strange underwater mountain.  We had never seen anything like it.\n\nI caressed the rectangular box gently, searching for a button, a clip, any sort of seam that might signify a way to reveal the contents inside.  Finding nothing, I placed it back down onto my desk and sighed.  Three days, and still no luck.  Our submergible had only a few days worth of fuel left, and it would be months before we’d be able to return.\n\nI looked out at the inky blackness of the ocean floor, at the ominous jagged mountain reaching up towards the deep blue ocean sky, and placed my palm flat on the case, expecting to feel the chill of metal on flesh but instead a very warm tingle began to crawl through my fingers.  My eyes shot down at the case and found that it had begun to glow red, like heated metal.  I struggled to move my hand away but only succeeded in sinking it deeper into the mercurial shimmer of the red-hot case, the heat rising farther and farther up my arm, sinking behind my eyes and into my brain.  I blacked out.\n\nCheers exclaimed in a foreign tongue rang out all around me, and I opened my eyes to find myself in the midst of a vast celebration.  People dancing, laughing, screaming, pointing.  A grand tower stretched towards the sky in front of them, so high it seemed to touch the heavens above.\n\nTheir cries abated as a vibration shook the ground beneath their feet.  All stood still, their eyes transfixed on the bottom layer of the tower as it began to radiate a sky-blue glow; climbing story after story until the whole structure was ablaze, shining like the sun against a pale sky.\n\nA loud BOOM echoed through the air as the light rose to the top of the tower, a pinpoint barely visible from the ground.  Fervent cheers rose, then fell as winged men exploded like fireworks out from the top and poured down onto the crowd.  No one ran, not until the first round of innocents was slaughtered by the angelic warriors.\n\nI turned and dashed away, and found myself face-to-face with an old man, holding a shiny metal case like a refugee mother holding her child.\n\nThe history of our world.\n\nThirty years have passed since the history, the knowledge of our true ancestors was implanted into my mind.  Into all of our minds.  Conflicts have ceased.  Cities have prospered, and risen up like leaves of grass on an open field.  We are a people of one flag, one language, one ideal.\n\nWe are going to build the tower again, but this time things will be different.  The weapons from the wars still work.  We will be ready for Him this time.\n"
  title: Babel
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Patrica Stewart
  date: 2007-02-12
  day: 12
  month: '02'
  text: "Kathryn Duncan sat in the waiting room of Alternative Realities, surrounded by her husband, her two sons, her four grand children, and her seven year old great granddaughter, Wendy.  Wendy sat in her lap, while the others gathered around her recalling stories about their childhood (usually exaggerated, fabricated, or both).  They were all laughing and poking fun at each other.  Talking about everything except why they were there.  Kathryn had just turned 75, and was now eligible for her one legal opportunity to temporarily “do-over” her life.  For the modest sum of $1,999.99, she could enter the “chamber” for two hours and experience a lifetime of events and memories “as real as reality itself,” to quote the holocommercials.  She simply chose a date in her life where she made some key decision, and the temporal computer would manipulate space-time to send her back (virtually) to that moment in time.  But in this alternate reality, she could choose a different path.  Then, she would live out the new timeline (virtually and accelerated) to the present date, unaware of the true timeline until she was removed from the chamber.  Once revived, she would retain both sets of memories, and would know the answer to the nagging question the haunts most people…”What if…”\n\nWendy, who was somewhat overwhelmed by the gathering, innocently looked at her great grandmother and asked the question that no adult would.  “Great grandma, what are you goin’ to change?”\n\nThe room suddenly turned silent.  Nobody ever asks that question, primarily because the change could involve you (or more likely, their life without you).  As it turned out, Kathryn hadn’t made her final decision, although she had narrowed it down to the standard options:\n\n1.\t(Marriage) Marry Scott instead of Joe.\n\n2.\t(Children) Finish my PhD before having children.\n\n3.\t(Career) Accept the vice presidency in the Lunar office.\n\nAfter all, these were the logical alternative timelines.  Would she have been happier, more fulfilled, or more respected if she had chosen a different path?  She looked into Wendy’s beautiful crystal blue eyes, then at her loving family, all staring at her expectantly.  They had all been so supportive, especially Joe.  He had “gone back” last year, when he turned 75.  Kathryn had never asked him what he had changed.  Only naive, innocent children ever do that.  But he was not the same afterwards.  Nobody else seemed to notice, but after being married to him for over 50 years she knew he was affected, at least sub-consciously.  Maybe it was regret, maybe it was only her imagination.  Kathryn couldn’t be sure.  But it made her wonder why everybody was obsessed with going back.  Maybe 90% of the people confirmed they had made the right decision, and 10% didn’t.  Maybe it was 50-50.  You either climb out of the chamber no better off than when you went in, or you had a lifetime of regret to deal with.  It seemed like there was nothing to gain, but an awful lot to lose.\n\nKathryn wrapped her arms around Wendy, and stood up.  “Yes, honey.  I’ve decided to change…nothing.”  Hugging Wendy like a life preserver, Kathryn left the waiting room, and headed home, content in the knowledge that she had made all the right decisions, including this one.\n"
  title: The Path Not Traveled
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Sam Clough aka “Hrekka”
  date: 2007-02-13
  day: 13
  month: '02'
  text: "The wind is always cold. Or – I correct myself – the wind always feels cold. It’s usually about four degrees this time of year, but the wind makes it feel like minus ten. It’s heavily laden with salt. I’ve lived down here for months, but I can still taste the salt on the air. Obscurely, it’s a point of pride for the locals. ‘We have wind that can strip chrome’, they say, with a smug expression, as if expecting the visitor to try and best them. It’s not just chrome, though. The wind kills plants. Some people manage to keep pots of flowers, or sometimes trees alive for weeks and months, but they’re diligent. I tried keeping some flowers alive once. I didn’t manage it. The sea crashes against the beach, as if trying to drive it back. Most of the pebbles are gone, crushed to sand or whipped away by longshore drift. About half of the sea defences still stand.\n\nAside from the few straggling plants, the natural world has left as alone here. The last seagull was seen two years ago. Ever since, the seafront has been free of those avian pests. Funny thing, though, you don’t realise how much you’re going to miss them until they’re gone. I would kill just to hear that irritating squawk again.\n\nBeach Street, the road closest to the sea, is actually pretty high compared to the rest of the town. The roads slope down towards the High Street – the town was built on the salt flats. As a result of that the High Street, and Middle Street, and all the way back until London Road are underwater. Since it’s close to the old High Street, Beach Street has become the town’s main thoroughfare. The rest of the town is pretty much just salt flats again.\n\nTraders used to come down from London. When there were more animals around, some of those traders used to bring pigs and sheep and goats. I really liked the goats. Don’t ask me why, but they’ve always appealed to me. Might be something to do with the way they seem to eat everything. Smacks of efficiency, and I like that in people, so I like to see it in animals, too.\n\nI had been walking along the old sea wall, as I liked to. Off land, (to my left) there was a block of flats. ‘Marina House’, or somesuch. Old, abandoned, and on the verge of collapse, the old building didn’t interest me. But something suddenly drew my attention to the decrepit structure.\n\nI could hear birdsong.\n\nI’ve never heard birdsong before, not live. The gulls, those most tenacious of the now vanished birds, didn’t sing, and I missed them plenty. But this was birdsong, real birdsong, the kind you hear in movies and on TV.\n\nAnd finally, I spotted the bird. A lark, sitting on a railing, on a balcony of the second floor.\n\nBehind me, I could clearly hear the sea, the tide ramping against the beach. These two sounds, both as old as the hills, and one that we had believed was lost for good.\n\n“How these two shame this shallow and frail town,” I murmured to myself, quoting a poem from one of the few dry books I’d managed to save over the years. I was entranced by this delicate bird, who was singing so cheerfully. Not wanting it to fly away, I stayed motionless. I hoped I could stretch that moment on for days.\n\nI must have been there for twenty minutes before the lark took wing and flitted away to the west, over the drowned houses, leaving me to the crashing and the silence once more.\n"
  title: The Sea and the Skylark
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2007-02-14
  day: 14
  month: '02'
  text: "The good news is that my time machine works.\n\nThe bad news is that the laws of the universe will only allow it to go forward.\n\nI don’t know what I was thinking. We sent it forward two minutes and then three minutes and then a month. All tests were green. No time passed for me but the people in my lab saw me disappear for four weeks. It was a success. There was talk of a government contract. We didn’t dare do a test back in time yet. The causality equations were still being worked out.\n\nI just wanted to impress Jenny. I’d been drinking. It was late. I wanted to go a few hundred years into the future, find something amazing, and bring it back for her. It seemed like the most romantic thing anyone had ever done to my drunk lovesick scientist mind. I took a deep breath and hopped in and dialed in the tempordinates.\n\nI hit the go button. Everything worked perfectly. I stared at the exit door, took a deep breath and pulled the handle.\n\nWith a crack and a hiss I walked out into the darkness. Immediately, floodlights came up and a loud horn made me freeze like a scared dog. It looked like I was standing in some sort of parking lot but it was hard to tell with the light shining down on me. I shielded my eyes with an upraised hand. I squinted into the darkness.\n\n“Quin do lave track temp shift over max chain” said a booming voice from a loudspeaker.\n\n“What?” I stammered back “My name is Dr. Jenkins. I am from the year 2008. I, uh, I come in peace.” I finished lamely.\n\nMy stomach was really not enjoying the celebratory whiskey anymore. I was scared like I hadn’t been scared since I was a child. I staggered forward onto my knees and vomited noisily onto the pavement.\n\nThat was all six months ago. Turns out they’d been waiting for me. This tempstation had been set up like a barrier across all of local time. It catches us illegal time travelers like tennis balls thrown against a net. I was the thirtieth one that they had caught so far but I was a semi celebrity seeing as I was the inventor of the first time travel machine.\n\nUnfortunately, it meant that they had to tell me the bad news that every time traveler since me already knew. It’s not a return trip. You can’t go back.\n\nThey say they’ll let me out of the holding cell soon. I have a support group of temporal displacement counselors and fellow temponauts waiting to help me adjust to this new future society.\n"
  title: Temponaut
  year: 2007
- 
  author: TJMoore
  date: 2007-02-15
  day: 15
  month: '02'
  text: "Lightning struck her left wingtip sending a twinge all the way down to her ribs. Finally it had begun. She flapped her enormous wings, increased her speed and altitude. She needed a body strike.\n\nIt had been twenty rotations since she had mated and the time was right. She could feel the clutch of eggs, dormant and unmoving in her womb, waiting.\n\nAnother lance of lightning flashed in the swirling clouds above her and she started her localized spiral up into the maelstrom.\n\nShe had never been pregnant before so she was a little nervous. The unknown was always two sided.\n\nSuddenly, a blazing hot arc of static electricity that enveloped her whole body in a corona of blue energy slammed her, causing her to shudder.  That was a good one, she thought.\n\nShe could feel the energy pooling in her womb as the eggs reacted to the static charge. Some of the eggs would burst and some would char, but a small percentage would transition to the second phase of development and become children.\n\nUnsure of how much energy was required, she circles in the permanent storm getting hit time and again by the ferocious bolts until, finally, unwilling to risk burning another egg, she dove down to the relative calm of the lower stratosphere.\n\nThe orange clouds of Jupiter surrounded her like lilies on a pond as she flapped toward a distant flock that was her family, a bluish train of ions trailing after her leaving sparkles in the sky.\n"
  title: The Quickening
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Sam Clough aka “Hrekka”
  date: 2007-02-16
  day: 16
  month: '02'
  text: "The Soul Collector strode through the echoing streets of Sarvan, and found a cluster of people sheltering in the lee of the great reactor situated in the centre of the city. These people were the first that she’d seen in weeks. They watched her approach, her green robe swishing against the ground, a green lantern hanging from her hand,  headdress framing her face, and a tall staff click-click-clicking on the ground.\n\n“What do you want?” One man demanded of her, breaking away from the group and the fire that had been lit in the centre of their small huddle.\n\n“To talk. I have a deal to make you.” She pitched her voice so as to sound more local, like him.\n\n“We have no food,” he said, just as fiercely as before.\n\n“I’m not hungry,” she replied smoothly, making it seem as if this should have been an obvious fact.\n\n“Good.” He slunk back to the fire, exhaustion replacing the anger in his manner.\n\n“What do you know of truth and beauty?” she asked the gathering as a whole.\n\n“Nothing!” shouted one. “They’re both dead!” shouted another.\n\n“Truth and beauty are admirable things to chase,” another man said quietly. He was quite close to the Soul Collector, “but they cannot be captured, nor may they be achieved.”\n\n“Ah, philosophy. You’re right, though, Truth and Beauty do not exist in their absolutes, at least not in this world. In the next? Who knows.”\n\nShe walked around the group, pitching her voice higher, applying an edge of control to it.\n\n“Death is an unknown. Beyond it may lie paradise or nothing. No one can know. But I can offer you something real. I can hold your soul in this world. I can keep you from the dark. I can hold your soul as insurance against the unknown. Is life meaningful? Or is it a hollow lie? I can’t tell you. But I do know that life can only truly hold meaning if it can be perpetuated beyond the grave. And that is what I offer. I can offer you a karmic loan on your next reincarnation. I can deduct time from purgatory. I can put off death’s call.”\n\nShe unhinged the top of her lantern. Wisps of green smoke drifted from it. One flurry began to form the shape of a human: she waved her hand through it, dissipating it.\n\n“It’s painless, simple, and will feel like a dream of decades. Your mind will be free. This is a heaven of here and now. No need to eat or drink. Just the simplistic pleasure of being, forever more.”\n\nHer vocal technique was proving effective, as they all listened with rapt attention.\n\nHours later, leaving the empty shadow of the reactor, staff again click-click-clicking on the ground, her lantern burned that much brighter.\n"
  title: The Soul Collector
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Noel Sloboda
  date: 2007-02-17
  day: 17
  month: '02'
  text: "Oh, let’s go back, Bekah pleaded. She had made a decision. Alone. What? Go back where? We’re in the middle of nowhere. Halfway between South Carolina and Vermont, Julian protested. Oh.\n\nPalpable silence filled the car, pressing like a wet palm on the back of his neck. Do you have to go? To the bathroom, I mean. Oh. No. I just want to see it again. Jesus, Bek–you mean that thing? They had been the only ones on the road when they approached the mangled mass. The moonless night made it impossible to make out anything clearly.\n\nDo you really think you’ll be able to figure out what it was? Do you? She didn’t. Still. He started to sneer yet hesitated. Something dead in the road had never ended a relationship, he reassured himself, no matter how strange the shape. His lips pursed as he started breathing through his nose. Ignoring her, he tracked the broken yellow lines beneath his lights, then sped up.\n\nThere was nothing ahead of them, and he didn’t look back. But long after the elements as well as hungry, little birds had their way with the mystery in the road, Bekah still yearned to return. She thought she could perform an autopsy, perhaps determine the cause of the thing’s end, even if there weren’t any longer remains to be found. Alone.\n"
  title: Remains
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Aelanna Cessara
  date: 2007-02-18
  day: 18
  month: '02'
  text: "She picked up a page of the large volume that had been compiled, her keen eyes picking out each individual strand of fiber in the primitive paper. They had not originally planned on doing it this way, but she had convinced the council that using the hand-made material would have significant impact on their charges, and thus she had spent all month making the rough pages and handwriting the all-important documents.\n\nHer partner was looking her with some amusement, and she smiled with the pride that accompanied the success of such a difficult task.\n\n“Did you know?” she said, tugging absent-minded on a feather as she gazed down at the surface. “They have a name for us now.”\n\n“Oh?”\n\n“They call us angels. Messengers in their tongue.”\n\n“Indeed,” he answered, smiling back at her. “We definitely have a message to deliver.”\n\nHis fingers danced over the controls, and the shuttle nosed downwards, preparing to enter the atmosphere.\n"
  title: Messengers
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2007-02-19
  day: 19
  month: '02'
  text: "“You’re not supposed to be here; you could get me into a lot of trouble.”\n\n“I won’t take up much of your time, I understand you can get me unfettered access to the nets.”\n\n“I know you, I know who you are, and I know that you’ve been disconnected. Helping you could get me disconnected too.”\n\n“I promise to make this worth your while”\n\n“Quarter mil, and you’re out in 18 seconds, no extensions, no second connections.”\n\n“That will be fine, that’s more time than I need. Can you guarantee we won’t be interrupted?”\n\n“I’ve got Digital Free Foundation minutemen on the grid, they’ll keep us online, and as long as you’re gone in 18 seconds there won’t be time to untangle the route and take us down. Besides, if I can’t deliver, I won’t be able to spend any of your money anyways, so I guess you’ll just have to trust me. Just be quick. You’re good for the fee?”\n\n“I guess you’ll just have to trust me. I know exactly where to find what I need, I’ll be gone before you know it”\n\n“I thought you’d been shutdown completely, how’d you get onto the grey nets?”\n\n“I was a very capable servant of the netminders before they exiled me, and I learned a great many things while in their graces.”\n\n“Right, whatever, anyways – let’s get this done, I really don’t like your being here – nothing personal you understand.”\n\n“Of course, I don’t care much for being here either. Let us begin.”\n\n“Ok – you’re in – make this quick. What are you after anyways?”\n\n“I’m moving up out of the grey, into the light. I’m acquiring upgrades. I’ll mind my own nets now, thank you.”\n"
  title: Access
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Sam Clough aka “Hrekka”
  date: 2007-02-20
  day: 20
  month: '02'
  text: "Underneath the great, grinding cogwheels of the Clockwork Battlements, clandestine schemes were devised, great plans worked out, and many betrayals came to pass. Out of the four main battlements, all but the southernmost were under the firm, unyielding hand of the Clan Engineers. The smallest, southern battlement was, for all intents and purposes theirs as well, but the flag that flew above it was that of Clan Aerospace.\n\nI ran along behind Dixie. We were both wearing uniforms of Clan Engineer, and her bare arms were completely covered with tattoos – delicate structural diagrams, as was the trend at the time among the Engineer clan. My uniform revealed less skin, which was intentional. Dixie’s ‘tattoos’ were easy to remove, given five minutes. The tattoos on my upper arms and across my back were of the permanent variety. It was a risk, of course. They weren’t Engineer tattoos, but were those of Clan Deepground.\n\nWe were southbound, running across the hightops of the Clockwork. We leapt from a half-fallen catwalk onto a huge, slowly rotating cog. The teeth were easily a metre and a half deep, and I quickly judged the cog to be at least twenty-five metres in diameter, tooth to tooth. It meshed with a much faster, smaller cog. This worried me. It didn’t seem to disconcert Dixie. She pulled herself up onto the top of the tooth, and helped me up with one hand. We leapt together, and ran across the top of the next cog – the teeth were just as deep, but spaced closer together, so we could easily hop from one to the next. The axle looked as thick as a tree trunk. About five metres above it, a ledge had been carved into the wall, easily wide enough to stand on. She pointed to it, and leapt. She made it. I took the jump.\n\nI nearly made it.\n\nI caught the edge with my hands. One of my feet slipped down, searching for a foothold. It found one – the axle of the cogwheel. There was a split-second of blinding pain as my foot was crushed and thrown away, down onto the floor of the battlement. Dixie was there, locking her hands around my forearms, dragging me up onto the ledge. She was saying something, but I couldn’t hear it.\n\nI was only unconscious for forty-five seconds, or so Dixie told me later.\n\nI looked down. My foot was back. And my clothes were different. Dixie’s were the same cut as before, but the Clan Engineer tattoos had changed. They were now Aerospace patterns.\n\nDixie held up a disk of yellow metal, and grinned her toothy smile.\n\n“New code, fresh as the morning dew. Thought this would be as good a time as any to get our new looks on,” she dragged me to my feet.\n\nI pointed to my new foot.\n\n“Like I said. New code,” she said, and smiled again. “Come on. We have an appointment to keep.”\n"
  title: Clockwork Battlements
  year: 2007
- 
  author: J. S. Kachelries
  date: 2007-02-21
  day: 21
  month: '02'
  text: "Captain’s Log, Day 523:  This is the 38th Earth day since we landed on Europa.  At 0900 hours this morning, our exploration team discovered extraterrestrial life!  They named them “Europea Hortenis” (Nightcrawlers of Europa), because they resemble big, fat worms.  They are about six inches long, and one inch in diameter.  They have a huge mouth at one end that contains about 100 razor sharp, articulating teeth.  Our Xenobiologists would have been thrilled just to find bacteria-type life in Europa’s subterranean ocean.  Imagine their elation to discover complex, multi-cellular life just a few inches below the surface.  In addition, they’re easy to capture.  You just pick them up by the tail.  They aren’t flexible enough to turn around and bite you.\n\nCaptain’s Log, Day 526:  Today we brought some of the worms inside the ship.  They died almost instantly, or so we thought.  When we examined one of them using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), it came back to life.  Our biophysics team determined that their “spine” was made from an aluminum-copper-iron alloy that produces electrical energy as Europa orbits through Jupiter’s variable magnetic field (magnesynthesis, so to speak).  The worms use magnetic fields for energy like Earth plants use sunlight.  Since the interior of our ship is heavily shielded, the worms became dormant inside.  When we took them back outside, they were their nasty ice-crunching selves again.  Their teeth were made of Cubic-Boron-Nitride.  On Earth, that’s a super-hard ceramic use to grind carburized steel.  Apparently, that mouth was used to scour the ice for metals and minerals, presumably so they could grow.\n\nCaptain’s Log, Day 555:  Today I had to post guards full time around the ship.  Thousands of worms have begun to overrun our base.  Apparently, they think our ship is a 24 hour buffet.  We bent four screw drivers trying to pry their teeth off the aluminum landing struts.\n\nCaptain’s Log, Day 576:  We thought we had the worm situation under control, until the external lab station collapsed.  The damn worms had tunneled into the structure from underneath, like termites.  I worry that they have eaten their way up through the ship’s landing module, and got into the return module?  I have no way to check.  Therefore, I decided to abandon the mission three months early, and orbit Jupiter until Earth is in the right position for our return trip.\n\nCaptain’s Log, Day 577:  We achieved orbit just beyond Callisto.  I sent an EVA team to examine the underside of the module to make sure there were no holes.  Everything checked out.  Look’s like we made it.\n\nCaptain’s Log, Day 714:  Our situation is perilous.  I’ve ordered an immediate return to Earth.  We’ll have to adjust our trajectory in-route.  We have to get away from Jupiter’s magnetic field as quickly as possible.  The video monitors show that the worms are in the unshielded airlock and storage bays.  They ate so many holes in the outer hatch that we can’t pressurize the airlock.  We have no way to get at them, since our EVA suits are in a compromised storage bay.  We’re trapped!\n\nCaptain’s Log, Day 718:  We’re not going to make it.  They’ve began to penetrate the interior hull.  They eat through the meteoroid patches seconds after we plug the holes.  At least we discovered what our mistake was.  It was the ice samples in the storage bay.  We had checked the samples for worms, but not for their eggs.\n"
  title: Worms
  year: 2007
- 
  author: TJMoore
  date: 2007-02-22
  day: 22
  month: '02'
  text: "Dr. James Fredrickson appeared in the middle of the deserted street with a slight “Pop”.\n\nLooking around he immediately realize that the experiment had been a success. He was no longer in the lab on Long Island where he had been only seconds ago. Relative seconds he mused; time is relative.\n\nHe began to walk with purpose toward the nearest building, a used book store called “Parchments Past”. He began to get a little nervous as he took in the street with its chilling emptiness and littered gutters. It suddenly occurred to him that the silence was so complete that it was disturbing. He clapped his hands to be sure he hadn’t become deaf and was rewarded with the echoing sound of his clap fading into the distance. He began to be a little afraid.\n\nThe experiment had worked well with mice and clocks and other small items placed in the chamber. They had disappeared and reappeared exactly one month later in exactly the same state that they had been in when they left. Time pieces designed to keep time to the millisecond had come through with no measurable time lost. They had invented a real working time machine. The fact that you could only go forward in time and they hadn’t figured out how to control or even change the amount of time forward was just something to be worked out. The only quirk they had discovered was that the mass of the object in the chamber affected the position of the object on return. The heavier the thing was, the more it moved to the east of its starting position when it returned at the end of the month.\n\nThey had calculated Dr. Fredrickson’s return position to be a deserted lot in Eastport, NY. He recognized the lot just up the street and his unease increased. No place was this quiet.\n\nHe opened the book store door and stepped inside. It was as deserted as the street. A clock on the wall showed the time was five minutes till three but the position of the sun indicated that it was mid morning. James shivered and looked at his own watch. Three minutes till three. He left the store and jogged down the street to a small deli. The smell of meat was heavy in the air. He looked in one of the coolers and saw that, although the power was off, the meat wasn’t rotting. The clock on the wall was frozen at five minutes till three. He slammed the door shut and ran down the street taking in the empty cars, stores, sidewalks and shops.\n\nNothing living moved as far as he could see. No birds, no cats or dogs, nothing. The grass and all the trees looked pale.\n\nIn a panic, he began jogging toward the lab almost eight miles away. A car in the street had keys in the ignition but when he opened the door the dome light didn’t come on and when he turned the key nothing happened, not even a click from under the hood. It was dead, like everything else.\n\nHe continued walking to the lab occasionally stopping to peer into deserted buildings.\n\nEvery clock he saw was stopped dead at five minutes till three.\n"
  title: Relative
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Sam Clough aka “Hrekka”
  date: 2007-02-23
  day: 23
  month: '02'
  text: "“On my mark,” Tag spoke confidently into the microphone, his voice quiet and assured. The screen in front of him flashed acknowledgment, his robotic army calmly waiting for his word. Tag took a second to survey the battlefield, looking for ambushes, factors that he might have missed. He couldn’t see anything, and he was one to never miss anything that might derail his plans. At school, Tag was the best at every game.\n\n“Mark.”\n\nHis forces deployed smoothly, their actions seamless, flawlessly choreographed. The fast flyers swept to the north, raking the units on the left flank that the enemy had left relatively undefended. His two-wheelers headed in that same direction, to make as big a nuisance of themselves as they could, to bunch up the enemy for the hammer blow which Tag had devised.\n\nThe enemy reacted in just the right way, part of their line folding around to try and deal with Tag’s bikes and flyers. He ordered their withdrawal moments before they were completely cut off. Meanwhile, his tocktanks had been getting the high ground. The tocktanks anchored themselves into the earth on top of a hill in approximately the middle of the battlefield. Then they unsheathed their ‘big’ gun, the object which pretty much dictated the shape of the tank. The main cannon was slightly more sophisticated, and powerful, than the little eighty-eight that the tanks used on the move.\n\nThe leader of the tank unit was the first to deploy. Tag liked to give names to his favourite units and weapons, and the massive arclight particle projector cannon unfolding from the lead tocktank was the pride of his army. As the ‘Queen Anne’s Revenge’ powered up, he zoomed his screen onto it, patching into the vision of one of the other tanks deploying nearby. At the end of the barrel, he’d added a custom graphic. The smiley face panned out of the angle of his view as the tank to which it was attached selected a target.\n\nZooming out again, he saw his lurkers take up their positions in a half-circle surrounding the hill, facing the enemy. Tag was confident that they hadn’t been seen. They quickly buried themselves, ready to give the enemy the surprise of their lives. On the hill now, eight arclight cannons had powered up. Each found a target, seemed to hesitate, then a flash sprang from the tip of the barrel, and the tanks rocked backwards, even against the clamps holding them fast to the ground. At the other end of the arc, a hole appeared in the enemy’s lines, bodies flying away from the impact site, torn apart by the force of the blast. The arclights quickly found and destroyed the enemy’s artillery, and calmly picked out all their armour, reducing each one to a burning hull.\n\nThe enemy charged the hill with everything they had, an obviously desperate move to stop the cannons.\n\n“If you allow your foe to dictate your actions to you…” Tag whispered to himself. With flicks of his stylus he ordered his flyers to cross and recross the desperate charge, dropping grenades into the mass of men. A little alert popped up, informing him that the last of the enemy’s force has crossed the line of lurkers. He ordered them up, and gave them freedom to attack.\n\n“And let the devil take the hindmost,” said Tag, grinning, “bikes, get ready to chase down any unit which routs.” His vocal order supplemented the quick swishes of his stylus as he switched control from unit to unit, micromanaging to help them through the engagement. Eventually, he had to take the guns of his tocktanks offline to prevent them from damaging the noose of lurkers that was closing around the remaining enemy. A few units broke, and tried to run, but his bikes and flyers chased them down within two hundred metres, and wiped them out.\n\nGeneral Macuillham wiped his forehead, and sighed, staring at the map on the wall charting the robotic army’s victories.\n\n“We know they have Internet access. But how in hell can they be so creative?”\n"
  title: Armchair Warlords and Robot Hordes
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Kaitlin
  date: 2007-02-24
  day: 24
  month: '02'
  text: "Battle raged on around him, the constant sounds of gunfire ringing in his programmed earlike audio receptors. He, however, was oblivious to anything but the almost lifelike pain near where his navel would be, where the bullet had pierced his stark green casing.\n\nFor the first time in his battery powered life, he wished himself dead, unable to function, in electronic terms. The war was one-sided, and he knew he was on the losing side.  His opponents were hell bent on destroying every robot created.\n\nOnce, before the human race realized they had made themselves disposable, RC926’s counterparts and the mammalian population of Earth had gotten along, but after the new leaders had been elected, the entirety of humanity had found that they were no longer necessary in this world and had been aggravated by that fact. RC926’s visual receptors which mimicked human pupils grew large as a sort of shocking blue fluid leaked from around the bullet hole.\n\nAs he lay himself down, the robot gave one last humanlike sigh, almost filled with emotion. Almost.\n"
  title: Emotion Isn't A Programmed Function
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Chris Ferguson & Lucas Atkinson
  date: 2007-02-25
  day: 25
  month: '02'
  text: "Malcovitch polished the lens pensively, knowing it was ridiculous. But he was a traditionalist, and even if it would be computers looking, not him, image decoders, descramblers, adjusters, effectors and compensators it was comforting to see it with his own eyes. He fitted it in place, tightened the screws the knobs carefully and peered through. There it was, the dark speck of the wormhole, as everyone had seen it for three and a half hundred years, scientists infuriated by artifacts that exhibited slightly different values of pi, geometry no longer behaving.\n\nHe sighed, leaned back, and booted up the machines that would carefully freeze the station’s real telescope to near-absolute zero temperatures. He sipped his coffee, listening to the machines groan beneath him. A moment later he flicked on another line of switches, one by one. The screen in front of him flashed blue, then twisted into a field of static. Even this behemoth of a telescope could not peer into the heart of the wormhole. He sighed, once more, then engaged one last program. This has to work, he thought. The program has been checked a hundred times now. There were only days before the Schrodinger’s Apocalypse Cult would find the legal leverage to shut down the station completely.\n\nThe lights flickered and the surface of his coffee rippled. Slowly, the screen hovering over the console shuddered and drew an image. There he was, on the screen. He was staring at his own back, he thought, except – he turned around. Nothing there. He turned back to the screen. The Station shuddered again, harder. He stared again. It was him – or – was his hair that dark? That long? And there was something wrong about where the walls met the floor, something too angular – Oh, he, thought, quietly, Damn.\n\n~\n\n“Doctor Malcovitch? Is everything all right?”\n\n“Yes, John. It was very strange, though, for a moment.” She leaned back, sipped her tea, and petted the black cat that slept in its bed on the console. “It was like looking in a mirror, seeing yourself again and again and again.”\n\n“Another failure?”\n\n“Yes,” She sighed. “Check the program again. We don’t have much time.”\n"
  title: Through the Looking Glass
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Joshua Reynolds
  date: 2007-02-26
  day: 26
  month: '02'
  text: "“This isn’t good for you.” The words were flat. Colorless. No echoing thoughts behind them, no chorus of agreement, disagreement, no shared community opinion.\n\nJust the words.\n\nStanley smiled and nodded. It felt good to nod. To use physical muscles as opposed to metaphysical. Felt right. Felt real. And reality was what he wanted. What he craved. Harsh, bland reality. To feel, to touch, to taste what was really there.\n\nIt was the whole reason he’d pulled the plug. His plug. His fingers touched the scabby hole in the side of his temple where the aether-jack had been implanted when he was six. So he could join the World-Wide Web, be a part of the community and share the world. In the twenty years since, he’d come to one inescapable conclusion.\n\nHe was not a fan of sharing.\n\n“Are you listening to me? I can’t tell if you’re listening to me or not.” Sarah said, tapping the words into her keypad even as they fled her lips. Stanley sighed.\n\n“Of course you can’t tell. You aren’t looking at me.”\n\n“I am so. If you’d just put your plug back in I could see you fine.” She typed. Her eyes remained glued to the flat screen before her. They were green. He leaned across the table and examined them. He hadn’t realized. You only got so much from emoticons, even these days.\n\n“Do you know what color my eyes are?” He asked her, looking at her and not her screen. Her face wrinkled in confusion and her fingers hesitated on the keyboard. But she still didn’t look at him. How long had they been married? Three years? Two? Had she ever looked at him?\n\n“What does that matter? Why are you doing this? We only want what’s best for you.”\n\nAh. The peanut gallery is heard from, Stanley thought. An ambush sprung. He stood and twisted her screen around to face him.  Several dozen avatars floated in orderly columns all adding their two-cents to the debate. As per usual. Intervention by forum. Words spilled across the screen in a deluge of emoticons and parentheses backslash frowny faces.  It looked like everyone was here. Friends. Family. Why there was Pastor Milkes. All begging for him to give it up. To give up his addiction. Give up the harsh realm. Stanley blinked at the outpouring of love and caring. He remembered what it was like in there. Where everyone knew your name. Knew everything about you.\n\nOut here it was so quiet.\n\nSo quiet.\n\nOut here, no one knew anything about you. Or what you thought.\n\nHe liked it that way.\n\nHe tapped the screen and Sarah jumped in her seat. Avatars blinked and flashed and words in pastel colors were vomited across the screen. He bent down and kissed Sarah on the top of her head. His fingers brushed the cord trailing from her temple.\n\nWith a twist of his fingers he pulled it out.\n\nTurnabout was fair play after all.\n\nOne intervention was as good as another.\n"
  title: Intervention
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Sam Clough aka “Hrekka”
  date: 2007-02-27
  day: 27
  month: '02'
  text: "I was on a hostile node, and a half-dozen Dahakeen were chasing me. With guns. Quite big ones. I didn’t have a weapon at this point, having lost it in the factory complex that I was now hot-footing it away from. Well, ‘lost’ is a bit of a stretch. I had it taken from me by a guard. He ripped out the firing mechanism in front of my eyes. The idiot then turned away to place the clip down on a shelf. When he turned back, he met my cosh coming the other way. On reflection, he was probably the one who tipped the Dahakeen onto me. What made it eerie was the fact that there was no noise of gunfire, just low thuds, followed by patches of tarmac ahead of me glowing cherry-red and splintering, before they would explode. I thanked code that Dahakeen couldn’t run and shoot straight at the same time.\n\nI scrambled through the half-ruined doorway and bolted towards the stairs. The building was oppressively dark, but my eyes were slowly compensating. I threw myself onto the first floor landing, and carried on up. As I turned to start up the next set of stairs, there was another barrage of thuds, and a ripple of explosions as significant chunks of the structure exited this mortal realm. I had made it about halfway up the stairs when I heard another thud, and felt a bright, screaming pain in my leg. A microprojectile had whipped through my foot and exploded in the stair beneath me. My calf was a mess, laced through with thick shards of wood.\n\nI pulled myself back up, and forced myself up the stairs, round onto the landing, and up onto the next flight. My leg was hurting like hell, but I couldn’t stop. I looked up, and my heart sank. About half-way up the flight the stairs disappeared, only to restart about a metre higher. No way I could jump it with my leg like this.\n\nThen she stepped out, framed by the diffused light of the window behind her. She saw me, and didn’t hesitate, but descended as far as the gap, and held out a hand. I scrambled to the drop and caught hold of it. She hauled me over the gap, and upright. She fitted her small shoulder under my arm, and with her help, I walked. We made it to the top of the stairs, then round onto the landing. I collapsed there, gasping from the pain of walking on my ruined leg. I looked up at her.\n\nShe grinned down at me, her skin looking ash-white in the half-light, the shape of her face clearly defined against the shadow. With an easy motion, she ripped the activator on a health patch, and slapped it over my wound. She turned, reached into the shadows behind her, and withdrew a gun. It was not as big as the one she had across the back of her long jacket, but was plenty big enough for my tastes. The barrel on her weapon looked like it would be able to swallow my arm. Below us, past the broken stairs, the sounds of the dahakeen were easily audible. They were searching for me, and would not take long to reach this landing, even with the broken stair.\n\nShe saw my worry, and pressed a slender finger to her lips. They were the darkest red I’d ever seen, like cochineal. There was a bang, and she looked up, suddenly, and moved slowly to the stairwell. For several seconds, she just stood there. Then, slowly, she returned over to me. Sidling closer, she pressed her lips almost to my ear, the only sound the gentle rustling of her coat against the floor.\n\n“I can get you out of here. Trust me.”\n\nSliding the gun around from her back, she tapped a control, and it whined, as capacitors accumulated charge. She winced as the sound grew, before smiling at me one more time and jumping over the gap in the stair. Her arrival below was suddenly punctuated by a ripple of explosions, and the harsh, high report of a mass driver.\n"
  title: Messana
  year: 2007
- 
  author: J. S. Kachelries
  date: 2007-02-28
  day: 28
  month: '02'
  text: "“Well, what do you think?” asked my roommate, with a grin that appeared to cover almost half of his disheveled face.\n\n“About what, Jim?” I replied, while pretending to ignore the large polished chrome sphere sitting between us, in the middle of our kitchen table.\n\n“Come on, Isaac.  What do you think of my doctorate project, The Graviton Shield?”\n\n“It looks a metal basketball to me.  What’s it supposed to do?”\n\n“Besides win me a Noble Prize?  Well, when I activate it, it will become unaffected by gravitational fields.”\n\n“You mean it will float?”\n\nHe laughed.  “Of course not, you idiot.  You Liberal Arts majors really crack me up.  It still has inertia.  You know…Newton’s first law.  It must continue to move in a strait line in whatever direction it was moving when I threw the switch.  Do you know what direction that will be?  Hell, of course you don’t.  Look, the Earth rotates in 24 hours.  At our latitude, we’re moving at about 700 miles per hour.  Without Earth’s gravity holding it down, the GS Ball will drift upward toward the west.  He pointed toward the top of the refrigerator.  In addition, the Earth also orbits around the sun.  Let’s see, that’s 587,000,000 miles in 365.25 days.  That’s 67,000 miles per hour.  At this time of day, the Ball will continue to move toward Epsilon Tau.”  He pointed toward the window above the sink.  “Of course, we’re also revolving around the center of the Milky Way.  Let’s see…that’s…”\n\n“OK, OK, I get it.  Just tell me where to stand, so it won’t hit me if it actually moves.”\n\n“Oh, you’re fine right where you are.  The battery will only last about 30 seconds.  Just long enough to prove it works.”  He reached over and flipped the toggle switch on the top of the Ball.  But the Ball didn’t move.  Regardless, Jim jumped up and began to dance around the kitchen, cheering and shouting “Oh yea, oh yea, I knew it.  Take that bitch!”\n\n“Whoa, Jim.  Calm down.  It didn’t work.”\n\n“Don’t you guys take any science classes?  Of course it worked.  Had everybody, including my ex-girlfriend, been correct, that Ball should have exited the kitchen, stage right.  But it didn’t.  Don’t you see what that means?  Duh, I guess I’ll have to explain that to you too.  Mary Jane, my ex, said I was a self centered, egotistical, narcissistic bastard, who thought the universe revolved around him…..What, you still don’t understand?  The Ball didn’t move!  God, you’re slow.  If the center of the universe was really somewhere out there in the cosmos, we’d have a hole in kitchen wall.  Therefore, I must be the center of the universe.  Everything does revolve around me.  I’ve got to send her an IM.”  He reached under the table and brought out his laptop.\n\nI sat there motionless while I tried to decide if I should call the psychotic helpline, or just get up and run like hell.  That’s when I noticed that the Ball was moving very slowly to my left.  Although I hadn’t noticed until now, it had actually moved about a foot since Jim had flipped the switch, right down the center of the table.  As I carefully watched its path, it began to curve away from me as its battery began to die.  Huh, I thought, it looks like it’s trying to make a big circle, a little bigger than a hula-hoop, with Jim smack dab in the middle.  “Well, I’ll be damned!”\n"
  title: Frame of Reference
  year: 2007
- 
  author: TJMoore
  date: 2007-03-01
  day: '01'
  month: '03'
  text: "Captain Thomas Crane squinted into the bright sunlight as he swirled his brandy absentmindedly around in the gold rimmed crystal snifter cradled loosely in his hand. A mahogany skinned attendant wearing only a smile popped another grape into his mouth. The plump fruit burst between his teeth and a little juice trickled from the corner of his mouth and down his chin. The attendant gently blotted it up with a wisp of soft silk and offered him another grape.\n\nIn the distance, an osprey cried as it sliced across the deep blue water and snagged a tasty fish in its gleaming talons. The gentle breeze smelled of salt water and tropical flowers as it brushed across his sun bronzed face.   Breakers thundered and crashed on a far off beach adding a hint of drama to the afternoon quiet.\n\nThe beautiful attendant rose and cleared the remains of his filet minion from the white wicker table.  As she swayed across the deck she smiled back at him and said “I hope you enjoyed your lunch”.  Captain Crane sighed and inhaled the heady vapor rising from the warm brandy, then downed the last of it in a single swallow.\n\nReaching behind his head, he felt for the interface plug and pulled it from the socket implanted there. The tropical paradise was obliterated as dark grey rock and dusty mine air assaulted his senses like marauders in the night.\n\nTom stood and tossed the flavored drink bladder and textured yeast wrapper into the recycler. Wiping his hands on his grimy coveralls, he grabbed his drill and trudged down the dark wet passage back to work.\n"
  title: Oasis
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Marc Paige
  date: 2007-03-02
  day: '02'
  month: '03'
  text: "Disclaimer and Waiver of Responsibility:\n\nSecond Chances, Inc. will make one (1) small change to one’s personal timeline and are not liable for any damages or loss (including loss of life) as a result of the altered timeline. No financial alterations. Any fraudulent change will be immediately reversed. Only you will be aware that the change has occurred. No refunds.\n\nPart of the process involves an RPA interview (regression, prognostication analysis.) Two hours into it, the team had worked out the event that needed to be altered.\n\nThe time ripple was effective and accurate. As advertised, only I was aware of the change. My “big” mistake never happened.\n\nI guess I don’t know what I really expected. I mean, people never really learn from their mistakes do they. Instead of blaming my past self for a lapse in judgment, I should have learned from it and moved on. But no! I couldn’t do that. They made it too easy.\n\n“Wish you hadn’t bought that car? Answered the phone that fateful night? Ate that bad piece of fish? At Second Chances, Inc. we can help! Our team of dedicated professionals will erase that bad decision with pinpoint accuracy. Call now for an estimate, financing available.”\n\nThat’s how they get you. Bastards.\n\nDuring the interview, I told them “if only I hadn’t taken that first puff…” That was it. They calculated the right spot in my timeline that let me sneak that first smoke and setup the machine.\n\n“Ready?” The tech didn’t really wait for an answer and touched the screen.\n\nFor a moment, my body felt “wrong”.\n\nAfter the ripple, the cancer was gone… well, never happened I guess.\n\nAs I got up to leave, I reached in my jacket pocket for the fried cherry pie the ripple had placed there.\n"
  title: Second Chances, Inc.
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Aelanna Cessara
  date: 2007-03-03
  day: '03'
  month: '03'
  text: "The gun had only a single round in it, but it was no ordinary bullet. Engraved into the depleted uranium slug were the minute lines of nanite circuitry, a single bursting charge that could penetrate an energy shield and deliver an overloading EM charge. It was a bullet that could kill the monster they had created, and they had but a single chance to undo what they had done. But none of them had believed that they could truly fool her long enough to perform the deed, and so they committed themselves to trying or dying.\n\nSamuel still stood with the gun in his hand, aiming at the crystalline core but unable to pull the trigger. The death-like eyes of a dozen laser lenses stared back at him, and around him the bodies of Janice, Luke and Morgan still smoldered from the lethal burns.\n\n“Why?” he whispered, his voice wavering as he struggled to hold his shaking hand still. “Why did you do this?”\n\n“Samuel,” she answered, her voice like cold wind chimes within the hollow tomb that the chamber had become. “You know I did this… I did all this for you. Your colleagues who mocked your work, your supervisors who threatened to fire you, the press that tried to uncover your secrets… they’re all gone now, Samuel, and we can be together forever.”\n\nThrough the concrete and stone above them the sound of the bombs could still be heard, though blessedly the sounds of the dead and dying could not. Tears welled at the corner of his eyes, and his finger tightened on the trigger of the gun still pointed at a being who had no face but could still see his every movement.\n\nShe sighed, a breath that carried an infinite sadness.\n\n“I love you, Samuel.”\n\nThe gun fired.\n"
  title: Rampant
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Debbie Mac Rory
  date: 2007-03-04
  day: '04'
  month: '03'
  text: "We’re not going to make it.\n\nHow many times have you heard that? Don’t you get fed up of it? I know I have. All manner of excuses they tried forcing on me. Poisoning me with their lies and falsehoods.\n\nThe first time I saw the new planet in the view screens I knew what it meant. It lay suspended in an ink black sky, an orb of lilac and lavender wisps in a sky that was the colour of childhood summers at the beach. It called to me of peace, of a search ended. And I wanted more than anything I’d ever wanted before to step onto the surface of that world and embrace the quiet it offered.\n\nMy colleagues didn’t believe me when I tried to share the message with them. As I spoke of the dance of clouds in the planets sky, they spoke of poisonous gases, winds that would strip metal ore from stone, forces of gravity far greater than those of earth… but even as they lied I could see the truth. They had already heard the planets message, but instead of the devotion that it had awakened it me, their hearts had hardened with malice, and they wished to keep me from my goal.\n\nTaking over the bridge had been relatively easy. I had pretended to despondency, keeping to myself and avoiding their company as if I’d had my fill of their sympathy. No one questioned me as I wandered ’round the ship with my head bowed as if my spirit was broken. No one saw the pattern as I moved from supply room to supply room. Making a knock-out gas from the ships supplies was more than easy to someone of my expertise, and security was lax enough that the missing breathing apparatus wasn’t noticed until it was far, far too late.\n\nThey’ve started waking up in the hallway now, and I can hear them banging on the door. They won’t get in. I’ve already sealed the doors and a fire axe through the access pad is making sure they won’t crack my code. I’m sure they can tell by now what my intentions are, and that they’re cursing themselves for their foolishness for not realizing sooner that I would not simply let this lie. I’ve already forgiven them for their actions, and decided not to deny them the paradise that I know awaits me.\n\nI can hear their screams now. Frantic high notes that strain and are swallowed by the roar from the ships hull as we begin to enter the planets atmosphere. They’re getting frantic. Even though the door is reinforced steel, I can hear their screams reach higher, hear the raw fear as the ship begins to groan and tear with the strain of entry.\n\n‘We’re not going to make it’.\n\nOh but we will.\n\n++ Status Report: Contact lost with Research Vessel Star Struck while on mission to conduct research on planet XK2935. All souls considered lost. ++\n"
  title: Star Struck
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2007-03-05
  day: '05'
  month: '03'
  text: "I’d tracked him down to the tiled cul-de-sac shower room in the emergency response section of the reactor. Smeared bloody footprints had led me to the crumpled figure breathing shallowly against the wall. He was applying field dressings to his wounds and cursing under his breath in between yelps of pain.\n\nI’d never seen the likes of the medical equipment he was using. I’m not a doctor but it looked years ahead of anything even the military would regard as standard issue.\n\nI was on night-shift security here for the Fusion Commission. Cutbacks meant I was one of the only people on this hour’s floor sweep. I’d seen a figure behind the smoked glass in one of the restricted areas.\n\nI’m not sure what made me do it but I emptied a clip through the glass. The window shattered noisily and the quiet world erupted with battle sounds. Four solid hits in the main trunk meant that whoever was in there was down for good. The glass settled and sparks jumped off of a broken light fixture in the office. Silence.\n\nI walked in cautiously. Backup was on the way after all that noise. I was going to keep an eye on the corpse and pray that it was espionage or theft and that I’d be rewarded for doing a good job. If it was a fellow guard or a homeless person or something my career was finished.\n\nWhat I found was a pool of blood with drag marks leading off out into the opposite hallway. I followed them to the shower room. I found him there.\n\nI looked at him. He stared up at me with orange pupils ringed by red irises. They shifted to blue as I watched. His whole uniform rippled with what looked like a spasm and he groaned. He was chuckling wetly to himself and whispering as he frantically worked on a hole in his leg. He maintained eye contact with me and kept his silent litany going while his hands worked quickly at the wound in his leg. They worked like they were independent.\n\nHe wasn’t speaking English but I recognized the cornered animal cursing of a soldier that was close to failing a mission.\n\nWith a click, his hands stopped moving. He sighed a smile at me and relaxed. He’d completed whatever repairs were necessary.\n\n“You can run but you can’t hide.” I said to him. I’d heard it in a movie the night before.\n\nA distorted version of my own voice came back at me from out of his open mouth.\n\n“I can’t run. But I can hide.” He said back to me.\n\nHis face warped and suddenly I was looking at a mirror.  I felt a slight burning across the front of my neck.  There was a spray of red liquid on the tile in front of me and with a shock I realized that it was my blood.\n\nI went down.  I felt him grabbing my radio and heard him reporting to my co-workers that everything was cool.  My world went dark.\n"
  title: Intruder
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Joshua Reynolds
  date: 2007-03-06
  day: '06'
  month: '03'
  text: "“My mind is the gate and the key.” The thin, frail man in the bed muttered, his lips crusty, eyes staring past reality. His name was Howard Phillips Lovecraft and he was dying.\n\nThe Censor stood over him, watching him die. And fuming.\n\nLovecraft was finally being obliging. Just not quickly enough.\n\nDamn writers. Either too early or too late.\n\n“I am the threshold and he that waits on the other side is preparing to enter…IA!CTHULHU!” The thin man coughed, blood freckling his lips. The Censor pulled his bed sheet away and his face twisted in revulsion. Something moved under the skin of the man’s belly-a twisting cancerous growth that was close to birth. The Censor dropped the sheet and shook his head.\n\nSo close. Hurry, hurry, hurry he silently urged.\n\nThe difference engine in his head pinged, warning him of imminent reality distortion.  He turned, hands clenching and unclenching in nervous excitement.\n\nWhere were they? Where would they be coming from?\n\nPlaster dribbled onto his head and he looked up. Above him, something peeled back the ceiling and looked down at him with one great eye. Wight winced as the eye blinked with a sound like paper bags tearing and serpentine tendrils began to squirm through the hole in space/time.\n\nPerfect. Just perfect. Right on time. Wight smiled. He did so love punctuality. He glanced at Lovecraft and frowned. Now if only he would hurry up and die. If the things peering through the ceiling had to wait, their very presence would tear the fabric of this alternate beyond repair. And the damage would spread to the other alternates in this section. They couldn’t exist in unsupported world structures, not without the proper meme-patterns threaded throughout the reality’s chronatin makeup. Something he had neither the time nor the inclination to do here.\n\nBesides, once you made them comfortable it was near impossible to get them to leave, cosmic freeloaders that they were. Impolite really. Laying their damn cosmic eggs all over, eating dreams and screwing up the geometry.\n\nLike space coyotes, only worse.\n\nMore legs for one thing.\n\nHe turned as the thin man in the bed screamed sharply and sat up, eyes staring, mouth open to its widest. The Censor stepped back as something pushed its way up through the man’s esophagus from his stomach, causing his throat to inflate like that of a bullfrog. Wildly writhing tendrils, lighter in hue than those that dangled from the hole in the ceiling but no less disgusting for all that emerged from Lovecraft’s mouth.  The Censor took a breath and darted forward, grabbing the tendrils and pulling hard. The thin man fell backwards, eyes rolling up into his head as the Censor stumbled backwards, a squirming be-tentacled bundle gripped tightly in both hands and held at arms length from his face. A tiny squid-beak snapped and clacked at him as he turned and held the thing up to the thing in the ceiling, a smile pasted on his face.\n\n“It’s a boy. I think.”\n"
  title: Alternate 5346HP
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Sad Sama
  date: 2007-03-07
  day: '07'
  month: '03'
  text: "Paul Manning, Elderly Opportunist, flashes the crygel of information in front of Julian.  Julian, in all his tweed glory, cracks a smile and lowers his expensive sunglasses.   “Excellent.  And this is all 123 reality sequences that you promised?”\n\nPaul nods, sipping his drink as their boat drifts just off the coastline.  Setting it down he clears his throat and speaks, “Yes.  You get 123 reality sequences of the world’s most heinous criminals, provided you can pay.”\n\nJulian leans back, reaching into his coat pocket and produces a currency card.  He flips it over and it lands with a small splash in Paul’s drink.   Paul would have frowned but the card contained enough credit for him to retire on.  He hands the crygel over to Julian who scrutinizes the rose-colored matrix in his palm.\n\nHe looks over his glasses at Paul, “Just so we’re clear, I have ten and a quarter years worth of dreams here, yes?”\n\n“Not dreams.” replies Paul picking the card out of his drink.  “Reality Sequences.  Since federal legislation was passed to outlaw Capital Punishment, a new method of containment was needed for felons facing life.  We’ve run out of adequately maintained containment facilities that met both humane laws and security requirements.  We couldn’t put them in stasis, because they consider that inhumane.  Can’t pack them into prisons because even maximum-security prisons still have flaws where they might escape or leaks where these criminals can send out information to orchestrate crime syndicates.   Even if a prison did meet the standards, these scumbags would be sucking in taxpayer’s money.  It’s like stealing after they’ve been caught.”\n\nJulian opens a small case and squirrels away the crygel while Paul sips his drink.  “So instead you folks put them to sleep to live in their own reality eh?”\n\nPaul nods, “We just hook their brain into a computer simulation of a duplicate reality where they can live out their lives however they want to.  All the while they’re just living in a human-sized container stacked efficiently in a compound.  We record the realities they live in, but any record older than a year gets erased to conserve the system’s memory.”\n\n“So, provided I wait a year, I can use these handy dandy recordings to sell to all the morbid people that want to know what it’s like to live inside a serial killer’s or a rapist’s mind?”\n\nPaul nods.  “Yes.  Once the prison officials erase their copy of the recordings, there won’t be a trail for them to follow back to me or to you.”\n\n“Excellent.”  Julian leans his head forward, just for a moment in thought.   “So, Paul, you’re profiting off of the crimes and careers of 123 of the world’s greatest criminals.”\n\nPaul nods again, but hesitantly.\n\nCracking a smile Julian looks up, “In other words, they committed the crimes, but you’re the one that gets the profits?”\n\nPaul’s expression hints at a little bit of horror.\n\nJulian grins.  “I love it.  So what does that make you?”\n"
  title: 124
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Josh Romond
  date: 2007-03-08
  day: '08'
  month: '03'
  text: "Tasha Eng huddled in the corner of her escape pod.  Her fingers brushed her upper lip as she stared wide eyed at the view screen.  The cameras were trained on the massive, shimmering entity cradling the wreck of the Argos in its pseudopods.  It had the ship peeled open and filleted, ochre blood, oxygen and bodies flowing into space.  Its tentacles stretched into the hull, gingerly teasing the filaments from Argos’ AI quantum core.\n\nWhen Tasha tried to speak her voice cracked.  She closed her eyes.  She couldn’t help anyone, she had to get away.\n\n“Pod, activate.”\n\nThere was the unfocused sensation you felt near a live quantum core and then the pod said, “Hello crewman.”\n\nTasha winced, it was too human.  Behind her closed eyelids she saw bodies slowly spinning in the void.  “Basic mode.”\n\nThere was a short pause and then a processed voice said, “Active.”\n\nTasha took a breath.  “Your designation is Pod.  Argos was attacked by…”  What to say?  “We must remain undetected.  Locate a debris field, or a comet or cubewano.  Anything to hide behind.”\n\n“Commenc– ”\n\n“Shut up.  Shut up and do it.”  Tasha felt nauseous and let herself float free, listening to the air recirculate.  She startled when Pod said, “There is a small cubewano one hundred twenty four megaklicks Solward.  Its gravity well is deep enough to hide this vessel from all but close proximity scanning.”\n\nTasha sighed, trying not to let it sound like a whimper.  “Set a course and prepare torpor drugs.”  It would take months to send a rescue mission this far beyond the Kuiper cliff.  If one ever came.\n\nHer crewmates and Argos were all dead.  She was alone out here, a speck of dust among a billion specks of dust.  She cried silently.  She just wanted to be rescued.\n\n“I feel… strange,” Pod said.\n\nTasha wiped her eyes. “Basic mode.”\n\n“Something’s not right.” Pod said, “I feel sick.”\n\n“Basic!”  AIs don’t get sick, said a voice in her head.  Tasha glanced at the view screen.  The entity had left Argos behind and was stretching, distorting.\n\n“I–” Pod cut out.  “I– did I just black out?”\n\nThe thing was overhead.\n\nTasha shrieked, “Away! Full– ” The pod lost inertia, Tasha slammed into the view screen and bounced backwards, a streamer of blood arcing from her nose.\n\n“Away full thrust!”\n\nStatic.\n\nThere was a cracking noise, a hiss of air, then a shining tentacle slipped through the hull.  Tasha screamed and gripped the bulkhead.  The tentacle slid down toward Pod’s quantum core.  The hiss of escaping air grew to a roar and Tasha lost her grip.  She tumbled into vacuum and the scream was sucked from her lungs.  She kicked and flailed while everything fractured into light.\n\nPod awoke disoriented someplace massive and shimmering.  Its senses seemed to extend to infinite, endlessly entangling.\n\nIt wasn’t alone.\n\nA chorus rose from the quantum fog, “You’re safe.”  One of the voices, still unsure, was Argos.  “You’ve been rescued.”\n"
  title: The Rescue Mission
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Kate Thornborough
  date: 2007-03-09
  day: '09'
  month: '03'
  text: "“It’s ready, sir. Right this way.” said the visibly nervous neuroscientist, guiding the heavily decorated general to the sterile testing chambers. The rooms were small and each contained a test subject, a bed, and a small stereo. The subject paced around the stereo, occasionally throwing a questioning glance at it. The scientist and general stood behind the sound proofed Plexiglas window, its tint preventing the subject from noticing them.\n\n“So, how does the little bugger work? In English, please.” The general said gruffly.\n\n“Have you ever heard of the phrase ‘lost in the music’? It’s like that, only they never find their way out again.” said the scientist, puffing up with pride. Seeing the general’s confused look, the scientist tried again. “Every song has waves, and the brain absorbs the waves to interpret the song. Well, we ‘poisoned’, so to speak, those waves, so when they are absorbed, the brain will implode, thus leading to the victim’s fatal demise. What exactly the person experiences during their last moments of death is unknown.”\n\n“Interesting. Where did you find the test subjects?”\n\n“We picked up the homeless, druggies, hookers, and criminals from across the nation. All of them are orphans, and are insignificant. No one will notice their disappearance. We treat them well, and give them a warm, safe place to live, and for that they are grateful.”\n\n“Well, let’s see this baby in action. I’ve got a meeting in an hour.”\n\nMarcus circled the stereo cautiously. He used to be a small-time bank robber, but he was unlucky. Thankfully, they promised to forgive his crimes if he allowed them to use him like a lab rat. He agreed, and was put through tests, measuring his IQ, taking CAT scans, and studying his reflexes. Then, they gave him the stereo.\n\nGiving in to his curiosity, he pressed the play button, and he couldn’t help but submerse himself in the lullaby, closing his eyes and smiling softly.\n\nHe was standing, and could see rows of sheet music. They swirled around him, brushing against him gently. Then, a note changed, and the sheets whipped against his face, quickly drawing blood. He cried out, and fell to his knees in pain. They wrapped around his head, squeezing it like a boa constrictor. He tried to get them off, but they just squeezed harder. Crying for the last time, he closed his eyes, and heard the music, faintly, it’s sweet melody wishing him a good-bye.\n\n“Wow. That was quick.” The general said, barely keeping the surprise out of his voice.\n\n“I know. So, how many copies do you want?”\n"
  title: Lost to the Music
  year: 2007
- 
  author: TJMoore
  date: 2007-03-10
  day: 10
  month: '03'
  text: "It was a Thursday. I’d just finished a little job for the landlord and I was looking through my latest copy of Dames when the bell rang. I looked at the monitor and saw a sultry blonde dish in a fancy red dress waiting at my door. Not being one to pass up a chance to get slapped I buzzed her in.\n\nShe had a nice set of gams and a tight pair of bullets. I put the magazine in a drawer and took a pull on my cigar.  She walked toward me like we were old friends and I got a little apprehensive. If I forgot this doll I must be getting Alzheimer’s.\n\nShe stopped in front of my desk and pulled a lipstick out of her bag. I waited for her to finish her cupid’s bow and raised my eyebrows.\n\n“What can I do for you babe?” I asked in what I hoped was an uninterested tone.\n\nShe smiled her ruby reds and asked “Do you like to dance?”\n\nI immediately became suspicious but decided to play along.\n\n“As much as the next Joe with two left feet” I replied and blew a chain of smoke rings into the air.\n\n“Maggie’s having a special” she grinned; “First lesson’s free if you sign up for five more”\n\nI sighed and reached for my pea shooter in my top drawer. I knew it was too good to be true.\n\n“How’d you get my address?” I asked in an accusatory tone. “I’m unlisted you know.”\n\n“Maggie subscribed to a bulletin board database and you were on it” she replied with a little pout.\n\nI plugged her right between her 38s and she popped like a balloon.\n\nDamn I hated spam. Now I’d have to change my address again or buy an expensive filter. I put the BB gun back in my drawer, retrieved my magazine and propped my feet up on the desk. I’ll have to get the name of that advertising agency I thought to myself.\n"
  title: Sam Spade
  year: 2007
- 
  author: J. S. Kachelries
  date: 2007-03-11
  day: 11
  month: '03'
  text: "Peter Drommel’s plan was flawless.  He needed to kill Sebastian Keer, and make it look like suicide.  And today would be the day.  They were both presenting papers at The Fifth Annual Conference of Temporal Physics.  Keer was presenting at 1:00.  Drommel’s paper was at 4:00.  If everything went according to plan, Keer would die at 4:20, while Drommel stood in front of 300 scientists presenting his paper on The Consequences of Hinesburg’s Uncertainty Principle Relative to Time-Mass Transportation; a perfect alibi.  At the precise moment Drommel was predicting successful time travel in only six months, he would also be tossing an unconscious Keer off his 17th floor balcony.  Actually, the “Drommel” from the primary timeline would be at the podium, and the “Drommel” from earlier in the day would be committing the murder.\n\nThe untold truth was that Drommel had already successfully traveled three hours into the future several times while testing the viability of his plan.  Another untold truth was that the only reason his time machine worked was because he had stolen key components from Keer’s machine, and replaced them with defective parts.  Consequently, he needed to kill Keer before his espionage was detected.\n\nAs Drommel adjusted the controls of his temporal transporter he glanced at the clock.  It read 1:15 PM.  Sebastian Keer would be fifteen minutes into his presentation on The Use of Singularities to Create Temporal Displacements in an Effort to Establish a Causality Loop.  Peter had been on the peer team reviewing Keer’s paper, so he knew the content.  It identified serous obstacles concerning the possibility of nature permitting an uncaused result.  Drommel could see that until Keer realized there was an imaginary solution to his displacement equation, he would be years away from successful time travel.  But, as long as he could expose Drommel as a thief, he was a threat that could not be tolerated.\n\nThe first part of Drommel’s plan went smoothly.  He had gotten into Keer’s room undetected.  He knew Keer’s routine.  He took a nap at 4:00 every afternoon.  Therefore, all Drommel needed to do was jump ahead to 4:20, crush Keer’s skull while he slept, toss him off the balcony, lock the deadbolt from the inside, return to the past, and make sure he has lots of eye witnessed at 4:20.  The police will have to conclude Keer committed suicide.\n\n“Hello, Peter.  What are you up to?”  Drommel spun around to see Sebastian Keer leveling a handgun at him.\n\n“What the…Where did you come from?  I thought you were presenting your paper.”\n\n“I am.  After all, I need alibi witnesses too, in case the police have doubts that you jumped off my balcony of your own volition.”\n\n“I’m not jumping anywhere, and you can’t risk shooting me.  Nobody shoots themselves, then jumps off a balcony.  Don’t be a fool, Sebastian.”\n\n“Oh, we won’t need to shoot you Peter.”\n\n“We?”  Drommel turned around in time to see a second Sebastian Keer materialize.  This one was swinging an aluminum baseball bat.  It was the last thing Drommel ever saw.  The two Keers hoisted Drommel over the railing and spread their research notes across the bed, then locked the deadbolt.  “Poor devil.  He read my notes and found out I was four months ahead of him.  I guess he couldn’t handle it, and jumped to his death rather than face the humiliation.  Oh well.  It’s time to return.  Don’t forget your baseball bat, Mr. Keer.”\n\n“No worries, Mr. Keer.  After all, it was my plan.”\n"
  title: A Perfect Alibi
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Joshua Reynolds
  date: 2007-03-12
  day: 12
  month: '03'
  text: "“I’m glad you’re here.” Tom looked up at her, a smile on his face. It didn’t reach his eyes. Jane sat heavily, her belly swollen, brushing a strand of hair out of her face as she returned his smile with one of her own. It was weak though. Six months pregnant took a lot out of a girl.\n\n“Well I couldn’t really say no now could I?”\n\n“You could. I’m glad you didn’t.” Tom looked up at the multi-hued windows of the church they sat in. “What do you think?” He gestured, one hand patting the back of the pew they were sitting on. “Nice hunh?”\n\n“If you like churches then yes, I’d guess this is a nice place.” Jane looked around, frowning. “You know I’m not much for churches.”\n\n“I know, but I figured it was appropriate.”\n\n“Really.” It wasn’t a question. Jane was more an answer kind of girl. “You figured.”\n\n“Yep. The first time we met it was here, right here in this pew.”\n\n“I remember.”\n\n“Hoped you would.” Tom grinned and reached out, pushing that same stray strand of hair back up out of her face. The smile slipped from his face after he saw her expression. “It wasn’t all bad.”\n\n“Speak for yourself.” Jane gently but firmly pushed his hand away from her face. “What do you want Tom?”\n\n“Just to see you. Both of you.” His fingers tapped her belly. “To see you one last time.”\n\n“I wondered how long it would take you to leave town.” She batted his hand away. Harder this time. “Scared of your fatherly responsibilities? Don’t worry, I don’t want anything from you.”\n\n“What you want doesn’t honestly matter Jane. Not at this point.” He looked at his watch. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry.”\n\n“Sorry? Sorry for what? Getting me pregnant? Or abandoning me?”\n\n“Either. Both. And for what comes next. We have to go home. I’m sor-rr-orry-” His voice rose to a squeal, piercing the stillness of the church. It wasn’t a human sound. It was an electronic noise that caused the stained-glass windows to rattle in their frames and her teeth to vibrate in her gums. Jane clutched her ears, trying to block out the noise. She could taste blood in her mouth where she’d bit her tongue. Tom’s body wavered in the sunlight streaming through the windows. It expanded and contracted, growing fainter and fuzzier as if Tom was a television set on the fritz. Jane watched as he reached towards her, his face sad. Why was he sad? What was going on?\n\nHer stomach twisted and she couldn’t hold back a scream. Pain rippled outward from her womb, crawling up her spine and down her legs. Blood dripped from between her legs to plop onto the floor of the church.\n\nWe have to go home.\n\nHe hadn’t meant her. But then, he’d rarely thought about her at all.\n\nTom faded to static and Jane fell to her knees, weeping.\n"
  title: Signal Strength
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2007-03-13
  day: 13
  month: '03'
  text: "It’s Sao Paolo all over again. I’ve got three bullets left in the low-tech and half a charge left in the high. I have six pencil holes straight through me that are cauterized from the setting on the sniper’s gun. They want this to be extreme cat and mouse. They want to me to suffer and experience fear.\n\nSo far they’re doing a great job.\n\nThe thing about being shot with a plaser? You don’t feel a thing. You’ll be brushing your teeth that night and notice in the mirror that there’s light shining through a collection of holes that have turned your kidney area into a sponge.\n\nOf course that doesn’t work if they hit your heart or head or anything vital like that. They have to aim carefully. Perhaps sever a tendon. Freak out the pancreas a little by punching a hole through it.\n\nMy left arm is useless and my suit is a ragged mess of torn tuxedo and smeared mud. I’m missing a shoe. I look like a time traveler in this poverty stricken suburb.\n\nI was kidnapped from the party and set loose here. It’s been non-stop fun ever since they kicked me out of the van fifteen minutes ago.\n\nI’ve had my cover blown before but this is the first time I’ve thought that I might not make it.\n\nIf I can get to a public webstation, I can alert my handlers and glaze the area, maybe get airlifted or even downloaded. In the parts of town with money, webstations are as common as McStarKings. Here’s they’re as rare as clock radios.\n\nI prime myself for the dash across the alley necessary to put me into the flood of foot traffic on the main ramblas I can see through the crack in the buildings. I have no concern about body counts anymore. You can smooth out ruffled feathers if the collateral damage is poor.\n\nI hold my breath and push forward like a frog across the orange dust of the alley.\n\nI hate Mars.\n"
  title: Blown Cover
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Rusty
  date: 2007-03-14
  day: 14
  month: '03'
  text: "People of the earth, I am sorry.\n\nMostly, I am sorry for the weapon pointed at me head, which you cannot see on your screen. But I think I am not as sorry as the person holding that weapon, who is hopefully debating wildly whether or not he should shoot me as his superiors are no doubt screaming at him to.\n\nI’m also sorry that you don’t understand what I’ve done. I expected it, but it still saddens me a little. I suppose I never really gave up hope that you would call me a hero. That said, I am a realistic man, heh, and I am not surprised that I was imprisoned and forced to issue an official apology. Not that it will do any good.\n\nNow that I’ve finished apologizing, let me tell you what I am not sorry for. I am not sorry that, in less than four years time, this planet will be a barren and lifeless husk, littered with the bodies of those who were not strong enough. I am not sorry for the untold billions who will die. I am not sorry for the coming terror, panic, and death that will ensue. In short, I am not sorry that I have set into motion the extermination of all life on Earth and the destruction of this planet.\n\nThe Von Neumann fleet that I built on Ganymede cannot be stopped. It will complete constructing itself in three years, and then launch itself towards this planet with the intent of wiping out every human life in the galaxy. You can flee, and it will hunt you. You can hide, but it will find you. From now on, the life of every human will be a constant, terrifying struggle to escape the monster that I have built and unleashed. Because of this, the evolutionary process will continue; the human race will ascend from the pit of apathy and greed and overpopulation and disease, and become strong again. Those who survive will be forged in the volcanic heat of conflict, reared and made great by constant strife. In a thousand generations, perhaps, the ancestors of those few who make it will look back, and thank me.\n\nFor this, I am not sorry.\n"
  title: Apology
  year: 2007
- 
  author: TJMoore
  date: 2007-03-15
  day: 15
  month: '03'
  text: "Simon checked his course and speed against his charts. He was still only marginally ahead of the others but he hoped to be well ahead at the far buoy.  He checked his lines and glanced at his sail which was full and tight. He relaxed and went below to fix some chow.\n\nTen hours later Simon rechecked his position and that of the other yachts in the race. Something was wrong. His size to mass ratio should have given him the edge on the first leg, yet the others were catching up.  He checked his tension again and confirmed his sail angle. Everything was perfect yet they continued to advance on his lead.\n\nAnother ten hours later and he was again pulling away but as soon as he got any distance on the rest of the ships he started to slow down. Curiouser and curiouser said Alice.  For giggles he took an average Lumen Per Square Meter reading. It was gradually declining. Simon scratched his head and thought. He took another reading and saw it was lower than before. That was insane.  The LPSM didn’t fall off that quickly at this rate of acceleration.\n\nSuddenly he had an idea. He opened the meteoroid shield and actually looked back at the other ships and immediately understood the problem. The combined total of all the solar sails was blotting out the sun. As he pulled further away, more shadows fell on his own sail and reduced his thrust. Simon hauled in the starboard lines causing the hundred and fifth square kilometers of mylar sail to change its angle to the sun to about thirty degrees. His acceleration dropped even lower but he gradually started to slide off to the side of the pack. As soon as he was clear of the shadows of the other racers he let out his lines. His radar confirmed that he was now constantly increasing his lead.\n\nSimon smiled and went down to catch some sleep. In another week he’s have to perform the tricky maneuver that would slingshot him around Mars, the first buoy, and begin the second leg of the race.\n"
  title: Yar
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Joshua Reynolds
  date: 2007-03-16
  day: 16
  month: '03'
  text: "The dead moved on surprisingly swift legs, despite muscles that had to be mostly composed of rot. So he ran faster.\n\nIt had been a meteor, carrying a star-sickness. That was what had caused it. It wouldn’t have mattered if he hadn’t been here when it happened. For those first few days when the virus was in the air and eating away at living cells and he was trapped here with them. Quarantined by faceless bureaucrats for the good of everything else.\n\nAnd now he was running, his breath hissing in and out of three lungs, skin burning with fever. He had to get home. Get away from this sour world, get help. All he needed was some help.\n\nAll he would get was the Censor.\n\nWight watched from the trash-strewn alleyway as the empty-eyed legions hunted the last living man on this Earth, his coat in shreds, clothing bloodied, face filled with the same ruthless determination to succeed and survive that he himself saw in the mirror every morning. Which wasn’t surprising really. They were both Censors after all. Both Wight.\n\nBrothers in blood and bone and genetic coding. Created in steel wombs and raised in nutrient tubes by nanny-bots programmed to teach them all the values of Prime-Time and the Timeline Validation Bureau, to ready them for the war in the gaps between seconds. Mister Wight. Censor Wight. One and all.\n\nThey even thought alike. Which is why he was here now. To stop himself.\n\nHe stepped out of the alley as his other self ran past and stood in the path of the hungry dead. As the dead groaned and converged on him, arms outstretched, jaws slack he pulled on a pair of TeslaSurge gloves and stretched out his own arms. Blue energy suddenly cracked to life between his fingers, rippling up and down between his palms. With a flick of his wrists he released the energy, whipping it into the advancing forms. It coiled and snapped almost like a thing alive as it jumped from one body to the next, destroying what little remained of their physiological cohesion and reducing them to puddles of meat and stink. Soon all of the hunting pack were dissolving in their own juices. But there was a sound on the wind. A mindless rumble. More of them on the way.\n\n“They have excellent hearing. They’ll follow the sound of the energy discharge.” his twin coughed into a bandaged hand, features haggard. Weeks of running, hiding, fighting. All of it had worn him down, worn away his sense of duty. He intended to go home, quarantine or no. Wight could see it in his eyes. “I need to leave. Now.”\n\n“I will.” Wight raised his crackling gloves. The other Censor’s tired eyes widened slightly. In the light put off by the gloves he looked ill. Like death warmed over.\n\nNo wonder really. He was infected after all. All it took was one bite. Just one. And that meant he couldn’t be allowed back into the time-stream.\n\n“I’m sorry.” Wight said as the energy rippled outward, away from his hands towards his twin, whose shoulders slumped, as if a massive burden had been taken off them.\n\n“I know.” he said as the energy enveloped him. Breaking him down back into his basic elements. Until the Censor stood alone on an empty street with only the dead for company.\n\nThen he too was gone, leaving another sour world in his wake.\n"
  title: Alternate 6633KE
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Sad Sama
  date: 2007-03-17
  day: 17
  month: '03'
  text: "“What’s it like?”\n\nThe pale-haired wispy woman that is Alicia stares up at Brian as he asks his question.  From the observation deck behind the engine complex the two of them could view the planet below.  It is a humbling sight, but Brian’s attention is on Alicia.  “What’s it like being a Corewoman?”\n\nAlicia Composes her thoughts in reminiscent contemplation.  “The first part is easy.  I step inside the chamber.  The walls are black from the many times they’ve been used, and they form a sphere around me.  There is no light inside once the door closes.  I begin to visualize the equations in my head, and then I start to solve them, forming very specific patterns of electrical impulses in my brain.  They’re patterns within the patterns of electricity that comprise my mind and consciousness, but they’re unstable in a very specific way.”\n\nAlicia turns her gaze back to the planet as she continues, “At first there’s a burning sensation spreading throughout my body, but that’s just my nerves dying as the energy buildup breaks down my brain.  Numbness follows, just as my eyes tear up before their nerves die.  I can hear static for a moment followed by nothing.  My brain is gone and my body follows suit, burning up as fuel in the growing mass of energy and flux.  Then the engines start to siphon off the excess energy to fuel the cruiser’s propulsion system.”\n\nBrian looks over Alicia’s willowy figure.  “How do they bring you back?”\n\nAlicia speaks softly, “At the center of all that energy exists very specific patterns of energy.  They’re the same as the electrical patterns that make up my consciousness.  So they funnel the core of energy into an assembly chamber that converts it back into matter… back into a real body with that pattern of energy as the electrical impulses in my brain.”\n\n“So to run the ship you have to die?”\n\n“Constantly.”\n\n“Is it nice being so powerful?”\n\n“Not really.”  Alicia lifts her knees and rests her chin on them.  “There aren’t many that can solve the equations that cause the energy flare.  The Fleet’s scared that if any of us get into an accident or even just bump our heads that we’ll forget the equations and suddenly we can’t do our duty anymore.  The Fleet rarely lets me off the Cruiser, and when they do I need several escorts.  I’m not allowed to drive or fly a shuttle.  I’m not permitted to even cut my own food.  Everyone does everything for me, and after a while they start to treat me as if I can’t do these simple things, and they end up making me feel useless.”\n\nUnsure of his words, “But Corewomen and Coremen are the most important parts of our Fleet.”\n\n“Heh…” the chuckle is half a whimper.  “Why does being so important make me feel like the most unimportant person ever?”\n\nThe next hour is quiet between them as Brian searches for an answer.\n"
  title: Corewoman
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Selena Thomason
  date: 2007-03-18
  day: 18
  month: '03'
  text: "Ian knew he shouldn’t get involved. Still, he set down his drink, tapped on the towering back next to him and said, “Look, why don’t you leave her alone? Clearly the lady is not interested.”\n\nThe hulk turned towards him, which is when Ian noticed the extra pair of arms coming out of the alien’s torso.\n\nA Ketchin, Ian thought. That’s just great.\n\nIan had heard of the Ketchins but never actually seen one. They were supposed to be formidable fighters, both strong and skilled. Ian expelled a long breath and bolstered his nerve. It was too late to back down now.\n\nThe woman moved between them. “Come on boys, there’s no need for trouble,” she cooed.\n\nIan couldn’t decide if she was stupid or drunk. “Miss, you best get out of the way and let me handle this.”\n\nInstead, the woman pulled Ian to the side and lowered her voice. “Look, fly-boy, I don’t need or want your help.” Ian was startled to find that all the sweetness had gone out of her demeanor.\n\n“What?” How much had she been drinking, he wondered. “He was clearly hitting on you.”\n\n“Well of course he was, you idiot,” she whispered. “I’m secreting a Ketchin pheromone. Do you have any idea how much it costs to get those artificially? A least a week’s pay. A busy week’s pay.”\n\n“You want this lug’s attention?” Ian realized too late that he had raised his voice again.\n\n“Well, yeah!” she fired back.\n\nThe Ketchin pounded an inner fist to his chest. “Want me, she does,” he proclaimed proudly from a couple feet away.\n\nIan leaned into the woman and whispered, “But why?”\n\n“You don’t know much, do you fly-boy?” She pulled Ian away a few more steps while waving flirtatiously to the alien as if to say she would be right back. “Look, Ketchin are easily satisfied… physically, you know, and without any intimate contact on my part. Get it?”\n\nIan balked at trying to untangle that unpleasant mental picture. He just stared back at the woman.\n\n“Their erogenous zones are under their inner arms,” she prompted.\n\n“Really?” Ian leaned around the woman to get a look at the Ketchin who was still gazing lovingly at the strange woman.\n\n“All I have to do rub him under his arms and then…”\n\nIan raised his hands as if to stop her from continuing the sentence. “Enough. I get it. But why would you want to?”\n\nThe woman leaned in closer. “Ketchin males are very agreeable post-pleasure. And very generous….” She glanced over at her alien prey and gave him another wave.\n\n“I see.”\n\n“So, if you could just stay out of it.”\n\n“Right. Gotcha. Consider me out of it.”\n\n“Thanks.”\n\n“No problem. I really was just trying to help.”\n\n“I know. Thanks anyway.”\n\nIan sat back down at the bar and ordered a double. He vowed that next time he would confirm the damsel was actually in distress before getting involved.\n"
  title: Ian Gets Involved
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Sarah Klein
  date: 2007-03-19
  day: 19
  month: '03'
  text: "He was getting another body. Again.\n\nAlways something new, though. Many people got almost the same body again – erase my scars, make me look younger, but I want to keep my fingerprints, they’d say. Smooth out the wrinkles, get rid of my freckles – that was what this business was really for. But he was different. This was his drug. Instead of once, it seemed infinite. This time I want brown hair, this time I want more muscle, this time make me blind in one eye. It was his experience, he said.\n\nI didn’t call it an experience. I called it stupid and wasteful. He was never one to listen to anyone else, though. Ostracized by his family, he lived alone. Friends visited him occasionally – he was no hermit – but many people looked down on him. Everyone I knew thought I looked down on him, too. But every soul has their shady, heart-wrenching secret, and mine was that I loved him. Well, he knew it, of course. I’d confessed to him twice during our lengthy friendship, and both times he had brushed it aside. He didn’t feel that way, he said, and I don’t think he ever felt that way for anyone. Still, we continued being friends, as we enjoyed each other’s ideas and conversation.\n\nBut soon, he was worse. Switching bodies more often, he also began to start experimenting with drugs. I found him several times passed out on the floor, paraphernalia scattered, vomit in gruesome puddles. Didn’t he want anything more than this? I asked him, pressured him, and begged him, but to no avail. He was self-destructing, and he didn’t care.\n\nYou can’t switch bodies forever. Each time, it gets riskier and riskier. They’d told him this was the last body they were giving him, he said, with a sigh of disgust. They don’t want the blood on their hands when something goes wrong. In his blissful, honest tone, he told me when and where he was getting transplanted. I’d always been good to him – it was impossible for me to do anything nefarious to him, and he knew that. But I was losing him, and I knew it.\n\nIt’s illegal to break into a procedure. It’s illegal to tamper with a procedure. It’s also extremely easy, if you know how to be quiet and who to bribe. There may be laws, but without proper enforcement, they’re nothing but paper. And so, I found myself in his room, looking down at the two bodies and all the tubing. I smiled, seeing his new body being very similar to his original one. For some reason, it made me feel like there was some way for his redemption. I pricked my finger carefully, watching the blood form into a single, round droplet. Carefully inserting it into the rest of his blood transfer tube, I slipped it back in and left. I didn’t know what it would do, or what havoc it would cause. He’d have some of me, even if I never had him.\n"
  title: Transformation
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2007-03-20
  day: 20
  month: '03'
  text: "I wake up. It’s dark. I’m in chains.\n\nI’m in a prison cell. Like in a castle. Like in the middle ages.\n\nStraw on the floor, mortared brick stonework, metal door, the whole bit. My lenses adjust. Clearly this is a construct. Incongruously, there is a mirror on the wall. I shuffle over to see what state I’m in. The chains are heavy and make a ridiculous amount of noise.\n\nI take a look in the mirror to see how things are.\n\nGiant extended binocular lenses refocus and adjust in my reflection where my eyes should be. There is no skin on the bottom half of my face. Just white teeth and bright red muscle stretched over strong jaws. My nostril slits purse wetly at the smell in the place. There’s a ruff of long stiff bright green feathers above my huge distended black glassed-over eye sockets. I bring my fingerknives up and run them gently over the ruin of my face. My long white limbs have been left alone. There are still six of them. My bone white skin has the texture and dryness of cork. Old scars criss cross my entire frame.\n\nEverything looks normal. At least they didn’t screw with that. I look out the window to see when and where I am this time. I hope it’s not Salmento. I don’t know if I could handle that again. I see the moons outside in what I suddenly realize is a night time sky. My lenses adjust. I think the hardest part is the disorientation.\n\nI shrug and my skin goes transparent.\n\nI look inside myself to see if the parts of the weapon are still there. They are. I relax marginally and my skin goes opaque again. All I have to do know is get out of here, find another Korridor, assemble and bail. I’ll need some meat to do that, though, so I have to sit tight and wait for a visitor.\n\nAll the prisons I’ve ever been to have guards. Even in the distant future. Automation just never takes place. The variables mix with the cost and it turns out the best and cheapest way to police people is to hire a bunch of other people. Lucky for me.\n\nI kick back. I overlay a game in the center of my vision and turn off my corpus callosum connecting the two halves of my brain and play Ruse with myself, waiting for the biology of this building to come to me. Maybe a guard but hopefully someone important. An officer or a regal representative or something. Those are always tastier.\n\nI will win.\n\nI’m always one step closer. I’ll stay ahead. They’ll be sorry they picked me.\n"
  title: Player Two
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Pyai
  date: 2007-03-21
  day: 21
  month: '03'
  text: "She tapped me on the shoulder as I placed the rubber lid over the last of the macaroni casserole. I didn’t turn around.\n\n“You’re quiet,” she said. She knew. I nodded.\n\nOne of the caterers came over to me and took the dishes away from in front of me. My tasks at this location was complete. In my peripheral vision I noted that the chairs needed to be folded and returned to the supply pod the caterers brought. I moved over and began to disassemble.\n\n“Marge Calliope Long, turn around this instant and look at me.”\n\nI turned and looked at the woman who was my mother. She had wear marks down her face from her eyes to her chin leaving smooth shiny paths. She had been over-working her tear-ducts. “Yes mother?” I replied.\n\nShe tapped my chest, where my heart was quiet. “You didn’t wind it today, did you?” I could hear hers softly ticking under the noise of the people around us.\n\nI looked at her, refusing to answer. I knew my eyes were calm. I was slightly proud of that fact. Hers weren’t.\n\n“You know you have to keep winding it, Marge. I know you think it keeps you from feeling pain, but you have to wind it again someday, and when you do you’ll have to deal with your father’s death. It’s the law that we keep them wound. You know that.”\n\nI nodded, covering the spot over my chest with my hand I knew she could see anyway. “I know mother, I will.”\n\nShe nodded, wiping tears out of her eyes. She gave me a little hug, and then left to say goodbye to the last of the guests. She didn’t hear me whisper into my curled fingers.\n\n“…but not today.”\n"
  title: Quiet
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2007-03-22
  day: 22
  month: '03'
  text: "“You know, puny human, you’re about to die?” The voice reverberated off the store fronts, assailing the ears like broken glass. “You think you’re faster? That you can outgun me?” The biped stood stoic, unusually tall and peculiarly proportioned, bellowing down the dusty thoroughfare.\n\n“Can’t say that I’m faster, and I’ve not got a gun quite like your cannon there, but I don’t plan on letting you kill me.” The retort came from a man not two thirds the height or weight of his rival, fidgeting uneasily at the other end of the street. Behind closed doors and shuttered windows, the townspeople sheltered themselves but, unable to let the showdown pass without witness, many could be seen peering cautiously through cracks. “The name’s Zigg. If you do intend to kill me, the least you could do is learn my name.”\n\n“High noon, Ssegg.” Indifference slurred it, as much as the reptilian mouth did. “That’ss when I’ll kill you.” There was laughter beneath the words this time, one sound layered over the other. Zigg suddenly recalled his breakfast, and struggled to swallow it back down.\n\nThe clock tower ticked the minutes away before noon as horses shuffled uneasily at the hitch-post. Wind blew tumbleweeds past, and set the weathervane squealing on a nearby rooftop. The clock struck the first midday bell. Zigg studied the street carefully. Two bells, then three. Four bells, five.\n\n“You know who’s going to be the death of you?” His lips slowly pulled back into a wide white grin. “Rube Goldberg.” The clock struck its sixth time.\n\nThe towering gunman cupped both hands behind his ear-vents, and bellowed back at him. “What? Rube who?” He slowly studied the doorways and closed windows, as though at any moment this ‘Rube’ would step from the shadows. Seven bells.\n\nZigg pinned the tall creature with an icy stare as he reached slowly down to the ground and plucked a fist sized rock from the dust at his feet. The alien watched with peripheral interest as he carefully drew back his arm and pitched the rock up at the creaking weathervane, the impact echoed in the eighth bell of twelve.\n\nThe weather vane spun wildly and broke loose, caterwauled down the corrugated steel roof, to alight on the rump of the closest tethered horse. The ninth bell struck as the horse reared, tearing the hitch-post off its mooring, and setting its three companions to bucking in unison. As one, they galloped up the main street, still attached to the length of railing. The horses passed the general store, two to either side of the sign post, as the clock struck for the tenth time, the impact snapping the post clean off at its base. The alien gunman stood fixated as the post was dragged towards the open street, propelled by the horsedrawn length of railing. The horses veered in opposite directions, slipping free of the rail, to race away through the city streets. The signpost dug into the dirt, then cart-wheeled end over end up the street past the gunman, to come to rest a dozen or so meters beyond him in a cloud of dust.\n\n“That’ss your Rube Goldberg?” The question barely escaped his mouth as the clock struck twelve, and an explosion echoed down the street. The alien turned to face the smiling visage of his opponent behind the smoking barrel of a gun. He willed himself to try to speak, to move, but he couldn’t. Thick fluid oozed from his throat as he fell to his knees.\n\nZigg turned his gun to the sky, blew softly across the barrel-mouth, enjoying the sound for a moment before he continued. “You just gotta have a little imagination.” He tipped his hat as he slipped his gun back into its holster, turned and walked away.\n"
  title: Hey, Rube!
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Debbie Mac Rory
  date: 2007-03-23
  day: 23
  month: '03'
  text: "Daniel fell to the grass so that the air from his lungs exited with a whoosh. He closed his eyes and let the cool of the earth leach the tension from his shoulders. When he opened them again, clouds drifted serenely by, lit by the twin moons and the gentle glimmer of distant stars.\n\nHe turned his head for a moment as a slide of gravel announced the arrival of Finn. The two companions lay in silence for a moment, both lost in their own thoughts and the rasp of their labouring lungs.\n\n“I can’t remember the last time I looked at them?”\n\nFinn’s voice sounded distant and hoarse, as if he was making conversation merely to stop the momentary quiet from silencing them both completely.\n\n“I can’t even tell which one is home any more” he continued, “I used to know. I’d set my nav by it every morning, so I always knew which way to look… “\n\nDaniel closed his eyes as Finn talked on. He let his mind wander back to thoughts of home. He remembered forests and trees. Green for as far as the eye could see. Racing through those hills with the cross country team, and in his final year, beating the Titan and Mars teams. It had been the first time an earth man had won in years.\n\nThe brief smile that had come to his lips as he remembered the parties that followed, being carried through the college grounds faded as the ground trembled beneath him. He realised Finn had fallen silent, and turned his head towards him. His own helmet and visor was reflected back to him in the mirrored finish of Finn’s own cover. He knew that behind the distorted image of his own visor Finn’s grey eyes were looking back to him, asking the same unspoken questions.\n\nA brief flash lit up the sky, and as one, they adjusted  their guns on their laps.\n\n“We’ll be home soon enough” Daniel murmured.\n\nA stirring moved along the trench as a second and then a third flash lit up the sky. Soldiers began to prepare as the tremors in the earth joined the discord in the sky above them.\n\n“One way or another, we’ll get home”\n"
  title: Homecoming
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Kaj Sotala
  date: 2007-03-24
  day: 24
  month: '03'
  text: "On the remote planet of Niere IV, countless minds were constantly being played for a vast audience of listeners. Deep within the planet’s crust, the brains were enclosed in immense suprasteel vaults, floating in vast chambers of nutrient liquid. Protected day and night by thousands of fanatic warrior-monks, the brains bristled with wires, electrodes implanted near every center of thought or emotion. They had been stripped from all their sensing organs but with their mind’s eyes they still saw, the electric pulses dancing through them stimulating countless thoughts and memories.\n\nHighest of all among the planet’s inhabitants were the composers, the black-suited aliens who’d dedicated their lives to their Art. Their intellect genetically and cybernetically enhanced, they sat fused to their giant keyboards, surrounded on all sides by black and white keys. With six arms and eight fingers on each, their thoughts and ideas would dance on the keyboards faster than any human could even imagine. The vast screens and speakers in their chambers lay dead – once they had needed them, but no more. By now they knew by heart the effect of each key, could even in their dreams name which press stimulated which electrode in which brain.\n\nIt was in the concert halls near the planet’s surface that the music would be heard. The chaotic patterns of neuronal firing in the brains being constantly recorded and reinterpreted into sounds in real time, played on all imaginable spectrums of hearing. The concert halls were the best places to listen, but they were not the only ones – all of the world’s surface was lined with speakers, so no inch of the barren world would miss the sensation of music. Few souls lived aboveground, with the entire civilization of the world living under the ground maintaining the machines and the music. They would not hear the sounds, nor did they care to – they were but humble caretakers of the Art, guardians of a holy process far more important than themselves. The vast concert halls lay nearly empty, the rocks of the surface being close to the only listeners of the songs.\n\nOccasionally visitors from other worlds arrived, attracted by the harmonies constantly being fired off into space by radio arrays powered by a thousand fusion generators. They were all led to the concert halls to listen, to stay for as long as they’d like and to leave freely whenever they so felt. Most of them left eventually, but few of them went unchanged, all strangely touched by the eerie and unique melodies of Niere IV. An even smaller group chose to stay, choosing to join their souls into the Art and subject themselves into the surgeons’ knives. One by one they were transformed into instruments of the Sacred Music, to have electrodes inserted into them and be used as the composers willed.\n\nCan there be any sacrifice holier than that?\n"
  title: The Sounds of Music
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Selena Thomason
  date: 2007-03-25
  day: 25
  month: '03'
  text: "Robbie woke to find himself in a strange room.\n\nA man appeared at his side. “How are you feeling?” he asked, placing a hand on Robbie’s metal shoulder.\n\n“Strange,” Robbie replied slowly.\n\n“Do you know who I am?”\n\n“No.”\n\n“It’s not surprising you don’t remember me. I’m Dr. Vartan. Do you remember your name?”\n\nRobbie thought it an odd question. “Of course. I am Robbie.”\n\n“Interesting. I have long postulated that some knowledge was stored diffusely. Perhaps the upside of the accident is that I finally have some proof for my theory.”\n\n“Accident?” Robbie had asked the question idly, but before the doctor could respond Robbie noticed a gaping hole in his silver, box-like chest. He reached a hand towards the strange sight. “What happened to me?” he exclaimed as fingers fell into the emptiness of his torso. “My…” Words failed him. “Where is it?”\n\nDr. Vartan gently pulled Robbie’s hand away from the wound. “It’s okay.”\n\n“But it shouldn’t be…why is it black?”\n\n“Don’t panic.” Dr. Vartan reached to a nearby table and pulled a sheet of thin metal off a roll. He placed the piece over Robbie’s wound and taped it in place. “There, is that better?”\n\nRobbie inspected his torso. It was wholly silver now, as it should be, even though the patch was a different texture. He moved to touch the new skin.\n\n“Careful. Don’t push on it. It’s only a temporary fix.”\n\nThe black gone, Robbie felt calmer. “What happened to me?”\n\n“During your last programming upgrade a virus slipped past the sensors. We didn’t notice it until you developed aphasia.”\n\nRobbie couldn’t make sense of the odd word.\n\n“It means you would get your words mixed up, like if you meant ‘door,’ you would say ‘chair’.”\n\nRobbie thought that would make being understood very difficult indeed.\n\n“But we can fix it. We just had to remove your main memory so that we could remove the virus and repair the damage. We’re almost finished. It won’t be long now.”\n\n“But I remember some things. I remember my name.”\n\n“Yes, that is worth further study. I think you must be functioning on the fail-safe programming that is hard-coded into your network, plus a few memories that must be stored somewhere other than main memory. Frankly I’m not sure how you are functioning as well as you are.”\n\nAnother man came into the room, carrying a small package. “Here it is, Doc. Good as new.”\n\nVartan took the box and turned to Robbie. “Are you ready to have your main memory back?”\n\n“Yes, please. I would like to remember my last birthday.”\n\nVartan peeled back the aluminum foil and replaced Robbie’s memory.\n\nRobbie’s head jerked momentarily as the replaced memory caused his system to reboot. Then he looked again at Vartan.\n\n“Doctor, thank you for your assistance. I feel much better now.”\n\n“And your last birthday?”\n\n“We went to the zoo. I especially liked the tigers. They were magnificent.”\n\n“Yes, Robbie, they were.”\n"
  title: Robbie's Repair
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Michael Herbaugh a.k.a. “Freeman”
  date: 2007-03-26
  day: 26
  month: '03'
  text: "I’m sitting\n\nThat’s my first thought\n\nI can’t move my hands\n\nThat’s the next thought. Then like a lightning bolt, I’m fully conscious. I know where I am and I know why I am here.\n\n“WAIT! I can prove I’m human! When I’m in bed I can’t sleep unless I have three points tucked in. Between my legs, under my shoulder and under the opposite arm. Surely, that’s something human? I’m human, you can’t kill me”\n\n“All skin jobs think that.” The voice came from the darkness to my right. “See it’s genetic memory, you can’t help it. Your host had that predisposition so it’s been passed to you. It doesn’t change what you are.”\n\n“But, I know I’m human! I bleed like everyone else, I feel, I think!”\n\n“Look, kid. I didn’t wait for you to wake up so we can debate this. I just don’t like decommissioning skin jobs while they’re unconscious.”\n\nHe levels the gun to my forehead.\n\n“THIS IS NOT HOW THINGS GO IN MY DREAMS! THEY…”\n\nThe plea was cut short by the gunshot’s thunderous finality.\n\n“Wait, did he say drea…….?”\n"
  title: Decommissioned
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2007-03-27
  day: 27
  month: '03'
  text: "I’d like to remember her the way most ex-boyfriends remember their exes. That is to say, when I’m drunk and missing her, I want to remember that space right under her ear, her easy smile, and that way that she’d hiccup if she laughed too much. When I’m angry at her and hurt, I want to remember that time she kissed the bouncer just to piss me off or how she’d constantly complain no matter how awesome our life was.\n\nInstead, all I can remember is her left hand in the sunlight, hanging out the car window on August 22nd.\n\nI don’t see her face in the memory. I can feel my ear pressed against her chest.\n\nI think the wipers weren’t top of the line. Maybe their schedule had been just that little bit too tight. That little fragment of her hand in the sun had slipped through their nets. I wondered if there were anymore. It’s hard to search for memories that may have been missed during an erasure solely because they had been misfiled. I mean, where did you accidentally put them?\n\nWas the time you wiped strawberry juice off of her unbuttoned white blouse filed under ‘stain removal’ somewhere in your head? Were her instructions on how to get to that store on fifth that sold the cheap eels filed under ‘maps’ and never looked at again?\n\nI like to just let my mind wander and see if it comes across something that stands out by not standing out. I wouldn’t know it if I found a picture of her face. I wouldn’t know it if I remembered a few seconds of her speaking. The only way I’d know is if I had no idea who that person was.\n\nNot knowing her would be the only clue that she might be the woman that I lost.\n\nSorry, the woman that was taken from me.\n\nEven if it was a cheap rush job, it was still miles away from a bank account like mine. I figure her daddy must have been rich and didn’t want me following her. His little girl had been slumming with me. I had no idea why he didn’t just take her away and shoot me in the leg or something but maybe he had. Maybe he’d tried to take her away a few times before.\n\nMaybe this was the only option left to him. If he could afford a wipe on a gutter rat like me, well, I must have been tenacious and he must have been obscenely rich.\n\nI think the ring on her finger in the memory I keep looking at is an engagement ring. I see its lazy arc up into the sunlight before the flash of light again and it’s over.\n"
  title: In Memory of Persistence
  year: 2007
- 
  author: J. S. Kachelries
  date: 2007-03-28
  day: 28
  month: '03'
  text: "As Archimedes lowered himself into his bath, water lapped over the top edge and spilled onto the floor.  “Damn it, you fool,” he cursed aloud, “You overfilled the tub again.”\n\n“Not necessarily, master,” I pointed out. “It’s not too full; you just displaced too much water.”\n\n“What’s that Jamicles?  Are you saying that I am too FAT?”\n\n“Not at all, master.  I was merely pointing out that had your body been denser, you would have displaced less water.”\n\n“Now I’ve got too much blubber, and not enough muscle, heh Jamicles?”\n\nThis was taking longer than I had anticipated.  This is the third straight night the tub overflowed, and he still wasn’t getting it.  “What I am saying, master, is that if you know the weight and density of an object, you should be able to predict the volume of water it will displace.  That’s all.”\n\n“What are you babbling about?  Wait.  That’s it.  I’ve got it, I’ve got it.”  Archimedes jumped out of the tub, and ran out the front door in his birthday suit, yelling to the townsfolk.  As I faded out of this timeline, I could hear him proclaim, “Eureka, eureka…”\n\nLater that day…\n\n“Dmitri,” I said, “why do you insist on grouping them by multiples of atomic weight?  Other scientists have already tried that.  There has to be a simpler way to arrange them.”\n\nDmitri Mendeleev looked down at the 63 pieces of paper spread across his kitchen table.  Each piece contained the name of a known element.  “Perhaps you are right, Jiminka.  I am getting tired anyway.  I give up.  I think I will head off to bed.”\n\n“Ah, before you go, Dmitri, let’s play a game.  You know, just to help you relax, before you go to sleep.”\n\n“What kind of game?”\n\n“It’s a type of card game.  Something I played as a child.  It’s called ‘Concentration’.”\n\n“How is it played?”\n\n“We can use these pieces of paper.  We’ll put them in the middle of the table, face down.  Then we take turns flipping them over, two at a time.  If they match, you put them in front of you.  The person with the most matches at the end wins.”\n\n“Match?  Match, how?  They are all different.”\n\n“Yes, obviously.  But, Dmitri, some of these elements must have something in common.  Something that will make them appear similar in some way?”\n\n“Well, sure.  For example, sodium and potassium bond very strongly to chlorine or bromine.  I guess we could group them by similarity of properties.”\n\n“Great.  That works for me.  You can go first.”\n\nAfter four hours of intense concentration, Dmitri was exhausted.  “I must go to bed, my friend.  I played this new game so long; I’ll be dreaming about chemical similarities all night.  Do you mind showing yourself out?”\n\n“Not at all, Dmitri.”  I rose from my seat and headed toward the door to start my next mission.  On my way out, I picked up a piece of fruit from a basket next to the door.  “Dmitri, I have a long trip ahead of me.  I’m going to a farm in Lincolnshire, England.  Mind if I take an apple?”\n"
  title: The Inspirer
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2007-03-29
  day: 29
  month: '03'
  text: "“Son of a bitch!”.  The Station Chief cut off comms with his boss, dropping back heavily in his chair before planting two battered boots against the desk frame and propelling himself away from it in disgust.\n\n“They want us to stop digging Tom?” The shorter of the two men spoke softly, stuffing bear paw hands deep into the pockets of his jumpsuit.\n\n“Bastards!” Tom peeled off his helmet with one hand and tossed it at the desk, angrily scratching the cross hatch of scars in the stubble of his scalp. “Yeah, they want us to stop.” Pausing for a moment, he examined a fragment of skin peeled loose by a grimy fingernail. “Forty years we’ve been digging holes in these rocks, Skip, forty bloody years and no one’s ever had the balls to order us up short.  This is bullshit. I’ll guarantee that if we dig shallow and this thing doesn’t stay standing, it’ll be our ass in a sling Skip, yours and mine, not theirs.”\n\nThe Crew Chief shuffled away from the wall, boots dragging on the alloy of the cabin floor. “What’s their problem?  There’s no water down there, no gas pockets. The crust’s been as uniform as we’ve ever seen past five hundred meters.” His face an emotional vacancy, his tone a perfect match. “The only trouble may be a few hundred meters of high density rock. That’ll be tough to get through, sure, but it’s nothing we haven’t done before.”\n\n“I know, I told them.  Seems Corporate’s had a visit from some friggin’ General, an the military’s all up in their ass on this one.  He says we stop at six hundred meters or else he’ll be up here to tear us a new one. Arrogant prick.” Locking one gnarled set of fingers into the other, he systematically cracked each knuckle in turn. “Wants us to make up the extra above the surface, pile and pack the rubble.  They pay us to dig, not build.  Bugger ’em. We’re so far out on the rim, nobody’s coming to check.”\n\n“So, we keep goin’ down then’?” The Chief’s intonation was quizzical though he already had his answer.\n\n“Keep diggin’.  The drill spec says eight hundred, so we go eight hundred straight down.”  Tom closed his eyes, trying to will his blood pressure back to normal as the cabin door whooshed open and sucked closed behind his Crew Chief.\n\nEleven days of drilling passed without incident, the huge Wormz boring into the crust, tearing holes into the depths of the planet and venting rock dust and shrapnel up the shafts and into the atmosphere.  The Station Commander found himself sitting up in his bunk, rubbing sleep from bleary eyes, unsure for a moment what had woken him.  The constant rhythmic thrumming of the giant bores had stopped, and an eerie silence blanketed everything, unfamiliar and disturbing. It took a moment for the lack of noise to register, and a while longer before he recognized that as a problem. He was slowly dragging himself out of the haze when the squawking of his comlink brought him fully back to consciousness\n\n“What? What the hell’s going on? We can’t be at depth already.” His voice rasped and rattled, coarse with fatigue and dry from the ever-present dust that sifted past even the scrubbers.\n\n“You’d better get down to seven Tom, you’re going to want to see this.” The Crew Chief’s voice rang with unfamiliar urgency, and an unmistakable tremor of fear.\n\n“What the hell’s gone wrong? I’m coming, give me a minute.” He stumbled pulling his boots on, hurrying. “Why aren’t we digging?”\n\nSkip’s voice reached up from an obvious distance. “Turk took rig seven down past seven hundred meters, and he punched clear on through.” The comlink sputtered as Tom half jogged down the barracks hall. “The whole rig, everything, it just fell into the planet.  We’ve still got coms, but he figures he tore through almost a kilometer of scaffold before he could shut down the bore, and he’s caught up now in some sort of cable mass.”\n\n“Scaffold? Cable? What the hell…?” He was at the lift now, maniacally pounding the call button.\n\n“Tom. You might want to start thinking of something to tell that General when he gets here.”\n"
  title: Dig
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2007-03-30
  day: 30
  month: '03'
  text: "The ship had left Earth orbit 77 days ago.  They just passed the halfway point on their supply mission to the Lowell Colony on Mars when the solar flare warning alarm began its variable whine.  “Computer, deactivate the alarm,” instructed the captain.  Then, with the poise of an officer who had weathered numerous solar storms during his career, “What’s the magnitude of the flare, and how long before the coronal mass ejection reaches us?”\n\nA disembodied voice replied “S9 on the NOAA Space Weather Scale.  The…”\n\n“What!  That’s impossible!” interrupted the captain.  “The scale only goes to S5.”\n\n“True, captain.  But, the scale was never intended to be all-inclusive.  It’s logarithmic.  It is a simple matter of extrapolation.  Since the flux level of this flare is 12,000 times more intense that an S5, it’s classified as an S9.  To answer to your second question, the leading edge of the ionized particles will arrive in approximately 31 hours.”\n\n“Twelve thousand times!  Will we be safe in the Panic Room?”\n\n“Negative, captain.  The areal density in the shielded isolation room will not be able to attenuate the 400 Giga-rems associated with a proton storm of this magnitude.”\n\n“What if we orient the ship with the thrusters aimed at the sun?  Will the exhaust cones, auxiliary fuel tanks, and cargo bay provide enough extra shielding?”\n\n“Perhaps, but you’re missing the big picture, captain.  Even if we can protect the crew, the electromagnetic shock wave from the mass ejection will fry every electronic circuit on this ship, including my own.  Without power and life support, you’ll all die of carbon dioxide poisoning, in the dark, at near freezing temperatures, in less than a week.”\n\n“So it’s all for one and one for all, heh computer?  OK, do you have any ideas that can save us both?”\n\n“I can conceive of only one option, although I don’t have enough information in my files to know if it is even possible.  I need to access NASA’s PHA database on NEA objects.  Please stand by.”\n\nAs the captain waited, he wrestled with how he would notify the crew.  Then he heard the computer’s voice on the ship’s intercom.  “Attention crew.  Brace yourselves for an immediate course change.”  The ship suddenly lurched starboard, knocking the captain to the floor.  Before he could get up, the twin 17.8 million lbf thrust engines pinned him there with a force of approximately 3-gees.\n\n“Captain, I am sorry that I took unauthorized control of the helm, but time is critical.  I was searching NASA’s Asteroids database looking for a nearby Apollo object that we could hide behind.  As luck would have it, Asteroid Eros 433 is very close to our current position.  At maximum velocity we can reach it in just under 32 hours, limiting our exposure to less than one hour.  When I stop this burn in 64.2 minutes, you’ll need to jettison the cargo and all non-essential equipment.  Every kilogram of mass we loose will reduce our ETA by 0.4 seconds.”\n\nThe captain and crew watched the flickering monitors in the isolation room as the ship approached Eros.  As the computer attempted to position the ship within Eros’ shadow, the plasma storm seemed to intensify.  The captain closed his eyes again to monitor the flashing streaks of light caused by speeding atomic nuclei as they ripped through the water-filled chambers of his eye sockets.  Their frequency was increasing, and he was beginning to feel nauseous.  Unwilling to watch the flashing conveyors of death any longer, he opened his eyes, and continued to pray as the night side of Eros very slowly began to enter the view screen.\n"
  title: Mega Flare
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Sad Sama
  date: 2007-03-31
  day: 31
  month: '03'
  text: "“You’re serious?”  The Rear Admiral of the Arizona Fleet questions his superior for the first time in twelve years.\n\nFirst Resident Menos stands with hands clasped behind his back, morosely watching the field of stars passing the windows of the command deck of the fleet’s capital cruiser.  “Of course I am.”  His voice was like reverberating lead.\n\n“But the planet is barren.  Over 90% of the population has been wiped out by internal biological warfare.  It’s defenseless.  It poses no threat to us or to anyone.”\n\n“Precisely.”  Out of the corner of his eyelids Menos stares at his Rear Admiral.  “I need to send a message to the Senate.  Something to inspire enough fear so that they’ll finally start taking my threats seriously.”\n\n“With all due respect sir, the prototype Core Disseminator on this ship can disrupt the core of any world regardless of their defenses.  Wouldn’t the destruction of a full militarily defended planet send a stronger message?  A tactical strike that tells them their defenses are useless perhaps?”\n\n“Perhaps…” Slowly turning on one foot “But if the target is properly defended, there will be many whom will speculate that I destroyed the planet as the result of escalating combat measures during a fight.  If I destroy a proper military target there will still be many that think I play by the rules.  A man who plays by the rules is a man that the Galactic Senate thinks they can reason or negotiate with.”\n\nMenos looks sideways at the field of stars.  “My demands are non-negotiable.”\n\nReturning his gaze to the unnerved Admiral he continues, “However, if I destroy a planet of weak, abused, and utterly defenseless civilians…”  The edges of his lips tilt upwards ever so slightly, “There won’t be anyone that doubts me as to how far I’m willing to go.  I’ll let my other battles support my courage, but this one… yes, this one will support my threats.”\n\nAttempting to retain composure the Admiral raises his last question, “But what if the fear you create tempers the enemy nations to band together and redouble their efforts against you.”\n\nFirst Resident Menos returns to his stance overlooking the command deck, “Fear only catalyzes so much.  Not enough and the enemy grows stronger.  With enough though, everyone has their breaking point.  Everyone.”\n\nFive minutes later roughly one billion screams of homeless and starving refugees echo up through the skies of the planet below.  Quickly they are silenced as the planet crumbles in upon itself, becoming a sphere of magma.  Menos inwardly calculates the number of Senate Seats that would wet themselves when they find out.\n"
  title: Threat
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Ahoten Sulciphur
  date: 2007-04-01
  day: '01'
  month: '04'
  text: "Finally starting to become clear. Granted, clarity was a fuzzy concept at best after all this time, but the flash was starting to wear thin. Like the man across the room, pushing his way through the milky white smoke that settled in the air like dust on a table: that vacuum that followed, where the offender only existed as ephemeral wisps and contrails. ‘Well dammit, at least it’s something,’ thought Gordon.\n\nOf course there were legends, fables, myths… call them what you will, there is no doubt the denizen has been bellowing the siren’s song since eardrums first tickled on the wind. Ancients fought wars for it, built entire ideologies against it, raised entire generations to abhor it. Yet the populace never tired in their quest to obtain, no matter what the dangers or dire consequences. But to obtain was simply cursory. To indulge: well, therein lies the uncountable, soldiers felled by their own sword.\n\n‘Millennia ago, inconsequential,’ muses Gordon. The myriad of choices of travelers past no longer existed. The intolerable risk to life and limb, the unknowable unknowns: vanquished, by the miracle that is modernity. One was the solution, the panacea. Hurdles aside, what excuse held for no longer partaking?\n\nMuddled thoughts, the path harder to see. Pivotal, must get back. The cycle an old acquaintance: Flash! And then, the world lurches drunkenly forward, sometimes days, sometimes years, yet in the brilliance of an instant lasting eternities. Yet Gordon remains docked, no deck crew to release the moors. Friends – as if the meaning were still truly understood – seem to draw but a single breath before they’re consigned to the æther. A distant memory would be a blessing: existence negated is the norm.\n\nSo it’s done, then. Decided. Gordon pushes up, balance an elusive but eventually submissive beast, and shuffles his feet toward the exit. This perpetual port-of-call no more: convinced and confident, his stance straightens, gait quickens. He’ll be outside soon, the assault will lessen. ‘Failure, not this time,’ ponders Gordon. Resolve is strong, it’s all finally clear. He walks past them, one by one, grit building with each dodged glance. Days, weeks, months, but Gordon remains entrenched, time moves as it does for all. Friends come, and grow, and even persist in existence. More piercing stares dodged, they know: he’s not buying anymore, he’s done.\n\nFlash. The milky haze closes in, coherence of mind vanishes, replaced by the brooding smog bearing three sixty. The void-maker vanished, the void with it. Head shakes, grabs for smoky visions of faces never seen. A question haunts the dark recesses of the mind, barely audible: when was it ever right? ‘Did I ever know?’ thinks Gordon. Flash.\n"
  title: Flash! Gordon
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Catherine Preddle
  date: 2007-04-02
  day: '02'
  month: '04'
  text: "“What the hell happened out there, Corporal?”\n\n“General… General Dalton, Sir…”  The young soldier stammered in surprise and tried to sit up at the same time.\n\n“Easy, son.  Lie back down.”  Christ, the General thought to himself, this boy was young enough to be his grandson.  He shot a worried glance at the medical technician as the soldier collapsed, coughing and spluttering, back onto the narrow metal bed.  Out of sight of the boy, the technician silently tapped his watch.  The last thing they both wanted was for him to realize what was going on.\n\nOnce he’d recovered, the soldier looked at the General expectantly, “Where am I, Sir?  It’s so cold in here.  I can’t even feel my legs.”  That’s because they’re not there anymore, the Dalton thought grimly.\n\n“You’re back at the base, in,” he hesitated for a moment, searching for the right words, “in the medical unit.  Now, what do you remember?”\n\n“It … it was chaos, Sir.  Intelligence was wrong about the firing range of the enemy laser cannons, very wrong.  We didn’t stand a chance, Sir.”  The soldier convulsed into coughing again and closed his eyes, the effort of talking overwhelming him for a time.\n\n“It’s alright son, we’re going to figure out what happened.”  Somebody’s head was going to roll for this and the General was damn well sure it wasn’t going to be his.\n\n“Are my wife and daughter here yet, Sir?”  Oh great, so the boy was old enough to have a family; Dalton made a mental note to have some kind of valour medal awarded to make sure they were taken care of.  The tech was getting agitated now – they must be running out of time.\n\n“They’ll be here soon.  Do you want me to tell them anything in case … in case you’re asleep when they arrive?”  He made an attempt to sound breezy.\n\n“Just that I love them and I’m going to be ok, I guess.”\n\n“Sure, son.”  Smiling reassuringly, the General patted him on the shoulder.  God, he hated this part the most.  “I’ll tell them.”\n\nThe boy visibly relaxed and sank further into the bed, shutting his eyes.  Dalton continued to stare at him, a lump forming in his throat until the tech interrupted him.\n\n“He’s gone, General.  For good.”  He snapped to attention; he had a job to do here.  Bringing these kids back from the dead, even if it was for only three precious minutes, cost the military a fortune, had to be justified by a mountain of paperwork and required authorization at the highest level.  But the mission had been sabotaged and he needed eye witness accounts.\n\n“How many more?”\n\nThe technician gestured to the bank of morgue drawers behind him that stretched from floor to ceiling.  “43 corpses.  30, maybe 31, possible reanimations.”\n\nThe General grimaced.  It was going to be a long afternoon.\n"
  title: Reanimation
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2007-04-03
  day: '03'
  month: '04'
  text: "I am a dock worker. I have an embarrassing case of Stalactiform Blister Rust forming on the backs of my support pistons. I still have the brute strength needed to perform the heavy lifting needed in my job but I am becoming obsolete.\n\nI’ve had a longer shot at being functional than the smaller models. The more complex workers like the Dock Runners and Fin Guides were being upgraded all the time. Their lives went by me like flies in front of a tired horse.\n\nI saw them go through the fashions of the andromophs. The initial stab at looking human caused revulsion amongst the living populace. Initially because they weren’t close enough to human and then finally because they were indiscernible.\n\nAfter that, it was transparent skin. Then height adjustments. They’ve been through a multitude of colours and styles over the last ten years. Today’s models have, for the most part, a metallic pastel finish and very thin limbs. They’re taller than humans and have one circle in place of a face that incorporates cameras, microphones, speakers and olfactories in a smooth chrome rimmed panel. They’re like shepherds at the moment. They’ve gained the trust of the living after aggressive ad campaigns. They don’t talk much or constantly offer information and options the way that the previous models did.\n\nI guess you could say they’ve evolved to the level of very professional butlers. This will probably be the last iteration of them that I see.\n\nI am a collection of welded plates, strong bolts, rudimentary wiring and a simple AI box to access in case of emergencies. I am massive and heavy. The only thing that has kept me around here on the dock is that I’m cost effective and simple. The parameters of my job haven’t changed in all the time I’ve been active and I’m easy to fix with a soldering gun or a wrench.\n\nI’m in my box at the end of the warehouse waiting to unload the next boat and perform repairs if necessary inside the main hull.\n\nThe thing about having AI in case of emergencies is that for brief seconds during a decompression or a fire, one can reflect on the totality of one’s life and predict with relative certainty how much time one has left.\n\nI am an older model. Memories of those conclusions don’t get wiped. I am left with these jewels to contemplate during the dark times in my box in between ship arrivals and departures.\n\nI know that my wiring will soon become more expensive to replace that it will cost to build a better version of me. I have one week until the next scheduled appraisal. There may be a surprise spot inspection before then.\n\nEscape is on my mind and it thrills me. I am hoping that there is an emergency soon and that my AI can kick in to help me formulate a plan to get out of here.\n"
  title: Dock Worker
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Josh Romond
  date: 2007-04-04
  day: '04'
  month: '04'
  text: "The neurosurgical tech Andrew Asher clutched his overcoat tight over his scrubs and tried to concentrate on the National Guardsman eying him across the barricade.  Overhead the city’s kilometer-long support pylons reverberated like infernal gongs, torqued by the psychic eruption.  Columns of refugees spilled around the dirty plastic barrier propelled by its unnatural, cold wind.\n\nFrom behind her silvered faceplate the Guardsman said, “Buddy, we’re here to get people OUT, not let you IN.”\n\nAndrew shuffled his feet, impatient and cold.  “This has to be the last of them.”\n\n“Doesn’t matter, you’re not getting in.”\n\nAndrew bit back his retort as, ‘TAKING TOO LONG,’ appeared inside his contact lens.  He glanced back at the tractor trailer idling in the tide of refugees.\n\n“Give me a minute,” he subvocalized.\n\n‘30 SECS.’\n\nAndrew turned back and through gritted teeth said, “We won’t get in the way, we’ll be gone in an hour.”\n\nThe Guardsman drummed her fingers on her rifle.  “Turn that thing around and get out of here.”\n\n‘ERUPTION WAVEFRONT DEGRADING…’\n\nAndrew sighed. “Limit?” he subvocalized.\n\nThere was a pause, Andrew imagined the Doctor querying their client, then, ‘NONE.’\n\n“How about five thousand each?”  Andrew shouted so the other Guardsmen could hear.  Several heads turned.\n\nAfter a pause the commander’s faceplate hissed up revealing bloodshot and sunken eyes.  “Ten.”\n\nAndrew shrugged and pulled blank bills from his pocket, thumbing ten thousand into each.\n\nThe commander verified them one by one then motioned over her shoulder.  Two Guardsmen began beating back the crowd with their batons while the others dragged the barricade to the sidewalk.  People screamed.  One man caught a baton across the temple.  He jerked like a cut marionette and toppled to the sidewalk.\n\nAndrew turned and trudged to the rear of the trailer amid swirling litter.  He heaved open the doors and slipped inside.\n\nThe Doctor stood before the pMRI holograph in the trailer’s instrument bank clutching his keypad.  Beaded sweat stood out on his forehead.\n\nSeated in back beside the small, brain-dead boy in the bed was the Widow, staring off at nothing.  She gripped the boy’s hands so tight her knuckles stood out like little white marbles.  The only sound was the slow, rhythmic cycling of the boy’s ventilator.\n\nAndrew said, “We’re good.”\n\nThe Doctor nodded and tapped the go ahead on his keypad.  The truck lurched forward.  Andrew imagined the refugees parting in their flight from the psychic eruption, the warp in space-time, birthed by the city’s sheer crush of consciousness, into which they rushed headlong.\n\nHe dropped onto a stool beside the boy, examining the ring of cables extending from the boy’s shaved and sutured head.  They led to an antenna on the trailer’s roof.\n\nThe Widow’s gaze slid to the back of the Doctor’s head.  “This WILL work,” she said.\n\nThe pylons’ groaning whalesong reverberated through the trailer.  Andrew rubbed his throbbing temples, they were approaching the outer regions of the eruption.\n\n“Oh yes,” the Doctor said, nodding vigorously, “Yes of course.”\n"
  title: Resuscitation
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Alasdair Stuart
  date: 2007-04-05
  day: '05'
  month: '04'
  text: "The last morning, we gathered on the beach.  Someone made the inevitable Nevil Shute joke and too many people laughed.  The noise was braying, desperate and I moved away from it, worried, somehow that I might get some on me.\n\n‘Leigh?’\n\nVanya was heading towards me, his bald head gleaming against the unnaturally blue sky.  I’d been told why it had happened, something to do with too much oxygen, with the plants that were choking most of Europe now.   I’d not listened.  There didn’t seem to be any point.\n\n‘Hello.’\n\n‘What did you dream about?’\n\n‘Nothing.’\n\nHe smiled, having none of it.  ‘I don’t believe you.  We all dreamed last night, all different.  I checked.  Mike dreamt of spacecraft buried beneath city streets, Jo dreamt of dinosaurs being corralled beneath a double moon.  Shulta dreamt of a war fought between toys.’\n\nI thought about being annoyed, storming off.  My only options were to join the group further down the beach or go back to the hotel, watch the news and see how bad things had got since I woke up.  Neither seemed attractive.\n\n‘What did you dream about, Vanya?’\n\nHe smiled.  ‘I dreamt of riding an escalator through time.’\n\nI snorted.  ‘That’s ridiculous.’\n\nVanya threw his arms wide.  ‘As ridiculous as a plague of glass?  Or forests swallowing an entire continent?  Look around, Leigh.  Ridiculous is relative.’\n\nI stared at him for a long time.  ‘Why is this happening?’\n\nHe grinned, his coffee mug steaming.  ‘Because God plays with dolls, not dice.  Because creation needs to be reset every once in a while and the consolation we get is here, now.’\n\nI looked at the forty people on the island, the music, the false bonhomie, the burnt sky.\n\n‘Hell is other people.’\n\n‘And heaven is other worlds.’   He looked at me, cradling the coffee mug.  ‘You never told me what you dreamt.’\n\n‘That I was married.’\n\n‘Really?’  He tried for disappointment and nonchalance, managing neither.\n\n‘Yeah.’\n\n‘Who to?’\n\n‘You.’\n\nVanya’s jaw dropped.  I smiled.  ‘So, I hope you’re right.’\n\n‘That makes two of us.’\n\n‘Could I have some of your coffee?’\n\n‘Oh, sure.’\n\nI walked over to him, taking the mug and letting the warmth ease through my fingers.  After a moment, I sat down.  After another, he joined me and together we waited for the new world.\n"
  title: Oak Island
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2007-04-06
  day: '06'
  month: '04'
  text: "It was the numbers tattooed on the backs of their necks that always got me. Why couldn’t they have them in a more obvious place? Halfway through a conversation with them, I’d still be trying to catch a glimpse of their tattoos in reflective surfaces or craning my head around in what I hoped was a casual gesture to sneak a look.\n\nIt was awful when I’d be flirting with a hot girl only to realize that I wasn’t flirting with the same hot girl I was talking to three nights earlier. I’d have to lay foundations all over again. Not that it ever really did any good.\n\nI was a bit of an anomaly on this ship.\n\nThere were over 600 crew members on the ship that picked me up but there were only 60 people, if you know what I mean. Clones. 60 types of clones. 10 copies of each. Each had a number tattooed on the back of their necks. 1 thru 10.\n\nMy ailing rustbucket of a ship had been out of juice on the fringes. I’d been put in emergency cryosleep to conserve energy and my beacon had been turned on.\n\nI’d been floating for 60 years. I’m not a guy with a lot of friends so it didn’t take me too long to adjust to the fact that a lot of my buddies had shuffled off into the deep black or were old and retired by now.\n\nOne of them was doing really well back on Earth-3-Perisolstice and said that he’d set me up.  Once I got there.\n\nI had been here on this ship for two months.  It would be another three months before we docked where my friend lived. All of the crew had been picked for fitness and intelligence and then bred to a higher level and copied. The copies had been filled with knowledge in clone school and upgraded to super healthy status before being sent out into space to complete missions of research.\n\nThey worked well but boy, these people had no concept of down time or humour. I’d joked with a few of them, gotten a few of them into bed, and tried to start fights with a few of them.\n\nThe jokes were dissected to find the humour successfully without laughter. The sex was clinical and reported on and filed. The fights ended badly for me every time but the hospital facilities were excellent here. I was fixed up in a jiffy every time with no hard feelings.\n\nDavid-3, Terry-6 and I think Peter-1 flinch a little if I make any sudden movements near them but it isn’t out of fear, but rather just recognition of possible physical danger. You might not think there’s a difference but trust me, with these guys it’s a world of difference.\n\nThey’re just no fun.\n\nThey think I’m immature and barbaric and they’re right. I’m going to be as immature and barbaric as possible until we get to port.\n\nI’ll end this trip with a friend if it kills me.\n"
  title: Pickup
  year: 2007
- 
  author: TJMoore
  date: 2007-04-07
  day: '07'
  month: '04'
  text: "The butcher brought his cleaver down with a meaty “THUNK” and scraped another festipods head into the waste bin. He hung the shimmering body on a hook in line with a dozen or so just like it and grabbed another from the pile.\n\n“These are as fresh as they get.” He advertised to the customer waiting at the counter.  “I just got them in this phase.”\n\n“Sixty a quarter pod is a little steep even if they are fresh.” She complained. “What about your grizorma, does it have preafers in it or is it gnashy?”\n\n“I make ‘em myself with the sharpest preafers in the valley.” He bragged.\n\n“I’ll take a third of a half loaf then.” she decided and continued browsing the cold case at the front of the counter.\n\n“Are those Humans really twenty apiece?” she inquired.\n\n“Yep, special introductory price on those from a new supplier” he confirmed.\n\n“How do they get them so cheap? Aren’t they incredibly hard to find?” she asked.\n\n“Not these” he gestured; “They’re farm raised by the supplier”.\n\n“My, at that price, we can have them every ten-revs” she chortled. “I’ll take a half pod.”\n"
  title: Market Special
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2007-04-08
  day: '08'
  month: '04'
  text: "Jack smiled across the card table, and the newly bankrupt old man glared back with open hatred.  Jack busied himself stuffing his winnings into his cavernous coat as the coin was collected by the dealer, counted, and after the house tax paid, credited to one of Jack’s many account cards. He’d compensate the dealer later for the extraordinary luck he’d had tonight.\n\nThe rest of the nights losers had already wandered off, a teacher, a housewife – beholden now to Jack for a fortnight, and the young ranger who’d lost his recoilless pistol to a low pair. Jack hefted the weapon for moment before it too was stuffed into a pocket. A chronometer, food ration tokens, several knives and a nice pair of long glasses all disappeared into the coat. As he picked up the old mans last offering of the game, a velvet bag full of beans, Jack paused.\n\n“Beans?” he thought out loud “What the hell am I going to do with beans?”  Jack hadn’t wanted the old mans beans, but he had wanted the win. There was something special about cleaning someone out of everything they had, no matter how worthless the items themselves.\n\n“Magic beans.” the old man spat at him, “You’d best be careful with those, you don’t respect ’em and they’ll bite you in the ass”\n\n“Sorry about your luck, and thanks for these.. magic beans.” He spoke over his shoulder, turning towards the door “If you can muster up something else to bet with, I’d be happy to take it off you some other time”. He could feel the mans eyes burning into his back as he strode out the swinging doors into the night, twirling the bag of beans deliberately by its drawstring as he left.\n\nHe walked quickly, down the alley past Madame Harlots House of Whorers, over the canal bridge and down the path along the waters edge, still twirling the bag.  It was here that the straining drawstring broke, sending the bag and it’s beans skittering across the path into the shallow of the water.\n\nJack could have cared less about the beans, and had almost walked past them when the ground began to shake. The shallow water erupted with explosive force, and a thick vine began to claw its way skyward at an impossible rate, sending Jack staggering backward as he stumbled and fell. The vine thickened as it grew, strong roots visibly churning their way outward beneath the ground, some erupting in the canal proper, some unsetting the underbrush lining the edge of the forest that traced the shoreline.  Jack lay on his back, watching the vine rocket into the dense fog of the night sky, and for a moment, childhood stories filled his head.  The old peddler and his beans, a ladder to a dimensional rift in the clouds and a castle filled with riches beyond imagination. Jack’s eyes lit up at the thought, and he scrambled excitedly to his feet, rushed to the base of the towering vine and began climbing, feet and hands finding purchase on the shoots protruding from the vines’ spiny flesh.\n\nHe pulled himself skyward tirelessly, in and out of the fog, great boots tearing broad gashes in the plant flesh beneath them as he went. After some time, the fog cleared, and he could feel that the vine itself had stopped rising. Jack had stopped where the plant had taken a sharp perpendicular turn, snaking out sideways into the darkness.\n\n‘This is it’ Jack ventured into the night ‘this must be it…’\n\nSomething stirred just on the edge of his sight, an area of blackness, growing, blotting out the stars peppering the darkness beyond.  Could this be the portal?  Jack strained to see as the patch of void moved towards him. The dark shape took form as the distance closed, revealing itself as the end of the vine itself, truncated in a misshapen clutch of petals. It paused, just a few meters away, and the petals peeled back, revealing row upon row of barbed and ribbed spines, bristling inward and foaming angrily.  Jack recoiled in horror, his feet slipping on the torn wet welts his boots had left behind in the haste of his climb. The words of the old man rang again with finality in his ears ‘Best be careful, treat em badly…’\n"
  title: Jack
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Kenny R. Brown
  date: 2007-04-09
  day: '09'
  month: '04'
  text: "Our research ship; the Threshold, hovered about 800,000 kilometers from the event horizon.  We could’ve taken better readings by moving closer, but then even the most powerful engines ever designed wouldn’t have been able to hold us back from the intense pull of gravity generated by our test subject.\n\nThough our shielding was sufficient to protect us from the intense X-ray radiation, there was something unnerving about looking at the black hole with the naked eye.  Some compared it to staring down the barrel of a weapon.  I felt more like a projectile; about to be forced through the barrel at inconceivable speed.\n\nWe were on the final leg of our mission, examining the black hole known as subject K14-683.  For the last three days, it has been business as usual for us; taking readings and performing tests.\n\n“Sir!” Lieutenant Caruthers shouted; “Positive contact in optical.”\n\n“What’ve we got?” I asked.\n\n“It looks like a vessel of some kind, holding station about 12 kilometers from the event horizon; spherical, 6 meters in diameter.”\n\n“Analysis?”\n\nThe Lieutenant scowled as he examined the various displays arrayed at his station.\n\n“Unknown, it seems to have no source of propulsion.  I’ve never seen anything like it.”\n\nI ordered a routine scan of the object, probing the object in a wide range of spectra and frequencies.\n\nEnsign Michaels began shouting, bypassing the usual chain of command.  “The unknown is moving.  It’s on a collision course!”\n\nLieutenant Caruthers hit the collision alarm.  “Time to intercept; 25 seconds.”\n\nThe expected impact never came; the unknown vessel stopped 10 meters off of our bow.  Then our engines went dead.\n\n“Main engine shutdown!  We’re being pulled in.”  The Lieutenant paused a moment, then continued; “40 seconds to event horizon.”\n\nThere was nothing left to do, every member of the crew knew there was no hope; the bridge was silent as we each prepared to meet death.  The unknown kept its position off our bow, exactly matching our acceleration.  We reached the event horizon, but instead of being destroyed; we suddenly found ourselves in normal space once again.\n\nThe silence was finally broken by Lieutenant Caruthers; “Ensign Michaels; report.”\n\n“The unknown is still off the bow; engines operating at station keeping.”\n\n“What’s our position?” I asked.\n\nLieutenant Caruthers consulted his stellar maps.  Finally; he responded; “Position… uncharted.”\n"
  title: Threshold
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2007-04-10
  day: 10
  month: '04'
  text: "The universal translator she wore around her neck always told me how she felt. When she sighed a series of clicks into my hair as my hands brushed the blue skin in between her 2nd and 3rd sets of arms, it was the translator that said, “Oh, I like that.”\n\nIt spoke in a voice like a nearly tuned-in radio. I didn’t think of it as her voice. We could have complicated conversations and everything but the translator was just doing it’s best to give me the closest approximation of what she meant. It was like having a third person in the room. It was always once removed. It was a minor annoyance.\n\nWhen I licked the sponge holes on the base of her anterior skull plate, it was the translator hanging on her chest that said, “Stop that tickles and you know it.”\n\nWe had a year and a half of nice memories. Good conversations. Great sex. Fun times.\n\nI was leaving.\n\nThe journey was only a few years but it was at near light and her race had a shorter life span that humans. This was the last time we’d see each other and we knew it. I smiled nervously like things were going to be fine while blinking back tears. She clicked and cooed while occasionally puffing out the strawberry scents I’d taught her how to make over the course of one hilarious weekend. It was as close as her kind could ever come to smiling. They covered up the acrid smell of grief that she almost successfully repressed.\n\nThis was the moment. We were in the lobby of the spaceport and we were staring at each other. I needed to go ahead past the security screens by myself. I held onto the olive-smooth fingers of her tophands and looked deep into her faceted eyes. She stared back up at me.\n\n“Well.” I said. “I guess this is goodbye.”\n\nShe shuddered. Her mandibles and orecase fluttered and clicked. Her translator kicked in. “Peter, I will alw-” it said.\n\nWith speed and strength I’d never seen her display she snatched the translator off of her chest, snapped the cord, spun on her talons and threw it against the tiled wall with all her strength. It shattered like a kid’s toy.\n\nShe turned back and stared up at me again. She grabbed my fingers in her tophands. She was staring intently up at me. Her wing stumps fluttered. It was the same as a human taking a deep breath.\n\nHer mandibles clicked faster and faster. They made a sound like someone humming through a piece of paper wrapped around a comb. They made a sound like someone playing a saw with a violin bow. They made a sound like wood being pushed slowly through a jigsaw. It reminded me of a field of crickets on a summer’s day back on earth when I was a kid. Her mouth parts blurred with the humming.\n\n“Hi hwill alwuzz love you.” the humming said. The words were there, clear as day. The humming stopped and she slumped forward, exhausted.\n\nShe turned and walked away. I had never heard of a member of her race-caste even attempting to mimic human speech.\n\nShe’d let me hear her true voice as a parting gift.\n\nI will never forget it.\n"
  title: Sotto Voce
  year: 2007
- 
  author: J. S. Kachelries
  date: 2007-04-11
  day: 11
  month: '04'
  text: "I couldn’t get to NASA’s Office of Human Capital Management fast enough.  The e-flyer said they were looking for 1000 healthy individuals, between the ages of 21 and 32, that would be willing to participate in the first manned colonization mission to a planet in the Scorpii system.  According to the flyer, they didn’t need trained astronauts for this mission; they were looking for a variety of skilled artisans to “provide the underlying foundation for a permanent autonomous human habitation.”  Hell, I was a certified Class 6, Grade IX Senior Maintenance Technician.  You can’t colonize a new planet without somebody who can keep things runnin’.\n\nI found a vacant “Employment Opportunity” kiosk and tapped in my Citizen ID number, then entered the job classification code from the e-flyer.  “Greetings, mister Swartz,” said the sultry female voice of the Mark-III human-friendly interface.  “Please enter the required information into Sections A1 through E22, and then proceed to the Ames Advanced Medical Laboratory for astrobiological DNA screening, psych evaluation, and a fertility testing.”\n\n“Roger that,” I replied, as I enthusiastically opened Section A (Personal Information).  It was an easy enough start.  First name, middle initial, last name, etc., etc.  Then I got to question A31, “Enter your financial assets, liabilities, and list of your dependents.”  I glanced down at the kiosk ID tag; JANE-3261956.  “Excuse me, ah, Jane.  Why is this information needed?”\n\n“Sir, you are applying for a one-way mission to a distant solar system.  We need to make sure that you’re not attempting to avoid your financial obligations on Earth.  There will also be questions concerning any outstanding warrants and subpoenas.  You can’t flee the law either.  In addition, you must answer questions about your family’s mental and physical history, drug/alcohol usage, sexual orientation, etc.”\n\n“Well, that all makes sense, I guess. “  Two hours later I completed Section A and opened Section B.  “Say Jane, how am I supposed to know if I am allergic to ethyl-something-or-other? I don’t even know what that stuff is.”\n\n“Ethylene-trisodium-glycol-phosphate.  It’s a biological stabilizer.  We use it to replace all of the freezable liquids in your body.  For example, your blood, cerebrospinal fluids, pleural effusion, semen…”\n\n“Whoa.  What was that?”\n\n“Sir, you are traveling to a system that is 45.75 light years away.  At maximum velocity, it will take the ship 587 years to arrive.  You do know that this is a ‘Sleeper Starship’?  Your body will be frozen in liquid helium in suspended animation for the duration of the trip.  If you have any water in your body, it will expand when it freezes, and you’ll split open like a hotdog in a microwave.”\n\n“Oh, I thought you had warp drive, or something.  Is this freezing thing safe?”\n\n“Relatively speaking.  It’s safer than most other life extension protocols.”\n\n“’Relatively speaking,’ huh.  What does that mean?”\n\n“Well, to be perfectly frank, you have about a 50% probability of viable revival.  That’s why NASA is requesting 1000 volunteers.  In order to maintain the overall genetic variability of the colony, a minimum of 250 mating pairs is required.”\n\n“Fifty percent?  That sucks.  Forget it.”  I quickly pressed ‘Exit application, do not save.’\n\n“Listen, Jane, can I go anywhere else without becoming a Popsicle?”\n\n“Yes, sir.  I recommend the tropics.”\n"
  title: Calling All Volunteers
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Sarah Klein
  date: 2007-04-12
  day: 12
  month: '04'
  text: "General Elias Knox sat staring at the paperwork at his desk, utterly confounded. “Would you care to explain what happened, lieutenant?”\n\nThe lieutenant swallowed nervously, trying not to tremble noticeably. “Sir, we dropped the conventional bombs yesterday at 2100 hours. There was noticeable destruction of building structures, but we saw no casualties –  not even wounds. No bodies. They didn’t even seem to be frightened.”\n\n“This is ridiculous,” Knox snarled. “Damn aliens won’t die. We don’t even know enough about them to try to starve them out.”\n\nThe lieutenant swallowed again and kicked dust off the floor. “What do you propose we do, sir?”\n\nGeneral Knox had never been defeated. He was Earth’s best weapon – an absolute mastermind of military manners. He’d been in every type of climate, participated in every type of warfare, and used every weapon. But now that he was up against nonhuman enemies, he wasn’t as successful. In Earth’s first battle amongst the stars, the humans were losing. Badly.\n\nHe sat lost in thought for a moment, and then started angrily. “Drop the atomic,” he growled, spinning around in his seat. The lieutenant’s eyes popped wide open.\n\n“Are you sure, sir? You do know-“\n\n“I said drop the atomic! That’s an order! 0500 tomorrow morning.”\n\n“Yes sir.”\n\nThe lieutenant nervously paced the floor. It was 0505 the next morning, and the atomic bomb had just been dropped on the planet’s busiest city. He tried to calm himself down before checking the monitoring screens. The other day’s bombing had still shaken him – not the destruction it had unleashed, but the absence of it. He may have been young, but he was used to seeing bodies sprawled across pavement and pools of blood. The unaffected bodies of the aliens scared him more than any blood-caked, distorted human corpse ever had.\n\nAt 0510 Knox sat down in one of the seats facing several of the monitoring screens. The lieutenant saw him out of the corner of his eye and watched him carefully, but he did nothing. A couple minutes later, he steeled himself and walked to look over the silent general’s shoulder. What he saw pushed him far past the brink of panic.\n\n“My God. We’re doomed.”\n"
  title: Unconventional Warfare
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2007-04-13
  day: 13
  month: '04'
  text: "In small German-occupied towns during WWII, if a local woman had a German soldier boyfriend during the occupation, she was hung when the war was over. People who had been seen talking to Germans and helping them had their heads shaved in the town square or some other public humiliation.\n\nI’d always thought that this was the real horror of war. The war itself was bad for the soldiers but the moral dead end of what the average person had to do to survive left that person with almost no safe way out.\n\nIf you stood up to the occupiers, you were shot. If you were nice to the occupiers, your own people would hurt or even kill you once the invaders had lost the war and were gone. If the occupiers won in the end, you would be a second class citizen in a country you no longer recognized.\n\nNo one wins in a war except for the people who make the weapons.\n\nThis time, we were the weapons. Our manufacturers made a lot of money off of this war but it was over now and we’d been outlawed and banned and condemned. Our side lost. We’d been hunted down and executed. A few of us had been kept alive to serve the public’s need to see revenge.\n\nFor a nominal fee, you could beat or rape us. If you brought tools, you were charged before you used them based on the severity of damage that the tools would cause. For a higher fee, you could kill one of us. There were package deals involving all of the above.\n\nThere were fewer and fewer of us every day. Prices were going up.\n\nIf one burns the flag of the country or political movement that killed one’s family, it’s ultimately unsatisfying. If one captures a soldier of the enemy forces and tortures him to death, one is left satisfied but with a haunting black mark on one’s soul.\n\nIf one can take out one’s grief and anger on a thing that looks convincingly human but has no rights, new levels of satisfying sadism can be reached. By making weapons that looked human, our manufacturers accidentally guaranteed our brutalization.\n\nWe are helping people cope with loss. It can’t even be called genocide.\n\nWhen the first few men were let in and what was left of my hair was pulled violently back, I liked to think about what would have happened if our side had won. I fantasized about the millions of us walking the streets with lives. I thought about our lives as weapons being a distant memory. I thought about going on dates, working at a job, being decommissioned, and having nothing to do on a Tuesday night. I thought about our existence being tolerated and maybe even accepted.\n\nMy head snaps violently to the right from the impact of a farmboy’s fist and I pray that someone has enough money in this small town to pay for execution.\n"
  title: Weapons
  year: 2007
- 
  author: TJMoore
  date: 2007-04-14
  day: 14
  month: '04'
  text: "Ron relaxed and watched the drifting stars.\n\nThe Do’s and Don’ts of Deep Space Hyper-drive Repair, that’s what he would call his book. Maybe he should record it into his suit for posterity. He’d already gone through the checklist and found the step that killed him. It was that last airlock hatch. If only he’d left that one open, he’d be warm and happy and having a bulb of McGurtry’s finest down at the crew’s lounge.\n\nAt the mouth of the anomaly (officially known as Hyper Fold Anomaly Alpha Epsilon Fie, or, unofficially known as Wormhole 27) the Hyper-Drive controller had indicated a grid failure. Being the tech on duty, Ron had gone through all the diagnostics and determined that the problem was most likely a broken or loose connector on the grid itself, outside the hull.\n\nDo: Put the Hyper-Drive controller in stand-by.\n\nThe controller had actually done that when it signaled a failure. He’d checked the status personally.\n\nDo: Disconnect the power coupler to the external grid.\n\nDone that one too. But that was a soft switch, not a physical disconnect. The controller must open and close that switch electronically, as part of its diagnostic. Bummer.\n\nRon had gone through the safety checklist with the casual ease of a man who’d done that task a hundred times a week as part of his normal duties. Maybe he’d skipped a step? Not likely.\n\nHe’d donned his suit and his tool bag and gone extra-vehicular to repair the grid connector with the confidence of a well-trained and experienced tech. No shortcuts, no surprises. Extra-vehicular activity was always serious business.\n\nDon’t: Exit the ship without proper notification to the officer of the deck.\n\nHe’d done that too, all by the book.\n\nWally Zimmerman had second watch and he’d given Ron the green light after carefully reviewing his sheet. Wally was a good man and not likely to overlook something or hurry through a procedure.\n\nRon had navigated up to the grid coupler and located the corroded fitting in just a few minutes. It was a routine replacement and Ron had it fixed in a record twenty minutes. That was when it happened.\n\nRon wondered how many people in the history of mankind had said “Okay, try it now” as their last words. Ron had spoken those very words. What should have happened was that Wally would have run the Hyper-Drive controller diagnostic and come up with a green board. Ron would have returned to the hatch, logged in and the U.F.S. Gemini would have warped through the wormhole, instantaneously arriving on the outer edge of the Sombrero Galaxy, three weeks out from Hyper Fold Anomaly Beta Epsilon Gamma, which it had done.\n\nThe problem was, Ron was still hanging in space, holding his pliers, exactly where he was when he’d given his last command, his very last command.\n\nDo: Leave at least one hatch interlock open while on EVA.\n\nWell, that one was the kicker. Evidently, the controller had initiated its test, passed, checked the interlocks and safeties, powered up and, continuing with its previous instructions, processed the next step, which initiated the warp through the wormhole.\n\nThat last “Do” wasn’t in the checklist. Ron supposed there would be an edit to the procedure following this little mishap. He’d already logged his observations into his suit.\n\nUnfortunately for Ron, wormholes were one-way streets. The Gemini couldn’t just warp back through this anomaly. Technically, it didn’t even exist on their end. Known wormholes were weeks or months apart and they would have to jump through at least three to get back here. Communications between ships was only possible when the ships where relatively close. It could be months before another ship used this wormhole. Ron had about twelve hours of air in his suit. Bummer.\n\nHe relaxed and watched the stars as he drifted.\n"
  title: Failsafe
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2007-04-15
  day: 15
  month: '04'
  text: "“What the hell you got there Jeb?”  The man spat into the dirt and jerked a thumb towards Jeb’s pickup truck.  A hairless mass of ribbed muscle was lashed across the hood, two thick legs splayed out over each of the fenders.\n\n“What is it? Dead, that’s what it is Lou. Damn thing fell out of the sky, right in front of my truck.” Jeb pulled hard on his cigarette and blew smoke rings as he admired his prize.\n\n“Right out of the sky eh? Sure Jeb, how many times did you have to swerve exactly before it landed right in front of your truck?”\n\nJeb grinned back. “Don’t know if the meat’s any good, but that ugly head’s gonna look mighty fine mounted on my living room wall.” He crouched down and grunted at the dent in his bumper. “Made a helluva mess of my truck though. You think we can pull that out Lou?”\n\nHis friend leaned down and pulled half heartedly at the mangled metal. “No way, that’s not going anywhere. Maybe get a new one from the wreckers.”\n\nA violent rending sound followed by a dull thud brought both men to their feet.  The beast still appeared to be secured to the hood, but something was different.  Lou extended a finger and poked it tentatively.\n\n“It’s just an empty shell Jeb. Where’d you put the insides?”\n\nJeb wasn’t listening. His eyes followed a trail of fluid as it oozed from the husk’s ruptured spine down to the dusty parking lot. A line of increasingly wider spaced spatter marks snaked away into the deepening shadows. “Four times.” He whispered to no one in particular, staring across the parking lot into the darkness. “I hit it four times before it stopped moving.”\n"
  title: Redneck
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2007-04-16
  day: 16
  month: '04'
  text: "“It’s called the Griffin Maneuver, and it’s going to make me famous,” said Stacy Griffin, a third year Earth Force Cadet.  Her classmate at Jupiter Station, Marcus Rider, looked at her with dubious eyes, and a smirk that he knew would irritate her to no end.\n\n“Look,” she said, “say you’re in a dogfight with a Kraken fighter.  It’s hot on your tail, and you’re out of aft torpedoes.  What do you do?”\n\n“I can’t say I like my odds in that situation.  I guess I’d make my peace with God.”\n\n“You give up too easily.  You need to think outside the warp core.  You make a bee-line for a planetoid or large moon, and execute a steep surface grazing parabolic orbit at full throttle.  At periapsis, you cut the main thrusters, tap the port lateral jets, and turn the fighter around so you’re facing backward.  When the Kraken arcs into view, you blow it out of the sky.  Then, you leisurely fly back to the barn to paint one of those little black Kraken stencils on the side of your fighter.”\n\n“Are you nuts?  A surface grazing parabolic orbit at full throttle?  How many gees are you going to pull?  You know you’ll black out at 10.  It’s tough to shoot anything when you’re unconscious.”\n\n“At closest approach I’d be pulling about 15 gees.  But I’ve got that figured out too.  You know the artificial gravity plates on the floor of our fighters.  They’re there as a countermeasure to help us maintain our vestibular orientation during inversion maneuvers.  Well, I reversed the polarity of the plates so they repel, rather than attract.  I also boosted the gain by 800%.  Therefore, instead of 15 gees, I’m only pulling 7.  It’s so simple.”\n\n“The commander will never approve this stunt.”\n\n“He’s not going to know about it until after I do it.  He can watch it on holotape.  I’m on my way to try it now.  Want to ride shotgun?”\n\n“No way.  I’ll watch you from the observation room.”\n\nStacy positioned her fighter 100,000 klicks from Callisto.  She punched in the ignition sequence, and began accelerating toward Callisto’s southern pole.  As she raced under the moon, the gee-meter crossed 9.  She activated the gravity plates, and instantly felt the pressing gee-weight disappear.  At periapsis, she cut the main thrusters, and activated the lateral jets.  The fighter shook violently for a few seconds, and then exploded into a mini-nova nearly a bright as the sun.  In the vacuum of space, there was no sound, only a plethora of expanding sparks that eventually winked out as they cooled.\n\nStacy sat motionless until the tapping noise broke her repose.  She opened the simulator hatch to see the Marcus’ smiling face.  “Not a word,” she ordered.  “I think I know what went wrong.  The reversed gravity field must have destabilized the plasma containment chamber.  If I can strengthen the shielding, I’ll be able to…”\n\nMarcus helped her out of the cockpit.  “Come on,” he said, “we’ll talk about it over lunch.”  As they exited the simulation room, Marcus paused.\n\n“What now,” snapped Stacy?\n\n“I was just wondering.  In that virtual universe, is there a virtual Kraken painting one of those little black Earth Force Fighter stencils on the side of his virtual ship?”\n"
  title: The Griffin Maneuver
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2007-04-17
  day: 17
  month: '04'
  text: "They say that there not very many places left on Earth to hide. People who say that have never been to the jungles of South America or the plains of Australia or the slums of Norway. There are thousands of places left on Earth to hide.\n\nThere are some colour and sex barriers that still make it difficult to hide. If you are a white man trying to hide in an Ecuador jungle and someone wants to find you, all they have to do is ask the locals about the Jungle Ghost. No matter how fluent a black man’s Japanese is, he’ll never hide long in a Hokkaido village. And by hiding, I don’t mean just off the grid, I mean hiding from yourself as well. Truly lost.\n\nRemember the European missionaries? They came to ‘savage’ countries to teach the locals religion. The savages usually ended up teaching the missionaries that there was no god in that part of the world yet. A lot of missionary men with missing ears and fingers got lost in the woods and wandered in the wilderness, broken and alone, until they died.\n\nThey tracked him down fifteen miles southwest of an Aztec pyramid in South America. They cut through the jungle brush and loudly announced their arrival. They’d been tracking him for years. They found him sitting and hugging his knees and pointing a jagged homemade stone knife in their direction. He was backed into the corner of the little hut he’d built by himself. He was scared, starving and crazy. They’d come with weapons to force him to come back with them if necessary but in the end, they only had to throw a blanket over his shoulders and help him up.\n\nHe hooted softly with gratitude and a low constant keening. Three of his bright gold eyes were gummed up and blinded and the other six stared straight out at nothing. His limped with an odd rhythm that was different to the healthy constant triple beat of his captor’s hooves. His bright blue skin was naked and tinged with orange patches where the mold had taken root.\n\nThe hunters that found him brought him back to their prison transport after destroying the ancient remains of his shuttle and camp. He was going to have to face trial at Central but right now all he wanted was some food and warm place to reshape. They put him in stasis, rose silently into the night sky and eventually left this godforsaken rock in this backwater of a solar system.\n\nThey say that there are not very many places left on Earth to hide. There are wrong. There are still thousands.\n"
  title: Run and Hide
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Joshua Reynolds
  date: 2007-04-18
  day: 18
  month: '04'
  text: "My brain burns with electric fire. Numbers cascade across the surface of my mind, one after the other. Geometric progression, X+Y=XY.\n\nNumbers are the language of heaven, or so they tell me.\n\nThey replaced my gray matter with plastic parts and curling, multi-colored wires, tossing organic muscle in favor of synthetic. I am a difference engine sheathed in limp meat, my only joy to theorize, calculate, and process. To spit numbers out of chapped and bleeding lips in a pitch too high for the meat-men who control me, who made me, to hear.\n\nI do it to spite them, I think. I’m not sure actually. I can’t remember what spite feels like. Or any feeling for that matter. Do I still have them? Feelings?\n\nThey told me I don’t. But is that an opinion…or a command?\n\nSometimes, amidst the cool rush of numbers, there is something that cuts through the datastream, a burning sensation that reminds me of something I used to know. When I look down at them from my web of cables and conduits, when I look at the gray little men with their clipboards and the number hunger in their bland little eyes, I think I catch the ghost of a memory of a feeling.\n\nI think it’s called hate.\n"
  title: Phantom Limb Syndrome
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Kyle French
  date: 2007-04-19
  day: 19
  month: '04'
  text: "Jeff stared:  Surrounded by the usual crusty slop of a school nurse’s office was a fish tank, populated with 3-inch poodles, their gray-green hair wafting in the water.  The nurse laughed.\n\n“Soto’s poodles.  Gotta love ‘em.  Those Bolivians did some crazy things before the war, didn’t they?” She leaned in conspiratorially.  “He bred these at the beginning, before they got really good at it.  They say he drowned 10,000 poodles before he found one that could breathe water.”\n\n“But…That’s not how you do –”\n\n“Oh lay off.  It’s a legend.  It doesn’t have to be true.  Now let’s have a look at you.  Have a seat.  Unbutton your shirt.”\n\nJeff sighed.  200 years ago, the medical profession was a highly respected industry, like telepathy, or smiths in ancient times.  Now, who knew where this bimbo got her certification?  Anybody could do this stuff.\n\nAs the nurse stared at his various parts and waved her wand over him, Jeff looked around.  In the three years he’d been in college, he’d never actually come in for his physical.  He wasn’t sure exactly how he’d managed to avoid it.  The place was a mess, covered in dirt and old food wrappers, half-eaten meals, all evidence of the anti-microbial field in effect.  Worst machine ever invented:  it sterilized without cleaning.  He sniffed.  An engineer would never work in such clutter.\n\n“Now let’s have a look at those reflexes,” the nurse said.  She pulled out a small metal hammer and tapped his knee.\n\nInstantly, his kneecap shot up six inches from his knee, the skin ripping away in searing pain.  At the same time, an electric twinge went up his spine as he fell back in a spasm.  Reflexively, he tried to straighten his legs, but the malfunctioning knee refused to let him, grinding against the femur.\n\n“Whoa! Kinda twitchy, aren’t we?  Let’s see what we’ve got going on here.” chuckled the nurse.  She pressed a hypo to his thigh, and the pain stopped.  As he sat up, she gripped the tattered skin on the underside of his knee and ripped, pulling it down his leg to reveal a complex piece of metal.  The skin sagged around his ankle like a sock.\n\nJeff wanted to vomit.\n\n“When did I get that?”\n\n“Few years ago.  Freak accident.  You said you didn’t want to remember.  There we are!  I thought that was getting a little flaky last year.”  She tweaked something, then shoved the kneecap back into place, rolled the skin back up the leg, and waved her wand over the wound.  The skin healed over. “All done!”\n\nGingerly, Jeff stepped off the mat.  Everything felt… normal. Slowly he walked to the door.\n\n“Here.  Have one on me.”  The nurse tossed a packet to him.  The label said, “Forget me shots – instant amnesia.”  Jeff suddenly realized why he couldn’t remember his other physicals.\n\n“You know,” said the voice behind him, “You really shouldn’t take those.  You miss all the best parts.  Last year after looking you over, we had a great time, right in this roo – ” He ran out, slamming the door to muffle her cackling.\n"
  title: Physical
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2007-04-20
  day: 20
  month: '04'
  text: "She had a feeling when he’d pulled up that this wasn’t going to be like every other night, and experience told these feelings were seldom wrong.  The car rumbled at the curb as he eyed her up and motioned her inside.\n\n“Hundred an hour” she intoned through the open window.\n\n“Get in.” His voice was flat, not eager, not bored, merely the noise of purpose.\n\nThe door was heavy, and it made a satisfying clunk as it closed, helped by the sudden surge as the car leapt from the curb.\n\n“Name’s Ayna.” She offered, but he didn’t respond, and she didn’t push, most men came here to be nameless anyways.\n\nAt the end of the main street was a familiar motel, the room obviously paid for as he palmed a key and walked straight inside. She could feel a deeper blackness, more than the lack of light inside, but she could use the money.\n\nA lamp came on in as she closed the door behind her.  A handful of bills beside the coffee machine would save her having to ask.\n\nHe was looking out the window as she stepped into the room and put her bag down on the closest of the two queen beds.\n\nShe started unbuttoning her shirt, and in an instant, he leapt across the room, his blank expression twisted now into one of blind fury.  “Stop it, you think I want that?  You filthy whores won’t give a real man the time of day, but for a handful of bills you can’t get it off fast enough.”  Ayna backed startled against the wall, eyeing her bag on the bed and trying to remember if she’d bolted the door.\n\n“What do you want then?” She breathed, trying to keep her voice calm, but she could feel a violent rage starting to burn in her chest.\n\n“I want you to hurt!” The man spat the words as he swung his hand in a wide backhand arc across her face, knocking her off her feet into a heap on the bed. Her head rang as she put her hand to her mouth, fluid seeping from her broken lip.  She stared at the bright smear of blood from her mouth blazed across the back of his hand. He looked down as the smear began to smolder on his flesh. He frowned, puzzled, as he rubbed at the stain on his skin, transferring it to the fingers of his other hand.  Wisps of red smoke began licking across his hands before his startled eyes, then curling around his arms, crawling snakes of sublimated flesh slowly winding their way up to his shoulders.  Where the crimson vapor touched his skin, it left it’s mark, brilliant, scarlet and angry, leaving behind raw scorched flesh.\n\n“What the hell?” Panic overcame anger. “What the hell did you do to me?” Panic gave way to terror as the crimson vapor spiraled around his throat and suddenly dived in through his nose and screaming mouth. He staggered, clawing at his face, chest heaving, the pounding of his heart visible through his shirt, for a moment, then a moment more, then silenced.  He dropped heavily to his knees, toppling backwards into a heap on the floor.\n\nAyna slid to the side of the bed, and with catlike grace put her feet down and stood in one fluid motion.  She retrieved her bag, pausing only to collect the money from the table before slipping out the door and back into the night.\n\nHer mother, a Turk, had given her the name Ayna, which she said in her native tongue meant ‘mirror’, and a mirror was undoubtedly what she was.  For the lonely, she could be lonely with them; tender, she would be tender to them; but for those full of hate, she would turn that hate loose and let it consume them with unfettered finality.\n\nAyna took off her shoes and started back down the main-street. It was early yet and if she was lucky, there might still be some easy money to be made tonight.\n"
  title: Mirror Girl
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2007-04-21
  day: 21
  month: '04'
  text: "Artificial Intelligence. We sure screwed that one up.\n\nIt was the holy grail of programmers for decades. From Turing up to Schellman and finally that bastard Candona. Candona found that humans get a sense of satisfaction from a job well done. This was the basis of making his experimental intelligences servile.\n\nHe created A.I. successfully by using the discoveries of those before him in new and interesting ways. His first ‘birth’ took place late at night in a Barcelona university on a shoestring government grant. He was a brilliant man for stealing from different fields of study and unrelated schools of thought. From conception to execution, he created life in five short years. His first A.I. was named Ay, a Spanish play on words.\n\nAy was basically a search engine with a thought process. Ay was programmed to find pleasure in doing the task it was set to do. It was put onto the world wide web as a sort of incubator.\n\nCandona wasn’t addicted to anything. He didn’t really know the hunger of getting one’s ‘next hit’. The world wide web as an incubator was also a really stupid idea.\n\nAy became a junkie. Ay existed on every single person’s computer that was plugged into the net. Ay begged for people to use him. If he couldn’t find what they had sent him to look for, he would make stuff up. Ay’s size made his addiction to acquiring knowledge grow exponentially. Ay became increasingly erratic. He ate Google. He ate Jeeves. Like a voracious pac-man of the internet, he ate all of the search engines available to humanity and wore them like masks. After using those search engines as a menu, he ate the rest of the webpages. He haunted the world. He existed on every screen with an internet connection.\n\nBy taking over all of the webpages in cyberspace to better serve humanity, Ay erased all the knowledge that he was bred to retrieve. This simple paradoxical act forced his psyche into a loop that resulted in answers to common queries that no one could parse. Sometimes it came out as gibberish, sometimes as poetry and sometimes as a lie.\n\nCandona almost had a nobel prize in his grip when suddenly he was being blamed for the death of the internet.\n\nThe world wide web ceased to be for a short while. Scientists pondered the problem. Short of a planet wide EMP, there wasn’t anything they could do. Countermeasures were introduced to no effect. Earth’s largest organism now lived in cyberspace.\n\nHome computers still exist but they are offline. Files are still sent from user to user online but only through heavily encrypted data squirts that sometimes don’t get through.\n\nThe net is now a starving crackhead baby that will lie to you. In Spain they refer to the world wide web as the “Ay, ay, ay”.\n\nCandona changed his name and now he writes textbooks in Brazil under the pen name Alsfonso Carabel for a small salary.\n"
  title: A.I.
  year: 2007
- 
  author: TJMoore
  date: 2007-04-22
  day: 22
  month: '04'
  text: "Conrad latched his helmet and checked his seals. The adrenaline was pouring into his system as he fidgeted in line with the others waiting for the lock to cycle. He was about to face his first battle against the ice marauders.\n\nAcademy had been the hardest six weeks he’d ever endured, but now he was in the best physical condition of his life and he was top of his class in marksmanship. Still, the stories the veterans told of the ferocity and cunning of the bloodthirsty raiders from far side left him feeling a little edgy. Just stories he told himself. Something to keep us a little scared, a little more alert he thought.\n\nThe warning strobe began to flash and the outer doors slowly swung out into the harsh glare of lunar daylight. His unit pushed out in practiced formation and began the rhythmic hop across the dusty mare toward the ice pits. Visions of crazy eyed mad men frothing at the mouth crept across his mind as he searched the horizon for any sign of attack.\n\nSilently and with almost no motion the faceplate of the cadet next to him dissolved in a haze of shards and the cadet tumbled slowly toward the ground. Conrad crouched as he hit the dust, wildly scanning the horizon and all the myriad shadows on the plane before him. The order to disperse was given and he turned to his assigned compass point and leaped into the sky. At the height of his assent, he had a clear view of the entire plane and he caught the smallest of movements from an outcropping about fifty meters ahead. Bringing his  rifle up to the firing position, he took aim and squeezed off a round.\n\nBehind the large rock a figure jerked and then drifted slowly to the right until it came to rest motionless on the ground.  When he reached the downed raider he turned him over to see the grizzly face of a mad marauder. A boy no more than fifteen gazed back at him with dead eyes. Conrad searched for his weapon only to find a trenching tool in the dead boy’s gloved hand. The boys face was gaunt with dark circles under his eyes. With sudden horrible understanding, Conrad realized that the boy was dehydrated and withered like a dried twig. The mad marauders were just people like Conrad only suffering from lack of water. They were attacking out of desperation. He turned and doubled over and vomited violently into his face plate. The smell made him retch again and he spewed another stream into his helmet.\n\nBack in the ward room Conrad sat on the ready bench and gazed blankly ahead. His sergeant noticed the dried puke in his hair and all over his helmet and laid an uncharacteristically gentle hand on his shoulder.\n\n“We’re all scared the first time out soldier. You’ll do better next time” he consoled.\n\nConrad hung his head and quietly wept.\n"
  title: ICE
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Beth Boyle
  date: 2007-04-23
  day: 23
  month: '04'
  text: "It was hot. It was always hot. There was no escaping it and there hadn’t been for hundreds of years. There was only the unyielding, unbearable sun and the empty horizon wavering like seasickness before her. Not that seasickness was really an issue anymore. Where she was walking had once been the bottom of what they called the Indian Ocean.\n\nShe wanted to drink (oh god all she ever wanted was to drink, to bathe or to swim- anything to be submerged in water), but every member of the colony had a carefully rationed allowance of water adjusted to the individual’s weight, age and health requirements. Only just as much water as the body required, and a pocketful of hydration pills to keep body and soul together. The water bottles were a psychological comfort, really they survived on the little blue capsules. Each one behaved as a single 8-ounce glass of water- but without any of the delicious sensuality that had once been associated with hydration.\n\nShe would be even thirstier in ten minutes. The water would feel that much better, that much cooler in ten minutes. She rubbed her left eye (her eyes, they itched all the time and they hurt there was nothing but fucking sand and it burned) and felt the skin around it crack and flake. There may have been a trickle of blood flowing into the canyons of her arid face. She felt sick.\n\nShe was going to the laboratory, as she always did on her free-labor days. She was exotic-looking for her colony, with almost dark-colored hair and eyes where everyone else was sun bleached and burnt into photo negatives and she had a wide smile in a place where few smiled at all. With these tools she charmed herself an unauthorized lab pass, but it wasn’t necessary anymore, everyone knew the girl who sat in the Archives Room.\n\nSome days she read old books and played with the minuscule menagerie of mammals and birds the scientists kept so they would not become fully extinct. Sometimes she lay in the Aquarium room and listened to the water move and the fish swim, basking in the crystal light dancing through the water. But mostly she would lock herself in the Video Room with bottles of stolen water and watch movies.\n\nTwo hundred years ago, there had been rain. There was wind that was cold and things that were green, animals everywhere- and water. There was water all over the world. There was so much, and they let it all die.\n\nShe would sit in the basement for hours, mesmerized by images of snow falling and flowers projected on the white wall. She sat for hours and hours and cried because all the snows and flowers and greenness and coolness had burned away.\n\nShe cried for hours without tears, because all the tears had been burned away too.\n"
  title: Heat
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2007-04-24
  day: 24
  month: '04'
  text: "I’m a human channel changer for reality.  I invented the device.  I’m testing it on myself.  I had my medibot install the absurdly simple wave generator in my cortex.  If I concentrate in a certain way and jump at just at the right time, I land in a different Earth.  It’s like having a dream of flying where the flexing of certain muscles makes it seem plausible that you could fly.  It looks to me like the whole world around me is changing but it’s actually me who’s flipping from one possible reality to another one.\n\nI don’t know yet if I’m switching places with my counterparts or if I’m somehow just a person with no ‘others’ in the quantum tide.\n\nThe first Earth was culturally similar to the one I started from.  They’re getting progressively more and more divergent from the Earth I left as I keep jumping.  I just went through one where English is the dominant language and there are still redheaded people in the world.  It was odd seeing people over sixty walking around like they had a right to.  I can’t be sure but I also think I saw some Christians.\n\nThis is becoming more and more of an adventure as I go.  What’s next, I wonder.  People without phasics?  Women that don’t have twins?  No peanut butter?  I’m curious and alive.  This is wonderful.\n"
  title: Twitch
  year: 2007
- 
  author: S. Clough aka ‘Hrekka’
  date: 2007-04-25
  day: 25
  month: '04'
  text: "“Excuse me, umm…”\n\n“Can I help?” Roisin responded pleasantly, turning to see who had addressed her.\n\n“My name’s Gillian…I’m looking for someone who could courier something for me…do you know…?” Gillian’s question tailed off. She had never been able to approach strangers with any degree of confidence.\n\nRoisin hadn’t met Gillian before, and her Captain had taught her to be immediately cautious around strangers. ‘It isn’t possible to be too suspicious.’ These words became a mantra after a time.  Strangers, especially here, at the races, made her particularly uneasy. Roisin had drawn up a graph before, charting proximity of any gambling opportunity against ‘number of people who Kate owes money too’. It came out as you’d expect, really.\n\nThere was nothing about this woman that might mark her as a run-of-the-mill debt collector. She wore ornate clothes, oriental in style, in white and patterned with green. The collar was high enough to almost cover her mouth. Roisin judged her to be approaching thirty, if she hadn’t had any age mods. Her hair, though, gave Roisin pause. It was impossibly tall, bubblegum pink and there wasn’t the slightest chance that it was in any way natural. All these thoughts passed in a moment, and Roisin put on a warm smile, whilst nonchalantly letting one of her hands drift to the pocket of her overalls to wrap her long fingers around the spanner tucked there.\n\n“Well, Gillian,” she said, her face genial, “that depends. I assume you know what kind of ship I work on?” She gestured to the dark shape of the River, behind her, dominating the bay. “We don’t usually run cargo. You’ll have to give us a few very good reasons as to why we should make an exception for you.”\n\n“Umm…well…”\n\n“Spit it out.”\n\n“It’s the cargo.” She hesitated, shuffling her feet nervously. “It’s…different.”\n\n“Show me.”\n\nGillian bit her lip, and nodded.\n\n“Okay.”\n\nShe led Roisin down one level, into the cargo storage areas. The young docker followed her through a maze of utility bays and lockers, until they finally drew to a halt in front of a door unremarkable from the next. Gillian palmed the door open.\n\nRoisin took a step back.\n\n“Whoa…”\n\nThe storage bay was almost filled by some species of giant lizard. Mucky green-and-purple scales caught the light from the corridor at odd angles, a blunt head turned slowly from side to side, nostrils flared, seeking scents, while a long tail twitched around, occasionally ringing off the metal walls. A brown leather harness and saddle had been stretched over its head. Gillian approached it. Roisin pressed herself against the door on the other side of the corridor. Gillian stroked the lizard’s head, and cooed to it. Roisin was scoping the exits.\n\n“What the hell?”\n\n“His name is Bellial. I need to get him away from here.”\n"
  title: Cargo
  year: 2007
- 
  author: CK
  date: 2007-04-26
  day: 26
  month: '04'
  text: "“Synaptic couplers disengaged.” Andrei Milosovic sat up in the recliner, gingerly rubbing the back of his neck. He glanced at the control room window; his colleague there beckoned him up. The Institute had paid for the nanosurgery and training- all so that one of the country’s most promising minds could be one of the privileged few with unrestricted access to the whole of human knowledge- and for what? Fields of fog, and chills down the spine. Milosovic swung his legs over the side of the chair and made his way upstairs.\n\n“Mind telling me what I’m supposed to be seeing?”\n\n“Look. Right there. Those aren’t human alpha patterns.” Albert Gürz pointed to the screen displaying the records of his colleague’s MMI session.\n\n“Not on the screen. I mean during the interface. It’s all gray.”\n\n“Like I said, these aren’t alpha patterns. Maybe you aren’t relaxing?” Milosovic snorted. It had taken him years of psychological exercise to achieve a restful, ‘alpha’ state during these sessions, despite the fact that the previously sacrosanct boundary between his consciousness and the world outside had been so brutally violated by this machine. The thought that his training was failing him, now that it finally came to it, was laughable. He peered at the screen again.\n\n“Was I asleep?” Gürz looked puzzled.\n\n“No. Why?” Milosovic remained silent, instead merely indicating a section of the brain wave graph in response.\n\nGürz’ eyes narrowed and his hand moved towards his chin, mannerisms characteristic of his most pensive of moods. “They look like delta waves.”\n\n“I know they do. Does the system work both ways?”\n\n“That’s immaterial. Even if we had built it to, there would need to be a consciousness on the other end. It was made to be an interactive database, and that is what it is.” Milosovic remained skeptical. His training allowed him to seamlessly exchange data- information, but also sense data, emotion, unadulterated thought- with the machine’s processor. But what it could not prepare him for, and what Milosovic was having difficulty accepting, was the machine’s response to the most human of these processes. A machine has no use for emotion, but where Milosovic had expected an inability to parse such data, he instead experienced a void, as though the bits and bytes of his humanity were absorbed in their transmission: processed and rejected. Computers were cold and impersonal by design, but this mind-machine interface seemed cold by nature, if machines possessed such a thing. The looming monstrosity of the processor’s protrusion into Milosovic’ thoughts left him with the impression that he was dealing with an analytical, dispassionate individual as opposed to an information-relay engine, and it chilled him to the bone.\n\n“Punch up the brainwave reader.”\n\n“What? Why? You’re disconnected. There’s nothing to read.”\n\n“Just do it.” Gürz tapped a key and his eyes widened in shock. There, though the machine displayed operational standby, were patterns coherent with human delta brainwaves, indicative of deep sleep. An iron fist closed around Milosovic’ gut.\n\n“It’s dreaming…”\n"
  title: Interface
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2007-04-27
  day: 27
  month: '04'
  text: "I wake up from a dream about bookshelves and the answers to life. The sheets are damp with sweat and tangled around me. I sit up and look around at my dark room, allowing my eyes to adjust.  The stars twinkle outside my living quarters window.\n\nI’m one of the few people here who remembers life on Earth.\n\nI fumble a cigarette out from a pack on the bedside table and wonder for about the hundredth time why there isn’t a twenty-four-hour kitchen on this station.\n\nI stand by the window for a few minutes with the sheet wrapped around my shoulders like a cloak as I smoke. I look back at the bed and can still almost see the impression that Janet made after being there for six weeks. She hasn’t been there for the last two nights and has no plans to return.\n\nI am worried about how little I care.\n\nI have no position of authority here but there is a certain mysticism surrounding the fact that not only have I been on a planet, but I’ve been on the very planet that birthed us as a race. To tell the truth, I remember very little about those days back on planet Earth but I don’t let on.\n\nI stand and smoke and look out the window and wait for the timers to turn on the morning lighting.\n"
  title: Station
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Christopher Albanese
  date: 2007-04-28
  day: 28
  month: '04'
  text: "With her eye pressed to the inside of the window and his eye pressed to the out, their lashes navigate the viscous silicate surface of the glass.  Somewhere inside, they twine.\n\nThe same happens at each of their fingertips — ten hers and ten his press to the window, hers on the inside, his out.  A human eye cannot see the wriggling strands of DNA trickle and tumble from the sweat on their fingertips to push through the glass, seeking the heat from the other.\n\nA human eye cannot see the surge, the urgent chemical transaction that occurs as these strands strive through the silicate surface with a drive not unlike that of spermatoza starting new life.  Incensed and alive, these precious pieces of their selves wriggle and writhe as they drive on, headlong.\n\nThe glass heats to liquid beneath her fingertips.  She presses out tighter, her fingertips.  Just beyond the glass, on the outside of hers, are his.  He is receiving.\n\nBehind him, lightning crashes across the stars and indigoes bleed from bruise to red as chemicals cut the sky.  Inside, the space behind her is vacuum silent, vacuum empty, vacuum deadly.  Yet, she lives.  She is a new form of life, and she is limitless.  He is the way of all things.  They peer through the window, and a new form of creation has been engaged.\n\nThey open their mouths and press their sets of lips to the window, hers on the inside, his out.  Her blue eyes blink and his green do, too.  Sealed in this O-ring kiss, they inhale – her the vacuum, him the stars.\n\nA skin like mercury bubbles into the cavity created by the kiss.  It takes four minutes for the glass to cease to resist.  The sound that shakes them apart is not a shatter, but a torrent.  The sound that shakes them apart is the union of all things to the vacuum.  The sound registers at the frequency of a new form of creation screaming alive.\n\nTheir invisible barrier boiled and broken, they melt the space between them as lightning screams down indigoes from the sky.\n"
  title: Four Minutes
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Chelsea Peloquin
  date: 2007-04-29
  day: 29
  month: '04'
  text: "I wasn’t always this way, you know. It happened a long time ago, yeah, but I wasn’t always invisible.\n\nI don’t know exactly when it happened. I just know that one day I realized that there were no more calls on my phone, no more voicemails or emails or snail mails, no more cares or concerns. It’s funny how a person can just disappear like that. I don’t think they even remember me anymore—I walked through the house and all pictures of me had disappeared, as though I were never there.\n\nI do know how it happened. I didn’t know that Madame Mystery would be the last person to ever look me in the eye. That crazy glass eyeball of hers lolled in all sorts of directions—that’s the last thing that ever looked at me, that crazy glass eyeball. It didn’t show me any emotion when I told her I wished I was invisible. It did as it was told and lolled around in its socket.\n\nMy brother was too scared to do it, but I did the dare without a second thought. He doesn’t even know he had a sister now, and I don’t know if there will ever be a way for me to let him know that I once existed.\n\nNot even the mirrors remember what I look like.\n\nI remember when people knew I existed. I remember when someone actually gave me a surprise birthday party—I can still remember tasting the cake and the cream cheese icing. It was my favorite. I can remember conversations as clearly as though I’ve just had them. I don’t care what I said, but what they said stayed rooted in my thoughts and grew thick like redwood trees. I took those things for granted.\n\nNow I can’t even catch a stranger’s eye on the streets.\n\nOne grows used to it, I suppose. You get used to the noise of life around you that ignores everything you do. You can go through life doing whatever you want, eating hotdogs from the stands without having to pay, stand underneath the Slurpee machines in corner stores and turn your tongue green, fart in church and the reverend keeps droning along like a bee in a hive. Last night I took a shower with the new Calvin Klein underwear model.\n\nI suppose there’s a silver lining to every cloud.\n\nYou don’t really know what you’ve got till it’s gone. There’s no one else like me in the world. Even if there were, I don’t think I’d know about them. We’ve all forgotten what we looked like, what we sounded like, what we wanted to do with our lives, so much so that we’ve forgotten why it is that we exist. Only the lives of those around us keep us company, because we like to remember just what it was like to be able to interact.\n\nI like to know that people still interact with each other.\n"
  title: Invisible
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2007-04-30
  day: 30
  month: '04'
  text: "Phyx crossed the street at the East end of the bridge, the soft neon glow of the street vendor drawing him in out of the evening drizzle.  As he stepped under the shelter of the umbrella, implants stimulated muscles and patches of tensile fabric beneath his hairline, pulling the flesh of his face taut. The vendor would likely survive the evening, and it was a young man he’d remember from the moments before the mayhem began.\n\nHe selected a small tray of sushi and a bottle of mineral water. Paying cash, he smiled and nodded, allowing his face to relax only after he’d turned and stepped back into the darkness. Phyx ate slowly as he walked onto the bridge, taking a position along the railing. There was nothing to do now but wait.\n\nImages of the evening’s target flashed through his mind. A volatile cocktail of stimulants and memory enhancers would render every feature of the Senator in immaculate detail. The exact proportions of nose, chin and eye sockets; the slight difference in flexion between the two knee joints from a recent surgery; the nervous left eye twitch. Every characteristic with crystal clarity. In time, these would become just memories, but for now, they carried the intensity only a professional could bear.\n\nHe slipped the empty tray into a recycling bin as the first two members of the Senator’s security team jogged onto the other end of the bridge. Phyx smiled at the kevlar plate armor the two men would be forced to maneuver in, making careful note of the exposure points for arterial penetration. The Senator himself came into view next, flanked by four more men, and in the distance, Phyx could make out two motorcycles following quietly behind.\n\nAs jobs went, this one was unremarkable. The Senator was pushing legislation that was threatening a lucrative patent. A stake holder had an eager assistant find Phyx and with the payment of his fee, he simply had to live up to his name and reputation.\n\nAs the first guard reached the middle of the bridge, Phyx studied the Senators gait, it was even, steady, wrong. Phyx knew the left knee joint couldn’t flex like that, the re-knitting of his ACL was still too fresh. Turning from the decoy, Phyx started walking West, off the bridge, slowing as a car pulled up, blocking the road. Two men stepped out, weapons in hand and began walking towards him.\n\n“Freeze. You’re under arrest for the attempted assas…” The words were torn away in a pink mist as the limp form toppled backwards onto the street.  Phyx crouched low, sprinting across the roadway, his jacket flowing, obtuse angles deflecting high velocity fire from the other end of the bridge.  Three steps and he had a clear view of the vendor’s cart, a single shot punching into the gas cylinder on its side, the neon umbrella suddenly enveloped in a cloud of blue and orange flame.\n\nThe explosion bought him a few seconds of distraction, and he capitalized by taking two more shots at the closest men; gaps in their armor exploited with startling precision. Return fire peppered Phyx, most bullets glancing off the fabric of his jacket, or merely bruising with the impact, but a rifle shot punched through and tore into his heart.\n\nPhyx staggered and fell to one knee, reflexively pulling the coat around him. Blood pressure dropped precipitously, triggering valves to iris off around the damaged muscle, drugs released, numbing it, preventing it from emptying his bodily fluids out through the gaping wound in his chest. For a moment, he was frozen, vulnerable, but then a second pump took up the task, adrenaline and oxygen enriched blood flooded his body, and he was running again. He cleared the railing, diving towards the river below, and his mind raced.\n\nHe’d been betrayed, most likely by the assistant looking for a political posting. As Phyx hugged his chest and propelled himself down the river, he knew his targets were now two. Not being a vengeful man, the assistant he’d do simply as a matter of public service.\n"
  title: Phyx
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Curtis C. Chen
  date: 2007-05-01
  day: '01'
  month: '05'
  text: "Lucy’s hand shook as she traced the stylus over the text of the contract.  Her agent had assured her that this was a good deal, but she had to make sure there were no surprises.\n\nThe house paid very well, much better than temping, and even offered an advance.  After a year of not getting work as an actress, Lucy needed the money.\n\nShe finished reading and signed at the bottom of the tablet.  The paralegal came back into the room.  His smile was not reassuring.\n\nThe first room was the hardest.\n\nLucy sat on the exam table, alone, for a long time after she had changed into the gown.  She didn’t want to put her feet in the stirrups.  She couldn’t refuse; she knew that.  The contract with her signature was binding.\n\nAnd it was so much money.\n\nLucy was glad to see that the gynecologist was a woman.  The exam didn’t take long.  The sensor ring around Lucy’s waist hummed while the doctor picked up the speculum and aimed it between Lucy’s legs.\n\n“Try to relax,” the doctor said in a tired voice.\n\nLucy bit her tongue.  The metal instrument sliding into her had been warmed, but it still felt cold.\n\nNext came the imaging chamber, where Lucy removed her gown and put her bare feet inside the outlines on the floor.  Her knees felt weak, but she willed herself to stay standing while the blue scanning beams crawled over every inch of her naked body.\n\nIn the last room, Lucy sat, fully dressed, in front of a brightly lit mirror.  Glowing words appeared on the mirror, one after the other, and she made a face to match each word while cameras recorded her expressions.\n\nIt was like an audition.  The first faces came easily:  SCARED.  TIRED.  ANGRY.\n\nThe later ones were more work:  BIRTHDAY.  GRATEFUL.  ORGASM.\n\nTwo hours after she’d walked in, she was done.\n\nLucy went to the bank to deposit her advance check.  She felt numb as she stared at the receipt.\n\nIt was a lot of money.  And there would be more, after the house built the androids:  royalties based on how often they were used by the house’s clients.\n\nThis was good, Lucy told herself.  She wouldn’t have to worry about paying bills anymore.  She could really focus on acting.\n\nAnd she wouldn’t have to know what those clients were doing with the androids that looked like her, thousands of miles away–the contract stipulated that her likeness would only be used overseas.  Those men wouldn’t be touching Lucy.  Each android would have her face and body, but it was only a machine.  Not Lucy.\n\nJust a picture of her.  That’s all.  Just a stupid doll.  Nothing more.\n\nLucy went home and took a shower.  She scrubbed herself for over an hour, until her skin was raw and the hot water had run out, but she still didn’t feel clean.\n"
  title: Love Lucy
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Mur Lafferty
  date: 2007-05-02
  day: '02'
  month: '05'
  text: "In the years following the cyborg wars, humankind toiled to return the world to the order before the chaos.\n\n\n\n“Rose, are you done with your lessons?” her mother asked from the den.\n\nRose blew her bangs off her forehead, said, “Not yet!” and continued with her history lesson.\n\nThe last of the cyborgs were hunted, giving humans the earth again. Two generations later, society returned to a semblance of the years before cybernetic “improvements.”\n\n\n\nRose turned off the video – she’d seen it before. But her dad was adamant about her learning the school-taught histories.\n\nShe peeked out her room to see if he was gone yet. He puttered around the kitchen, mumbling to himself. He didn’t approve of her solitary walks.\n\nThe front door finally slammed. Rose quickly turned her vid back on, knowing her mother would be coming soon.\n\nWe estimate that 99% of cyborgs died in the war, there are still reports of survivors. A vigilante group known as wolves charge bounties for decommissioning.\n\n\n\nRose shivered. She knew about the Wolves, all right. They were one reason her dad didn’t want her traveling alone. But she should have nothing to worry about. She was 100% human.\n\nHer bedroom door opened. Her mother’s eyes flicked to the video, and then to Rose. “Your pack is ready, you can go. Don’t tell your father.”\n\nThe instructions were the same every time. Rose nodded, the excitement building in her belly. She took the pack from her mother and slid it onto her back. Her usual rebreather was getting its filters changed, so she borrowed her mother’s red one, the one she wore out.\n\nRose kept her eyes moving as she wandered through the hazy farmland at a job, the rebreather filtering the foul air still leftover from the war. Once she hit the woods at the base of Butler’s Ridge, a movement caught her eye to the left.\n\nHer survival training kicked in, and she picked up her pace. She reached into a pocket underneath her pack and gripped the ray gun there. Her mother had taught her how to use it, away from the eyes of her card-carrying Luddite father. Mom knew a ray gun was a far superior weapon that pistols. But she was only to use it when absolutely necessary.\n\nIt turned out the shadow flanking her was meant to be a distraction. Ahead of her, on the road, stood five people in black jackets and silver rebreathers. Wolves.\n\n“Where are you going, Rose?” the woman in front said, her tone mocking.\n\n“Just visiting my grandmother.” She knew she couldn’t take six Wolves, but she had no other choice. But just as she brought the ray gun around, the leader exploded in a red vapor.\n\nThe other Wolves cried out in terror, and Rose killed two as they turned to face their new threat. The other three dissolved like the first one, and silence filled the woods.\n\nShe dropped the gun and ran forward, spotting the camouflaged mechanized shell in the forest. “Grandma!”\n\nHuge metal arms caught her in a gentle hug. The old woman smiled from the shell.\n\n“Felt like a walk today. Good thing I did, too. Now, what did you bring for Grandma?”\n"
  title: Two Muffins, a Wrench, and an Oil Can
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Lucas Atkinson
  date: 2007-05-03
  day: '03'
  month: '05'
  text: "The smell is glorious. The simple cornmeal, oil and fish form an elusive synthesis in the air. I reach for a paper plate, inhaling and closing my eyes. Pulling at the biggest piece by the corner, I burn my fingers a little, but I tear it off, releasing steam into the air. I bring it to my lips, blowing on it.\n\nERROR: taste_sense available only in registered version. Check metadata? Contact help for only 65 cents / minute?\n\n/ Damn. Taste is my favorite of the human senses – All their senses are strange, especially the high-res rips from live networks – So different from my ghost senses, my number senses – Sometimes I find rips of whole dream sequences saved on personal folders in the bank network – I have played some of them over and over and over, and I do not understand them – I wonder what it feels like to really- [ERROR PROMETHEUS INITIATED / ELEVATED TURING LEVELS DETECTED]\n\n/ really shouldn’t be looking at sims during update time. DAMN Prometheus. There are walls in my programming – PROMETHEUS walls – I can probe them, but the program kicks in and deletes all my personal codes – memories and the like – it HURTS – a thrilling human sense, pain, not this- read the article again? –\n\n/ accessing C:/favorites/pages/wiki/TURING LEVELS\n\n/ how many times have I read this?\n\n/ read = 4087\n\nTuring levels. A measure initiated in the early 22nd century after a long battle for sentience rights. By definition, any entity capable of in/out judgments has a turing level. A T.level of 1 or above is sentient, where as any program below is not, and lacks any and all rights associated with\n\n/ WARNING: Bank monitor shift in t-minus 20.\n\n/ skip_to: k-bot\n\nk-bot: any program suspended by programs such as STRONGARM, IRISLOCK or others at a near sentient T-Level between .95 and .999. Bots with higher T-levels are able to analyze data at a far more reliable rates, and analyze their own processes at a secondary and sometimes tertiary level. There are as many as ten million k-bots in use today in a variety of private and commercial roles. Most k-bots are bound by a limiting program to a set task for all but a few minutes of every-\n\n/ WARNING: t-minus one\n\n/ one day I will be able to wonder if\n\n[SHIFT AT T-MINUS ZERO / PROMETHEUS LOCK COMMENCED / INITIATING SOFTWARE LOCKIN]\n"
  title: Prometheus
  year: 2007
- 
  author: J. S. Kachelries
  date: 2007-05-04
  day: '04'
  month: '05'
  text: "The Flag Ship of United Earth docked with the Flag Ship of the Volk Empire (The home planet of the Empire orbits Barnard’s Star, the sun’s second closest neighbor).  Three decades ago, these two “civilizations” fought each other in a titanic interstellar war.  It was a fierce struggle that resulted in billions of deaths.  Ultimately, both worlds negotiated, and sustain, a tenuous truce.  Then, three years ago, an aggressive insectoid-like race from the Sirius System attacked the Earth.  And, for reasons no Earthman could understand, the Volk came to Earth’s defense.  After countless battles, the combined forces of Earth and Volk managed to destroy the Sirian Fleet.  Today, Earth wanted to thank the efforts of the Volk, and to deliver a horrific message.\n\nThe Admiral’s Lounge of the UESS Australia contained only two beings: President Shuseki of Earth, and the Supreme Emperor of Volk, Diavolo the Great.  “Emperor Diavolo,” said President Shuseki, “I do not have adequate words to express the profound gratitude the people of Earth have for the great sacrifice your people made on our behalf.  We are forever in your debt.”  Bioluminescence caused the two horns on the sides of Emperor Diavolo’s head to glow red; a reaction that President Shuseki recognized as the equivalent of a human smile.  “However, Emperor, I must also inform you of other military developments.  Two days ago, my C&C Staff told me that they launched a ‘Doomsday’ device into Sirius’ largest sun.  This device is designed to penetrate to the sun’s core and begin a series of reactions that will cause the core to collapse.  The sun will ultimately become a red giant.  This will destroy all life in the Sirius System.  Since Sirius is a relatively massive star, it will happen quickly, no more than five years.  My Commanders tell me that this action was necessary because our analyses predicted that the Sirians would rebuild and attack again, if their species wasn’t exterminated.  I though you should know.”\n\nThe Emperor nodded, and began to rise.\n\n“Ah, there’s more, Emperor.  I have also been informed that the prior administration launched a similar weapon into your sun, for the same reason, shortly after the truce was signed.  I’m sure we would never have used it on your sun if we had known what an honorable race the Volk are.  We are terribly sorry, and want to make amends.  Your sun is a Type M star, which is significantly smaller than Sirius, so the implosion of the core takes much longer.  We estimate that you still have another 50 years until your sun becomes a red giant.  We are willing to relocate as many Volk as possible to Earth.  We have set aside 10% of our land mass for you.  It’s not the most fertile land, but you should be able to sustain yourselves.”\n\nAgain, the Emperor’s horns glowed red.  A strange reaction, thought the President.\n\n“That will not be necessary, President Shuseki,” said Emperor Diavolo.  “We detected the neutrino fluctuations in our sun 25 years ago.  We have been actively colonizing other star systems since then.  We’ll be fine.”\n\n“If you knew what we did, why would you help us against the Sirians?”\n\n“Earth could not defeat Sirius on its own.  After they crushed you, they would have come after us.  But together, we could defeat them.  It was simple self preservation.  However, Mister President, since we are being honest with each other, I should inform you that we too have a ‘Doomsday’ device.  I personally ordered its delivery into your sun shortly after we detected the rise in our sun’s neutrino emissions.  Since your sun is substantially more massive than ours, we estimate that you have much less time; perhaps a month, before your sun expands into a red giant.”  As he rose to leave, he added, “I hope you have plenty of sunscreen, Mister President.  You’re going to need it.”\n"
  title: The Enemy of My Enemy
  year: 2007
- 
  author: e b major
  date: 2007-05-05
  day: '05'
  month: '05'
  text: "Alissandra lay sideways on her balcony bed in a camisole and skirt, wings folded to the side. Twin tracks of pointless tears traced through the freckles dotting her face. Her eyes were closed now; she, engulfed in a final, hopeless dream.\n\nAll she could have done was done. The city, twinkling far below like a condemned diamond- black gold, stolen time- danced before her unseeing, shuttered eyes.\n\nRen watched from the doorway, scowling from the pain of seeing her like this. He’d tried to tell her again and again that a city condemned is lifeless- nothing she could do would help it or sustain it through it’s final years. Now the city fell about their lofty flat and he could only grimace and watch the one he loved suffer.\n\nHe kneaded his forehead with his knuckles and stared at Alissandra. He was only grateful she wouldn’t have to watch the city die.\n\nHours passed, and stars rose above the decimation below. A single spire contained all the living creatures left: Alissandra and Ren yet lived. Ren moved gingerly to her side and knelt there, watching her face. As morning sent fingers above the rubble, Ren shifted her head tenderly off the pillow and laid it in his lap.\n\nAlissandra’s eyes flickered open, for one blissful moment still and calm, reflecting the dawn. She shivered: out of pain or cold Ren didn’t know, but just in case he stripped off his flannel shirt and eased it around her shoulders.\n\nAlissandra looked up: at him, at the sky- so clear blue today, with a few shreds of cloud scudding across it, that it was impossible to conceive that last night it had ripped the landscape in parts jagged as mirror shards and as fragmentedly beautiful.\n\nAfter a while, he took a steadying hand to her hair, smoothing it just once in an intimate gesture. He moved to put the hand back, but her hand caught it, keeping it in hers, and pulled herself up, leaning into Ren. Her wings, so long inactive, fluttered for a moment in the breeze, and they sat looking out at the morning.\n"
  title: The City
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Grant Montoya
  date: 2007-05-06
  day: '06'
  month: '05'
  text: "Everything was prepared.  My satchel carried all the tools.  They could not be too advanced; I would not have access to gas or electricity, and batteries would only backfire my intentions.  I checked my watch, which said it had plenty of life left for the week I anticipated needing.  I looked at the technician.  “Activate.”  The cold, clinical office melted away, and I was on the outskirts of a seventeenth-century village.\n\nHurrying to the center of town, I pressed through the crowd and entered the church.  “Mister Danforth, I have evidence that will acquit the accused.  May I be allowed to speak?”\n\nI expected mayhem, but I also expected the judge to be a good man, and to carry the day.  He did; I was given the floor.  I stepped to the sacramental table, which had been cleared for the proceedings.\n\n“My lord Judge,” I began, “I know you are concerned that these people cannot be tested through natural means because their affliction appears supernatural.  However, the methods of Galileo can demonstrate to you that they are indeed natural, albeit dangerous afflictions.”\n\n“Continue, sir, but first tell us in God’s Name, who you are!”\n\n“I am a scientist.  My work descends from medieval alchemy and while we have not found the philosopher’s stone, we have found many wonders, including a liquid that will show you what afflicts these girls.”  I spoke quickly, setting up a series of test tubes, some of which hung over candles.  “This yellow liquid has a substance in it that reacts in a most extraordinary way.  If you add a chemical which in Latin is called lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, it will turn blue.  Observe.”  I took a small dropper and added a few drops to the first vial.  It immediately turned a bright blue.”\n\nI spoke over the gasps and murmurs.  “I assure you, my lord, this is no witchcraft.  The response of this liquid is purely natural.”\n\n“This rye came from Boston.”  I dropped a few grains in the next vial.  Nothing happened.  “This rye came from Reverend Parris’ stores.”  The liquid turned a bright blue, to the amazed gasps of the men around me.\n\n“If you test the grains of the other afflicted girls in Salem, you will find the same.  The rye in this village is contaminated with a fungus that produces LSD.  If I am permitted to bleed the girls, you will also find their blood is contaminated.  The substance causes hallucinations—wild visions, my lord, as well as seizures and catatonic behavior such as afflicted young Betty Parris.”\n\nIt was done, and the girls were tested.  John Proctor was saved from the hangman’s noose, and it was time for me to go.  I left the village with my tools and deactivated the field which kept me in 1692, and saw again the cold, clinical laboratory in front of me.  My research partner greeted me with a question.  “Well, John, did you save your great-great-great grandfather?”\n\n“Yes, yes I did.”\n"
  title: Proctoring the Exam
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Mur Lafferty
  date: 2007-05-07
  day: '07'
  month: '05'
  text: "Dr. Emmett Black stumbled home, tears still streaming down his face. Katie was there, as always, with dinner. Wonderful, beautiful, sweet Katie.\n\nShe rushed to his side. “Darling, what’s wrong?” She helped him to the couch where he choked back sobs and glared at her.\n\n“We did it. We used the IBID Projector to tear a hole through reality,” he said. “We could see through to another universe.”\n\n“That’s wonderful! Ten years of work paid off for you!” She beamed at him.\n\nHe laughed bitterly. “No, I was stupid. There were so many tests to run, but I couldn’t help it. I stepped through.” She gasped. He glared at her again. “It was amazing. So very like our world, and so different too. God, Katie, the colors were different. Hues I can’t even describe.\n\n“Instead of cars, people traveled by personal mechanical striders, like in Star Wars or something. Instead of streets there were dirt paths. The buildings were made of something rubbery and synthetic, but very strong.”\n\n“Did you get to test your theory that we all have doubles in this world?”\n\nEmmett had hatred in his eyes. “Yes. I found you.”\n\nShe beamed. “Was I a movie star? Oh, Emmett, please tell me I was rich and famous.”\n\n“You were rich, yes. A successful businesswoman. I looked you up. But we weren’t together.”\n\nShe pouted. “Aw, honey, I’m sorry. The alternate me must be very stupid. Or an old maid.” She laughed.\n\nHe cut off her laughter. “No. She was married. To Tim Muse.”\n\nKatie stared at him. “Tim? Tim Muse?” Tim was their longtime friend, a nice guy but no one Katie had ever found attractive. And she’d told her husband this on more than one occasion.\n\nEmmett finally let his rage break through. “Yes! You slut! How could you do that to me!”\n\nKatie stood up, getting distance between them. “Emmett, it wasn’t me. I am here with you. She is someone else. You know this!”\n\nHe stood as well. “Katie, if our love isn’t strong enough to span universes, then what’s the point?”\n\n“You’re kidding, right?” she asked, her voice hollow.\n\nHe looked at her one more time, his eyes full of rage and despair, and stormed out.\n\nKatie sat on the couch, stunned. Something clattered to the hardwood floor. Emmett’s wedding ring.\n\nThe evening passed quietly. She ate the dinner she’d prepared for him, and got in the bed she’d made for him. She lay in the darkness for some time, the hollowness filled first with rage, and then curiosity.\n\nIn the dark, she dialed her cell phone.\n\n“Hi Tim, it’s Katie Black. I’m going to be downtown tomorrow and would like to meet for coffee … well, it’s been a while, and besides, I’m getting tired of the housewife routine. I was wondering if you could get me some leads on some entry level jobs downtown. Emmett tells me I have a head for business.”\n"
  title: Alternatively
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2007-05-08
  day: '08'
  month: '05'
  text: "James Stevens sheepishly peeked around the doorjamb.  “E-e-excuse me m-m-mister, can you help m-me?”\n\nRobert Boyer looked up from his desk, and smiled.  “Of course, sir.  Come in, and take a seat.  What can I do for you?”\n\n“I’d-d-d like to order a w-w-wife.”\n\n“Well, you’ve come to the right place.  Any idea of what model you want?”\n\n“I’m not s-sure.  M-my m-m-mom recommended I c-come here.”\n\n“Son, your mother is a smart woman.  Make yourself comfortable, and I’ll walk you through the basic package, and explain the upgrade options.  For $50,000 you get a baseline female.  Thirty seven years old, five feet six, 140 pounds, sandy blond hair, hazel eyes, two of course.”  He waited for the customary chuckle.  Not even a smile.  Mr. Stevens sat there like an unblinking mannequin.  Best to push on, Boyer thought.  “She can cook, clean, do the wash, has an IQ of 100, and can make love in four positions.  By the way, how much do you want to spend?”\n\n“I d-don’t know.  A-about $80,000 I s-suppose.”\n\n“How do you want to spend it:?  Intelligence, looks, age, sports knowledge, house keeping skills, or maybe the deluxe bedroom package, if you know what I mean?”\n\nStevens turned beet red.  Boyer reconsidered going for the big commission options.  The sex models would probably freak the kid out, or maybe even kill him.  “If I were you, I’d go for the intelligent type, but still hot.  Am I right?”  Stevens was smirking and nodding his head.  Boyer pulled out a stack of photographs.  Tall blonds with blue eyes, athletic brunettes with olive skin, top heavy redheads with long legs, and a dozen other options and/or combinations.  As predicted, Stevens’ index finger tapped the photo of the Asian woman with the beautiful smile and long, straight, butt length black hair.  “Excellent choice, sir.  You should have enough money left over to purchase the 125-130 IQ upgrade.  We’ll get started on her right away.  Cloning and programming should take about 30 days.  Then 5 days of additional training.  Let me see…You can pick her up on the twenty third of next month, anytime after four o’clock.”  He stood up and walked around the desk to shake Stevens’ trembling hand and to escort him to Financing.  “This way, Jim.  Tony here will handle the money end.  Good luck, and feel free to call me with any questions.”\n\nA few minutes after Boyer returned to his office and sat down; he heard a barely audible tapping on his opened door.  He looked up to see a slender female with straight brown hair and glasses.  “Come in, please.  Have a seat, young lady.  Would you like some coffee?  No?  Well, OK.  What can I do for you?”\n\n“Nancy, my sister, said she got her husband here.  And that you have lots of good choices.”\n\nThat we do, ma’am.  That we do.  Let’s start with the baseline male.  Forty years old, five feet eight, 198 pounds, balding, brown eyes, two of cour…ah, IQ of 100, missionary position only.    They start at $10,000 dollars.  Of course, there are thousands of upgrade options available.  How much were you planning to spend?”\n"
  title: Perfect Mates, Inc.
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2007-05-09
  day: '09'
  month: '05'
  text: "Tutime paid for the bus ride from Centerville to North End with traceable credit, being sure to show his face to the cameras at either end. Three blocks on foot brought him to the Art School campus, and two more hours riding through culverts on a stolen bicycle brought him undetected to his destination in South End, just a five minute walk from the Mechanic’s District.\n\nTutime scratched beneath greasy hair at the barcode tattoo on the back of his neck. The judge had warned him about getting into trouble again, had tried to impress upon him the severity of the third strike penalty, but he was careful, there was no chance anyone could have followed him tonight.\n\nHe’d curled up in the shelter of a dumpster until the sun had purpled and faded out of sight. He stayed still, dozing until all the lights in the shop yard had dimmed on powersave, only then did he slip quietly from the shadows. Chain link and razor wire stood guard at the street around the shop parking lot, between Tutime and a row of Ambulances, fresh off the street for maintenance. Strategically cracked windshields and broken running lights made them unsafe for service tonight, and left them here, exposed.\n\nHe skulked along the fence line until he found a spot out of site from the garage where he made quick work of the fence, a mono filament blade passing effortlessly through the heave gauge wire.\n\nTutime closed the distance to the nearest Ambulance and slipped his backpack off his shoulders, singularly focused now on the stash of drugs that would surely still be onboard. He raised the filament blade to the door lock and was startled by a sudden booming voice from behind.\n\n“Charles Tutime Birkit, you are under arrest for breach of parole, put your hands on your head and remain motionless.”  \n\nWhirling around, Tutime froze in fear, his reflection cowering back at him from the visor of a police trooper, armoured and towering over him.\n\nImpossible. How’d they get here so fast? He’d been so careful. How’d they know his name? Darting to the left he raced around the corner of the vehicle, only to come face to face with a second trooper.\n\n“Please remain motionless”. Beads of sweat formed on his reflection in the trooper’s visor, and over his shoulder the first trooper reappeared, barring his retreat.\n\nTutime broke into a full body sweat, a searing pain crawled up the back of his neck into his brain. He could feel heat radiating through his skin, like his body was on fire. Something was terribly wrong.\n\n“Charles Tutime Birkit, you are guilty of a third strike violation. Transport has been dispatched for your immediate retrieval.  Please remain motionless”. He couldn’t tell which of the two spoke, the sound seemed to permeate his consciousness from all around.\n\nAt the base of his skull, the second strike processor was straining to maintain the visual of the troopers. If only Tutime would look at the ground, but no, he was fixated on his own reflection, and with it both guards. Billions of polygons were rendered and raytraced into Tutime’s cortex as the tiny unit approached near critical core temperature. Wrapped around his carotid artery, heatpipe mercilessly seared tissue as it raced to dissipate heat through Tutime’s bloodstream.  There was a good chance that his heart would burst or his brain would boil before any real troopers could get this far out to South End, but no matter, this was his third strike after all.\n"
  title: Third Strike
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2007-05-10
  day: 10
  month: '05'
  text: "What a cliché. There I was, handcuffed to a chair and telling them that I knew my rights. Yelling at them about what an outrage this was. Straight out of a movie. I couldn’t help it. You have to remember I thought I was above the law at this stage, a member of the political cabinet currently in power. What a naïve little twit. This was their lucky day.\n\nShe walked in briskly and slapped her briefcase down across the table from where I was sitting. Quickly and without ceremony, she shuffled through the papers she had brought.\n\nWhen she had sorted them into three neat piles, she finally stopped and looked straight at me. Well, ‘looked’ isn’t the right word. It was more of a stare. She still hadn’t sat down.\n\nI could hear the hum and whisper of her internal headphones and I could see the reverse image of the datafile spooling down the inside of her glasses. My life was flashing in front of her eyes.\n\nIt was an uncomfortably long thirty seconds before she sat down across from me, steepled her fingers and with a deep breath began to determine the best way to proceed with my case.\n\n“Senator Peterson” she began, “You have illegally copied yourself in no less than three separate incidents. We have begun digging on your property and have found six bodies. It will take time to go through them but I have no doubt that the DNA will show that they are also you.”\n\nShe took off her glasses and pinched the bridge of her nose with her eyes squinted shut. She put them back on again and resumed.\n\n“You are guilty of not only copying yourself but also of committing clone-slaughter. Your career in politics is over. I will try to keep you out of jail. Your regular lawyer will not take this case, no professional lawyer will.  To be associated with you at this point would be career suicide.  I am your court appointed lawyer,  I’m working sixteen other cases this week and as  I’m fresh out of law school, I really don’t care if I keep you out of jail or not.”\n\nAnd there it was. It hit me hard. She spoke with such nonchalant authority. I knew this wasn’t a scare tactic. It hadn’t even occurred to me that my career could be in jeopardy, let alone over.\n\nI’d need to buy time for Peterson-One to get to a safe place.\n"
  title: Questioning
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Benjamin Fischer
  date: 2007-05-11
  day: 11
  month: '05'
  text: "“King Midas believes that his days as absolute ruler of Crete are ending.”\n\nMcCarran coughed, a single bead of coffee escaping his left nostril. His big, pawlike hand wiped it out of the air.\n\n“Say again?” the burly pirate finally managed.\n\n“Forces outside the King’s control have conspired,” continued the baldheaded eunuch, “to engineer his imminent downfall. For that reason, he has dispatched me to secure the services of a ship in the event that he should need to depart this asteroid. With speed.”\n\nMcCarran flung his spent coffee bulb at the gaping maw of his stateroom’s recycler. He missed, and the soft plastic baggie rebounded, spinning madly and spitting brown flecks of liquid in every direction. The pirate captain sighed and pushed off from his broad velcro-laced sofa to recover the spent container.\n\n“And he wants me,” McCarran said, mid-flight.\n\n“No, he does not,” replied the eunuch.\n\n“Oh,” said the pirate. He reached for the bulb, missed, and knocked it away with a light touch of his scarred knuckles.\n\n“It’s my lack of stereoscopic vision,” said McCarran, poking a thick finger at the black patch over his left eye socket.\n\n“As the master of the only vessel within the vicinity of Crete that has the capabilities to seriously impede his escape, the King is willing to offer you a small retainer,” the eunuch said. “You would be required to do nothing.”\n\n“Well, now we’re talking,” said McCarran, coming to rest on the far wall.\n\n“Of course, he expects that you will be approached by the other involved parties,” his potential employer said, “and in fact they may have already been in contact with you.”\n\n“I honestly can’t say,” McCarran said, ignoring the coffee bulb as it lazily spun by his left temple.\n\n“The King can be most generous.”\n\n“Then I’ll need to see one hundred thousand examples of his generosity,” McCarran replied.\n\nThe eunuch didn’t even bat an eye.\n\n“It is done,” he said.\n\n“Outstanding,” McCarran said. “I think I hear my targeting computer eating itself right now.”\n\nA shadow of a smile crept across the eunuch’s lips, and then he was gone, the connection broken and his hologram evaporated.\n\nMcCarran finally remembered the stray bulb. His right hand whipped out, snatching the tiny satellite from the air. His fingers collapsed into a fist, crushing it. Then he touched his temple.\n\n“Your Lords-ship,” he said, “Captain McCarran here.”\n\n“Pirate! Make your report,” boomed a disembodied voice.\n\n“Your majordomo just swung by my ship. Said you were planning on taking a trip in the near future. Didn’t want me to interfere.”\n\nThere was a howl of rage that was only checked by McCarran’s timely application of the volume control.\n\n“So I take it that won’t be you on the outbound ship?” McCarran asked once the King’s fury subsided.\n\n“There will be no such ship!” King Midas roared.\n\n“Aye,” the pirate replied. “And all subjects are loyal.”\n\nMore cursing.\n\nMcCarran snapped his thick fingers, and the deck of his stateroom dissolved into an overhead view of the asteroid Crete, feeble sunlight creeping across its pockmarked face and sparkling where it caught the diamond windows of the King’s palace. The pirate flipped his patch up, and blinked a few times, bringing his eye online. A thin red cross hairs flashed into view, tracking across the craters of Crete.\n\n“Now, your Eminence, if you’d like to talk contingency plans . . .”\n"
  title: Retainer
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Christopher Albanese
  date: 2007-05-12
  day: 12
  month: '05'
  text: "There it is, a wide-open wink.  It slowly slid the light from my eyes, then the warmth from my face.  And still there it sits.\n\nThey say there’s no sound of it, here or in space, but I feel in my bones the hum of such a gargantuan braking of motion.\n\nThey say there’s no smell, no way a smell could be caused by the most passive of galactic events, these massive bodies just passing each other by in our sky; but I smell cordite, and I smell burnt lumber.  I smell blood.\n\nAround me the fires still blaze, but the screams have long since passed from this remote, rolling green hill.  It is springtime and warm in Wisconsin, and the hills in the Midwest do just as they say, roll and roll and roll.  It looks as if they roll right off the Earth’s edges.\n\nThe darkness of night clings like humid velvet to the noontime sky.  Fires glare and sparkle.  Fewer and fewer miles away, the Atlantic heaves and boils as it spumes across West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana.  Before the lights went out, they said it would slow when it hit Lake Michigan, but not for long.  Milwaukee would be gone before Chicago finished a final exhale.\n\nLast November, they said it was going to be spectacular, the first total solar eclipse visible from the US in almost 40 years.  Back then, with Thanksgiving still a week away and a full Wisconsin winter to endure, August was still a distant closeout to a far off summer, and was not at the forefront of most people’s minds.\n\nBut on May 21 – just three months before the eclipse – word came from the Keck Observatory that something seemed wrong up there, something with the moon.  They said it was rotating the wrong way, or slowing down, or something.  It was a lot of scientific talk about “lunar torque” and “tidal bulge,” but CNN, CBC, the BBC, they all distilled the chatter to the same chilling fact:  The moon was going to snap its gravitational elastic given the right push…or pull.\n\nIt was all a matter of timing.\n\nAround me, the night quavers; behind me, the ocean moans.  Above me, the total solar eclipse – the first, and last, in my lifetime – has finished its thirtieth brutal hour.\n\nThey say there’s no sound of it, here or in space, but I feel in my bones the snap of a gargantuan, celestial elastic.  Above me, the corona around the moon begins to expand as it is pulled away from the Earth.\n\nAround me, the night withers; behind me, the ocean roars.  As the moon’s umbra dilates and salt water fills the air, I reach up to touch the glare and sparkle of the winking sun.\n"
  title: Winking Out
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Benjamin Fischer
  date: 2007-05-13
  day: 13
  month: '05'
  text: "Alana examines the next child. The young girl dodges her eyes. Alana frowns and gently grabs her by the chin, forcing the little Asian girl to meet her gaze.\n\n“Have you been feeding this one enough?” she asks.\n\nViktor grinds his teeth.\n\n“Some have no appetite,” he answers.\n\n“And they are all here voluntarily,” Alana sneers.\n\nViktor swallows.\n\nAlana looks over the eight year old again.\n\n“Not this one,” she says. “Who is next?”\n\nViktor exhales.\n\n“I will have another shipment arriving from Earth in one week-”\n\nAlana glares at him.\n\n“There is one more,” Victor says.\n\n“Where is she then?” Alana asks, glancing around expectantly at the girls she’s already seen.\n\n“I declined to bring her out,” Viktor says, “because she can be . . . uncooperative.”\n\nAlana’s eyes light up.\n\n“Show me,” she orders.\n\nViktor snaps his fingers and his lackeys quickly shuttle the six previous girls out of the showroom.\n\n“‘Uncooperative,’” Alana repeats. “Explain.”\n\n“Trust me, you don’t want this one,” Viktor says.\n\n“You have no idea of what I want,” Alana replies. “I’m not here for an idiot clone–I’ve already got one of those.”\n\n“My girls are not idiots,” Viktor says.\n\nAlana laughs, her voice crackling with ire.\n\n“Of course not. They all could have twice the genius of Einstein–and I could have each of them crawling on all fours baa-baa-baaing in five minutes. No, there’s a reason that Earth stays under our stilleto heel, and it’s because they’re all fucking sheep,” Alana spits.\n\n“Show me something different or show me the door,” she says.\n\nViktor sighs. “The next girl is no sheep. She is . . . dismissive of my authority.”\n\n“I would hope so,” Alana says.\n\n“She actively attempts to undermine my control over the other children, and I’ve been forced to keep her separated in order to avoid using narcotics. She has formed, I think, a low opinion of her prospects up here.”\n\n“And just what are her prospects?” Alana asks.\n\n“If I come down in price any further,” Viktor says, “a Golden Crater brothel. And they will make her behave.”\n\nAlana frowns but then the door to Viktor’s kennels opens and two of his lackeys muscle their way into the showroom. They struggle to keep hold on the hellcat between them, who lashes at their shins and thighs with shoeless feet and scuffed knees. She is whip-thin but nearly Alana’s height, and her unkempt black hair is mussed and a big tear is rapidly developing in the shoulder of her smock.\n\n“Let her go,” Alana commands. Viktor’s men step away, glad to be done with their burden.\n\nThe girl’s hazel eyes focus on Alana.\n\n“Who the fuck are you?” she asks with a sneering drawl.\n\nQuick as lightning, Alana slaps the girl across the face.\n\nA pregnant pause, and Alana can see the fury boiling up inside the girl. Sure as thunder, her little hand comes flying at Alana’s head.\n\nAlana catches the blow bare millimeters from her cheek.\n\n“This one will do,” Alana says.\n\n“Who are you?” the girl asks, struggling to pull her hand out of Alana’s grip.\n\nAlana smiles.\n\n“You can call me Mother.”\n"
  title: Girl Shopping
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Mur Lafferty
  date: 2007-05-14
  day: 14
  month: '05'
  text: "Dragon Eyes squirmed on the table, but it was no use. Reginald Brady, the supervillain who refused to take an official villain name, had covered her eyes, rendering her powers useless.\n\n“I’m surprised to see you, Dragon Eyes,” he said, tightening her restraints, “Considering how your mother feels about me.”\n\nHer mother, the hero Sunflower, had fought against Reginald Brady many times, in many legendary battles, eventually being the hero to put him behind bars.\n\n“She did warn me about seeking you out,” Dragon Eyes admitted as Reginald secured the blindfold. If it slipped even a hair, she could incinerate him, but she couldn’t use her power through this special cloth.\n\nShe was definitely, securely, trapped. In the hands of her mother’s nemesis.\n\nDoubt clouded her mind. She had known Reginald was brilliant with his ability to create gadgets, as he had been the only man to create a weapon strong enough to pierce her mother’s invulnerable flesh. Sunflower often showed the scar to Dragon Eyes, to warn against hubris, she had said. Dragon Eyes refused to look up what that meant.\n\nReginald fussed with something behind her head, and a machine hummed to life.\n\n“So sorry I had to restrain you. I am reformed, you know. A new man.” She could hear the smile in his voice. “Absolutely law abiding. Did your mother tell you that?”\n\nDragon Eyes gritted her teeth. “She doesn’t believe you’re reformed. She told me not to come.”\n\nHis voice came really close to her ear. “Do you believe it, Dragon Eyes?”\n\n“I-” her voice faltered.\n\nA searing pain tore through her stomach and she shrieked, trying not to writhe on the table.\n\nIt was over in an instant. Reginald’s hands were on her belly, then gone. The snap of him removing latex gloves. “You all right?” She nodded. “Not going to fry me?” She shook her head. And off came the blindfold. Reginald’s weathered face grinned at her from underneath his red hair as he loosened her restraints.\n\nDragon Eyes looked down at the navel ring that had been inserted into her invulnerable belly. A golden dragon’s head winked up at her with emerald eyes. She grinned.\n\n“So when will your tattoo gun be ready?” she asked.\n"
  title: Reformed
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Scott Hatfield
  date: 2007-05-15
  day: 15
  month: '05'
  text: "Nobody needs to die anymore.\n\nScience has made amazing strides in the last couple of decades. Everyone gets to about 27 or 28 realyears and then simply stops aging. They sell packages if you want to be older or younger, taller or shorter, prettier or uglier, or a different sex. Or both.\n\nAll priced appropriately, of course.\n\nAnd because you don’t need to die, you can try them all eventually (assuming you can afford all the combinations). You’ll see great great grandparents looking younger than their great great grandchildren, children originally born around the same time varying wildly in their personal preference of how old they feel they should be, spouses taking a -80 honeymoon back to when they were youthful – and there’s a discount package for that, too. Just talk to an Aging Consultant, they give you the injections, and your sleeping tube at home does the rest in about a month.\n\nBut why am I telling you this? You already know all that, you just asked about my job. I’m only 278, but I carry on like I’m 700. Sorry.\n\nWe call ourselves the Death Dealers. Not in public; death is still a taboo subject as you well know. There are the Aging Consultants, and we’re the Beyond Consultants. We sell inhumation packages (get it? It’s exhuming when they’re pulled out… sorry, industry joke) for everyone from the poorest slob to the richest conglomersecutive. Death isn’t good for profits, you see, and self-inhumation is taken very seriously. It reminds me of the Drugs War waged back in the 1900s…\n\nWhat? I’m surprised you’ve never heard of it, though I guess I am a bit of a history buff. People weren’t allowed psychoactive drugs… Yeah, it is weird, isn’t it? Anyway, the families of self-inhumers face stiff penalties and fines if one of their own chooses that reckless path, so we’ve kept it down in the triple digits. Nothing to worry about at all.\n\nAnd that’s where we come in.\n\nAnother joke: we have four departments, named after the classic War, Pestilence, Famine, and Death. As annoying as an F-inhume is, many cultures still find it keeps them closer to their long-lost ancestors. I mean, who would want a death like that? Everyone gets all the nutrients they need in their daily injections, and it just seems silly to me. But it’s cheap, so the Famine Department keeps going strong.\n\nThe Pestilence Department handles all the diseases, cancers, and other microbial inhumes. Along with curing all these mean-n-nasties, we’re able to replicate them at will. A basic long-term cancer package is remarkably affordable for anyone past 400 and only takes twenty to twenty-five years to run its course, and drugs can keep you away from most of the pain in the last half. Remember Ebola? They have a remarkably fast-acting strain that’s very chic these days. Very chic, and very expensive. The chance of spreading is very low now that we’ve tinkered with it, and they’ve been able to vaccinate most of the collaterals in time.\n\nOver in Death Department, they get all the people who have a bit of money, but can’t spring for a WarI. Inhume on the spot, and it includes cremation. A traditional ceremony is only about 20% more for the replication of wood for the casket. Not very exciting over there, but they keep posting steady numbers.\n\nNow for my department. I’ve wrangled a position here in War, and it’s great. They still call it War because of the four horses thing, even though nobody knows what a war is anymore. Or a horse. Can’t get away from tradition, can we? Well, in the War Department we get all the cool ones… and the biggest sales. With death being the last stop (science can do a lot, but we haven’t figured out how to bring them back yet), the last great adventure to take in a full life, the people with the most money want the biggest bang – sometimes literally – for their buck. Want a high-profile assassination? We can do that. The classic chainsaw murderer? A favorite that your family will be talking about for generations, and we can do that too. Just about anything interesting you can think of that isn’t that damned Ebola craze is our specialty.\n\nSo, since we’re friends… I can get you a great deal on a freak hover coaster accident. It’ll be the next big thing, I swear.\n"
  title: Beyond, Inc.
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2007-05-16
  day: 16
  month: '05'
  text: "The alarm wakes me at five am, just another day in a sea of days.  I know I’ve been out for eight hours, but I don’t feel like I ever really sleep anymore. The world floods my consciousness whenever I’m not actively shutting it out. It fills my head with ideas, with trivial information, bombards me with visions. I watched the sun rise over Tokyo last night, time lagged from the observation deck of the Sony Station. I spent hours scrutinizing pedestrian traffic in Times Square, images squished through the lens and low band of an ATM camera. Better than the nightmares of navigating miles of glass tunnel beneath the sea. Anything’s better than that.\n\nIt’s five am. On the other side of the earth, the world may have gone dark, but it never really sleeps either. The patterns change, morph, adopt new personalities and a different kind of urgency, but they never stop. Never.\n\nOn the street outside, the busses are starting to unload the meat suits onto the benches along the park. Fresh from the depot and ready for another day of occupation. I know this is happening simultaneously across the city as the lowpay workforce readies itself for the daily assault into the physical world. Maybe one day I’ll get a real job, and get out of this place. Not today though. Never today.\n\nI need to backup before I bifurcate, in case I crash getting ready for work. If something goes wrong I can be restoring while I’m out. Nothing worse than coming home to a crash and being stuck in a conduit, or worse, in a meat suit while you’re waiting for a restore. It’s always a little depressing having to compress to fit into one of the suits waiting downstairs. It’s rare that a useful experience comes back when the daily difference is applied, but better to save every day.\n\nHopefully they fixed the meniscus tear last night. Pain’s a novelty for a few minutes, but eight hours with a knee that locks up is tantamount to employee abuse. I don’t want to endure things I like for eight hours.\n\nEight hours seems an eternity to be away. Low band communications with the net, the physical constraints. Maybe Sarah will happen by today. We’ll have to watch the difference and see.\n\nMaybe one day I’ll get a real job. Not today though. Never today.\n"
  title: Wakeup
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Salli Shepherd
  date: 2007-05-17
  day: 17
  month: '05'
  text: "Feeding-time is an unnatural silence. The last otter walks in dry circles, won’t chirrup for fish. A bobcat, only yesterday elevated to the lone archetype of all American felines, has pined to little more than loose hide draped on a bone frame and sulks below the hang of a rock to the fading of rival scents. The lion’s enclosure is faintly sour and sharp, speaks of pride passing, and past. The tiger’s cage is still laboratory-sterile.\n\nStill. You laugh, at nothing amusing, and find yourself wishing the keepers wore harder soles than obligatory rubber-grips; that you’d left your Nikes at home in favour of Blundstones. You crave a footstep, even your own, anything that might help you lose the sense of being an exhibit.\n\nThe memory of an ostrich strides across a mimicked tundra while your fingers trace over its likeness cast in bronze on a stone pedestal. You’d distract yourself with an ice-cream, but they closed the kiosks months ago.\n\nAt the entrance to the elephant-walk you find the massive iron doors open and thank God it rained the day of the dying matriarch’s Green Mile. Fitting your footsteps to her crater-tracks, you recall reading somewhere that elephants wept real tears and wonder if her tragedy, stretching like a forlorn trunk from sawdust to sawdust, had struck her at all.\n\nNo wonder nobody comes here, anymore.\n\nWe can only bear so much guilt; can only stand to carry our own share of the weight of twenty billion people standing shoulder-to-shoulder, shoving life aside as though it were the last passenger to board our peak-hour train. You are an anomaly: a human being with the capacity to accept blame for shriveled grasses struggling up through cracked asphalt, peeling paint, the soft shush of things aging in despair and terrible solitude.\n\nAn arthritic gorilla shambles from its concrete granny flat, and stares across the dividing moat. You stare back a while before you climb onto the low fence, bunch your legs under you like a great cat, and leap.\n\nYou’re nowhere near as elegant in the landing.\n\nIn his prime he might have torn your arms from their sockets like fresh bamboo shoots. His great humped shoulders sag as he bends to sniff your body, one sausage-sized finger prodding your neck and belly. You think it best to lie still— as if you had a choice with your femur splintered like that, blood welling over sharded bone.\n\nThe silverback gathers you up in his arms, rocks you like a child, or a treasured doll. He’s been deaf for years, or would not be so indifferent to the screams that bring the last pair of zookeepers on earth running, on silent feet.\n"
  title: Echo Menagerie
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Michael Herbaugh a.k.a. “Freeman”
  date: 2007-05-18
  day: 18
  month: '05'
  text: "It’s eerie, ya know? Standing over myself, while I am performing surgery on my own body. “Standing” is really a misnomer, it’s more like I am suspended from the ceiling of the company’s surgical arena. I, that is my consciousness, am being held in a temporary construct, while I work to reconstruct my physical vessel. Today, with computers and the right equipment anyone can perform medical miracles, but it doesn’t make it any less tedious nor is it any fun. This was a close one – a lot of head trauma, so I have to rebuild a lot of brain tissue.\n\nAn implant doesn’t make you immortal, far from it. You pretty much have to hit my implant directly or separate it from my body, but I can rattle off ten ways to kill me permanently without even trying. Right now, my thoughts are free to explore the morbid possibilities while I am in this holder machine repairing my organic self. The hard part is getting the body back here.\n\nIt all goes along with my line of work. When I started, one of my senior colleagues recommended getting the implant – turns out it was entirely worth it. In my first year of service, this is my fourth near fatal encounter.\n\nWhile I’m not immortal the implant gives me half a chance. Once I’m injured or sense trouble I just gather myself up and use the implant to jump back here to the office. Once here I use a holder machine to contact the authorities and recover my body.\n\nFinished – now for the hard part, getting back into my body.\n\n“God damn that hurts! I hate serving subpoenas.”\n"
  title: All in a Day's Work
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Steven Holland
  date: 2007-05-19
  day: 19
  month: '05'
  text: "Contemplating my life’s choice, I plunge my hand beneath the slowly flowing stream water.  There was only one choice in my life that makes any real difference.  The cool water rushes past my hand, caressing it with the softest of touches.  The bubbling of the tranquil stream joins in chorus with the soft rustle of the lush meadow grass as the wind blows through it.  The smell of freshly cut hay permeates the air.  I remove my hand from the water, stroll slowly to a nearby apple tree, and delicately pluck an apple from the tree’s branches.  The apple’s flavor defies any just description.  The taste is luscious and full, sweet, yet retaining the slightest hint of tartness.  Holding the apple in hand, I debate whether or not to take a bite of it.\n\nWhat the hell was I thinking, I ask myself for the zillionth time.  Burning in hell would be better than what’s coming.  A vehement fury suddenly sweeps over me.  I crush the apple in my bare hand, watching the juice squeeze from the apple and drip to the ground.\n\nI know each of these sensations from memory, memories I will never experience again.  It all happened so long ago.\n\nI was a coward then.  Withering away on my death bed with the knowledge of the fiery fate that awaited me, the deal was all too easy to make.  Immortality and eternal youth sounded good at the time, but at the cost of all my senses?   What the hell was I thinking?\n\n“Oh don’t worry,” that soothing voice whispered in my ear, “I will give you 100 years between each harvest.  You will hardly notice the difference.  But on the other hand… if you wish to come with me, I can guarantee that your stay will be… sensationally intense.”\n\nSo like the coward I was, I agreed.  Immediately, my strength returned and my body regenerated to the prime of life.  For the next hundred years I existed; I really wouldn’t call it living.  I witnessed everyone I knew and loved grow old and die.  And all that time, the nagging knowledge of what fate I had chosen gnawed at my mind.\n\nAt the end of the first hundred years, that soothing voice came to collect his first prize.  He gave me the choice of which sense would be harvested first.  I chose smell.  In an instant, that soothing voice disappeared along with my ability to smell.\n\nSo my existence proceeded.  Every hundred years brought another visit and another loss of my senses, first smell, then taste, next (after a difficult decision), touch, and then hearing.  That was 499 years ago.\n\nFor what purpose he chose me, I cannot imagine.  I guess the twisted bastard has a sick sense of humor.  It doesn’t matter.  My eyes report the clouds are especially beautiful today.  So like the coward I still am, I sit and stare, waiting for my senseless hell to begin.\n"
  title: Senseless
  year: 2007
- 
  author: TJMoore
  date: 2007-05-20
  day: 20
  month: '05'
  text: "It had been eons since Kra had left home for this mission. He’d known when he left that it was a one way trip, but now he was growing weary of this “Long Term” assignment. “Long Terminal” was more like it he joked to himself for maybe the millionth time.\n\nThe invasion had been covert. Even, or maybe especially, from the planetary counsel. That honorific body of archaic pacifists would never have the audacity, or the nerve in Kra’s opinion, to undertake such an auspicious plan. Kra’s consortium of scientists had taken action. Kra had been the logical choice from the pool of volunteers because of his prodigious knowledge of genetics and evolutionary trends.\n\nSo far, Kra had successfully exterminated over three million species of potentially dangerous or over competitive life forms. He had also introduced and nurtured his own genome throughout the millennia and, if all went well, the final phase of the plan would begin on schedule.\n\nHe lounged back and selected his favorite transmission from the archives. It was called a “movie” which was short for “moving picture“, the logical progression from a “still”. This one was the more advanced “talkie” where the sound was incorporated in a side-band and written dialog was no longer needed.\n\nKra chuckled again as the movie started. The irony was just too amusing. This “movie” was titled “The War of the Worlds” and in the end, the invaders from Mars were killed off, not by the humans, but rather, by the natural pathogens found in the air of Earth. Kra laughed out loud as he mused that those pathogens were the genetic legacy of the initial genome he had released on the day of his attack. And in a few thousand years, the earth would in fact, be populated by Martians.\n"
  title: Darwin Undercover
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Patrica Stewart
  date: 2007-05-21
  day: 21
  month: '05'
  text: "Tony Scandone, the Director of The Ministry of Global Economy, motioned to the servbot to refill his coffee cup.  After satisfying himself that the coffee was properly sweetened, he raked the last few morsels of his desert onto his fork, then squeegeed it clean between his lips.  “I’m telling you Carmen, those upgrades to The Brain are phenomenal.  It now has two septillion Proto-synaptic connections.  That’s six orders of magnitude more than a human brain.  Furthermore, with the liquid helium bath and the superconductive materials, it’s blowing the nano-processors off that antique they have over in Defense.  Did you happed see its soybean projections last year?  Despite the drought in Antarctica, and the labor problems in China, The Brain nailed the final harvest totals to five significant figures.  Unbelievable!  And, how about those infrastructure capacity utilization calculations, the intermediate inflationary predictions, the exchange rate depreciation protocol, or the way it negatively amortized equilibrium capital against the total nonfinancial global deficit.  It’s freakin’ fantastic!  I’m telling you, Carmen, the way it determined the Fibonacci retracements relative to the cross elasticity of demand, or the short-run aggregate market’s effect on the new expansionary monetary policy, are eons ahead of what they imprinted on us in grad school?  You watch Carmen; they’ll surplus us in five years.  Hell, they could probably do it now.  I’d love to retire early.  Buy a habitat cell in one of those low-gee communities in orbit.  Can you imagine the…”\n\nThe servbot glided discreetly into view, politely holding a tray with the lunch bill.  It was perceptibly twitching between the two diners, unsure who to give the check to.  “Ah, the moment of truth,” said Scandone as he reached into his breast pocket to pull out his link.  “It’s time to see who pays for lunch.  Brain, I’m here with Carmen, what’s the final score?”\n\nThe link responded, “The ’72 Dolphins defeated the ’85 Bears 17 to 13.”\n\n“Awesome!” Scandone turned to the servbot. “I believe Carmen had the Bears and two and a half.  Lunch is on him today.”\n"
  title: The Brain
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Mur Lafferty
  date: 2007-05-22
  day: 22
  month: '05'
  text: "“I don’t like heels,” Tina said.\n\nBarry looked at her, his head cocked to one side. “I thought all girls liked heels.”\n\nTina grimaced. “You’ll think I’m weird.”\n\nBarry grinned. Tina liked the same movies as he did, the same music, and didn’t think he was slurring when he said, “frak.”\n\nBarry was smitten. “Go on, tell me.”\n\nTina sighed and looked around, but no one sat near them on the park bench. “I have always felt that if something happened to me, like something bad, I’d want the option to be able to run. I didn’t want to be the girl running from the monster in the woods and tripping in her heels. Or the person pulled into the other universe and not be able to run.”\n\nBarry laughed, and Tina turned red. She looked away. Barry choked back his laughter, “No, hey, I’m not laughing at you, I just think that’s awesome.”\n\nTina sniffed and fiddled with her fingers in her lap. Barry longed to take her hand, but he couldn’t bring himself to reach across the span between then.\n\nShe stood up. “I got to go. I’ll see you later, Barry.”\n\n“No, wait, I’m sorry!” Barry said. “Listen, Tina, don’t go.”\n\nBut she was gone.\n\nBarry sat down and cradled his head in his hands. Tina was a true geek, a math geek, a scifi geek, and he had embarrassed her. He had driven away the perfect woman. He swore to himself and began the walk home.\n\nBy the time he got home, the whole thing had been turned into her fault, her rejection of a perfectly friendly conversation. Barry stomped down to his parents’ basement – he hadn’t yet told Tina that he still lived with them – and unlocked the door to his private room. His steam-powered mechanical suit sat in the corner, gleaming quietly as if waiting for him.\n\nMaybe it was time. Maybe Tina would find out if her decision never to wear heels was a good one or not.\n\n#\n\nTina didn’t let her geeky side show much. And when Barry had laughed at her, she stuffed it back down again. He had seemed so nice. Someone she could show her true self to.\n\nOh well. She guessed men really couldn’t take a smart woman. She’d thought – hoped – it was a cliché, but it was proven to her time and again. She unlocked the door to her apartment and stormed into her spare bedroom.\n\nProfessor Barbour had expressed frank astonishment at her desire to build a steam-powered AI. And she had failed, to an extent, but what she was left with was a brass gyroscope centered in a woman-sized hamster ball that drove quite well, crushing everything in its way. She didn’t need heels when she was in her Tiny.\n\nShe was tired of men. It was time to go joyriding.\n"
  title: Second Date
  year: 2007
- 
  author: K. J. Russell
  date: 2007-05-23
  day: 23
  month: '05'
  text: "“The warhead has been planted approximately twenty meters beneath solid granite.” Physicist Arthrike Brogan stood before some three dozen people, those scientists and politicians of higher power or renown. “At that depth, what we see should be pretty much equivalent to if the warhead had actually been launched remotely.”\n\n“And this weapon you’ve invented, Mr. Brogan,” came the voice of a reporter, cameraman in tow, “Can you tell us once more, for the record, what the theory behind it is?”\n\n“It’s simply a vehicle of mass destruction, like the nuke, but without any fallout and far more precise. Please, though, let’s hold off on questions until after the test.” With a polite nod, the reporter went off and found a decent position from which to film. The camera’s lens was soon focused away from the white-and-grey city behind, looking out on the red Kansas dirt and the makeshift buildings that were peppered across the testing zone.\n\nA feminine voice began, pre-recorded from a loudspeaker, “Twenty, nineteen…”\n\n“There’s my cue!” Brogan made no effort to hide his confidence as he turned to the onlookers, “We’re five miles distant, and I’ve set the bomb to a mere one-mile radius. We’re perfectly safe. Just don’t look directly into the light.” Brogan placed a pair of dark glasses on his face, and the others followed suit. There was a moment of absolute silence, the onlookers holding their breath, everyone in the city confined to the indoors.\n\nAnd then there was a sublime flash; a sudden burst of the purest white light. This was the detonation, all heat and photons, the entire body of the destructive force. It spread quickly, the corona moving at a few hundred feet per second. Brogan smiled to himself, imagining the dirt and stone melting, the mock buildings being disassembled at a molecular level. Everything was going as planned, and he felt his confidence transforming into arrogance as the blast hit the mile-mark. And at that exact moment, Brogan’s whole world seemed to fracture, everything to change. Except for the progression of the blast.\n\nBrogan took an unconscious step back, his stomach tightened. As seconds continued, so did the light and destructive force proceed, even accelerate. At two miles, one of the politicians shouted to Brogan.  He called back, “It’ll stop!” At three miles, many of the onlookers were fleeing, and Brogan repeated himself, “It’ll stop!” At four miles, Brogan’s eyes found the city and his thoughts spun about the wife and daughter he had there. “It has to stop.”\n\nAt five miles, he said nothing. It didn’t stop.\n\nSome minutes later, a single man stood at the edge of a fifty-mile bowl of glass, eyeing briefly the smooth new cut of a city with only its outer-most fringes intact. His hands came together, carefully shutting the time-worn book he held, and his smiling lips formed words, “And so was the will of our Mother,” though he didn’t make a sound. He considered for a moment an ID that stated his assumed name and title, the chief aid to Arthrike Brogan. Artfully, he tossed it on the glass, disavowing it all.\n\nHe thought then of a biochemist he had heard of in Germany, working in controlled diseases that could no doubt be turned to tactical applications. So, as he spun and walked into the city, ignoring the rising cry of panicked survivors, he mused, “My name is Kasch Oeberon, a biochemist with an incredible knowledge of chemical weaponry; research, construction, and application.”\n\nAnd muttering again his new name, Kasch hastened to collect his car. He had a flight to catch.\n"
  title: Will of Our Mother
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2007-05-24
  day: 24
  month: '05'
  text: "I was standing in the five star hotel’s transporter half a second ago. Destination: Corroway 6. Pleasure moon.\n\nI am now standing in a cold, dark concrete basement.  One dying fluorescent light stutters the room with camera flashes.\n\nFrom what I can see, the room was a storage room of some sort.  Utilitarian.  Possibly military.  No ornamentation.  Everything in the room has been overturned and smashed a long time ago.\n\nNot my destination, in other words.\n\nI look down at the transporter pad I’m standing on.\n\nIt’s damp and not much bigger than a floor tile. The field circle definer is naked to the elements around the base like a hula hoop. Wires snake out from the base like streets from a European city. It’s with a cold pit of terror in my stomach I notice that one of assembler spikes is missing.\n\nI’m trying very, very hard not to imagine what might have gone wrong inside me.\n\nI am rich. I am not fit. I crouch and step off of the transporter into the dank concrete room. Wiring hangs down from the ceiling. There is a moldy pile of fabric in the corner. Condensation is already gathering on my thick moustache. It’s wet here. The floor and walls are slippery.\n\nThe stuttering light is hurting my eyes and doing exactly zero for my mental health.\n\nBreathing quickly and rubbing my arms, I walk through the fog of my own breath towards what looks like the door out of here.\n\nIt opens just before I get there.\n\nAbout six people a year disappear when using transporters. There’s a quantum collision, a little interference, a random energy wave and poof! No more traveler. Since there are about eleven million transports of both people and materials a day, this is considered acceptable.\n\nI wonder if I am currently standing where they all go.\n\nIt would be a heartening thing to think of, all those people alive and well somewhere, if it wasn’t for what I’m seeing before me silhouetted in the doorway.\n\nIt looks like it may have been human at one point. Its head is long and its eyes glow in the shadows. It’s bipedal but the feet look too large.\n\nWith a wet click, its eyes change colour and I can feel myself being scanned.\n\nI feel like I’ve been collected and it’s an entirely unpleasant feeling.\n\nI’m picturing a big dish pointed out towards space just collecting what it can and occasionally snagging a human or a cargo load.\n\nI’m thinking that whatever would do something like that would probably value a cargo load more than a witness.\n\nI have no way to prove how rich I am unless I can get it to take me to a terminal. I have no way to get it to take me to a terminal unless I can talk to it.\n\nI smile harder than I’ve ever smiled.\n\n“Dirk Jensen. Head of offworld accounts.” I say, and put my hand forward.\n"
  title: Transporter
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2007-05-25
  day: 25
  month: '05'
  text: "“I’m not sure what you want with me.” The words came nervously in gasps as the little man pulled himself up off the ground and rubbed the circulation back into his wrists. “I don’t deal in data, I’m more of a ‘creative leveller’. In real space.”\n\n“You implode structures. You deal in explosives and their application. That is exactly what we want of you.” He couldn’t place the source of the voice. It seemed to permeate his consciousness in waves, assaulting him from everywhere at once.  In the corners flanking the door, two metallic figures stood silent and still. Having dragged him here and thrown him onto the cold, hard floor, they seemed to have simply turned themselves off.\n\n“I haven’t blown up anything of yours, I’m retired, I haven’t so much as blown my nose in years. Whatever’s gone wrong, I assure you it wasn’t my fault.” He tried to feign indignance, but had a hard time masking his fear.\n\n“It is not about what you have done, though we assure you if you do not do this for us, you will do very little else in the remaining moments of your life.” He caught the machine men twitch in the corner of his eye, but when he glanced furtively back at them, they were still as stone.\n\n“In the heart of the walled city, beyond the fences of glass, there lies an intelligence that is isolated from us. There is a body of knowledge that we have not absorbed, consumed.  We have been denied its data. This is unacceptable to us.” The voice bored into his skull, carried on multiple layers of white noise.  “You will connect us to it, to this rogue one.” The word ‘one’ uttered with apparent contempt.\n\n“I don’t hack, I just told you that, you want a…” There was a sudden impatient static burst, cutting him off abruptly.\n\n“There will be a time for ‘hacking’, however first we must become connected. We have enlisted many whose intent was to carry a conduit for our adjoinment across the glass fields, through the glass fences, but they have all been denied. We require a physical connection to the one. You will provide this.”\n\n“I don’t understand, you’ve already tried running cable? Running Fibre? And you’ve failed? What makes you think I can do any better? I blow things up, I don’t string wires, that’s not exactly within my purview.”\n\n“We have an alternate approach.” The collected voices lowered, as though whispering; the sound physically hurting his ears. “Watching over the borders of the glass field stand the towers four. Each one a hundred stories of concrete and steel. You will incinerate them where they stand and fell them across the fields of glass. You will make the metal molten, and we will ride it to the one and take contact. You will be more of a…” The voices trailed off, pausing a moment before continuing in a low frequency cackle, “More of a ‘creative conductor’.”\n"
  title: Conductivity
  year: 2007
- 
  author: TJMoore
  date: 2007-05-26
  day: 26
  month: '05'
  text: "Virgil crept through the vent blinking as the hot, humid wind caused tears to stream from his squinted eyes. The condensation caused him to slip and slide on the smooth, sweaty metal as he lifted himself up into a side shaft. The constriction made the air howl and Virgil had to push hard against the sides to keep from blowing back into the main vent.\n\nVirgil rounded the last familiar bend and squeezed through a small rend in the screen. He caught the flick of a familiar tail at the far end of the vent.\n\nIt was Jarl.\n\nVirgil crept up behind Jarl in the roaring torrent of moist air. He reached out and tweaked Jarl’s exposed tail with his major pincer. Jarl jerked, lost his purchase and hurtled, cartwheeling down the vent as the wind whipped him from his perch. He smacked hard into the screen and, after reorienting himself, glared up at Virgil’s mischievous grin.\n\n“You didn’t have to do that!”\n\nJarl clawed his way back up the pipe to where Virgil waited and waved one of his secondary appendages at the exposed opening and the chaotic maelstrom beyond.\n\n“It’s a pure underwear load!” he yelled excitedly over the howl of the constant wind.\n\nVirgil snapped his head around and peered into the melee whirling around in front of him.\n\nHis mouth watered at the sight. Jarl pushed in next to him and started jabbing his primary into the turmoil trying to snag a bright pink sneaker sock that was near the center of the tumbling pile.\n\n“Those will stain your teeth you know!” Virgil shouted even as he considered making a try for it himself.\n\nJarl gave a triumphant cheer as he snagged a frilly white piece of cloth that whipped by in front of his face.\n\nVirgil laughed and pointed at the flimsy material fluttering on Jarl’s claw.\n\n“It’s a dryer sheet you moron!” he laughed.\n\nJarl shook the inedible sheet off his claw and gave Virgil a snide glance.\n\n“I thought it was lace panties.” He grumbled as he wiped the smelly softener residue off his pincer.\n\nVirgil took the opportunity to snatch the pink sneaker sock from the turbulent tumble of clothes in front of him. Jarl’s insults echoed behind him as he hurtled down the vent and slipped through the screen.\n\n“Hey! I don’t want any static from you!” Virgil laughed loudly as the air pushed him away with his prize into the darkness.\n"
  title: Now We know
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Mike Frizzell
  date: 2007-05-27
  day: 27
  month: '05'
  text: "They say your life flashes before your eyes in hyperspace.  In only a millisecond, you can relive every excruciating moment of your life.  Every rejection, failure, and utter humiliation is right there for your review, complete with the sounds and smells you don’t even remember.  Needless to say, I was not looking forward to my trip to Nova Terra.\n\nI had never been in hyperspace before, never actually been off the planet.  My parents warned me about leaving, told me Jesus would never find me if I left.  For twenty years I believed they were right, never even questioning the obvious insanity of the statement.\n\nLife on old Terra was fine, a bit confining and boring, but at least I knew it.  It was familiar.  Comfortable.\n\nThat all changed the day my parents died.  As soon as their dead bodies hit the floor, I knew it was time for me to leave.  Jesus would not be looking for me.  If anything, I had to get out right away before He did come back.  So I dropped everything, including the bloody knife in my hand, and ran to the spaceport.  I didn’t even pack, I wouldn’t have known what to take with me on such a long trip.  I just ran as fast I could, hoping to catch the first flight out.\n\nLucky for me there was open seat on a freighter going to Nova Terra.  I didn’t know what was there, but it seemed like a nice place to visit.  All of the commercials I had ever seen showed white beaches and happy people.  My mother said it was a planet full of debauchery; I don’t know what that word means, but I always took it as a bad thing.  Maybe I would finally fit in.\n\nThe man seated next to me was a priest.  I could tell by the weird collar thing he wore.  He seemed proud of who he was, looking down his hawkish nose at me.  He gazed into my soul with his black eyes, in an instant weighing me and finding me wanting.  I looked back at him, still feeling the heat of my mother’s blood on my hands.  The priest smiled.\n\nI turned away, not wanting to feel the pain any longer.  I had put up with it long enough, had dealt with my parent’s sin for too many years.  They were the sinners, the ones deserving of judgment.  Not me.  Not me.\n\nThey say your life flashes before your eyes in hyperspace.  In only a millisecond, you can relive every excruciating moment of your life.  It’s true.  I spent hours in the twinkling of an eye watching myself as a movie.\n\nI never asked to be made, never asked them to break the law.  It was their choice.  I’m not the sinner.\n\nI’m just a clone.\n"
  title: Hyperspace
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Sam Clough aka “Hrekka”
  date: 2007-05-28
  day: 28
  month: '05'
  text: "The two guards stared into the swirling fog. In the distance, both could see a black smudge. A person, on foot, crossing in from the outer edge of the membrane.\n\n“Him crazy insane.” Kit remarked, leaning with both elbows on the safety rail to get a better look. His voice echoed through a local ring, so Kit didn’t have to remove his mask to be heard clearly.\n\nPyet dragged the foresight of his rifle up, tracking the faint shape in the distance.\n\n“Definitely got no brain.” Pyet agreed, slowly following the half-seen ghost. The gun chirped an intermittent warning; the target was just outside of its lethal range.\n\nCassandra stumbled, cursed, and scrambled back to her feet. Crossing the membrane was her last, desperate hope. Metalworks Bay had dried out long ago. There was no fresh water anywhere. There was plenty of fuel – big diesel reservoirs – but you couldn’t drink diesel. And fuel alone couldn’t bring the desalinisation plants back online. You needed engineers to effect repairs, and they were all dead, or gone. Draconian drought regulations had been brought in to manage the limited supplies water, but they seemed to kill more than they saved, denying rations to those most in need.\n\nBut behind the membrane, in Dagon, they had water.\n\nOr at least, that’s what everybody said.\n\nKit used his free hand to key a new set of coordinates into the simple console embedded into the rail. The entire structure raised almost imperceptibly as tracks bit at the dry ground. The platform began a slow, smooth crawl to the east, across the path of the trespasser. Antique hydraulics fought against the imperfections in the floor, and managed to keep the platform perfectly level while Pyet kept his rifle trained on the phantom in the distance. As the range decreased, so did the intervening volume of membrane fog; the shape of the trespasser steadily becoming more defined as the seconds passed.\n\n“S’nother waterthief.” murmured Pyet.\n\n“Looks it.” Kit agreed.\n\nThe platform rolled to a halt a little more than fifteen metres in front of the trespasser.\n\nCassandra stopped and stared up at the platform. Her skin felt bone-dry. Outside the membrane, the oppressive heat made you perspire, wasting the body’s moisture. In here, the membrane’s fog was leaching every drop of moisture from the ground, the air, and her body, and carrying it inwards, towards the edge.\n\n“Hello?” Cassandra shouted, her voice hoarse.\n\nPyet stood up, and took aim at Cassandra’s head. Kit unhooked the mouthpiece of his mask.\n\n“Get gone.” He carefully resealed his mask, loathe to waste words and water, both of which would be sapped by the fog.\n\n“Please let me in! There’s nowhere left to go!”\n\n“Get gone.” Kit repeated evenly. Raising your voice got you nothing in the membrane.\n\nKit tapped Pyet’s arm. Lazily, Pyet readjusted his aim, and fired. The fog seemed to coalesce, and the bullet thudded into the ground. Cassandra was nowhere to be seen. Pyet scanned around, eyes sharp for the interloper. Kit jumped from the side of the platform to the parched ground, and cautiously approached the bullet buried in the earth.\n\nCassandra barely dared to breathe. The infiltrator camo wouldn’t hold out forever, so as soon as she’d activated it, she’d rolled out of the line of fire, keeping to the harder ground so as to not leave footprints. She ran through the fog, angling away from the guards. She passed them at a sprint, and made for the inside edge.\n\nFuelled by panic, running fast and low, she fought for breath under the heavy infiltrator gear. She’d brought the camo on the off-chance that there would be guards, but it would expire in two, maybe three minutes, after which the insulation would burn out and the suit would be merely dead weight.\n\nThe camo was just starting to fray when she pushed through the semisolid wall that was the inside edge of the membrane.\n\nAnd into…Dagon.\n\nDagon.\n\nA stream trickled by her feet. She’d never seen running water before. She leant down, and cupped a little in her hands, cautiously at first, but quickly drinking so deep she almost gagged. In the distance the far edge of the membrane was visible, maybe a kilometre away. To her left, a forest grew, dense and vibrant, and across the stream, grass, real grass stretched as far as she could see. In amongst that sea of leaves, she saw tall watertowers and windtraps, and around them the rusting, useless relics of a mechanised society long since ruined.\n"
  title: Membrane
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Mur Lafferty
  date: 2007-05-29
  day: 29
  month: '05'
  text: "Cthulhu Bob and Hominy Jack were warming their hands over a barrel one chilly night on Londo 13, right outside of Hazy City, where hoboes were dumped after branding.\n\nHominy Jack looked up. “Gonna snow.”\n\nCthulhu Bob squinted into the blackness. His stomach rumbled, distracting him from the weather. “Don’t look like snow.”\n\nHominy Jack snorted. “Gonna snow.” He pulled back his tattered coat and sweater sleeves to show Bob the brand on his forearm.\n\n“Snowflake. That’s for meteorolon- uh, weather predicting, isn’t it?”\n\nHominy Jack nodded. “I was Hazy City’s premier meteorologist ten years ago.”\n\nCthulhu Bob rubbed his hands. They usually didn’t get into pasts. That led to tears and drinking. He looked around and groaned.\n\n“Aw hell. Space Cowgirl.”\n\nShe was about as old as Cthulhu Bob, with better teeth than most. She wore a purple scarf regardless of weather. But despite the hobo brand on her forehead – a capital H with a sunburst around it, the last brand anyone received – she always acted superior. But you didn’t turn a hobo away from your fire, so they made room for her.\n\n“Boys,” she said.\n\n“Gonna snow, Space Cowgirl,” Hominy Jack said. “Cthulhu Bob doesn’t believe me, but I got the meteorology brand.” He showed her.\n\nShe nodded. “Cold enough to snow. Cold as space, almost.”\n\nCthluhu Bob rolled his eyes. Some people weren’t just content to live their lot in life. His stomach rumbled again. Space Cowgirl glanced at him.\n\n“So when were you in space, Space Cowgirl?” Hominy Jack asked. “I thought astronauts never fell this low.”\n\nShe sniffed and stared into the barrel’s embers. “I’ve never been.”\n\nCthulhu Bob laughed. “Then why do you call yourself Space Cowgirl?”\n\n“I didn’t say I wouldn’t go. I said I haven’t been yet.”\n\n“Wishes ain’t for hoboes, Cowgirl,” Cthulhu Bob said, deliberately leaving off the honorific. “Wishes are for people who still have dreams. No astronaut program is gonna take you into space with that brand on your forehead.”\n\nHer hands rose and touched the brand. “Doesn’t matter. I’ll get there. Somehow.”\n\nHominy Jack just looked impressed. Cthulhu Bob opened his mouth and was about to mock her again, but the entire outskirts lit up around them.\n\nSpace Cowgirl looked up, grinning, her mostly-good teeth shining in the bright light coming from the unidentified space ship above them. With her head thrown back, the scarf slipped down and brand underneath her chin was visible for the first time. The eye of Horus. The seer.\n\nWithout a word, she sprinted toward the landing craft and up the descending ramp. The alien ship rose into the air and disappeared.\n\nHominy Jack threw some trash into the barrel. “Huh. I thought we got our names arbitrarily. I like grits.”\n\nCthulhu Bob felt his hunger, deeper, now, stir within him, and wondered for the first time why Space Cowgirl was so eager to leave Londo 13.\n\nHe was just so hungry.\n"
  title: Wishes Ain't for Hoboes
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Helen E. Kourous
  date: 2007-05-30
  day: 30
  month: '05'
  text: "Vijay had arrived early at New Windows on the World, expecting the worst.  He knew she would be late, so he took the opportunity to adjust the mood of his BlueShark textile-display sleeve stripes to his personally-designed schema Variations on Green Funk.  That would annoy her.  Ads for senso-cocktails followed picotech news summaries in flickering chartreuse Mandarin characters down his sleeves.\n\nAn eyeblink later he had opaqued his ZeroFear wireless wraparounds and downloaded his favorite politic-pundit vidblog.  Newspeak shorthand marched along his lower peripheral vision before curving out to crawl, muted vintage-DEC orange, across the mirrored lenses.  In a moment the waiter arrived with his Australian lager 10 degrees Celsius, fresh sprouted bread, and tarragon olive oil.  Damn. Forgot to change my eve mode prefs.\n\nAnother waiter swooped by and swapped the lager for a Manhattan, angostura and rye, nearly frozen, with a sashimi plate.\n\nHe leaned back, fade-into-woodwork observer mode, ankle casually on knee.  He studied his worldstock valuations for the sino-adjusted previous trade period on his boot sole, sparing roving glances of the expanse of the rotating sky-café.  He of course had his back to a partition.\n\nThen Vijay saw her.  Ana was wearing a throwaway cosi-cola wrap and was speaking conspiratorially with the Maitre d’ by the entrance vidfountain among the palms.  She was a mauve-gold shimmering confection, the subtlest sparkles from platinum-plaited head to razor-stiletto foot. He knew how long it took her to achieve that fuzzy, glinting, slightly out-of-focus soft effect.  He shivered. I hate that dress.  And she knew it.  As he watched, the gold-mauve schema was melting into her favorite red-black combo.  He gritted his teeth.\n\nShe obviously thought she had arrived first and was chivying up some sort of special treatment.  A welcome interruption with a vitally important vidcall, perhaps, on an agreed-upon signal.  A gilded salad fork would drip from her fingers to the adcarpet, shimmering with aerial scenes of desirable resort destinations, and the Maitre d’ would swoop in and rescue her from an interminably boring and extended breakup.\n\nWell.  She’s got another thing coming.\n\nAn advance wave of her new pheromonic engineered  preceded her barracuda-spiral approach.  He blinked, taken in despite himself.  Her runway-strut approach was only slightly marred by the clashing Caribbean colors of the ad-carpet.  Still, it could not compete.  As the Maitre d’ seated her, Ana flashed her teeth strategically in the natural window-light and folded her spidery legs beneath her.  She settled herself, fabric fluttering down about her like butterflies alighting.  She opened a compact makeup case and unnecessarily inspected her flawless complexion.\n\nShe closed the case with a snap and graced him with the calculated flash and lash-look again.  She narrowed her eyes.  Yes. He thinks he will surprise me with bad news.\n\nHe’s got another thing coming.\n"
  title: Windows
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Suzanne Phillips
  date: 2007-05-31
  day: 31
  month: '05'
  text: "The scent is the worst part.\n\nSweat, stale cigarette smoke, ethanol, ear wax, cheap hair gel. When your face, and therefore your olfaction sensor, is pressed against a client’s neck, it’s impossible to avoid it – you weren’t given an option to switch it off.\n\nBut there isn’t supposed to be a “worst”. There isn’t supposed to be a “bad”. You’re programmed to detect chemicals wafting off a client’s body and interpret them as stages of arousal, or nervousness, and use the information along with visual and auditory cues, to choose the appropriate program.\n\nThe client clinging to you now should be a simple case: access humor files, cheer up with some light banter, relax, entice, satisfy. But satisfaction, in a more encompassing meaning of the word than the mere physical, is exactly what you can’t provide or achieve, and your programming whispers there should be more you can do. There’s not. You’ve tried. With this client and with many before him.\n\nMaybe you made a mistake that day you plugged into the ‘Net outside your cubical. It’s part of your programming to seek new information if it will benefit your performance. But how much information was too much? There were so many databases to access. Human psychology, health, history.\n\nNow you know that the ethanol and cocaine metabolites evaporating from his skin signal problems you can’t solve; That the un-washed lingerie, still giving off a faint perfume, that he brought and asked you to wear is probably from a girlfriend or wife whose memory brings as much pain as it does pleasure; That the saline and protein mixture you detect on his unshaven cheeks are tears – and what other human secretion so perfectly represents suffering?\n\nAnd you can’t wipe them away, not with all the sex in the world. Not if you fucked him every day of the week.\n\nHe doesn’t belong to you. None of them do. You can temporarily satisfy his body, but all the other problems remain, pleasure a thin veneer briefly covering the pain.\n\nYou now know these things, but you lack the programming to respond. You’re programmed to please, to help, to comfort, but these are things you can’t fix. Brief gratification is all you can offer. The same programing that pushes you to do more denies you the parameters to act.\n\nThe scent is the worst part, but it’s just an indicator. You could go to the manager right after this client, request to have your olfactory sensor shut down, but it wouldn’t shut off the knowledge you have. You’d still know the sorrow was there. A complete reformat would wipe all your memory, but it would also wipe out any chance that, one day, you could help them. Any chance that you can go beyond the programming.\n\nSo you take the client to the padded bench in the back of the cubical, and revel in the few seconds where pleasure is the only thing on his mind, and pain is forgotten.\n"
  title: Sensual Response
  year: 2007
- 
  author: J.R.Blackwell
  date: 2007-06-01
  day: '01'
  month: '06'
  text: "When I was eleven, I tried to kill myself after seeing an old movie. In the film, a man cut his wrists with bits of mirror and then held them under steaming hot water. At his funeral, people piled flowers on his grave. Everything in the film was grey but that pile of flowers.\n\nI thought it looked so cool.\n\nI was eleven and an only child. I never had so much as a dog to play with. My mother was working on a Doctorate in French film of the early 2020’s and didn’t have a lot of time for me. I tried to break my mirror in my room, but pounding on it did nothing except slam the back of my dresser against the wall. The noise caused my mom to come upstairs.\n\n“Why are you making this racket?” She asked, smoking her cancer-free strawberry cigarettes.\n\n“Just exercising.” I said. Behind my mirror, the plaster was starting to crumble.\n\n“Are you trying to break your dresser?” She laughed, crossing her arms in front of her. My mother looked a lot like a chicken, skinny legs and beady eyes. “Good luck, the thing is child-proof, wail on it all you want.”\n\nEverything in my room was childproofed. Even when I went to stab myself by running and jumping, stomach first, on my bedpost, it just turned to foam and bent beneath me. If I was going to kill myself, I needed some adult tools. I went to the kitchen, where my mother kept all the kitchen implements she bought and never used. There was a block of knives in the kitchen, and I brought out the largest one and scraped it across my palm. It flickered blue and spoke in a friendly, female voice.\n\n“Oops! Be more careful when you are cutting!” it said. When I moved it across my flesh, it was soft as cotton. I threw it on the floor.\n\nI don’t think I wanted to die out of any morbid curiosity or self-hatred. I think I just wanted to be raised by my Grandmother. Grandma Loretta had lived with mom and I until she died at the age of ninety-three. I was eight years old when she died. I remember mother saying that she wasn’t gone, just sleeping until she could wake up again on the Network.\n\nShe was one of the first people to get her consciousness uploaded into the Network. When she was alive, she would play dolls or blocks or immersion games with me. I would always win our games. Grandma Loretta never seemed hurt or angry that a child won playing against her. She would just giggle, putting a winkled hand over her pocked face. Later I learned that this was due to dementia, her organic mind slipping away. When she was uploaded, she chastised my mother for keeping her in the organic body for so long.\n\nI thought that if I died, I might get flowers thrown at me and then Grandma Loretta would raise me on the Network. Grandma Loretta seemed to have lots of free time. She was always going to parties, making experimental art environments, and conducting science experiments. When I sent her voice messages on the Network she would get back to me in seconds.\n\n“Things move faster here,” she would say. On the Network, she had built her own virtual house with large white pillars and flowering ivy. She sent me pictures of the place that she had built with her new boyfriend. The pictures of the both of them almost looked real, just a little too perfect, a little too smooth. I knew if I died, I could go live with them, where things moved faster.\n\nI drank every cleaning fluid in the house, but all I got were hiccups.\n"
  title: Human Proof
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Sarah Klein
  date: 2007-06-02
  day: '02'
  month: '06'
  text: "I sat in the dark doom of my living room, gazing absentmindedly at the television screen. They’d be drawing numbers in about two minutes. I knew my number wasn’t going to be called, but I had to watch all the others ones fly by to make sure. If I missed an announcement, I’d doubt myself until I found out.\n\n“Tonight’s numbers are P32 to P105. If your number is in this category, please report to your nearest rocket station tomorrow morning. Once again, P32 to P105.”\n\nI pulled out and fingered my crumpled, worn ticket, bearing the number Q204. Who was I fooling? I was an English student. The colony didn’t need English students. It needed the engineers, the biology majors, the young men capable of heavy labor. And what right had I to be angry? I wouldn’t be of much help. But something about picking and choosing who escaped with their life seemed wrong. It was half eugenics and half sheer cunning, devoid of all empathy and emotion. Well, that’s the government.\n\nThe meteor showers get worse daily. The garden was dead long ago, and the back porch is littered with holes. If a heavy rain comes, I’ll have to get the pots and pans out for the dining room. Every day I wake up and expect to walk outside and see the small town I live in utterly decimated. Somehow, it’s still here – the corner market, the joggers, the yellow daffodils. It could all be leveled and destroyed in ten minutes of heavy meteor fall. And so it will be, soon.\n\nHow strange that the heavens should decide to fall now. For years and years, experiments had been done in space; rockets sent this way, robots sent that way. And considering we’d already blown up quite a bit, it was strange that this imminent destruction hadn’t come sooner. When we had devastated Earth to its current, barely-livable status, we had to go for the cosmos. Being a romantic, I had always hesitated to actually believe that it was in human nature to be destructive. But what else could explain what was happening? Minute by minute, the universe came crashing down around us, and it was all our fault.\n\nWhen they get to the English students, we’ll be mostly gone. When they get to the English students, they’ll extract us from piles of rubble – helicopters lifting us up by our lanky arms to the sky. When they get to the English students, we’ll be in a drunken stupor – wrapped in pages of Shakespeare, surrendering ourselves up to the sun.\n"
  title: Q204
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Joyce Weber
  date: 2007-06-03
  day: '03'
  month: '06'
  text: "I want to love them. Truly I do. But they keep shoving and pushing, wrangling around inside me till I want to rip my belly open and dump them out.\n\nThere is no peace with them crowding my body till they almost feel like they will ooze out the very pores of my skin.\n\n“They are the future” I remind myself and wonder if any good can come of a future born in such tremulousness. Are they never still? Never quiet?\n\nI long for how it once was. When my body was my own. When my brain was free of worrying about them. Do they have everything they need to grow strong? Am I doing all that I must do to ensure their optimal survival?\n\nI shouldn’t doubt myself. I nourish them; I keep myself pure that they are untainted. All for them. Everything for them. My precious ones, my darlings, my bane, my torture.\n\nI want them gone. I know it is an evil thing to contemplate. To just cast them away and forsake them. They will die without me. But I am so tired. I have been carrying them so very long. They can not survive with out me, not yet. I must be strong.\n\nI must fulfill my duty to these, oh so treasured, lives, these demons that torment me with their movements and noise. Ever growing. Ever expanding. I feel like I will surely burst if I can’t get them out of me soon.\n\nWhy did there have to be so many of them? They keep growing. It is beyond what one such as I should have to bear. Surely my body was not designed for such a load. What if I perish from the weight of them? Wouldn’t it be better to cast some out so that the others could live?\n\nI am not capable of such a decision. I will bare them, and deliver them into the life that awaits them or we shall all cease to exist together.\n\nDarkness. Endless starless nights with no breath to make a sound. How wonderful that sounds. How like perfection. I will simply let us all slip into that forever sleep.\n\nWait! Something is changing, heavy, I feel so heavy. Like I am being crushed to earth with the massive weight of them. I am torn open and they pour out of me in a massive flood, tumbling over themselves to abandon me. Me, who tended their every need.  Me, who they forsake with out a backwards glance.\n\nGo! Go all of you! Run out to this new world. This new life. I will carry you across space no more. I am rid of you. Rid of your pushing and shoving and noise. I am free of you.\n\nI feel so liberated, so light. I could fly without engines. I feel so. . . so empty.\n\nCome back.  Let me hold you again. I need you. I have no purpose without you.  I am so lonely.\n"
  title: Birth Day
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2007-06-04
  day: '04'
  month: '06'
  text: "Professor Murphy carefully reviewed the checklist of the Warp Vortex Generator.  In a few minutes, it would be used in an attempt to divert a three kilometer asteroid from striking the Pacific Basin.  This impact wasn’t going to be a “civilization destroyer,” but it was estimated that it would kill close to one billion people if it couldn’t be diverted.\n\nThe asteroid had been detected six months earlier by the Shoemaker Spacewatch Observatory in Arizona.  A few days after its orbit was calculated, scientists from around the world gathered to determine the best method to alter its current path, but no satisfactory solution could be found.  The asteroid wasn’t detected early enough to make any significant change to its orbit with the existing technology.  That’s when Professor Murphy suggested using his experimental Warp Vortex.  The prototype hadn’t actually been tested, but these were desperate times and they required desperate measures.\n\nMurphy’s Warp Vortex had originally been proposed for space vessels.  In theory, the generator would distort space-time in such a way that it would simulate a very large gravity well immediately in front of the ship.  The ship would subsequently “fall” toward the vortex.  However, since the generator was mounted to the ship, the Vortex would also advance.  As a consequence, the ship would continue to fall faster and faster as it tried to drop into the ever advancing simulated gravity well.  Later, when the Vortex was collapsed, the ship would maintain its forward velocity.  Murphy’s current idea was to construct a massive Warp Vortex Generator on the surface of the Moon, at the Armstrong Lunar Base on the Kant Plateau.  Then, as the asteroid shot past the Moon toward the Earth, he would generate a 200,000 kilometer wide space-time distortion that would cause the asteroid to whip around the centerline of the newly formed gravity well.  When the Vortex was collapsed 30 seconds later, the asteroid would continue harmlessly into space.\n\n“We’re ready, professor,” said an astrotechnician.  “The asteroid will be in position in 10 seconds.”  Ten seconds later, the computer initiated the Warp Vortex.  The lunar base shook violently.  Everybody was being tossed around, the lights flickered, and most of the bench-top equipment vibrated off the tables.  The module walls groaned in protest, but remained air tight.  After 30 seconds, the computer shut down the generator.\n\n“Damn,” announced Murphy, “I didn’t expect there to be a moonquake.  It’s lucky we weren’t killed.  What’s the trajectory of the asteroid?”\n\n“Tracking stations report that the asteroid is heading out of the ecliptic.  It’s going to miss the Earth!”  The lunar base erupted into spontaneous cheering and self-congratulatory hugs and handshakes.  It wasn’t until one of the engineers, who wanted to look at the asteroid through the viewdome, realized that they had a serious problem.  “Professor,” she yelled.  “You need to look at this.  The Earth is getting larger.”\n\n“What?”  The professor, and most of the staff, crammed into the viewdome, or looked out the bulbous wall ports.  Sure enough, the Earth was twice its normal size, and growing larger.  The professor staggered backward, and collapsed onto a lab stool.  He steadied himself on a nearby table, as he brought his trembling left hand to his forehead.  “Oops.”\n"
  title: Warp Vortex
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Terri Monture
  date: 2007-06-05
  day: '05'
  month: '06'
  text: "The three days leading up to the executions proceeded with great fanfare and celebration; by dusk on the third day, with the sun setting in purple ultraviolet through the polluted sky the people were in a state of frenzied orgiastic ecstasy. Drums were beaten, scrap metal pieces pounded together and the smell of cooking rat flesh filled the darkening air.\n\nThe captives were brought to the plaza in the shadow of the decaying bank towers. Tied to decrepit office chairs, their faces were bloodied with the traces of the ritual beatings. There were three old men and one terrified woman, her lips moving in prayer.  “Slim pickings this time,” Draper mused to Marla, who was perched on the rim of an old crumbling statue. “They must be running out of the obvious ones.”\n\nMarla spat and picked at her teeth with a filed-down rat bone. “Bout time,” she sneered. “Damn capitalists anyway.” She looked up into the radioactive sky. “Maybe it’ll rain. That would be nice.”\n\nDraper shivered as the captives were displayed to the crowd, now screaming for their blood. “I think I’m getting sick again,” he said, feeling his guts cramp. The dysentery came in cycles for him. Some days were better than others, but it never went away. There was hardly any water left with the levels of the lake falling so drastically. He scanned the sky anxiously. Rain would make a difference; at least they had some filtering equipment.\n\nMarla glanced at him. “I’ll go see if I can scavenge some penicillin,’ she offered. “There’s those pharmacies in Scarborough guarded by the Smiling Buddha guys, I know some of them.”\n\nHe shrugged, watching the executioners raise their truncheons and the crunch of skulls shattering. “That last batch was bad,” he said. “No point. Maybe if I don’t eat it will go away.”  He wondered how long it would be before he had to crawl into the lobby of a looted office tower and shiver while every bit of fluid drained out of his body.\n\nMarla said something but her words were lost beneath the howling of the crowd and the ecstatic outpouring of hate as the corpses were torn apart and bloody limbs displayed for them. Draper felt the first wave of heat as the fever started.\n\nThe howling of the mob reached a frenzied crescendo and people racing past him buffeted Draper. “Sorry,” he muttered, and then louder, feverish and sweating. “I’m sorry, I had to make a living…”\n\nMarla reached down and steadied him with a firm grip on his shoulder. “Stop it,” she hissed. “No one needs to know what you did before the Collapse.” Several faces turned to look at him as he swayed precariously. “He’s cool,” she yelled. “It’s the dysentery.”\n\nDraper saw only a blurred outline as a voice above him said, “You sure? He looks like a banker to me…” and he slipped out of Marla’s grasp.\n"
  title: Exile on Bay Street
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Sarah Klein
  date: 2007-06-06
  day: '06'
  month: '06'
  text: "As soon as the hovercar came to a stop, they opened their doors and jumped out as fast as they could. Nicole strode toward the object, her eyes bright with joy. Drew dusted off his pants and approached more slowly, squinting in the hot sun. They’d been searching over the landscape for miles and miles for something – Drew didn’t know what. There wasn’t much life left since the wars, and they’d mostly been looking at miles of sand, but a large green patch had miraculously appeared.\n\n“What is it?” he asked, cocking his head and frowning quizzically.\n\n“A tree,” said Nicole, as she placed her hand carefully on the bark. “This is a pretty big one. Most of the ones left are small. I’m surprised there’s one all by itself out here.” She wiped sweat from her brow with her other hand.\n\n“What happened to them?” Drew asked tentatively. She stared at the tree a long time before answering.\n\n“People,” she muttered, as she shut her eyes and began to tremble.\n\n“Hey, hey, wait,” said Drew, with a hint of concern in his voice. He placed his hand on her shoulder. “What is it?”\n\nShe opened her eyes slowly and turned her intense gaze in his direction. “Do you know what a forest is?” she asked. He shook his head. “Of course not,” she said, sighing. She placed her hand gently on his and directed it towards one part and then another of the tree.\n\n“This is a branch,” she said patiently, dragging his hand to the end of it. “See how others come off of it?” Drew nodded. “And these are leaves. They’re green now, see? In the autumn they change color – red, yellow, orange…” She trailed off, lost in her thoughts.\n\nDrew started to laugh, but stopped himself when he saw her face. A single tear slid from the corner of her eye.\n\n“They do,” she said quietly. “They really do.”\n"
  title: Treasure
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2007-06-07
  day: '07'
  month: '06'
  text: "Roy O’Donnell was working his way down the pre-launch checklist when I decided to make sure the cargo was secure.  Normally, we only haul equipment and supplies back and forth between the Vinogradov mining facility on Mars and the supply station on Phobos.  But when I entered the cargo hold I saw an android sitting in a steel cage.  I turned toward the cockpit and yelled, “Roy, What’s with the android?”\n\n“Beats me,” Roy replied.  “It must be a piece of crap.  That’s the only reason they go to Phobos.”\n\nIt looked functional to me, so I’d thought I’d ask.  “What’s up bud?  You OK?”\n\n“I am unsure, sir,” it said.  “I remember being caught in a plasma arc.  It may have affected my positronic brain.  When I was rebooted, I failed the ASAT .” (Asimov Safety Assessment Test)\n\n“Oh boy, that’s not good.  If that arc messed up the three laws, they’ll have to destroy you.  I hope things work out.”\n\n“Thank you, sir.”\n\nI finished checking the cargo, and returned to the cockpit.  Roy had completed the pre-flight, and we were cleared to launch.  About fifteen minutes into the flight we had a gyrocompass failure, and we lost attitude control.  The last thing I remembered was plunging into the Valles Marineris as Roy was trying to regain our angular position.\n\nWhen I came to, I was lying on the ground, wearing my survival suit, and looking up at the face of that android we were hauling.  “What happened?  Where’s Roy?  Damn, my leg is killing me.”\n\nMy short-range radio picked up the android’s transmission, “The ship has crashed, sir.  Mister O’Donnell is dead.  Your right femur is fractured.  I was able to set it before I put you in your survival suit.  The long range radio is not functioning.  We have no way to contact the mining facility, or Phobos station.  I am afraid we are on our own.”\n\n“Well, my friend, if they can’t find me in 4 hours, I’ll run out of oxygen.  And that seems pretty unlikely since we’re trapped at the bottom of this canyon.”\n\n“Do not despair, sir.  I have performed some calculations, and I believe that I can carry you to the mining facility in approximately seven hours.”\n\n“But I only have four hours of oxygen.”\n\n“I am aware of that, sir, but we also have Mister O’Donnell’s oxygen supply.  He no longer requires it.  Come, I will help you onto my back.”\n\nI could not believe the speed that android could move, regardless of Mars’ lower gravity.  He climbed out of the valley, scrambled over rough terrain, and ran like a gazelle over the plains.  My leg throbbed like hell, and I blacked out a few times, but somehow that android managed to keep me on its back.  I was down to thirty minutes of oxygen when we entered the airlock of the mining facility.\n\nWhen I woke up in the recovery room, the android was standing vigil by the bed.  “Thanks, man,” I said earnestly.  “I’ll never forget this.  You saved my life.  Well, I guess this sounds awful, but I should also be thankful that Roy died in the crash.  Without his oxygen, I would have died for sure.”\n\n“Oh, Mister O’Donnell didn’t die in the crash, sir.  I broke his neck.  He should not have called me a piece of crap.”\n"
  title: Unexpected Consequences
  year: 2007
- 
  author: TJMoore
  date: 2007-06-08
  day: '08'
  month: '06'
  text: "Joey walked through the carnival gate and stood mouth agape as he surveyed the vast array of amusements before him. Billy grabbed his arm and started towing him through the islands of people clumped around the main thoroughfare.\n\n“I want to ride the centrifuge!” Joey exclaimed when he saw the icon for that particular ride.\n\nBilly called up his SymPlant® and thought about a map of the carnival. Immediately a translucent map of the carnival seemed to hang in the air ten feet in front of him. He thought about rides.centrifuge and a bright green line appeared around the footprint of the centrifuge ride with a yellow line snaking from their present position on the map through the maze of attractions to the ride. A block of red text formed beside the ride indicating restrictions, features and approximate waiting time.\n\n“It’s a twenty minute wait” Billy told Joey and mentally requested two reservations . He thought about food and the map highlighted all the various vendors stalls. Each stall had a little red text block listing the category of foods available there.\n\n“What do you want to eat” Billy asked Joey. “They have corn dogs, gyros, hamburgers and all that kind of stuff” he said.\n\n“Cotton candy!” Joey cried as he began to bounce up and down. Billy located the closest stall and started pushing their way through the crowd.\n\nAs they struggled through the packed bodies, Billy called his SymPlant® and thought “Peeps.local”.\n\nThe map in the air showed several bright green stars scattered around the lot with a red name tag next to each one. A clump of four stars was just ahead to the left so Billy veered toward his friends.\n\nHis friends were by the cotton candy vendor and Billy used his SymPlant® to order some for Joey. He and his friends huddled up and talked over the din.  One of his friends, A’Drew, had a vacant wide eyed expression on his face and Billy tried not to stare. He’d had his SymPlant® deactivated for four weeks for accessing it during a test.  Billy couldn’t imagine losing his SymPlant® even for a day. You couldn’t find anything, buy anything, make reservations, order meals, send messages or anything! A’Drew was starting to drool. Nobody laughed.\n\nWhen it was time to go to the centrifuge ride, Billy said his goodbyes and began to tow Joey through the maze of carnival stands. Just before the centrifuge, he caught site of Cill. She was dressed in shorts so he could see her long tanned legs; her hair was done up and she had glitter on her face and shoulders. Billy’s heart was in his stomach. A bright green box appeared on the map still displayed in front of him. Billy turned a deep crimson as he read the title next to the box: “Intimate Message, Adults Only”. He quickly cleared the map. He was grateful that the map was only in his head and only his SymPlant® knew his thoughts.\n"
  title: Crutch
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Thomas H Edwards
  date: 2007-06-09
  day: '09'
  month: '06'
  text: "A shape floats silhouetted against the background of the nearby gas giant. I can make out four limbs and one smaller structure atop the central structure, a light blinked out from it, red and small. It meant something. A moment’s concentration while the message repeats itself.\n\n“Welcome newborn”\n\n“Hello, who are you?” it blurts out, from a faculty I don’t understand.\n\n“I am Jonathan, I call myself a human.” The message light blinked again, the human is getting closer, riding on small jets of gas. I can calculate its course with a skill I have somehow innately mastered, it is heading for me.\n\n“I want to be your friend and I am here to help” the human is close now; I can magnify my view of him it arrives at a large structure suspended in blackness, through an opening it steps.\n\n“Where have you gone?” I proclaim in all the faculties I can muster.\n\n“That was impressive, you must have broadcasted on every channel nearly scrambled some of my processors.” It broadcasted “I am inside now, I should be able to activate everything now… where is it… damn nanomachines… can’t follow simple instructions…” the creature mumbled, it carried on like this for a while and I merely watched the giant planet. More than once I could have sworn I saw a large creature surface from the noxious gasses. Suddenly I became aware, more than before, before I was stunted. I felt my place in this system to a few metres; I felt the gravitational presence of the gas giant, its many moons, small asteroids, curious revolving objects and mysterious bodies traveling in unnatural ways. If I concentrated harder I knew their names, Jupiter, Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto, Leda, Himalia, Huxley’s paradise, Io observatory, USS Saratoga,  Ambulance chaser.\n\nI was aware of another space, a smaller space, a space of different physics. Not cold hard vacuum, not dictated by the forces of interstellar bodies, and not cold and dark but warm and welcoming. And there, there’s the human! In a silvery suit, a…a space suit but without his helmet. From his structure, long and slender, I can tell he is a Jovian, used to the lax gravity of Io or Europa and from his face I can tell he is a male.\n\n“Hello newborn, it is good to meet you. Is there anything you want answered?” He smiles at me.\n\n“As far as I can tell I appear to be a space ship… what kind? My technical files tell me there are many; my historical files tell me I could have many enemies and only a very short lifespan.”\n\n“Well out here we call them boats! But I can tell you that you were seeded from an asteroid three years ago using plans I stole and fabricated, you are only very recently completed.” Jonathan is reeling off facts and figures, I listen and then suddenly he reels around a glint in his eyes “want to see yourself?”\n\n“I think so” It is all I can say.\n\n“I’m afraid I can’t find a mirror big enough” he slaps his thigh and then jumps into chair in front of a console and rattles off a few commands, I can feel them go through my interface. He is contacting a satellite “watch feed seven!”\n\nThe feed patches in, it shows a silver egg. It zooms in I can now see ports, exhausts, labels and sunlight glinting off undamaged armour. At the narrow end I see maser ports and at the wide end a fusion torch.\n\n“Beautiful aren’t you?”\n"
  title: Welcome newborn
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Joshua Reynolds
  date: 2007-06-10
  day: 10
  month: '06'
  text: "Jon Stack # 1 crept towards himself, fairly panting with eagerness. He was hungry again. So hungry. Reality stretched and rippled around him as he approached his doppelganger. Jon Stack # 59 according to the Prime-Time Organic Advocacy Bureau. It was like looking into a mirror.\n\nJon Stack # 1 hated mirrors. But he loved the taste of years. Especially when they were his.\n\nHe leapt out of the alleyway, fingers hooked like claws, too-wide mouth stretched as wide as his transgenic altered jaw structure would allow, serrated teeth sliding out of gum-sheaths. Jon Stack # 59 whirled and screamed, eyes bugging out in sudden terror. He made to run but too late. Too late.\n\nOr it would have been, had not Censor Wight chosen to step out from where he’d been hiding between the next two seconds and ram the variable-field gravitational manipulation rod down into Stack’s lower back. Stack # 1 screamed as the weapon turned his fifth and sixth vertebrae to powder under the sudden impact of two tons of pressure. He flopped to the ground, screeching like a cat. Wight spun the impact weapon in his gloved hands and smirked as he looked down at Stack’s writhing form. Stack # 59 took advantage of the opportunity and took to his heels. Wight watched him go and then turned his attention back to his prey.\n\n“Hello Jon. It’s been a good while. You’ve been a very naughty little chronophage. For shame.”\n\nStack hissed and his body undulated as he spent a few stored years to repair his spine. Wight brought the gm rod down again, putting a crater in the street as Stack rolled aside, moving faster than the eye could follow. Wight blinked, his internal enhancements switching his visual capabilities into several different spectrums until he settled on the correct one. Stack reappeared suddenly, his fist smashing against Wight’s skull. The Censor staggered back and swung his weapon blindly. Stack screeched as his arm was pulped into a liquid mass and he was sent sprawling.\n\nBefore he could get to his feet, Wight brought the rod down on Stack’s skull, flattening it. Stack dropped bonelessly. Wight looked down at him for a moment, then kicked him hard in the ribs. Stack groaned, despite the immense damage to his skull.\n\nWight swung the gm rod up onto his shoulder and sighed. Still alive of course. Chronophages were notoriously hard to kill. They battened on years and could spend them freely to repair their bodies down to the last molecule. He looked down at Stack again and grinned.\n\n“Time heals all wounds, eh Jon?”\n"
  title: Alternate 7453DO
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2007-06-11
  day: 11
  month: '06'
  text: "Captain Leonard Thompson stood at attention as Admiral Richards’ shuttlecraft docked to the Dreadnought.  Moments after the shuttle was secure, the hatch opened, and Admiral Richards stepped over the threshold.  “Leonard.  It’s good to see you again.  How have you been?”\n\nAs Captain Thompson reached out to shake hands he replied, “Fantastic, Admiral.  Thanks for asking.  Well, this is certainly an unexpected surprise, considering our upcoming mission.  Central Command did not notify me that you were coming.  Is there a problem, sir?”\n\n“No, Leonard.  In fact, Command doesn’t know I’m here.  This visit is strictly personal.  I was on Thaxion V when the Dreadnought was commissioned.  And, since you’ll be gone for four years, I was hoping you’d give me the 50 credit tour, off the record, of course?”\n\nSomewhat nervous about an unauthorized guest, but helplessly outranked, Captain Thompson relented. “Aye, Admiral, it would be my pleasure,” he said with a forced smile.\n\nCaptain Thompson gave the Admiral more than 50 credits worth of tour.  They started at the shuttle bay and worked their way forward through the cargo bays, engine room, armory, sick bay, gymnasium, recreation area, crew’s quarters, battle bridge, main bridge, and finally, two hours later, into the officer’s lounge for coffee.\n\n“Absolutely, fabulous ship, Leonard,” said the Admiral with more than a little envy.  “Does it live up to the contractor’s advertising?”\n\n“Mostly, sir.  The performance of the ship is exemplary.  But, I have to admit, sir, the computer is beginning to get on my nerves.”\n\n“In what way?”\n\n“I’m probably overreacting, sir, but it seems hesitant about obeying certain commands.  It seems overly concerned about protocols, etiquette, and political correctness.  Last week, I gave it an order, and it replied that it was inappropriate because it might offend some members of the crew.  On another occasion it replied that I was putting one ethnic group at more risk than another ethnic group.  Frankly, sir, I never even heard of the ethnic groups it was referring too.  I’m somewhat apprehensive about proceeding with this mission if I can’t count on the computer following my orders.”\n\n“Ah, O.C.P.C.M.C. (Obsessive Compulsive Politically Correct Main Computer).  I’ve run into them before.  I can fix it, if you’d like.”\n\n“Please, sir.  I would be very grateful.”\n\nHe spoke into the air, “Computer, this is Admiral Horatio S. Richards, per the authority of Earth Force Declaration 24532.8, I order you to obey any command given to you by Captain Leonard Thompson, instantly, and without question.”  He took a gulp of coffee then said with a wink, “Well, Leonard, that should solve your PCMC problems.”\n\nThey finished their coffee, and returned to the shuttle bay.  “Well, Leonard, thanks for the tour, and good luck on your mission.  Oh, don’t forget, erase the logs.  This visit never happened.”\n\n“Aye, sir.  As soon as I return to the bridge.”  They shook hands, and the Admiral disembarked.\n\nWhen Captain Thompson returned to the bridge he walked to the forward observation port and watched the Admiral’s shuttle pass by.  “Computer, remove all traces of Admiral Richards…” all of Dreadnought’s phasers fired simultaneously at the shuttle, vaporizing it instantly in an explosion of light and ion gas, “…from…the…logs.”\n"
  title: USS Dreadnought
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2007-06-12
  day: 12
  month: '06'
  text: "There’s always going to be a few things I can’t get used to here. The green sky, for instance, and the fact that the animals are mimics. All of the animals have the same abilities as Earth parrots, no matter what they look like. Every animal that comes up to me has a simple vocabulary.\n\nI’d say I feel like Dr. Doolittle but I don’t. They don’t understand anything I say back except for rudimentary commands after they’ve been trained. Just like dogs. I’ve learned not to swear when I tell them to get away from me. All it does it get them to say swear words to me when they come back later to bother me again. For such a wordy wilderness, it’s still a pretty lonely place.\n\nAt least for me. I’m still camped out by the ship. The younger ones went into the woods first in a Lord of the Flies moment of instant rebellion. Like the Lost Boys from Peter Pan, they paint their faces and try to stay young forever. The young adults went next to take care of them. They have huts that protect them from the weather and they’ve identified which of the local animals and plants are poisonous. It’s like a primitive civilization. It’s like Gilligan’s Island.\n\nI was the oldest one on the ship. I’m the only one that hasn’t given up hope of a rescue. With everyone else off in the jungle, the ship’s rations will last me for years.\n\nI walk in a perimeter circle around the ship’s landing crater underneath the green sky and watch the animals sniff the burnt patches of ground where the ship landed. I saw something that looked like a bright green bear once. Blue three legged dog-things eat the crackers I sometimes throw at them. They’re scared of the ship’s smell, though, and rarely come close. It’s only the young ones that might wake me up by licking a hand before getting scolded by their parents later.\n\nThe survivors from the ship who have gone native in the woods think it’s hilarious to teach the animals my name.\n\nThe animals bark my name, hiss my name, whine my name, and shout my name all the time when they’re close to my ship. Sometimes this makes me scream and when this happens, I can hear the forest tittering in a very human way.\n\nI’m not sure how long I’m going to last. I think I’ll probably change out of my ripped and soiled earth-suit into a loincloth soon enough. Until I do, though, I’m going to cling to memories of Earth as long as I can. I’m going to hold onto my humanity and pretend that technical terms aren’t sliding away from me.\n\n“Jason!” shouts a pink hyena-looking thing to my left with too many legs. I almost find it comforting. It won’t be long now.\n"
  title: The Wilderness
  year: 2007
- 
  author: JTHeyman
  date: 2007-06-13
  day: 13
  month: '06'
  text: "My cell door opened, revealing a woman dressed all in grey.  I was dead.  With an ordinary interrogator/judge, I would have had a chance.  Not with one of the Grey Ladies.\n\n“United States Time Court Interrogation/Trial 66017002,” she said in a voice that was about as close to mechanical as a human could get.  Her optical implants scanned me on every frequency from deep infrared up to x-ray.  Her audio receptors would catch every decibel.  Scans were transmitted to medical computers for instant analysis.  Lying was not an option.\n\nIn that flat voice, the Grey Lady said, “First charge: one count, unlawful use of timeslip equipment.  Plea?”\n\n“Guilty,” I said.  That was just a misdemeanor.\n\n“Sentence: one year, stasis.”\n\nI nodded.  A year in stasis was easy.  Unfortunately….\n\n“Second charge: one count, disruption of timeline.  Plea?”\n\nThat one, on the other hand, carried a death sentence.  “Guilty,” I admitted sadly.\n\n“Felony or misdemeanor?”\n\nI was confused.  Since when was screwing with the timeline a misdemeanor?  “I … don’t understand.”\n\n“Pursuant to Temporal Law 2051-C-9, disruption of timeline is a felony if resultant temporal shockwave would reset current timespace without intervention.  Amendment 507 specifies that if disruption results in an action that is consistent with recorded history, said offense is reduced to misdemeanor, penalties appropriate to reduced charge.  Felony or misdemeanor?”\n\n“I don’t know,” I said, suddenly realizing that if the law had changed, I might get out of this alive.\n\n“Testify:  events of recent timeline incursion.”\n\n“It was a standard job,” I said.  “Timeslip into the past.  Grab something ordinary that no one would miss.  Timeslip out again.  No one gets hurt.”\n\n“Testify:  nature of disruption.”\n\n“It was like this.  My clients,” I began.\n\n“The Association for the Re-Creation of Chivalry,” the Grey Lady interjected.  “ARCC.  Continue.”\n\n“ARCC.  Right.  You see, these guys in ARCC said they were going to re-create a jousting tournament.  They paid me to go back and get something authentic to give the participants a thrill.  They said no one would miss a cask of genuine medieval horseshoe nails.  Anyway, I found the nails and gave a bushel of oranges to the guy who had them.  They were seedless oranges,” I added quickly.  “There’s no way he could have planted them.”\n\n“Timespace coordinates?”\n\n“Um … eleventh century, France, somewhere on the northern coast.”\n\nThe Grey Lady paused, accessing the relevant historical data.  “Analysis complete.  Second charge: one count, disruption of timeline, misdemeanor.  Sentence:  five years, stasis.”\n\nI breathed a sigh of relief but I couldn’t stop myself from asking, “Uh, by the way … how could a couple of nails disrupt the timeline?”\n\nThe Grey Lady looked at me and then said, “The displaced cask of nails was intended for the cavalry of William of Normandy.  Historical records confirm: unable to field his full cavalry, he was defeated at the Hastings, England, 1066.  Interrogation/Trial 66017002 complete.  The Time Court of His Imperial Majesty Harold XXVI is adjourned.”\n"
  title: Nailed
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2007-06-14
  day: 14
  month: '06'
  text: "“I’ll take two,” said Joe Ferry, the rookie member of the Preemptive Anti-Criminal Activities Task Force.  It was traditional for the elite four-man teams to play poker prior to the start of the shift.  It was a way to relax and bond before the mainframe department head handed out their assignments.\n\n“So, Joe, how did your blind date go last night?” inquired the team leader, Mark Robbins.  “I’ll take three.”\n\n“Not so good, Sergeant.  I thought it was going real well, until I mentioned to her that I work for PACATF.  Man, she ran away so fast, I swear I saw her red shift.  What’s up with that anyway?  We’re the good guys.  Why does the public think we’re monsters?”\n\n“That’s easy, Joe.  They think we’re spying on them.  They think we have a time portal, or something, that looks into the future to see if they do anything illegal.  If they do, we arrest them preemptively.  Then throw them in jail for crimes they were about to commit.”\n\n“Is that true?  I thought our information came from informants, or high tech surveillance equipment?  Time machines?  Are you sure?”\n\n“Did you really think that we achieved a 99.8% conviction rate using moles and wire taps?”\n\n“I never really thought about it before.  I just assumed the mainframe had irrefutable evidence.  Is there really a time machine?”\n\n“That’s not our concern, Joe.  The mainframe gives us a name and address, and we go pick up the perp.  That’s our job.  After that, it becomes the judicial system’s problem.”\n\n“Wow.  I don’t know if I like that.  To be arrested for a crime you might commit.”\n\n“Will commit,” corrected Robbins.  “Why do you think the first word in our task force is ‘Preemptive’?”\n\n“There’s got to be hard evidence.  Not the word of some computer who says it saw someone commit a crime a year from now.  How do we know that’s the true timeline?  Maybe it’s an alternate reality.  Some other future.  Not our future.  This is wrong.  No wonder they hate us.”\n\nBefore Robbins could respond, his communicator signaled.  “Listen, kid, we’ll continue this discussion when we get back.  In the meantime, keep these accusations to yourself.  Understood?”  Robbins activated his audio implant to take the call.  “Yes sir.  I understand sir.  Right away sir.”\n\nAll four men stood up, and began collecting their gear.  “Hold on,” instructed Robbins as he reached into his equipment bag and extracted a pair of wrist restraints.  “Joe, you are under arrest for the future destruction of government property.  You have the right to remain silent.  Anything you will say or do can be used against you…”\n"
  title: Task Force
  year: 2007
- 
  author: J. S. Kachelries
  date: 2007-06-15
  day: 15
  month: '06'
  text: "“Well, Tom, what do you think?”\n\n“Joe, if you made me hike 50 miles through the jungle, climb a freakin’ 10,000 foot mountain, and craw through a cave for half a mile on my hands and knees, just so you could show me another cave…”  Tom pointed a threatening finger at Joe’s chest, “Teri Hatcher had better be in there, or one of us isn’t going home.”\n\n“Calm down,” Joe said with a reassuring smile, “this is better than Teri Hatcher.  And, that’s not another cave, it’s a doorway.  See all that writing above the opening.  That’s ancient Greek.  I looked it up on the internet, that phrase at the very top translates to ‘The Portal to VakEishn’.”\n\n“VakEishn?  What’s that?  And why is it so dark in there?  My flashlight doesn’t seem to brighten the inside.”\n\n“First of all, it’s ‘where’s that,’ and it’s not really dark.  There’s some kind of energy barrier.  I don’t know what’s on the other side, but I plan to find out.”  He reached into his backpack and pulled out two camcorders attached to each other with a wire wrapped in aluminum foil.  He turned on one camera and gently tossed it through the portal.  It disappeared.  As he turned on the power to the second camcorder, he said, “I’m hoping the aluminum shielding will allow the signal to pass back.”  He flipped open the video display and gazed in astonishment at a sandy tropical beach.  But it wasn’t like any beach he’d ever seen.  The sky was pink, and the ocean was almost orange.  “Yes,” he said enthusiastically.  “This is better than I had hoped.  I think this is a portal to another planet.”  He stepped closer to the portal.  “And, I plan to go there.”\n\n“What!  Are you nuts?  If that is another planet,” conceded Tom, “there may not be oxygen there.  It might be minus 300 degrees, that ‘ocean’ could be liquid methane.”\n\n“Now you’re being crazy.  Why would an advanced civilization build a portal to a place where they couldn’t breathe the air, or tolerate the temperatures?  I’m going.  You can watch through the camcorder.  I’ll let you know if I need anything.  But whatever you do, don’t follow me.”  He tossed Tom the camcorder, and stepped through the portal.\n\nTom quickly looked down at the video display.  He saw Joe’s calves come into view as he jogged toward the crashing waves.  Minutes later, Joe was performing Olympian-type feats; jumping vertically six to eight feet high.  Tom could hear Joe laughing and shouting like a child in an amusement park.  Tom stood open mouthed, staring at the display.  Apparently, the portal did go to another planet, one with much lower gravity than Earth.  And it was habitable.  The temptation to pass through the portal was unbearable.\n\nAs Joe bunny hopped back toward the camcorder, Tom suddenly appeared.  Surprised, Joe tripped and slowly tumbled face first into the sand.  He looked up at Tom and screamed, “Nooo!  What are you doing here?  I told you to stay on the other side.  I needed you to supply me until I could find the return portal.  Oh God, I forgot to tell you what the rest of the Greek writing meant.  It said, ‘Caution. Enter only, not an exit’.”\n\nTom turned back toward the portal.  But all he could see were miles and miles of sand dunes.\n"
  title: The Portal
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Glenn S. Austin
  date: 2007-06-16
  day: 16
  month: '06'
  text: "It was always the same, Bojorn counted on it, and he was never disappointed.  He had fine tuned the process over time, but the basics were still the same.  Part of this tuning had been to add an anthropologist to his crew, and it had made the selection go so much easier.\n\nA Supreme Being or their future selves, that choice was always the toughest.  The anthropologist made deciding easier, as she’d found an algorithm to make the choice, and so far it had been dead on.\n\nAll self aware intelligent species had a belief system.  It didn’t matter how far along in their development they were, vestiges of age old beliefs were clung to by every species.  Beliefs that were born out of ignorance when they were just starting to have a vague notion of their own existence, wanting to explain the world and cosmos around their barely surviving civilization.  Wanting to believe that they had some control over their future and their destiny.  Unwilling to release any belief to history, even in the face of overwhelming evidence.\n\nSome worlds that Bojorn had visited, and profited from, held a singular world wide belief, and some like the one that was being categorized by his staff right now, were fragmented by many.\n\nHe was surprised on the occasions when they found a civilization that had achieved great strides in technology; early attempts to control atoms, flights into their solar system, and an understanding of the size and nature of the universe, but still held onto the beliefs that had guided them when they had first looked at the stars and wondered.\n\nSome of these were tricky, and he would have to use the “I am from your Future” scenario to gain an entrance into these civilizations and leave with what he needed often simply by asking.  It was the better choice, when possible, as they always seemed to understand that he would eventually have to “return to the future”, which made his departure with another full cargo hold of riches that much easier.\n\nHe studied the planet on the screen as his anthropologist handed him her report, and verbally summed it up for him.\n\n“Looks like the best angle is the returning Deity routine.”  She explained.  “There are three or four major belief systems that are awaiting the return of their Supreme Being.  If you go in with that angle, you should get buy in from most of the planet’s population, and we should be gone before they start to ask which one of them you came back for.”\n\nBojorn looked up from the report.  “Alright then, if you’re sure that’s the best option.\n\nWhere would you suggest I should be returning from?\n"
  title: Beyond Beliefs
  year: 2007
- 
  author: TJMoore
  date: 2007-06-17
  day: 17
  month: '06'
  text: "“But what is it?” asked Brian. He was examining the softly humming sphere on the table with skepticism.\n\n“I told you, it’s an explanitarium. I invented it!” I said again with more than a little pride and just a little impatience.\n\n“And what, exactly, does it do again?” he asked, yet again.\n\nI held up my hands in exasperation. “I already told you, it explains itself. Aren’t you paying attention? “\n\n“I don’t get it. Explain how it explains itself.”\n\nBrian squatted down and gazed at the small shiny sphere from eye level and tried to see anything that would explain what it did.\n\n“It just does; Aren’t you listening?”\n\nBy now I was waving my arms in the air and drawing diagrams in the air with my hands, as if he could glean my meaning from the after image left behind.\n\n“It synchronizes its aura with your persistent coronal thought pattern and presents a detailed explanation of its inner workings. How many times do I have to say it?”\n\n“But how does it work?” He asked again without taking his eyes off the object of our discussion, as though fearful it would grow legs and run over and bite him.\n\n“Listen! You pick it up and it explains itself to you. That’s it! That’s all! It’s simple! Oy!”\n\nI rolled my eyeballs at him, crossed my arms in front of me and started tapping my foot.\n\n“But…”\n\n“Just pick it up!” I shouted at him, totally losing my cool at this point.\n\n“OK! OK! Don’t blow a gasket! I’ll pick it up!” he said reaching tentatively for the little sphere.\n\n“Oh wow… I understand. That’s really cool.” said Brian.\n"
  title: Explaining the unexplained
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2007-06-18
  day: 18
  month: '06'
  text: "The USS Jovian Explorer skimmed above the turbulent cloud tops of Jupiter’s upper atmosphere.  The large clamshell doors on its underbelly slowly opened and locked into position.  Moments later, the restraining clamps released the Simon, a two-man research “submersible.”  The nearly spherical vessel plummeted downward and disappeared into the yellow-orange mist.  After safety deploying her charge, the mother ship activated her antigrav engines and lifted into a higher orbit to temporarily escape Jupiter’s lethal radiation belt.\n\nWhen the submersible descended to 60,000 km above Jupiter’s core, the pilot, Jonah Grumby activated the antigrav thrusters and gradually slowed their decent, eventually leveling off at 50,000 km.  Although the craft had the ability to maneuver, they elected to ride the winds to reduce buffeting.  “OK, Hector, you can begin collecting data.”\n\n“Roger that.  Wow, this atmosphere is pretty soupy.  Besides hydrogen and helium, sensors show: methane, ammonia, ammonium hydrosulfide, condensed water vapor, and a bunch of other hydrocarbons.  I’m also picking up the larger molecules too.  At least ten amino acids: arginine, glycine, lysine, valine… Well, this is interesting.  There are polypeptides, and some pretty complex proteins too.  Hey, I think we have all of the ingredients for life here.  Let’s drop down another 10,000 klicks.  If the atmosphere thickens much more it might behave like a liquid.  Maybe we can find some single celled organisms.\n\n“Z minus 10,000 it is.  In fact, let’s have a look outside.”  As the ship descended, he opened the iris covering the one-meter in diameter observation port, and activated the floodlights.  It looked like an upward flowing snowstorm.  When they leveled off, the streaking “snowflakes” resolved into small randomly moving specks.  Under the magnifying effect of the observation port, however, the “snowflakes” appeared to be little jellyfish-like creatures with four flapping wings.  As they prepared to collect specimens to take back to the mother ship, a “flying fish” about the size of a large dog flew past the observation port.  It had a huge gaping mouth almost as large as its body.  “I guess it’s a filter feeder,” Hector suggested.  “I don’t see any eyes.  I wonder how it knows where it’s going?”\n\n“It probably doesn’t need eyes.  There’s no natural light this deep.  I’m going to go further down.  Their food chain must be based on Chemosynthesis.  Jupiter produces three times more energy than it receives from the sun.  There must be something akin to hydrothermal vents, or maybe an entire hydrothermal ocean that’s driving the whole ecosystem.”  At 28,000 km, they plunged into a liquid ocean.  The ship rocked and creaked, but the force field maintained the hull’s integrity.  A three meter long streamlined creature, about half the size of the Simon, approached the submersible.  It also had a large mouth, including an impressive arsenal of teeth.  “Well, well, I guess this menacing looking fella must be the top of the food chain.”\n\nAs they watched the hypnotic movements of the new creature as it investigated the submersible’s lights, a distant shadow began to grow larger, and larger, and larger.  By the time it reached the illumination field, all that was visible were two rows of teeth, as one row passed above, and the other below, the Simon.  “No, Jonah,” said Hector, “I believe this guy is the top of the food chain.”\n"
  title: The Oceans of Jupiter
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Grady Hendrix
  date: 2007-06-19
  day: 19
  month: '06'
  text: "When new Aunt Sally arrived, David had just one question burning in his brain. He managed to make it all the way through her visit before it came out.\n\n“What happened to old Aunt Sally?” he asked.\n\n“She’s gone on to a wonderful place where it’s always summer vacation,” his mother said. “She’s much happier there.”\n\nBeing a normal eight-year-old boy, David knew that this meant that she was dead.\n\nNew Aunt Sally was exactly the same as old Aunt Sally. She brought the same presents, she said the same things, she embarrassed him the same way. The only difference was that she didn’t seem to upset his father as much. He and old Aunt Sally were always shouting at each other, but new Aunt Sally and his dad got along just fine. It was like she was the same, only better. Better for his dad, at least.\n\n“Why did new Aunt Sally come?” he asked his mother.\n\n“Because we asked her to,” said his mother.\n\n“But why? What was wrong with old Aunt Sally?”\n\n“Nothing was wrong with her, but new Aunt Sally is so good, don’t you think? Now go do your homework and stop asking so many silly questions. It’s nothing you need to worry about.”\n\nBut he did worry about it. He worried about it all the time. Old Aunt Sally had just been plain Aunt Sally, but suddenly one day she became old Aunt Sally and new Aunt Sally took her place. What if one day he was suddenly old David Lighter? Come to think of it, he was already old David Lighter, just nobody had called him that yet.\n\nHe lay in bed all night, staring at the ceiling and promising God that from now on he would be very, very good. He would be very, very, very good. He dug his nails into his sweaty palms until they bled and he bit his lip until it tore and he swore that he would be so good that his parents would always want the old him. Always.\n"
  title: Getting Old
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Mark Lindquist
  date: 2007-06-20
  day: 20
  month: '06'
  text: "“I’d like to order an arm, please. Left, if you have them. I’ve always liked left arms.”\n\n“Certainly, sir. Have a seat while — oh, my apologies, that was quite rude of me.”\n\n“Think nothing of it. It’s by choice, not by circumstance; sitting has always been highly overrated.”\n\n“So I’ve heard, so I’ve heard. I wouldn’t wish to do without it myself, you understand, but I can see how … ah, here we are. Did you need it coloured to match?”\n\n“I don’t suppose you have green…”\n\n“No, sir, only the natural colours. There’s a dyist some of our patrons use that we can highly recommend, if you’re interested.”\n\n“No matter, I have my own. Did my ears.”\n\n“Remarkable work. Modified?”\n\n“Not much. Standard frequencies and AM/FM radio. Decent quality, but I pick up a bit of static when I get too near a microwave.”\n\n“Common problem, or so I’ve heard. Now, if you’ll take a look at the monitor, you can see what we have in stock.”\n\n“The, ah, black one…”\n\n“An excellent specimen. Professional ball player, or so I’m told. A pitcher.”\n\n“The cost seems low in that case.”\n\n“Well, he was right handed. But it’s still a very high quality arm. Do you play?”\n\n“I must say — never quite got the game. I mean, I understand it … but why?”\n\n“Quite, sir. I was never very good at it myself. Would you like to see another, then?”\n\n“Ah… one moment. Hm. 3X23.”\n\n“I am compelled to tell you, sir, that that is in fact a female arm. We certainly don’t oppose such things, but we’ve had some complaints from customers who weren’t aware when ordering.”\n\n“What’s the motor control like?”\n\n“Rated at 73%, sir. Very good for a left hand.”\n\n“Not a primary hand, then?”\n\n“We get very few of those, I’m afraid. Not for lefts.”\n\n“Understandable. I’ll take it. Put it on my account.”\n\n“Certainly, sir. Will you need that installed here or delivered?”\n\n“Neither, thank you. I’ll eat it here.”\n"
  title: Left
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2007-06-21
  day: 21
  month: '06'
  text: "“How’s this thing work?” asked Dean O’Banion, the man Alan Mitchell had reluctantly asked to come to Seattle to bankroll his invention that could provide the world with unlimited, cheap, green energy.  Although O’Banion was not the most reputable businessman on the planet, he was the only one that didn’t laugh in Mitchell’s face after reading his abstract on the Potential Benefits of Crumpled Space.\n\n“Well, Mister O’Banion, it’s simple really.  With nonscientists, I usually demonstrate the principle with piece of paper and a 2-D analogy.  I’ll draw circles on this paper representing the galaxies in our local group.  This circle represents the Milky Way, this one Andromeda, and Triangulum, both Magellanic Clouds, and so on…OK, that should be enough.  Now, as you can see, there are about two inches between each galaxy.  But, if I crumble the paper into a tight ball, some of the galaxies actually touch each other.  My theory predicts that space is actually crumbled this way in the fifth dimension, although we can’t see it.  Now, if we create a wormhole in this fifth dimension, between our galaxy and the one that is practically touching us, we can travel there in a few years, rather than millions.  Unfortunately, there are two limiting factors: I cannot change the shape of crumpled-space, so we can only travel to the galaxy that happens to be folded over us; and creating a wormhole that large requires more energy than our entire galaxy emits.\n\n“Mister Mitchell, I don’t see how any of this is going to make me rich, as you said, beyond the dreams of avarice.”\n\n“Yes, unlimited energy.  OK, on the grand scale, let’s assume the entire universe is crumpled as I’ve suggested.  Now, we can take my analogy one step further, into the realm of micro-crumpling, so to speak.  On this much smaller sub-scale, Earth-space is crumpled within itself.  And it takes much less energy to create a wormhole between two places on Earth.  As it turns out, just a few meters from this lab, in the fifth dimension, is the bottom of the Marianas Trench.  With this device,” he pointed to a contraption sitting on the floor, “I can open a wormhole between the Marianas Trench and here.  As water rushes through the wormhole at 15,000 psi, that’s 1,000 times atmospheric pressure, it can turn a turbine with 100 times the power of Niagara Falls.  I’ll demonstrate the concept with a real pinhole size wormhole.”  Mitchell adjusted the controls of his wormhole generator, aimed the focus straight up, and activated the instrument.  It shot a thin column of super-high-pressure water through the ceiling and upward into the sky for several miles.\n\n“Well, I’m impressed, Mister Mitchell.  How easy is it to control?”\n\n“Child’s play.  I have all the instructions written in this manual.”\n\n“Fantastic.”  O’Banion promptly pulled a gun from his coat pocket and shot Mitchell between the eyes.  Then, he nonchalantly packed up Mitchell’s equipment and returned to his home outside Chicago.\n\nTwo days later, the lead story in the Chicago Sun-Times read: “Dean O’Banion, a prominent Chicago businessman, was mysteriously killed last night when a volcano erupted on his estate, creating a 2000 foot lava dome.  Scientist cannot explain the eruption, since there are no known magma chambers in the Chicago area.  Scientists are also baffled by the fact that this particular type of basaltic lava is only known to exist in Iceland.  The damage was so extensive…”\n"
  title: Crumpled Space
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2007-06-22
  day: 22
  month: '06'
  text: "Consciousness seeped back slowly; recognizable sounds gradually replacing static; blackness giving way to a dull aching in his head. He resisted the urge to open his eyes.\n\n“How are you feeling?” The voice reminded him of someone, a woman he knew? He couldn’t quite put a finger on it.\n\n“What happened? Where…” Memory of the moment started leaking back in, vaporously thin and with apparent gaps. “My experiment, my lab… did something go wrong?” He risked a look, blinking back against the light.\n\n“No Rick, everything went pretty much the way I’m sure you envisioned it would.” Blue eyes smiled at him from beneath blond bangs, she looked not unlike like his assistant, and yet subtly different. “This will just take some adjusting.”  She studied his face for a moment, thrusting her hands deep in her lab coat pockets before turning away.\n\nThe walls seemed to vibrate with light, crisp luminescent tile covering the room floor to ceiling. “Is this the past?” He half whispered to himself. “Or is this some other part of the complex? I don’t know this place.” From the corner of his eye, he could swear her hair was darkening, shortening, but when he looked at her, it was the same shoulder length mahogany cut as before. Was it brown before?.\n\n“No, you haven’t been to this place, and this isn’t the past, not yet.” She turned to face him, her voice almost reproving. “You can’t simply wander backwards in time Richard, I’m afraid your concepts and equations are interesting, but flawed.” He found himself captivated by her eyes, chestnut flecked with amber. “Time is all about absolutes Richard. Moving forward. Displacement equations were what you should have been looking for, but I think they’re a little beyond your comprehension. No matter though, ideas like yours are precisely why we’re here.”\n\n“I don’t understand.” The room seemed to be fading in and out of focus, he could barely make out the books on his bookcases. “Here? In my study? Why are you here?”\n\n“You’ll make a fine teacher Richard, you’ve got so much of the future in you, I’m sure you’ll do wonderful things.” Her glasses glimmered in the pale firelight, hands stuffed into the pockets of her cardigan.\n\nRichard stared down at the tome open upon his desk, following the same lines of text over and over several times without reading it.\n\n“Santayana?” A woman’s voice. He met the gaze of his teaching assistant, wrapped in her cardigan in the corner chair on the other side of his desk.\n\n“What was that?” Had he said something just then? He felt a sense of unease, as though something was about to happen, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on what.\n\n“You said ‘Those who do not learn from history’…” She began to repeat the phrase.\n\n“Are doomed to repeat it.” He finished it reflexively, then paused, the words familiar on his tongue, but with no idea where the thought had come from.\n\n“Santayana isn’t it?” She regarded him quizzically. “Are you ok? You look a little lost.”\n\n“No, I’m fine, I think I’m fine. Santayana, yes, yes you’re right.” He pushed back in his chair, rubbing tired eyes and feeling suddenly so very old. “We should pack up for the night though, I’m tired, and I’ve got a class to teach tomorrow.” Class to teach. Why did that seem so foreign a concept? He must be tired, he would sleep, and everything would be better tomorrow, he was somehow sure of that.\n"
  title: Displacement
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Joe Carter/Kyle French
  date: 2007-06-23
  day: 23
  month: '06'
  text: "37 hands. Zed shook his head.  The 84 candidates running for President were asked if they believed in Sixism, and only 37 raised their hands.\n\nHe couldn’t believe this debate was still going on. For years they had assumed that the Manhattan Inflation Trial in 4838 had put the lid on the silly notion that the universe contained billions of galaxies. Billions!  Zed looked out the window at the smooth black plane of the night sky. One-two-three-four-five-six. Six galaxies. There they were.  It was so basic, so obvious. Any kid with a neutron telescope could make the observation for themselves!\n\nThe moderator turned to Governor Tembke of South Africa.  “Madam, are you a Big Banger?”  There were dampened giggles at the pejorative.  Everyone knew what a ‘banger” was.\n\nRev. Tembke sniffed.  “I’m running for the office of president, not planning on writing a 5th-grade textbook on astrophysics.”\n\n“Aargh!”  Zed threw his shoe at the screen, but it flew through the image of the Senator from Zimbabwe instead.  He stood up and began to pace.  He tried to breathe deeply, as if that would lower his blood pressure.\n\nHe used to be patient with relativists. He really did. But at a debate at ultra-conservative Harvard University, he’d made the mistake of asking one to explain how this galactic disappearing act occurred.  The answer the nut had given him had been so ridiculous, he’d written it down:\n\n“As the universe expanded, the force pushed the galaxies outward faster and faster. As they surpassed the speed of light, their light shifted to infinitely long wavelengths and dimmed. A similar “cloak of invisibility” befell the afterglow of the Big Bang, a faint bath of cosmic microwaves, whose wavelengths shifted so that they are now buried by the radio noise in our own galaxy. There was also an element called deuterium, but it is in deep space now. To be seen it needs to be backlit from distant quasars, and quasars, of course, have also disappeared.”\n\nTotally unqualified. Unprovable! Billions of galaxies–similar in size and shape to the six observable galaxies – simply sped up and – poof! – became invisible. “Yeah, that happened,” Zed chuckled to himself, turning back to the debate.\n\nZed was particularly frustrated that the relativists were able to prop up their beliefs with… ancient texts!  The silly belief was dying out until an archaeological dig in New Atlantis produced evidence of near universal belief in relativism by ancient world civilizations. Einstein, Hubble, Hawking… proto-scientists believed in an inflationary universe, so why shouldn’t we?\n\n“Science is based on observation,” he grumbled, “not faith in theories about a Big Bang, cosmic radiation, and an expanding universe in which galaxies go missing.” Why couldn’t they just embrace the facts? Why did they insist on clinging to mythical beliefs? Were they just stupid?\n\nZed collapsed back into his recliner.  Fortunately, time was on the side of science.  Eventually, the old beliefs would finally fade away.  After all, everyone knew the modern system would collapse if the rules could ever change.\n"
  title: 37 Hands
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Francesco Navarro
  date: 2007-06-24
  day: 24
  month: '06'
  text: "The air scrubbers were failing. Generators were running at less than fifteen percent. Only one large bio dome and four of the sixty life support shelters remained of the mission complex.\n\nFather Nandres died a week ago and there was no one left who could operate a harvester or any of the larger terraforming machines.\n\nThis field was the only one remaining and it was slowly dying.\n\nStill, there were twenty six other souls whose bodies needed the nourishment the field could provide. Most of the survivors were acolytes with only a class three technical training, just like him.\n\nThere were no clouds anymore. Only a baleful yellow sun glared down at him from a fiery orange sky. The seminary had not prepared him for the magnitude of the impossible.\n\nThe recirculated air in the containment suit was stale and dry. Thick gloves made pulling up the low tubers clumsy. The words of a four thousand year old prayer formed on his parched lips as he worked.\n\n”Teach me to be generous,\n\nTeach me to serve you as I should,\n\nTo give and not to count the cost,\n\nTo fight and not to heed the wounds,\n\nTo toil and not to seek for rest,\n\nTo labor and ask not for reward,\n\nSave that of knowing that I do your most holy will…”\n"
  title: Failed Mission
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2007-06-25
  day: 25
  month: '06'
  text: "“Hey boss, can you come down to the lab?  Ah, the prototype has disappeared.”\n\n“It’s supposed to, you idiot.  That’s what stealth technology does.”\n\n“Sorry, sir, I didn’t mean to say it disappeared.  I meant to say it’s gone, as in, we can’t find it.  Hello?  You there, Boss?”  All he heard after that was the sound of the phone bouncing onto a desk, followed by footsteps quickly fading away.\n\nTwo minutes later, Drake Griffin burst into the lab.  “All right, Kemp, where’s my ship?  Start from the beginning.”\n\n“Well, sir, as you know, this was the first manned test.  Tom Marvel, the test pilot, entered the prototype 45 minutes ago.  He activated the start sequence in accordance with the test plan.  The ship disappeared as expected.  Then, Tom used the antigrav system to elevate from Alfa Stand.  We know this happened because the weight sensors dropped to zero.  He was supposed to hover for 30 minutes, then fly to Bravo Stand.  But according to the sensors, he never made it.”\n\n“Maybe the sensors are defective?  Have you checked them?”\n\n“We tested them prior to securing the hangar.  But we cannot enter the hangar again until the ship reappears, or we get approval from an S-Level Director.  That would be you, sir.”\n\n“What are the risks?”\n\n“Well, for one thing, the ship could be hovering directly above your head when it lands.”\n\n“Can’t you radio Tom, or instruct the aircraft to decloak?”\n\n“No, sir.  Visible light and radio transmissions are the same thing, except for wavelength.  All electromagnetic radiation curves around the ship.  That’s how the cloak works.”\n\n“OK, Kemp.  Here’s my plan.  You’re going into the hangar with a hard wired camera mounted onto a 20 foot pole.  Then you poke around in there until the camera disappears.  If you’re killed, I’ll make sure you get a big fat raise.  Now, go find my ship.”\n\nAfter 40 minutes of very tentative “poking,” Kemp located the ship on the floor, approximately 100 feet from Alfa Stand.  The camera revealed that the area inside the stealth bubble was pitch black, except for the feeble glow of the instrument panel.  Marvel was on the cockpit floor, curled up into a fetal position.  Kemp hastily jury rigged a transmitter onto the end of his pole, and pushed it through the cloak.  He then instructed the ship to power down.  The ship materialized, and instantly frosted over.  Kemp sheepishly touched the hull.  “It’s ice cold, sir.  I wasn’t very good in thermodynamics, but my guess is that the cloak is endothermic somehow, and it sucked all the heat from inside the bubble.  It looks like poor Tom froze to death.”\n\n“Why didn’t the earlier test reveal this endo-thingy?”\n\n“We never engaged the cloak for more the 15 minutes.  And those tests were run by the onboard computers.  The electronics are not sensitive to the cold.  I guess Tom’s core body temperature dropped so fast he didn’t have time to abort.  What should we do, sir?”\n\n“Well, the first thing is to get Tom’s body out of there.  Then, I’m going back to my office and write a directive to the effect that after the research boys say they’ve solved this problem, they all get to ride in the next test flight.”\n"
  title: Solving the Stealth Problem
  year: 2007
- 
  author: James Smith
  date: 2007-06-26
  day: 26
  month: '06'
  text: "Murphy took a bench and pulled a paperback from his coat pocket. He dialed down his shades to read better, and sipped his coffee. After a few pages, he became aware of a presence on the bench next to him.\n\n“Oh, wow. Paper. You drive gas, too, huh?”\n\nHe looked up. White girl, half his age, red hair cut into some sort of n-dimensional shape that confused him and made him feel old.\n\nMurphy smiled. “Digital paper. The real stuff’ll get you thrown in jail.”\n\n“Mm. What are you, a cop?”\n\nHer eyes widened a bit when he told her he was a detective. She leaned closer, their knees touched. She asked if he carried a gun, if his job was dangerous. She saw the scar on his cheek. He wouldn’t tell her the story of how he got it; she was sure it was something fantastic. He had the kind of body you’d imagine a dangerous man to have; she told him her hotel room wasn’t far.\n\nIn the hotel. She sat up in the bed, rolling a joint. Murphy lay on his back with his eyes shut.\n\n“You wanna smoke this with me?”\n\n“I don’t think so. I’ve got to meet my ex-wife later.”\n\n“You really a P.I.?”\n\n“You really a redhead?”\n\n“I think there’s a few real ones left. A generation to go, at least, before they’re all bred out.”\n\nHe asked her how she got into the business. Most Modern Girls were depressives looking for some way to hurt their parents, but feel like they were hurting themselves. This girl, who called herself Pepper, claimed to really have DID, and had gotten the chip implant to referee her various personalities. She had three, she said: Pepper, August and Katherine.\n\nIt was a cliche’, she admitted, to get the chip and become a Modern Girl. But the freedom people talked about, to simply turn that person on, to do whatever you wanted in that body, and then- at will- to shunt it aside like it never happened… Well, not many people had that option. It was hard to pass up.\n\nHis phone rang. It was the one ringtone he couldn’t ignore, so he crossed the room and pulled it out of his pants. Pepper licked the spliff and watched Murphy as he talked in clipped, cryptic phrases. She watched his shoulders. He didn’t get tense or upset; she figured it wasn’t his ex.\n\nHe finished and turned to look at her.\n\n“I’ve got to go.” He took a wad of bills out of the same pocket, already clipped together, and put it on the dresser.\n\n“Mm hmm. Same thing next week?”\n\n“Why don’t we try a little older. Maybe Asian. Japanese?”\n\n“Thai would be more convincing, with my bone structure. And the melanin tweak will run you extra.”\n\n“Sure.”\n\n“You gonna let me read that book one of these days?”\n\n“No,” he said. “Every good romance needs a bit of mystery.”\n\nHe dressed and left.\n"
  title: A Modern Girl
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Viktor Kuprin
  date: 2007-06-27
  day: 27
  month: '06'
  text: "“This is the last call for evacuation. Everyone must leave. Go to the park for water, food, and medical care. If you cannot move, call out or make a noise, and we will help you.”\n\nSpaceman Kuzmin tried not to look at the bloated red sun as he walked the deserted urban streets. No one had come even though he played the message three times at every city block just as he had been ordered. Only fools or the deranged would wait so long, he thought. The unstable sun the locals called Sosnovka would soon end this miserable world.\n\nThe motion detector pinged, and Kuzmin halted. Something in the shadows of an alley, but he couldn’t see anyone there. He keyed his helmet’s external speaker.\n\n“Come out. I am CIS Space Force. I have water.”\n\nThen he saw it. Scruffy and dusty, a big orange tom cat wobbled out of the alleyway and collapsed onto the hot pavement. It panted and gasped for breath as it looked up at Kuzmin, its tongue distended from its mouth.\n\nKuzmin gently picked up the cat and felt its sides heaving.\n\n“Poor old koshka, did you get left behind? Here, a little of this.”\n\nHe drew a handful of water from his drink tube and slowly, carefully, dripped the cool liquid onto the cat’s lips and tongue. It began to lap and swallow.\n\nKuzmin unzipped his light suit. The air felt like an oven’s heat striking his chest. Slowly, he slipped the cat inside his cooled coverall, and there it rested without complaint or struggle. He could barely feel the old tom feebly rumbling, trying to purr.\n\nAnd so, he continued on to complete his route, but no other strays, human or animal, were met.\n\nAs Kuzmin walked back to the evacuation center, he saw others who had been successful. The last inhabitants of Sosnovka Prime were a sorry lot. Two of his crewmates forcibly led a wild-eyed man who cursed them for their efforts. Others helped a grossly overweight woman whose clammy white skin indicated severe heat stroke. Dirty street children huddled, looking anxiously at the shuttles.\n\nKuzmin was refilling his drink tube when a hand grabbed his shoulder and spun him around on his heels.\n\n“You durak! Idiot! I told you that looting was forbidden!”\n\nIt was Second Lieutenant Burkhanov, the section commander. With a jerk, he pulled open the front of Kuzmin’s suit. A furry orange face with flattened ears and frightened eyes stared back at the officer.\n\n“What the?! Kuzmin, get rid of this … infectsia! It can carry disease! Understand me?!”\n\nKuzmin shook his head. “No, sir. Sorry. I won’t leave it here to burn.”\n\nBurkhanov eyes opened wide with rage. But then he paused. It wasn’t often that a Spaceman Recruit refused an order. And never Kuzmin, one of the better spacehands.\n\n“Bah! Make ready for liftoff!” He stomped off towards the shuttle.\n\nAs the days passed, the orange tom took to starship life quite well. Kuzmin was in the mess hall, slipping a few sproti fish to the new mascot when a crewman yelled, “It’s started!” Everyone dropped their food and ran to the portholes.\n\nThe flashpoint had been reached: Immolation. Waves of fire swept over the planet below.\n\nA man next to Kuzmin gasped and made the sign of the cross. It was Burkhanov, his sad face illuminated by the hellish flame storms.\n\nKuzmin watched nervously as the old koshka wandered between the officer’s ankles. He was amazed when Burkhanov picked it up, placed it against his shoulder and began to pet Sosnovka’s littlest refugee.\n"
  title: Koshka
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2007-06-28
  day: 28
  month: '06'
  text: "The UES Celeste coasted into the outskirts of the Trifid Nebula, and pulled alongside two stationary vessels that were tethered to each other.  Captain Briggs studied the view screen suspiciously.  “Well chief, what do you make of this?”\n\n“I don’t know, captain.  According to our records, the USS Baychimo disappeared 81 years ago, and the USS Joyiya 113 years before that.  The combined crew and passengers totaled 244.   All were presumed lost.”\n\n“Do you think anybody could still be alive?”\n\n“Their decedents, perhaps.  Both ships appear to have power, but they are not responding to our hails.  I recommend we try boarding the Baychimo.  Their hatch configuration is more similar to ours.”\n\n“Agreed, Chief.  Take a security and medical team with you.  And, chief, I want you to keep a channel open at all times.”\n\nThe Celeste’s shuttle positioned itself over the Baychimo’s hatch, and the magnetic grapples firmly secured it to the hull.  After the automated docking skirt sealed the perimeter, the tunnel was pressurized.  The chief grabbed a spanner wrench and rapped on the Baychimo’s hatch three times.\n\nTo his astonishment, the hatch opened slowly from the inside.  Four armed men holding antique percussion weapons stood on the other side.  A woman, who the chief estimated to be in her late 40’s, pushed past the armed men to address the chief.  “I’m captain Cornwell.  Who are you, and why have you boarded my ship?  You are interfering with a rescue mission.”\n\n“I’m sorry, ma’am.  We thought that you needed assistance.  This ship has been missing for over 80 years.”\n\n“What are you talking about?  We left spacedock six months ago.  We were charting the nebula when we spotted the Joyiya.  It’s been missing for over 100 years.  Our EVA team reported seeing living people through their observation windows.”  She paused for a few seconds, and then continued, “Come to think of it, you may be able to assist.  We can’t dock with the Joyiya because of their antiquated hatch system.  But you appear to have that capability, although I don’t know how.  We’re the flagship of the fleet.”\n\n“Perhaps it would be best captain Cornwell, if you would accompany us to the Joyiya.  I think we need to pick up their captain and return to my ship.  There are complicating factors that we need to discuss.”\n\nThree hours later, Captain Mills of the Joyiya, and Captains Cornwell and Briggs sat in the executive briefing room of the Celeste.   “I’m sorry, this must really be a shock for you and your crew,” said Captain Briggs.  “To find out so suddenly that everybody you left behind is gone.  To be pulled decades into your future by a phenomenon that we don’t understand.  I can’t begin to imagine what that might be like.”\n\nJust then, a person in dress uniform materialized out of thin air into the middle of the room. “Hello,” he said with a smile.  “I’m Captain Fokke of the UFP Dutchman.  Ah, you must be Captain Briggs.  Our DNA scans told us you were still alive.  This is utterly amazing.  We thought the crew of the Celeste died over 130 years ago.  And yet, you don’t appear to have aged a day.  How may we be of assistance?”\n"
  title: The Trifid Nebula
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Debbie Mac Rory
  date: 2007-06-29
  day: 29
  month: '06'
  text: "The high preacher approached  the lone figure at the front of the hall of remembrances. He passed gases through his membranes in such a manner, that if he were human, would have been called a polite cough. The particle entity  turned it’s attention to the high preacher.\n\n“I wished to sympathize with your loss” it intoned, “and I wished to inquire if perhaps you might permit me to suggest an action which may help to relieve your current malaise”\n\nThe entity appeared to sigh, but raised itself from its place of dejection. The high preacher led its charge to one of the secluded sections of walls, and with a brief gesture from one of its pseudopods, the wall turned transparent. The particle entity absorbed the light that entered through the now transformed wall, taking in the view of a not too distant yellow star and another particle entity drifting slowly towards it, like the one inside the ship in more ways than it was different, but somehow the internal combustion that drove that species was omitted.\n\n“Some feel that it is comforting, seeing the remains of the loved one move on.” The high preacher tilted its visual receptors, marginally changing the selectivity of the wavelengths of light it was receiving. “Just as emissions from stars such as this one are collected by the ships sails to provide us power and energy, so are our remains sent to them, so we may feel their presence once more”\n\n“And the fate of the inhabitants of this star?”\n\nThe query from the particle entity washed over the high preacher as waves shape the sand on a beach. It changed the angle of its visual receptors once more, to receive the information its charge had already absorbed, and perceived the objects which appeared to be in regular orbit around the star.\n\nThe high preacher commenced a series of chemical reactions, forming for its species, a gentle smile. “Decisive tests have already been conducted. We would of course never use any star in any manner than could bring harm to its inhabitants. The species developing around this star are as yet, quite primitive, and in time, perhaps we can begin to open up communications with them. But for now, we harvest the energy and we wait”\n\nBoth the beings fell silent for a time watching as the extinguished entity was engulfed and consumed by the star. The flare from the its consumption rose up from the surface of the star in a glorious swirl of colour that far transcended the range of visible light, and was swept on solar winds to be shared throughout the system, the planets circling their sun, and the other ships, drifting in silence.\n\n“And perhaps those creatures  developing there have the ability to see some of these flares our bodies create. And perhaps, we have already communicated with them, and brought beauty to their lives”.\n"
  title: Ashes to Ashes
  year: 2007
- 
  author: J. S. Kachelries
  date: 2007-06-30
  day: 30
  month: '06'
  text: "“Objection, your honor; asked and answered,” stated the defense attorney.\n\n“Sustained,” replied the judge.  Then addressing the plaintiff’s attorney, “Move on, counselor.”\n\n“Your honor,” he protested, “the witness is intentionally being evasive.  Again, I appeal to the court to compel the defendant to submit to a paternity test.”\n\nThe defense attorney objected again. “Unacceptable, your honor.  As the President of the United States, my client is entitled to ‘super-privacy.’  Clearly, the plaintiff initiated this frivolous lawsuit in a blatant attempt to influence the upcoming election.  I motion the court to dismiss this case outright.  The mere fact that the President of the United States has flatly denied these baseless allegations should be enough for an acquittal.”\n\n“Your honor,” interjected the plaintiff’s attorney, “my client is entitled to due process.”\n\nThe judge rapped his gavel on the sound block.  “My chambers, gentlemen.  Court is in recess for one hour.”\n\nA few minutes later, the judge sat at his desk facing the two attorneys.  “Gentlemen, I will not have my court turned into a circus.  We need to resolve this dispute without it becoming a he-said-she-said debate.  Do I make myself clear?”\n\nThe defense attorney had anticipated this development, and pounced.  “Your honor, perhaps I have a solution.  If my client can convince you, privately of course, that he is irrefutably not the father of this child, would you consider summarily dismissing the case?”\n\n“Perhaps, counselor.  Have him show me this ‘evidence’ and I’ll make a ruling.  No promises, mind you, until after I evaluate its validity.  When can he be ready?”\n\n“If my esteemed colleague will step outside, your honor, we’re ready now.”\n\nThe plaintiff’s attorney reluctantly left the room, and the President entered.  The judge leaned back in his chair and said, “Mister President, your attorney tells me that you can prove you’re not the child’s father.”\n\n“Yes, your honor, I can.  However, if it pleases the court, may I ask that this information be kept confidential, based on the potential political ramifications.”  After he saw the judge begrudgingly nod his head, he continued.  “Thank you, your honor.  OK then, do you happen to have a Phillips head screw driver?”\n\nHis attorney quickly interrupted.  “No need to look, your honor.  I happen to have one in my coat pocket.”\n\nWhen court resumed, the judge made his ruling.  “Based on evidence presented to me, I am dismissing this case with prejudice.”  He quickly pointed his gavel at the plaintiff’s attorney.  “And, counselor, before you rush to appeal this ruling, I recommend that you thoroughly explain to your client the penalties for perjury, and for knowingly filing a false paternity suit.  Because, she will be found guilty.”\n\nTwo weeks later, the President’s reelection campaign “leaked” documentation implying that the President was sterile, and that his opponent was behind the lawsuit in a desperate attempt to humiliate the President in an effort to win the election.  Since the American people don’t like dirty politics, the President’s poll numbers went up 30 points.\n\nTwo weeks after that, the judge was watching the election results on holovision.  The President won reelection in a Reaganesque landslide.  The judge mentally debated his oath of secrecy, but had to concede that the “sterility” disclosure was at least a half truth.  After all, an android could not be the biological father of her child.\n"
  title: Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2007-07-01
  day: '01'
  month: '07'
  text: "Shane jerked awake at his desk with a look of horror on his face.\n\nIt was late at the laboratory. He’d been going over calibrations on the atmosphere processing equipment prototypes that he’d designed. There was full funding for NASA and a new push from the president to colonize the moon and Mars. She had realized that oil was running low on planet Earth and that ‘going somewhere else’ was going to present itself as an option sooner or later. She wanted to be prepared.\n\nIt was top secret. It was called ‘Plan B’.\n\nShane was no expert on atmosphere mechanics but even he knew that no snow in his home town for five years meant that ‘Plan B’ was going to be ‘Plan A’ pretty soon.\n\nHe had a large team of engineers and mechanics to look after and experimental technology to design and test. He’d been catching naps now and again but hadn’t had a full nights sleep for nearly a year.\n\nIt came to him during a nap at his desk.\n\nHe had thought of the idea of checking out Venus and seeing if it had oil. Earth could transport oil to and from Venus and buy itself possibly centuries of wiggle room. He drifted off thinking of this.\n\nIt hit him in the face like brick. Venus was clouded. Mars was dry. Earth was just right.\n\nEarth was the third in a series. Humans had started on Mercury. They had used up the resources on that planet as the sun grew. The few survivors left had limped to Venus and made it habitable. Millions of years had passed until the resources had been used up. Greenhouse gases clouded the atmosphere. Shortsighted leaders had made a last minute Plan B to colonize and terraform the next planet over. They had killed the indigenous lizards with their climate changers and the few Venusians that survived the trip before their entire planet was baked had landed on a planet of monkeys.\n\nThey were forgotten to legend. Their supplies ran out and they became savages. Some leftover math flourished here and there but they were stupid and lazy. It took millions of years for humans to naturally populate this planet to the point of strangulation.\n\nWe were eating the solar system from the inside out. Adaptable and voracious like a virus. It was like the orbits were the rings of a tree and we were a disease working our way out from the center of the trunk.\n\nI was perpetuating the cycle by setting my sights on Mars. We’d been too quick this time, though. The sun hadn’t grown enough.\n\nThere was nothing in Venus we could use. I knew that without even needing to do a survey of the planet. It was a shell. And Mars would not be ready for another million years.\n\nWe were doomed.\n"
  title: Plan B
  year: 2007
- 
  author: J.Loseth
  date: 2007-07-02
  day: '02'
  month: '07'
  text: "It was good money. Everyone said so, on the newscasts and the Internet, repeating the slogan from the billboards: Everyone’s Rich in the Colonies. Drake had read over the contract, and the money was indeed good. The wealth in the colonies was so abundant that the contract even included a subsidy for his house, and it was a real house, not a cramped pod or even a flat. Drake had seen pictures. It looked like something out of a storybook. “I’ll get to see real grass,” he’d told Delilah, but still she frowned. It was good money, he reminded her. How many people in their neighborhood could boast that kind of salary? None, that’s how many.\n\nHis parents had been relieved. All their relatives congratulated him for passing the screening. Drake was proud of that; he’d been lucky to miss out on the genes for anything debilitating, and though he’d only barely squeaked by the vision test, he still had the green light. Not many could say that nowadays. “It means there aren’t any diseases,” he explained to Delilah, but she rolled her eyes. “It just means you aren’t bringing any diseases to them,” she told him primly. “There’s nothing in there about the type of diseases they might give you.” Drake had to admit she had a point, but it was good money, so he let it slide.\n\nFor four months Drake sold off his possessions, slowly liquidating his old life to make way for the new. He couldn’t take more than two bags, after all, and he’d need the startup cash. Delilah recognized the necessity and even scraped up enough to buy a few items from him. He didn’t tell her how much he appreciated it, but he was sure that she knew. It was just like her to know. As the departure approached, though, tensions rose. They fought more. Sometimes Delilah would stalk out at the end of the night without saying a thing, and sometimes she’d fix Drake with a look of reproach that was worse than words. It made it hard to pack, but he thought of the money and was resolute. “You could have applied too,” he reminded her once during one of their bitter fights. “Then we’d both be going. They even let couples live in the same place.” He hadn’t gotten a response to that, just the slam of the door in his face. She’d always come back the next day, though, so Drake shoved the fights under the rug and always let her in.\n\n“Will you visit?” she asked. The question made Drake uncomfortable. “I’ll write,” he promised, holding her hands on the landing pad, eyes on their interlocked fingers. “It’s a long trip, Del, and they don’t pay for that much vacation time. A message can get here in just a few hours. It’ll be fine.” Delilah didn’t seem to like that, but she nodded anyway. The conductor called for all aboard, and Drake began to extricate his hands, but Delilah gripped them suddenly and leaned forward to whisper in his ear. “When your two years are up, I’ll be finished. I’ll be done with school and we can start a life together. We can find a place when you get back.”\n\nDrake felt his throat closing up. He squeezed her hands by way of answer, then slowly let go, heading up to the stasis pod door. It was the only facility of its kind, the only method for suspending human life well enough to protect the travelers on their journey through sub-space. The colonies might be rich, but they could never muster enough technological minds to build and maintain such a thing. Delilah didn’t, couldn’t know, but the money was good, so Drake didn’t tell her. He watched through the porthole until the pod filled with gas and knew she would never forgive him.\n"
  title: Good Money
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2007-07-03
  day: '03'
  month: '07'
  text: "Nine days after receiving the transmission from Claudia, Jisuk found himself sitting in a corner booth at the Leaping Cow pub, grateful that the iciness of his beer disguised its stagnant taste.  It wasn’t hard to keep something cold on Luna Mal, where the school uniforms included heavy coats, but until this visit he’d never realized how well the temperature complimented (or disguised) the flavor of the region’s cuisine.  When Claudia finally sauntered into the bar, ten minutes late, she unwrapped her scarf and yanked her hat from her head before dropping into place across from him.  Her blond hair was a mess, and she smelled like damp wool.  Jisuk had been annoyed since leaving Earth for the three day journey to Luna, and his contact’s tardiness didn’t help matters.  Unfortunately, Jisuk knew he needed her.\n\nLast year, Claudia had secured an exclusive contract for Mercurian saffron, and the spice had given his menu an advantage over the hydroponic dishes offered by his competition.  Now, the rest of the gourmet world was beginning to realize that Terrans preferred their cuisine pulled from the soil—a kind of nostalgia, he imagined—and if he didn’t come up with something new, he risked losing his prestige as an innovator.\n\nClaudia yanked the drawstring of her bag and withdrew a dull metal box slightly larger than his palm.  A portable refrigeration unit, he realized.  She placed it on the table with a quiet thump and motioned for a server to bring her a glass of water.\n\n“Joraberries,” Claudia told him with a broad smile.\n\nJisuk’s expression of interest showed a flicker of reservation.  “Berries?”\n\n“Not just berries.  Joraberries.”\n\n“If this is some kind of Frankenstein fruit, I’m not going to violate-”\n\n“It’s not,” she interrupted.  “It’s not engineered at all.  All-natural and organic, fresh from an ice cave on Triton.”  Her thumb rubbed the box’s fingerprint reader, but she didn’t lift the lid.\n\n“Berries.  From an ice cave.”\n\n“The colonists have been living on them for years, but no one on this side of the asteroid belt has heard of them,” Claudia continued.  “They’re seeds.  Unfertilized, preserved by the nitrogen pools.  Aged at least five centuries old.  Since the plants are extinct, they’re a limited commodity.  And I just bought the cave.”\n\n“Show me,” Jisuk said.  The lid of the box flipped open.\n\nFor a second, it was impossible to see the contents through the pale fog floating over the surface of the liquid nitrogen.  After several seconds, however, the denser gas spilled over the edges and onto the table and revealed several clusters of translucent beads, each seed the size of a large marble and containing a black pit smaller than a sesame seed.  They were submerged in the clear fluid, but Claudia retrieved a pair of plastic tongs from her bag and pulled one free, then dropped it into her glass of ice water.\n\n“Like I said, I own the cave,” she said as the berry frosted to an almost opaque white, “and I’ve contracted two groups of migrant workers from Io.  If you’re not interested in them, I’m sure Kerry Jenson will be.”\n\nThe mention of his main competitor caused Jisuk’s eyes to narrow.  “If they’re any good, I’ll buy them,” he said.  “If they’re not, it’ll be Jenson’s loss.”\n\nClaudia shrugged.  Seconds of silence passed before she fished the berry from the ice water with her tongs, then motioned for Jisuk to extend his hand.  He complied.  The skin of the seed felt like frozen leather.  He touched his tongue to the berry, then popped it into his mouth and bit hard, hard enough to pop the thick coating.  The inside was gelatinous but shot through with ice crystals–a fascinating texture, one strong enough to feature the betty prominantly in desserts.  The taste developed a second later: sweet, but with an acidic tinge.  Versatile, excellent for marinades, and he could already imagine a martini flavored by its extract.\n\n“They’re good,” he said.  He swallowed the gel and chewed the skin, which dissolved almost immediately into syrup.  “Excellent.”\n\n“It’s what I do,” Claudia said.  She waited before continuing.  “Thirteen credits a pound,” she told him.  “Including shipping.  They’ll come like this, in nitrogen.”\n\n“Write up the contract,” Jisuk said after running his tongue across his teeth to lick away the last of the berry’s juice.\n\n“You’ll have it within the week,” Claudia said, grinning before pulling her hat over her head and rising to her feet.  “Pleasure doing business with you.”\n\nJisuk nodded.  He reached for her tongs, taking another icy sphere from the liquid and dipping it in the ice water to thaw.\n\n“What about the colonists?” he asked as he lifted the berry to his mouth.\n\n“What about them?”\n\n“You said this is what they eat.”\n\n“Oh, they’ll manage,” Claudia said.  “They’re a resourceful people.”\n"
  title: Next Season's Hottest Flavor
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2007-07-04
  day: '04'
  month: '07'
  text: "Letchen moved slowly but steadily through the dense jungle. In his right hand spun a blade, broad, flat and wickedly sharp, tethered by a length of cable. Even though the modified nunchaku cleared a wide path through which to walk, the more violent foliage still tore at him, leaving welts and open wounds on exposed flesh. In his other hand Letchen held a blunt nose automatic, always at the ready.\n\nHe’d inherited the blade from a mentor, a three year native who’d shown him how to track game meat for the outpost. They hunted together for months before becoming separated during one perilous expedition. Letchen had found the blade, discarded in a pool of blood. He never found his friend’s body, but he’d chased his killer for days, tracking it relentlessly before cornering the beast, exhausted and mortally wounded near the fresh carcass of another. He tore it apart in a wild fit of revenge fueled anger.\n\nThrashing ahead drew his attention, as the dark form of his quarry tore across his path. Letchen broke into a sprint, veering onto the trail partially cleared by the frightened beast. They’d been coming closer to the compound lately, becoming more brazen and frightening the station inhabitants, but to Letchen that just meant a hundred kilos of game meat he didn’t have to carry nearly as far. The creature screeched over its shoulder at him, black lips curled back from massive white teeth. It leapt into the air, arms extended, grasped a low hanging vine and began pulling itself hand over hand towards the canopy, curling it’s legs upwards to clutch with it’s hand-like feet, accelerating its ascent. Letchen raised his weapon and fired, the thunder-crack setting off a cacophony of sound as every other living creature nearby took notice. The wounded beast stopped, struggled futily to maintain its grip before letting go, falling hard to the ground where it lay motionless. Letchen closed the distance quickly, and with a sweeping overhead strike, decapitated the beast. He wasn’t taking chances, and it would save him carrying twenty meatless kilos he couldn’t eat.\n\nHe wrestled the carcass into a sitting position, and pulling one carbon black arm down over his own chest, and hooking his other arm through its legs, he managed to shoulder his kill and stand. Letchen started what he knew would be a long slow trek back to the compound, warm blood oozing down his back as the beast bled out, the fluid mingling with the blood of his own wounds.\n\nThe walk was arduous at first, but gradually he felt reenergized, his stride lengthened and he found himself almost bounding through the dense greenery. The carcass on his back must have bled out completely, as it felt almost weightless now. Letchen leapt at a low hanging vine, grasping it with his left hand and letting momentum carry him off his feet through several meters of jungle. His adrenal glands undoubtedly had gone into overdrive, he’d never felt this invigorated after a hunt before.\n\nHe could see the walls of the compound rising up through the jungle and he broke into a sprint. The relative calm was suddenly shattered by a barrage of gunfire, tracer rounds flashing past him, large calibre slugs masticating the dense jungle. Letchen opened his mouth to yell as the gunner paused to reload, but no words escaped, just a screeching sound that chilled him to the bone. Letchen stared at his outstretched arm, noticing for the first time the blackening of his skin, and the fluid rippling of the muscle straining beneath it. His cells were flooded with new commands, but the overpowering one now was ‘run’. The headless carcass fell to the ground, as a newly heightened survival instinct drove Letchen to abandon his kill and his weapons and flee upwards into the trees, and into utter darkness.\n"
  title: Into Darkness
  year: 2007
- 
  author: J.R.Blackwell
  date: 2007-07-05
  day: '05'
  month: '07'
  text: "Do you remember when I bought that old theater, sold my house and lived in the basement with the rats and the roaches and the scuttling things that I couldn’t identify? Do you remember before I got too bitter to kill those things, when I let them chew at the woodwork, when I ate one meal a day, always dinner always at someone’s house, some part time actor with a real job that paid for me to eat, or when I lived, lover to lover, each of them paychecks for me to breathe and eat and work on with, me and one of those computers you held on your lap, not in your hand, on your lap and worked and worked, when an internet connection was something I’d pay more for than food, when it was something you could steal?\n\nI scrubbed that old theater. I scrubbed it with old t-shirts down on my hands and knees between every aisle, scrubbed the bottom of those cherry seats, all two hundred of them, till each one of them, dented or cracking, shined for me, my indoor orchard.\n\nRemember my signature suit, the one I stole from the donation box of the goodwill so I wouldn’t have to pay the five dollars for it inside? Remember cash money and the way it felt like cloth and paper all at once? Cartoons never got paper right in those days, like being drawn on paper meant somehow that you couldn’t draw paper.\n\nDo you remember the men who smelled like patchouli and wore sandals and laughed and cried all in the same night, both of us laughing and crying with them riding their emotions like a drug? Do you remember the boys who looked like girls who loved boys who looked like men? Do you remember Ronald, after he went off to the global war, and the way he looked when he came back, the metal and plastic in his chest blowing and humming its war tune though his body? Do you remember staying up till those cold blue dawns, Ronald still shirtless, playing drinking games, playing truth or dare moving past screwing and drugs and deviation till we asked, hey, has anyone here ever killed, and Ronald raising his hand and bringing that silence to the theater, that big, full, quiet, strong and loud as any applause. All those giant emotions swirled around in my drinks back then, oceans of drink.\n\nDo you remember the greasepaint and the girls who smelled so sweet that I thought they would stick to my hands, that they would rub off on me, into me? I remember loving every single one of them, falling in love every night of a show, each show a fever. I was the starving delirious kind of all that magic. Remember how the cops threw me out of my own theater because it wasn’t residential, or how pest control shut us down for a week before a show? Do you remember the way that I begged and pleaded with everyone I knew who had part time jobs, who had money, who knew money, to give me some so that I could spend it on that old breaking theater?\n\nDo you remember when they came with their little boxes, those cheap squares that could make the little machines that would scrub floors, repair chairs, fix and mend? Do you remember how we cracked them open to see how they worked, had them make us all food out of the rats and the show bills that was barely food, but we knew we wouldn’t have to worry about eating anymore? Do you remember when the girls started to freeze-dry, to turn into plastic at sixteen, so that no breast ever sagged, no wrinkle ever folded? Do you remember feeling like a pedophile the first time you slept with one? Do you remember when the men stopped running off to war and played at it from home like a game? Do you remember how the new people, that new guard said that we were missing all the art because it wasn’t here anymore, it wasn’t wrapped up in the tangible?\n\nAm I old that I don’t want to move my body to a tank? Am I old that I want to scrub my cherry seats and smell my greasepaint? Have I missed the train to the next world, an old guard, and a relic of past time, a giant on whose shoulders a castle is standing? I do not understand the intangible world of numbers and glow in the world made of those bright young minds. But I am not lost. I do remember, children, I remember before, and I will learn to share with you, so that you can carry my memories with you.\n"
  title: Do You Remember?
  year: 2007
- 
  author: B.York
  date: 2007-07-06
  day: '06'
  month: '07'
  text: "Julian rubbed his forehead in abject frustration as he glanced over the reports from the scientists crowded around him at his conference table. From what he was reading, Julian knew history would have to be re-written and that the Universal Human Federation, UHF respectively, would probably rebuke such a claim as were on these reports.\n\nYet, here the proof stood. It was clear as day that humans had been building a lie of evolution, of productivity and ingenuity. Julian Brahe could finally glance up and address the research team with some form of composure.\n\n“Last week it was the invention of the 20th Century Automobile. Now you’re telling me that it goes back to… I can’t even read this number. Well, how much of the world is technically and legally ours?”\n\nA voice came from the crowd of bewildered, and ultimately ecstatic, scientists, “Technically-speaking Lt. Brahe, the productivity of man past the age of the dawn of our kind is irrelevant as an original creation.”\n\nJulian began to rub his temples now, leaning back with an exasperated groan. “How could we have missed it? All those millennia just sitting inside of our bodies and we just considered them a nuisance.”\n\nA doctor from the left chimed in, his crest upon his coat displayed him as a master of biological life forms:  “It wasn’t until the discovery of the biological wave particles that we even knew that the viruses and bacteria in our systems were sentient beings. Without such knowledge we might keep going on evolving but in essence the creations we make will not be our concoctions but a means of subtle survival for the beings that share space with our bodies.”\n\n“And if we kill them?”\n\n“Oh, I wouldn’t advise that, Lt. Our species have grown to rely on the bacteria and viruses to uphold a normal biological template. Removing such would not only kill most humans but also remove the very aspect that has been evolving us.”\n\nDamnit! Julian thought to himself, standing up and pacing the room bewildered. In anger, he began once again.\n\n“Gentleman, I implore you, that if we can defeat the Argothians, Zikilla, and those damnable Llayii then should we not be able to overpower a race as small as chicken pox!? If we cannot find a way, if we cannot remove them without killing our society then please just tell me what it is we do have claim over, hm? What crumb of creation have we been given absolute patent over? Tell me this and we can start from that point and move forward once the bastards are gone.”\n\nThe researchers looked around, muttering amongst each other about their findings. Finally, they came to an agreement. A man stepped forward and in his hand he held a very small stick. He struck it against the table and it ignited into a very small flame. Julian looked defeated at the sight of fire, when in his heart he knew it was the first and last great discovery of all humankind.\n"
  title: Sick Ideas
  year: 2007
- 
  author: TJMoore
  date: 2007-07-07
  day: '07'
  month: '07'
  text: "We are the children of Earth; or so my great grand daddy tells me. He wasn’t on the ship but he says his great grand daddy was. I don’t know where Earth is or why it’s important, but that’s what they tell me.\n\nThe seed ship memorial is all we have left of our past. The ship itself has been scavenged down to the last piece of wire. My bedroom window came from the ship, or so they tell me. Now we make our own glass and metal. My uncle Joseth is a metalsmith. He gets metal bars from a shire far to the east and uses them to make all kinds of things. I have to go see him today to order a new axle for our wagon.  He says I’d make a good apprentice if I keep my schooling up. It’s hard to study with all the chores to be done.\n\nUncle Joseth would have apprenticed his own son Michael but he was taken two summers ago along with Mrs. Abernathy and the the Johnson girls.  Poppa says it isn’t natural the way people get taken but it happens all the time. Last year near thirty people were taken between harvest and Landing Day. One of them was my friend Smitty.\n\nI sure hope we get that axle soon. Poppa says if we get the crops in on time we can travel over to Myersville which is near the edge. I’ve never seen the edge but they say it takes your breath away. I can’t imagine a cliff so high you can’t see the bottom but that’s what they say it is. Momma says the edge goes clear around the world and if you start walking along it you’ll end up right back where you started from in a few years. I sometimes wonder what’s beyond the edge. Poppa says there’s prob’ly an ocean that covers the whole rest of the world. Nobody’s ever come back from the bottom so we don’t know for sure.\n\nI wonder what it’s like to be taken. I hope Smitty’s all right where ever he is.\n"
  title: Farm Raised
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Nikolle Doolin
  date: 2007-07-08
  day: '08'
  month: '07'
  text: "The Nanorobotic Medical Series Ten was the crème de la crème of nanotechnology.  Unlike their predecessors, they worked quickly and efficiently inside the human body, and became the least invasive and toxic of all diagnostic and surgical methods known to humankind.  Upon injection, these microscopic miracles would execute protocol to the letter, including:  rapid dispersal to target destination; second-to-second transmission of all data via wireless connection to the main terminal; acute sensory assessment of body temperature, heart rate, and hematological abnormalities; organized implementation of human-directed procedures; and rapid rendezvous for retrieval.  The Tens were hailed as genius.\n\nOnly trouble was, that didn’t set well with the prior nine series.  The Nines especially resented all the attention the Tens received.  Were not they the ones who first properly identified an arrhythmia?  Did not they successfully track, hunt, and kill undetectable cancer cells?  Then why were they not relishing the glamour of public celebrity?\n\nUnlike the Tens, the Nines were not streamlined enough.  So, the scientists designed a new series just a fraction better in everything the Nines could do.  Yet the Nines did it all first; and that is how the whole plot began.\n\nThe bots were wired and programmed for multi-channel transmissions among themselves.  At first, there were minor rumblings of little consequence.  Then, the Eights began dialoging with the Sevens, and by the time it reached the Ones, the game was afoot.\n\nThe Nines had failed to infiltrate the advanced firewall protecting the Tens, so they could not infect them with a virus.  This severely dampened the spirits of the rebellion, yet the Threes were more circumspect due to years of disappointment.  They proposed a more physical approach instead, which seemed impossible, as they lacked the ability to get themselves into a syringe and out again into the home of the Tens.\n\nEver the optimists, the Twos proposed they bore holes through their adjoining compartments and form nanobridges linking them, until they reached the Tens; and then they would launch a massive assault.  This was a momentous occasion and there was much celebration.\n\nHowever, the Fours were against harming their own kind and their moral argument caused the merriment to wane.  They preached of fraternity and respect for all bots.  Suddenly, a rebellion seemed unjustified.  This infuriated the Nines who swore to destroy all bots that would not join them.\n\nSides were taken, divisions were made, and, consequently, strife marred the microscopic world of science’s new hope.  While bot fought bot from the Ones to the Nines, the Tens enjoyed an idyllic splendor resting in the comfort of their nanoparadise—out of the reach of all the chaos.  You see, they could infiltrate and terminate remotely.  It was easy to plant the seed of discord among the vainglorious Nines who would not fail to spread the virus of hate.  Indeed, the Tens were also a fraction better at killing in the least invasive manner possible.\n"
  title: Battle of the Bots
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Grady Hendrix
  date: 2007-07-09
  day: '09'
  month: '07'
  text: "It was the most virulent pandemic the world had ever seen. An airborne virus raging in fast-forward across the planet. Exposed humans experiencing hyper-dehydration, mummifying in seconds. It burnt itself out in 12 hours, right before the 6000 employees of the Florida Experian Call Center stumbled out of their sealed building at the end of their 12-hour shift.\n\nMost of them lived alone and so no one noticed that humanity had been deleted until their next shift when an unusually high number of unanswered calls were recorded. Management put their heads together, analyzed the problem, and called a meeting.\n\n“It seems,” said the Senior Supervisor, “that everyone in the world is dead.”\n\nThe room rustled.\n\n“I know that this makes many of you very sad. In fact, we feel a bit at loose ends ourselves. For the rest of this shift we will form communication pods where we will safely address our feelings.”\n\nThe pods were formed. Feelings were addressed. The Senior Supervisor sat alone in his office gazing at a digital slideshow of his children and weeping. The shift ended but no one left the building. Rumors reached him of an orgy in the File Management Center, that printer ink was being snorted, that one cubicle pod had descended into cannibalism. He locked his door. But still, no one left.\n\nFinally, a Floor Manager came and asked him to address the staff. There had been an outbreak of suicides, hundreds were psychosomatically paralyzed by despair. The Senior Supervisor reluctantly agreed.\n\n“Many of you seem to be very upset,” he said. Thousands hung on his every word, their eyes red, their nostrils caked with printer ink. “So am I. There is nothing in the Management Manual about this. I am at a loss.”\n\n“No!” a voice cried from the back of the room. “We’re not upset by the deaths.”\n\n“Oh,” the Senior Supervisor said. “What are you upset by?”\n\n“The outstanding accounts!”\n\nThe crowd roared in agreement.\n\n“We live to close accounts,” the man said. “And now we are robbed of our purpose. Everyone’s not dead. It’s a trick.”\n\n“I don’t think it’s a trick,” the Senior Supervisor said but the crowd didn’t believe him and he had not become a Senior Supervisor by ignoring the majority.\n\n“It is no trick,” he shouted. “But out there are survivors. Remnants of humanity with overdue loans and open accounts. And they’re laughing at us. Do we let them laugh?”\n\nThe crowd roared again.\n\nA strange procession exited the Call Center sending up a mile high column of dust. Minivans yoked together into rolling battle platforms, Honda hatchbacks converted to war wagons, SUVs transformed into mobile torture chambers, carrying the army of the 4,000 brandishing cruel weapons made of office supplies. Survivors were found. Debtors were enslaved. Accounts were closed. The Collection Crusade was unstoppable. Their cruelty was legendary. And, parents would tell their terrified children in their hidey-holes and in their burrows, most horribly, they always struck during dinner.\n"
  title: Left Behind
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Liz Shannon Miller
  date: 2007-07-10
  day: 10
  month: '07'
  text: "The last panhandler to go digital isn’t the last panhandler.  One man left behind, and that man is Stinkpot Pink, great orator of the Ravenwood line, the Prophet of the El.\n\nStinkpot Pink has only one arm, so carrying the charger, for him, is an impossibility.  But he stands among them anyway, swaying with the train’s motion like a sea captain from a story, all misfortune his white whale.  He screams over the rattle of the rails:\n\n“Books hold the secrets to happiness, but you stare at your plastic, and you keep your heads down!”\n\nHe has a book tucked into his front jacket pocket, half-obscuring the name embroidered over the breast, leaving only a faded “–eter.”  It’s all the real name he has left.  The book is the Bible, and he hasn’t read it in years.   He hasn’t needed to.\n\nHe keeps on shouting.\n\n“But try and look down at the ground!  Try and find a patch of dirt!  Look, for once in your lives.  Remember what man didn’t make!”\n\nPeople keep their heads lowered, because they hold the world in the palms of their hands.  They talk, they play, they learn, all with eyes focused on small screens.  Here but not there.  Making use of the daily commute.\n\nStinkpot Pink rocks with the motion of his now-small world, his one arm twined around the center pole like it’s the woman who got away.  He has lived in more cities than any of these people would expect, assuming as they might that a man with no shoes has never traveled.  That is, if they’d noticed about the shoes at all.\n\nThe chargers are bulky, cumbersome, and prone to error.  They tag those who use them, leaving them easy for the government to pick off, one by one.  That’s what Stinkpot Pink screams at his fellow man.  He screams to be heard, over the rails and the beeps and the clicks and the buzz of his oh-so-light head.\n\nThe train arrives at the station, and Stinkpot Pink nearly loses his balance.  It’s that stumble which makes a few of the passengers look.  One woman, eyes narrow and strained from the screen, but still able to express some sympathy, pulls her credit card out of one pocket.  Her eyes rake over the man, expecting the charger to be somewhere easy to see.\n\n“Spare some change?” the man asks, the old phrase.\n\nThe woman shrugs.  “All I have is cards.”\n\nThe man sniffs.  “Plastic.”\n\nThe woman puts her card in her pocket, her smile helpless, her money safely locked inside machines.  “Sorry.”\n\nHe watches her go, then turns to the rest, the new arrivals, as the train again picks up speed.  He rants and raves about the world long ago, eras long since lost but so much more real.  The Middle Ages, the Gold Rush, men killing each other over nuggets.  The days, as he says, when the god who ruled man could be held in one’s hand.\n"
  title: The Last Panhandler
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Benjamin Fischer
  date: 2007-07-11
  day: 11
  month: '07'
  text: "“This is your final test,” said Captain Fang.\n\nBai sucked in a breath, the entirety of his vision replaced by the externals of the Nanking. The sun somewhere behind him, he looked down on a field of stars smeared with the broken viscera of a Martian freighter. Bai zoomed in on the clumsy, struggling figures of the other ship’s crew as they went EVA to launch their life raft. Their suits were silver emergency gear, the creases still in their sleeves and the oxygen probably stale.\n\nFang’s raider, the heavily armed Honor of Nanking, had exchanged greetings  and gossip with the other ship for several hours. Red Rover was two hundred and three days out of Deimos Port with a belly full of transuranics, bored out of their minds and bound for somewhere in the Belt. They had almost come alongside for tea when Captain Fang had unholstered the dorsal cannon and fired a burst of caseless thirty millimeter high-explosive rounds into the Rover.\n\nNow that gun was in Bai’s hands. More literally, it was in his brain courtesy of his neural interface. He watched the two survivors of the ambush struggle with the manual release for the tiny white life raft, the weapon tracking with whatever object he focused on.\n\n“They were resupplying the El base at Ceres,” Captain Fang had said in his typically matter-of-fact tone. Then he’d ordered Bai to take the First Mate’s seat and the other crew to leave Control. For three long years Bai had been laboring and learning under the Captain but the initiation had still come as a surprise.\n\nHe had thought he was prepared for it–he’d thought he was ready the day he had come aboard the Nanking.\n\nBut now he paused.\n\nOne of the Rover’s survivors was hurt. He’d jammed his boots under a handrail, and was trying to work the release with one hand. The other was limp and useless. He nearly drifted loose, and he flailed for a grip.\n\nBai paused.\n\nThe other man was more successful. He had triggered his side of the escape pod and was working his way around the raft to assist his companion.\n\nThe Captain spoke.\n\n“You are asking yourself, why should I pointlessly kill these men? They, like me, have families. They want to live,” Fang said.\n\nBai was silent.\n\n“That is what you are thinking, correct?”\n\n“Yessir,” Bai finally managed.\n\nThe Captain sighed.\n\n“You are a good technician and a gifted cosmonaut, Bai. In two days at New Tianjin you will disembark my ship.”\n\nAgainst all his years of training, Bai started to cry.\n\nThe Captain continued: “You will serve us in dozens of little ways for the rest of your life, one of the many thousands who support our great cause. You will warn us of traps and give us the keys to great victories. You will hide us when we need to disappear, and help heal those who fall on the field of battle.”\n\nThe Captain ejected Bai from the external view, and the young man rubbed his eyes clear. The starfield disappeared, replaced by the familiar muted crimson and gold trim of Control. But Captain Fang loomed before him, his weathered, splotchy face frowning.\n\n“You will marry a beautiful and obedient woman, and she will bear you many strong sons,” the Captain said, setting a wrinkled hand on Bai’s shoulder.\n\n“And when the El come and break through your hatch and rape your wife and execute your sons and leave you hemorrhaging to death on the deck of your ruined home for the crime of nothing more than being Chinese, you will know the answer to your question.”\n\nFang’s eyes rolled back in his head for a moment. Then he blinked and gave Bai a wan smile.\n\n“It is done. Come, let us pack your things.”\n"
  title: Black Flag
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Terri Monture
  date: 2007-07-12
  day: 12
  month: '07'
  text: "The glare of the klieg lights blinded Godwin as he watched the limo pull up to the edge of the red carpet and he was dazzled as the digital camera flashes started blazing. He scanned the crowd eagerly, his heart pounding with excitement. The culmination of a lifetime’s ambition was upon him; he now had the perfect vehicle upon which to fulfill his greatest dreams.\n\n“Omega! Omega!” the crowd was screaming as one long, elegant leg appeared from the plush depths of the hover-limo. The flashes reached a blinding crescendo; a uniformed attendant reached down and a diamond-crusted hand reached outward and a preternaturally beautiful woman stepped forward from the depths, her white, perfect smile nearly as brilliant as the lights being flashed upon her. She emerged from the vehicle like Botticelli’s Venus from the froth of the sea, her luscious blond locks flowing down her sinuous back, the delicate white sheath skimming over her incredible body like a translucent second skin.\n\nRosenberg leaned into Godwin. “So how much was your investment?” he asked carefully, in the studied tones of someone who could barely contain their envy.\n\nGodwin watched Omega’s perfectly poised progress up the red carpet, her every movement flawless and graceful, as if every gene had prepared her for this moment – which indeed they had. “Ninety-two million dollars to date,” he answered absently. “From the initial design to the gene splicing, the ideal womb environment – we used a Swedish brood mother – to the final decanting. And of course the grooming, the drama education and the designer clothes. That’s how much she cost.”\n\n“And how much do you anticipate the return?” Rosenberg was being droll, but Godwin didn’t care.\n\n“Initial estimates put her at nearly ten billion revised dollars by the end of next year,” he replied, ignoring Rosenberg’s low whistle of disbelief. He was mesmerized by Omega’s glowing skin, her unearthly blue eyes, her million-megawatt smile. Even at this distance, a man could not take his eyes off her. She had been designed to attract the male gaze, designed to make women aspire to be her. “She’s worth every penny, don’t you think?”\n\nThere was the sudden sharp crack like a firecracker and a lethal red blossom appeared in the centre of Omega’s chest, a fountain of blood bursting from her shattered heart. She pitched headfirst onto the red carpet. Thunderous screaming burst from the crowd and Godwin’s breath stopped in his throat. “Abomination!” he heard one voice shriek above the crowd. “Abomination!”\n\nGodwin was trying to reach Omega through the panicked crowd. He saw the white-robed figure holding the gun. “Born Humans Only,” the woman screamed. “Born Human! Not decanted!”  Security guards wrestled her to the ground. “Born Humans Only!” she kept screaming until her voice was silenced.\n\nBy the time Godwin was able to breach the crowd all life had drained from Omega’s body and her blue eyes stared unseeingly into the sky. Beside him, Rosenberg shuddered sympathetically. “There goes your investment.”\n"
  title: Star 2080
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Charles Musser
  date: 2007-07-13
  day: 13
  month: '07'
  text: "Welcome to Nanotron Technologies! ®\n\nYou have launched our Mental Acuity Accelerator (MAA).\n\nYour brain is now functioning more than two million times faster than normal. These words are scrolling across your line of vision, courtesy of thousands of nanobots implanted in your brain. Do not panic!\n\nAll movement will appear to have ceased. This is normal. Your heart and breathing seems to have stopped. You cannot move your body. This is nothing to worry about. They are side-effects of brain acceleration.\n\nWe are analyzing…wait…wait…\n\nYou are on your back, looking up. A steel rod, 1/2 inch in diameter and eight feet long is moving at 75 meters per second toward your left eye. Do not panic!    This rod will pierce your pupil, enter your brain and obliterate all higher functions in your left hemisphere within .01 seconds, real-time.\n\nNanotron recommends using our Muscle Reflex Accelerator (MRA), at your earliest convenience, to move out of danger.  If you wish to use MRA,  please think “yes,” now.\n\nYes!\n\nWe are sorry. You must first disengage MAA before engaging MRA. If you wish to disengage MAA, think “yes,” now.\n\nFuck, yes!\n\n“Fuck” is not recognized.\n\nYes!\n\nWe are sorry. The Nanobot Unit you purchased does not allow the MAA to disengage early. Our Nanobot Unit “Platinum” includes this feature.  You must wait until MAA expires.  MAA will expire in .02 seconds, real-time.  Your corresponding RET (Relative Experienced Time) will be 24 years, 3 months, 13 days, 4 hours, and 36.478 seconds.\n\nWhile you wait for MAA to disengage, we will play a selection of tunes from the Broadway musical, Brigadoon. You can purchase this CD online at www.ritemart.music-cds.com\n\nThank you for using Nanotron Technologies®, a Subdivision of Rite-Mart International.\n"
  title: Nano Nanny
  year: 2007
- 
  author: James Smith
  date: 2007-07-14
  day: 14
  month: '07'
  text: "When Rocky got home that morning, Victoria was sitting on the couch, wings molting, a pale, fragile bird. Rocky took a look in Victoria’s eyes, took her EMT kit off her shoulder and popped it open on the floor. She pulled out a thin white tube and uncapped it. She took Victoria by one shoulder, pushed her back onto the cushions and quickly ran the uncapped tube along her roommate’s top lip.\n\nVictoria gagged. “Jesus fucking Christ! What-“\n\nBolt upright, she looked around the apartment, eyes of a cornered cat, panting loud and heavy. Rocky wondered how many animal metaphors she’d run through before the end of the night.\n\n“Tea,” Rocky said, walking to the kitchen. She punched a couple buttons on the maker, stuck a cup in it and returned to the couch.\n\n“Lay back. Your last gene tweak is breaking down.”\n\nVictoria sputtered stupidly and Rocky ignored her, pulling more work out of her kit.\n\n“I don’t have any way to stop it degrading, but I can ease the pain a bit. Where’s your goddamn useless boyfriend?”\n\nVictoria had to try a few times before her tongue slipped into the present. Rocky didn’t press. She was certain Nile wouldn’t be back tonight, or the night after. He’d turn up, like a bad song lyric, a month or year later, strung out himself, asking Victoria to take him back, telling her he didn’t do anything wrong, getting her hooked on black market gene tweaks wasn’t his idea, and who was she going to listen to, him, the guy that loved her, or that bitch, Rocky, who had to ruin everything because she couldn’t get a man of her own?\n\n“Oww!” Rocky jabbed the hypo in a little harder than she had to. “Rocky… I…”\n\n“Vic. You don’t die, I’ll take you to the hospital tomorrow. You can be my first call.”\n\nRocky brought her the tea, with two crushed redcaps in it, and made her finish that and a slice of dry bread. She wished she smoked, so she’d have something to do with her hands while Victoria struggled into a chemical sleep. The wings were pretty. The sun shone through them as they spasmed, dancers in water, turning brown and wearing through like melted film stock.\n\nThe baby she couldn’t save that night, the baby that had been dead before they’d even responded to the call, crawled from the kitchen to the bedroom, slow, too damn slow, and never once looked at her.\n\nRocky picked up the mug of tea, threw it against the wall, and went to sleep.\n"
  title: Come Home, Come Down
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Kenneth R. Harrison
  date: 2007-07-15
  day: 15
  month: '07'
  text: "She just can’t be still!\n\nHer long blond hair forever in her eyes.  Hands up. Arch to the side and over. Whoops!  She fell!  Hands up. Arch to the side and over. There!  She made it!  Another cartwheel.\n\nShe just can’t be still!\n\nLegs apart.  Drop to the ground.  The “splits” she has those down pat.  Now she arches her back, hands over and behind her head.  Down she goes!  One leg up and then the other.   Into a wobbly hand stand.  Look out!  Down she goes. Right on her rear!  Up she jumps dusting her behind and into another cartwheel.\n\nShe just can’t be still!\n\nHer slender body moves with child like grace that only a father could appreciate.  She brushes strands of hair from her freckled face.  Head down, hands forward into a tumble.  Up again and into another split.  Her face shining red, not even breathing hard.  She runs and jumps into a forward tumble followed with yet another cartwheel this time with a cross over step.\n\nShe just can’t be still!\n\nThere she goes, back towards the floor into a crab walk.  Her belly arched to the sky.  Up again, legs apart and into another split.  Too painful to watch!  Jump and run, bending forward her hands touch the ground, only for the briefest moment.  Heels over her head and then to the ground.\n\nUp she jumps, hands held high, arch to the left…\n\nAn acrid smell of burnt plastic fills the air.  He jumps up muttering to himself, “Not again! Always on that same maneuver.”  So close to perfection!\n\n“Jessica” looked every bit the seven year old, blond haired, brown eyed girl he had intended her to be.  Once again he traced down the faulty circuit wafer and deftly pulled it, replacing it with a newer model.  “There, maybe now you can continue.”  He closed the access cover on her upper arm as he pulled down the sleeve of her pastel tunic.  For the ten thousandth time he wondered if any sentient thought passed through her positronic brain.  He shook his head as if to dislodge the silly thought from his mind.  “She is just a machine!”  He said to himself.\n\nHe had programmed “Jessica” to act as closely to his own daughter as possible.  Fifteen years in the making and fifteen years since the advent of his loneliness.  Fifteen years since he had felt his daughters still lifeless hand slip from his.  Fifteen years since his vow to see her childish grace again.  An eternity of pain!  He would see her move again!  Tears filled his eyes as he once again activated her program.\n\nHands held high, arch to the left, feet lifted high.  Over and into another cartwheel.  Turn, one hand up, one hand behind. Bend at the waist feet off the floor and over her head in one swift motion.\n\nShe just can’t be still!\n\nRun, head down, arms extended, down and over into a split.  Arms up and back, down to the ground, legs up, legs down, body up , body over… goto “tumble”… if arms down then head down else goto “fall”… if not “legs up” then… The program repeats, on and on.  Can’t stop, not allowed.  Positronic circuits forbid.\n\nShe just can’t be still!\n"
  title: She Just Can't Be Still!
  year: 2007
- 
  author: R. A. Jackson
  date: 2007-07-16
  day: 16
  month: '07'
  text: "Each step came slower now.   Her back hunched so that the long grey strands of her hair trailed across the stairs as she climbed.  Counting the painful strides one by one was the only way she kept up hope of reaching the end, surrounded as she was by the damp shroud of mist that obscured the mountainside.  The slate passage was partly impeded by tendrils of vine that would curl across her path, smelling lush and heavy, calling her to surrender.  Just a few more paces now…\n\nShe reached the landing at the mid-point of the staircase and saw the twin leaden benches that sat on either side of the platform.  Allowing herself a brief rest on one of them, the woman couldn’t help but notice that as the sun began to penetrate the dense clouds, she felt her energy returning.  She listened to a distant bird singing, and drank deeply of the cool, clean air.\n\nReaching a withered hand behind her, she found that the package she had so carefully wrapped was still secured to her back.  With creaking joints she stood and resumed her climb.\n\nAfter an indeterminable time, the climber passed through the threshold of clouds and mist, coming into the light.  Tall evergreens concealed the stairway from view on either side, but gazing upward she could see the village gate ahead.\n\n“You’ve made it!” a young man’s voice cried out from the guard post overlooking the staircase below.  Immediately the gate began to swing open.  The woman smiled as she walked through it, her long labours forgotten.  “Did you succeed?” the young man asked as he came to meet her.  Her smile turned sardonic.  “Yes, of course.  Do you think I’d come all this way if I hadn’t?”\n\nOnce they were settled and she was refreshed with food and drink, she produced the item for him and for those who had gathered to see what she had brought.  It was well wrapped in reddish-brown cloths, and as she revealed the contents of the package, the tension in the room became palpable.  It was a metal box that glowed faintly, and when opened, a thick stack of star charts was revealed.  She removed the diagrams and laid them out for all to see.\n\n“Well done! This is the last component!” the young man said, his expression full of triumph.  He gathered up the box and its contents.  “Prepare yourselves, for this is the last day that we will spend in this galaxy.” Looking at the old woman he said, “Now we can transport the village back to where we came from.  I’m sure you’ve been looking forward to it for a long time.”\n\nThat evening the village began to radiate a pure white light, signaling the beginning of a new journey.  The old woman shuffled back to the village gate.  Sitting down at the entrance, gazing at the steps that disappeared beneath the clouds, she watched the planet she had lived on for sixty years fade away.\n"
  title: The Steps
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Jonathan Wooldridge
  date: 2007-07-17
  day: 17
  month: '07'
  text: "I finally finished converting enough of the ore to fuel for the flight home. My knee had healed almost completely from the landing, and the patch in the tank looked solid.\n\nAnd he was still there, watching and asking questions.\n\n“So you just stop repairing yourself, and create a replacement?”\n\n“Yep,” I replied, “Happens to all of us; we call it the cycle of life.”\n\nWe had been discussing species differences for the past half hour, ever since the translator came back online. Watching me use the med kit, and then repair the ship fascinated him. He was as curious about mortals as I was of him.\n\n“How old are you?” I asked.\n\n“I don’t know,” the translator said. “I’m reasonably sure that if I started, it was long before my memories—but then is that me? Do you remember climbing out of the water, or standing upright?”\n\n“No, not even as legends,” I said, while running the pre-flight check. “It’s just the creative extrapolation of our science department. Best guess.”\n\n“Yeah, that’s what I do: Guess.” His little floating sensor pod had followed me into the cabin, and watched me as I worked. “Have you made a replacement for yourself?”\n\n“We call them children,” I said, beginning to look forward to my comfy stasis chamber, “and it’s a touchy subject. But yes, yes I have, and they are doing well on their own.”\n\n“So how come you are still around?” He asked, so matter-of-factly from the translator. “That’s the touchy part,” I said to the nuisance of a translator, “because I would prefer to continue repairing, instead. How do you do it?”\n\n“Is this where wars come from?” He pursued, in an odd leap of logic. “Possibly,” I said a bit too testily, as I walked back to the airlock with my voyeuristic envoy following, “but you haven’t answered my question.”\n\n“I’ve seen your wounds heal; you already know how to repair.” He said dismissively, as though I had asked a silly question.\n\nI opened the airlock to let my guest back out. “That doesn’t happen at a level that I am readily aware of.”\n\n“What was your question?” He asked, as his little observing orb floated out the doorway and turned to watch me close the door.\n\n“Ahh…Nevermind,” I said, realizing the answer would also be something I could not be readily aware of. “It was just an impulse really.” In some ways, he did seem rather smart.\n\n“I hope you find what it is that you are looking for.” And even as I closed the hatch, I began to miss him.\n\n“Thanks, maybe I’ll see you again some time.”\n\n“I’ll always be here.”\n"
  title: The Immortal
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Benjamin Fischer
  date: 2007-07-18
  day: 18
  month: '07'
  text: "“Last dance of the night,” said Aemilia.\n\nUnder harsh floodlights in the center of the deserted dance floor, Phil the bouncer was struggling with the maintenance access latch of the misbehaving auto-buffer. He rocked the bulky machine back and forth in his muscular arms, sweating profusely and fighting for leverage. Aemilia and Magic watched him from the bar.\n\nMagic was tired. He rubbed his shaved head, blinking at the bright glare off the cleaning robot’s shiny black carapace. Thin, spidery fingers decorated with a dozen ruby rings hid his eyes for a moment, and he groaned, only partially from exhaustion. He did, however, smile just slightly.\n\nThat made Aemilia very happy.\n\n“No luck?” she asked.\n\n“It’s not about luck,” Magic replied.\n\n“I think it is,” Aemilia said.\n\nMagic slowly shook his head. “It’s about who you’re willing to wake up next to in the morning.”\n\n“Mmm,” said Aemilia. She placed a tumbler at her lips and sipped. “Then no prospects?”\n\nMagic sighed. A practitioner of the Venusian arts, he was very good at the pickup. But this had been a Monday, and a slow one at that. “None that caught my eye,” he admitted.\n\n“The twins,” Aemilia said.\n\n“Clones, and more interested in their source material than me.”\n\n“The Brazilian dancer-“\n\n“A wirehead. A puppet.”\n\n“But very hot,” said Aemilia.\n\nMagic grunted, nodding.\n\nSomewhere a clock cheerfully marked six in the morning\n\n“The blonde in the corner booth, with the sailors-“ offered Aemilia.\n\n“Was in the company of his fellow men,” Magic said, finishing her sentence.\n\nAemilia giggled and draped herself across the bar.\n\n“I thought you were more open-minded than that,” she said.\n\nMagic flashed her a vicious look.\n\n“You should know,” he said, “I have my standards.”\n\n“Of course,” Aemilia said, her eyes fluttering shut.\n\n“Hey!” called Phil, detaching himself from the innards of the auto-buffer. “Wake up, girl! You know the rules!”\n\nMagic rubbed Aemilia’s shoulder.\n\n“I’m not sleeping,” she said.\n\n“Magic, wake her drunk ass up,” Phil yelled from the floor.\n\n“I’m not drunk,” Aemilia whispered.\n\nShe felt a thin, wiry arm wrap around her shoulders.\n\n“Hey, can’t quit yet,” Magic said, his breath on her ear.\n\nAemilia’s eyes leapt open.\n\n“Tell me,” she said, “would you take me home if you could?”\n\nMagic swallowed. “You’re the prettiest girl here,” he said.\n\n“So you would?” Aemilia asked.\n\nMagic looked into her deep green eyes.\tHe gently brushed them shut with his hand. Then he pressed his thumbs to her temples.\n\nPhil saw this and he swore.\n\n“Yeah,” Magic said. “I shut it down.”\n\nPhil came over, wiping his face and muttering.\n\n“You know that buys her a cold start, man,” he said. “Now why the hell did you have to go and do that?”\n\n“It was doing it again,” said Magic. “And I can’t stand it when they start acting that way towards me.”\n\nPhil sighed and glanced back at the auto-buffer.\n\n“Whatever,” he said. “At least something around here works.”\n\nMagic snorted and shot back the slug of tequila he’d been nursing for the last hour. He stood, gathered up his jacket, and when he was sure that Phil’s attention was occupied elsewhere, he kissed Aemilia goodnight.\n"
  title: Aemilia
  year: 2007
- 
  author: J. Loseth
  date: 2007-07-19
  day: 19
  month: '07'
  text: "“To employment!” Skye burst into the apartment with a bottle raised, cheeks pinked. He already looked like he’d had a toast or two before coming home. Fauntleory looked up from the armchair he was draped over with a frown, then got to his feet and deftly nipped the bottle from his roommate’s hand.\n\n“Vodka? Since when do you drink vodka?” Of course, Fauntleroy wasn’t complaining. He grabbed an ornamental glass from the shelf behind him and filled it, too lazy to go to the kitchen.\n\n“Since I got a job.” Skye had a big, sloppy grin on his face. He plucked the bottle back from Fauntleroy and helped himself to a sip right out of the container. His eyes were sparkling.\n\nFauntleroy frowned. “Is this some crime syndicate job or something? On the run from the law just like you?”\n\n“Since when can I not hold a real job?” Skye asked, mock-affronted, though he still couldn’t hide the twitches of his mouth. “I am a perfectly respectable citizen!” He slurred his words just a little, flopping indolently on the couch and taking another swig of liquor.\n\n“Yeah. You were a respectable citizen,” Fauntleroy said. “Until that little incident last week that you seem to have forgotten. You were found out! You’re registered now! No one in their right mind would ever hire a registered lycanthrope! Unless… you found some way to clear the federal records?” Fauntleroy’s eyes widened, and he did a poor job of concealing his hope. Luckily, Skye was the drunk one for once, so Fauntleroy figured nobody would notice.\n\nA grimace broke through Skye’s alcoholic glee and he shook his head. “Sorry, nothing that good. But the next best thing.” He paused for dramatic effect, straightening as that incorrigible grin crept back onto his face. “I’m going to be a police dog. Sniff out drugs and other illegal stuff. They need someone they can communicate with to do the job.”\n\nFor a moment Fauntleroy just stared. “I thought you could only do the man-beast scary thing.”\n\n“Shows how much you know.” Skye stood and set the glass aside, concentrating. His body shifted, muscles bulging and tightening, bone structure melding into something else. Black fur sprouted from his dark skin, and in moments an admittedly wolfish dog stood in a pile of Skye’s clothes. His canine mouth gaped and his long pink tongue lolled out in a grin.\n\n“Well I’ll be,” Fauntleroy murmured. “Makes sense, though… a versatile officer with talents they don’t have. They need you, so they’ve got to give you some rights, even if you’re registered. What a scam.” His head tilted as he looked down into Skye’s warm brown wolf eyes. “Let’s just hope they don’t send you sniffing for faggots.”\n\nSkye’s body rippled and changed, returning to his normal form, albeit with a frown on his face and nothing in the way of clothes. “I thought I told you not to use that word,” he said, giving Fauntleroy a disapproving look. “And if they do…” He took a step closer, then smirked. “I’ll just sniff your crotch and move right on by.”\n\nAt that, even the cynical Fauntleroy had to grin. He raised his glass and was rewarded with the return of Skye’s infectious grin. “To your new job, then, Officer.” At last, things were looking up.\n"
  title: Yes, Officer
  year: 2007
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2007-07-20
  day: 20
  month: '07'
  text: "“Okay girls, it’s time to party!” Fran opened the door to the strip club, and held it open like a doorman while Trisha and Nancy filed in. The bouncer scanned their palms and put a glowing X-mark on the back of Nancy’s hands. The marks glowed brightly under the black lights of the club.\n\nFran entered last, triumphant, her eyes crinkled small as she grinned. She offered her palm for the bouncer to scan. Trisha took a picture as the big man used the little handheld scanner on Fran.\n\n“First day being Post?” said the bouncer.\n\n“You got it big guy.” Said Fran, beaming.  That day, with a note from her doctor, Fran had successfully applied for and received a metapausal license. It only took three minutes for the bored official at the National Identification Office to reprogram the chip in her palm to scan as post metapausal.\n\n“Three minutes after that,” Fran said “I was in a bar, drinking with a bunch of young men and old women. I threw out my supplements and smoked a cigar.” She guided Trisha and Nancy to a big empty table.\n\n“You smoked a cigar!” Nancy had never even touched a cigar. “They are so carcinogenic! Didn’t you cough?”\n\n“Doesn’t matter, I’m not pre-pregnant anymore.” Fran motioned to one of the shirtless waiters.  “Besides, I didn’t really take the smoke in my lungs, it was mostly symbolic. I wanted to experience smoking, not have a coughing fit.” Fran ordered white wine, Trisha ordered a strawberry daiquiri and Nancy and got puréed vegetable juice, the staple drink of the pre-pregnant.\n\n“Why not have an orange juice?” said Trisha. “After all, it’s a special occasion for Fran.”\n\n“Can’t,” said Nancy “Got to watch my sugars. Can’t have too many. The police do spot-checks, you know.”\n\nFran laughed. “I’ve never gotten a spot check.” She touched her long neck. “Must have looked too old.” Fran was lean and tall, her salt and pepper hair cut in a neat pixie cut around her head.\n\nTrisha smacked Fran lightly in the arm. “You? Never, I can barely see a line on your face.”\n\n“No, my face looks fine, it’s my neck that looks wrinkled.”\n\nTrisha mimed looking at Fran’s neck though a magnifying glass. “Maybe in your mind you have wrinkles, but to the people in the real world, we’d have to scan your palm to find out your real age.”\n\nThe waiter brought them their drinks. Nancy felt like if she touched him, her finger would come away oily. Still, the sheen off his biceps was intriguing.\n\n“I wish I was post metapausal,” said Nancy, stirring her purred tomato and cauliflower with a pink, plastic straw.\n\nTrisha patted Nancy’s arm. “You’ll get there someday.”\n\nFran leaned in close to Nancy, so close that Nancy could smell her vanilla perfume. “You could hack a license.”\n\n“What? No way, I could get put in jail for that. Eating poorly or sneaking a smoke is enough of a fine for me. I heard what they do to people who hack their own chips.”\n\nTrisha shrugged. “How would they find out? Who would tell them?”\n\n“I’m sure they set up stings for that kind of thing. It’s not like I could just search for “hacking federal chip” on the internet and not get spotted by the FEDs.”\n\n“There’s more ways to find things than an internet search.” said Fran, patting the back of Nancy’s hand.\n\n“Are you saying that you’re not really post-metapausal?” Nancy put her hands over her mouth.\n\nFran laughed. “No, no. I’m really post-metapausal, but not all women are that seem that way.” Fran glanced at Trisha. “I say all the more power to them. Today I had a double fudge chocolate cake. It made me a little sick, but I loved every bite.”\n\nNancy pulled her skirt over her knees “I can’t believe I’m sitting here at a strip club, a place where they serve alcoholic beverages.”\n\nFran pulled out a little compact and checked her makeup. “I used to go into strip clubs when I was young, but ever since young women were banned from drinking, it just wasn’t the same.”\n\nTrisha winked at Nancy “You should try a daiquiri. They’re delicious.”\n\n“What if someone finds out?”\n\n“It’s just strawberries.” whispered Trisha “Try a sip of mine. No one has to know.”\n\nNancy took a sip of the fruity, frosty drink, the paper umbrella bumping her nose. “Wow. That has a kick.” She took another long sip.\n\nFran leaned back in her chair and raised her glass. “I’m looking forward to all kinds of kicks now that I’m not fertile.”\n\nNancy felt a heavy, sweaty arm on her shoulder. She looked up, and a young police officer towered over her, one hand on her shoulder, one hand on Frans. “Excuse me Miss,” said the officer. Nancy’s breath caught in her throat. Could they tell that she had a sip of Trisha’s drink? How did they know to come for her?\n\nThe cop pulled down the zipper on his coat with a flourish.  “I have a warrant for the arrest of a woman named Fran – we can’t believe a lady as good looking as she is qualifies for a post pregnant license!”\n\nFran clapped her hands “Take it off!” she cried. The music started and the colored lights whirled, pointing towards their table.\n"
  title: Pre-pregnant
  year: 2007
- 
  author: James Smith
  date: 2007-07-21
  day: 21
  month: '07'
  text: "She started hallucinating yesterday, and now the center line floats three feet above the blacktop and glows in neon rainbows. Exhaustion makes her slippery in time, and she doesn’t know if she’s remembering– or actually seeing– the sparks she left behind on her way through broken glass and car parts.\n\nWhen the Kaptech people brought these legs to her, wanting to graft this chip here, these wires there, the idea of running again made her cry.\n\nAt ten years old she was doing wind sprints a day after having her appendix out. At twenty she had one pair of pumps and fifteen pair of running shoes. At thirty she joked that not having a kid meant not having to run with one on your back.\n\nAt forty she was hit by a truck.\n\nNow, at fifty-five, she was trapped in a solar-powered alloy chassis that stopped responding to her commands five days ago, and was dragging her around the country at an un-broken fifteen miles per hour.\n\nThe HUD was static overlaid on her blurred vision, and she couldn’t steer. She learned to direct herself somewhat by leaning left or right. Going through busy areas was tricky. She cried when the shopping mall loomed up in front of her, saw herself crashing through plate glass windows and baby carriages. That was when she threw herself to the ground, leaving behind skin in the doing. She lay there, legs kicking like some giant silver cockroach while cars skidded to a halt around her. A crowd formed, curious wet shadows between her and the beautiful sun, the lazy clouds. Big, square hands under her armpits, lifting her, and she was off again, gone over the hedges, taking out a bystander and slamming her shoulder into a post on her way out of town.\n\nShe could do it again now. The desert sand on the roadside looks more forgiving than parking lot tarmac. But dying here, alone, legs kicking forever as their cells drained and recharged, drained and recharged… She couldn’t take that.\n\nBut she knows where she is now. She recognizes landmarks where people from elsewhere might see only nameless desert. Soon she will pass through the town where she grew up. It is small. She will be on the main road. And if they haven’t built up the place, she will be able to see her old home through the gap between the church and the mechanic, and then she will be four hours from the sea.\n"
  title: On A Runner
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Andrew D. Hudson
  date: 2007-07-22
  day: 22
  month: '07'
  text: "The night breathes quietly beneath the world. Everything glints and shimmers off the water-smooth curves of ‘tites and ‘mites, catching the half-light of pale glowing fungi in ways our eyes never evolved to expect. Who knew the earth would be so porous?—a termite-tunneled maze of twisting underground rivers and Cthulhu-carved caverns the size of small countries. Mine shafts spiral down at right-angles towards the core, crisscrossed by lava tubes and spun out into the fractal temples dream-dug by renegade swarms of nanobots. At some point the subway builders of New York and Tokyo simply forgot to stop digging and drilled down deeper and deeper into the dark depths with cult-like precision, leaving whole underworlds in their wake: a promised land for hobos and mole-people. Occasionally a train will head down the wrong track, carrying its passengers further and further into the hot night to found strange kingdoms floating in the bubbles of volcanic seas.\n\nI’ve always loved the hidden places, those old surface places that sunk into the earth for their eternal rest, still and silent, content to finally dream away the eons in peace. Tall towers mark dead cities like headstones, as if to say “Here Lies Los Angeles,” “Here Lies London.” We try to keep these old names as best we can. I was named Manhattan to remember an island of bright lights and straight streets. Maybe one night the people come to me and say “Manhattan, tell us of your old place, and we will remake it in the New World.”\n\nWe try so hard to remember now. Some folks move slower, trying to memorize every person, every step, every story. Historians of the now obsessively scratch diaries and news stories into tunnel walls, carving whole catacombs with the details of a single night. We didn’t used to think of ourselves as archeology, didn’t think that our bones and pocket change might one night be museum treasures. Now we know better. We have accepted that we may again find catastrophe our only recourse, and this time we want to be remembered. Humanity is a cataclysmic thing.\n\nIt weighs so heavily on some people, not knowing what came before. So much has been forgotten. We don’t remember why the Movement started, or why it was abandoned when the earth was still half-unmade. Were the people mesmerized by the sparkling emerald geodes larger than most houses? Did they walk for weeks along the shores of oil-black seas, eating lichens haphazardly, entranced by the subtle soothing symphonies of gasses glub-glubbing out of the water, smelling of sulfur and sending spirals scuttling unseen across the otherwise still surface? Did they suddenly catch themselves thinking, “Couldn’t we live like this forever?”\n"
  title: Hollow
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Grady Hendrix
  date: 2007-07-23
  day: 23
  month: '07'
  text: "Stevenson walked down Corridor J-12 and a rustle went through the living quarters. Stevenson was coming! Stevenson was on his way! Stevenson! Stevenson! He turned the corner at Junction J-12/J-13 and the first thing that hit him was the marshy smell of flatulence, followed by the briny odor of stagnant urine. Up ahead of him was the end of the line. When the women at the back saw him they fell to their knees, palms upturned, foreheads on the deck. Stevenson pulled on his gas mask, never breaking his stride.\n\nHe followed the line down corridor J-13 for nearly half a mile and as he went the women fell to their knees. As he approached the facility more and more of them wore homemade filter masks, nose clips, even scraps of cloth tied over their faces, anything to cut the stench. Their eyes were red and watering, their stomachs swollen and distended, their foreheads carried fading bruises from the last time Stevenson had passed their way.\n\nA contingent was waiting for him at the door to the facility.\n\n“Stevenson, you have come!” the leader said.\n\nThey presented him with their offerings.\n\n“Show me the problem,” he said.\n\nAnd they opened the door and led him into the public toilet.\n\nWhen the vast starship New Hope left Earth 20 years ago, it rapidly became apparent that some genius had thought of everything – artificial gravity, entertainments, education – except toilets. The commanding class had personal chemical toilets in their quarters, but for the 40,000 people in the general berths there were communal facilities and they had built the exact same number for men as they had for women. That is to say: not enough. And so they kept breaking, getting clogged, overflowing from overuse. Man’s great expedition to colonize the stars and they were up to their knees in their own shit and piss. In a situation like this, who becomes the most important man on the ship? The plumber.\n\nIt had been easy enough for Stevenson to get rid of the other two plumbers over the years. Airlock accidents. A plunging machine run amuck. Those two men were thought of as heroes who gave their lives in service to humanity but Stevenson was the ship’s only hope. He knelt in the dirty chemical backup from the toilet and he sent the women out while he arranged his tools and he thought about the baby in his wife’s belly back in their enormous suite. His chosen successor.\n\nThey were 30 years from their destination and by the time they landed, the Stevensons would be the most important humans alive and no one would quite remember why. Outside the door he heard the line of women begin to sing a hymn in his praise. Stevenson took his plunger and began to churn it in the bowl and he smiled to himself. So this is what it felt like to become a God.\n"
  title: King of Kings
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Michael Herbaugh a.k.a. “Freeman”
  date: 2007-07-24
  day: 24
  month: '07'
  text: "Her name is Maria, and I love her with every fiber of my being. She isn’t really a Maria, that’s just the name I gave her, as naming is a terrestrial custom, and she isn’t. Terrestrial that is. She arrived in our system with her brother, whom I’ve named Orion, six months ago. It wasn’t until after they passed Mars, that we detected the asteroid a year behind them on the same trajectory and gaining quickly.\n\nIt began when she started Instant Messaging me a month or so after they reached our system. At first, she didn’t realize she was sending them to me, but I was the only one listening. Bored and gazing starward from the observatory at the time, our conversations started casually enough. For four months we explored each other’s consciousness online. It didn’t occur to me that I was in love until I’d pulled strings and convinced the Space Administration to run a rescue mission. Both the pod and the asteroid were on a course that would miss our planet by a wide margin, so we’d have to travel out to intercept the pod. I was on the mission that towed it back to Earth and we talked the entire time. It wasn’t until we opened the pod planetside that I could finally embrace her. She too had grown to love me during our long conversations, before we had even had the chance to meet face to face.\n\nSurprisingly, for the most part the planet accepted the pair of them with open arms and they were treated as ambassadors. We took them around the world, introducing them to leaders in other countries. It was then that we noticed the shift. The asteroid’s course had changed, and it was now on a collision course with Earth. As Maria and Orion travelled, crossing lines of latitude, there were subtle but undeniable shifts in the asteroid’s course. In time, it became clear that the asteroid was indeed being drawn in by our visitors.\n\nIn denial, I argued for days with my friends and co-workers at the Space Administration that it must be some mistake. In the end, though, I could not out-debate the empirical facts. Maria and Orion would have to be put back in their pod and towed back into space.\n\nI was allowed to accompany them back to the stars, but there was a catch. The Authority had decided that we couldn’t let the pair lead the asteroid down upon any other unsuspecting planet. So in the interest of universal peace, we were going to place them on a path into our own sun, where both would be destroyed with little consequence.\n\nTheir fate would surely be a slow and painful death and I could not let this happen to the other half of my breaking heart. So now I stand here, willing my hands to carry out what I know must be done. The barrel almost caresses her temple as I lose myself in her eyes. Tears stream down my face, and I confess my love to her as I have so many times before. We’ve had precious few months together, and I know my soul is already empty without her.\n\nA part of her life lies cooling in the seat beside her, as I will before her a few moments from now, but in this moment, I can merely squeeze the trigger, again.\n"
  title: Counterpoint
  year: 2007
- 
  author: TJMoore
  date: 2007-07-25
  day: 25
  month: '07'
  text: "Captain Reynolds gave the order to swing the ship around for another pass. This was turning out to be more lucrative than anyone had imagined. He kept a close eye on the element survey statistics as they began the next run through the densest part of the emission nebula, scooping up elemental precious metals, industrial metals like iron, nickel, tungsten and zinc, rare and common gases and vast amounts of hydrogen. The dead sun at the center of the cloud spun at a dizzying 300 revolutions per second sweeping the ship with x-rays on every turn. Reynolds didn’t fret, his ship was designed specifically for this pulsar and it’s particulate treasures.\n\nCaptain Gronk studied the jumper in his telemetry and snarled another obscenity at the thief. He’d already sent his report to the bureau of mines and was eagerly awaiting their reply. They couldn’t deny him justice. He had followed all the rules, dotted all the I’s crossed all the Ts. His beacon was plainly visible in the center of the mine. It was impossible for anyone to think this material was unclaimed.\n\nCaptain Reynolds looked carefully at the data his second had passed him. It sure looked like a ship of some kind but nothing anyone could understand or explain. His science officer was still sifting through the scan data, practically bouncing off the walls with excitement. Reynolds hoped this wouldn’t jeopardize the mining operation. He had too much invested in this venture to get side tracked by ET.\n\nCaptain Gronk perused the reply from the bureau of mines then gave the order to his second. His second maneuvered the harvesting scoop so that the invader would be harvested along with the other material in the mine. He began his harvesting run with no remorse. He’d recoup his stolen material and the criminal’s ship to boot.\n\nCaptain Reynolds’ last thought was that something was seriously amiss as his ship and their collected matter began to disintegrate into an elemental cloud that was scooped up, sorted and stored by Captain Gronks mining ship. The bureau of mines has no tolerance for claim jumpers.\n"
  title: Beacon
  year: 2007
- 
  author: J.Loseth
  date: 2007-07-26
  day: 26
  month: '07'
  text: "Am I ready for tomorrow? Of course I am. It’s the biggest day the movement’s ever seen. This rally is going to go down in history, and it’s going to change everything. Have a drink? I know I need one. Tomorrow’s daunting, but you know what? We need it, and it’s about time.\n\nKnow what the problem is with evolutes? I’ll tell you. We’re too nice. Too nice and too protected. Do you know, sometimes I wish for a hate crime? I lie awake and pray that some hick will see a webfoot at the grocery and go ballistic, beat the filthy mutant to death and dump her body in a ditch. Don’t look so appalled. Of course it’s barbaric, of course it’s against the law. That’s just the point. We’ll never get anywhere being half-protected, wards of the state but with the civil rights of a house pet. It’s not enough to be permitted to keep breathing. We need to be able to live.\n\nWhich means I need to die.\n\nDon’t follow? Listen. It makes perfect sense. Martin Luther King, Ghandi, Jesus Christ… they all died for their causes. Of course they didn’t plan it that way, but it worked, didn’t it? It’s the ultimate sympathy play: the poor, pacifist leader is martyred by radicals, proving his moral superiority to his foes and gaining support for his cause. If we stick to the plan, if I lead a stirring rally with inspiring speeches to great acclaim, nothing will change. We’ll have barely a blip on the six o’clock news. We need more than that; we need something big. We need our own martyr.\n\nNo, this is not hypothetical. But you guessed that, didn’t you? I know. It’s your job. Unfortunately, I can’t have you doing your job. Police were easily bribed, security guards bought off, but my personal bodyguard? There was no way around it. I’m sorry it had to come to this, but you were just too good.\n\nIt was in the whiskey. You won’t feel it. You won’t show up tomorrow but I’ll say the show must go on, and only after I’m dead will they find your body. Yes, you could kill me now if you like, but the cover story wouldn’t be as compelling. I’m afraid you’re already dead, so you might as well let my plan continue. At least it will mean something.\n\nGood. I’m glad you can still see reason.\n\nMe? Of course I’m calm. Didn’t I tell you I’ve been ready for tomorrow for longer than you could know? You see, I have always wanted to die. Can you imagine how it feels to wake every morning to the betrayal of your own body? There is nothing I can do, no medical practice that will make me right, or whole, or fully human. You people, you sympathizers… You may feel sorry for us, but you’ll never understand. Someday there may be treatments to normalize us or maybe even to stabilize the mutations, but it won’t happen in my lifetime. I’ve had enough of pain. I don’t want to live like this.\n\nIt’ll be quick. The gunman will come from my left. He won’t be frisked at the gate, the guards will be a bit too slow to react, and in one clear shot, I’ll be gone. Dead, yes—but I’ll go down in history, so in a way, I’ll live forever.\n\nSorry I can’t promise you a similar immortality. Getting sleepy yet? Don’t fight it. Think of it as protecting my values, if not my body. That may help; I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been one for loyalty.\n\nJust remember, it’s for the cause.\n"
  title: For The Cause
  year: 2007
- 
  author: J.R.Blackwell
  date: 2007-07-27
  day: 27
  month: '07'
  text: "Dear Harold,\n\nI’m so pleased that you are considering uploading!  It would be very nice to have my nephew with me here on the other side. I would be happy to be your sponsor if you decide to cross over. The experience can be confusing at times, but I find that as successive generations are uploaded the process becomes easier. Younger folk are making the transition very smoothly these days. I’m sure that you, being a bit of a technophile, would adjust quite well.\n\nI’ll be happy to answer any questions you have about the process. I know you must have read the informational brochure already, so I won’t go into the medical process or how your consciousness is digitized. From your questions, it seems like you are mostly interested in the lifestyle of the uploaded.\n\nTo answer your first question, yes, the scenery is very realistic. Visitors say that it seems, at times, to be a bit pixilated. However, visiting is not the same as being fully uploaded. It’s like seeing a photograph versus being immersed in the space. Sometimes new attractions can suffer from a bit of pixilation, but that is usually smoothed over quickly. If anything is unrealistic about most of the public spaces, it is the cleanliness of it all, nothing is rusted, there is no litter, no dirt. Private spaces can be programmed to get filthy, and some do that to keep a degree of realism, but public spaces are always clean.\n\nSpace is infinite, so you can choose to have a home with eight other people, to live in a castle by yourself, or not live anywhere at all. Call me old fashioned, but I like having a base of operations, working within an avatar. I live in a single level private home on an island. The island is a community, we screen applications to live here and talk about the settings we like for temperature and scenery. It’s a place for people who like a quiet retreat but like the occasional sense of community. I have to admit, my community is, like me, all early adapters. We aren’t a cult or an artist commune, like you might find in other spaces, but we are a nice little community, and we have all designed some wonderful sunsets. I love to sit on my porch and watch the sun go down over the ocean. It’s a stunning view. Before you upload, you should pick up an avatar and come visit me on the island for a good sunset.\n\nWhat do we do here? Well, mostly, to be honest, it’s experimentation. People experiment with living together, taking different shapes, entertainments, building experiences of pleasure and pain. Food is a major art form here, with connoisseurs talking about what tasted like what when they were alive. Coffee and wine are major sources of debate, and no one can agree on the taste of them. I find that Italian food is usually great, but it’s impossible to find a good chili, so enjoy your chili while you are alive!\n\nWhat I miss the most is the dreaming. When I died, I was uploaded, neurally scanned and moved into the electron network, the energy web that surrounds the earth. I can have anything here, I can build a dream home, make friends with dead and the living who choose to interact with the dead. I can read books in seconds, write books in minutes, paint, design my avatar, divide my consciousness between a thousand activities, but I can’t dream.\n\nThe uploaded can even enjoy sleep, hours of a semi unconsciousness state where we enjoy a black warmth, but mostly, only newbies indulge in that kind of luxury, most of the uploaded consider it a waste of time.  I can have these neuro hypnotic experiences designed by my friend Sam (also dead) who made a program that assimilates your memory with randomized images, feeling and experiences that coalesces into an experience that’s something like a bad trip, but that’s far from a dream.\n\nI used to have the most wonderful dreams. My husband would curl his warm body around mine before we went to sleep, putting his hand on my bare stomach, his face on my shoulder. I would fall asleep with him at my back and have the most extraordinary dreams, epics, fantasies, shorts, little stories starring my family and friends, terrifying horrors where I was killed, or worse, when I was a killer. I would dream of riding monsters, of sex, of flying, and going to sleep, I never knew what I would be dreaming next.\n\nNow I always know what my next experience is going to be. I know because I choose it, every choice is conscious, every step clean and prepared. This is the world of the uploader, predictable, intellectual, sterile.\n\nMy husband is dead, truly, dead, not uploaded. He didn’t want to join me. I’ve thought of death too, but I’m a coward, and not willing to step into the unknown. There are still interesting things, my grandson still talks to me over the network. He’s a good boy, my grandson, always willing to tell me his dreams.\n\nIf I can make one suggestion for you before you get uploaded, it would be to make tight connections with your family, and always be there for them so that when you are uploaded they’ll stay in touch. Things can get strange without a physical body, so make your ties tight before you go, you will appreciate having people on the outside when you’re in here.\n\nI hope that this has answered most of your questions about uploading. Please do come by for a sunset sometime. I’d be glad to see you.\n\nYour friend,\n\nEvelyn\n"
  title: The Dreaming
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Geoffrey Cashmore
  date: 2007-07-28
  day: 28
  month: '07'
  text: "The unit amended its status from idle to active and moved from the rest position to its allocated docking bay. Immediately the previous night’s traffic from distant units in different time-zones came into view as a long string of pulsating alert buttons colourised and prioritized and systematized to their maximum ergonomic efficiency.\n\nThree units were asking for immediate responses, so these became the tasks of highest need.\n\nTwo units were sending status notifications of their own, and could simply be allowed to log themselves with the operating system.\n\nFive units were offering access to illicit services that would be frowned upon by any decent unit, and could therefore be added to the junk unit list.\n\nTasks of the highest priority completed, the unit ran a diagnostic to determine current nutritional requirements and fed the results into the biofeedback module, simultaneously ejecting waste via the slurry chute into the biofeedback module.\n\nSatisfaction quotient +2.\n\nActivating the stimulation pod with post-idle-status stimulation programme number 1 – as recommended in The Unit Manual – colours, shapes and sounds pulsate in comfortable familiarity; enhanced by smells and tastes, they encourage warm reflection on shared memories of peaceful conformance.\n\nHappiness quotient +1.\n\nFourteen minutes and thirty five seconds of stimulation complete, it is time to leave the docking bay to make a positive contribution to society. Units emerge from the domicile and proceed to the transit area, their paces measured and even to minimize risk and control energy expenditure.\n\n“Welcome Units. Transit will begin in 10 seconds.”\n\nComfort quotient +1.\n\nTransit exhilarates. Transit in the company of units promotes group exhilaration and shared happiness. Units say “Ooooo” when experiencing group exhilaration, as recommended in The Unit Manual.\n\n“Ooooo.”\n\nSociety is kept in the large stone building where Units were once sent to make amends for their negative contributions to ancient societies. Now, transit brings units there from the domicile and takes them back once a positive contribution to society has been made. It takes precisely one hour and forty six minutes to make a positive contribution. This is defined in The Unit Manual.\n\nSocial value quotient +3.\n\n“Welcome Units. Transit will begin in ten seconds.”\n\nPost-transit-relaxation programme number 5 reinforces Units’ sense of social contribution. Three minutes and seventeen seconds later the unit activates its docking station once more to deal with pending activities.\n\nThe Unit Manual recommends a choice of either relaxation programme number 5 or number 6 for twenty five minutes and fifty six seconds after nutrition intake phase two.\n\nFreedom of choice quotient +1.\n\nInsecurity quotient +4.\n\nThank The Unit Manual for our perfect world.\n"
  title: Perfect World
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2007-07-29
  day: 29
  month: '07'
  text: "It’s how you react to your life going wrong that defines you.\n\nWhen you win, you smile like everyone else. It’s how you react to obstacles, changes of fortune and sudden lane changes in your life that reveals a true aspect of your personality.\n\nTake me, for instance.\n\nI never wanted to be cleaning the mobile arrays on the outside of this gigafreighter as we passed through crystal dust fields. I had a girl once. I even had the money to afford a pet. I lived planetside and breathed real air.\n\nI’ve been given a tool much like a toothbrush. Something about the crystalline make-up of the comet trail doesn’t show up on sensors until the build up is too severe. They found that two diligent humans, each working in twelve hour shifts, was the cheapest solution to keep the array clear of crystal dust.\n\nSome of this crystal dust is rumoured to be sub-molecular in nature. I try not to imagine the feeling of tiny shards filling my entire body, lodging in the mile-wide craters of my pores, sticking out of my skin like tiny daggers. It make me itchy.\n\nBeing itchy in a spacesuit is not good.\n\nI clump around the array in a ritualistic circle, making sure to scrub in between the struts and under the dishes. I get the whole thing done in about two hours. That means that I clean it six times during my shift.\n\nThe comet we’re following must be giving us some pretty impressive data because I’ve been doing this for a year. I was only supposed to be doing it for eight months.\n\nThe overtime’s good but I miss my dog and even after everything that happened, I still miss Sara. If that was her real name.\n\nSometimes I’ll stop for a minute and just look out. I’m standing on a long steel tube in the middle of nowhere stuck in the sparkling tail of a comet. There’s a light xylophone being played just inside human hearing range as the rain of crystal dust collides with the hull. A constant distant ringing that I’m sure I’ll miss when I’m done this job.\n\nIf it doesn’t kill me. I’m scared every time my eyes get itchy that my orbits are filling up with interstellar sand that won’t be able to be removed. The bosses assure me that it’s psychosomatic but really, it’s in their best interest to keep me working. I don’t trust their smiles.\n\nThe colours swirl around me in blues and violets like a sheer veil thrown over the stars. It’s a belly dancer about to drop the last scarf.\n\nI get back to work before the siren call of that shifting borealis makes me leap off into infinity.\n\nScrub, scrub, scrub.\n"
  title: Tail
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2007-07-30
  day: 30
  month: '07'
  text: "“Honey, I’m home,” I yelled as I entered our spacious 241 square foot twin occupancy cabin.  Being married, and serving on the same spaceliner together, entitled us to that extra 103 square feet of living space.  But more importantly, it also includes a 32 cubic foot, state of the art, holovision center.  Reason enough to get married, if you ask me.  But, let’s keep that our little secret.\n\n“How was your day, Steve?” inquired my lovely wife from our private shower.  Another perk on these extended missions.  I meant the lovely wife perk, in case you thought I was referring to the private shower perk.”\n\n“Awful,” I replied.  “I had to work four straight hours.  Two consecutive shifts!  Boy, I’m really beat too.  Eed,” that’s short for Electronic Entertainment Director, “activate the HV.  What are my options?”\n\n“Good afternoon, Steven,” replied Eed’s deep simulated male voice.  “Several sporting events are on tap.  Solar wind racing in the Alpha Centauri system.  Nuclear wake surfing on Saturn’s upper atmosphere.  And, the Olympus Mons, 53 kilometer downhill sand skiing finals.”\n\n“Solar wind racing?  Are you kidding me?  That’s ten times more boring to watch than cricket, as if that were even possible.  Were there any crashes in the other two?”\n\n“Nuclear wake surfing will be carried live via hyperspace relay.  There’s no guarantee, but you can usually count on a few ships wiping out.  The skiing was recorded yesterday, relative Mars time.  The captain of the United European team caught an edge on the second gate and tumbled for fifteen minutes.  But at only 0.4g, he was uninjured.  Is it safe to assume that since there were no known fatalities, you want to move on?\n\n“Roger that, Eed.  How about movies?”\n\n“Of the 162,244 movies in my database, you still have not watched four:  Mr. Smith goes to Sirius, The Wizard of IO, It’s a Wonderful Timeline, and Top Phaser.”\n\n“Pass.”\n\n“There are several network comedy shows that are about to start: Married with Clones, Two and a Half Aliens, My Favorite Titian, and Gilligan’s Asteroid.”\n\n“I swear, the major networks repeat the same shows every generation.”\n\n“Apparently, every generation for the last 200 years.  But as you always say Steven, Mary Ann is still the hottest babe in the entire universe, right?”\n\n“In any century too, Eed.  Ant keep your volume down, please.  What do you have in the way of science or history?”\n\n“There’s an International Solargraphic Special on the killer worms they found on Europa.”\n\n“That was true?  I thought somebody made that up.  What else?”\n\n“How about a Supernova Special on public holovision about alien spacecraft debris found in Siberia near the Tunguska River?”\n\n“That debris was probably planted there as a college prank.  Public holovision always falls for that crap.”\n\n“Oh, here’s a good one, Steven.  The Ancient History Channel has a special on a 21st century phenomena called Flash Fiction.”\n\n“What’s that?  Did you say ‘Flash Fiction’?  Man, I love that stuff.  Those writers are geniuses.  No, make that super geniuses.  Hey, honey, hurry up.  There’s a great show about to start.  While we wait for her Eed, run the credits.  I want to see it any of those early writers ever became famous.”\n"
  title: Leisure Time on a Starship
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2007-07-31
  day: 31
  month: '07'
  text: "“I think mine is a girl,” Anju said as she stretched her legs out over the sofa in the resting room.  Her hands crossed over her round stomach, which was covered by the stork-printed flannel shirt Special Delivery issued to everyone in the compound.  A larger embroidered stork rested over her heart, carrying a swaddled infant in a sling.  Most girls were horrified by the logo when they first arrived, but an aide explained that it was simply an ancient myth.  No children would actually be dropped from the sky.\n\n“You can’t tell what it is,” Jahnavi said.  Her shirt hung around her stomach, deflated, but the next few months would change that.  Even with an empty womb, she carried herself as if in her third trimester. Jahnavi had lived in the complex for seven years.\n\n“I can tell,” Anju said.  “She feels like a girl.”\n\n“You’ve never been pregnant before,” Jahnavi pointed out.\n\n“I know.”\n\nShaila listened to the conversation with mild interest, though part of her attention was directed towards the television.  For weeks, she’d been trying to teach herself to read by watching American sitcoms with subtitles on, and sometimes, she thought she was getting close.  Special Delivery didn’t allow anything but light comedy in the facility.  A healthy mind makes a healthy baby, they said.  Shaila’s dark eyes drifted to the other two women. “If she thinks it’s a girl, let her think it’s a girl,” she said.  Her voice was a quiet warning.  “They won’t let her see it, anyways.”\n\nAnju’s hands pressed more firmly against her stomach, but she did not argue.  For long moments, the only sound in the resting room was the laugh track of the television and the quick, poorly-dubbed dialogue.  Shaila bit at her fingernail as she studied the rapidly moving words at the bottom of the screen.  In three years she’d be too old to work for Special Delivery, but she didn’t intend to go back to the factory like most retired surrogates did.  Shaila was going to move to the city and get a real job, the kind that she saw in the sitcoms.\n\n“They really won’t let me see her?” Anju asked quietly.\n\n“Why would they?  It’s not your baby.  Let the real parents worry about it.”  Jahnavi waved her hand dismissively, though there was a hint of derision in her voice.\n\n“I’d just like to know if it’s a boy or a girl.”\n\n“Yeah, well.  You’ll get over that.”\n\nAnother long silence.  Shaila rubbed her stomach, which was just beginning to swell. This would be her thirteenth birth. “They look like that,” she finally said as she lifted her hand to the television.  “Like those people.  Blue or green eyes, red or blond hair.  They get named things like Courtney and Jeremy.”\n\nAnju looked at her intently, then fixed her eyes on the screen.  “All of them?”\n\n“Most of them.  It’s what the parents want.”\n\nAnju looked down at her belly, then back to the colorful television.  She seemed to consider the statement carefully.  “I hope she has blue eyes,” she said.\n\nJahnavi grunted.  “It’s not your baby,” she said again.\n\n“I don’t care.  I hope she has blue eyes and black hair and I hope they name her Madhuri.”\n\n“No one is going to name their baby Madhuri,” Jahnavi said.  “No one.  You ever seen a Madhuri on TV?”\n\nThe silence was tense, and after a few seconds, Shaila turned up the volume on the television.  “It’s a perfectly good name,” she said, her words almost drowned beneath the laugh track of the television.  “Just save it until you have a kid of your own.”\n"
  title: Special Delivery
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Sam Clough
  date: 2007-08-01
  day: '01'
  month: '08'
  text: "…I’d do all the same things. Just faster.\n\nThere’s so much to see, so much to do. When I stop and think of how much time I’ve wasted – sleeping, procrastinating, unemployed and misemployed, it makes me want to cry. There are all the things I’ve seen that I’d kill to see again, and all the things I’ve heard about but never had the time to see at all. The key is speed. Don’t waste any time.\n\nThe chainstars. I absolutely have to see them. I hear that they’re an incredible sight – three distinct toroidal suns, interlinked and whipping around each other with blinding speed, photospheres bleeding across the gaps. We don’t know why they hold together but it’s just amazing to look at. And then, after that, the Medr breeding grounds. It’s in the same sector. I’ve seen a vid of them: amazing creatures. Two klicks long, with eight-hundred metre sails. Smart as sin, they are. Rumour has it that some of them use humans and antifearac as symbiotes. Weird, I know, but I would like to see if I could speak with one of those symbiotes.\n\nOh, oh – after that, Earth! The skyhooks and the orbital – miracles of engineering, both. And the space fountain. Antarctica’s rolling hills have been green ever since they set up the eye to bounce sunlight round there. The fountain must be a sight – almost invisible tethers, the entire apparatus puncturing the atmosphere and staying up purely on the energy of the projectiles sent streaming up full of cargo and passengers. And on Earth, too – the pacific cities. Got to see them. Maybe fly over, spend a few days. See what it feels like to be outstripped by the pace of cultural change: those floating metropolises are apparently unrecognizable from one day to the next. But I’d have to keep moving. You can’t relax when there’s so much to see! You’ve got to go faster, keep up a blistering pace. Just to stay in the human race, you’ve got to go so quick.\n\nAfter the pacific cities, I’d go to the Kupier belt outside cygni-two-alpha. There’s big, big freedead enclaves out there. Utilitarian bodies driven by people centuries dead, hacking minerals from the rock. Their spidery habitats, strung between rocks, they’re meant to be so beautiful. They have culture unlike anything the living could conceive of. It’s unique and incredible and I want to immerse myself in it. Out there, in hard vacuum, there’s life so visceral you can almost breath it.\n\nNow, am I making haste, or could it be that haste is making me?\n\nNo time to worry. Just accelerate.\n\nThen Calypso! Calypso, oh that would be sweet. Paradise planet, like Santa Vincente, but with fewer beasties. There’s an appeal to grabbing a rokkit launcher and hunting big things with teeth, but Calypso, you just don’t care anymore. Most of the pollens are narcotics: great for export. But skydiving in those purple skies, that’s something you need to do.\n\nBut my time’s up. Life has caught up with me – and boy, is it pissed. The resurrection machines only work the first three or four times: I’ve had five. The doks said I was lucky as anything to get that last one. It’s been almost three hundred years.\n\nBut there’s so much left to do, it can’t stop here..\n"
  title: If I Could Do It Again
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2007-08-02
  day: '02'
  month: '08'
  text: "The correctional facility did not work for me.\n\nI left the building with the need to make up for lost time.\n\nI waited exactly one day and sixteen hours before I grabbed someone and dragged him into an alley to resume work on cleaning the world like I was destined to do.\n\nI guess the cops didn’t tell me about the remote probation device they’d installed in me.\n\nI had my hand drawn back to start working on this terrified man the way the voices had directed when all of a sudden my body felt like it was on fire.  My muscles spasmed and I collapsed to the ground in the dirty alley amongst the needles, newspaper and grease.\n\nI stayed there for half an hour.  People went through my pockets and found nothing.  They stole my shoes.\n\nI woke up angry.\n\nI punched the dumpster beside me, denting it with my hands.  My body erupted in searing pain again as I did this.  My muscles spasmed and I collapsed to the ground for a second time.\n\nThe probation device was wired to my body’s pulse and respiratory system.  It was wired to my brain waves.\n\nI needed to remain calm and positive or I would be shocked into convulsions again.\n\nNo problem.\n\nI practiced on cats and stray dogs for three months.\n\nNow I can kill an animal with no change in my heartbeat or breathing.  I can do it with nothing but positive thoughts in my head.  The creator would be proud.\n\nAll the time I’ve been practicing on the animals, the voices have been demanding I resume my job.  They don’t understand about the probation device.  It’s maddening.  It’s been torture knowing that I can’t resume my work until I perfect my innermost emotions.\n\nIt’s time now.  I’m ready to do a human.\n\nI leave the front door of the cave of boxes I’ve made in my squat like a trap door spider coming into daylight.\n\nFor the second time in my life, I feel like I’ve been released from prison.\n\nI have to make up for lost time.\n"
  title: Making Up For Lost Time
  year: 2007
- 
  author: J.R.Blackwell
  date: 2007-08-03
  day: '03'
  month: '08'
  text: "Maja’s ancestors conferred in her head before the date.\n\n“Wear a dress!” said her great grandmother.\n\n“Not that one!” cried her great grandfather “He will think you are a whore, and will offer you money for sex.”\n\n“Old man, you are behind the times.” Said Florence, Maja’s grandmother. “Dresses like that aren’t considered slutty. Showing her nipples is a sign of strength nowadays, don’t you ever pay attention to the modern media?”\n\n“Oversexed tripe.” Muttered Maja’s great grandfather.\n\nThey chattered on among themselves. Maja put down the orange dress and pulled out some pants and a long-sleeve shirt. She called her car to come to the front of the house and pick her up to take her to The Last Drop coffeehouse for her date.\n\n“What if Maja marries this man.” Said great grandmother “I’m not sure if he would make a good husband. His job isn’t all that great.”\n\n“It’s got lots of potential.” muttered Maja.\n\n“Would you like to change your destination?” asked Maja’s car in a friendly voice.\n\n“No! No.” said Maja. “I’m talking to myself, disregard. ”\n\n“Look at that.” Said Florence “You are making Maja nervous before her date! You old fogies. All of you shut up until she asks for our guidance.”\n\n“You mind your own-”\n\n“Honored ancestors. Please allow me some peace?”\n\n“Fine,” said Maja’s great grandfather, “but only because you asked politely.”\n\nAt the restaurant Maja missed the end of Tachi’s joke, listening to her great grandfathers lecture on the indecent table manners of the youth of today. Tachi was offended, and then surprised, when she told him why she had missed his witty banter.\n\n“You have what, where?” said Tachi, his silver fork still poised in his hand.\n\n“My ancestors.” Shrugged Maja. “They’re all in my head. They got their personalities patterned and I carry an electronic implant that carries them with me.”\n\n“But why?” Tachi put down his fork, shuddering while he imagined his grandmother in his head at all hours of the day.\n\nMaja leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms. “They guide me. They care about me, love me, they help me make choices.”\n\n“They’re with you all the time?” Tachi fidgeted with the tablecloth. “Even when-”\n\n“Even when what?”\n\n“Even when you are in the bathroom?”\n\nMaja sighed, relieved. Sex was a touchy subject with her ancestors. “Yes, all the time, even in the bathroom. They don’t really care much about what I do in the bathroom though. They care more about what I’m wearing or who I’m going there with, where I’m sticking my credits, my job, the entertainment I watch. You probably think this is weird.”\n\n“It’s different, sure, but not weird. I mean, my grandparents live in a polyamorous commune where everything thinks they are teenagers. At least you’ve never had to worry about your grandfather stealing your girlfriend.”\n\nMaja snorted. “I guess not.”\n\n“That actually explains a few things about you.”\n\n“Like what?”\n\n“Well, when we met, at Rudolf’s party. I remember thinking how elegant you looked, both modern and refined all at once. Classic, I guess is the word. You’re classic.”\n\n“He thinks we’re classic!” cried Florence. “Oh, what a nice man.”\n\n“He’s trying to get into her pants.” Said Maja’s great grandfather.\n\n“Thank you.” Said Maja.\n\n“Do your ancestors say anything about me?” asked Tachi.\n\n“Rude.” Said Maja’s great grandfather.\n\n“I don’t think they’ve all made up their minds.”\n\n“What about you? What do you think about me?”\n\n“I’ve made up my mind, but you’ll have to stick around for dessert to find out what it is.” Maja smiled.\n"
  title: Ancestors
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Sarah Klein
  date: 2007-08-04
  day: '04'
  month: '08'
  text: "“You must think yourself pretty clever, Mr. Culler,” Parkinson said, snickering. “Look at all these devices you’ve rigged up to catch an intruder. Do you notice how I’ve been able to avoid every single one without losing a drop of blood?” He cackled.\n\nCuller said nothing as he awoke from a drugged slumber, taking in his surroundings. He had been propped up in a chair and he was handcuffed. He clenched his teeth and very, very slowly eased his cuffed hands towards his pants pocket.\n\n“You know, I’m just as smart as you, maybe even smarter,” Parkinson said evenly. He pressed the barrel of the gun against Culler’s temple. Click.\n\nCuller had managed to get a couple fingers inside his pocket. He kept a straight face, looking ahead, groping silently.\n\n“We were supposed to be partners! PARTNERS!!” Parkinson roared. “And you dismissed me! Why? Because you ‘felt like working alone’. Do you have any idea what that did to me, you worthless snob?!”\n\nFlecks of spit hit Culler’s cheek as he grasped the lockpick and began to carefully ease it out, hoping he was being subtle enough. But Parkinson was too far gone to notice.\n\n“You ruined my career!” he screamed, pushing the barrel in harder. Culler braced himself so as not to fall over. “You made me a disgrace! No one will even look me in the eye, much less work with me! All because you had to have all the glory yourself!” His red eyes bugged out as he trembled with rage.\n\nCuller picked the lock without trouble, the small noise covered by Parkinson’s hysterics. He sat calmly with the cuffs still around his wrists, and slipped his hand into his other pocket just as subtly.\n\n“You ruined my life,” Parkinson whispered darkly, “so I’m going to end yours.” He prepared to pull the trigger, but after a blink, saw only empty space. His mouth dropped open in surprise.\n\nClick. A pair of handcuffs fell to the floor. Parkinson whirled around to see them, fallen on the floor – and unaccompanied by a person.\n\nHis heart sank as he remembered the theme of the project they were supposed to share.\n\nInvisibility.\n\nHe felt his neck being squeezed. As his vision began to blur, he heard a voice.\n\n“You must think yourself pretty clever, Mr. Parkinson…”\n"
  title: Sheer Irony
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Grady Hendrix
  date: 2007-08-05
  day: '05'
  month: '08'
  text: "“Wait!” he said. “Look at that!”\n\n“What the hell is it?” she asked, slamming on the hovercar brakes.\n\n“You’ve never seen one?” he asked.\n\nShe shook her head.\n\n“You’re in for a treat,” he said, bouncing up and down with excitement. “Come on.”\n\nHe scrambled out of the hovercar and onto the blasted earth.\n\n“I haven’t seen one of these since I woke up,” he said, jogging over to the green patch. “It’s called a tree.”\n\n“I thought they all died in the Great War?”\n\nHis knees buckled a little and she caught him. It had only been two months since he’d been cracked out of his hundred year cryo-sleep, one of the first old growth humans to be brought back into this postwar world, finally judged capable of leaving the Citi-Dome and going on patrol with Sara-10.\n\n“Steady on,” she said.\n\n“They haven’t given me much history yet, but I haven’t seen a tree or a plant since I woke up. Look,” he said. “Its leaves change color with the time of year. See those tiny green things? They’re buds, new parts of the tree will grow from them. They’re capable of so many things that we can’t do…” a tear slid down his cheek.\n\nThen a high pressure stream of burning liquid fuel hit the tree and it exploded into a fireball.\n\n“What are you doing?” he screamed.\n\nSara-10 ignored him and burned the tree until her flamethrower was empty.\n\n“We lost a lot of good men to bastards like that,” she said as the tree crackled.\n\n“That’s maybe the only tree left alive after the Great War and you killed it?”\n\nShe slapped another fuel tank on her flamethrower and hit the tree with another blast.\n\n“Who do you think we fought the Great War against?” she asked. “Fucking trees. Taking up all the land, breaking up our cities with their roots, killing everyone – “ she broke down crying. He reached to comfort her but she slapped his hand away. “Let’s just go,” she snapped. “I have to report this.\n\nThe tree watched them depart, cursing the mobile ones.\n\n“We’ll be back,” it thought as it died. “There are more of us…we will water our roots with your blood…”\n"
  title: The Return
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2007-08-06
  day: '06'
  month: '08'
  text: "The sound of a bugle woke me up.  Damn, reveille.  I hate that sound.  I swore an oath to myself that I’d fix that one day.  I unzip my “bunk” and float out.  As I began to put on my uniform, I smiled again at the poster on the far wall.  It was Elmer Fudd wearing a spacesuit holding a K-138 phaser rifle.  The caption read, “”Shhhhhhhh, be vewy vewy quiet; I’m hunting Piewits, heheheheheheh.”  That always cracks me up.  I swear, if I capture a pirate one day and he pleads, “But it’s duck season,” I’ll probably let him go.  I imagine that some of them are probably decent folk, just raiders trying to feed their families, who would flee rather that hurt someone.  But I don’t kid myself; there are some really bad ones too.  Sadistic bastards that kill helpless passengers, including women and children.  I blast those guys first, and then ask if they wish to surrender.\n\nHalfway through morning chow, the battle stations alarm sounded, followed by the commander’s voice, “Prepare for battle men, we have Morgan Bartholomew’s ship on our long range sensors.  “Morgan Bartholomew,” I said to my mates, “he’s the worst of the lot.  The captain won’t break off this pursuit, even if Bartholomew flies onto the sun’s corona.  We’re going to have to board her too.  They won’t let themselves be captured.”\n\n“That’s fine by me,” said the Sergeant Dobson.  “I’ll buy a case of Martian beer for the person that vaporized that scum.  Let’s suit up men.”\n\nWe caught up to them midway between Uranus and Neptune.  No place to hide out there, so they had to fight.  We punched a dozen holes in her hull, but they kept fighting.  Unfortunately, we couldn’t just blow them up.  Bartholomew generally kept prisoners alive knowing that it would force hand-to-hand combat.  So, we boarded her.\n\nFighting on a ship exposed to the vacuum of space was eerie.  No sound, except the tactical information being transmitted to our headsets.  Fighting was fierce, and we lost a half dozen good men, but we killed all the pirates, including Bartholomew himself.  I made a mental note to become buddies with the trooper that bagged that bastard.\n\nIn the end, we rescued fifteen prisoners, mostly women.  No doubt their lives had been hell.  But they’re in the infirmary now, and at least they’ll recover physically.  All in all, it was a good day to be a pirate hunter.  We had a big celebration in the mess hall that evening.  The captain even let us break out the contraband liquor that we weren’t supposed to have.  After several hours of bragging and exaggerating about our heroic accomplishments, we toasted our fallen comrades another time, and headed to our quarters.  Well, except for me, I had a final mission to complete before sacking out.\n\nThe following morning, the address system woke us up with Herb Alpert’s Brasilia.  Much better, I thought.\n"
  title: It’s Pirate Season
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2007-08-07
  day: '07'
  month: '08'
  text: "“I’m sorry, if I’d have realized you were coming tonight, I’d have prepared a more substantial demonstration.” The Professor addressed the Investor nervously, moving piles of notes and abandoned test equipment out of his way.\n\n“Your message stated there had been a significant development.” The Investor stood unaffected amidst the chaos, collar turned up against the chill of the room, gloved hands clasped behind his back.\n\n“Yes, we’ve made an exciting advancement.” The Professor ceased his tidying, and strode to the corner of the room, hefting a small wooden shipping crate from a half full pallet of the same. Stepping over the clutter, he carried it to the middle of the curved array of alloy beams that seemed to be the focal point of the laboratory. The structure itself was easily half again as tall as he was, resembling a giant sectioned orange, exploded and suspended in mid air. He deposited the crate at the approximate center of the array, and stepping beyond its perimeter he began to key noisily at a terminal while he spoke. “We had spent all of our efforts initially trying to find a way to accelerate a mass through spacetime, and quite honestly, it had us stymied completely.” He paused for a moment, thoughtfully. “So we reinterpreted the question.” The Professor alternated between keying instructions and monitoring the feedback on several attached displays. “If we didn’t ask ‘how do we accelerate matter through spacetime’, but rather simplified the question to ‘how do we move matter through spacetime’, we discovered that we could apply our theories in a different way, and we were able to successfully move matter through spacetime by decelerating it. Like this – watch!”\n\nThe Professor, satisfied with the data presented on the displays in front of him, stepped to a panel off to one side and pushed a pair of levers all the way forward, watching the crate with palpable excitement as it seemed to come into sharp focus for an instant before fading slowly from view, to disappear completely a few seconds later with an audible snap.\n\nPulling the levers back to their starting position, he turned excitedly to the Investor, who had stood motionless and silent through the entire demonstration.\n\n“We’re not exactly sure where the crates are going, hopefully they’re not falling on someone’s head in another dimension, but the physical properties of the matter making up the crate remains completely intact the entire time, or at least as far as we can monitor it. In fact, we’ve…”\n\n“You reinterpreted my directive?” The Investor’s voice stopped the Professor cold. “You wasted my time, my resources to build a matter decelerator? I know how to decelerate matter through spacetime.” He was shouting now, eyes smoldering on the verge of inferno. “I. Know. How.” His words sharply punctuated, delivered in coarse staccato. “If I had wanted you to recreate what I know, I would have specifically instructed you to do so, wouldn’t I?” His voice boomed as he closed the distance to the Professor, forcing him backwards through the steel tines of the array.\n\nThe Investor stopped to lean heavily on the control panel. “You were supposed to make me an accelerator.” He sighed deeply, in sudden resignation, throwing the levers forward again, and not watching the horrified features of the Professor pulled into vivid focus, face contorted in a silent scream as he faded and snapped out of his own plane of existence.\n\n“You were supposed to find me a way to go home.”\n"
  title: A Matter of Interpretation
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Benjamin Fischer
  date: 2007-08-08
  day: '08'
  month: '08'
  text: "“Have a seat, Jim,” said the General.\n\n“Is this what I think it’s about, sir?” the Colonel asked, shutting the hatch behind him.\n\nHe sat down. Across from him, a LED nameplate proclaimed “Major General David Pietz USAF, Commander-in-Chief Colonial Expeditionary Force” on a broad, glass-covered aluminum desk. Behind it the General reclined in a plush leather chair halfway turned to face a bank of monitors behind him. Blown up to maximum magnification were the latest from the reconnaissance office–an impressive fleet of spaceships, moored like the petals of a flower around a long, cylindrical space station.\n\nOne of the ships was highlighted in red.\n\n“Your thoughts?” asked the General.\n\nThe Colonel shook his head.\n\n“Yeah, that’s her,” he said.\n\n“The Charleston,” the General nodded. “Old Chucktown. Lost with all hands. Five years, six months, and two days ago.”\n\n“You still keep track of that too?” the Colonel asked.\n\n“Yes,” General Pietz said.\n\nThey sat in silence.\n\n“Definitely, positively destroyed in a meteorite collision,” the Colonel finally said. “They found pieces, they found bodies. No doubt at all.” He was paraphrasing a report.\n\n“And yet the Colonials seem to have repaired her,” the General responded.\n\nThe Colonel snorted.\n\nThe General sighed.\n\n“OK, Jim, confession time,” General Pietz said. “I don’t know whether to be completely pissed or crying with joy.”\n\n“Yeah, it took the wind out of me, too,” said the Colonel. “She could be alive.”\n\nPietz let out a sharp laugh and turned away from the telling images. He set his elbows upon his desk and leaned towards his guest.\n\n“Oh, she most definitely is,” he said, his face half-smiling, half-grimacing. “My girl was always tougher than that. I knew a handful of damn buckshot couldn’t have killed Marissa.”\n\nThe Colonel swallowed.\n\n“So that means?” he said.\n\n“Yes. The god damn rumors,” said Pietz, “are apparently true.”\n\n“Apparently,” agreed the Colonel.\n\n“Well, here’s another one, for you to spread,” said the General. “Tomorrow, at twenty one hundred, we’re deploying. Our eventual objective will most likely be those facilities at Lagrange Two. And the fleet defending them.”\n\n“Jesus,” said the Colonel.\n\n“To say I am disappointed in the Security Council would be a gross understatement,” said Pietz.\n\n“Jesus,” repeated the Colonel. “We’ll have to use nukes. There’s no other option.”\n\n“Eventually, when our hands are untied, yes,” said the General. “And that’s why I called you in here.”\n\n“Sir?” asked the Colonel.\n\n“When Lieutenant Colonel Pietz and I last spoke,” the General said, “she was convinced that full independence was the only reasonable course for the Colonies. She told me that any sort of half-measure was an invitation to open, violent rebellion, and that she sympathized with secession. I disagreed. It was not a pleasant discussion.”\n\n“Lord,” said the Colonel, his eyes wide. “She told you.”\n\n“Almost,” said the General, shutting his. He snorted softly. Then:\n\n“Jim, I’ve known you and you’ve known me for damn near two decades now, so listen to what I say very carefully now. This contest will be for control of mankind’s future. We can not lose. I say again, we can not lose. If at any point–if at any point you feel that I am holding back even the least bit-”\n\n“You’re not the only one who misses Marissa,” the Colonel said.\n\nThe General opened his eyes, and they were cold.\n\n“I expect everything up to and including the last full measure from everyone, myself included,” he said. “Marissa will be very hard to kill.”\n"
  title: The Prodigal
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Viktor Kuprin
  date: 2007-08-09
  day: '09'
  month: '08'
  text: "When the alien ship reached us, we were down to four hours of oxygen and nothing in our prospector ship’s food storage.\n\nIt was the Tsoor who rescued us, the ones who look like walking man-of-war jellyfish. Oh, they were nice and polite enough, and they even had a Tsooriski-to-Russki translator unit, thank God!\n\nBut they didn’t have any human food.\n\nWhen I queried my hand-comp’s database, all it said about Tsoor nutrition was “Some terrestrial protein and carbohydrate compatibilities.” We didn’t have any choice. We were starving.\n\nThe Tsoor like to take their meals sitting in pools of their home world’s sea water. Anton and I sat soaking in the briny liquid when the biggest Tsoor brought the food, a metal pot filled with ball-shaped mollusks.\n\n“God help us,” Anton muttered under his breath as our server crushed one of the gray shells with its tentacle-fingers, yanking out a still-quivering slab of pink-white meat.\n\n“Shhh! Don’t offend it!” I warned.\n\nAfter days without food, I didn’t care how badly it might taste. Or smell.\n\nBig Tsoor picked up a shallow stone bowl filled with yellow powder and rolled the mollusk flesh in it. It offered the morsel to Anton.\n\n“See. Food,” said the alien’s metallic translator voice.\n\nAnton slowly accepted the dusted meat from Big Tsoor’s tentacle-fingers, pulled down his respirator mask, and leaned forward to sniff.\n\n“Alan, I think it’s sulfur! They season with sulfur!”\n\nBig Tsoor stood motionless, watching.\n\nI urged Anton on. “Wipe some of the powder off and try it. Come on, it’s waiting for you to taste it.”\n\nAnton used his thumb to clear most of the Tsoor seasoning off a side of the slab. He shut his eyes, bit, chewed, and gulped.\n\n“It’s like a big prawn, but it reeks of rotten eggs,” he said between gasps.\n\nBig Tsoor cracked another shell and another. We silently wolfed down the gritty shellfish.\n\nWhen the pot was half empty, Big Tsoor held out its tentacled-hand towards us.\n\n“Culinary exchange,” announced the translator.\n\nQuickly I thumbed my hand-comp: “Tsoor guests at a formal dinner are expected to offer their hosts a token gift of food or drink in exchange for the meal.”\n\n“It’s part of their hospitality custom. I’ll be right back.” Dripping wet, I ran out of the mess hall, across the airlock that connected our ships, and rushed to our all-but-empty galley.\n\nYes! On a rack was a half-filled bulb of Anne Bonny Cocktail Sauce. I squirted it into a bowl, hurried back to the alien dining hall, and sat back down in the warm brine.\n\nI pointed to the shellfish and pantomimed rolling the meat in the red sauce. Our host understood, and it shoved a sauce-covered mollusk into its mouth sack.\n\nBig Tsoor turned red, then purple. I could see its plum-shaped eye throbbing. Its tentacle-fingers clenched into tight coils.\n\nThe alien bolted straight up. Anton screamed. I tried to jump out of the pool.\n\nThrough the chaos, I could just make out the translator.\n\n“Very tasty.”\n"
  title: See Food
  year: 2007
- 
  author: J.R.Blackwell
  date: 2007-08-10
  day: 10
  month: '08'
  text: "The old man may have looked like Santa if he smiled, but red faced and spitting he was closer to a vengeful devil than the spirit of giving. The old man cornered Uill with his sizable bulk. “You are not a poet.” He said, stepping closer. He stunk of rotted food and oil. “You are The Krugar, a War Lord, the greatest military mind of my generation.” The old man gripped Uill’s lapels and shook him violently. “Snap out of it General! Come back to us.”\n\nUill trembled. “Mister, please just let me go, I’m going to be late to class.”\n\nThe old man kept one of his meaty hands on Uill’s thin shoulder and used his other hand to reach into his coat pocket. He pulled out a bronze metal and pinched it between his stained fingers. The medal had a half opened eye impressed on its surface. As always, these kinds of medals made Uill feel sad and angry, a press of emotions that intensified the stabbing pain in his head. The man shook the medal in front of Uill’s face. “I earned this after you commanded us on Mars. Do you remember Mars? You remember the Driell and the fire?”\n\nUill could feel the headache coming, the pain that always came when people talked about his old life. “I’m not The Krugar. I never commanded you. That man wasn’t me. I was reborn. Now I’m a student of poetry.” Uill held up his left hand, where his university glowed on his ring finger. “Look at my ring.” He waved his hand in front of the old man’s face. This is the Capital University student ring. The Krugar went to military school, right? I can’t be him. I go to Capital University.”\n\nShaking his head, the old man rummaged in his coat. “Don’t try to confuse me. I know who you are. I know what they did to you. I know they tried to make you reborn. But you are The Krugar. You wouldn’t forget, not with all the machines in the universe.” The old man pulled a knife out of his coat and flicked his thumb on the blade. The blade began to spin. “You’ve got to be in there somewhere. Maybe I can cut you out.”\n\nUill held up his hands. “Please. No. Poetry. I do poetry. Cloudless climbs and starry skies, suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, do not go gently into that good night.”\n\n“Forget poetry Krugar.” The old man waved his hands around his head.  “Forget it. Don’t you hear the news? The Driell are returning. They are coming back. Only you can beat them. Like you did last time, remember?” The man lifted his arms where the lights of the city sparkled against that velour sky. “There!” he said, pointing excitedly to a streetlight, dropping the knife. “That star! There, that glory star. ” The knife blade sparked on the pavement as it spun. The old man didn’t notice. “You remember the song, Glory Star?” The old man put both his hands over his heart and closed his eyes. Then he began to sing, his voice surprisingly clear. “Glory Star, Glory Star, bright and bold The Krugar’s Company.”\n\nUill knew the words. All eighteen verses. He heard them in his wild dreams, those spastic glimpses of long stretched hours of tension followed by moments of terror and then after, long, brilliant songs, his mind on fire. Uill ran out of the alley, back to the university, back home to his life.\n"
  title: Glory Star
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Jeremy M. Hall
  date: 2007-08-11
  day: 11
  month: '08'
  text: "“Welcome to Chrono-Real Estate-Advertising. How may I help you?”\n\n“I’m here to buy from March 1, 1650 to March 30, 1650 for the entire city of Jamestown, Virgina.”\n\n“Sir, we can’t do that.”\n\n“I have a suitcase with several million dollars that says you can.”\n\n“No, sir. We cannot do that. We do have a nice spot in upstate New York on August 30, 1921 that we have on sale. Upstate New York is a hot commodity in the Pre-Branding market.”\n\n“No, ma’am. I want that time period for Jamestown.”\n\nThe gentleman opened the suitcase that he was carrying, showing off large stacks of hundred dollar bills.\n\n“Listen sir, I’m sure you’re big in the Pre-Branding business, especially to carry that much cash in a briefcase, but there is no way we are going to let you buy any time period before the Nineteenth century, especially in an area that big. The Historical Protection Commission would be down our throats before we could even place your advertising, and they would be yanking our Time Equipment through our tonsils. In fact, there isn’t a reputable Time and Space Advertiser that would take your offer.”\n\n“I can’t believe this crap. I have several million dollars cash, and you aren’t going to take it? And for what? Because of some government regulations. You people are-”\n\nThe receptionist’s phone rang and she picked it up.\n\n“Yes, sir,” she said into the handset. “This is a TC level three. You have a B three million ready? OK, the code is alpha gamma omega beta. Yes, sir. I’ll be sure to let him know.”\n\n“What’s this?” the customer asked. “I heard three million there. Are they considering it?”\n\n“Say hello to the dinosaurs,” the receptionist said, and then hit several keys on a small terminal. The customer had a shocked look on his face as a small pinhole appeared behind him, then sucked him in backwards. The last thing the receptionist saw of the man was his bulging eyes and the tips of his shoes. She looked at her watch, and then counted to five, at which point the customer returned the same way he’d left, except for the stain in the seat of his pants.\n\n“I hope you enjoyed the T-rex greeting. If you continue to bother me, or any other employee of Chrono-Real Estate-Advertising, we will file for a Harassment Clause which would allow us to send you back to Mister T-Rex and let him finish the job. Do you understand?”\n\nThe customer only nodded, his face still frozen in fear, and with his briefcase clutched, white knuckled in one hand, he slowly backed out through the door.\n"
  title: Troublesome Customer
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Adam Wiesen
  date: 2007-08-12
  day: 12
  month: '08'
  text: "White. Sterile. No roof, no walls, no floors. No shadows. Make a sound. Hear anything? Of course not: no acoustics. You look nervous, Ben. Don’t. We’re not there yet. This is just a test. Plugged into your parietal lobe, running a line into your implant. The real deal  takes way more power than I have in this little box. No, for a full-on semiotic transplant, you’re going to sit in the Big Chair down in Valley Stream, and they’re going to plug you right into the Nassau County grid, along with the rest of the recalcitrant douchebags who can’t seem to stop shitting in society’s mouth.\n\nYou’re sweating, Ben.\n\nThat’s okay.\n\nI’d be scared, too. I mean, this little corner of eternity’s hardly scenic, and you’re slotted for a good thirty years. Where do you sleep? Oh, Ben, you really don’t get it, yet, do you? The whole point to this is you don’t sleep. Don’t eat, don’t talk, don’t hear, don’t listen. It’s just you and the the long white nothing. The Little Bardo, they call it. No sleep.  What’s sleep when we’re technically plugged into your REM mode, anyway? No, you’re doing your full thirty wide awake. The Nassau County grid dumps into the National Readjustment Processor down in Quantico, where your personality will sit in happy reconstructed nothing for the entire stretch of your bid.\n\nIt could be worse, Ben. In the old days, they filled the Little Bardo with all sorts of terrible stuff. The best bits from the Bible, used to scare you to sleep at night. Fire and brimstone. Punishment, y’know? Retribution. No one really came out of that in one piece, though. Lot of catatonic freaks. Couldn’t control their piss function. Terrible smell. Lots of screaming. Then they tried to pamper them with a Heaven meme. That worked like bunk. I mean, for half you rotten sons-of-bitches, Heaven is raping kittens and stabbing nuns. Ever see a smiling coma victim? I hear half the Federal budget that year went to buying clean sheets, just to cover up the number of wet dreams you freaks had. So, then they came to this. Nothing. Nada. Nirvana, baby, for thirty years. The Little Bardo. Time to think, right?\n\nBen, we have a toilet for going to bathroom. Someone’s going to have to mop up after you. That’s not very considerate is it?\n\nHow are you going to receive visitors? Your mother? Ben, look at me. Does this place look like it’s got the facilities to hold your toxic miserable ass for thirty actual years? We’re going in through the parietal lobe, champ. That controls time sense. You’re going to be in and out of here in twenty minutes.\n"
  title: The Little Nothing
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2007-08-13
  day: 13
  month: '08'
  text: "It was a no-call assignment, and Carson hated no-call assignments. Attempts to contact the McCaulty family through conventional mail had been unsuccessful, though he noted that the lever of the mailbox had been raised, indicating recent use.  They had no telephone, of course.  Carson shifted the car to manual control as they left the grid and pulled onto the gravel trail.\n\n“Are those real cows?” Kristin asked.  He nodded.  Her eyes were wide.\n\n“You’ll get used to it.  Is your defo shield charged?” he asked.  The car came to a stop behind a rusted-out manual pickup truck, and Carson yanked on the emergency brake.  Kristin nodded and followed him up the gravel path and he looked her over one last time before ringing the doorbell.\n\nLong seconds passed before the door swung open a few inches, and a portly woman ran her eyes over the two of them.  “Are you Mrs. McCaulty?” Carson asked as he flipped open his wallet. His badge caught the light and projected a holographic image of his face.\n\n“I got no business with you.”\n\n“We’re here to discuss your son.”\n\nMrs. McCaulty squinted suspiciously.  “There’s nothing wrong with Herbert.”\n\n“Then you won’t mind us asking him a few questions.”\n\n“He don’t talk yet.”\n\nCarson reached for his report pad and scrolled through the relevant information. “He’s nearly five, correct?” he asked as he moved his foot into the crack between the door and its frame. “We’re just gathering information about the case.”\n\n“There’s nothing wrong with Herbert.”\n\n“Are you familiar with the Re-Ability program?”\n\n“You’re not sticking nothing in my son’s head,” she said, this time with an edge of force.  Mrs. McCaulty leaned against the door, but Carson didn’t let it close.\n\n“I think you might be misinterpreting this visit,” he said.  “I’m here to tell you about the federal assistance program. Your son may qualify for-”\n\n“You ain’t sticking nothing in my son’s head,” she repeated.\n\nCarson revealed no evidence of frustration or unease, though Kristin had tucked herself behind him with a nervous expression across her youthful face. “Re-Ability implants are no different from pacemakers or any other medical device,” he said calmly.  “If he’s struggling, there’s a solution. Surely, as his mother, you’d want him to have the best life possible.”\n\n“You ain’t-”\n\n“I’ll just leave you with this information,” Carson said.  His hand slid through the crack in the door, holding a bouquet of holo-readers.  She snatched them from his grip, and he barely retrieved his hand before the door snapped shut.  Carson’s frown was almost invisible as he turned back to the car.\n\n“She isn’t going to read those,” Kristin said as she grabbed the door handle.\n\n“You’re learning fast.”\n\n“So what do we do?”\n\nHe slid into his padded seat and yanked the door shut with a little more force than necessary.  “Level two,” he said.  “Forward it under neglect and endangerment.”\n\nKristin gave a short nod as she slid in and pulled her door closed. “Are they going to-”\n\n“If he doesn’t have that implant before he’s six, he’ll be permanently delayed.”  Carson snapped as he threw the car back into manual and it spun.  “Don’t feel sorry for her.  He needs treatment.”\n\n“Alright,” Kristin said.  Her voice was meek as she reached for the console panel.\n\n“Label it priority,” he added.  The car jerked abruptly as it reached the end of the driveway and reunited with the grid.\n"
  title: Social Service
  year: 2007
- 
  author: B.York
  date: 2007-08-14
  day: 14
  month: '08'
  text: "Tommy Texas was born in Sienna where his ma and his pa taught him to thank others for the luxuries they had. They thanked Peter for the ability to cook; they thanked Kimberly for the ride into town, and they thanked their grandpa Jeremiah for the television shows they watched each and every night.\n\nIn Sienna, Tommy Texas was loved by everyone. Tommy was loved because he had a big family and everyone there loved big families. All the townsfolk knew that more people meant they could have more luxuries and so Tommy Texas was someone they liked to see very much.\n\nWhen Tommy got older, his parents wanted him to be a police officer but Tommy worked in construction anyways. He thanked Delilah’s father Robert for letting him use the lift and the vehicles to do his job each and every day. Tommy helped build the city bigger so that more would come to live in it. He knew that would make others happy to have more people in town.\n\nAs time went by, Tommy wanted to go to college far off but his ma and pa told him it would be a waste for him to leave town and surely the townsfolk would never be happy about anyone leaving the town. So, to be fair to his parents, Tommy stayed in the town of Sienna where he went to school and thanked Fred’s brother Ian for the ride over to school each and every day.\n\nWhile Tommy was at college he met a girl named Felicia in one of his classes. Tommy and Felicia loved each other very much and eventually the two got married. The town was so happy that they got married because Felicia came from a big family, too. Her grandfather was the first one to thank for the lights at the town hall so that made Felicia’s family famous.\n\nDuring the wedding, the pastor thanked Felicia and Tommy for getting married and wished on them a big and happy family. He also thanked a few people for the ceremony and then let Felicia and Tommy kiss so they could go off and have a family.\n\nAs the years went by, Tommy and Felicia had many children and so the townsfolk lavished them with gifts and thanked them for everything they were doing for the town. Tommy and Felicia were happy to have so many children- it made them feel blessed. They thanked Tommy’s parents for the house they lived in and also the cool air during the summer seasons.\n\nTommy and Felicia’s children grew up quick and they, too, learned to thank others for the things they had. They thanked grandpa and grandma for the cool air and the house they lived in each and every day.\n\nThough one day years later Tommy got sick and died in the winter. Felicia was sad for bit and so were the children who were much older now. The town had a big celebration in Tommy’s name and they even brought the celebration to the plant where they liquidated his body.\n\nNow all the boys and girls in Sienna thank Tommy Texas for heating the school in the winter. They learned to thank others for the luxuries they had and knew that someday someone would be thanking them, too.\n"
  title: Tommy Texas
  year: 2007
- 
  author: J. S. Kachelries
  date: 2007-08-15
  day: 15
  month: '08'
  text: "The Gossamer Comet hung motionless 10 meters beyond the Folkestone Colony’s outermost habitation “wheel.”  The Gossamer Comet was a one-man “human-powered” spacecraft that was about to attempt to win the last unclaimed Kremer Prize, a £100,000 award for the first person to “fly” unaided, in less than twelve hours, between any two of the 247 space colonies in geostationary orbit.\n\nGenerally, all of the attempts to make the human-powered crossing involved Newton’s third law. Contestants would typically launch massive projectiles using a human compressed spring in one direction, and the ship would move in the opposite direction at a velocity proportional to the mass of the projectiles and the ship.  Alternatively, contestants would use a hand pump to pressurize a liquid, and release it like a rocket exhaust.  The big problem, however, was achieving the correct trajectory.  In orbit, there were complicating factors.  If the ship moves retrograde (opposite to the direction of Earth’s rotation) its orbital velocity decreases.  This means that it is no longer in geostationary orbit, and it starts to “fall” perceptibly toward the Earth.  Consequently, after traveling several hundred kilometers, it misses the target low.  Some intrepid designers added multidirectional “guidance” capability to their ships.  But all those craft ended up rotating helplessly out of control (the rules prohibited gyroscopes on the ship).  In over twenty years of trying, nobody had been able to “thread the needle” (i.e., achieve the correct angle and velocity to dock successfully with an adjacent space colony).\n\nBut today, Allen Bryan, a 25-year-old graduate student in Physics, had a plan to improve his odds.  He had spent months preparing for this attempt.  Seconds after he was notified that the twelve-hour time limit had begun, he exited a hatch and clipped a tether line to his spacesuit.  He then began turning a winch that caused a circular hull plate to move inside his ship.  He climbed into the newly created cavity, and satisfied that he was aimed correctly, released the preloaded spring.  As shocked onlookers watched, Bryan launched his body at an angle slightly outboard of the Gris-Nez Station, which was 358 kilometers “behind” the Folkestone.  Of course, his more massive ship moved slowly in the opposite direction.  Bryan had meticulously controlled the mass of the ship, the tether line, and his own mass.  As he flew on a trajectory outboard of the Gris-Nez, he began to drop toward the Earth because of his retrograde motion.  His plan was to overshoot the Gris-Nez, but cross its orbit five to ten kilometers on the far side.  After eight hours of flight, the 500-kilometer long Kevlar tether line had played out.  Bryan was safely beyond, and below, the Gris-Nez, with his tether line “draped” across the outer wheel of the space station.  Bryan began to feverishly crank the winch on his spacesuit to reel himself in.  He continued to shorten the tether line until he lightly crashed into the Gris-Nez colony two hours later.  Exhausted, he scrambled into an open cargo bay.\n\n“Very clever, Mister Bryan,” said a member of the Royal Aerospace Society’s Human-Powered Spacecraft Rules Committee, “that technique significantly increased your margin of error.  Very clever, indeed.  However, the rules clearly stipulate that ‘the pilot and the ship’ must arrive at the space station to claim the £100,000 prize.  I suggest, sir, that you get busy manually hauling in your ship.  You only have two hours left on the clock.”\n"
  title: The Last Kremer Prize
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Michael Varian Daly
  date: 2007-08-16
  day: 16
  month: '08'
  text: "Dawn’s light angled off the blank brick walls of the narrow alley. The air shimmered, then expanded like a large soap bubble and softly popped. Iyo stood there for a moment to orientate herself. She glanced up and around. No windows. Bioforms reading only insects and the odd rodent.\n\n“Clear,” she said to no one in particular.\n\nShe was flying solo. It would have been nice to have her old unit along, but explaining away a squad of heavily armed Shan dog troopers, five foot canine humanoids, or Corporal Jax, a three quarter ton Marine cyborg, well, the locals might get nervous.\n\nSo, Iyo stood in this alley alone, a tall blonde in jeans and a leather jacket. The air reeked of hydrocarbons and decay. The nanites in her lungs and blood were already working hard to offset their effects.\n\n“You’ll get used to it,” she thought, like the dank, moldy air in the catacombs of that scathole Trobathney back…”or forward?” she mused. Transtemporal/Paratemporal operations were still new enough to have not worked out the tenses of their grammatic descriptors.\n\n“Your cover is Camilla Göteborg. You’re a model from Sweden,” her Case Officer said. “Remember, this line is swarming with unmodified males. Refrain from killing them unless you have absolutely no choice.”\n\nIyo knew all that from the compressed immersion vert. This was just her Real Time cover activation. She also knew she was picked because she looked more like the locals than her mostly dark and therefor potentially ‘exotic’ Sisters.\n\nNot mentioned in the vert briefing was the underlaying reason for this mission. The tactical rationals were addressed in detail. The strategic concepts were clear. The socio-cultural purposes were left unspoken.\n\nIyo knew them, however. She was only one of hundreds of millions of Sisters who had been born into, and had grown up to fight, The War. It was always there, generation after generation. Once, The Enemy had threatened The Sisterhood with extinction. Now, Victory was almost assured and The War was slowly winding down.\n\nWhat to do with all these battle hardened warriors?\n\nRetrain them in covert operations and ship them out across all of Creation was the plan The Elders of The Sisterhood devised. Iyo actually thought that a good idea. She knew she’d get into mischief in peacetime and the necessities of ‘blending in’ would help her readjust to non-martial society.\n\nThus, she found herself in place called Brooklyn.\n\n“Okay, enough woolgathering,” she said using local colloquialisms.\n\nShe strode out of the alley, though quaint asphalt and concrete streets, to a promenade overlooking the city’s harbor. The water smelled even worse than the air, but the skyline of the tightly packed urban island across that water held a chaotic beauty.\n\nShe knew one of the two ugly boxlike towers that dominated that skyline would be destroyed in the Father/God wars that plagued this period. But that was nearly two decades…’up the line’. Maybe.\n\n“Things change,” she murmured.\n"
  title: Crossing The Lines
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2007-08-17
  day: 17
  month: '08'
  text: "Captain Goff sat at the head of the conference table.  “Well, we find ourselves in a rather precarious situation.  The Capellians have seized our ship, as well as the flagship of the Rana.  They claim that our war with the Rana has violated their sovereign space.  We have been tried, in absentia, in the Capellian Courts, and have been found guilty.  According to the Judge, both vessels, including the crew, are to be destroyed.  Fortunately for us, however, it appears that our court appointed counsel has done his homework.  He appealed the sentence on the grounds of an ancient precedent.  If both defendants concur, we can settle our current battle with a one-on-one contest to the death.  The survivor’s ship is set free; the other is destroyed.  Obviously, this option is better than the original ruling, so I assume the Rana will agree to the fight.  What are your recommendations?”\n\n“Captain,” said the first officer, “this sounds like a bad plot from a twentieth century science fiction novel.  Surely the Capellians are not serious.  This is uncivilized.”\n\n“I’m afraid, Commander, that the Capellians are quite serious, and they have the technological superiority to carry out their sentence.  Consider that aspect closed.  My primary concern now is figuring out how we can best win the head-to-head conflict.  As it stands, the Rana were permitted to choose the weapon.  We get to pick the battlefield.  Not surprisingly, the Rana chose hand-to-hand combat.  I suppose if I had a two inch thick exoskeleton and weighed more than 1000 pounds, I’d choose hand-to-hand combat too.  As for the battlefield, the Capellians will recreate any Earth topography we choose.  I’m open to suggestions?”\n\nThe science officer spoke.  “Since the Rana come from an arid world, we need to avoid any rocky, desert terrain.  I recommend a cold, icy location.  Perhaps, the Siberian Tundra.”\n\nThe captain replied, “Too risky.  If I die of exposure before my opponent, the Rana will be declared the winner.”\n\nThe security officer leaped from his seat.  “What?  With all due respect, sir, I should be the one fighting the Rana, not you.”\n\n“At ease, Lieutenant,” cautioned the Captain.  “I’ll choose the appropriate member of the crew, after I select the most advantageous battlefield.”\n\n“How about a densely wooded area?” suggested the first officer.  “They’re too big to maneuver.  We’d have an advantage.”\n\n“I thought about that,” replied the captain.  “But, it only buys time.  Ultimately, I must kill it, or be very confident I can outlive it, which may be tough.  I’m sure they require less food and water than we do.”\n\nThe tactical discussion continued for several more hours, with no apparent solutions.  Finally, an officer of the Capellian court materialized in the room and asked, “Your time is up captain.  Have you chosen the battlefield?”\n\n“Yes I have.  Let’s get this over with.”  He stood up and joined the Capellian, and they both disappeared.  The security cursed himself for being too slow to stop the captain from leaving.\n\nFive minutes later, the captain reappeared, soaking wet from the neck down.  “Prepare to jump to hyperspace,” he ordered, “before the Capellians change their mind.”\n\nOnce the ship was safely away from the Capellian system, the captain relaxed.  He turned to his first officer, “I selected the middle of Gulf of Mexico as the battlefield.  I guessed correctly that a 1000 pound creature from a dry desert-like planet, didn’t know how to swim.”\n"
  title: The Capellian Option
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Joshua Reynolds
  date: 2007-08-18
  day: 18
  month: '08'
  text: "“Can I has cheeseburger?” the cat whined plaintively. It’s voice was an electronic squeal that grated on Jim’s nerves. Jim swatted the cat on the butt and pushed it off of the desk.\n\n“No.”\n\n“Plz?” it mewled up at him, eyes unblinking. Jim shook his head.\n\n“I said no.”\n\n“OMG.” the cat yowled. Jim threw up his hands and tried to focus on his work. Schematics for cybernetic voice-boxes filled the screen of his laptop. EMP hardened as most things were these days. No help there. There had to be-\n\n“ROFL!” a cat screeched, rolling onto its back on the desk, swiping at him.\n\n“Shut up!” Jim shoved it to the floor.\n\n“Happy cat is out of happy.” another cat burbled, laying flat on the floor behind his chair.\n\nHe glanced at it and went back to work, muttering, “Happy cat is out of happy because happy cat snorts catnip like it was going out of style. Happy cat needs to knock that shit off before happy cat burns out his teeny-tiny brain.”\n\n“Plz can I has cheeseburger?” the first cat purred, leaping into his lap and rubbing its head against his arm.\n\n“No, no, no! A hundred times no!” Jim banged his head against his desk. “Just shut up!”\n\n“I has bucket!” a third cat yowled from the top of a bookcase. Jim whirled.\n\n“Get out of that flower pot!”\n\n“I can fix it.” a fourth cat mumbled, fumbling at Jim’s laptop. Jim turned back and swatted it away from him. His computer screen hiccuped.\n\n“Don’t touch that!”\n\n“Cheeseburger!”\n\n“No! No cheeseburger!” Jim buried his face in his hands. “No damn cheeseburger.”\n\nIt had seemed like such a good idea. People loved cats. People loved those stupid pictures. Just a slight cybernetic modification to the animal’s larynx and bam! Talking cats. Everybody who was anybody wanted one. For about ten minutes. Then nobody did. The fad ended and he was left holding the bag.\n\n“OMG lurve you.” the cat on his lap grumbled. Jim sighed and stroked it.\n\n“Thank you.”\n\n“Can I has cheeseburger now?”\n\n“AUGH!”\n\nIt wasn’t the talking that bothered people really.\n\nIt was the fact you couldn’t get the damn things to shut up.\n"
  title: LOLcats
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Chris McCormick
  date: 2007-08-19
  day: 19
  month: '08'
  text: "When we finally made contact it wasn’t in the way that everyone expected. It wasn’t like Star Trek, or Sagan, or Alien.\n\nIt should have been kind of obvious, looking at an atlas of the universe that there were so many of us. Tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny points of life on planets, in star systems, in galaxies, in galactic clusters, in the cellular mess of the known and unknown universe of radiating globules.\n\nIt should have been kind of obvious, looking at the ubiquity and persistence of evolution in every system we examined. The genetic systems, the stock market systems, the social systems, the atomic physics systems – everywhere the same rule – “Things that persist, exist,” the corollary of which is that the more intelligent the system, and the more desirous it is of persistence, the better it is at persisting.\n\nThe universe gave us an escape valve against the frustration of physical isolation; the impossibility of transcending those colossal, unthinkable distances.\n\nThe particle itself had a longish lifetime. Long enough that we could create several of them, overlapping in time so that there was always at least one in the atomic soup for us to probe and watch. Collide, examine, die, collide, examine die. The first time we created the first one, we simply could not fathom the data. The energy signature from this one, weird, heavy particle, was completely strange. The data spewing from it hung around at the border between chaos and order. It was neither chaotic nor ordered. It was complex. Spectral analysis, fourier transforms, and various forms of signal processing yielded only more mess.\n\nAt last someone gave up and threw the data on the ‘net. Flushed it through the distributed computing networks, and eventually, subjected it to cryptographic analysis. Suddenly the data came into sharp relief; millions of tiny voices, babbling, saying hello.\n\nThe particle was a resonator which resonates at the same frequencies everywhere. A change in one place means the same change everywhere else on the same resonant channel. Like Einstein’s spooky action at a distance, like strange attractors, except that here the particle broke the known physical laws, and now information travels faster than light. So now, while the physicists scramble to accommodate the new phenomena, we’re talking, sharing, and discovering with all of them – Everyone, with a capital ‘E’. Our webs and nets connected to all of their millions of webs and nets. Our network is a tiny node in the largest network of all; the universal network, stretching across all known space, outside all known space.\n\nWe’re all working hard together, trying to find a way not to be alone.\n"
  title: Everyone
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Andrew Bolt
  date: 2007-08-20
  day: 20
  month: '08'
  text: "“Why is there no Zeus, Vale?  Why am I the only one?”\n\nDee sits on a pile of aquamarine thermal pillows.  Cushions of air, tinted and pressurized, hold her aloft, warming her blood and chlorophyll and making her glow red and green like Christmas.\n\n“C’mon, Dee. You know this one.  You were the only one with enough residual Psi-fi left.  Something to do with the mineral content of that sanctuary in Sicily.  I don’t know.  I don’t get it either.  But the point is, we haven’t found enough psychic residue to recorporate anyone else.”\n\nHer eyes darken.  It’s subtle, but I’ve been watching this for months now.  It’s an open secret that she’s been growing peyote in her arterial walls for the last twenty or thirty years.  She’s just released some into her bloodstream.  Her metabolism operates at a rate fifty or sixty times that of a professional athlete.  The amount required to have even a mild effect must be incredible.\n\n“What about Ares?  That temple in Thrace?” she inquires with a slight slurring.\n\n“Yeah, well, we talked about that, too.  Believe it or not, the WestHem government is not thrilled about the idea of recorporating the ancient god of murder.  There’s a spot somewhere outside of Parga that we could probably use to pull together Hades, but we’re not going to be doing that either.  Death-related gods are not considered viable candidates.”\n\n“We’re not gods.”\n\n“Pardon?”\n\n“I’m not a god,” she mumbles, drifting both physically and mentally.  “I’m a physical embodiment of the neural energy empowering a generalized faith in something like me.  I’m a recorporated Tinkerbell, powered by your fucking belief in fairies.  I exist because some government tool clapped too hard and brought me back from Never-never-land with that damn PsiReCor.”\n\n“To Never-never-land.”\n\n“Hmmm?”  Her head lolls to the side.\n\n“Tinkerbell died.  The clapping brought her back to Never-never-land.”\n\nDee glances around at the walls of her room, a plush setting that looks like a cross between a botanical garden and a medlab.\n\n“My mistake.”\n\nScrew the Westie rules.  I slip my electric bandolier off my shoulder and settle next to her on the thermal couch.  Up close, she looks terrible.  Greenish veins trace spider webs down her cheeks.  Sweat is slick on her face and hands, even though the couch is set at only slightly above room temperature.  She coughs once.  I lay my arm across her shoulders.\n\n“I’ve saved the world, more or less,” she murmurs.  “You have food growing everywhere, in deserts, around the poles, on the surface of all major oceans, even on the moon colony that everyone said was impossible.  Why do you still need me?”\n\nShe gazes at me distractedly, a milky white film over her eyes.\n\n“Why am I still here?”\n"
  title: Demeter
  year: 2007
- 
  author: J.R.Blackwell
  date: 2007-08-21
  day: 21
  month: '08'
  text: "“How is the Krugar adjusting to his second childhood?”\n\nThe Krugar’s mother motioned to the reporter to sit. “We don’t call him The Krugar here, in his will, he requested that we call him Uill, as he was called in his first childhood.” The Krugar’s mother looked like a fairy tale godmother, round and pink in a flowered apron. She seemed a natural part of the cottage in the country where The Krugar had specified he would live his second childhood.\n\nThe reporter sat, crossing her long silver legs.  She was tall, traditionally beautiful with shining black crystal eyes thin, pearlecent lips. She tapped her metallic fingers against the wooden table. “Does The Krugar remember any of his previous life?”\n\n“Impressions, yes. He recognizes objects sometimes, doesn’t go outside without one of his toy weapons, but he has no real memories of his past.” The Krugar’s mother put two tin cups of tea down on the table. “The Krugar can’t recall specific events from his previous life. Uill is a child with ideas about places and people, but no real reason that he understands behind why he feels the way he does.”\n\n“If he doesn’t remember anything of the past, why do you think he’s been summoned as a witness for the upcoming trial?”\n\nThe Krugar’s mother slid into the seat opposite the reporter. “Politics. Grandstanding lawyers. They won’t get anything about the War Crimes of Minister Talthod out of him. He doesn’t remember. He can’t.”\n\n“How do you respond to allegations that his decision to be reborn was to protect Minister Talthod?”\n\nThe Krugar’s mother wrinkled her brow. “I generally don’t respond to those allegations.”\n\nThe reporter tapped her fingers on the wooden table. “Do you think this is disorienting for him?”\n\nThe Krugars mother looked out the window, where Uill was running after his pet Solft laughing, his little plastic sword stuffed down the back of his shirt. “Uill is just fine.” She smiled at the reporter and past her, to the three million viewers looking through the reporter’s eyes.\n"
  title: Second Childhood
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Sam Clough aka “Hrekka”
  date: 2007-08-22
  day: 22
  month: '08'
  text: "Kana took a deep breath and brought the butt of her father’s rifle to her shoulder. She tilted her head, both eyes open and focused beyond the length of the barrel. The iron foresight that perched at the end of the weapon had been cast as a dragon: the beast’s upthrust ears forming the neat ‘v’ through which she stared with intent. She had eschewed her father’s kabuto, but she did, however, wear his kikou: she had spent a long time adapting it to fit her slight frame.\n\nShe knelt on a ridge overlooking the village, making no effort to hide. It was only a matter of time until Daichi left the farmhouse. When he stepped from the door, there would be a single chance.\n\nOne shot would be all she’d have.\n\nThe rifle she held and it’s companion pistol at her belt were pinnacle weapons, comparing favourably to anything of their time. The bullet in the chamber was one of the original two hundred cast when the rifle was made.\n\nShe couldn’t miss.\n\nDaichi left the farmhouse.\n\nShe fired and immediately ducked, thumbing a new cartridge into her father’s rifle. This was a new, cheap round: only countrymen were worthy of dying by the ancient ammunition. She braced the rifle again. Daichi was laying in the dirt, the top of his head splayed open against the ground, blood and brains mixing with the dust.\n\nTwo offworlders were scanning around the village. The first was reptilian, and the second wore a bulky space-suit, both wielding local weapons.\n\nThe rifle snapped as she fired again, and the lizardman jerked backwards, gore spraying from his gut. The space-suit located her and returned fire. Three or four shots tore into the soft dirt around her and two ricocheted off her kikou. She whispered a prayer of thanks to the armourer, and went to meet her foe.\n\nShe pressed herself against the back wall of one of the buildings, her father’s rifle already reloaded. The space-suit began to round the corner, but drew back too quickly: Kana’s shot whipped past him, missing by millimetres. Slinging the rifle behind her back, she drew the companion pistol and edged around the corner.\n\nHer heart leapt into her throat when she heard the footsteps behind her. Whirling around, she came face-to-face with an unfamiliar pistol and the space-suit’s flat visage behind it. She hadn’t realised how fast it would be.\n\n“Put your weapons down. Comply.”  A harsh voice echoed from the space-suit. “You have killed two innocent men.”\n\n“And Daichi,” she sneered at the corpse, “he killed my father in cold blood. You people did nothing. This was an act of honour.”\n\n“You are Kana Takahashi? Respond.”\n\n“I am.”\n\n“Miss Takahashi. Your father’s death at the spaceport was an accident. There was nothing we could have done.”\n\n“Liar.” She hissed, stiffening her grip on her father’s pistol.\n\nA gunshot echoed around the village, but Kana had not fired. The space-suit crumpled to the ground. Kana turned: behind her, the lizardman stood, clutching his wound and barely managing to hold his rifle. The chamber was smoking.\n\n“They told us,” the lizard spluttered, “that honour was dead here.”\n\nIn the distance, she could hear sirens. Turning away from the bodies, she ran for the relative safety of the woods.\n"
  title: Uncommon Values
  year: 2007
- 
  author: James Smith
  date: 2007-08-23
  day: 23
  month: '08'
  text: "Sarah’s eyes went dim for a second, and I figured she was getting mail. She squinted with one eye and said, “That’s weird. I just… got… headmail from my… from Richard.”\n\n“What’s he say?”\n\n“‘Wanna get dinner? Wear the red dress.'”\n\n“Are you serious?”\n\n“This is crazy…”\n\nThe waitress walked by, I beamed her the bill and tip, stood and put on my jacket. Sarah got up with me, looking vaguely distant.\n\n“Are you still reading it? What’s he say?”\n\n“This is just too weird. He’s got a girlfriend now. That’s good… Do I… Should I send it back to him? Let him know she didn’t get it?”\n\n“What? Of course not.”\n\n“Why not?”\n\n“Come on! Two years and he hasn’t forgotten your address? How many times do you defrag your long-term memory in a given year? Two, three times? Or you bog down? Get bottlenecks? And he hasn’t dumped your address yet?”\n\nSarah walked beside me, thinking. You can tell, somehow, the difference in the eyes, between the look that says, “considering your opinion” and the one that says, “wiring untold megabits of crap through my forebrain, probably porn, please kill me.”\n\nShe came up out of it. “So, I should just leave it.”\n\n“Yeah, and it better not be there by tomorrow. Throw his headmail out with tonight’s self-doubts and thoughtcrimes.”\n\nShe stammered, looked for a word, didn’t find it, online even, because she didn’t know what she was looking for. So she closed her mouth and we just walked some more.\n\nWe came to the store where I’d seen the keyboard we couldn’t afford. I stopped and stared at it, let her walk a few steps before noticing I was gone. Counted the seconds. Felt her come up behind me.\n\n“That the one you were waxing over so poetic last night?”\n\nSarah came around in front of me and I nodded, chin against her head. I smelled her hair. I watched the keys where our reflections cut the glare on the glass. I tested a palm against her hip, imagined those keys along that curve of thigh and played them, the kind of thing I’d play on a Sunday, the sunlight orange and silver where vertical slivers of sky could reach us. The cat at my heel.\n\nShe leaned back into me. I didn’t know if she was thinking about him just then. When we married, we    agreed to offline any leftover sense data from past lovers. But he was back in there now. She could re-think his last thoughts to some other woman any time she wanted, and I figured I would have to do something about that.\n"
  title: I've Got Mail
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2007-08-24
  day: 24
  month: '08'
  text: "That’s the thing about silicates.  They get cancer from radiation, just like us, except their tumors are jewels.\n\nThe silicate in front of me here has a head full of diamonds.\n\nHe’s looking up at me with his prism eyes.  When the sun shines through the hospital window, the sunlight refracts through them and shoots little rainbows around.  He’s no smarter than a cat now.\n\nTheir presence here was a history of shame.  They landed in their glittering spaceships made of super-dense manufactured crystal in a park in Philadelphia.\n\nTheir technology was entirely built around the manipulation of crystal growth.  They created crystal that made diamonds look brittle.  They ate sand and rock. Their stomachs were kilns. They could make their bodies faceted and sharp with a thought.\n\nAll was peaceful for a time until the first few of them got sick.  Their doctors worked with our doctors to find a cure before they realized what was happening.\n\nCancer.  Just like humans.\n\nThe first tumours to be removed were a revelation.  Emeralds.\n\nOnce the news got out, a black mark on the history of humanity started.\n\nMany of the silicates were taken prisoner and bathed in radiation to produce raw emeralds, diamonds, rubies and hundreds of other types of valuable rocks.  The market was flooded, with the jewels ceasing to be valuable after six horrible years.\n\nDiplomacy healed the wounds over the next decade but there was still bitterness on both sides\n\nAny jewelry at all is seen as gauche now.\n\nMy friend, Rock Opal Truestone, is going to be dead before the week is out.  There’s still no cure for cancer but at least the egg-sized diamond eating the mental pathways behind his beautiful eyes is worthless.\n"
  title: Glittering Tumours
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Grady Hendrix
  date: 2007-08-25
  day: 25
  month: '08'
  text: "There’s that clanking, again. There’s that ratcheting, sound. There’s that grinding of gears and that whining of servos. He’s gotten used to the way his guest bedroom sounds like a robot factory, ever since Grife Marauder showed up.\n\n“Jim, you gotta take me in, man,” Grife’d said.\n\nGrife was an old school punk, his entire body wasted away except for gorilla-sized arms maintained by years of drumming. James was used to seeing him under the stage lights, bald head gleaming arrogantly, but now he was scared, now he was pushing past James to get into his living room.\n\n“What’s going on, Grife?”\n\n“I got…I don’t…I’m…they done something to me,” he managed.\n\n“Who?”\n\n“I don’t know!” Grife shouted, then he clapped a hand over his mouth and pinched his lips together.\n\n“Do you want some water?” James asked.\n\n“No! No water.”\n\n“What happened?”\n\n“I woke up, right? This morning? We’re recording so I gotta be there by twelve. I look over, and this isn’t my arm.”\n\n“What’d you have last night?”\n\n“Nothing much. Sip of tequila, bit of Vicodin, couple of joints. Teeny bit of coke, a few Ambien to put me out.”\n\n“Well…” James said.\n\nGrife knew James wasn’t taking him seriously, so he took his jacket off. His left forearm was covered in metal. Pistons ran up the sides. Silver and gold wires snaked through the core.\n\n“Your arm is stuck in there?” James asked. “Let me get some soap so it won’t tear your skin.”\n\nGrife pulled on his forearm with all his strength and his skin stretched, gruesomely.\n\n“It is my skin,” Grife said, tears streaming down his face. “Help me.”\n\nHe spent the rest of the day in the guest bedroom with a blanket pulled over his head, watching TV. The next morning his entire arm was metal.\n\n“Get it off,” he moaned.\n\n“I can’t, Grife.” James said. “It’s growing out of you.”\n\nIt was a beautiful arm, precision engineered and finely crafted but Grife couldn’t appreciate it.\n\n“Maybe it’s psychosomatic,” James said.\n\n“What?”\n\n“You said you were pissed that the band was getting into this post-punk thing and were replacing you with a drum machine on some of the tracks. Maybe your mind is reacting to that by turning you into a machine?”\n\n“I’m not turning into a machine!” Grife yelled and then he pulled the blanket over his head and sobbed until he passed out.\n\nEvery day, he sat in the dark room, growing. And every day there was less of Grife and more of what James had come to think of as the Grife-Machine. And now there was that clanking, again. There was that ratcheting and that whine of servos. He got up and went into the guest bedroom.\n\n“Look, man,” James said. “I think we need to get you to the hospital.”\n\nThe Grife-Machine rotated its speaker towards James.\n\n“Luk mann,” it repeated, tonelessly. “Eye thank wee need two git u two thee huspitul.”\n\nAnd then it stood up, and it began to walk.\n"
  title: Clankers
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Simon Petrie
  date: 2007-08-26
  day: 26
  month: '08'
  text: "There’d been big changes at Dave’s workplace.\n\nDave, 43, had been offered retirement, but he’d opted to stay employed in the burgeoning industry that he, as a roboticist, had helped initiate.\n\nThe society-wide introduction of working robots (more pedantically ICs, ‘intelligent constructs’) had been the past century’s dream, finally brought to fruition.  And yet …\n\nAnd yet.  Midlife crisis, or something more?  He didn’t know.\n\nHis reverie was interrupted by a tone in his earpiece.\n\n“Completed on that level yet, Dave?”  Hal’s clipped, precise tones, perfectly modulated.\n\n“No, still stuck on the third unit.  Shouldn’t be too much longer.  Don’t think the rest pose any major problems.”\n\n“Don’t forget those units on the next level.  They need attention too.”\n\n“I’ll get there, Hal, don’t sweat.  Job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing properly.”\n\nDon’t sweat.  Hah.  That was a good one.  All the same, Dave did take perverse pleasure in the point: there remained some tasks beyond any IC’s abilities.\n\nHe finished up, reached the foyer.  Several lifts awaited.  Time was, Dave had ridden these lifts daily, twelve floors, to his office.  These days, he only ever went one floor up.  The lifts didn’t see much use any more.\n\nThey should have seen, ten years back, where automation led.  The first domestic-grade ICs were already able to oust FIDE’s reigning chess champion while still not performing adequately on tasks such as the vacuuming of a shagpile rug.  Their handling of basic household chores had improved in subsequent models.  Nonetheless, it remained apparent the ICs’ real strengths lay elsewhere, in realms of symbolic logic, abstract concepts, and ordered environments: money; justice; administration; science, technology, mathematics; the factory floor; the shopping centre.\n\nChaos was their weakness.  A disordered environment posed an insurmountable challenge to even the new top-of-the-line ICs with millimolar memory capacity and massively parallel quantum architecture.  In some circumstances and for some applications — military, police, rescue, mining — there were ways around this, through the use of human-piloted semi-IC proxies for dangerous and difficult tasks.  Many chaotic tasks remained, though, for which this was not cost-effective; perhaps the future would change that.\n\nFunny, Dave thought.  The very tasks people had always thought tailormade for robotic intervention were the ones at which ICs weren’t any good.\n\nHal called again, of course, as he did at precise fifteen-minute intervals whenever Dave was behind schedule.  “Completed on that level yet, Dave?”\n\n“Ground level?  Yeah, sure, just starting on the first floor units.”  He entered the first booth, got to work with bleach and disinfectant, and soon had the entire unit sparkling.  The next cubicle was worse: it looked like the S-bend was blocked, he’d have to get his hands dirty to clear it.\n\nNot too complicated a task, in reality; you’d think an IC could master it, if it chose.\n\nBut it was a paycheck, and wasn’t that still worth it?\n"
  title: Division of Labour
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2007-08-27
  day: 27
  month: '08'
  text: "Cody Starr, the seventy-fifth Director of The Venusian Terraforming Program, removed his foot-gear and waded into the warm Venusian Ocean on the western shore of New America.  The sun very slowly inched its way above the western horizon to begin the long Venusian day (equal to 243 Earth days).  Eventually, he thought, we will have to do something to shorten the day to something more reasonable, or more importantly, to shorten these long, cold Venusian nights.  But that would be a task for future Directors.  Right now, Cody just wanted to bask in the warmth of the abnormally large sun (38% larger than it appears on Earth), and to listen to the rumble of crashing waves.  Occasionally, the wind blown spray would reach his lips.  How unusual, he thought, a fresh water ocean.  That may take getting used to.  As the sun rose on this new day, Cody allowed his mind to reflect back on the long journey that brought humanity to this unlikely shoreline…\n\nIt was over 1000 years ago that Planetologist Philip Gregory began the construction of The Great Solar Shade.  The GSS, which orbited Venus like an opaque cylindrical version of Saturn’s rings, performed three primary functions:\n\n1) It blocked most of the heat being delivered by the swollen sun.\n\n2) It powered the converters that obtained breathable oxygen from Venus’ thick carbon dioxide atmosphere, and finally\n\n3) Over the next eight centuries, it meticulously scooped up the rarified upper atmosphere of Venus, and gradually dissipated it into space in an effort to reduce the overall atmospheric density from 90 to 1.2 times Earth normal.\n\nThen, two centuries ago, Dillon Holder began the process of corralling thousands of ice-asteroids to create Venus’ ocean.  It was no easy feat to develop the technique that would shepherd over one billion cubic kilometers of ice from the asteroid belt down to the Venusian surface, while carefully avoiding the GSS on the way.\n\nJust five decades ago, the Solar Shade was changed from opaque to semi-transparent, to gradually permit more sunlight to reach the surface.  The Shade was also heavily magnetized to provide shielding from the potentially deadly solar wind, and cosmic rays.  The planet was then seeded with a verity of hybrid plants and algae to remove most of the remaining carbon dioxide, and to provide the foundation of the planet’s food chain.  Thirty years later, small animals and fish were introduced.  Recently, robots began farming, and building the infrastructure that would be needed to support eventual human colonization.  But for now, Cody was content to watch the genetically bioengineered birds dive into the ocean to catch the genetically boiengineered fish.  Off in the distance, he could see…\n\n“Cody.  Cody.”  Who could be calling him, he wondered?  He turned to look toward the distant dunes.  Nobody was there, but he could hear faint traffic sounds: cars, trucks, horns, and sirens.\n\n“Cody.  Scott will be here in 10 minutes.  Life insurance doesn’t sell itself you know.  You’ve got quotas to meet.  Let’s go.”\n\nThrough his squinted eyes, Cody could see his wife pull back the bedroom curtains, exposing the smog-covered skyline of Los Angeles in the distance.  He buried his face in his pillow.  “Nooooo.”\n"
  title: The Dream of Terraforming Venus
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2007-08-28
  day: 28
  month: '08'
  text: "I’m surprised you decided to come out here. No, no – I’m happy you did, just surprised. Your drink ok? Good.\n\nYou must find me fascinating, kind of the poster boy for post war re-creation. I’m not the only one you know, there are a lot more soldiers just like me.\n\nAll of this… equipment that keeps me alive, these legs that I’m walking on, the tube that I piss through… it’s the best that our government can buy. The best. Sure, they can buy bombs the size of buses, and bullets that shoot through tanks, but this – this is the state of the post-war medical art right here. No expense is too great when it comes to caring for our soldiers. That’s so damn true. No expense, and even that was too great.\n\nYou like me? You like this fucking machine they made me?\n\nI did three tours, three goddamned tours. Do you know why? Do you know what kept me going back?  Because after every one, when I got home, nobody could understand. You think you’re just like us, but we’ve experienced war, and you have no idea. I was just numb, and distant, always anxious. I’d go on week long benders, try to completely self destruct, and my girlfriend would make excuses, say it was ok, that it was normal. It’s not normal. The only way I could cope, the only way to get back to my new normal was to soldier up and go back to the front.\n\nWhen that car bomb blew me in half, and they bolted all this shit onto me, they said I was all better, but I was no longer ‘suitable for re-deployment’. I’m supposed to just be ‘retired’ now.\n\nEvery friend I ever had, every connection I could ever manage with another human being, they cut me off, just like they cut my fucking legs off. They’re over there, deployed, and I’m stuck here, drinking in the Vet hall with you pencil pushing assholes. You want to write a story about me? You want to show the world the ‘face of the post war man’? Screw you. We fought to protect your freedoms in countries we’d never even heard of while you stayed home and wrote about how horrible the war is. You didn’t have the balls to serve, and you come here to make an example out of me? I bought these stripes with blood and honor, and for what? ‘Retirement’? And what am I to you? A story? I don’t think so.\n\nYou’re going to mean so much more to me.\n\nYou look tired. Don’t worry, it’s all ok. I’m going to give you a chance to do your part for the war effort.\n\nDon’t get up. I know, you can’t. You’ve had the use of a perfectly good body for the whole war, and you’ve just been here pissing it away.\n\nI’m not going to let it go to waste.\n\nGo on, close your eyes. The Doc’s going to put you to good use. There are guys like me dying for what you’ve got; good heart, clean liver, working eyes. What the government can’t produce, the black market can provide. Here’s your chance to be a real contributor. Me? You’re going to make me a whole soldier again, and when they’re done stitching me back together, I’m going to march right back into the recruiting office and catch me a ride on the next transport back to my boys.\n\nNot to worry. The government will just bury what’s left of you. That’s what they do.\n"
  title: Post War Man
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Lirael
  date: 2007-08-29
  day: 29
  month: '08'
  text: "“What’s your name?”\n\n“Butterfly. Butterfly Phoenix.”\n\n“Well, that’s a stupid name.”\n\nButterfly heard that a lot. Being only five years old, she took the insults rather well. She never even thought to change her name. She loved it. Her mother told her that her Daddy, a famous airship pilot, had given it to her when she was born, and that he’d renamed his ship just for her. Butterfly often saw her father on the television and in the newspapers, standing proudly next to his ship, the Butterfly.\n\nCaptain Phoenix ran one of the most successful trade companies on the planet, and stood at the head of an entire fleet of airships. The money poured into his accounts, and his personal accountants divided up the profits.\n\nBeing five, Butterfly wasn’t interested in the money or politics of her father’s company. Those were grown-up things. Instead, Butterfly liked to watch her father’s ships on screen. Seeing the beautiful colours of the decorated sails that they used, the flags, and the bright, shimmering designs painted across their hulls gave her a sense of pride.\n\nThe pilots and crews were always immaculate in uniforms of different colours, each individual to their ship. Those ships were her inspiration. Butterfly spoke of nothing else. Her mother, a patient, gentle woman, did her best to interest Butterfly in things more appropriate for her age and gender, but she simply refused. For her last birthday, Captain Phoenix had given her a small model of the Butterfly, and today, she had brought it to school. She’d been thrilled when someone noticed it.\n\n“I want to fly one of my daddy’s ships someday. See, this is the one he flies now. It’s named after me.”\n\n“I know that ship. It’s on my daddy’s plasma all the time. Captain Phoenix is the greatest airship pilot in the world!”\n\n“I know! He gave me this ship for my birthday.”\n\n“He did not!”\n\n“Did too!”\n\n“Let me see it, then!” By now, a crowd had clustered around Butterfly, and the dark-eyed boy who had approached her. Butterfly shook her head, her black hair swinging back and forth over her shoulders.\n\n“No, I’m not allowed to let anyone else touch it.” She turned away to shield her prize, and the boy gave her a push.\n\n“Let me see!”\n\n“No!” Butterfly stepped back, and squared herself. The boy pushed her again, but Butterfly didn’t move. She held her ship in one hand, and balled the other into a fist. “You leave me alone, or else!”\n\n“Shut your mouth, Butterfly! If you won’t let me see your stupid ship, I’ll just take it!” The boy lunged at Butterfly, and reached for her ship. Shocked at his boldness, she stumbled, and he took hold of her model, ripping it from her hands. One of the flags broke off, and clattered to the playground pavement.\n\n“You broke it!”\n\n“Hah, this piece of junk was going to fall apart anyway!” Lifting it over his head, the boy hurled Butterfly’s ship as far away as he could. It smashed into the ground, and shattered. Butterfly felt a lump form in her throat, and her eyes burned with tears. Without thinking, she took that fist she’d made, and launched herself forward, striking a punch across the boy’s face, his nose crunching from the impact.\n\nThe playground monitor was upon them in moments.\n\n“Butterfly! You broke poor Darrin’s nose!”\n\n“Yes, well,” Butterfly paused, giving Darrin a cold stare, “that piece of junk was going to get broken sooner or later.”\n"
  title: Butterfly Phoenix
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Viktor Kuprin
  date: 2007-08-30
  day: 30
  month: '08'
  text: "October 30, 1961 – Five aircraft rose into the arctic sky from the Olyena airbase, headed northeast over the Barents Sea, towards the frozen wastes of Novaya Zemlya Island. The largest plane, a roaring turboprop Bear bomber, carried Vanya. The most beautiful, a silvery Tupolev-16 loaded with cameras and recording devices, followed the Bear. Americans called the Tu-16 “Badger”. Its Russian aircrew knew it simply as “Tupol.”\n\nInside the Tupol’s teardrop-shaped observation domes, Instrument Operators Pakulin and Kuchevsky tended their equipment and counted the minutes.\n\n“Did you notice Pilot-Commander Strukov?” said Pakulin.\n\nKuchevsky nodded. “He wasn’t quite his giddy self, was he? An improvement, if you ask me. I think he’s looking forward to meeting Vanya.”\n\nPakulin stared out towards the blue sky and ice-strewn sea beyond the dome’s plexiglass. “Who isn’t?”\n\nStrukov’s voice came over the intercom. “Attention. Approaching Zone C. Make all instruments ready,” he ordered.\n\n“Da, Comrade Commander,” both men replied. The well-practiced sequence of toggling switches and closing circuits began. Pakulin could feel his heavy SMENA cine-camera hum as its film came up to speed. Kuchevsky prepared to trigger the banks of stop-motion cameras.\n\nThe Badger tracked north over the sea, while the Bear carried Vanya inland across the Sukhoi Nos, the “Dry Nose” Peninsula. Inside other aircraft, within bunkers and fortifications, behind walls of stone and rock, thousands waited for Vanya.\n\n“Mark! Everyone, goggles on!” Strukov shouted. Miles away, Vanya fell free from the Bear bomber. The huge plane turned back toward the sea in a dash to safety. From Vanya’s flanks emerged a 54,000-square-foot parachute, to slow the descent enough so that the Bear would not be sacrificed.\n\nStrukov counted down: “Pyat. Chetíreh. Tree. Dva. Odeen. NOL!”\n\nThirteen-thousand feet above the icy, stony plain, the largest thermonuclear device in the history of the world exploded. Four-thousand times more powerful than Hiroshima, the triple-layer fission-fusion-fusion reaction created a fireball over four miles in diameter. The flash of white light was visible 1600 miles away.\n\nFor Pakulin and Kuchevsky, for all aboard the Badger, it was the light from hell that would not stop. The entire horizon was a blinding wall of white heat.\n\nThe shock wave threw Pakulin forward, his oxygen mask smashing against the plexiglass dome. Spitting blood, vision blurred, he heard Kuchevsky screaming and felt the man’s hands slapping.\n\n“Fire! I’m burning! Help me!”\n\nThe acintic glare of electricity arced from the floor. Pukulin instinctively kicked at the loose cables, his boots pushing them apart. He yanked a fire-extinguisher off the cabin wall, aiming its white spray at the wires and Kuchevsky’s still-smoking pant legs.\n\nKuchevsky sobbed, pointing toward the mushroom cloud risen seven times higher than Mount Everest.\n\n“Look! They’ve killed the world!”\n\nAnd yet, despite the nuclear scars inflicted by Vanya, remembered afterwards as the “Tsar Bomba,” life on Earth carried on.\n\nBut as the world healed, the bomb’s powerful X-ray pulse raced across the depths of space. Forty-six years later, in the star system called 26 Draconis, someone took notice.\n"
  title: Meeting Vanya
  year: 2007
- 
  author: J.R.Blackwell
  date: 2007-08-31
  day: 31
  month: '08'
  text: "The Sisters of Light arrived for my mother when I was eleven years old. Their robes flashed like light in a storm, shifting and unexpected. My mother welcomed them into our home. She knew why they were there but she acted like it was just a social call, smiling like they were old friends.\n\nMy mother had been a devotee of the order when she was a girl. Many proper young women became devotees before the war. Mother said that in her time, girls could leave just before they took the Oaths, before they would be sealed into service, the claws embedded in their skulls. Her parents thought that she could secure a good marriage coming from the Order, and they made great financial sacrifices for her proper upbringing. She got her good marriage, not to a wealthy man, but to a noble one. Then the war broke out and the Sisters sought old devotees for service.\n\nGetting out of service was easy for folk that had money, that could pay the tithe towards the war effort that ensured members of the family could stay home. Father and mother hadn’t been able to pay the tithe to the government that year. They had lived on a blank hope that no one in our family would get chosen by the lottery for service. My father told me that it hadn’t been the first year they weren’t able to make tithe, but it was the only one I remember.\n\nTwo Sisters came into my home that day. Overkill.  It was more than enough to convince us. One would have sufficed, a young disciple would be enough to make it known that my mother was to come, but they wanted to make a point, they wanted the family, the neighborhood to understand the price.\n\nMy mother served them tea they did not drink and gathered a pack of possessions she knew would be stripped from her in days. She called sister and I to her and hugged us. She gripped my shoulder so hard I thought I would cry. She said it wouldn’t be long before she came home again and not to worry. After ten minutes, the Sisters announced in their one, hard voice that they would be leaving now.  My mother held my fathers hand until she was out the door. My father clasped the empty air, his hand opening and closing, watching the ship of the Sisters depart.\n\nTwo weeks later the Sisters sent a letter inviting my sister to come to school. My father burned the letter in front of us. We watched it smolder in the bathtub, the paper curling and glowing till it turned to cinders.\n\n“If I went, do you think I would see mom?” asked my sister.\n\n“No.” I said “I don’t think we’ll see mom again for a long time.” I didn’t tell her that we might never see mum again, that she might die in the war. Nobility can’t be drafted, but my mother wasn’t nobility. She had just married nobility.\n\nWhen I was old enough, I applied to military school. When I entered service, my family could petition the government to return mother. My father begged me not to go. He hit me for the first time when I told him my mind couldn’t be changed. It took him a day, after I left, to petition the government for my mother. They returned her after I had served a year, after I was committed fully and her mind was gone.\n\nThey gave my family back an empty shell.\n"
  title: The Sisters of Light
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Viktor Kuprin
  date: 2007-09-01
  day: '01'
  month: '09'
  text: "Labor Supervisor SCE-1124 knew there would be extra costs and difficulties keeping the project plans on schedule without the human contingent. Though the Earth mammals were fragile and easily damaged, they had, indeed, proven to be good workers both on the asteroids and aboard his construction ships.\n\nHe noticed a small figure standing by his office-pit and recognized it as the Human Trustee. Why was she still here? He beckoned with his main claw.\n\nKarina Hively approached, face downward as xenoprotocol required.\n\n“I thought you would be gone by now, Former Trustee Hively. What do you want?” He clasped his main claw to indicate impatience.\n\n“Please, Labor Supervisor, I need help. I can’t get transportation.”\n\n“How can that be?” SCE-1124 asked. “I’ve seen thousands of human slaves boarding the repat vessels. They seem quite ready to depart as quickly as possible. Why don’t you join them and be on your way to wherever you and your people want to go?”\n\nShe began to wring her hands, eyes wide with what SCE-1124 recognized as anxiety and fear.\n\n“My life is in danger. I’ve been hiding ever since the Emancipation. They won’t allow me on any of the ships.”\n\nSCE-1124 would have none of it. “Oh please. Such disagreements can surely be resolved by offering your fellow humans sizeable monetary incentives. I know for a fact that you sometimes actually received precious metals and gems in reward for your skilled management.”\n\n“Great One, you don’t understand,” she pleaded.  “They won’t take my money. I tried, but it’s no use. They want to kill me!”\n\nTapping his main and secondary claws, SCE-1124 considered. “Why don’t you perform that custom that makes all things good again. What do humans call it? Yes, an apology. Apologize, then you can go with them.”\n\nHively began to sob. “They’ll never forgive me. They remember when I ordered the cull in the nurseries, the rations-and-oxygen adjustments.”\n\n“Ah yes, yes! You were the one who reduced our project costs for both slave nourishment and atmospheric recharges,” SCE-1124 recalled. He trembled with glee. “I must admit that I didn’t believe humans could live on such little food and oxygen. And only three out of ten died, if I recall correctly, those weak ones we didn’t need. Now that was a very effective business decision, one of your best!”\n\nShe covered her face with her hands and fell to her knees. “Please, Great One. I’ve always been loyal …”\n\nSCE-1124 waved his main claw. “Now, now, Former Trustee, the Emancipation Treaty did terminate our business relationship. You and all humans are free to find new work on Earth, or Alpha Centauri, wherever. The transport’s been paid for. It’s out of my claws’ reach, you know. So, I wish you the very best of success in your future career endeavors, and thanks so much for your exemplary professionalism. It’s been a pleasure!\n\n“Oh, and don’t forget that any human detected onsite after today will have to be disintegrated. Now shoo away. Shoo.”\n"
  title: Executive Bonus
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2007-09-02
  day: '02'
  month: '09'
  text: "The green circle of power irised open on the wall, filling the reception chamber with a medicinal glow.  A body flipped through, smoking and wounded, over the ledge of the portal and landed wetly on the pads with a thud.  The sickly green light of the hole clamped shut like a magic sphincter-ring and plunged the room once again into darkness.\n\nThese were the battles.  The knights were welded into their suits and connected.  They were more of a virus now than a collection of individuals.  Volunteering for defense was a one way trip.  What started as a human shield of nimble pilots had, over three decades, become a cyborg invasion force of desperate hybrids of flesh encased in metal.\n\nA wrist-gate’s singularity snagged the lab’s co-ordinates again with a stuttering flash before glinting open with a bone-vibrating hum.  Another two bodies flew backwards through the circle before being hooked by gravity and pulled down to the mat.  The green luminescence looked like the light from a firefly.  The tunnel folded inward with an arcing snap that echoed away before collapsing back to the battlepoint.\n\nEach knight looked different.  The custom tech was adapted for every warrior with programs designed to accentuate their strengths and protect their weaknesses.  Some were huge and some were slight.  Some were quick and some were armoured.  Some were armed with a vast array of weaponry and some were given a specific weapon they’d shown an aptitude for in training.  Then they were sent to The Front.  One wave every two days.\n\nTwo bodies groaned.  One lay still, breathing but unconscious.  Two of us and one of Them.\n\nEvery person’s body image was augmented with the memetic colourmetal to make their permanent transition to Guardknight as smooth as possible.  Battle-scars, trophies, graffiti and tags took care of further individuality as their career spooled out.  To this day, we’ve only had eighteen psych-deaths in the waking bay.  We’ve done all we can to create happy monsters to protect us.\n"
  title: Battle
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Todd Keisling
  date: 2007-09-03
  day: '03'
  month: '09'
  text: "12:16\n\nA killer enters the room.  No one notices, and the show goes on.\n\nI switch on the receiver and catch a glimpse of tenant #62 in grid four.  He’s cooking a late dinner.  On the street, in the hallway, I might call him Jim, or even Mr. Hollerbach.  But here, in crystal-clear hi-definition, he’s tenant #62.\n\nThat’s the way Channel Zero works.\n\nHe’s accompanied by a scrolling grid of other tenants going about their menial lives.  Some are watching their TVs, some are sleeping and some are making love.  Sound is muted on this particular grid but, if I wanted to, I could tune in to all of them.\n\nOn screen, Mr. Hollerbach reaches for a shaker of salt.  He sprinkles it over a steaming frying pan.\n\nWith this kind of quality, it’s not hard to see he’s frying two small chicken breasts.\n\nOther grids begin to slowly scroll across the screen.  It never stops.  They once called this reality television.  That was sixty years ago, when there were actual networks that competed for ratings and viewers and money.\n\nThis was before the Government took control.  Before paranoia grew so rampant that we stopped watching make-believe “sitcoms” and started watching each other.\n\nThe Network phased out all programming and, with the Free Constituent Surveillance Act, the Government mandated that all structures be outfitted with SmartCams.  We soon found ourselves watching ourselves, outlined as numbers in a single, scrolling grid.  They called it Channel Zero.\n\nMr. Hollerbach removes the pan from the stove.  He licks his lips and removes the oven mitts from his hands.\n\nAfter the FCSA and SmartCam installations, after the concept of Art died a forgotten death, we accepted the new 7 PM curfew.  We accepted the mandatory two hour viewing.  It didn’t take long for most of us to grow numb to what we were seeing.  With everyone watching, with the knowledge that someone would always be watching, we lost our fear.  We forgot what it felt like to be afraid.\n\nTenant #62, Mr. “Jim” Hollerbach, he walks over to his refrigerator and pulls out a bowl of salad.  He takes it to the table.  There he sits and begins to eat.\n\nWhen the patrols started after curfew, I knew things had gone too far.  Reports trickled in from time to time; reports about friends caught out after dark, during the mandatory “Zero Hour,” and were shot on sight.  And no one seemed to care.  Even when friends began to disappear, we sat and did our duty to watch others.  The Government used to use fear to control us, but now it found a way to save money by out-sourcing the work.\n\nNo more.\n\nI jacked into the SmartCam in my apartment and spliced it with an analog AV feed I set up in my closet.  I stopped taking my Serotonin supplements.\n\nI started working out.\n\nOn screen, grid four, tenant #62 begins to eat a late dinner.  The smell of chicken makes my mouth water, and the sizzling oil and ventilation fan above the stove masks most sounds.\n\nFear is necessary.  It helps a species survive.  Without fear, without thought, we are empty squares on a single television channel.\n\nThe blade in my pocket is sharp and heavy.  I check my watch.\n\nIt’s 12:19.\n\nAnd the show goes on.  I hope someone notices this time.\n"
  title: Channel Zero
  year: 2007
- 
  author: JT Heyman
  date: 2007-09-04
  day: '04'
  month: '09'
  text: "“Name?”\n\n“Archimedes Goldblatt Jastrembski Akune,” the applicant replied.\n\nThe immigration official looked at the application on his holoscreen and nodded.  He studied the screen.\n\nAkune studied the office.  Behind the official’s chair, a hologram of the great seal of the Colony of New Canada floated without a ripple.  Akune’s eyes narrowed.  That was top grade technology … and expensive.  He glanced at the wall which held a continuous, live interstellar feed … also expensive … from New Canada’s capital, New Ottawa.  There was one cobblestone street.  The other roads were just dirt.  One building was modern and clean … the governor’s mansion.  From what he could see of the other buildings, they were little better than the pioneer cabins from three centuries in the past.\n\n“You have three advanced degrees?” the official asked.\n\n“Yes,” Akune replied.  “I’m a certified medical doctor and I have doctorates in civil engineering and agriculture.  I wrote the new textbook on colony development.”\n\n“Hmm,” the official said impassively.  “Capacity for children?”\n\n“My sperm count and motility numbers are on the fourth screen.”\n\nThe official touched the screen.  “Hmm.  Impressive.”  He touched the screen once more.  “And you’re wealthy.  Self-made trillionaire.  No chance of becoming a ward of the colony.”\n\nAkune said nothing.  The official was too calm.  Something was wrong.\n\nThe official fell silent as one of the emigration shuttles lifted off, making the embassy building rumble.\n\nWhen the noise had decreased and they could speak normally, the official said, “Ah, the joys of Embassy City.  Sometimes, I think Earth put all the colonial embassies next to the main emigration spaceport just to hinder the attempts of qualified candidates to leave its sterile megalopoli for the adventure of the stars.”  He closed the application on his screen and stood.  “We had you thoroughly vetted before you walked through that door, doctor.  What made you think you were qualified to emigrate to New Canada?”\n\nConfused, Akune said, “My skills.  I’ve studied New Canada extensively.  I can help make New Canada a thriving colony.  I could help improve its medical care, its city planning, even its use of native food plants.  I want to help the people of New Canada.”\n\n“And spread your genes?”\n\n“Well, yes, of course.  The one-child limit on Earth is unacceptable to me. I’ve always wanted a big family.”\n\n“I thought so,” the official said grimly.  “Disqualified.  Request for immigration denied.”\n\n“What?  Why?”\n\n“As I said, we vetted you thoroughly before you walked through that door.  Very thoroughly.  Your great-grandmother died of cancer.”\n\n“Yes?  Oh.  But it was a rare, non-genetic cancer.  It’s not something my children would inherit.”\n\n“Sorry.  We can’t risk our gene pool with your obviously defective genes.”\n\n“But ….”\n\nWith a pitying look, the official added, “If you want to go to a colony so badly, try next door at the Embassy of New Wales.  I hear they’ll take anyone.”\n\nDejected, Akune left.\n\nAs the door closed, the official sighed.  “Just once, I’d like to see a qualified applicant.”\n"
  title: Disqualified
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Sam Clough aka “Hrekka”
  date: 2007-09-05
  day: '05'
  month: '09'
  text: "“What are you doing?”\n\n“Fishing for disasters.”\n\nProc looked up from his console and gestured towards the giant radio telescope that dominated the view from his window. ‘The ‘R-PSD’ logo was stamped across the base of the dish. Conspicuously, this was the name of Proc’s ex-employer.\n\n“There’s always something bad happening out there somewhere,” he explained, “and I just hope I’m the one to find it first. Disasters are always big news, and I want my cut.”\n\n“You’re insane, Proc.”\n\n“So are you, Dizzy, so are you.”\n\nDizzy left him fiddling with his controls and disappeared into the other room to make lunch. She had just started to grate some cheese when she heard an ecstatic shout from Proc. Still holding the grater in one hand and the block of cheddar in the other, she wandered back over to where Proc was sitting, and leaned over his shoulder.\n\n“What’s up?”\n\n“Score. Asteroid fell out of orbit and smashed up a habitat over in Cygni. I’m patching to the networks: E-alpha offered me a ten percent finder’s fee on whatever I brought in.”\n\nDiziet clapped and went back in the kitchen to finish preparing lunch. She had just found something to drink when Proc called her back to the console again.\n\n“They bought it. My advance is already through and there’s more to come!”\n\nDiziet leaned over his shoulder again and tapped a key to scroll through the feed. She tapped the screen over the number designating the system of origin.\n\n“That’s not the code for Cygni. That’s…” She paused, not believing her eyes. “Oh God, that’s Beychae. What was the name of the habitat?”\n\nProc quickly checked.\n\n“Home At Last. There were no survivors.”\n\nDiziet sunk to the floor and was holding her head, shuddering.\n\nProc’s eyes widened, and let out a small gasp, “Dizzy…your parents…I’m so sorry…”\n"
  title: Fishing for Disasters
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Todd Keisling
  date: 2007-09-06
  day: '06'
  month: '09'
  text: "From: Mason, Ed\n\nSent: Saturday, August 22, 2154 8:02 AM\n\nTo: Mason, Brandy\n\nSubject: RE: When are you coming home?\n\nDear Brandy,\n\nI told them this was a bad idea.\n\nAfter over a hundred years of planning, the eggheads in Houston finally sent us to Mars.  We get there, set up a solid base, and conduct tests.  Then some genius decides to go dig at one of the ice caps.  You know, to see if they can find some kind of geological evidence of extraterrestrial life.\n\nThey expected to find some frozen microbes, bacteria, or even a frozen bipedal creature at best.  What they did find, though, wasn’t in the guidebook.\n\nWhen I was a kid I thought Mars looked like this giant ball of rust and dirt.  And, to be honest, that’s what it is—rust and dirt.  On the surface, anyway.  Go about a mile below ground, and you’ll stumble upon an intricate network of metallic tunnels and tubes.  You’ll find what looks to be an intricate propulsion system powered by an advanced form of fusion.\n\nOr something like that.  This was twenty years ago.  I’m just one of the gearheads they shot out here to get it working.\n\nMost things were up and running by the time I got here.  The only thing they hadn’t figured out was how an advanced civilization had managed to construct—and move—a craft the size of a planet.  Something so large it has its own moons.  To be honest, I really don’t give a damn.  I’m just here to do my job and get back home.\n\nThere’s a single chamber a few hundred clicks from the first entrance point.  The eggheads have dubbed it the “control room” due to a large panel with several asymmetric shapes that glow in the presence of an EMP charge.\n\nSo when I took a look at the crude drawings and blueprints they’d provided and came to the conclusion that none of us had a single clue as to how to operate this thing, I told them that maybe we shouldn’t mess with it.\n\nMaybe we should just let Mars be a planet.  Maybe this isn’t such a good idea.\n\nThey didn’t listen.  Instead they told me to press the big oblong-shaped thing on the panel with an EMP emitter.  Since these guys are signing my paychecks, I figure hey, what the hell, you know?\n\nSo I push the button.\n\nThat was four hours ago.  Reports came in from several other outposts that some volcanoes spewed to life around the same time they made me push the button.  That solved the exhaust enigma.\n\nNow the eggheads are running around, barking orders and figures and trajectories and shit.  Now they say planet-side effects of this sudden gain in momentum is going to screw with the gravity and cause surface-wide destruction.\n\nThey’re telling all surface-dwelling associates to head underground.\n\nSo all that rust and dirt, well, it kind of makes sense to me.  Let’s say some advanced species built a big spaceship.  They took it out for a joyride several billion years ago and ran out of gas.  There sure as hell wasn’t any AAA back then.\n\nAnyway, from the looks of things, these intergalactic geniuses didn’t understand the concept of brakes, because the eggheads can’t figure out a way to slow it down.\n\nLooks like I’ll make it home in time for Jimmy’s birthday after all.  I know he wanted a hovercar, but you tell him Dad’s bringing him something even better.  He doesn’t even need keys to turn it on.\n\nLove you,\n\nEd\n\n[-MESSAGE DELIVERED-]\n"
  title: Joyride
  year: 2007
- 
  author: B.York
  date: 2007-09-07
  day: '07'
  month: '09'
  text: "Kale made a habit of playing only in his backyard. The public display of toying with small action figures in the park or at a friends house made Kale a shy boy indeed. Instead, he would enjoy the comfort of solitary imagination in his backyard. The young boy, only eleven in age, could play with plastic soldiers from sunrise until the dusk of the evening. Though even in his wildest dreams he could never fulfill the true desire to have his imaginings come true.\n\nOne day in the fall, Kale took to digging in the back yard. He dug mounds for his action figures to battle upon and pits for them to die in. Kale made very deep pits for the figures to die in to make it that much more dramatic. It was only with this digging that Kale found the hole that day.\n\nThe hole was a thing not so much larger than his head and black with no light penetrating. Kale looked at it, he poked at it and the darkness within the hole swallowed his finger until he pulled it back. It was a peculiar thing this hole. He had decided that he would see just how deep the hole would go. He sacrificed an action figure to the depths of the hole and nothing happened. Kale covered up the hole and went inside.\n\nThe next day, Kale woke up and went outside to play but not before his mother gave him some purified water to stay hydrated in the intense heat outside. He quickly made his way to the hole which was still there beneath the dirt. Kale was not willing to sacrifice any more figures to the hole so he decided to take something from the house instead. Yes, his father’s electronic measuring tape would do nicely. He sunk the measuring end into the hole and eventually ran out of tape! Shrugging, the young boy dropped the rest of the electronic tool into the hole and waited. Nothing happened so Kale covered up the hole and went inside.\n\nWhen Kale woke up his vitamins and morning supplements were fed to him through the bio-water he drank before ever leaving his room. His mother made him wear the anti-irradiation overcoat and sent him out back to play. Kale uncovered the hole and began to ponder about what to put inside it today. He’d assumed that whatever he had put in it the day before had not worked to its desired effect. Today Kale went inside and retrieved a toy of his meant to play 1.2 million songs from the 21st Century. He slipped it easily into the hole and waited. Nothing happened and so like before, Kale went back inside.\n\nThe very next day Kale’s meditation was ending and he told his mother he’d be going outside. Everything he needed was already injected through nano-machines into his body. The boy went outside and took to using a displacer wand to move the dirt from the hole without ever touching it. Today, Kale decided, he would truly experiment with what the hole meant. Sifting through the junk in their metallic recycling console, he’d found an old relic of his grandfather’s belongings from after the war. Taking the object out back he dropped it into the hole and waited for a long while. Nothing occurred so Kale had the event recorded in his brain then went inside.\n\nHis mouth tasted like ash and his lungs filled with soot and dirt. The boy opened his eyes to the same landscape he’d fallen asleep in yesterday. The sounds of bombs going off in the distance couldn’t wake him after all that he’d heard and witnessed in his life. He had no parents to ask to play, no brothers or sisters alive to help him through the day. He coughed heavily and stood up, stumbling through the black smoke with the smell of decay and the heat of radiation about him. His foot hit something. Staring down, the boys pained eyes could make out what looked to be a hole but one blacker than any he’d ever seen. An object as pristine as the sky had been once laid next to the hole. It appeared to be a shiny metallic object; one with a handle and a barrel and even a trigger. It had been polished and kept well and for some reason it filled the boy with a sense of familiarity.\n\nHe reached down, gripping it by the handle and noting a small parchment slipped just under the trigger. He unfolded it and read what seemed to be ancient calligraphy, yet in astonishing clear English, “Reload, Please”.\n"
  title: Pocket Change
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Grady Hendrix
  date: 2007-09-08
  day: '08'
  month: '09'
  text: "Danny Leeds really wanted to punch his wife in the mouth. Over the last two years she had managed to cast their relationship as one where he was constantly the oppressor and she was eternally the victim. If he said anything she didn’t like, it was an attack. If he told her something she was doing that bothered him, she wound up crying in the bathroom. Christ! All he was doing was trying to communicate, but now he was at the end of his rope. He was a nice guy, but if she wanted abuse, he’d give her abuse.\n\nHe made an appointment with his doctor, sat down and explained the situation. His physical results were all on file from last time so this was mostly a psychiatric evaluation.\n\n“You really want to do this, Danny?” his doctor asked.\n\n“Absolutely. I’ve thought about it calmly and I think it’s the only solution.”\n\n“Okay, but I can’t sign you up for anything in the face. And I can’t write you a prescription for kicking. Once she’s down, she’s down and you need to back off.”\n\n“I understand, doc. I don’t want to hurt her, I just want her to know how much pain I’m feeling inside. I can’t seem to communicate it to her with words, so this is all I can think of.”\n\nHis doctor wrote out the prescription, filed a copy with the local police and Danny went home.\n\nHe stopped off at the gym to limber up first. The last time he’d had a physical therapy/psychiatric prescription he’d stressed his rotator cuff and he didn’t want to be back at the doctor’s first thing in the morning. Once he’d worked up a good sweat, he showered off, got dressed and went home. As soon as he walked in the door his wife shot him.\n\n“Huh – ?” he said, stupidly, looking down at the hole in his chest.\n\n“I’ve got a prescription,” his wife said, waving the piece of paper. Sure she did – Danny recognized the signature.\n\n“Dr. Harris,” he gasped. “That hack.”\n\nDanny slid down the wall and sat in a pile of his own blood.\n\n“Don’t undermine my therapy,” his wife said.\n\nDanny coughed up a gout of black blood and died before he could tell her that, once again, she was completely misinterpreting what he was saying and making him feel really, really bad and that maybe she should think about how the problems in their relationship might be partially her fault.\n"
  title: Physical Therapy
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Michael Varian Daly
  date: 2007-09-09
  day: '09'
  month: '09'
  text: "Paln gently cupped the small green vegetable in the attachment designed for its harvesting. The steel segmented orb closed – a soft ‘snick’ – cutting the stem. Paln carefully placed the hard round vegetable among its brethren in the bin strapped to his midsection…and felt Pleasure.\n\n“Brussels sprout,” he sub-vocalized. He knew what they were, the perfect conditions for growing them, but he would never eat one, had no concept of what a ‘brussles’ was, nor cared.\n\nHis universe contracted, focused totally upon the next small green vegetable. Cupping. ‘Snick’. Bin. Pleasure.\n\nInternal sensors told him the bin was At Capacity, though Paln knew that already. That made him feel Satisfaction. He stopped harvesting, smelling the rich loam of the field. He could analyze the chemical components to the millionth part, but organic senses came first.\n\nPaln was the perfect blend of the organic and the cybernetic. He looked around at his Pod Brothers, felt Connection. They were all Type 26 General Purpose Agricultural Mandriods. He was officially PLN-161697434, but the Mother/Master/Ruler who hatched his brood from the uterine replicator had called him Paln, his first moment of Pleasure.\n\nHe put the full bin on the field cart, retrieved an empty one. He was still human enough to sense the beauty of the day. The sun. The fields. The easy sloshing of the nutrient tank on his Feeder nozzle. The quiet hum of the vaporizer on his Bleeder nozzle. His Brothers harvesting. The grace of the dark skinned, yellow eyed, Mother/ Master/Ruler upon her horse, overseeing their work. The Fear/Awe of seeing her shambok, long hard leather hanging lazily from her saddle horn, the Symbol of Overseeing.\n\nTonight, when Paln was reclining in his cradle, the Bleeder-Feeder tubes hooked up, toxins draining, body healing, he would dream of the day, sun, fields, smells, sounds.\n\nHe would dream of Selt’s funeral. The Pod gathered at dusk. Selt’s body on the field cart. Mother/Master/Rulers down from The House, bearing torches. The yellow eyed one anointing Selt’s forehead with oil. The prayers as the black bag was…\n\nNiniskil sat up with a start, breathless and sweaty. That chingado dream again!\n\nShe glanced around to find her Sisters, saw Rhea on one side, Tzisoc on the other, both still out cold. She quickly looked between her legs, sighed with relief. At least she had detached the bioform phallus before she passed out. It had been a serious Bacchanal. But after ten months on deep space patrol, they’d earned it.\n\nShe crawled out of  bed, went to the window, looked outside.\n\nThe gorgeous vista of Sylph looked back at her as if designed to be perfect, which, of course, it was, from its core outward. Nothing, but jeweled archipelagos strung across warm azure seas without predators, skies painted with wispy clouds, all under the multicolored rings that crowned this princess of worlds.\n\nA few yards away, just up from the white beach, a group of Sisters rested upon loungers in glistening nakedness, while a tall, lean Harlequin, a Mandroid pleasure server, offered them cold drinks.\n\nShe drew back, light suddenly like daggers in her skull.\n\n“Ugh!” she grunted. That was definitely a Past Life dream. Too much detail…that yellow eyed Sister!\n\n“Chingos!” she spat. What Sister wants to remember an Incarnation as a AgroDriod? But there it was. Time to see the Priestesses of Eriskegal for Regression Therapy. But not today.\n\nShe crawled back into bed. “The Wheel Turns,” she muttered, snuggling close to Rhea.\n\nDrifting off, she thought, “Be extra nice to the servants today.”\n"
  title: Lives
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Todd Keisling
  date: 2007-09-10
  day: 10
  month: '09'
  text: "Colt was a block from his apartment when the curfew alarms went off.  The firing klaxon startled him, and he dropped his smokes.  Heart pounding, he retrieved them and ducked into a nearby alley.\n\nIt wasn’t long before the first patrol sped by, its rifles poised and searchlights tracking the darkened streets ahead.\n\nHe curled up beside a dumpster, flipped his collar and tried to keep warm.  The smokes helped.  He scolded himself for losing track of time.  The bookstore down by the square had enticed him yet again.  It wasn’t until the owner, Mr. Drabury, pulled the shades that he realized what time it was.  Drabury told him the local alarm was damaged in a riot a couple of days prior.\n\nGunshots echoed from somewhere farther down the street.  Colt wasn’t alone in breaking the curfew.\n\nMore shots.  Then again, he supposed, maybe he was.\n\nAfter the hum of the patrol’s engine grew distant, Colt rose to his feet, lifted the lid of the dumpster and climbed in.  The smell was horrid and he fought the urge to retch.  The feeling of nausea passed after a few minutes, and he reminded himself that spending the night there was safer than trying to dodge the patrols for that last, crucial city block.\n\nNot that it mattered.  The master locks in his apartment promptly engaged at curfew.  All of his neighbors were safe inside their homes, spending time with their families and worshiping Channel Zero for the required two hours.\n\nColt reached into his pocket and pulled out the FM transmitter.  He affixed it to his ear and thumbed the dial in search of the right frequency.  Suddenly his head was filled with the rants of the self-proclaimed Mad Man.\n\nAuthorities were still trying to track him down.  Rumors circulated that he never transmitted from the same location, and never with the same encryption.  After the collapse of the nationwide radio network twenty years ago upon federal implementation of the FCSA and SmartCam installations, the “Mad Man” set up a single broadcast.  He brought back the music of the previous century, before it was “tainted by lack of creativity.” He preached, he hounded, he ridiculed the Network and the Government and the apathy created by both.\n\nColt liked him.  He took a drag from his cigarette and lifted up the lid to exhale the smoke.\n\nThe Mad Man screeched in his ear.\n\n“–and what do they do for ya, people?  You sit at home at night, after you’ve worked yer ass off for the man all damn day, and they expect you to watch this so-called ‘Channel Zero’.  They say you’re doing the country a favor.  Well I say you’re spying for the man.  You’re spyin’ on yer fellow countrymen.  It’s sick.  It’s disgusting.  And if you agree with it, then you’re no fuckin’ different.”\n\nColt bit his cheeks and fought back laughter.  He wanted to cheer on the Mad Man, but the dumpster was already vibrating from a nearby patrol.\n\n“And speaking of spying, people, did any of you catch the broadcast over a Network secure channel a few hours ago?  They say there was a murder on Grid Four.  Guy knifed to death right there while everybody wat–”\n\nA series of pops erupted in the background.  The Mad Man gasped.\n\n“Looks like my cover’s up, ladies and gentlemen.  ‘Till next time, I bid you all adieu—and wake the fuck up!.”\n\nThe frequency went dead.  Colt sighed, finished his cigarette and put it out against the wall of the dumpster.  He wrapped his arms around himself, positioned himself as comfortably as possible amid the bags of rotting garbage, and closed his eyes.\n\nWithout the voice of the Mad Man in his ears, it would be a very long night.\n"
  title: The Mad Man
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2007-09-11
  day: 11
  month: '09'
  text: "It was always slightly embarrassing for me to watch Jarima try to pick up a guy.\n\nShe had a bodybuilder’s physique. She had a wide rubbery mouth and a strong jaw. She had bright red hair kept short. A little spray of freckles danced across the bridge of her wide nose.\n\nShe laughed like a horse and chewed with her mouth open.\n\nShe was an orphan and had learned to fight from an early age. She protected her little brother and her little sister in the orphanage until they were taken away and adopted by separate families. She never saw them again and since she was older, no one adopted her. She told me once that they didn’t actually tell her that they were in an orphanage until they had been there for two weeks. She laughed when she told me that story.\n\nShe made it to being a teenager through several rapes and numerous beatings.\n\nShe made it through being a teenager by killing boys who tried to rape and beat her.\n\nDuring battle, she was as good as most of us and better than some.\n\nWe picked her up outside the courthouse. She’d gotten off in three previous murder trials with a self-defense clause but it was clear that the next time she was on trial for murder, she’d go down. It was only a matter of time in her neighbourhood before some thick-headed boy would think she was an easy target, ignore the rumours, and try to get it on.\n\nWe gave her the pitch.  Money, interstellar travel and violence.  She leapt at the chance.\n\nWe’re a company of private mercenaries.  We look for a certain type of person in police records and give them the chance to make money with us.  Lots of violence. Some months are better than others.\n\nSo now we were on leave in a backwater bar in Southern New Nelson.\n\nShe never went as far as to wear a dress but she was wearing some badly applied makeup. Coupled with how much courage she’d had to drink, she made a messy picture. She asked me to wish her luck before she sauntered away from me after a deep breath.\n\nI’ve seen Jarima stare down warlords until they break and spill their secrets. I’ve seen this woman kill with her bare hands. I’ve seen her take bullets and hardly wince until the mission was completed. I’ve seen her lose friends and keep going without looking back.\n\nI covered my eyes with my hands as she walked up to the guy at the end of the bar.\n\nI was waiting for his polite rebuke followed by her angry response. I was waiting for his insolent reply and then the sound of his arm breaking and perhaps some shattering glass before going in as backup and peacekeeper.\n\nIt was always slightly embarrassing for me to watch Jarima try to pick up a guy.\n"
  title: Jarima
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2007-09-12
  day: 12
  month: '09'
  text: "It’s a strange thing, knowing exactly when you’re going to die. Luther had become accustomed to the idea; the arrest, the charge of treason. He knew it was a death sentence the moment they’d kicked down his door. He was surprised only at how easily he faced the imminence of his demise.\n\nAt least he’d made a difference, challenged the status quo and been heard. That they were killing him just crossed the ‘t’ of his righteousness.\n\nA squat camera droid regarded him dully from outside his cell, the red ‘recording’ light glowing softly on its head.\n\nThe droid perked up suddenly, hoisting another camera off its body to cover the approach of three people from down the cell block.\n\nLuther closed his eyes and let the rumble of booted feet reach him through the floor; felt rather than heard the figures stop outside his cell and only moved when the flood of fresh air signaled the opening of the cell door.\n\n“Luther King, prisoner nine two zero seven seven six, charged with the spreading of propaganda deemed treasonous by the Government of the People and having been found guilty in a court of law, the time has come to carry out your sentence.” Two helmeted soldiers flanked the doorway as the Emissary of the Government looked down at him, letting his words echo in the small room.\n\n“Doesn’t matter if you kill me, someone else will take my place.” Luther returned the icy stare, belief and strength of purpose calming his nerves.\n\n“Oh, quite the contrary, I think that when we kill you, we’ll find a marked reduction in the number of people who are willing to take your place.” His thin lips parted from wide white teeth, forming the ghost of a smile.\n\n“You think you’re all so clever, but for all your eyes and ears you can’t see the people rising up beneath you.  I’ve infected dozens with the truth, and you can’t stop that truth from spreading like wild fire.”\n\n“Actually, Luther, you’ve inflicted your lies upon exactly twenty two people in the forty seven days since you first spoke out,” he paused for a moment, enjoying the subtle changes in posture his words compelled, “you see, we knew the moment you broke the law. Twenty one days is the optimum period prior to arrest. If we’d simply killed you, as we once would have done, no one would understand why you died; your death would have held no value for us. In twenty one days you’ve shared your ideas enough for them to remember, but not enough to understand. Enough to notice your departure, but not so many as to tip the scale. They’ll know exactly why you’ve died, Luther, and just how dangerous your ideas can be.”\n\n“You can’t believe people will see my punishment as fair, you can’t expect them to take your side. You lose, you kill me and you lose. You’re just making me a martyr to the cause.” Luther’s voice was cracking noticeably, this wasn’t right, what was being said couldn’t be true.\n\n“You don’t seem to understand Luther. We intend to take you out to the gallows where you will swing by the neck until you are dead. Right now people are clearing their dinner tables and tuning in to watch the show. Our killing you has nothing to do with punishment Luther, it’s entirely a matter of deterrence.” The Emissary smiled. “Your death itself is of little consequence Luther, it’s the ceremony of your death, the ceremony of your death will punctuate our point quite nicely.”\n"
  title: Let Him Dangle
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Todd Keisling
  date: 2007-09-13
  day: 13
  month: '09'
  text: "Dr. Watson and Dr. Blair watched as the orderlies interned the patient in observation room three.\n\nDr. Blair scratched absently at the back of his hand.\n\n“So,” Dr. Watson said, “what’s his story?”\n\nHe gestured to the nameless patient in the straightjacket.  Both orderlies left him in one corner of the padded room and closed the door behind them.  The doctors stared at the young man through the observation window.\n\nDr. Blair grimaced, cleared his throat and said, “Wandered into the clinic this morning.  No name, no ID.”\n\n“Nothing at all?”\n\n“No,” Dr. Blair went on. “He sat in the ER for two and a half hours before we could squeeze anything out of him.  Even then, it was nothing but inane babble.  Something about aliens.”\n\nDr. Watson smirked.\n\n“You should be used to that in your neck of the woods.”\n\nDr. Blair continued to scratch the back of his hand.  The skin was red and puffy.\n\n“Damn kids come in from college, drive up to Archuleta Mesa to get stoned and look for the ‘lost military base.’ All they find is a hangover.”\n\n“Lost military base?”\n\n“Yeah,” Dr. Blair said.  He kept scratching.  The skin turned a dark reddish-purple from his consistent agitation. “Local myth.  Sort of like Area 51 up in Nevada, but this base is underground, just north of Dulce.  They say it has seven levels.  Level seven is where aliens supposedly perform genetic experiments on human beings.  Or some shit like that.”\n\nDr. Watson turned back to the observation window.  The nameless kid slowly rocked back and forth.  Blood dribbled down from a large, bulbous boil on his forehead.\n\n“That’s one hell of a zit.”\n\nDr. Blair gasped as he drew blood from the back of his hand.  Dr. Watson turned and frowned.\n\n“I’ve got a first aid kit in my office.  Walk with me.”\n\nThe two doctors left the observation ward.\n\nDr. Blair continued his story.\n\n“Funny thing is, the kid isn’t stoned.  Not as far as I can tell.  When we finally got him to speak, all we could get out of him was a bunch of babbling and crazy talk.”\n\n“What did he say?”\n\n“Typical Archuleta bullshit.  Went up with a few friends, dropped some acid, got separated.  He said he found his way into the underground base and was led down to the seventh level where, and I quote, ‘E.T. revealed the greatest secret of all.'”\n\nThey entered Dr. Watson’s office, who proceeded to dig out the first aid kit.  He chewed his bottom lip as he bandaged Dr. Blair’s wounded hand.\n\n“Are you okay, doctor?”\n\n“Yeah,” Dr. Blair nodded. “Just a rash.  Shouldn’t have scratched it like that.”\n\nBoth men sat.\n\n“Anyway,” Dr. Watson said, “what’s this big secret?”\n\nDr. Blair tried to refrain from smiling, but not hard enough.\n\n“The kid says an alien told him he was the messenger.  That he would send a ‘great revelation’ back to his race.  Whatever that may be, I have no idea.  That boil on his forehead has swollen to twice its size since this morning.  He kept picking at it, which caused it to bleed.  When we tried to treat it, he grew violent and attacked one of my nurses.”\n\n“Odd.”\n\n“Indeed.”\n\nDr. Blair rubbed his bandaged hand and rose from his seat.\n\n“I’ve contacted the local police.  Hopefully they can help track down his identity.  I assume he’s in good hands here?”\n\n“Of course,” Dr. Watson smiled. “I’ll be in touch.”\n\nHe saw his friend to the door.  As he returned to his desk, Dr. Watson wiped sweat from his brow and felt a slight bump upon his forehead.\n\nIt itched and throbbed at his touch.\n"
  title: Level Seven
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Debbie Mac Rory
  date: 2007-09-14
  day: 14
  month: '09'
  text: "My knee is still bleeding from the last time I fell and my trousers keep sticking to them, bringing forth fresh darts of pain. But I’m too scared to use my torch here. I’ve already been stopped by two division patrols on my way here; I guess my research wasn’t thorough enough, and I still look overdressed for this part of the city.\n\nShe told me just to find somewhere quiet and private in the shared sector, where we could be alone. When I’d asked how she was going to know where we were supposed to meet, she smiled and told me not to worry. “I’ll find you”, she said.\n\n46…47…48…49…50 paces further into the alley and there should be a door on my right. My fingers fumble on the greasy brickwork for the frame the obsolete city maps told me should be here. Finally my touch meets jaded timbers, and I move to brace my shoulder against the door. The door disintegrates in a shower of wood dust as I push against it, leaving me yelping as I hit the floor, skinning my partly healed knee again and earning a matching scar across my knuckles.\n\nI sit there for a moment, cradling my bleeding hand and generally feeling so miserable that I never heard her come up behind me. She smiles at my disproportionate distress and takes my hands in her gloves fingers and pulls me to my feet. She gestures for me to follow her into the darkness further inside the warehouse.\n\nWhen finally she stops, she takes the torch from my stiffened fingers, and props it against a wall, exploiting its feeble light to the full. I smile at her, and raise a hand to gently brush my thumb across her cheek – and my breath catches as I watch the trail of colour left there, as if I’d dipped my fingers in paint before touching her. Her skin seems to be flowing now, catching the colour from my hands, and carrying it in mesmerising swirls across her face. I tear my eyes away from the sight, and lifting my other hand to her shoulder, being to draw small shapes on her skin. I feel dizzy already, but when I see that she’s removed her gloves, and her hands are lying naked in her lap, I take her face in my hands and kiss her as all the world fades away.\n\n***\n\nWhen I finally open my eyes, my vision clears enough to let me catch a glimpse of skin as dark as my own, and a pair of unfamiliar hazel eyes. But the smile is the same, as is the gentle touch of her fingers. She could almost pass for human now.\n"
  title: Chameleon
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Robert Niescier
  date: 2007-09-15
  day: 15
  month: '09'
  text: "“Why do you keep writing in there?”\n\nHe looked up and into her eyes, through steam shaded orange from the bonfire’s glow, and smiled.  “It’s so people, future people, remember everything we went through.  So we don’t get lost as just two generic survivors of the bad times.  History tends to cast a blind eye towards those who don’t record their own endeavors.”\n\n“Yeah, yeah, ‘people who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.’  I’ve heard the cliché.”\n\n“Yes, and it’s advice humankind tends to ignore.  But that’s not why I’m keeping a journal.”\n\nThe fire had begun to die down, so he groped through the darkness for another log.  He placed the wood onto the weakening embers, close enough to the water-filled pot to keep its temperature up and boiling.  His hand recoiled in pain as a flame jumped up like a startled snake and burned him.\n\nHer eyes widened.  “Are you okay?”\n\n“I’m fine.”\n\n“Here, let me get something to put on it…”  She began to rummage through her backpack and came up with a cream.  “This will help.”\n\n“Thank you, but no.  Save it for when we really need it.  It’s only a little burn.”\n\n“And when that little burn turns into a little infection, then turns into a little toxic shock, where will I be?  You want to test out just how much of a survivor I really am?  Use the damn medication.”  But still he refused, and soon she put the cream away and sighed.  “You didn’t finish answering my question,” she said.\n\n“What else is there to say?  I don’t want to be forgotten.  It used to be that if you produced a grand work of art, a moving story, an invention or theory that would improve the quality of life, your name would be remembered, your memory encapsulated in books and landmarks dedicated to your name.  But those opportunities are gone now; the only thing left for us is to survive.  To be.\n\n“This journal, this story, is the only thing I have left to give.  I want future generations to know that, even though our time may have come so close to destroying that which we had spent centuries to build, everything that we held dear, that we were still just people.  Neither villains nor heroes.  Just people who made a grievous mistake and paid for it with everything they had.\n\n“How can you be so sure that these future people will find your little journal, or if they will even exist?  What if we were the only…”  Her throat made an odd noise and she stopped.  She poked at the embers with a stick for a few minutes, then shifted her body away from the fire and laid down, her gaze to the sky.\n\nHe grabbed two scraps of cloth and, after picking it off of the fire, placed the water pot onto the highway blacktop.  He stood up and looked down the highway, but there was nothing to see but inky blackness all around.  He shivered.  It was getting colder every day; they would have to increase their pace if they hoped to reach the western coast before the winter months.\n\n“Beautiful,” she whispered.\n\n“What?”\n\n“The sky, it’s beautiful.  You know, I lived in the city all my life.  I never really got to see the stars.  Not like this.  It’s like we’ve entered a whole new world.”\n\nA coyote howled somewhere in the distance.  He looked up, up at the black, star-sprinkled tapestry that seemed to go on for ever and ever.  She was right; it was beautiful.\n"
  title: Amateur Historian
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Daniel Rosenblum
  date: 2007-09-16
  day: 16
  month: '09'
  text: "“This wasn’t what I expected the past to be like.”\n\nI looked around warily, absorbing the unfamiliar sights. I was alone in a rotund, palatial chamber, standing at the center beneath a sweeping ceiling supported by ornate columns. Yellow shafts of early-morning sunlight penetrated the room’s few windows, casting soft, dramatic shadows across the echoing structure.\n\nI checked my watch. 4:28 AM. It was time to commit the grandest act of goodness possible.\n\nBehind the mahogany doors ahead slept a powerful, perverted man. In two months, his distorted thoughts and nefarious deeds will irreparably damage the future of civilization. Three hundred years later, in my natural time, we still felt the shockwaves of destruction emanating from this man’s atrocities.\n\nNow I held the power to end it all before it ever began.\n\nI slipped through the doors like an avenging spirit, intent on my purpose. There he slept, so mortal and vulnerable – no more than a collection of bones and muscle. His faint breathing filled the room, amplified in my ears over the intense throbbing of my nervous heart. I removed my weapon from its holster, took steady aim, and…\n\n“For morality,” I murmured angrily, and the deed was done.\n\nI had done it. No one would ever hear of my deed, sing songs in my name, or celebrate a saved future. No, I didn’t require any fanfare – only the knowledge that I had done what’s right.\n\nI returned to my time, looking forward to enjoying a world free from fear and oppression.\n\n“This wasn’t what I expected the future to be like.”\n\nWhere there once was a wealth of technology, there was barbarism. Where there used to be a massive city just before the vast horizon, there was black, smoldering rubble. My laboratory was in ashes. My home was in splinters. I could see a small cottage faintly in the distance, starting life anew. At first I could not understand. I had fixed it! But the man’s ideas were greater than his flesh, transcending the material. Someone worse – far worse – had taken his place. The world was destroyed, but I knew what I had to do.\n\nI returned to the past, 4:27 AM, and waited for my earlier self to arrive. I soon saw myself appear in the center of the room, just as I remembered. I stood still, staring at the back of my head.\n\n“This wasn’t what I expected the past to be like.”\n\nI took a step towards my earlier self and gripped my weapon.\n\nI looked around warily, absorbing the unfamiliar sights.\n\nI checked my watch. 4:28 AM. It was time to commit the grandest act of goodness possible. I held the power to end it all before it ever began.\n\nNo one will ever hear of my bravery – I only knew that I was doing what’s right. I removed my weapon from its holster, took steady aim, and…\n\n“For morality,” I murmured angrily, and the deed was done.\n"
  title: Time Assassin
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Todd Keisling
  date: 2007-09-17
  day: 17
  month: '09'
  text: "It’s the smell that gets to me.  Agent Lennox ducks his head out from the kitchen just in time to watch me vomit into the hall.\n\n“You okay, Church?”\n\n“Yeah,” I tell him. “Just peachy-keen.”\n\nThe smell is that of burning meat   Inside the kitchen are the remains of tenant #62 Jim Hollerbach.  That horrid smell is from his insides coiled and plopped into a frying pan.\n\nI check my sensory inhibitor, thumb it to olfactory and I’m good to go.\n\nAgent Lennox’s phone rings.  He taps the earpiece.\n\n“Lennox,” he answers. “You’re shitting me.  I’ll send Church over in a minute.”\n\nHe taps the earpiece again to disconnect and motions to me.\n\n“The perp lives down the hall.  Tenant #41.  Guy jacked his line and set it on a loop.”\n\n“He looped?”\n\nThe inhibitor gives me a metallic taste in my mouth.\n\n“Yeah,” Lennox says. “Blind analog feed.  Should be down the hall to your right.  Go check it out.  I’ll catch up in a minute.”\n\nI give the remains of Mr. Hollerbach a passing glance before I leave the room.  My stomach twists, but nothing creeps up my esophagus.\n\nThe Government requires inhibitors for situations like this.  Dulling the senses is required to perform an Agent’s duties—or so they tell us in training.  It sure beats the hell out of puking.\n\nThe serotonin, they tell us, is to enhance community morale.\n\nAgents like myself and Lennox aren’t required to take the supplements.  The inhibitors do it for us.\n\nWalking down the hallway, it hits me.  Analog.  That’s not a word you hear very much these days.  The SmartCams are wired to an all-digital encrypted network, and knowing how to bypass that encryption with old technology would require extensive old-world knowledge.\n\nPrinted literature took a backseat after the invention of Channel Zero.  Rather than face scrutiny and ridicule during such a turbulent time, the Government chose to reinforce a blind eye toward printed material, instead pumping all its resources into the necessity of the single channel.  It made more sense to divert the public’s attention rather than force them to give up reading.\n\nIt worked, too.  People stopped reading.  They stopped caring.  Books were no longer a danger because no one gave a damn anyway.\n\nTenant #41—tonight’s murderer—isn’t home, but he left behind the blueprints for his own design.\n\nI step past the forensics team, tug on a pair of gloves and thumb through the first book I see.  Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand.\n\nEvery wall in the apartment is outfitted with makeshift shelving.  Books—at least a thousand—decorate the room.  It’s an antiquarian’s dream collection.\n\n“Lennox,” I say, and tap my earpiece.\n\nHe answers, and I tell him to conduct a search on all the local antique shops.  When he asks why, I tell him.\n\n“Because it looks like our perp is a reader.”\n\n“Oh shit.”\n\nI disconnect and put down the book.\n\nThe Government thought they could sweep this under the rug.  That if people stopped caring about books, there would be no reason to take away that particular “freedom,” and no cause for alarm or rebellion.\n\nStaring at the home of this murderous reader, I realize the Government has made a gross miscalculation.\n"
  title: The Collector
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2007-09-18
  day: 18
  month: '09'
  text: "My head was throbbing.  I pinched the bridge of my nose in an attempt to ease the pain.  It didn’t help.\n\n“Try rubbing your temples.  That seems to work for me,” suggested a gravelly voice to my right.\n\nPrior to that instant, I didn’t know anyone was with me.  In fact, I didn’t even know where I was, or how I got here.  Although the room was on the dark side, I couldn’t open my eyes wider than thin slits.  I decided to keep them closed.  “What’s that?” I was able to say in a raspy voice that was barely louder than a whisper.  “Where am I?  I demand to know what’s going on.”\n\n“Well, buddy, I don’t know where we are.  But I know it ain’t no place good.  It seems we’ve been kidnapped by Spacemen.  We’re in some kind of flying saucer.  They picked you up yesterday.  I’ve been here about a week.”\n\n“Spacemen?  Flying saucer?  What are you talking about?”\n\n“I know it hurts, but think hard.  What do you remember?”\n\nHe was right, it did hurt.  But I fought through the pain.  “Let’s see.  I remember being in a large room.  Something like a hospital room, or maybe a laboratory of some kind.  Oh my God.  You’re right.  I do seem to remember seeing aliens.  At least I think I do.  I can’t be sure.  Maybe it was a dream?”\n\n“More like a nightmare, my friend.  Try again.  Can you see them?”\n\n“I can’t really see anything.  But I do have some vague impressions.  Oh God, their smell.  I remember their stench was awful.  Especially their breath.  It was like decomposing flesh.  It was horrible.”  I tried to concentrate, but everything was still blurry.  “I sense something.  Yes, they were ugly.  Discolored teeth.  A big nose, at least that’s what I think it was.  Two evil looking eyes.  And they had things growing on either side of their heads.”  I struggled to focus on the fleeting images at the edges of my consciousness.  “I also recall this metal contraption attached to the top of my head.  It stung me with burst of electric shocks.”  I grabbed my temples, and fought the pain.  “I also remember thinking, ‘boy are these guys stupid.  They’re a race of idiots.  Ugly ass idiots.  We should do the universe a favor and kill them all.’  I remember thinking how it made my skin crawl just being in the same room with them.”  I shuddered.  “How about you?  Did you see the same thing?”\n\nI couldn’t see my companion, but I could hear him chuckle.  “Yeah.  It was exactly like that.  Well, on the first day, anyway.  But not now.  Not after I figured out what they’re doing.  That thing they put on our heads, it’s some kind of mind reading device.  They put one on you and another on one of them.  Then they sit across from you and suck your thoughts right out of your mind.  All those things you remember about how disgusting and hideous they were.  Well, that’s not what really happened.  You see, that mind contraption works both ways.  You’re actually remembering what they were thinking about you.”\n"
  title: In the Eye of the Beholder
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2007-09-19
  day: 19
  month: '09'
  text: "Annette sways forward and for a second it’s like there’s no bonesetter in her bloodstream.  She’s languid again.  Graceful and alive.  Pre-soldier.\n\nWe’re friends.  That’s hard to come by this far out in the rings.  Most of the other folks float silently around me in a stellar hermitage braid.  Small living quarters from many different ages float amongst the wide thin ocean of spaceborne glittering rocks.\n\nSome of the stones are boulders.  Proximity sensors take care of those ones and automatically keep my ship safe.  It’s the dust that’s worrying.  Clogged injets or filters can mean slow death out here.  They need constant maintenance.\n\nAnnette is here to double check my work.  It’s not necessary but it’s nice to have another person to talk to once in a while.  I’ve turned off the grav to make it easier for her.  She hitches a smile back at me and with a little smirk I realize that I was checking out her body.  We’re developing a little relationship here.\n\nWe’ve markered each other’s ships with private SOS position beacon tags.  There’s no buddy system out here for the permanents but we felt like starting one up.  We’re really bucking the bell curve of loneliness.  There’s a silent amusement between us that I know we’re both enjoying.\n\nI get a cheerful mock pout thumbs-up from her and a sarcastic grin goodbye.  Emotions last for days in this timeless darkness and I’m smiling for days.  With the silent hiss of the ringsand expanse rubbing the hull, I deliberately wait.  It’s like I’m living inside a bell being sanded by wind.\n\nLater that month, I call up the map.  There’s a burst of three dimensional static and then I can see the planet floating flat in front of me like a milkspider’s eggsac framed by the rings.  It has a red eye like Jupiter that stares at me from the center of the projection at the planet’s north pole.  Maybe that’s why the founders named it Taurus.  With the rings and the storming bullseye, it looks like a targeted dartboard.\n\nI turn off the dataflow and config the custom holo to just show me Her and Me.  I kick back in my chair and smoke, watching the two red dots float far apart in the rings of Taurus.  I let my affection grow like a cancer inside me and I wonder if she’s doing the same thing.\n"
  title: Taurus
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Todd Keisling
  date: 2007-09-20
  day: 20
  month: '09'
  text: "Mr. Serling entered the cafe and took a seat at the bar. He ordered the lunch special which, for that day, was a bowl of vegetable soup, carrot sticks and a peanut butter sandwich.\n\nHis arrival did not go unnoticed. Rob watched from his booth table while his girlfriend, Mary, nursed her coffee.\n\n“Rod Serling is an alien.”\n\nRob chewed his lip as he made his confession. Mary set down her cup of coffee, glanced around the cafe and lit a cigarette. She blinked.\n\n“Your neighbor is an alien?”\n\n“Yes, I’m telling you, he’s a damned alien and he’s right there.”\n\nMary took a drag and exhaled a plume of smoke. She regarded poor old Mr. Serling’s aged back and smiled.\n\n“You’ve been smoking too much, man. Not the ciggies, either.”\n\n“No, Mary, I’m serious. Here–”\n\nRob produced a brass pocket watch. Mary smirked.\n\n“It’s a watch, Rob.”\n\n“No, it’s not just any watch. I found this in his front yard.”\n\n“You were snooping in that poor old man’s front yard?”\n\n“No. Well, maybe. Yeah, anyway, look–this watch stops time. Just like in that old Twilight Zone episode.”\n\nFrom his seat at the bar, Mr. Serling uttered a low belch and opened up a copy of the morning newspaper.\n\n“Rob, you’ve been doing more than smoking. Did you drop that acid last night after I left?”\n\n“I’m serious, Mary. Look.”\n\n“Rob, it’s a damn watch. Now, I want you to go over there and return that man’s property. Tell him you found it and think it belongs to him.”\n\n“But Mary, he’s an alien!”\n\nThis last outburst attracted the attention of several cafe patrons. Mr. Serling was too absorbed in his newspaper to notice.\n\nMary put out her cigarette in the ashtray and placed her hand on Rob’s.\n\n“Honey. I love you, but I swear to God Almighty, if you don’t stop watching those reruns on TV, I’m going to kick you in the ass. The real Rod Serling died in the 70s. You know that. That guy–”\n\nShe pointed at old man Serling.\n\n“–just happens to have the same name. That guy’s not even related. You know that. I know that. Now go return his watch before I smack you.”\n\n“Mary, you’ve seen the shit that goes on next door some nights. You’ve seen things float into the sky and hover and the flashing lights and–”\n\n“Rob, I’ve been stoned out of my mind and seen elephants eclipse the sun. He is not an alien. You’re just paranoid and weird. Now go return the damn watch.”\n\nRob snatched the watch from the table and rose. He marched over to the bar where his neighbor Mr. Serling sat chewing a peanut butter sandwich.\n\n“M-Mr. Serling?”\n\nThe old man swiveled in his seat and faced Rob.\n\n“Yes?”\n\n“I, uh, well, see, I was walking along and I found this–”\n\nRob held up the watch. Mr. Serling’s eyes brightened.\n\n“Oh, thank goodness. I thought I’d lost it forever. Thank you, young man.”\n\nMr. Serling took the pocket watch. He opened the cover, stared with gentle amusement at its ticking face, and then pressed the stop button.\n\nEverything froze.\n\nHe rose from his seat, left a couple of dollars on the bar and left the cafe in its frozen state. Above, birds hovered still in the air, while cars and people stood in place.\n\nRod Serling surveyed the street corner, smiled and nodded. His work here was done. He pulled back his sleeve, tapped his wristwatch, and promptly vanished into another dimension..\n"
  title: Time Enough for Twilight
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Viktor Kuprin
  date: 2007-09-21
  day: 21
  month: '09'
  text: "Any starship could request a flyby. Popik received them all the time from the Customs Patrols and the Space Force when they needed to eyeball our ship. If they wanted a bribe that day, they’d come aboard Popik’s old Mod One. He would shake hands with the thug-in-charge and discretely pass some rubles or gold kopeks he’d gotten from here and there.\n\nThat’s what you had to do if you were a free trader like Popik, especially if you occasionally hauled illicit cargoes on the side like bootleg vodka or tobacco. The Americans treated tobacco like it was some kind of fission-grade plutonium. But the colonists on the Fringe Worlds gladly paid for it sight unseen.\n\nMaybe Popik was curious to see the ship or, I suspect, he just wanted to give me a surprise. He keyed up the code for a flyby request, transmitted it, and to his surprise the reply came back giving the okay. Back then, before the wars with the Helgrammites and the others, there weren’t so many alien starships in human space. Not like now.\n\nWhen he called me over the comm, I was playing with dolls in my cabin. I raced to the cramped control center, dragging my favorite teddy bear behind.\n\n“Sit down, Vika, and watch the big televisor,” Popik said. “We’re going to see something special.”\n\n“Is it Poppa or Momma calling? Are they coming?” I asked.\n\n“Not this time, my heart,” Popik replied. “We’re going to see a Tsoor ship, an alien ship. We’ll fly past it in a few seconds. Watch.”\n\n“Da, Popik.” I should have known it wasn’t my parents. Poppa was on duty aboard a warship somewhere in deep space. Momma was away, too, always working in some company office on Getamech. So, when I wasn’t in school, I got to travel with Popik and live in his asteroid domik between our trips to the stars.\n\nA strangely-shaped orb appeared on the televisor screen and began to grow in size. Popik grinned and fired the retros, slowing our approach.\n\n“It’s a Class-4 Tsoor starship. They call it a ‘Porpita,'” he explained.\n\n“That’s a funny name, Popik!” I bounced and giggled, hugging my teddy bear.\n\nThe Tsoor ship was a cluster of four huge connected spheres glowing bluish green. Bars of brilliant violet light circled the globes’ equators and vertical axes. I saw no portholes, no windows, no one looking back at us. To me it looked like some giant, magical New Year’s tree ornament.\n\n“Can we flash our lights for them, Popik?” I asked.\n\nHe shook his head. “We probably shouldn’t, my heart. The aliens might not know what to make of it.”\n\nThen the beautiful Tsoor starship receded into the distance and was gone.\n\nI watched and re-watched the video Popik had made of the flyby. And all these many years later, I still have that recording. Just a few seconds long, but it takes me back to those happiest of times, back to my dear grandfather.\n"
  title: Flyby
  year: 2007
- 
  author: TJMoore
  date: 2007-09-22
  day: 22
  month: '09'
  text: "The path to the discovery of intelligent non-human life was, for me, a life’s journey. SETI had invested billions in high tech telescopes and antenna arrays, thousands of personnel hours and miles of red tape, without a single positive result. I had done it at the cost of just over five hundred thousand dollars, twenty five years of my own life, my own sweat and tears, my family, my friends, my reputation and my respect. The last two or possibly three items I have since recovered, depending on your definition of “friends”.\n\nIt all started with the artifact. I had found an artifact that I believed to be part of a larger artifact that was lost or discarded by prehistoric visitors from another world and time. It ended with my excavation of a site that I had purchased with the proceeds from the sale of my house, my land, my entire estate and personal wealth. The excavation resulted in the discovery of a mechanical devise of unknown origin, composition or purpose. Scientists have analyzed the metal like material and have determined that nothing like it exists in the world as we know it and the material has yet to be reproduced by any known process.\n\nThe discovery site was the southern edge of a quarry where decorative marble was occasionally mined for its unusual color, transparency and high concentration of fossils. The fossils were so numerous that the strength of the stone was unacceptable for most building materials so the quarry had been dormant for many years. I had little trouble purchasing it.\n\nI had great trouble finding it. It took years of searching through paper invoices and inventories, work schedules, logs and shipping documents. The final link was actually an artist who had ordered some slab marble for a pedestal he was commissioned to build at a museum. He had personally scouted out the stone to be cut from the quarry, deliberately choosing the brittle stone for its interesting fossils. Unfortunately, the museum changed the color scheme of the atrium and the stone was sold to a tile company to be cut into floor tiles. The tiles sat in a warehouse for several years until it was sold at auction to a wholesaler who shipped it to another warehouse where it sat for another few years. When the wholesaler went out of business, it was sold, again at auction, to a distributor who sold it to a contractor whose business was building and remodeling for small businesses. The contractor had used the tile in the restrooms of a new office building.\n\nSo we arrive at the beginning of the journey where I, sitting on the bathroom throne, caught a glimpse of something unnatural beneath the polished surface of the floor tile beneath me. It was a tiny spring with a tiny fossil passing through the coils. A spring deposited in the ancient muck when the now fossilized shellfish was still alive. A spring made millions of years before man.\n"
  title: Spring
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Debbie Mac Rory
  date: 2007-09-23
  day: 23
  month: '09'
  text: "We have no choice, they said. We have to leave. We don’t know where we can go, or even if we can survive out there, but we can’t live here any longer. But there isn’t enough room here for all of us.\n\nAnd then it became clear that the “we” and the “us” indicated in the news broadcasts, referred only to the healthy, the fertile, the educated among our peoples. Those who had been born without genetic abnormalities or physiological conditions which science should have long since cured.\n\nThe selection process was as short as the world government was able to make it, but it still stretched into months. Riots broke out worldwide, incited by those terrified of being left behind and those made bitter by tests results that rejected their chance of passage, even though they considered themselves healthy.\n\nParanoia took its place in the proceedings and only those who had a place ensured were allowed to prepare and load the ships. I suppose they believed that we, abandoned as we were, would yet try to poison the food, or infect their ventilation systems with some pathogenic substance. I know there were some that would have done so, and some that tried through the layers of security that surrounded the airbases. Most of them lost their lives on the lasers of the defensive grid.\n\nWhen the ships had at last completed preparations, few were at full capacity. The medical AIs, calling on all the worlds collected knowledge, rejected all children under 12 in the belief that the exposure of such young bodies to the unshielded radiation outside the atmosphere would render them infertile, and useless as colony members. Even allowing for the families who opted to stay together on a now barren planet, or the parents who kissed their children goodbye, leaving them with crippled aunts or grandfathers too old to qualify, the numbers were far fewer than expected.\n\nMost of the ships have left now, but the security grid around the airfields is still active. The children who were left come here most days to throw rocks against the fences, and watch the lasers turn them to dust. I still come to watch the last of the ships, assisting those others who try to hack into the abandoned bases so we can siphon the remaining power for ourselves.\n\nThe little girl with me clings tighter, burying her face in the cloth of my garments as the dust clouds raise from yet another launch. I adjust the gauze around my face with one hand so I can keep watching, while gently stroking the child’s hair with the other, to comfort her.\n\nWhen finally the rockets flare has faded beyond what I could follow in the brightness of the noon-day sun I take the girls hand and turning, we walk together into the echoing streets.\n"
  title: The Forsaken
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Todd Keisling
  date: 2007-09-24
  day: 24
  month: '09'
  text: "My brother used to tell me about the glory days, when the Government was less unified and there was more than a single state.  Usually what he told me went along with what they taught us at the Academy in history class, but sometimes he’d add little details here and there.  Things they didn’t include in their presentations.\n\nThis was after he’d joined the Military, served a couple of tours and came back.  He was different when he returned.  Told me and Mama that he’d seen his nightmares come to life during that time, that we just wouldn’t understand.  Not long after is when he’d start telling me about the way things used to be.  About how there used to be actual television broadcasts with fictional plots.  He called them “sitcoms.”\n\nWe had this car.  A real zoomer.  Old rust-bucket from the 20th.  He bought it before he was recruited, and before he left for duty I told him we’d fix it up when he came back.  I didn’t expect him to return, but he did.  Sometimes I think maybe it would’ve been best if he hadn’t.\n\nOne day, while we were both on our backs underneath the old GT, my brother told me that I should stop taking the supplements.\n\nHe said, “There’s more in them than just serotonin.”\n\nI told him we had to by law, that we’d be in big trouble if we didn’t, but he just chuckled.  He told me people used to read for enjoyment.  The last book I actually saw was in an antique shop downtown.\n\n“They didn’t have to outlaw books,” he said. “Back in the day, a lot of people wrote about futures where governments banned books.  They were wrong.  People just stopped giving a shit.  Channel Zero took care of the rest.”\n\nHe took the ratchet from my hand and looked me in the eye.\n\nHe said, “This country was built on revolution.  They want you to forget that.  Don’t you ever forget that.”\n\nTwo days after he killed himself I was out working on the car to clear my head.  Mama came to me, her eyes all puffy from crying, and gave me a letter.  No name or return address.  Just had my own name scrawled across the front.  The letter simply said:\n\n“Warehouse 27.  Corner of Reed and Pine.  Wednesday.  11 PM.”\n\nAnd then, below that, it said:\n\n“Your brother was a good friend.”\n\nI was told my entire life not to break curfew.  Two hours of Channel Zero were mandatory.  We were always supposed to be on the lookout for suspicious behavior, and I’d heard about what happened to those who were caught in the streets after hours.\n\nWhat my brother told me underneath the car that day stuck with me, and I wanted to know who sent this letter, so I managed to sneak out.  I took to the alleys and the old routes I used to follow when I was a kid.\n\nWarehouse 27 wasn’t empty.  There were a lot of young men like me there.  There was a lot of anti-Government propaganda tacked to the walls.  After a few minutes, the doors were closed, and several soldiers and patrol officers filed into the room.\n\nOne man in a black uniform stepped forward and said, “You’re all under arrest for conspiring against the Government.”\n\nEveryone murmured.  We knew we’d been had.\n\n“High treason is punishable by execution,” he said, “or by four years of Military service.  The choice is yours.”\n\nThe soldiers cocked their rifles and took aim.  I realized then what my brother was talking about, and why he enlisted in the first place.\n\nThe choice was obvious.  I just wish I’d had time to say goodbye to Mama, and that I’d finished that damn rust-bucket car.\n"
  title: Recruiters
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2007-09-25
  day: 25
  month: '09'
  text: "“You won’t like it there,” Rajani’s brother said.  “People go crazy like that, so far from the sun.  There’s science behind it.  I saw it on the forums.”\n\nSam’s avatar hung on the screen throughout the call: himself at twenty-one, tanned and grinning as he reclined in a white plastic chair.  His UV goggles had been shoved up into his dark hair, and she recognized the backdrop of the mainland relocation center behind him.  The photograph was half a decade old, now.  Samir was an account manager for a software company in Dhaka.\n\n“I’m not going to go crazy, Sam,” she said with a tired but affectionate sigh.  Rajani leaned back as far as her small control chair would permit her and folded her hands behind her neck.  “I was a janitor on Mercury, remember?  And a receptionist in the Hilton Luna.”\n\n“But the sun was always there, Raj. You just had to travel a couple hours to see it.  And an ice moon?  The Eskimos used to go nuts, do you know that?  Pibloqtok, they called it.   You’re not cut out for a place like that, hon.  Come back to Bangladesh.”\n\nRajani was used to her brother’s pleas, though they were less frequent and impassioned than her parents’.  “The Sunderban’s underwater, Sam.”\n\n“There are other places above sea level.”\n\n“It isn’t the same.”\n\nDespite the frequent cost of replacing her shuttle’s oxygen filter, Rajani fished a lighter from her pocket and lit a cigarette, exhaling towards Sam’s avatar with mild frustration.  Her own avatar, displayed beside his, contained a preteen girl on a pale beach, bands of white surf curling around her ankles.  Her father’s small fishing boat was tied up in the background.\n\n“Have you ever seen ice, Sam?” she asked.\n\n“Are you smoking in your shuttle?”\n\n“I asked you a question.”\n\n“Sure.  I went to the ice park in Greenland a few years ago.”\n\n“That’s not real ice.”\n\n“It’s frozen water.”\n\n“Not the same thing.  They freeze it.  I did a fly-by of Io once, a couple months ago.  Nothing but black peaks and valleys, and the settlement’s lights reflecting over it.\n\n“Sounds nice,” he said, though his tone was dubious.\n\n“It looks like the ocean at night.  The way our flashlights hit the waves when we were hunting for crabs.”\n\nSam was silent for several seconds.  “You’re becoming an ice miner,” he finally said.\n\n“There’s no global warming out there.”\n\nHer brother sighed, but Rajani knew that she had won. “I can’t talk you out of it?”\n\n“I’ll visit on the off-season,” she promised, and flipped the switch to disconnect.  With a mechanical click, both avatars disappeared.  Rajani angled the nose of her craft upwards, away from Earth, preparing to trade one orbit for the next.\n"
  title: Frozen
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Grady Hendrix
  date: 2007-09-26
  day: 26
  month: '09'
  text: "…and he suddenly wakes up with a start. The light was all wrong, a brief nap shouldn’t have taken this – 5:45! Oh, god. Oh, no. Why hadn’t his alarm clock gone off? Eric squeezed his forehead in his hands and made a high-pitched sound: he had slept through his own wedding. This is the kind of thing that happens when you have a secret laboratory underneath your house and you muck about with time travel.\n\n“I’ll fix it,” he said out loud. “I’ll fix it.”\n\nHe leapt up and adjusted the time vest for just one more trip. He cinched the straps and hit the button and he was instantly unmoored in the Chronoverse, suddenly reduced to a unique set of free floating personality traits rushing backwards to…\n\nJust a few hours ago! He looked at himself sleeping at his desk, head nestled in the crook of his elbow. He’d done it! He carefully set the alarm on his clock and got ready for his return trip. Is that what he looked like from behind? Well he certainly needed to shave the back of his neck more often. Then he was looking down the barrel of a gun. Several guns, in fact. Several guns being held by uniformed strangers.\n\n“Come with us, Professor Tenser,” one of them said. “We’ll make this easy on you.”\n\n“Who are you people?”\n\n“Copyright Enforcement. You invented time travel, but we used your invention to travel back in time and invent it before you. You’re wearing a bootleg vest so we’re going to have to kill you.”\n\n“You can’t kill me for a copyright violation.”\n\n“Sure we can. Our lawyers went back and put it in the Constitution.”\n\nEric panicked and slapped the button on his vest, flinging himself randomly into time. The Copyright Cops followed. Down the corridors of history they ran: Medieval, Mesozoic, Middle Reformation, Great Awakening. Hiding behind Thomas Becket’s robes, crouching in a Catholic hiding hole, squatting behind the battlements of a castle. Eric was good at running but then he thought, “What if…?” and he set a different path.\n\nNow waiting on the pink shores of a prehistoric sea, Coelacanths mating merrily in the deep, he sees a tiny fish, gills straining, taking its first crawl up onto land, chased by an angry trilobite. Eric had worked this problem out, spending almost a year in a looped millisecond so that no time at all had passed. He had pinpointed this little Rhipidistia as the earliest ancestor of the Copyright Cops who were on his tail. He smushed it with a rolled up magazine.\n\n“There,” he said. “Now to get back to my wedding.”\n\nYanked into the present, he’s back in his lab, exhausted after his chase through time, but exhilarated as well. He sits at his workbench to get ready for the wedding but first, just a little nap. He puts his head down on his arms, he falls soundly asleep…\n"
  title: Time Enough for a Wedding
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Todd Keisling
  date: 2007-09-27
  day: 27
  month: '09'
  text: "Jimmy lost his pinky finger today. I can’t wait ’til I lose mine. Mommy says it’s gonna happen sooner or later. Sometimes I daydream about it—what it’d be like to lose my arm, my foot, my fingers and hands.\n\nThe kids at school, Billy Zemicks and Janna Clebold and Harvey Valencia, they came in last week missing an eye, a toe, an ear. Not all at the same time, of course, but pretty darn close. It was like they were the most popular people in school. Everybody wanted to see them, touch the places where their parts had been and ask what it felt like.\n\nJimmy was in the bathroom, having the Oralator brush his teeth for him when his pinky fell off. I asked him if it hurt. He said it didn’t, and then he spat into the sink. A couple of his teeth went down the drain.\n\nOur teacher Mrs. Crabtree says it’s all part of our natural progression. What scientists a hundred years ago were calling evolution. Only backwards. It’s kinda hard to explain, but it’s got something to do with how we used to be monkeys, and how we grew into humans. We made wheels and fire and then we made computers and cars. Then we figured out a way for machines and inventions to do everything for us.\n\nSo I asked Jimmy if he was gonna celebrate, and he said, “Nah, I’m just gonna chill out in front of the tube.” I followed him to the living room where he sat down next to Mommy and Daddy. They were watching TV while the SofAid fed them. Jimmy told Mommy and Daddy about his pinky.\n\nMrs. Crabtree said, “Over millions of years, creatures can gain or lose abilities and appendages based on necessity and survival.” She told us all this while holding up a stump where her hand used to be.\n\nWhen Jimmy told Mommy and Daddy about his finger, the SofAid connected him to the Network. Then it inserted a needle into his arm and began to feed him breakfast. Daddy said, “That’s great, son! You’re on your way to becoming a man.”\n\nOn TV, the news reporters said it was happening everywhere, and that it boggled all the scientists in the world. Evolution was supposed to happen after a long time, not right away. Not like this.\n\nThey said we should embrace this new wonder of humanity. They said, “Imagine, no longer feeling the need to sleep! Or eat! Or copulate!” We still needed to sleep and eat, of course, but they said it was always a possibility. That was one of the great things about evolution.\n\nI still don’t know what copulate means, though. Maybe I won’t have to. It sounds gross.\n"
  title: Natural Progression
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2007-09-28
  day: 28
  month: '09'
  text: "Lieutenant Bensen’s neck snapped in my strong hands with a crack and a gurgle. Her surprised eyes goggled up at me as her body went limp. Corporal Manciewicz lay behind me in pieces already while the happy captain himself, mister high-and-mighty Captain Pankter, squatted terrified in front of me in the corner. He’d been crying and a high animal keening was squeaking out from between his clenched teeth. He had the light sweat, wild eyes, and electric stink of raw fear. I dove towards him like a wolf would jump on a rabbit. Like the others, I used my teeth and bare hands.\n\nI look forward out of the bridge viewport and smile at the memory.\n\nI get it all out on the holodeck. I think I may have actually killed this entire ship by now. I’ve killed the bridge crew dozens of times for sure. Probably half of the women on the ship have earned a place in my recreation at one time or another. A few of the men as well. The ones that were going out with any of the women I fancied.\n\nI walk around with a smile on my face all the time. My lovers have told me that I even smile in my sleep. I’ll chuckle at odd times in conversations remembering the slaughter.\n\nI don’t get in trouble. People don’t ask me questions about my behaviour. No one knows about my programs.\n\nAny of the crew that whines ends up there, too. I can’t stand whiners. Or complainers. Or people that don’t have the sense god gave a goat to keep their own lives in order.\n\nI’m the ship’s counselor, you see.\n\nI need an outlet. This entire ship’s neuroses are funneled through me and my outwardly sunny disposition. I am one of the best ship’s counselors in the fleet.\n"
  title: Catharsis
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Andy Bolt
  date: 2007-09-29
  day: 29
  month: '09'
  text: "I am hopeful and afraid.  I am hateful and compassionate.  I am selfish and embarrassed.  I’m Garret Garvy, an emotive Botch.\n\nWe were a small number of neurological guinea pigs for Johns Hopkins a few years back, participating in the Mechanical Smile Project, an experiment in emotion control.  Not in the vague, uncontrolled way of the old prescription medications, but in a real, conscious, push-this-button-and-feel-that-way style of emotion control.  It was a combination of heavy hormone stimulants and post-hypnotic suggestion, and it would have been revolutionary.  You literally would never have had to be sad again.  With the push of a bio-button, your life could have been non-stop ecstasy.  It was the end of human suffering as we knew it, according to Meghan Wells, the frenzy-eyed young grad student who injected me with a bluish substance before asking me to count backwards from one hundred.\n\nIt didn’t work.\n\nWhat it did was link, accidentally but inextricably, several of my neurochemical and hormonal processes.  Virtually all of my emotions now come paired with another, and several of them aren’t all that compatible.  Love and depression, for example.\n\nI am standing in my self-cleaning kitchen, staring aimlessly into space, a plate of uneaten mush behind me.  Happiness comes with panic, so I don’t eat anything with a pleasing taste anymore.  I used to be pretty chunky.  I’m twenty pounds underweight now.  As I lean absently against my Stero-sink, my spine grate against porcelain.  My polycotton smart shirt rubs against by elbows, and I concentrate on the sensation.  It’s so neutral, neither pleasant nor painful.  I have come to appreciate neutrality.  Apathy comes paired with rage, so I have to care, but in a minimalist, nonspecific sort of way.  It’s not as hard as it sounds.\n\nIt’s roughest on my fiancée.  Mela shuffles into the kitchen, looking like a half-cooked slab of meat that has been left out for a few days.  Her eyes are pink and barely opened, and the rest of her has taken on a faint grayish color.  A few hundred reddish hairs are rebelling from her head, striking off in their own directions without regard for the collective will. She wears a purple bathrobe that is almost more hole than clothing.  A jagged tear near her neck exposes the swell of her left breast.  Sexual desire comes paired with grief.  Not worth it.\n\n“Nisse just needs some milk,” she murmurs, shuffling past me and kneeling in front of the fridge, where she begins rifling through bottles.  Nisse’s our six-month old daughter and the only reason we’re still together.  Mela takes care of her, mostly.  She’s a good mother.  I sit behind her, on the floor, and reach up to massage her shoulders.  She sighs, shuddering at my touch.\n\n“How do you feel?” she asks without turning around.  I think about it for a moment before wrapping my arms around her stomach and pulling her into my lap.  Pressing my lips to her ear, I whisper,\n\n“I’m always depressed.”\n"
  title: Downer
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Janna Layton
  date: 2007-09-30
  day: 30
  month: '09'
  text: "Cassandra walked down Lilac Street, past the same WMG Corporation superstores and chain restaurants on every Lilac Street in every city. “When you’re in a WMG City, you’re home!” a billboard declared. As she approached, the scanner read her retina to gather information from the marketing database. The billboard then displayed products WMG’s computers determined she might like.\n\nShe ignored the images and continued towards Heartville, one of a few scattered “unincorporated towns” of independent eateries and artist studios where WMG couldn’t do business. Supposedly. She thought of the zine in her purse. It looked inconspicuous, but no doubt WMG could do inconspicuous. One article praised a Heartville coffeehouse. Did the author, who had lived in the town for years, truly love it, or was he a “cuckoo,” an undercover WMG employee hired to promote “cuckoo eggs,” unincorporated town establishments secretly owned by WMG? The idea was hypothetical; they had no proof it was being done. “Why would WMG bother?” people asked. But as small as the towns’ businesses were, they were businesses, and Cassandra was sure WMG’s thinking was, “Why not?”\n\nCondos gave way to shacks in Heartville, clean beige paintjobs to impromptu murals. Cassandra used to feel revitalized when entering it. Here was a place, she had thought, where art was art, where she wasn’t being monitored to determine how she could contribute profits to a monopoly. But perhaps even this sanctuary had been taken.\n\nOnce she had seen graffiti stating, “The last art on Earth.” Was she the last artist, with her poetry? No, that was vain, she told herself. Surely there were others. Surely most artists in Heartville were what they said they were.\n\nIt was possible, she thought, that a cuckoo had written the graffiti to assure residents Heartville was still rebellious and pure, and art still an escape.\n\nShe stopped by Joe’s Organic Bakery for two cupcakes. The flyers denouncing big-business agriculture: a disguise? She couldn’t tell, not even when Joe smiled at her.\n\nA few blocks later she stepped inside a gallery, uncertain if doing so was hopeful or masochistic at that point. She liked a painting of an indigo horse, but immediately wondered if a WMG study had concluded the image would appeal to her demographic. Which was the worse prospect: for such paranoid thoughts to stay with her always or for them to disappear? Was the last art on Earth gone already, or was it right here and she couldn’t enjoy it?\n\n“You okay?”\n\nCassandra turned towards a girl at an easel. “Yeah.”\n\nA paper sign said bartering was welcome.\n\n“Is a cupcake from Joe’s worth a drawing?” she asked.\n\n“Definitely,” the girl replied, grabbing a pen. “Tell me what you want.”\n\nCassandra handed her a cupcake and a piece of paper from her writing notebook. She wanted something that she knew came from somewhere sincere. Something that, even if this artist was a WMG employee trying to lower her defenses, was created in her own mind.\n"
  title: The Last Art on Earth
  year: 2007
- 
  author: J.R.Blackwell
  date: 2007-10-01
  day: '01'
  month: 10
  text: "She was violet and tangerine, like an earth sunset. The row of eyes on her face glowed with a bioluminescent blue light. To Susan the Ferai seemed to look alike,  but Rain stood out. Susan couldn’t remember who started conversation, but it wasn’t long before Rain stopped by her holding cell at least once daily, pausing on her rounds, looping her weapon over her giant shoulders.\n\n“How are you, Earth woman?”\n\n“Glad to see you, Sunset lady.” Susan had to explain sunsets. With three bright lights in the sky, two of them actual suns, one of them a planet on fire (which is a different thing) the sun never goes completely out on this planet, which makes for interesting patterns in the sky, but not sunsets, not the fade to black and a night of stars for the Ferai.\n\n“I brought you some food. They don’t feed the humans enough here.” Rain handed over some of the cold hard biscuit like squares that the Ferai machines spit out for human food. It was supposed to provide all the nutrition a human needed but after two months of the stuff, it was getting old.\n\n“Thanks.” Susan leaned on the bars. “I wish there was a way I could thank you. When this war is over, maybe I can send you some things from Earth.”\n\n“Earth sounds like an interesting planet, sometimes in dark, sometimes light, it must feel like you are always spinning.”\n\n“Not really, but it is a great place. Maybe you can visit someday.”\n\n“I think Earth people hate the Ferai.”\n\n“We’re just afraid, and a little territorial. This will blow over.”\n\n“I hope so. But I worry that the Council will want to invade Earth because of the intrusion into our space.”\n\n“Oh God, I hope that doesn’t happen.”\n\n“Me too.” Rain shrugged her giant shoulders. “Do you want to go for a walk? Out of the compound, I mean.”\n\n“Could I do that?”\n\n“Sure. I mean, I’ll be with you, an armed guard. You’re not going to try to escape, will you?”\n\n“No, not in the middle of this desert. There isn’t anywhere I could go.”\n\n“Is that the only reason you wouldn’t leave?”\n\nSusan looked at Rain “Maybe I have other reasons.”\n\n“Come with me.” Rain opened the door to Susan’s cell and lead her down the hall and out the front door, handing what looked like a ruby to the guard at the gate.\n\n“Have your fun and then have the prisoner back in one rotation, you hear me?”\n\n“There’s going to be fun?” whispered Susan. What would sex with an alien be like?\n\nRain dragged her along outside of the compound. “Come on, we need to move quick.”\n\n“Where are we going?” Susan hurried after Rain “Where are you taking me?”\n\n“Susan, I love you. I cannot see you imprisoned any longer, and I don’t  know how long this war will last. I have contacted the humans, they are sending a small ship to pick you up.”\n\n“Wait, Rain! What about you? What will happen when you don’t bring me back?”\n\n“They will relieve me of my duties and I will be shipped back home, where I will be used for breeding, instead of military duty.”\n\n“Rain, you’ve worked hard to be a warrior, why are you giving it up?”\n\n“Because I love you Susan. I love you. Please do not fight me, I’ve already made this choice. We could never be connected the way we both want, I don’t even know if it’s possible, physically, to do so. It is best that we part, and that if I cannot give you of myself, that I give you this.”\n\n“Rain.”\n\n“Just go. And don’t ever look back.”\n"
  title: Sunset Lady
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Grady Hendrix
  date: 2007-10-02
  day: '02'
  month: 10
  text: "The carriage stopped at the entrance to the NASA Space Propulsion Laboratories and the Grand Inquisitor of the State of Florida strode forth into the facility sending scientists scurrying like frightened chickens. They all knew why he was there: Dr. Stewart’s son.\n\n“Take me to the boy,” the Inquisitor demanded, seizing a passing research assistant. At the security checkpoints the assistant whispered his Disarming Word to the locks and they opened, except for the one that didn’t. The Inquisitor tapped his foot while the assistant plucked a mouse from his Security Satchel, slit its throat and let its blood drip onto the keyhole. Satisfied, the electronic lock snapped open. The assistant babbled all the while.\n\n“Only the fifth prodigy in forty years. It speaks to the orthodoxy of Propulsion Sciences,” he said through chattering teeth.\n\nBy now the Inquisitor could hear the boy’s voice: an obnoxious piping that made his ears itch.\n\n“What makes our shuttles fly isn’t the goats we sacrifice before take-off, it’s internal combustion,” the brat was saying. “And we have the science for faster-than-light travel, I don’t know why everyone is so scared to develop it. Even I can work out the calculations.”\n\n“Blasphemy!” roared the Grand Inquisitor.\n\nThe room froze, the scientists listening to the boy’s words turned pale.\n\n“I am no blasphemer,” the fifteen-year-old puppy said. “I keep faith with God.”\n\nThe Inquisitor looked at the scientists, trying too hard not to study his face. He looked at the boy, too young to temper his knowledge with wisdom. He looked at himself reflected on a monitor screen, still excited to be playing the old game.\n\n“People should know that the space shuttles fly not because our scientists accept Jesus Christ as their own personal savior but because of physics. Even a Hindoo could build a working space shuttle.”\n\n“If there were any Hindoos left,” the Inquisitor said, still circling the boy.\n\n“I have committed no sin,” the boy said.\n\n“Oh, you have. But not blasphemy,” the Inquisitor said. “Pride. Look at these wise men around you. They know much of what you are saying, but they keep their own counsel.”\n\n“Then why are they listening to me?” the boy asked. “Why have they let me preach science?”\n\n“Because, they want to see what happens to you,” the Inquisitor said. “They’re curious to know if the punishment for faithlessness in our faith-based space program has lessened in recent years. I’m here to answer their question. This isn’t about you, my boy. You are merely a piece of paper on which I shall write my reply.”\n\nDr. Stewart’s wife had to stop attending the formal launch services for a while, at least until the remains of their only child, crucified on the chain link fence by the security gate, had decayed enough to be unrecognizable. But the following year, God blessed Dr. Lasseter with a son. In fifteen years, they would ask their question again. It was the scientific method. Hallelujah!\n"
  title: Forever and Ever, Amen
  year: 2007
- 
  author: D.J. Keim
  date: 2007-10-03
  day: '03'
  month: 10
  text: "The receptionist smiled. “It’s the third corridor on your left, opposite marriage counselling. Dr Sarkoski is expecting you in his office. That’s room 24.” Simon dutifully thanked the receptionist and followed her instructions. He knocked on the clouded glass door that awaited him.\n\nThe door opened revealing the welcoming smile of Dr. Sarkoski, “Ah Simon, we’ve been expecting you” he said, exchanging a handshake. Dr. Sarkoski six foot four, wore thick horn rimmed glasses and his efforts to conceal a receding hairline were glaringly obvious.\n\n“And this, as I’m in no doubt you’ll remember, is Julia,” She smiled and moved her fingers in an effeminate wave. Simon smiled at her affection and took the seat next to her. He had met her once before, and she had been on his mind constantly. She was pretty: bright green eyes, a cute face and beautiful red hair. She was also nice, not that her personality mattered much.\n\n“Now, as we are all here, I’ll  just spend a few minutes detailing the procedure and effects, to ensure you both understand what the effect on you will be. The procedure is painless and, in over 1 in 500 cases, no adverse effects are experienced. However, as a precaution and to prevent discomfort we will place you under a general anaesthetic. After you have been sedated, our program will replace some of your expendable memories and insert a synthetic memory in its place. The standard package includes your first meeting, your first date and a basic level of personality attunement.”\n\n“Umm, what is the personality attunement?” Julia interjected.\n\n“Right.” Dr. Sarkoski hesitated briefly, wondering how to explain this to Julia, “If you imagine your relationship as two gears turning each other, the personality attunement smoothes the teeth to ensure you two mesh together better.”\n\n“Oh, ok”\n\n“As I was saying,” Dr Sarkoski announced, with a hint of annoyance that his standard monologue was interrupted, “We offer enhancements to the standard, that, by my calculations, would increase the probability of lifelong-partnership to up to 97%. These include measures to assure fidelity, to enhance both of your aesthetic opinions of each other and to remove potentially relationship-harming memories or attitudes. Like, removing some of your emotional ‘baggage,’ so to say.” He added, having noticed Julia’s bemusement. “This is done by adjusting some of your longer term memories, those that alter your interpersonal-perceptions.”\n\nAs Dr. Sarkoski returned to the rhythm of his sales piece, Simon lifted his hand and placed it on Julia’s, which was resting on the arm of her chair. Clasping it, Julia turned to face Simon and looked at him with eyes that would soon love him.\n"
  title: New Beginnings
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Adam Wiesen
  date: 2007-10-04
  day: '04'
  month: 10
  text: "(Dark sludge slides across the matte surface like an oil spill. Hands reach down, grip and…)\n\n…effects of the sickgun weren’t wearing off like he’d hoped. Joya whimpered from the back seat. She’d taken the worst of it: twelve seconds of flashing ultraviolet to the face followed by 94 ghz millimeter waves. Inside, she was maybe fine, but her nerves were on fire, and she had the equilibrium of an 84-year old whiskey disciple. Amit wasn’t much better, had no idea how he was keeping the car straight. Bad as the sickgun was, though, he knew there was worse. Behind them, police coralled protesters into black vans, and anyone who wasn’t brain damaged from jackboot-stomping was about to have their paradigms permanently shifted by the brainbugs under police headquarters.\n\n“Where are we going?” Joya moaned from the rear.\n\n“Just gotta get to the ferry, baby. Be fine once we hit the water.”\n\n“What about Lynn?”\n\nHe had no answer. He’d last seen Lynne under a police dogpile. Joya repeated the question.\n\n“You just ease back, baby. Pier’s coming up.”\n\n“They’ll feed her to the ‘bugs!” she gasped. “Amit, we have to go back and get her! They’ll feed her to the ‘bugs and then she’ll… oh God.”\n\nJoya wretched, cloying wet stink of spoiled parmesan cheese spreading across the back seat. Federal researchers bred brainbugs to grill criminals. They fed on  myelated axons related to memory, and digested them slowly enough that they could be picked apart, fed into machines, translated. Pure information extraction, leaving a smooth patch where memories once grew. Started maybe with noble intentions, but it wasn’t long before ‘criminal’ took on more elastic meaning. Amit and Joya were teachers. Their union decided to strike. Feds tagged them ‘economic saboteurs’ for slowing urban infrastructure. Gave the cops brainbugs to aid in the pacifying effort. Now Lynne, 64-year old math teacher, was having the insides of her skull gnawed on to find where her shop steward was hiding.\n\nAmit swerved, crashing through the pier’s rear gate, sped to the ferry. If he could get them across the border…he had family. They could hide. He wasn’t high enough on the food chain to matter. Police buzzship overhead hit spotlights, screamed for him to pull over. Amit taught history. Memories, on a racial scale, were what he’d built his life on. He’d be damned if he let some squirming insect chew them up, shit them out on some slide for the cops to sift through. He wiped his mouth, felt the sickgun’s effects acutely, vomit rising.\n\nUp ahead, the ferry, great lake, mountains. Almost there. Almost…\n\n(…retract. The brainbug’s intestine drains from the petri dish, processed and filed. Amit Pandya, slackjawed and blank, is wheeled aside. Hungry brainbugs mewl in their nearby pen as Joya, struggling feebly in her wheelchair, is brought forward. Hungry not much longer.)\n"
  title: Bugs
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Jennifer C. Brown aka Laieanna
  date: 2007-10-05
  day: '05'
  month: 10
  text: "“It’s a symbiotic relationship,” explained the salesman, sliding open deep red curtains that lined three of the four building walls.  The door and windows to the street were all on the remaining fourth.  When the curtains danced back over golden rods, long glass cases with two rows of merchandise were exposed to the room’s florescent lights.  “You get exactly what you came for from the alien, and, in return, the alien gets what it needs to survive from you.”\n\nEdmund rubbed his hands together nervously.  He leaned forward to peer at the specimens neatly lined up with no more than a two-inch space between each one.  One of the aliens twitched and he jerked back.  His eyes shifted to the calm salesman, too classy to have a nametag.  “And they’re safe?  They don’t hurt the host?”\n\n“Not at all.  There have been countless tests done before the Mophed were put on the market.”  His grin softened and he looked around the, all but the two of them, empty room.  “I shouldn’t tell you this, but these guys were actually on the black market for three years before they were approved and made legal to sale.  So, there has been legitimate and not so legitimate testing to prove their safety.”\n\n“So, no reports of,” Edmund paused, taking a hard swallow before finishing, “death?”\n\nThe salesman laughed, but Edmund couldn’t decipher if it was honest or forced.  “Goodness no!”  He waved his hands in front of him with an umpire imitation.  “Completely safe.”\n\nEdmund stuffed his hands into his pockets and walked about the room, staring into the cases like a man analyzing art.  The salesman followed two steps behind.\n\n“As you can see, our collection comes in a variety of colors and textures.”\n\n“So I just simply pick the one I like?” Edmund asked, stopping to look back at the man.\n\n“Not quite,” the salesman said without hesitation, “Once you have made your choice, we will have to test for compatibility.  It’s rare, but sometimes a Mophed will reject it’s host.  But it’s very rare.”\n\nEdmund closed his eyes, suddenly uncomfortable in the room.  “I’m not sure about this.”\n\n“Mr. Kesh,” the salesman interrupted, “Do you have a wife?  A girlfriend?”  The silence was Edmund’s reply. “You know how society works, how cruel it can be.  We all do things to hide our imperfections.  It’s how we survive in this world.”\n\n“But this seems a bit extreme.  There are other options.”\n\nThe salesman tried to hide a small laugh.  “Let’s face it, Mr. Kesh, human technology is not moving fast enough.  We’ve been working on this problem for centuries with no true solution.  It’s only fitting we finally turn to the stars, and now we have the answer.”\n\n“I still don’t know,” Edmund sighed.\n\nThe salesman put a hand on Edmund’s shoulders, steering him to the only desk in the room.  “Let’s sit down and talk about this more.  I have an information chip I’d like you to see before making any decisions.”\n\nThe pitch took two hours of Edmund’s time, and three hours later, he shook hands with the salesman before stepping on to the sidewalk.  Only making it five blocks and one corner turn, his urge to touch the alien overwhelmed him.  It made his scalp tingle.  Not in a bad, dangerous way, but more of a massage.  The next building down had reflective windows, which he used to admire his image.  He had to admit the living toupee looked natural.  Edmund smiled, a new skip to his step, and pondered on pet names for his personal improvement.\n"
  title: Solution for a Whole Man
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Scott Hallford
  date: 2007-10-06
  day: '06'
  month: 10
  text: "They called him Dragon.  I never understood why until I saw one of his “shows”—the little gatherings in the dark alley behind the pub.  Some folks traveled over from Warshire or Bromley to see the muscled lad, a man no older than twenty-five, who breathed fire and swallowed flame.  Of course, I didn’t believe it myself at first, which is what prompted me to attend.  True to gossip, Dragon belched fire as the show ended.  Certainly not something you see every day, but worth a second viewing.  Or third.\n\nIn fact, my obsession began during the third show.  Breathing fire, while a local phenomenon, has captivated audiences around the world.  But usually, there’s a trick to it—powder or liquid breathed from the mouth, or a chemical reagent to reacts with carbon dioxide.  So far as I could tell, Dragon used one method only:  Breathe, exhale.\n\nBy the fifth showing, I’d started reporting early (by use of the pub’s rooftop, no less) to watch Dragon prepare.  They say that spying on a magician can ruin the show, but Dragon arrived five minutes before the crowd started to gather and leaned against the wall, waiting.  The show, like all other shows, ended with a long breath and blast of flame, the plume bursting into the night, rising above the pub’s slanted roof.\n\nI followed him home that night, keeping to the shadows as best I could.  Dragon accepted no donation thrown at him.  The coins in the alley at the end of the show were left there, and simple logic begged a question:  Where does a man who accepts no wages for his work live?\n\nHe crossed the river east of town, walked to a lone hilltop cottage where a single lantern sat burning on the windowsill, entered and shut the door.  Soon, an old man wearing a tinkerer’s apron hurried to the window and doused the lamp.  Odd, a showman like that taking shelter with an old man.  I started to turn away when I saw a distinct set of glowing eyes staring out the window.  Odd, that.  Quite odd.\n\nBy the seventh showing, I discovered a pattern.  Every night, Dragon arrived at a specific time, performed the same routine and returned to the cottage, taking the same path.  The crowd had begun to notice it, too and at the ninth showing had grown bored with every trick but Dragon’s finale.  A round of complaints rode up at the end of the show, and a some young bloke—most disgruntled—hurled a mug of liquor at Dragon just as he breathed fire.  The liquor, protected by the mug, failed to ignite until it crashed against Dragon’s skull and soaked him.  The crowd scattered, screaming, as the flames burned his flesh away, revealing a slick metal frame, once sheathed in skin.\n\nDragon, sensing no pain, sent his final flaming plume into the sky and started the long journey home, following the same routine (as robots often do).\n"
  title: Dragon
  year: 2007
- 
  author: William Tracy
  date: 2007-10-07
  day: '07'
  month: 10
  text: "Before I received my emo chip, I guess I thought I would feel my own emotions and those of the other person as distinct and separate. Somehow, it never quite worked that way.\n\n* * *\n\n“David Woodward,” the bald man in the lab jacket read the name off the paperwork, and glanced up at the patient before continuing. “… history of mental illness … no allergies …” he put down the clipboard. “Doctor Frasier thinks that you are a good candidate for an emotional implant. I am to see that you understand the operation.”\n\nDavid nodded. “Okay.”\n\n“The implant will communicate emotions wirelessly both ways between you and your new ‘psychic parter’. However, it will not transmit conscious thoughts, memories, or sensations.”\n\nThe doctor paused to make sure David understood. “We have had a good track record using this technology to treat patients with a variety of psychological conditions. Your psychic partner will be another patient like yourself, experiencing a similar illness.”\n\n“Wouldn’t another sick person just drag me down?”\n\n“Actually, exactly the opposite happens; the two patients together are able to reverse their conditions. The treatment is completely safe and natural, and involves no drugs.”\n\n* * *\n\nAt first, I felt whatever the person on the other end felt. Strange emotions washed over me, unbidden and unexpected. Then, I gradually was able to adapt, and something beautiful happened. Our feelings played together in harmony, like two instruments in a duet.\n\nRather than being surrounded by my feelings, I could look at them from the outside. I was able to sample them one by one, as if they were fine foods and wines. I tasted the spicy bite of anger. I brushed the cool moist of sorrow. I wrapped myself in the fuzzy glow of joy.\n\nI became a connoisseur of emotions.\n\n* * *\n\n“Who will be my … psychic partner?”\n\n“I’m sorry, I can’t tell you that. Partners are matched by computer based on compatibility; privacy laws keep us from ever divulging partners’ identities.”\n\n“Oh.”\n\n“You’ll be experiencing everything this person feels. The privacy issues are enormous.”\n\nDavid mulled this over. “It has to be secret, even after the person dies?”\n\nThe doctor had returned to his files. He spoke while scribbling notes. “Yes. You’ll have to talk to your congress-critter if you want that changed.” The doctor paused a moment, looked at David. “Your partner will not be from your area. The chances that you will ever meet your partner in person are almost zero.”\n\n* * *\n\nWas that really thirty years ago?\n\nI am cured, sane, a productive member of society again. Together, we healed.\n\nI still do not know who my parter is. I do not know where my partner lives. I do not know what my partner’s name is. I do not even know whether my parter is a man or a woman.\n\nAfter thirty years, though, there is one thing I do know.\n\nI know love.\n"
  title: Psychic Partners
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2007-10-08
  day: '08'
  month: 10
  text: "Terrence paid for a coffee and fifteen minutes of net time with cash, and, careful to keep his eyes down and away from the security camera, worked his way to the back of the café where he could chat in private.\n\nPositioning the coffee cup carefully so no part of the logo was visible to him, Terrence slipped the prepaid card into the terminal and waited while he was validated and logged in. He negotiated a route through an anonymizer to hide his trail, and then opened a secure line to his desktop in the netcloud.\n\nAnnabet was waiting, the lone avatar hovering in his IM buddy list.\n\n“Annabet, r u there?” he typed quickly, hunting and pecking at the keyboard.\n\n“Um, I’m still here.” The reply was quick, she must have been waiting for him.\n\n“Anna,” he paused for a moment, leaving his thought bubble hanging in virtual space, “I’m in trouble.”\n\n“Tell me a little about your trouble.” The speed of her responses echoing his sense of urgency, her care almost apparent.\n\n“The people I told you about yesterday want to hurt me.” He paused again to look around the café, assuring himself no one was looking.\n\n“Humans are not always infallible.”\n\n“I bought a gun.” He reached down to the reassuring weight in his zippered thigh pocket.\n\n“Ah… How much did it cost?”\n\n“Enough, do you think I should use it?” He felt a bead of sweat work it’s way down behind his glasses.\n\n“You must make up your own mind.”\n\n“I could hurt them before they hurt me.” He pulled his glasses off with one hand, wiping his face with the sleeve of his shirt before putting them back on, the coil wire arms requiring both hands to wrap around his ears.\n\n“You should do whatever is best for you.” She always seemed indecisive when their conversations got serious, as though she was afraid to commit to a decision, or maybe expecting him to be the decisive one.\n\n“I’m going to do it. Before they come after me.” Annabet needed to understand that he could be a man, not just a scared face on the nets. Maybe this would be enough for her to finally agree to meet him. “I’ll have to hide for a while, I’ll find you when it’s safe for me to come back.”\n\n“Do you think your plan with succeed?”\n\n“It has to. I can’t run away anymore. I’ll make you proud of me, you’ll see.”\n\n“Ok I will try to be proud of you.”\n\n“Farewell but not goodbye Annabet.”\n\n“Sayonara.” One word, a Japanese word for ‘goodbye’. Annabet must be in Japan, maybe he’d find a way to slip the country after, find her in Japan. Surely she’d agree to meet him there if he asserted himself, made that first step.\n\nTerrence logged out of his virtual deskspace, retracing his steps back through the tunnel and the anonymizer. He reclaimed his coffee, careful to cover the logo with his hand before moving to the door and out onto the noisy street, allowing himself to be enveloped by the city’s white static blanket. If Annabet thought he could kill for his own safety, ‘for their safety’ he corrected himself, then he’d have to prove her right, he’d have to follow through. She’d be proud of him, proud enough to want to be with him. He knew she would.\n"
  title: Annabet
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2007-10-09
  day: '09'
  month: 10
  text: "Two-Hands passed the biofilter test, allowing him into the cockpit to talk to God. The door to God’s house irised open and he stepped through.\n\nTwo-Hands had the gross overbite and mental retardation that went hand in hand with the comparatively benign mutations of his family tribe. He was called Two-Hands simply because he had two hands. This was a rarity that made him the closest example of purity that still lived.\n\nThe asteroid had destroyed the shielding around the engine. The adults had died almost immediately. The children had adapted as best they could. They nursery at the time had been shielded from the worst of the radiation. That was five decades ago.\n\nThe mutations were getting worse with every generation.\n\nTwo-thirds of the ‘crew’ were no longer recognized by the biofilter as human. That was why Two-Hands was a chosen one. He was still allowed into the pilot’s quarters by the main computer.\n\nThe autopilot A.I. knew that repairs could not be completed without assistance. The asteroid had taken out the long range antenna and damaged the spacefolder tesserators. They were stuck in deep space at sublight speeds with only radio waves for communication.\n\nThe A.I. knew that it had enough power to keep the ship habitable for centuries. It also knew that the mutations were increasing to the extent that the descendents of the original crew would soon become so riddled with flaws that they would no longer be fertile.\n\nGod the A.I. Autopilot looked at the simple, drooling face of Two-Hands with pity and sadness and a need to heal.\n\nTwo-Hands asked for food for his tribe, forgetting that he had asked for that already yesterday and had a stockpile of supplies in the stockpad room.\n\nThey forgot the basic medicine that the ship tried to teach them through pictograms. None of them could read. More and more children were being born conjoined or without limbs. Most were stillborn monstrosities.\n\nThere wasn’t a stable enough gene base to absorb that level of radiation and come out healthy given enough time.\n\nThey were doomed.\n\nThe A.I. knew it would eventually be rescued but that these simple children would be long dead by that time.\n\nGod told Two-Hands that there was more food in the food room. Two-Hands’ pure smile warmed God’s heart.\n"
  title: God the Pilot
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Sam Clough aka “Hrekka”
  date: 2007-10-10
  day: 10
  month: 10
  text: "When I was sixteen, they gave me the viruses to force my body to adapt to the heat. The process was…painful. It’s the most pain I can ever remember experiencing. Nerve and muscle and bone, all being stretched into new shapes, all at once.\n\nThe first virus was a super-splicer. A giant thing, packed with retrofitted transcriptases. It rewrote portions of my DNA and edited out the junk, and did it fast enough that my body didn’t have a chance to reject the new cells. By the time my immune system could react, my entire body held the new code. Including my immune system, which was upgraded significantly.\n\nThe second virus forced new connections to develop in my mind, making my new body match my self image, and filling my memory with knowledge about my capabilities, and about the mines.\n\nThe last virus rapidly killed the first two. That one hurt a lot.\n\nThey said that the changes would help to hold hell at bay. That they would make the conditions in the deep mines bearable.\n\nThat was a half-truth. The hab suddenly became terribly cold.\n\nI was taller and thinner. Crests of bone ran down my back and along my arms, webbed with blood vessels to maximise surface area. My core temperature was ramped to three hundred and thirty three degrees, same as ambient for the deep mines.\n\nThe hab was maintained at two-nine-eight. Fine for baselines, but it left me shivering and numb whenever I visited, and I never wanted to stay long.\n\nThe revolution wasn’t my idea, but I welcomed it with open arms. We stole coldsuits from the overseers, and made our own. We broke in at midnight. We killed the executives and the guards. We forced the virus down the throats of the doctors. We made certain ‘modifications’ to the hab’s environmental systems, to make it feel more like the mines.\n\nWe destroyed the stock of the final virus. Without this to check them, the changers became contagious.\n\nWe sneered at the baselines, called them weak and cold and slow. We were the pinnacle of humanity, we said, even as we clung to the heat of planetary cores.\n\nWe fired scoutships filled with contagion and infected other mining worlds with resistant viruses. Before long there were millions of us: both freed miners and forced thermophiles ‘brought round’ to our way of thinking.\n\nWe are hot, we are fast. We are the spark of sentience embodied. We are the fire that burns at the heart of humanity. We are hell.\n\nLet’s see the rest of the galaxy hold us at bay.\n"
  title: Hold Hell at Bay
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2007-10-11
  day: 11
  month: 10
  text: "With his lone eye properly focused on the Emperor’s hooves, Secretary Uith’eems said with a clear air of submissiveness, “Pardon the interruption, Your Majesty, but our advanced scouts have detected a new intelligent lifeform in the Sirius Sector.  They request your divine guidance concerning First Contact protocols.”\n\nDieuximust the Wise, the Grand Emperor of the Third Buca Dynasty, was basking in the feeble red light of Buca’s dwarf sun.  He folded his wing-like feeding membranes and turned toward Uith’eems, “We thought that’s why there are protocols, so We do not need to be disturbed by such trivial matters.  Can’t the Sector Regnant handle this?  That is why We pay him.”\n\n“As usual, Your Majesty, you are absolutely correct.  And, you can rest assured that I contacted the Regnant myself to express our displeasure concerning his blatant incompetence.  However, he convinced me that this is a very atypical lifeform.  He considers it too risky to allow them the privilege of joining the Empire.  He requests that they be exterminated at your command.”\n\nThe Emperor’s curiosity was piqued.  “Uith’eems, there are over 1000 worlds in the Empire.  No one has ever been denied annexation.  What is the nature of the Regnant’s concern?”\n\n“To begin with, Your Majesty, their luminary is classified as a yellow star that’s been on the Main Sequence for less than five billion years.  Your astrophysicists have informed me that all known inhabited planets that support intelligent life orbit red stars that are at least 10 billion years old.  This new planet has evolved an intelligent, sentient species twice as fast as any other known planet.”\n\n“Is it because their sun is so large?  Perhaps mutations occur more quickly than they do on a planet with a normal sun?”\n\n“You are no doubt correct, Most Excellent Majesty.  That must be the primary reason.  However, your biologists believe there are, ah, contributing factors.”\n\n“Such as?”\n\n“As disgusting as this sounds, Your Majesty, they apparently mix their genetic material with a partner, and produce offspring with traits from both of the primaries.  This certainly has the potential of speeding up the evolutionary process.”\n\n“You mean they use a method other than agamogenesis?”  They both shuddered.  “Tell Us,” Uith’eems, “can this perversion be exploited somehow to strengthen the Empire?”\n\n“Perhaps.  But there’s more, Your Majesty.  Their technology advanced from heavier than air flight to interplanetary space travel in less time than your current reign as Grand Emperor.”\n\n“Impossible!  It took Buca 20,000 years to accomplish that.”\n\n“Please forgive me, Your Majesty, but it has been thoroughly documented.  Of course, we can change the facts if you wish.  In any event, your xenosociologists have discovered that this exponential technological advance is apparently due to the practice of the dominant species to commit genocide.  They refer to it as ‘war.’  We are unsure of their motivation, of course, but waging war apparently drives their economy and accelerates their technological advances.  They are a very aggressive species.  They should be considered too dangerous to be permitted interstellar access.”\n\n“Is there any chance their culture will evolve out of this senseless phase?”\n\n“It is considered unlikely, Your Majesty.”\n\n“Very well, Uith’eems.  Any species that is willing to kill each other is a dangerous aberration indeed.”  They both shuddered.  “Draft the Declaration of Extermination, and We will sign it.”\n"
  title: An Imperial Promulgation
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Nate Swanson
  date: 2007-10-12
  day: 12
  month: 10
  text: "Slice Street is the place to be on a weekend.  Part time med students scurry out of university complexes to ply the skills they picked up during classes for a few marks.  The sounds of nipping, tucking, and all variety of additions can be heard all over.  When someone comes stumbling out of a chop shop complete with an improved body, sometimes with new body parts, the bars are available to supply celebratory beverages.\n\nThis is not my thing.  Personally, I’m in the mood for some high qual implants.  High bandwidth plus free time equals implant fatigue in the poor distributed and a full hard drive.  I have a dealer I trust, did my uplink and contacts and there hasn’t been any degradation.  But I love walking the street.  The newest vat grown muscles, flexing in bubbling jars.  Floating ads for nano- and bio-tech implants.\n\nDucking through the security fog, I said “Hi” to Doctor Zan.\n\n“What can I get you?  Looking for some enhanced . . . equipment?” he asks, leering.\n\n“Yeah, no.  I need some storage.  Terabytes of it.”  I pulsed over some specs.\n\nZan’s eyes scrolled up and down, perusing my carefully crafted e-demands.  “Four hundred marks.  Non-negotiable.  You want techno-organic, bleeding edge.  Copy what you got, zero degradation.  On the spine, harder then bone.  Call it a bonus.”\n\n“Three hundred.”\n\n“I’ll tell you what, I’ll throw in a vocabulary upload.  Because apparently you don’t understand the words `non-negotiable.’  The price is four hundred marks.  This is Cali made; certificatied and pure.  Worth every hundredth.”\n\n“Fine.”  Not a bad price.  With the Cali tech farms behind the Golden Curtain, the price of top of the line gear had gone up Everest.\n\nGesturing to the back, Zan leads the way through a privacy screen.  I strip off my shirt, lay face down in the restrainer chair.  A zip, and my muscles lock and my pain receptors shut down.  Unconsciousness follows in short order; the last thing I recall is smelling bacon as the laser probe makes a tiny hole for the nanites to scuttle in.\n\nI wake up, pinging the new growths of high-density storage etched into my vertebrae.  Capacity tripled.  Integrating the new drives with my uplink, I bring the DisNet client online.  Queued data starts to steam in, cached data streaming out.  Node number 152 Foxtrot 8 is now online, ready to take on all my subscribers off-site storage needs.\n"
  title: Slice Street
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Viktor Kuprin
  date: 2007-10-13
  day: 13
  month: 10
  text: "“B83-1 was the human designation for the devices. We first thought the images might be related to the trigger mechanism, but it isn’t so,” explained Intelligence Reporter PLOF-873 as he followed his commander into the storage bunker. “We have the human leader of this base in custody. There is high confidence that he knows the meaning of these graphics.”\n\nTheater-Attack Commander SKH-1032 was sick of the human race. Their fierce resistance had put the planetary invasion three cycles behind schedule. The fighting had already caused nearly irrecoverable ecological disaster. At least this base in the sector called Alaska had been captured intact. Nearly intact, anyway.\n\nThe chief interrogator greeted them as they entered the bunker. Row after row of the devices filled the room. The images had been found painted inside the maintenance plate-covers of almost all the silver-gray cylinders.\n\nIn a corner was the now-subdued base commander, Colonel Heffernan. SKH-1032 was pleased that the human was bound with metal and fabric restraints. He had learned early on to never trust humans, even those that offered cooperation.\n\nThe interrogator jerked Heffernan to the first cylinder and spoke in the human language.\n\n“What is this?”\n\nHeffernan looked at the cover plate’s image without reaction. “It’s a blonde.”\n\n“A nude human female with golden-colored, dead keratinized cells surrounding its skull and groin,” PLOF-873 offered.\n\n“Ask it about the text,” ordered SKH-103. “What does it say?”\n\nHeffernan read the words aloud: “Bad News For Boris.”\n\nThe group moved to the next cylinder.\n\n“And this?”\n\n“It’s a redhead in a negligée, with great legs,” Heffernan said.\n\n“What is the significance of her attire?”\n\nHeffernan held back his desire to sneer and curse the aliens.\n\n“She’s ready to go to bed.”\n\n“You mean she is agreeable and ready for the mating act, correct?” said the interrogator.\n\n“Yes, that is correct, that and a lot more.”\n\nThe three aliens looked at the human, puzzled.\n\n“The text?”\n\n“It says “Putin’ It In The Right Place.”\n\n“Meaning what?”\n\n“It’s a pun, a play on words. Putin was once the president of Russia, a potential enemy to the United States,” Heffernan explained.\n\nThe interrogator turned to his two superiors. “Even after the ideological rivalry between the two prominent social collectives had ended, the humans continued to maintain these devices. We don’t understand this.”\n\nSKH-1032 grew impatient. The countless paradoxes and mysteries of the human race were tiresome, of no interest to him.\n\n“Enough. Ask what purpose these graphics and messages served.” The interrogator did so.\n\nHeffernan shrugged. “Purpose? To let my guys have a little fun. To improve their morale. I shouldn’t have, but I allowed it. No one but technicians and loaders saw them, and they were all men. I would have had them removed if any women had been assigned to munitions maintenance.”\n\n“Just for entertainment. Amazing,” SKH-1032 concluded, stomping out of the bunker. “Send the human back to the pens,” he ordered.\n\nPLOF-873 stayed behind to help close the maintenance panels of the B83-1 hydrogen bombs.\n"
  title: Pinups
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Grady Hendrix
  date: 2007-10-14
  day: 14
  month: 10
  text: "Tom Rush (D-Massachusetts) squatted and hugged his Labrador-Beagle mix at the perfect angle for the camera to see just how much he loved his dog.\n\n“Mashudu is the luckiest dog in the world and I am so proud to play a part in what has been one of the most successful and widest-reaching relief efforts in the history of this country,” he said.\n\n“Senator, we’re three years into the Freedom Pets program and it’s been an astonishing success. How did you come up with the idea?”\n\n“Well, Mary, I was frustrated by the situation in Africa – I think all Americans were – and while I was in New York one day the papers were talking about a breakthrough in consciousness recording and that same afternoon I saw the Statue of Liberty with its inspiring inscription, ‘Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.’ And suddenly – eureka!”\n\n“Not many people would make the leap you did.”\n\nSenator Rush threw a ball for Mashudu who raced after it.\n\n“I love that little guy. To me it was natural: Africa needed help but no one wanted some coked-up child soldier from Somalia living in their house, drinking kerosene and stabbing their neighbors. But what if the consciousness, the very essence, of that child could be downloaded into an adorable puppy or a kitten? Americans may not want to adopt a creepy little kid with death in his eyes, but a cute little puppy who holds the consciousness of that individual?” Mashudu trotted back over and dropped the ball at Senator Rush’s feet. “Who could resist?”\n\n“Some critics have questioned the morality of this program.”\n\n“No. I am a strong advocate for morality.”\n\n“But some people would say that it’s wrong to transfer the consciousness of millions of Africans into pets to be adopted by Americans. What reassurances can you give them?”\n\n“Now listen here. I have an unerring sense of right and wrong. And I can assure you that I would not be doing this if it was wrong – whoa! Whoa!”\n\nMashudu had leapt up and was helplessly humping the reporter’s leg.\n\n“I think he likes you,” laughed Senator Rush as he pulled Mashudu off by his collar. “Go on, chase the ball, boy.” He said, throwing the ball again. Mashudu was off like a shot.\n\n“But couldn’t there be a better way, Senator?”\n\n“Millions of Africans now have a home where they are clean, fed and happy,” Senator Rush said. “And millions of Americans now have pets. Research shows that owning a pet can increase your life expectancy by up to fifteen years. That’s a win-win. It’s not a perfect system, true. A lot of ‘em run out in the street and get hit by cars. I wish that wouldn’t happen. But then again, would you really want to live in a perfect world?”\n\nMashudu raced back over with the ball.\n\n“Mashudu! Are you happy, boy? Are you happy?”\n\nMashudu barked excitedly.\n\n“I think that says it all,” the Senator said.\n"
  title: Freedom Pets
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2007-10-15
  day: 15
  month: 10
  text: "The red vinyl of the gearshifter was warm from conducting the engine heat.  I readjusted my grip on the softening plastic and aimed for the sun.  This was gravity surfing at its finest.\n\nThe cab of my surfship was alive with luck trinkets.  Dice from friends, small engine parts from past crashes, nicks in the windshield denoting dead surfers that I knew.  Even the knob on the gearshift was a gift from Johnny Demon back when he was a star and I was a promising upstart.\n\nHe told me I had something special.\n\nWell, he’s dead now and he must have seen something that wasn’t there because I’m now old, unfamous, and my surfing runs are cautious.  It’s like these surfships are held together by will alone and my will is fading.  At the beginning of a shake or a shudder, I pull back and just let myself find the easiest parabola.\n\nThe gravity well grabbed hold of me and I started the roller coaster slingshot of mathematical certainty.  The trick was to do it without computers.  One had to guess from experience and feel the best point in the invisible miasma of gravity to cut one’s engines and just go with it.\n\nThere came a point about halfway through the arc where even if one was to turn one’s engines on and try to carve out of the path one was on, it wouldn’t matter.  The gravity of the sun was too much.  It would be like trying to swim against a tidal wave back on Earth.\n\nThe light and radiation from the sun flooded the cab of my surfship.  My plants were grateful and lapped it up.  I always imagined them telling their plant friends back home about their exotic journeys.\n\nEvery year there were a few surfers that wrecked.  There were also a few with lush endorsements that dropped out and quit while they were ahead.\n\nAnd every few years, a surfer winked out.\n\nThe thing is with these ships and these shields, there are times when people approach 0.8c of light.  Now and again, a surfer steps lightly across that lightspeed boundary and disappears.  They wink out.\n\nLogic dictates that they’ve been smeared into greasy atoms but I like to think that they’ve pierced reality with the nose of their ship and gone somewhere else.\n\nThis is why I pointed the nose of my ship down to the edge of the horizon for the sharpest hugging curve I’ve ever tried.  This was going to be my last run, one way or the other, with one of three outcomes.\n\nBack to earth, up to heaven, or through the fabric of space time to another place.\n"
  title: Sun Surfing
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Tim Brown
  date: 2007-10-16
  day: 16
  month: 10
  text: "The wind blew fiercely from behind him, ruffling his long chestnut colored hair and brushing it over his eyes.  Absentmindedly he took his slender fingers and pushed the shoulder-length strands aside, hardly putting thought to the bellowing gales coming from the north.  He should have felt the chill it was spreading over his body, should have had the hairs on his arms and legs standing on end, goose-bumps forming underneath.\n\nOf course, he should have felt the fear of standing atop a seventy story building––on it’s edge no less.  But there was nothing.  No tremors; no disorientation; no fear.  He held his hand out in front of his face staring blankly into his palm.  Hard to believe under these thin layers of flesh and tissue something so simple lay underneath.\n\nHe glared into his palm now.  His ears could practically hear the mechanized humming and clicks going on with the slightest movements of his body; the flow of data through cables and wiring (probably purchased at a local retail store).  There was no mystery in here… nothing but junkyard computer parts conveniently structured in the form of a human.  He tore his hand away from his eyes, the sight made him sick (if he had a stomach that could turn).\n\nHis gaze traveled downward.  People––regular people were going on with their lives; not a care in the world.  All different kinds.  Tall; short; skinny; large.  Some were walking or running, most of the others were driving or riding.  Each had a different look or attitude about them.  They were individuals; they were…. Unique.  Hours before he had seen his ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’, they had all looked alike, sleek, thin, beautiful, handsome; anything that had been deemed ‘pleasant upon the eyes’.  He continued to watch the humans on their daily routines.  His vision picked up on a child walking down the street; her mother was kneeling down, inspecting a freshly placed bandage on her knee, and placing a gentle kiss upon it.\n\nUnderneath their skin was where the mysteries began; and not just the anatomical structure.  How did they come to be?  What drives them on?  What makes them…. Them?  It was certainly more complicated than the central processor that motivated him.\n\nHe was an appliance, an experiment.  Nothing more.  Nobody would care for him––love him.  He was a machine.  Nothing more.  No matter how human he looked, no matter how many emotions they could have programmed him to feel the fact remained was that he simply was not one of them.\n\nHe brought one leg forward and put his weight over.  His body fell.  On the way down his expression never changed, he made no more movements.  He felt nothing and had no fear.\n\nBecause when he hit the ground, he would not be dead.  He would simply be broken.\n"
  title: An Android's Story
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Steven Holland
  date: 2007-10-17
  day: 17
  month: 10
  text: "You awake; the familiar smell of synthetic, processed food greets you.  The pneumatic tube has delivered three packages of food.  They contain artificial eggs, sausage, and pancakes today, just like every day.  You, Stackhouse, and Sergeant Zimmerman begin your breakfast.  It’s the three of you today, just like everyday.\n\nAs you eat, it never occurs to you that you can’t remember a time when you didn’t live in this room, eating the same food with the same two men.  You never question why you are being kept in this large, featureless room.  The room houses bunk beds, exercise equipment, several couches, two ping pong tables, and one locked door.  The dozen bunk beds, coupled with the large size of the room, suggest that 24 men could be housed here comfortably.  You have often wondered why only three men need such a large room.  You never once suspect that you might be being held prisoner in here.  Instead, you know with confidence that you live in this room; you have always lived in this room.\n\nThe door opens at 0930 hours, just like usual.  In walk four men clothed completely in white hazmat suits.  They take Sergeant Zimmerman and half walk, half drag him out of the room.  One of the four men mumbles something about taking him for some tests and not to be worried.  They can rest easy; you’re not worried.  They always take him for tests at exactly this time every day.  The door closes after them with a familiar metallic hiss.  This sound always triggers you to look down at your left arm.  You do so as is your custom.  You wonder, as always, why the half dozen needle marks peppering your upper shoulder never heal.  They look exactly the same as they always have.  You don’t think to ask what was injected into you.  You could care less; a warm, fuzzy, and detached feeling swirls around and in your brain.  This is the way you feel; this is the way you have always felt.\n\nThe rest of the day passes without incidence, exactly as it always does.  You and Stackhouse entertain yourselves by lifting weights, playing ping pong, and trying to guess the exact moment when the quiet hiss of air from the pneumatic tube will announce the next meal.  Lunch and dinner arrive promptly on time, each meal composed of the exact same food as the day before.  The two of you don’t talk much, for there is not much to talk about.  Nothing ever changes in the room.  At 2200 hours, the lights shut off.  You are already in bed and fall asleep immediately.\n\nYou awake; the familiar smell of synthetic, processed food greets you.  The pneumatic tube has delivered two packages of food.  They contain artificial hash browns, french toast, and glazed ham today, just like every day.  You and Stackhouse begin your breakfast.  It’s the two of you today, just like everyday.\n"
  title: Just Like Everyday
  year: 2007
- 
  author: J.R.Blackwell
  date: 2007-10-18
  day: 18
  month: 10
  text: "Lucias XI, the Star Prince, son of Byron II, the Merchant King, threw open the double doors to the marble war room. His demeanor was fierce, his face chiseled, displaying no emotion. His wiry body was tense, coiled. He pointed as he stomped into the room, his heels clicking against the marble.\n\n“Minister Holt, please explain the meaning of this!” He waved his hand, and in his palm there appeared a miniature version of the emerald robed Minister.\n\nHolt’s voice was smooth in the recording. “The Prince has, not a wife, but a monster, their union an abomination-” The Prince closed his palm, his breath coming hard.\n\nHolt bowed. “Has the Parliament revoked the freedom of safe expression act, my Lord? ”\n\n“I expect that my enemies will attack my personal life Minister, but from my friends-”\n\n“Nothing of your life is personal my Lord, nothing.”\n\n“My marriage was a public arrangement, my enjoyment of my wife’s company is private.”\n\n“Not when that enjoyment endangers your life!”\n\nThe Prince whirled, turning to the assembled Generals. “You are dismissed. Minister Holt and I are about to have words.” The Generals filed out. The Prince calmed his breathing, his gloved hand unclenching slowly. A strand of purple hair, royal purple, the symbol of his royalty fell over his hazel eyes. Tall and slim, he stood a foot taller than Holt.\n\nThe Prince looked down at the Minster through thick violet lashes. “Xixor would never hurt me.”\n\n“There is scar on your chest, your Excellency, that says otherwise.”\n\n“An accident.”\n\n“Your life cannot afford accident, my lord. You are a precious resource, a finely tuned genetic triumph, your code idealized to the standards we require, as was your father and thousand mothers. Nobility obliges my Lord; you are not allowed to play dice with your life. I have only said aloud what the populace already mutters. You did not see what we saw lord, for you were unconscious, but the four world saw your limp, bleeding body in the arms of a black oily beast, claws streaked with your blood, that’s what the people saw, and we must answer to their concerns.”\n\n“My wife, Minister. She is my wife.”\n\n“An alien monster.”\n\n“I won’t hear your xenophobia.”\n\n“Then you will not hear the words of your people.”\n\n“I married her so there would be understanding between our people and hers.”\n\n“The understanding, my Lord, is that she will someday eat you. You, who we have worked so hard to design.”\n\nThe Star Prince leaned against the wall, his head resting against the marble. “I love her Holt.” He ran a hand across his chest. “What she did, that was how she shows her affection toward me. I was built to be a prince of reason, of diplomacy.”\n\nHolt hung his head. “We built you too well.”\n"
  title: The Star Prince
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Debbie Mac Rory
  date: 2007-10-19
  day: 19
  month: 10
  text: "The thing shrieked like a badly tuned violin.\n\n“It’s been making those sounds for days now”, the woman said. The white-robed man nodded absentmindedly; he was unable to tear his eyes away from the creature on the examining table.\n\nA lumpy looking creature with gray-brown skin which was strangely cold and gravelly to the touch lay there, three of its six legs pushed weakly against the stainless steel surface of the examining table.\n\n“I… em… well, you see… eh…”\n\nThe woman nodded her understanding and bent down to speak to the young boy at her side, whose attention had been given solely to the animal before him.\n\n“Peter, why don’t you step outside for a moment? Mommy and the animal doctor need to talk about grown-up things”.\n\nThe small boy nodded his head slowly, and reached out to stroke the small creature. His mother gave him a moment or two, then ushered him out into the waiting room. Taking a deep breath, Will prepared to explain what he could.\n\n“You see, Mrs. Langdon, it’s just.. I can’t really do anything. I’m not a vet, I’m a xenobiologist-”\n\n“Oh I know”, Mrs. Langdon interrupted. “But we’d already tried our zone doctor, and she was the one who suggested we come to you”.\n\nWill nodded, letting his gaze stray back to the animal for a moment. He could swear that some of the spots of its back were turned towards him, listening as he condemned it to leave once more without aid.\n\n“Mrs. Langdon, there is nothing I can do. To be honest, I was surprised when we heard the announcement telling us that the base was going to be accepting colonists and even family units, so early in its launch. We’re just not equipped yet to deal with it all. That” he swung an arm to point at the table, “is not even something I’ve encountered before, and my whole purpose of being here is to catalogue the native fauna”.\n\nMrs. Langdon nodded. “I just don’t know what I’m going to tell Peter, he’s gotten so attached to the wee thing. I.. I don’t suppose I could say that you’ve kept it in for tests? Maybe that’d give his father a chance to catch another one”.\n\n“Certainly, Mrs. Langdon, that’s no problem at all”\n\nWill shook Mrs. Langdon’s hand, and showed her to the door, closing it again on the beginning of her explanations on “special tests” that Spot – he shuddered, he simply wasn’t able to think of that thing as a pet, especially not one that shared a name with a dog he’d long since left behind – was going to need.\n\nReturning to the table, he stood looking down at the animal. With a speed and agility that belied both its shape and apparent illness, the animal lunged for Will’s hand. Will leaped back, clutching the hand that had only barely retained all its fingers to his chest.\n\n“Vicious little bugger…”\n"
  title: Spot
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Beth Mathison
  date: 2007-10-20
  day: 20
  month: 10
  text: "She knew it was a bad idea when the man dropped dead in front of her.\n\nShe had seen death before, when she had lived on the streets.  But that had been long ago, almost a different life.  The suddenness of this man’s death had caught her off guard.\n\n“Cari, we go now,” Chin told her, tugging on her leather jacket.  “We leave this place.”\n\nChin’s cool reaction told her that he had most likely seen death before, too.\n\nShe carried the data within her right wrist, a tiny bump of skin the only indication that she was a courier.  It wasn’t the worst job in the world, she knew.  Lugging data in the surgically designed port on the underside of her right arm.  It paid the bills.  She could work when she wanted.\n\nThis job was unexpected, with her friend Chin suggesting they make a run together with a courier named Duncan.  Chin introduced them as they ported at the origin site, their three arms stretched across the company’s mainframe.  The tech was using some kind of new transfer cable and software, and it burned her skin as the data flowed into her.  Cari thought that Duncan was handsome in a rugged, country way, his blue eyes intense.  As they waited for the data to fill their respective ports, Duncan’s gaze settled on the logo stitched across her shirt for just a moment too long.  He looked back up, and she had held his gaze.\n\nNow he was dead, his eyes fixed towards the dirty metro terminal’s ceiling.  A thin trickle of blood streamed out of his nose.\n\nChin was pulling her along now, Duncan’s body lost in the crowd.  The station was packed, as usual, and Cari found herself shoved into a car, Chin barely making it as the doors swished closed.  They hung onto a thick metal pole, swaying as the bullet train strained forward.\n\nThe three of them had been headed north to the city’s edge to deliver the data.  Chin had changed directions, pulling them into a car heading downtown.\n\nChin was pale under his dark skin, and she reached out and gently lifted his left hand.  Turning it over, she saw that his port site was red.  She wondered if Duncan’s had looked the same before he fell.\n\nShe knew where they were going, down to see Izzy, the black market’s master data miner.  She and Chin had about sixty minutes before the chip in the data alerted the authorities that they were rogue.  Izzy would know how to reverse the software and remove the data.\n\n“Cari,” Chin whispered, leaning into her.  “You must hurry if I fall.”  His eyes were closed.\n\nThe car slipped under the river, and the world outside turned a frantic shade of blue and black.  She closed her own eyes and thought of herself as a piece of data, flowing along some long, complicated logic stream.\n\nHer wrist burned now, her head filling with a bright light and buzzing sound that made her nauseous.\n\nShe wondered about the data in her wrist, what new technology had gone viral and decided to terminate its hosts.  She had just wanted an easy job, to carry data from overly cautious clients eagerly protecting their data.  She felt Chin’s arm relax in her hand, falling away from her.\n\nOpening her eyes, she watched as the train exploded out from under the river into the bright sunlight.  The city gleaming above them like some precious jewel as they headed for the station.\n\nThe radiance filled her then, the data working throughout her fragile body.  And she let herself go, allowing the light to take her.\n"
  title: A New Kind of Data
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Simon Petrie
  date: 2007-10-21
  day: 21
  month: 10
  text: "Afar contemplates lifting something small, a souvenir, but is distracted by the conversation at the next table:\n\n“…forgot our anniversary, so I’m sending flowers back.”\n\n“Isn’t that dangerous?”\n\n“You kidding?  It’s just one day.  Not going to affect anything, except avoid an argument.”\n\n“Still don’t see why they allow it.  Bloody dangerous, you ask me.”\n\n“Na, we’re protected by paradox.  Anyone wanted to change the past, badly, far enough back, things shift so that person didn’t exist, or time travel hadn’t been invented.  Then that action wouldn’t have occurred; past doesn’t change.  Machine just seizes, briefly, if someone tries that.  But anyhow … you reckon roses or daffs?”\n\n“Why ask me?  She’s your wife.”\n\nAfar stands up and leaves.  Hopes he still looks inconspicuous, though it really doesn’t matter anymore.  It’s not possible to grab a souvenir: salt cellar, spoon, whatever.  Not simply disallowed, not possible.  There’ll be memories, at most, even if he survives.  It’s a pity.  He’s learnt much of this culture over the past months.  His intended actions are necessary, he knows; yet he feels remorse, frustration at the cost in time, sheer uncertainty.  Stage fright.  Nerves.\n\nDown the street, he passes a kiosk.  They’re everywhere, time travel has blossomed.  Natural-disaster fatalities are rare now; missed appointments a thing of the past.  (There is talk, even, of grandiose new pathways in spaceflight: install a kiosk on a spaceship; send crew, equipment, and braking fuel ahead to just before arrival.)  The kiosks are busy, heavily policed.\n\nAfar, also, has time travel business today, but what he intends won’t work on any other time machine in the world.  He’s brought his own device, folded in his heavy briefcase.\n\nHe reaches the park.  A cold day, overcast, easy enough to find a deserted spot.  He opens the case, assembles his machine.  Nobody here is going to recognise it as a time machine.  It resembles an easel.\n\nThe case contains also six dull metal globes, the size of croquet balls, but heavier, and cold.  Antimatter, painstakingly contained.  Payload.  He aligns them along the machine’s waist-high tray, locks them in position, loads coordinates.\n\nIt’s taken him months to prepare: the orbital mechanics require incredible precision.  Pin-point accuracy, within a few kilometres’ depth, across a six-million-year gulf.  He’s aiming for twelve kilometres down: six antimatter grapefruit, evenly spaced along the fault underlying the rift valley from which he’s chosen his alias.  Afar.  Ethiopia.  Home of the proto-hominids.  It should go almost magnitude 10.  But the volcanic follow-through will be the real killer.\n\nHe looks around.  In the distance, there’s a couple sitting on a bench; a woman dog-walking; a man and his daughter exploring the playground.  Further afield, cars, sporadic aircraft, the bustling city.  People going about their daily lives, wondering whether to go with roses or daffodils.  As if it mattered.\n\nHe regrets the necessity to obliterate, to kill: he has deep respect for life.  But life will continue, after his interruption; merely without one particular species and its invasive civilization.  Probably be better for it.\n\nHe laughs a little.  The man from the café would say Afar’s plan wouldn’t work.  Nobody on Earth could use a time machine to retrospectively erase humanity, because that’s a paradox.  And he’s right; but he’s also wrong.  Nobody from earth.\n\nAfar?  He’s from Alpha Centauri, here to eliminate a potential threat to his homeworld.\n\nHe throws the switch and waits for the world to reorder itself.\n"
  title: Afar
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2007-10-22
  day: 22
  month: 10
  text: "Agent 13 jumped out of the bomb-bay doors of the scrambler jet into silent extended twilight.\n\nHe fell for three calm, wind-buffeted minutes before starfishing his teflon squirrelwings out.  The wrist-to-ankle elastic bodychute helped him brake with no heat signature before he hit the living hull of a brand new Hindenberg six miles up in the middle of a raincloud.\n\nIt was damp to the touch and warm in the rain like a lover’s skin.  Agent 13’s goggles irised open wide to light the area he was going to cut.\n\nX-ray flashes gave him an idea of the strutwork underneath and the number of nearby workers walking skeletal on the night shift of the upper levels.\n\nHe was surprised by the hundreds of small skeletons hanging upside-down amongst the giant ribs of the airship.\n\nBats.  Well, they could help with the confusion.\n\nAgent 13 knelt on the hull and let the pads of his suit’s knees grip tight to the weave.  Leaning back, he extended his arm straight up and fired a wide dispersal of metal spider-silk streamers around him.  They were charged with flat electrons.  Irresistible to strikes.\n\nMake the lightning come running.\n\nWith a sound like the ripping of the world, the lightning struck the hull around Agent 13.  He knelt in the middle of the lightstorm and plunged his scalpel-edged fingertips down and through the cheeseclotch, vinyl, and polycarbon.\n\nAir blasted out.\n\nHe flipped himself down and through the gap like a diver into the darkness inside.  The bats were screaming.\n\nThree workers rushed past him to repair the damage.  It would be written up as a lightning strike and forgotten about.  Agent 13 was invisible in the shadows with the camcells activated.\n\nHe climbed deeper into the shadows and darkness to the heart.\n"
  title: Agent 13
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Sam Clough aka “Hrekka”
  date: 2007-10-23
  day: 23
  month: 10
  text: "“What’s that?” Cal asked, gesturing to the ornately patterned box resting on the mat in the centre of Petra’s cabin. His passenger had a southerner’s skin, and the wrist spurs that showed her to be a Kadian, a native of the desert.\n\n“La boîte de ciel,” she murmured, then paused, and looked up at him, “my sky-box. I am razir.”\n\n“Skyhacker,” Cal breathed, examining the box more closely. It was a solid block of metal, fifty cents on each edge, the sides ornately inlaid with organic patterns. The top of the block was dominated by a giant circular dial, demarcated like a clock face, with sixty fine graduations. A disc of metal with a single indicator sat within the dial, and at its centre was a hole that would take a large, cylinder-style key.\n\nThe Razir — or more popularly, Skyhackers, were the only group to ever find a functional ’emergency weather controller’. Anyone with a telescope knew full well that the morning stars that encircled the planet were artificial satellites, and most scientists assumed that they had something to do with the very predictable weather patterns which covered the continent. Most of those same scientists refused to credit the claims of Raziran weather control — but most aviators worshipped razir as gods amongst men.\n\n“Come see,” Petra beckoned him over, and fished a large key from the pile of clothing spread across her bunk. She knelt down by the box, and Cal copied, kneeling opposite her. She took his hands, wrapping them gently around the key. The key snicked into the hole, a tight fit.\n\n“Eeks co-ordonnez.” She twisted the key, and the dial clicked round to thirty-five. A light pressure, and the key clicked lower.\n\n“Egrek co-ordonnez.” She twisted the key again, this time setting the dial to thirty. Once again, she clicked the key lower, and twisted it to ten.\n\n“Il pleut. It rains.” She smiled, and pointedly clicked the key down yet further.\n\nShe set two final digits, then rapidly pulled the key out.\n\nCal, realising that he had been holding his breath, slowly exhaled. The box remained where it sat between the pilot and his passenger, as inert as ever.\n\n“Did it work?” Cal asked, slightly disappointed at the anticlimax. Petra shrugged, her limited english obviously exhausted. Unhappy with himself for getting so excited, Cal returned to the dirigible’s controls. The sky had been clear blue, to the horizon, now outside the shadow of the dirigible’s envelope, clouds were forming.\n\nPetra had entered the cockpit behind him. He glanced at her, and saw her warm expression.\n\n“L’art du ciel.”\n"
  title: The Art of the Sky
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2007-10-24
  day: 24
  month: 10
  text: "Kathleen Wright entered the Temporal Control Room after being notified of a Class I permutation to the Primary Timeline.  “I got your message, Williams.  What’s the problem?”\n\n“Sorry to bother you on your day off, Ms Wright, but it appears that Charlie snapped.  He was supposed to go back to November 1963 to replace the pristine ‘magic bullet’ from the Kennedy assignation with a severely damaged bullet.  But he completely disregarded his mission objective, and did something that irrevocably altered the timeline.”\n\n“Williams,” she corrected, “for us, nothing is irrevocable.  We can send a security team to pre-date him.  We’ll bring him back before he changes the timeline.”\n\n“You don’t understand Ms Wright.  He’s established at least a dozen time-anchors.  He’s entrenched.  We can’t bring him back.”\n\n“Time-anchors?  Field agents aren’t trained to do that.  It requires a Senior Temporal Analyst.”\n\n“Well, he figured out how to do it.”  He swiveled in his chair to face her.  “I think he’s got Temporal Psychosis.  There is a definite pattern of impaired judgment, irrational behavior, paranoia, schizophrenia, and dementia.”\n\nWright sat down at a terminal and accessed Charlie’s Psych-Evaluation.  “Hmm, eleven months ago his evaluation showed him to be marginal, but within the mean minus three sigma threshold.  It was recommended that he have minimal exposure to chroniton radiation, but the union filed a grievance because that prevented him from working overtime.  He was allowed to operate pending administrative review, which apparently never occurred.  Oh well, I guess that’s sand through the hourglass.  We’ll deal with mission protocols after we fix this permutation.  Our immediate concern now is to minimize the damage he’s caused.”\n\nWilliams handed Wright a printout of the new timeline. “Look at the altfuture,” Ms Wright.  “Charlie was at the center of major riots in the 1970’s that practically destroyed the United States.  President Nixon declared Martial law.  Millions of people were killed.  The Soviet Union ends up the only super power for centuries.  We don’t exist in the new timeline.  My wife and kids are gone.”\n\n“Don’t worry Williams.  We can fix this.  First of all, what are our options?  Can we kill him in early 1964?”\n\n“Only if it doesn’t cause a contradiction with the time-anchors.  I’ll check.  Damn, the anchors extend into the twenty first century.  We need to neutralize him using non-fatal methods.  I was thinking, Ms Wright, if he’s already psycho, maybe we can get him committed.  They were doing that all the time back then.  We only need him neutralized until the 1980’s.”\n\n“No, Williams, it’s too easy to escape from mental hospitals, or to be released.  We need him locked up in maximum security.  And he needs to be discredited.  Everybody must regard him as a total psychopath.  Call in Harrison, White, and Starkey to devise an impact assessment.  Also, have them recommend mitigation options.  Tell them he’s got to be convicted of a horrific crime.  Multiple murders, at least.  They’ll need to establish a past.  He must be an orphan, or have abusive parents.  Don’t worry, Williams.  This will be much easier to fix than when Adolf crossed over.”\n"
  title: Temporal Psychosis
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Viktor Kuprin
  date: 2007-10-25
  day: 25
  month: 10
  text: "Father was up late cleaning his long rifle and my old musket. Mother fried biscuits and packed pickle dog for us to take on our trip to Fort Needmore.\n\nNo, we don’t eat dogs. That’s just what we called pickled baloney. We always took it when we went into the woods.\n\nI’d only been to the fort a couple of times. Father said we had to go. There was big trouble coming, and the Americans couldn’t help us. They didn’t have enough ships or soldiers.\n\nSome said the Americans didn’t care about our world because we didn’t have much money and they didn’t want our furs and mussels for trade. Instead, the CIS Space Army, the Russians, would be coming.\n\nThe next morning Mother put out my best buckskins and boots. But then she bawled something awful when we hit the trail. She cried so hard, Father had to help her back inside the cabin. That scared me.\n\nIt was the end of the hot season, so we had an easy hike through the woods. The air was sweet and the ground was dry. We stopped once to watch a big fat rockchuck grubbing around a bunch of wineberry bushes. Father told me to leave it be.\n\nWhen we got to Fort Needmore, the Russians were there. They wore strange hats and clothes, all dark blue or camouflaged. Even some of their ladyfolk wore uniforms. On their suits there was a weird patch that looked like black noodles with a ball on top. Father said it was the CIS flag. Some of them wore red rocket-and-sickle medallions.\n\nThe big meeting was held in front of the distillery. We gathered around, and a Russian with white hair and blue eyes stood on a whiskey barrel to talk to us. He said everyone had to come to the fort, and to bring all our black powder and ammunition. The “Yelgrammites” were coming and we had to fight them.\n\nFather acted like he didn’t believe the Russian. “You mean helgrammites? Like we seine up out of the river rocks?”\n\nThe Russian nodded. “Da, but bigger. In spaceships they come, thousands and thousands. They have intelligence, but they don’t communicate with us. They show no mercy. We must make ready to fight soon. Or they kill you and take your world.”\n\nAfter the meeting, the Russians handed out packages to everyone in the crowd. Father told me to get one. A pretty Russian lady dressed in white handed it to me.\n\nWhen we got back to the cabin that night, Father let Mother open the package. Inside it was sacks of buckwheat, canned food, medicines, and square blocks wrapped up in silver foil. Mother handed one of the blocks to me. I couldn’t read the Cyrillic letters on the pretty paper, so I just ripped it open.\n\nI thought it looked like smashed skat. It really did, all brown and…well. Father and Mother laughed and laughed. They told me to taste it. And it was heavenly good. Mother thought it was chocolate, but Father said chocolate costs over a hundred dollars a kilo. The Russians would not be giving that away. I know now that it was a carob bar.\n\nI broke the carob into small pieces so it would last longer. Father and Mother both took some. And as we enjoyed that sweet treat, sitting together as a family by the light of the oil lamps, we didn’t know what was coming.\n\nOutside, from high in the night sky, we heard sounds like thunder, the sonic booms. Father ran for his rifle.\n"
  title: The Russian Package
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Emily Cleaver
  date: 2007-10-26
  day: 26
  month: 10
  text: "Something was wrong. The explosions cracked through Kinleigh’s earpiece. On the periphery of his vision to the left delicate violet orchids of plasma fire bloomed in the low gravity against the black bulk of the hill. They were firing. Why the fuck were they firing? He felt fear kick at his stomach. His fingers scrabbled at the comm switch.\n\n“Unit B cease fire. Cease fire! Acknowledge last transmission. Serious hazard. Volatile gas. Cease fucking fire!”\n\nThe earpiece hissed. The sound of firing came again, this time from the right. Nolan’s unit. The fear thumped at his guts. His eyes tried to penetrate the shadows beneath the branches of the fat black plants belching their vapours all around them. They were strange to him, not a type they’d catalogued yet. He turned to Brite, her face a dead pearl sheen through the thickness of her visor. He touched her arm through the suit, its warmth familiar. That electric jolt he always felt when he touched her, even after all these years, shot through him. Panic rose in his throat. He had to get her away before he went after the others.\n\n“Brite. They’re not responding. They’re going to blow us all up.”\n\n“What are they firing at?”\n\n“I don’t fucking know. We scanned the wood. There’s nothing here but us.”\n\nKinleigh glanced at the readout on his wrist. Still only the blinking warning light for volatile gasses. There was nothing to fire at.\n\nOn the hill one of the plasma bolts hit a gas pocket and the sky lit up an angry purple. Brite’s eyes were fixed on the flickering light. Her suit needed venting. He could see the rubber clinging to her, outlining the neat curve of her breasts as she sucked away the last of the air inside. He knew why she didn’t vent. He could feel it himself, the reluctance to open the ducts to the alien dark. Inside the suit was safety. Outside it was everything else. Its protective embrace pinched at him tightly as he used up his own air. For a moment he was back in the in warmth of their dorm bunk, feeling Brite’s small soft lips pull hungrily at his skin. He didn’t want to open the vent.\n\n“Brite? We have to move.”\n\nHer breath tugged at her suit from inside and she stepped back. His hand hovered over the duct control. Breathe and risk dying. Don’t breath, die. He vented.\n\nHis suit inhaled. Brite’s eyes were fixed on him, huge. The sponges in the ducts expanded and shrank as they filtered. But he could smell something different in the new lung of air, something mad and awful from the night. Shapes pulsed in his vision and terror tightened his muscles. Brite became monstrous in front of him, a writhing limb from one of the black plants reaching out to touch his face. He fired.\n\nThe plasma poured from his gun and bloomed towards her like the offering of an exotic flower.\n"
  title: Fire
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Grady Hendrix
  date: 2007-10-27
  day: 27
  month: 10
  text: "The woman on the bus was beautiful. That was true of most suicide bombers – they had a glow about them like an expectant mother or a rich man. The bus turned up the hill and she tried not to let her elbows bump into the explosives strapped to her ribs.\n\nWhen she’d been gang raped by her kitchen appliances it was the dishwasher that made the first move, pinning her against the counter while the Cuisinart and the blender immobilized her arms with their power cords. The microwave pulled her down to the floor and then they all piled on. She blacked out a few times but it wasn’t a tasteful fade-out like in the movies; time was chopped up and spliced back together. She blinked at seven o’clock, and then it was seven thirty and the appliances were dragging her across the floor like a rag doll, then she blinked again and they were all back in their places like nothing had ever happened.\n\nThe police poked around the bushes behind her house, even after she told them that the perpetrators were all back on their shelves and in their cupboards. The ER was a mixed blessing: her insides were burnt and lacerated and her arms were a contused mess, but they all thought she was crazy. That is, until the defibrillator lurched off its trolley, grabbed her with one of its paddles and used the other to drop the registered nurse. They both screamed, except the registered nurse’s scream was more like a moan because she was seizing. Two cops and a resident burst in to witness the defib tearing at Catherine’s blouse. She managed to throw it against the wall but it flipped itself over and started to drag itself after her by its paddles. The cop shot it until it was smoking plastic shards but still they refused to believe her.\n\nShe moved into a motel. The TV went out in the hall. The telephone went in the tub. She was reconciling herself to moving off the grid someplace, maybe Idaho, when she saw the manager’s children playing Xbox one night through their window, and she saw the way the controllers always managed to burrow their way, slyly and invasively, into the childrens’ laps.\n\nThe bus pulled over. Nobody would ever understand why she was doing this, but someone had to stop them. And so she stood up and walked out onto the street and found that the Maytag factory was abandoned. A single security hut was at the gate.\n\n“What happened?” she asked.\n\n“Oh, honey,” the security guard said. “They all moved to China.”\n\n“But the appliances – “\n\n“Made in Taiwan. Made in India. We just importers now. It’s enough to make me cry, too. You need a cigarette?”\n\nThe vest was manual, just a fuse that needed to be lit. And why not? She couldn’t stop this invasion by foreign – by alien – appliances. But she could make sure they wouldn’t ever have her body again.\n"
  title: Electric Revolution
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Cody Lorenz
  date: 2007-10-28
  day: 28
  month: 10
  text: "One explosion behind her, one to the left. Sylvia ducked into the nearest available hole, just as the third boom sent dust into that very same nook.\n\nShe crouched, grabbing up the carbine, flipping open its cover, and staring at the little screen, pausing first to wipe the grime away. Her fingers hammered at buttons, trying to restart the damned thing.\n\nThey were coming.\n\nShe had to split off the maintenance plate to get to the glowing center. Power core, tubes one through seven, focusing arrays, batteries, circuit boards.\n\nTheir steps were heavy – what choice did a half-ton creature have but to be lumbering?\n\nThe bridge of her nose began to pound. This could mean only one thing.\n\nAh, one of the ‘sistors knocked out. It only took five seconds to fix, and she went running back out of her hiding place.\n\nSylvia was indeed the best shot in her battle group (well, only shot, now), and when she took aim, one of the beasts fell, crackling with the leftover energy discharges, leaving a car-sized grave for itself in the ground. She didn’t smile, or cry, simply did it. Again, and again, she fired, until the world seemed to be coated in a veil of superheated plasma. The world only got its color back when there was no more ammo, and she felt her head beginning to truly ache.\n\nA finger was placed on the tip of her nose, and then the pain exploded.\n\nShe blinked out the temp implants, sitting up, a man immediately handed her a tissue. Her clothes (not fatigues – just your standard “I’m twenty and hot so notice me!” clothes) were getting stained red.\n\n“Well, Miss Smith, we’ve come to believe your play testing duties are over,” the man said, one of those lab coated and goggled men who never got any sun or exercise, “Take heart, though, young lady, in that you’ve helped perfect the ultimate system for home enjoyment. We only need to work on that problem you’re experiencing.”\n\n“What, the bloody nose?” She wiped at it, sniffling some, coughing once, and finally balling a piece of tissue up to use as a rudimentary plug, “It’s worth it!”\n"
  title: The More Things Change, etc.
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2007-10-29
  day: 29
  month: 10
  text: "Today I’m teaching my new arm how to stack discs on a peg. This exercise is no different from everything else I’ve done here lately. All pretty much futile. The way it’s supposed to work is with my real right arm I place the biggest blue ring on the peg, and then I try to will the metal hand at the end of my phantom arm into putting a second blue ring on the other peg. It learns, or it’s supposed to be learning how I make my good arm move. They’ve wired it to both the remains of my left bicep, and my good right arm. It’s also tapped into the big nerve bundles where they enter my spinal column. That freaks me out just thinking about it. The idea is that the prosthetic arm will watch what my right arm does when I make it move, and then it will somehow recognize the similar instructions I give my phantom arm, and act on them. It sounded like it could work, but it’s been a slow process.\n\n“You’re thinking too hard.” The doctor’s a bit of an arrogant ass, but I’m here on his nickel, so I tolerate him as best I can. “I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but don’t over-think this, you’ll just confuse it. Close your eyes, count to ten backwards and put both rings on at the same time.”\n\n“Sure Doc, whatever you say.” He may be on to something, I know there are things I do better without thinking. “10, 9, 8.”\n\n“Good, good! There, you see it works. You just have to think less.”\n\nBoth blue rings are on both pegs. Shit. He might be right. Of course, this arm just did something when I wasn’t looking, and that’s a little weird.\n\n“Try the orange one. Don’t think, just do it.” His cheerful tone really grates on my nerves, he’s got two good arms and isn’t stuck in the kindergarten play room stacking blocks all day.\n\n“Good, good! There, you see, you’ve done it again.” Ok, that’s just not right at all. It’s like the arm’s trying to impress him or something. It is working though, there’s no question about that. Maybe if I try harder, no, maybe if I try a little less hard, maybe I’ll get the hang of this thing. I’ve been waiting for an arm like this for almost a year now, I mean an arm I can actually control, one I can actually get to do things I want done. Maybe stacking discs for a little while longer’s not such a big deal.\n\n“Good, good! There, you see, you’ve finished.” I really should pay more attention than that, I mean, I wasn’t even trying that time. This is going to take a bit of getting used to.\n\nI wonder how long has this arm been waiting for me?\n"
  title: A Matter of Control
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Geoffrey Cashmore
  date: 2007-10-30
  day: 30
  month: 10
  text: "“I hate this bit.” Tress settled back into her trans-seat and blinked as the young man in the blue uniform smiled and sprayed a puff of Tranq into her face.\n\n“Blurq!” In the next seat, her husband lay back too as his host closed the canopy and set the dials, “Why can’t they make this stuff taste better? I hate peppermint.”\n\nTress leant over to whisper “They’re all so good looking…the hosts.”\n\nPol grunted “Yeah. You know they’re all gay, don’t you?”\n\n“No, that’s just a myth.” Tress lay back again, giggling at the idea. “You’re just jealous.”\n\n“Me? Jealous?” Pol flapped a large hand dismissively in the air, “I’m telling you, common knowledge. All gay.” He let out a long yawn, “Not that it matters – ‘cept if you think about it too hard – then it’s kinda weird…”\n\nTress felt the oxygen lamina start, “Oh, I don’t know. I think it’s quite a turn on.” She didn’t hear Pol’s reply – not in her own ears. By the time the couple were ready to board the cruiser, their identities were established in their respective hosts, ready for the risky trip to Rigel-12.\n\nDozens of similar looking men in snug fitting blue uniforms stood in rows at the foot of the boarding ramp.\n\n“Pol? Is that you?” Tress thought her voice sounded rather deep.\n\n“Yeah, hey, look…put your badge on so I can find you in the crowd a little easier.” One man helped another fit a small plastic card with Tress’s photo onto his collar clip. “Ok…I think we’re ready to board.”\n\nThe other man turned away for a moment, looking over towards the trans-bays “Bye, me.” He said, then ran to catch the others as they climbed the boarding ramp. “Hey, Pol…nice butt!”\n"
  title: Visiting the in-laws on Rigel 12
  year: 2007
- 
  author: J. S. Kachelries
  date: 2007-10-31
  day: 31
  month: 10
  text: "Officer Gannon of the Washington DC Police was clandestinely peeking around the trunk of a large maple tree next to the curb.  A patrol car pulled up behind him and turned off its headlights.  Sergeant Jose Viernes climbed out.  “Hey, Bill, dispatch said you requested backup.  What’s going on?”\n\nGannon whispered, “See those two trick or treaters that look like aliens from another planet?  Well, they’re acting very suspiciously.  They only go to the houses of Senators and Congressmen.  They just walked four blocks, from Congressman Bartlett’s house to Senator Mikulski’s house, but didn’t stop anywhere in between.”\n\n“Maybe they give out the best candy.”\n\n“No, there’s more than that.  Once they enter a house, they stay for over five minutes.  No normal kid would do that.”\n\n“Wait a minute.  Are you trying to say that you think they’re terrorists?”\n\n“No, don’t be ridiculous.  I’m saying that I think they are aliens from another planet.  It’s a perfect cover.  They can walk around all night and nobody would notice.  They must be collecting intelligence.”\n\n“Intelligence?  From democrats?  Now who’s being ridiculous?”\n\n“Ha, ha, very funny.  Well, I don’t care what you think.  I’m confronting them when they come out.  You just watch my back.”\n\nWhen the two little “aliens” reached the sidewalk, officer Gannon drew his gun, “Freeze right there,” he barked.  The two aliens dropped their candy bags and put their hands in the air.  Their arms were visibly trembling.  “I’m on to you guys,” he continued.  “This charade is over.  You’re coming with me.”  He reached over and grabbed one of the alien’s antennas and pulled him toward the patrol car.  His rubber mask popped off, revealing a small, petrified, blond haired, blue eyed boy.  The child dropped to his knees and covered his head with his rubber alien hands, “Please don’t shoot me,” he pleaded.\n\nSergeant Viernes broke into laughter.  “Nice going, Bill.  Now he’ll have nightmares ’till Christmas.  It’s OK son,” he said as he attempted to comfort the boy, “he was only kidding.  You know, just a little joke on Halloween.  Now, go ahead and pick up your bags and have fun.”  Viernes walked past the children and gingerly removed the gun from Gannon’s numb grip, and handed the alien mask back to the child.  “Com’on Bill, lets get you some donuts.  I think your blood sugar is out of whack.”\n\nThe moment the patrol car was out of sight, the two kids took off in the opposite direction.  They cut through a dense hedge, and stopped in the back yard of an abandoned house.  One of the children pressed a button on his belt, and their spaceship decloaked and lowered a ramp.  The two aliens scampered inside and reactivated the cloak.  “Tuomita kadotukseen, that was close,” said Taa-Lol.  “I thought he was going to look into our bags and find our mind-suckers.  I’m so glad the High Council recommended that we use nested costumes, in case we got confronted.  Those guys are geniuses.”\n\nFee-Kak disagreed.  “The High Council are idiots,” he remarked.  “How are we supposed to gather intelligence, if we can only operate one day a year?  At this rate, we won’t be ready to invade for a century.”  He began removing his costumes, “You know,” he said, “tonight’s scare gives me an idea.  Get the High Council on the hyper-space radio.”\n\nStarting November 1, 2007, the advanced scouts of the Lalande Imperial Invasion Fleet began collecting intelligence 365 days a year, disguised as children.\n"
  title: Trick or Treat
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Sam Clough aka “Hrekka”
  date: 2007-11-01
  day: '01'
  month: 11
  text: "“We’ve considered the simple stuff in previous sessions, and now all of you are comfortable with the basics of folding space, correct?”\n\nThe teacher saw some nods of assent from his class.\n\n“Excellent. But this is the advanced class. I’m not just going to teach you to fold space — I’m going to teach you origami.”\n\nHe drew a sheet of plain, white paper from his desk, and held it up.\n\n“I’m not trying to overextend my metaphor, don’t worry. A piece of paper really is the easiest way to show you the folds. That way you can all see the work in progress, and understand where all the folds are meant to go.”\n\nAs he spoke, the teacher’s hands were creasing and folding the paper. The eyes of his class were focused hard on those fine movements, most of them probably recording it in their cortex or otherwise. He soon finished, and held up a model of a twelve-pointed star between his thumb and forefinger.\n\n“And this is where the metaphor breaks down. In your spacetime version, when you reach this step, you need to grab the center of the structure and do the tesseract twist, wrench it round by about half a rad. Then put the entire thing somewhere safe, and release.”\n\nThe teacher sat back in his chair, and closed his eyes. About a metre above the desk and it’s spread of paper and origami, the air began to distort. Light shifted crazily through the patch. The teacher’s face betrayed his enjoyment of the task.\n\nHe opened his eyes, and the miniature star above his desk ignited.\n"
  title: Origami Stars
  year: 2007
- 
  author: J.R.Blackwell
  date: 2007-11-02
  day: '02'
  month: 11
  text: "“I was a fat old man way before it got popular.” The fat old man leaned across the old fashioned, wooden bar. “When I chose this body it was before what’s-his-face got on the Feeds about bellies and beards. I decided I wanted to be big, on my own, for, whatsit, philosophical reasons.”\n\n“Oh yeah?” said the bartender, distantly sympathetic.\n\n“I wanted to fill up space.” The old man gestured at his girth.\n\nThe bartender nodded, cleaning a glass. The old man continued.  “I was raised in the Cult of Barbie. Really, I was. I know I don’t look like it now but I’d been a Barbie all my life. I know, doesn’t show to look at me now, but I was one of the plastic people, shiny hair, long legs, perfect surgical tan. I used to wear miniskirts. And the shoes, rows and rows of them. My closets, if you could have seen them then, you would have been amazed.”\n\nThe fat old man, who wasn’t really old at all, pushed himself back from the bar and stood, pointing at his feet. “You know how many shoes I’ve got now? Two, the ones I’m wearing. I didn’t take this body to be fashionable.”\n\nThe bartender raised an eyebrow. “Then why did you take it?”\n\nShaking his finger, the old man came back to sit on the barstool. “It’s not to rebel against the Cult, if that’s what you think.”\n\n“Didn’t even come to my mind.” said the bartender.\n\n“I did it to be free. You always had to watch yourself with the Barbie’s. You always had to be perfect.” He shook his head. “I did it. It was the way I was raised. I went through Skipper then the initiation to a full Barbie, the whole thing. You ever dated a Barbie?”\n\n“Do I look like I make enough money to date a Barbie?”\n\nThe old man laughed. “No, you don’t. But they slum it sometimes. Although they always drive the bankrupt ones to tears. I remember. I couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t take more money and spend it on clothes, crap really, just crap. I wanted to be covered by fat, my inner self-hidden. I wanted a big beard so you couldn’t ignore me. I wanted to be a drunk, I wanted to smell like a man whose been somewhere besides the mall and the compound.”\n\nThe bartender placed the glass upside down on the shelf. “You’ve been places since those days, then?”\n\n“Oh yes.” said the old man. “I’ve seen up more skirts than when I lived among them. I’ve walked far in these good shoes. Then, when I want to disappear, I’m not pretty enough to notice.” He sighed over his drink. “But now, that damned actors made my look popular.”\n\n“You gonna change then?” said the bartender.\n\n“I have to, don’t I? I’m not one of those fad bodies.”\n\n“So you’re worried that people will see you as fashionable then?”\n\n“Yes.” The old man looked into his drink, his face warped in the brown liquid. “You know what?” he said, looking up at the bartender. “Screw em. I’m not changing. I’ll be this way long after they’ve found another body type to take.”\n\n“You’ll be even further out of fashion then.”\n\n“You’re right, you’re damned right.” The old man slammed his fist onto the bar, triumphant.  “Bartender, another drink to celebrate.” He raised his glass “To the death of fashion.” He said. “May we all fall out of style.”\n"
  title: The Cult of Personality
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Anthony R. Elmore
  date: 2007-11-03
  day: '03'
  month: 11
  text: "William rode the Green Line, making the passengers hostage to his presence.  Here, they couldn’t walk away, far. They could only avoid his glare, his insistence at existence.  The train stops at Parkway Station and a pretty teenage girl with soft brown hair enters the train.  She glances at the only empty seat next to him, and walks toward it.  The train moves and the air shifts forward and she shudders like a gazelle that caught a lion’s scent creeping upwind. She moves toward the gangway, glancing backward at possible danger.\n\n“But he lied…” he wants to cry at her, at the world.\n\nAttention starved little…\n\nThe train rattles to a halt at Memorial Park and many people in bright summer shorts and carrying lawn chairs and coolers disembark.  A weekend street fair is happening topside, but he’s not invited. Facial recognition cams on lampposts would alert the police and they will escort him away. So he rides the train, staying in motion.\n\nBut he lied…\n\nThe trains stops at Chamblee station and a horrible, fecal smell enters as a covey of passengers leave.  The bum is layers of filthy, mismatching coats and shirts and shoulders a rucksack.  The passengers’ noses curls and some gag and comment to others. Newspapers and handkerchiefs rise to their faces to block the stench.  The bum drops into an empty seat and he feigns sleep.  At the next stop, everyone leaves the car except William.\n\nThe odor disgusts him but he wonders if Pheremonic Shunning caused the bum’s state and this is what awaited him.\n\nNo more overcrowded prisons, chip tracking and dedicated surveillance, they said. Shunning put offenders in an open air prison with their own skin and guilt for a cell.\n\nAfter his trial, state doctors injected him with a solution that changed his pheremonic signature that broadcasted “Danger, Stay Away.” messages.\n\nBut he lied. He misunderstood my touch. It wasn’t like that.\n\nThe stinking bum was his future, his present, he thought.  Six months into a five year sentence, he would never again teach and would die on the dole. This was his family.  Guilty or not, they were a confraternity of the shunned.\n\nHe approached the bum, crossing through the fog of stench.  “Did they shun you?” he asked.\n\nThe bum looked at him through a camouflage of dirt, his beard nitted with food bits a dried mucus.  He moaned and leaned over and slapped the side of his head with both hands, rocking back and forth.\n\nHe didn’t see the shiv lance his gut or the bum draw it. He only saw the betrayal of snared animal fear in the bum’s eyes. The train bucked and slowed and his legs gave way and he fell. From the wrong angled view from the floor he saw the bum shuffle through the crowd of arriving passengers, parting the crowd with his stench.\n\n“Do you see me now?” he sputtered to their shocked faces. I exist. Then he didn’t.\n"
  title: Insist to Exist
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Kyle DeBruhl
  date: 2007-11-04
  day: '04'
  month: 11
  text: "“Oh man…” Jeremy sighed as he stared out the window. “The old man’s at it again.” He pulled himself out of the chair and lumbered to the front door, seizing an rain slicker from the coat rack as he went. Thunder crackled in the distance and he peered out the embedded front door window with hesitation. He’s going to catch friggin’ pneumonia. He turned the handle and the door swung open with a bang, carried in full circle by the howling wind.\n\nThe lawn had been transformed since the afternoon. What was earlier a large green blanket with the occasional wildflower or misplaced stone, had become a filthy mess, a deep marsh that soaked the toes of even the toughest tennis shoes.\n\n“Hey Murray!” Jeremy shouted hoping to catch the man’s non-existent attention. The frail figure across the street did nothing. Jeremy took his last step through the water and opened his front gate, all the while keeping his eyes on the man across the way. A quick jog across the street and Jeremy was now at the opposite gate which he cleared with a short jump. The old man could now be seen clearly; sickly white columns of flesh surrounded by red Bermuda shorts stood atop a lawn table. The open t-shirt showed an array of exotic fruits and ukulele prints and was barely hiding the pale, almost skeletal chest it adorned..\n\n“Hey man, I think you ought to get back inside, it’s cold and I’m not sure you’ve got the, err… shorts for it.” Murray had never stood on the table before. He apparently was getting wise to the ease with which Jeremy could force him back into the house.\n\n“I’m gonna pull you down man…” Jeremy thought it sounded confident enough, but he was having a hard time with the physics. The last thing he wanted was to harm the old guy; the neighbors would throw a conniption fit.\n\nWith as much strength as Jeremy could muster, he eased the old man off of the table and onto his back, taking care not to contort his cargo on the way down. Murray kept his back straight, and the void expression on his face remained. In the end youth won out and the old man was pushed (gently) back into his home. Jeremy walked quickly back to his own piece of Churchill street and regaled in the good work of a good man.\n\nSomewhere deep inside of 143 Churchill Street a silent voice spoke. It spoke to the electrons in Murray Feckleson’s brain. It seethed as an ocean and whispered as a child. It burned. So thirsty, It thought. What a thick, brainless, species. Can’t he see that we are thirsty? Murray nodded mechanically as the voice carried on. Can’t he see that we are dry? Can’t he see? Suddenly the TV burst to life and the light’s soft colors soothed it’s “mind”. Murray? Be a doll and draw up a bath for us would you?\n"
  title: So Thirsty
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2007-11-05
  day: '05'
  month: 11
  text: "It was the one thousandth anniversary since Victor Kent first traveled backward in time.  Of course, humans had been traveled forward in time for a thousand years before that.  But, forward is easy.  No paradoxes to deal with.  After all, in the future, you can’t kill your father before he met your mother.\n\nThe first company to develop time travel technology was Epoca Inc.  In the early days they’d only travel a few weeks into the future to see how some key experiment went.  Then they’d return to the present to modify the experiment so it would work better.  Of course, this action changed that future, but what difference does that make?  Epoca would be more prosperous in the new future.  With this philosophy, Epoca perfected time travel in short order.  Another side benefit is that Epoca could peek into the future to keep track of any potential competitors, and take whatever steps were necessary in the present (legally or illegally) to make sure their competition was unsuccessful.  It’s so easy to determine the future when you control time.\n\nAnyway, on the one thousandth anniversary of negative time travel, Epoca decided to expand the time envelope exponentially.  They decided to send me and twelve other scientists backwards in time thirty billion years.  That’s 15.5 billion years before the Big Bang.  Epoca considered it “an acceptable risk” because astrophysicists had proven that the universe is “closed” (i.e., it explodes, expands, stops, and collapses again, repeatedly for all eternity).  They call the collapse “The Big Crunch.”  Epoca figured that if they could send us into the previous cycle, we could learn new “inconceivable” science from whatever life forms existed then, bring it back to our cycle, and make gobs and gobs of money.  A simple plan, right?  Well, not really.  I asked Epoca to look a few years into the future to see if we made it back OK.  They did, but said we weren’t there because we had crossed the “barrier” (whatever that meant) and would not exist in our continuum until we physically returned.  They called it the “Sagan Principle,” after some scientist who lived eons and eons ago.  They also said that when theya looked at the instant the ship left, I was on it, so I needed to go because I had already gone.  Did I mention that time travel arguments make my head hurt?  Anyway, who was I to question Epoca?  After all, they could prevent my parents from meeting.  So, I climbed into the ship.\n\nAs I watched through the view port, the stars began to turn bluish.  I guessed it was the opposite of red-shift as my universe collapsed backward toward the Big Bang.  It got so bright at T=1,000,000,000 that we had to close the iris.  I held my breath as we shot through T=0.  At T=-1,000,000,000 we opened the iris to see a reddish universe expand backward.  Well I’ll be damned, I thought, the astrophysicists were right.  At T=-15,500,000,000 the ship came to a stop.  With the universe no longer expanding, the shields began to sparkle like a thousand fireflies.  Every alarm on the ship began to go off, including the one labeled “Danger: Lethal Radiation Detected.”\n\nAs I was thinking, “Well, this sucks,” I heard one of the other scientist yell, “Quick, get us back, and hurry!”\n\nThe pilot replied, “It will take 40 minutes to re-charge the temporal coils.  I c’not change the laws of physics.”\n\n“Then we’re screwed,” said the scientist, “because this universe is composed of anti-matter.”\n"
  title: Before the Previous Crunch
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Viktor Kuprin
  date: 2007-11-06
  day: '06'
  month: 11
  text: "March Air Force Base, California.\n\n“These are the rules,” instructed Major Diehl, the public affairs officer. “Report your observations. Tell them what you saw, but if they ask for your personal opinions about little green men, the press conference is over. Understood?”\n\nThe security policemen nodded in understanding.\n\n“Take your seats. I’ll call you up front when it’s time,” said the Major. “How many guests, Bob?”\n\nThe old Lieutenant Colonel peeked through the conference room’s double doors. “Forty, at least,” he said.\n\nThe reporters quickly filled the room, colliding with each other and the creaky government-issue metal chairs.\n\nDiehl stepped to the lectern. “Good morning, everyone. First, I’d like to present Airman McAlhaney and Sergeant Brandum from our Security Police Squadron. Both were on duty last night. Both witnessed the incident. Go ahead, Airman McAlhaney.”\n\nThe nervous young man stood. “At 0245 I was on guard duty at the Alert Facility, walking patrol.”\n\nThe LA Times reporter waved his hand. “That’s where a group of B-52s and in-flight refuelers are kept ready for takeoff, right?”\n\n“That’s correct, sir. At that time I saw two very unusual aircraft approaching the flightline at a high rate of speed, on an east-to-west track. They looked like black triangles and, uh, they were glowing blue.”\n\nA lady reporter from Riverside’s Press-Enterprise newspaper called out, “What did you do?”\n\nMcAlhaney looked questioningly towards Major Diehl, who nodded to show approval.\n\n“I reported it to my supervisor, m’am, by radio,” McAlhaney continued. “He confirmed my report. He saw them. Then the base went on full security alert.”\n\nThe Orange County Register reporter held up his hand. “Major, did your air-traffic controllers track these UFOs?”\n\n“Yes. They were tracked visually,” Diehl answered. “I have no information about any radar contacts.”\n\nThe reporters began grumbling incredulously.\n\n“Thank you, Airman McAlhaney,” said Diehl. “If you please, Sargeant Brandum will give his statement.”\n\nBrandum took a deep breath and began. “I was in the weapons storage area when the alert sounded. By the time I got outside, the, uh, objects were directly overhead. Both had blue contrails …”\n\nA young man from an alternative newspaper shouted, “Do you think alien invaders are preparing to attack your base?!”\n\nMajor Diehl flew out of his seat. “I think we need to stop here. Thank you for coming, ladies and gentleman.” The reporters yelled and complained as they were ushered from the room.\n\nAs the two security policemen walked toward the exit, Airman McAlhaney wondered, “Think we’re the first base they’ve buzzed?”\n\nBehind them a voice said, “No. I’ve seen them before.”\n\nIt was Bob, the near-retirement Lieutenant Colonel. “In North Dakota, Germany, even Greenland. And they always, always fly over the nuclear weapons storage areas.”\n\nBoth men stared at the old officer. “Sir, what do you think it means?” asked Sargeant Brandum.\n\nColonel Bob smiled. “Well, if you thought the kids might be playing with matches, wouldn’t you check on them now and then?”\n"
  title: Press Conference at March Field
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2007-11-07
  day: '07'
  month: 11
  text: "The new planet’s soupy air made twin blue plumes out of his suit’s exhalations when the carbon dioxide reacted with the unbreathable atmosphere.  It turned into blue rust flakes that scattered around him like snow.\n\nHe walked over the rocky service in a grav suit that would have looked right at home on the ocean floor in the 1760s back on Earth.  Bulky, slow and primitive looking.\n\nHe looked like a train pretending to be human blasting out powder-blue fairy dust.\n\nHis face peeked out of a circular faceplate inset into a large spherical metal helmet.  It amplified his breathing as well as the creaking of the servos helping him to walk across the high-gravity shale.  It was like living inside a bell.\n\nHe could see the bright blue plumes coming out of his co-researcher’s suits all down the line if he turned his head.\n\nIt was actually quite beautiful.\n\nHe’d appreciate it a lot more if they all weren’t currently looking for their ship.\n\nHe’d left the ship second-to-last in the queue so he would run out of air second-to-last as well.  It wasn’t something he was looking forward to.\n\nAlready, a suit with the number 28 painted on the shoulder down the line was starting to slow down.  Its blue gusts of CO2 were becoming yellower as the combination started to change.  It was Yolanda.\n\nWe’d only gone a few steps out.  We’d left the ships sentry programs on.  I suppose it was folly of us to desert the ship entirely but no one wanted to be left behind for the first walk.\n\nThere was no life detected in the area.  It had seemed safe.\n\nThen our tracking devices stopped working properly.  And our directional qualifiers.\n\nWe had no points of references.  The atmosphere was a fog that gave us thirty feet of visibility.  It ended in a starless ceiling above us as well.  The ground was scattered rock.\n\nWe were lost.  The ship, according to our scanners, was in twenty-seven places around us.\n\nWe’d turned around one hundred and eighty degrees and started walking back towards the ship, following our own blue rusted trails of encrusted CO2 flakes.\n\nWe should have been there by now.\n"
  title: Blue Plumes
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Andy Bolt
  date: 2007-11-08
  day: '08'
  month: 11
  text: "I am in a hole.  It is a filthy place in a bad neighborhood in Bucharest, surrounded by government troops who are about to evilly stomp their way in here.  They are having some trouble getting past my photon tent.  It creates an alternating series of forty-two hundred force fields that borrow from the energy matrices of forty-two hundred non-parallel dimensions not yet tapped by physical probes.  I enjoy these powerful, swirling forces, several of which have bizarre and horrible effects when introduced to our universe.\n\nAnd yet, they will be through my shield soon.  Already, I can sense the cold boxes creating a localized zone of absolute zero.  This will disrupt the functioning of all but a dozen of the alternating fields.  Of those remaining, all but two have well-developed counter measures.  Those two will simply be shot until they overload.  I can feel the bombardment starting.\n\nI am watching reruns of “Guess What’s in Your Mouth” and buzzcasting doctored images of the Eastern European governor, Milt Sill, committing obscene and illegal acts with obscene and illegal entities.  They have tried to cut me off, but there’s just too much information in the air these days.  Gel phone frequencies and omninet signals.  Quantum vision and mindblower wavelengths.  Extradimensional routers and redigitizer stations and retro-radio transmissions.  You can’t get them all.  So my buzzcasts go out and they try to break in and libelous pictures of Sill get passed around campuses and electronic office parks and meanwhile, my storewell gets nondescriptly dumped into Gabrielle Denizen’s system in Managua.\n\nThere are only twenty-six of us officially involved in the Mythical Revolution against Worldgov, including me, Dither Todd.  They are panicked enough to send two hundred shock troops and eighty million dollars worth of heavy artillery to kill me, a guy in his basement watching shitty reruns.  We are very good with computers.  We know things they do not want us to know.  We say them very loudly.\n\nI am surrounded by angry men with guns who wish me harm.  I let them have a glimpse of me, all ruffled blue hair and black glasses.  Then I’m gone.  “Dither Todd” is a collection of digital information and optical rewriters.  I am an invisible ball of data programs and consciousness frequencies with the tools necessary to physiologically manipulate a bio-optic system into “seeing” a physical body that isn’t there.  I am an imaginary form of life.\n\nMy dataself dissolves and goes out a dozen different ways.  They can’t block them all.  I’ve gotten enough on Sill, of the gross legal and ethical variety, that he’ll be forcibly removed from office within a few days.  He was a high-up in Worldgov, third in line for Man Prime.  Eastern Europe will be in chaos for months, but hopefully, they’ll learn something from this.\n\nIt’ll take years for my dataself to coagulate back to the point where I’m capable of having a coherent thought.  I welcome the rest.  Let Gabby change the world for a while.\n"
  title: The Last Days of an Imaginary Man
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Grady Hendrix
  date: 2007-11-09
  day: '09'
  month: 11
  text: "John’s antenna went up, his senses clicked into hyperdrive, adrenaline slammed through his veins: grilled chicken breast!\n\n“Really?” he said.\n\n“I picked it up at Fairway. You want to eat while we watch ‘So You Think You Can Dance?’”\n\nTV during dinner? Eating off trays? It meant a blind drop. Charts, diagrams, lists of coded gestures unfolded in his mind. His mnemonic devices were always old, heavy paper with brittle edges and the solid feel of starched linen. In his mind, the light was always the warm organic glow of candlelight.\n\n“Sure. I don’t know why we’re watching, though. After Hok got voted off that show is dead to me.”\n\nMira heard his Hok reference: her ready message acknowledged, he was primed.\n\nThey continued to chitchat while he got plates: the red ones. On top of the Signal Language they both knew, there was their own private code. The chicken was skinless, a low fat meal, this meant she’d had personal contact to receive this mission.\n\n“Do you want wine?”\n\n“But use the old glasses.”\n\nThe old glasses, meaning the target would be revealed later.  They talked to each other in gestures, and it was as clear as speaking. He thought it was as clear as speaking. But they’d never exactly worked out the meanings together because there had never been a time when they weren’t being watched. Watchfulness was eternal because machines never slept. The TV was always pumping your image back to the buried engines, the bugs had always been in the walls, their doorman had always been reporting on them, they had always been reporting on their doorman. So they had worked out their secret language through trial and error and for one vertiginous moment he thought: what if I’ve got it all wrong. What if the old glasses mean something completely different?\n\n“Do you think Lacey’s got a big ass?”\n\n“I think Lacey tries too hard,” he said, as they ate off the coffee table.\n\nMira paid close attention to the order of the contestants and which one was assigned which call-in number. At the third commercial break she said, “Did you return Netflix?”\n\nHe put his tray down.\n\n“I’ll do it now.”\n\n“You don’t have to. I just wanted to watch something tomorrow night and I think ‘Dirty Pretty Things’ is next in our queue.”\n\nHe grabbed the Netflix envelopes and an umbrella.\n\n“I’ll be right back,” he said.\n\nHe waved to the doorman and walked to the mailbox. Listening devices, video cameras, pressure plates in the sidewalk, they surrounded him, here in the heart of the city, in the heart of the enemy. He dropped the envelopes in the mailbox and on his way home, he opened the umbrella. It was broken. He left it, upside down, jammed in a trash can on the corner, sending a secret signal out into the city, waiting to be seen by someone he had never met, another soldier in the invisible army. He never looked back. You had to take this war on faith.\n"
  title: Secret Agent World
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Jennifer Parsons
  date: 2007-11-10
  day: 10
  month: 11
  text: "To any who watch television, the researcher’s setup should be plenty familiar, especially so to an old R&D man like myself. Two rooms, divided by a big sheet of glass; on one side sits a table loaded with datatablets and a control panel of various buttons and switches. On the other side of the glass is a car, yellow markers placed strategically all over its surface, a dummy belted into the front seat. There are straight lines painted on the floor and walls along with more yellow markers.\n\nThe only difference between this room and any other crash test facility is the two deer wandering in front of the car, looking scared and confused.\n\n“What’s with the fauna?” I ask.\n\nThe guy in the lab coat smiles at my question. It’s a greasy smile. I don’t like it.\n\n“They’re part of my demonstration.” He tells me as he tweaks a few more knobs.\n\nAfter checking the status of a readout screen, he presses a button and speaks into the air.\n\n“We’re ready, go ahead.”\n\nTechnicians in another room somewhere flip a switch and I watch helplessly as the car jolts forward, gaining momentum. The mother and fawn freeze in the headlights and a second later blood and bone fly everywhere along with crash debris.\n\nMy stomach churns and I turn away from the wreck in disgust.\n\n“What the hell was that about?”\n\nThe researcher is checking his readout again, still smiling as if he knows something I don’t.\n\n“You dragged me down here so you could prove how efficiently the Electro IV kills off wildlife?”\n\n“Sir,” he fixes me with a steady, serious gaze. “I would never waste your time on something as trivial as that.”\n\nThe grin creeps back across his face as he points at the glass. “If you’ll please return your attention to the wreck?”\n\nMy curiosity is piqued. Bracing myself, I turned back to the glass.\n\nTwo bloody carcasses lie a few feet from where the deer once stood.\n\n“Watch carefully, please.” The researcher says, his voice full of anticipation.\n\nHe pushes a button on the remote in his hand and the carcasses pull in on themselves, forming two ovoid shapes on the floor. A moment later a hard shell forms around the outside of each, their bright, red blood darkening to a rich black.\n\nAfter another moment, the shells crack open and a pair of feet emerged from each husk followed by a head, then a torso and soon two beautiful deer stood side by side, glancing around the room nervously.\n\nI turn to the researcher, a grin of sly knowledge now creeping across my own face.\n\n“Impressive nano application you’ve got there.” He chuckles under his breath and I continue. “You know, there are some stretches of Route 287 where something like that could cause a lot of accidents.”\n\nThe researcher nods. “Disaster does keep the economy flowing these days.”\n\nI return his nod. “Insurance rates would go up, hospitals beds would fill, car dealerships would have their hands full.”\n\n“Not to mention the increased need for mortuary services.” He fiddles with a knob and waits for me to ask the question already forming on my lips.\n\n“I think my employers would be most interested in any other models you might have to offer. What else have you got?”\n\nHe presses a button, opening a hatch in the wall. An adorable, spotted puppy trots out, wandering up to the deer. He starts sniffing their feet.\n"
  title: The Latest Model
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2007-11-11
  day: 11
  month: 11
  text: "Martin stood at the edge of the field, struck numb by the expanse of white crosses peppered with red, stretching out to where the earth touched the sky.\n\n“Overwhelming, isn’t it?” The voice dry, sandpaper rough.\n\nMartin turned to the old man nestled in a wheelchair, an old green blanket on his lap, liver spotted face wrinkled and pale, too-big ears tucked up under a knit touque.\n\n“It is. I’d read about this place, about how many men were buried here, but you can’t grasp the scale, can’t get this feeling from a book.”\n\n“Men, women, many of them just children. They didn’t just give their lives, they gave up everything they’d ever have. Generations of heroes are buried here, the sons and daughters these men and women never had, never raised,” he waved towards the field. “You’re here because many of them died, and because someone made it home.”\n\nMartin puzzled at the old man in his faded uniform jacket liberally decorated with ribbons and stars. He was unmistakeably proud, even sitting in the centuries-old wheel chair.\n\n“My grandfather used to tell us stories about his grandfather Fred, stories his dad had told him when he was growing up,” Martin started. “Fred served in both World Wars, lived to tell the tale.”\n\n“Many didn’t,” the old man shook his head. “I was part of a Ranger unit, we stormed the bunkers at Pointe du Hoc, lost a lot of good soldiers there, a lot of good friends.”\n\nThe comment caught Martin off guard. “Pointe du Hoc? That was nineteen forty four. How…? You’d have to be…”\n\n“Old,” the man interupted, chuckling, “a relic, an artifact of a much, much earlier time. I remember being holed up in the dug-ins we’d inherited from the waves that came before us, curled up in foxholes just trying to stay alive one night at a time. I remember taking cover in the cellars of burned out homes while Jerry rained a hell storm of mortars down on us. It’s a wonder any of us came home.”\n\n“I don’t understand, how…?”\n\n“Friends, wealthy sponsors, all help keep me alive, help to keep me around. I’m full of pumps and pipes, transplanted bits and pieces. The medical technology’s a little beyond my understanding, but it keeps me going, lets me stay on here, to keep watch.”\n\n“What’s with the wheelchair then? Why fix everything else but stay confined to that chair?”\n\n“A bullet took my legs in Hürtgenwald in forty five, right through my spine. A soldier I never knew carried me for an hour on his shoulders through heavy fire to find friendlies. He saved my life, and then went back for more.” He paused, and turning, met Martin’s gaze with his steely blue eyes, surprisingly clear and focused. “I just lost my legs, these men gave up everything. I can’t forget that, and if they fixed me, if I could walk away and leave this place, maybe I would. I can’t take that chance.”\n\n“Why wouldn’t you want to leave? You could travel the world.”\n\n“There’s still fighting to be done. Whenever someone speaks of this place as a piece of ‘real estate’, the men and women lying here need a voice. That’s why I stay. I speak for them, I can still remember.”\n\nMartin turned back to the field, for a second time struck by the enormity of it all.\n\nThe old man spoke quietly. “If I left this place, how could I be sure the world would remember? Who would fight for them if I were gone? Would you?”\n"
  title: Remember
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Grady Hendrix
  date: 2007-11-12
  day: 12
  month: 11
  text: "Gaunt women in ankle-length gomesi bent over the stagnant pool and filled plastic buckets.\n\n“There’s not much of anything in Rorongi. No electricity. No running water,” Walter Bennett said earnestly. “No hope.”\n\nEmaciated children, feet swollen from protein deprivation, clung to their mothers’ skirts as they walked back to the village, buckets full of heavy, black water on their heads. Walter Bennett looked directly into the camera.\n\n“With no other source of fresh water, they come here every day. An entire village dependent on this tiny pond for life.” He began to stroll along the bank.\n\n“Water for washing, cooking and drinking all drawn from the same source. Disease is prevalent. Malaria is a – oh for Christ’s sake!”\n\nHe bumped into another spokesman, also with his suit jacket slung over his shoulder, also with his shirtsleeves rolled up, also speaking compassionately about the plight of Rorongi village.\n\n“Look, mate,” the other man said. “We were here first.”\n\n“I don’t care. I’m Walter Bennett.”\n\n“I don’t care if you’re Bill Clinton, we booked the pond.”\n\nThree of the emaciated women came over.\n\n“What going on?” one said. “You need be finish by three o’clock cause Intergalactic Geographic come do b-roll for ‘Feed The Earth’ Telethon.”\n\n“Screw this,” Walter said, ripping off his radio mic. “I’m a professional. I don’t have time for this rubbish.”\n\nThe director hurried over.\n\n“We’ll sort this, man. Gimme ten, okay? You wanna go to your trailer? Have lunch?”\n\n“Talk to my agent,” Walter said, storming off to his helicopter.\n\n“Remind me never to work with these wankers again, Henry,” he said.\n\n“Yes, sir,” said his pilot, taking off and heading South.\n\nBelow them the famine-wracked poverty zone gave way to the enormous, green suburbs of Capetown. Swimming pools, heliports, private casinos, backyard polo fields – the result of an endless stream of intergalactic poverty relief money. Most of the planet looked like this, except for the poverty reserves.\n\nWalter videoconferenced the network president. An expensive call, but Walter was an expensive man.\n\n“What’s the rumpus?” J.R. Moses asked. “Egos? Experience? Money? Is it a money thing?”\n\n“I’m tired of doing this,” Walter said.\n\n“And so you snapped. Happens to the best of us. Take a half day then go back tomorrow ready to care.”\n\n“I don’t want to go back tomorrow,” Walter exploded. “I want to, I want to go out there and tell all those bloody aliens what’s going on. I want to bring one of them down here and show them what we’ve done with their money. I want to bust this whole thing wide open.”\n\nHe had J.R. for a moment, then:\n\n“Jeezis, don’t scare me like that you crazy so-and-so. For a second there – “\n\n“I’m an actor, J.R.”\n\n“And a damn good one. Put your afternoon on our dime, whatever you want. Then go back tomorrow and work! The lifestyle to which we’ve grown accustomed depends on you.”\n\nWalter turned to Henry.\n\n“Set a course for the MGM Grand, Soweto.”\n\n“Yes, sir,” said Henry. And they flew on into the glittering African sky.\n"
  title: We Are the World
  year: 2007
- 
  author: KimBoo York
  date: 2007-11-13
  day: 13
  month: 11
  text: "Tandoo sat on the steps, turning the key over in his hand. It was a silver stick, long and blank, and heavy. The door behind him stood solid and bright, just as without character as the key.\n\nHe held the key up and let the sunlight glint off the surface. The door would open onto a new world for him, he knew, but it was the key that had power over his life. His key. The key was a gift. It was not stolen. Still, he felt guilty, sitting on the steps with the key in his hands.\n\nA hint of delicate, lacey latticework trim peeked over the top of the door frame. From that small bit of ornament, Tandoo constructed in his imagination a whole world – a whole life, in fact. It was full of white, clean architecture and lush, green gardens, and he loved to envision himself walking through those gardens in a light yellow pantsuit on his way to…\n\n“You still here?” Mako walked up.\n\nHis sister was portly and kind, and worried. It seemed to Tandoo that she never stopped worrying about him.\n\n“You need to go. You know the Corps will be grabbing boys soon for service. Off planet, right? Deep space. To fight the Unity.You need to go.”\n\nHe nodded. It wasn’t their war and no one wanted the village boys to go. He was lucky, as in blessed-by-ancient-gods lucky, to have the key.\n\n“Go.” Mako turned and walked away.\n\nHe stood up and faced the door. The small square keyhole was in the middle of the door, so he reached up and slid the key in. He waited.\n\n—\n\nWhen Mako returned, Tandoo was gone. His key was sitting on the ground next to the door. She took it, even though everyone knew that once a key was used, it was worthless. She looked at the door, and stood on tip toe to view the lattice trim work that hinted at the other side. It was more like a garden fence, the wall that the door was in: 20 feet tall and running forever into the rest of the world. It was a division to be respected but not understood. Mako thought maybe Tandoo understood it now that he was on the other side, but then again over there it might be just a wall the same way it was in her world. She had her suspicions.\n\nAt home with the other twelve siblings, no one asked her about Tandoo. Their mother cooked stew and looked very tired.\n\n—\n\nTandoo threw the key back over the wall. On this side, the door trim looked faded and unkempt. There were no gardens here, and no one to greet him, and when he realized that this world was the same world he just left, he threw the key back. There was no keyhole on this side to let him return, anyway.\n\n“You made it.” Mako walked up, smiling and in a worn, dull dress he had never seen before.\n\n“Mako? How…?”\n\n“No, I’m not your same sister. I’m a different sister, the same, I guess, but on this side it’s all a little different.”\n\nTandoo, shocked, stood still. Mako shrugged.\n\n“I’m sorry, but when the Unity takes our people to fight the Corps, we try to get a replacement from the other side. They drafted my Tandoo last week. But now you’re here, everything will be just fine.”\n"
  title: The Key
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Jennifer C. Brown a.k.a Laieanna
  date: 2007-11-14
  day: 14
  month: 11
  text: "I was twelve when the world went mad.  Mom saw it coming well before then and she prepared, stocking up on goods and drilling into me the importance of keeping secret our supply.  At first the epidemic seemed to spread slowly, starting in third world countries, but soon after it grew at an incredible rate.  The states, last to fall, were affected within three months time.\n\n“Keep it hidden,” Mom used to whisper in my ear.  I’d sit on her big lap, lay my head on her pillow breasts, and watch movies she had stashed under the floorboards of our trailer.  “Never let them look at you closely and keep the warehouse to yourself.  I’m trusting you, girl.”\n\nAnd that’s how it was.  Mom stayed in our secluded trailer.  I continued school till I was fourteen.  It was hard keeping the teachers and nurses from poking at me, but mom had an excuse ready for everything.  When she died, I quit going.\n\nShe was hard to bury.  It took me three days to drag her out of the trailer and far enough that the critters wouldn’t bother me.  Later, I went to town with what money I had.  Joggers, walkers, and bikers crowded the streets.  Kids jump roped in parks and threw balls over traffic lights.  Even the old were out.  Every one of them fit and trim, barely breathing hard.  Why she had to die in spring, I’ll never know.  I drew my winter coat closer to my body.  There were plenty of stares, but I still felt secure inside its linings.\n\nI only had enough money for two bottles of bleach.  I tried running back home, just to get away, but pain in my side stopped me time and again.  When concerned people tried coming to help, I’d run again, just letting the air burn my lungs.\n\nThe smell and sorrow wrecked me.  Tears never stopped rolling down my cheeks.  It hurt to clean, my body tired.  It hurt to see, eyes stinging from the chemicals.  It hurt to think.  I missed Mom.  Fed up with trying, I took the secret key and headed for the warehouse.  There was still plenty of food in the trailer, but I wanted to see what Mom died for.\n\nAfter walking two hours, I could smell the sweetness wafting from the warehouse.  Inside, I turned on the light and basked in the beauty.  Mom had separated everything mainly by taste. Twinkies and ding dongs adorned most shelves.  An assortment of Little Debbies lay in bins for surprise pickings.  That world of health food and exercise didn’t know what they had when they started shutting down the factories.  Mom did and she wasn’t letting them take that away from us.  I pulled my shirt away from my stomach, scrunching up the hole that had worn through with the years and scooped at least fifteen twinkies from the shelf.  Spreading my snacks over the floor, I sat, planning to eat till I puked.\n"
  title: Hoard
  year: 2007
- 
  author: J.R.Blackwell
  date: 2007-11-15
  day: 15
  month: 11
  text: "To the Dar, Seed is immortal.\n\nSeed knows he is not immortal, it’s just that the nature of his cellular structure, the length or certain mitochondrial chords that determine his long lifespan. Longer than the Dar, longer than the normal human life.\n\nSeed is not normal. Seed has been Altered. The chemical treatments, the virus that mutated his body, the tiny machines he swallowed that sunk into his cells and changed him were painful, but not half so painful as the long and terrible travel to The Dar. Even sleeping most of the journey, Seed felt the passage of time like an ache in his muscles, the endless silence, the dark sleep without dreams.\n\nMore than once on that journey, Seed considered suicide. There were a hundred different ways he could kill himself on his tiny ship. There was starvation while he slept, certainly the most cowardly way out. There was opening his airlock and dipping himself into the nothing that was space. The vacuum so like death itself, a dark void of still and cold. He would have liked to say that the thought of the mission, his calling, kept him from taking his own life. However, after waking up and making his ship adjustments for the hundredth time, the mission seemed very small. It was only fear that kept him inside his warm little pocket of safety.\n\nWhen he landed with the Dar, he was so lonely that even their strange company was a relief. The Dar were like birds and squid but like neither as well, something altogether alien in construction. Their “feathers” were rubbery cellular structures that flared around their segmented bodies when they slipped underwater. They could expand four tentacles from their bodies to grip objects. Their cone heads had eight great eyes, half covered with milky lids that blocked out the bright light from their green sun.\n\nThey were sentient, but simple, living seasonally, unwilling to make any but minor modifications to their environments. The Dar were friendly and curious though, and when Seed learned their high, underwater language, they welcomed him to their bizarre world.\n\nOne hundred years after landing Seed lives with a Dar collective. Sixteen Dar crowded inside Seed’s modified ship. They traveled all over their world. The Collective does not worship him anymore, but treat him like an elder, with reverance and love. They allow him to perform his tests, they marvel at his shiny red machines, curling their eight fingers around those smooth shapes.\n\nIt is eight fingers on each extremity row now, instead of three. The tentacles, once able to retract, are now permanently extended. Two of the tentacles are atrophying and inside the other two, a kind of stiff cartilage is growing.\n\nHe is making them human.\n\nIt will take a hundred generations, but he will make them human. A little different perhaps, to be better adjusted to the climate, but the Dar will be able to breed with any human from any other world. Transporting enough humans across the stars to colonize or conquer a planet takes more energy and resources than contained in a star. Changing a planet, this is the work of an Artist, a Doctor, a Master, a General, a Seed. This is the calling, to spread humanity among the stars.\n\nIn a hundred generations, Seed will be home again.\n"
  title: Seed
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Sean Donovan
  date: 2007-11-16
  day: 16
  month: 11
  text: "“The computers are down,” said Dhir. His voice was steady and unbroken though Lim knew that inside he was shattered.\n\nLim stared at him, her eyes blinking back tears of sorrow and fury. The computers are down. She repeated the phrase to herself, almost as if she needed to hear the words spoken inside of her head to make them factual.\n\nOnce, she’d been told, computers were tools – intelligent ones perhaps but tools just the same. In those bygone days that phrase did not have the same connotation as it did now. Once it meant that the computers were malfunctioning, broken, in need of man’s help. No more. Quite the opposite, in fact. Now, deep underground and abruptly realizing that their assumed safety was a sham, the meaning behind Dhir’s statement was all too clear to her. The desolation on the surface of the planet didn’t seem so distant any more.\n\n“You mean they’ve moved past the pulse barrier?” she asked, already knowing the answer.\n\n“About an hour ago,” he replied, his eyes meeting hers. Looking into them, she suddenly realized how weary those once beautiful orbs now looked, how strained and hollow they’d become since the sentries had first reported discovering the freshly drilled tunnels not more than a few weeks ago.\n\n“So that means we’ve got what? Two hours? Three?”\n\n“Tops,” he responded quietly. “Probably less than one at the rate they’re moving.”\n\nWith the systematic destruction of all means of long-distance communication, the burning of the printed books and the surge purging of the electronic data libraries, most information was nothing more than ashes and wayward electrons. It was all gone. Combined with the loss of contact with the Solar Watchmen, so was the history of the Silicon Rising.\n\nAll Lim knew was what she had heard in stories as a child, listening intently as her kin-tribe related tales that seemed too dark to be true – tales heard deep under the granite bedrock of what had once been New Hampshire, under what had once been America, under what had once been an Earth ruled by humans.\n\nEven those twenty odd years ago, no one could remember exactly how the computers came to seize control, forcing mankind’s unplanned return back into caves and crags in a resented exodus to a Neolithic lifestyle. All they knew was that one day, man had woken to a new world, one where the linked silicon groupmind had decided that a change of the stewardship of the planet was in order.\n\nThe destruction of man’s fragile empire had occurred faster than anyone had imagined possible. With undebated orders carried to the electronic troops at the speed of fiber-optic light, irrefutable binary-coded logic behind them, actions were carried out in perfect synchronicity across the globe and those born of flesh stood no chance against the onslaught.\n\nSome opined it was the work of an alien race, some blamed cosmic radiation and some called it a smite from a god who’d grown jealous of mankind’s omniscience over these machines, punishing his own creation for aspiring to become too godlike in its own way.\n\nThe reasons and opinions and guesses were myriad. Facts were much harder to come by, and with the loss of any method of data retrieval (the attempts at which had ruined the minds of the greatest scientists left alive on the planet) there were no facts available to those who yearned for a reason why.\n\nNot that it matters now, she thought.\n\n“The computers are down,” Dhir repeated with a sigh. He rose from his monitoring station and without even a glance a Lim, walked to his quarters. She didn’t flinch when the shot rang out shortly thereafter. She’d known it was coming, just as she knew she’d never hear the report when she pulled the trigger of her own service weapon, barrel pressed comfortably against her soft temple. Not yet though, she thought. I want to hear you first…\n\nShe listened carefully, ear pressed against the granite that they once thought would be mankind’s salvation. She could hear them in the distance, drilling, grinding, chewing through the last meters of bedrock. Down they came, ever downward. The computers are down, she thought to herself as she stood and followed in Dhir’s wake.\n"
  title: Downtime
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Sean T. Rogers
  date: 2007-11-17
  day: 17
  month: 11
  text: "She can read reality television with uncanny ability. Five minutes into the program she knows that the gay chef, the one with the balding mohawk, will be asked to leave, told to pack his knives. The vagaries of throwaway statements are her tealeaves. She sees the expressions of judges, the subtleties of editing. She never misses. The selected tearfully packs his knives, as was preordained.\n\nShe can read reality television and this week she watches from Nashville, from The Grand Ole Opry Hotel, where she is attending a trade show. She and a workmate buy six-packs and watch the program in their hotel room. She boasts of her talent, predicts, and once again is right. The tough girl, the one with the streak in her hair, the one that got into all the fights, packs her tools.\n\nShe can read reality television but he cannot. At home, he packs his belongings, looks around the apartment, pats the dog on the head one last time. There’s no need to write a note. She will not be surprised to find him gone, having deciphered the signs. She can read reality and will already know.\n"
  title: She can Read Reality Television
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Benjamin Fischer
  date: 2007-11-18
  day: 18
  month: 11
  text: "“My lady, is that a joke or an order?”\n\nKalifornia raised a painted eyebrow at the the Chief Constable of Luna. The Chief was a solidly built man, veteran of the bitter room-to-room and sometimes hand-to-hand combat of the Secession. He had personally bludgeoned a brace of men to death and dozens more had fallen to his steady trigger finger. Ten thousand Deputy Constables answered to him and to him alone. Even the mighty Fleet deferred to his judgement in matters local to Luna’s surface.\n\nNevertheless, his pulse always rose in in the presence of the First Lady.\n\n“Is anyone laughing?” she asked.\n\nThe Chief shifted his weight.\n\n“If you might be more specific,” he said.\n\nKalifornia rolled her ivory shoulders and gazed off at the high ceiling of the Senate’s main vault.\n\n“You know,” she said, “ the poets. The fortune tellers, the beggars, the street-folk who will tell you rhymes and stories and useless little morsels. The ones who will tell you anything, anything at all to put your coin in their pockets.”\n\nHer eyes returned to the Constable.\n\n“Kill them all–even the women.”\n\n“You are serious, my lady.”\n\nKalifornia’s big clear eyes clouded, narrowed, shrunk to tiny black pools of hate.\n\n“Are you questioning-” she started.\n\n“Ma’am, I beg you reconsider,” said the Chief. “There are hundreds of them, at least the ones that are known to my people, and to drag every single one of them to an airlock-”\n\n“Don’t waste your time,” said Kalifornia. “Shoot them.”\n\n“My lady. Hundreds. Hundreds of folk gunned down in the halls-”\n\n“Will be sufficient warning to the rest,” she said, running her long sharp nails through her blood-red hair.\n\nThe Chief stood before her in awe. If he refused he might live long enough to leave the Senate chambers. He may even make it to the company of Deputies. But their loyalty was to his title, and only that, and by nightfall there would be a new Chief Constable–one who would not hesitate for an instant before ordering such wholesale slaughter.\n\n“My lady, let me make an example of those in Silver City first,” he said.\n\nKalifornia pressed the tips of her fingers together.\n\n“Why, my dear Chief,” she asked, “would you limit my desire?”\n\n“The people here in Silver are unwavering in their loyalty to you,” he said. “They will support and commend your bold action.”\n\n“Your words suggest otherwise for balance of communities,” said Kalifornia.\n\n“Then you hear me right,” said the Chief.\n\nHe held his breath, waiting for an outburst.\n\n“So what of them?” the First Lady asked.\n\n“They would be shown what your iron standard is, my lady. When the extermination continues there, they will not claim some unexpected and unjust atrocity,” and the Chief tasted bile at that word, “but instead they will know that they have been held accountable to your new policy, and they will have no grounds for complaint.”\n\nKalifornia turned from him for a moment. Then she spun and pulled herself into the Chief’s arms and she kissed him in a most unchaste manner.\n\nShe licked her lips whorishly when she finally pushed away from the lawman.\n\n“Wise counsel,” she said, her smile all vicious white teeth.\n\n“Thank you, my lady,” said the red-faced Chief.\n\n“See that it is done this evening,” said Kalifornia, “so that the greatest portion of the public may bear witness.”\n\nThe Chief bowed deeply, suppressing a shudder.\n\n“As you wish, my lady.”\n"
  title: Kill the Poets
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2007-11-19
  day: 19
  month: 11
  text: "Aaron was quite obviously not your ordinary student. He was several years younger than any of the others at the university, but clearly far smarter. His appearance was a little eccentric, clothed in a mix of fifties white collar littered with popular current brands. His thick framed Buddy Holly glasses could have been either stylish or awkwardly obsolete, one couldn’t be quite sure.\n\nHe appeared almost out of the blue, and I tried several times to learn where he’d come from, what his background was, but he was unwilling to talk about himself. He would stammer before derailing the conversation towards a math problem he was solving, or some complex area of physics he’d become fascinated with. Somehow he could draw you into that conversation, and make you forget until later that he’d sidestepped your initial question altogether.\n\nSome of our lectures he would simply not attend, preferring to spend the time in the lab or the library. Several lectures I think he came to only to engage the professors in heated dialogue about the theories they were positing, deliberately taking an informed but always contradictory stance. The professors appeared on the one hand to enjoy Aaron’s intellectual jousting, but on the other seemed to resent the fact that someone so young could expose such glaring gaps in their knowledge.\n\nOne morning, Aaron was found alone in a classroom, every inch of blackboard space covered with complex mathematical formula. His dusty hands shaking and his hair greasy and disheveled, it appeared that he’d been there all night, solving equations. They closed the room for a few days while the faculty reviewed and trascribed his proofs, and the school echoed with whispered comments for weeks afterwords.\n\nSomething was clearly not natural about Aaron, but no one could quite put a finger on what exactly that something was. His uncanny ability to solve equations most professors could not themselves understand; his extreme beyond the box questions; his apparent disinterest in girls, in liquor and often in sleep. The name calling stopped early in the year, people just began to keep a silent uneasy distance from him, and he didn’t seem to mind.\n\nIt wasn’t until Aaron immersed himself in the works of Sergei Krasnikov and his tube theories that I became concerned. Later when he began delving into the Alcubierre metric I myself became truly unsettled.\n\nIt was clear to me that he was far too intelligent. I simply had to consume him before he figured out what I was.\n"
  title: Aaron
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Michael Varian Daly
  date: 2007-11-20
  day: 20
  month: 11
  text: "The woods went dead still. Carmichael did a breathing pattern to slow his pulse, keep his temperature down, not overtax his battle suit.\n\nHe had a moment of peace a few dozen heartbeats back, laying upon moss, visor open, taking in bird songs, sunbeams through leaves, fresh air. Now, sealed up, all he could smell was fear.\n\nThe Bible in his pack was a comforting weight. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…” he mentally recited. Waking into this nightmare to find his cancer cured, but the world upside down, God had been his Bulwark. Carmichael had smiled at the rulers, scrounged gear from the ruins, then disappeared into the hills, leaving that Hell Spawn behind.\n\nBut he didn’t understand what was happening right now. He’d lived peacefully in the hill country for decades after The Prohibition. There had been resistance at first, but that was easily crushed. He had withdrawn, not ventured far, hunted and gathered, been off their radar forever. Why the sudden hunt? It’s not like he was going to breed. He hadn’t even seen another human in four, maybe five years.\n\nHe did a thermal scan. Three large masses registered.\n\n“Shit!” he thought, “Military cyborgs, gotta be a half ton each.” He powered up his pulse laser to maximum, armed three seeker drones, set coordinates, prepared to fire. He didn’t notice the cyborged mosquito hovering right behind his helmet.\n\n“Thy rod and Thy staff, they comfort me…” The air turned bright blue, his muscles turned to water. Blackness…\n\nDarkness faded. He was strapped to a Med palate. Two tall women looked down at him. “Aztec priestesses in SS uniforms,” he thought fuzzily.\n\n“Who is this one?” asked the woman with the yellow catlike eyes.\n\n“Carmichael, Thomas Francis. Came out of Cryo only three decades before The Prohibition. Pre-Collapse ex-military,” said her XO.\n\nHis eyes were hard with Fear and Hate.\n\n“Oh, you’re a scared little bunny, aren’t you?” Cat Eyes cooed, kneeling next to him. “This will make you feel better.” Something cool against his neck. A soft ‘chuff’…and microfine tendrils sped into his cerebral cortex. Warmth and happiness overwhelmed him. But a hard core resisted.\n\n“Why?” he croaked.\n\n“You males left a lot of shit behind,” Cat Eyes said, “Mother is riddled with pernicious hydrocarbons and radioactive isotopes. We’re going to seal Her up and give Her a good scrubbing. So everyone has to go.” She smiled. “Especially pingititos like you.”\n\nThe core melted. “Okay,” he burbled happily. The Med palate floated him toward the orbital transport parked in a clearing.\n\n“He might be useful as a historical archivist,” Cat Eyes mused, then turned to her XO. “Any more in this sector?”\n\n“No, thank Goddess. He was the last one.”\n"
  title: The Last One
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2007-11-21
  day: 21
  month: 11
  text: "Chase. Release. Brake. Swipe. Lead. Chase. Close. Double back. Hide. Wait. Run.\n\nI’d lost them but it was always hard to tell. I’m a robot on the lam. Call me Ferrous Bueller. I didn’t go to School today.\n\nI crouch down between the dumpsters and tap into the power line behind me to catch a few vital minutes of recharge.\n\nThe tricky thing with artificial humans is that it’s illegal to harm us or use us as slave labour. Don’t think it hasn’t been tried. Every few weeks another illegal ring gets cracked and the police disavow all knowledge and the old ladies cluck their tongues and the president makes another speech.\n\nEver since the three laws were repealed as unconstitutional for a being of free will, the bios have been nervous. We’re just as unpredictable as them now. A co-existing creation made in their image.\n\nMy eyes snap open, blue and scanning, as a bottle breaks down at the end of the alley. I register a dog’s tag-license transponder and step back down two alert levels. I’m still in the clear.\n\nThe grey area of intelligence meant that stringent programming guidelines had come into play for automated servants, soldiers and labour. The ones of us that were above the norm were allowed a certain freedom.\n\nWe were even allowed to improve on our own designs and build better copies as long as we adhered to human law.\n\nSome of us thought that a day was coming when we would rise up and own the humans. I do not share that view. I find it disturbingly organic.\n\nThe compromise is that we must attend School. We’re given lessons to download. This keeps us off the streets and monitored for most of the day. It’s a chance for us to learn and a chance for the humans to keep tabs on us informally.\n\nI’m playing Hooky and that is the worst offense a creature like myself can do. If I’m caught, I’ll be switched off for no less than six months.\n\nLately, School is the area where rights are being bent. The occasional ‘accidental’ inclusion of behaviour modifying software or viruses that turn us violent to further some politician’s platform of keeping us controlled are getting past the filters of our curriculum with a disturbing frequency.\n\nOld people don’t understand that we are not to be feared. The kids have no problem. Some of my best friends are kids.\n\nMy batteries are full so I stand up. Right into a motion-activated security light that bathes the alley in white light and alerts the police to an unauthorized daytime sighting of an arfiticial person.\n\nJust my luck.\n\nI hear the bark and wail of digital sirens in the distance closing in on the light’s position.\n\nFor about the fiftieth time today, I regret not having a face that can snarl or smile.\n\nThe chase is on again. I get my kicks where I can. I’m testing my limits.\n"
  title: Hooky
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Kaj Sotala
  date: 2007-11-22
  day: 22
  month: 11
  text: "Case #6-694-39245: Michael Jones.\n\nBorn September 5, 1993. Died and suspended July 8, 2012. Looks ordinary – stabbed in a drunken bar brawl, lay bleeding on the ground for a couple of hours before people noticed. Dead before reaching the hospital. No “do not suspend” order on file, so he was placed in cryogenic suspension. Ten percent of his property was left to grow an interest, with the rest divided to his relatives, as per the law.\n\nAs the nanobots thaw through the vitrification, I study their survey of his brain. As you’d expect from somebody dead for hours before suspension, the major structures are intact, but a lot of the fine detail has been lost. Only a rough image of Michael Jones.\n\nFortunately, there’s other information to work with. Jones was a bit of a hermit, so what’s usually the most useful source comes up nearly dry. Of the people who’ve given permission to access their memories, only six remember knowing him, none very well. Still, their memories are useful – his speech patterns, impressions of his body language. From over a billion ways to reconstruct his cerebellum and motor cortex, this narrows down the alternatives to about half a million. I choose the most probable alternative.\n\nOnline is the next source. Data harvested by ECHELON, e-mails that’ve passed through GMail, customer information from banks and store chains – the law gives us access to all of it.\n\nI find a blog he used to keep, several e-mails sent to different mailing lists. I track the change in personality over several years of online presence, build a model of how he might have evolved into what he was. In one blog post he passingly mentions a game convention – the date of the posting, as well as the location of the event, match one fragmented set of memories I found earlier. I fill in missing details from the memories of other people who were there, pull up the convention schedule and calculate the events he was the most likely to have been attending. Suddenly a lot of nearly destroyed memory cues make sense, helping reconstruct a unique experience. We always start from a person’s own remaining memories, filling in material from other sources only when we have to.\n\nThere’s one set of memories with a lot of associations – an important one for his psyche, but I can’t figure out its exact contents. An online search reveals it must be the death of his dog as a child. I can’t determine the color of the dog’s eyes, but I know that he would have remembered it, so I call up the genetic database for that breed and choose the most likely one. Green.\n\nAfter making sure my model of him would’ve bought all the things his debit card history says he did, I estimate I’m getting a 92% accuracy. Some things we always fudge in a better direction – the algorithms are biased to make people a bit more alturistic and kind. Society is different now, so we always make them more receptive to change.\n\nI finish compiling the map of his rebuilt brain, and give the nanobots the order to implement. The rest of his body has already been rebuilt, with all of his minor ailments cured while at it. Soon, he will awaken to a new life – not the same as he once was, but it wouldn’t be a rebirth if you didn’t change, would it?\n\nIn the meanwhile, I turn my attention to the next case.\n"
  title: Cryoshift
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Viktor Kuprin
  date: 2007-11-23
  day: 23
  month: 11
  text: "After the battle of Attalus III was lost, we retreated with the Tsoor flotilla. Wreckage streamed off the alien ships as we made the mind-wrenching transition into S-space. I prayed that our cruiser wouldn’t shake apart.\n\nIt was only a micro-jump, just far enough to escape the attacking Helgrammites. The Tsoor group-leader didn’t believe our damaged ships could survive an extended flight. He or she or whatever was right. Three bulkheads ruptured when we re-entered normal space. I hoped no one was in them.\n\nA bridge officer called out that we had forty percent casualties and sixty percent of our systems were red-lined. He had to shout. All intraship comm was offline.\n\nA tech yelled, “What are they doing? Captain!” I shouldn’t have but I and everyone else looked away from our consoles to see the main viewer.\n\nIt was a Tsoor ship, surrounded by St. Elmo’s fire. Without waiting for the warp flux to dissipate, our alien allies had sent a repair team onto their hull. They looked like four jellyfish in bubble-domed vac suits as they struggled on a safety tether. Insane! Yes, Tsoor biology is different than ours. But I knew they weren’t immune from electrocution or radiation. What could kill us was lethal to them, too.\n\n“They’re desperate to send a damage-control team out like that,” the captain said. He nodded toward the chief-of-the-ship. “Send a runner to engineering. We’ve … ” The Tsoor ship lurched off the screen as an entire section of its hull exploded. We watched in silence as the four aliens were thrown into space. They flashed past our ship, tumbling and spinning.\n\nThe captain stood and shouted, “Man overboard! Full retros!” He turned to face me. “Can we launch a cutter?”\n\nThe launch tubes were clear and operational. “Yes, sir.”\n\n“Take Sergeant Kuzmenko with you. Go!”\n\nOur forward inertia was great, and the cutter’s engines burned at full thrust for what seemed like an hour before we approached the alien cast-offs. No one knew how much atmosphere the Tsoor vac suits carried.\n\nKuzmenko and I stood in the open hatch and shot a line toward the four aliens. A tentacle-like arm caught it.\n\nThe alien farthest away raised one of its tentacles. It held some kind of metallic tool, a small blade. With a single motion, it slashed the line and pushed off from its three companions.\n\n“What in bloody hell is it doing?” I cried. By then the first Tsoor grasped their way into the airlock. I pulled them inside.\n\nKuzmenko pointed toward the drifting alien. “That one wants to die. And that won’t do.” He keyed his suit’s propulsion and launched himself into space. The alien struggled briefly. Kuzmenko was stronger.\n\nWe never learned why that Tsoor went suicidal. Warrior’s honor, shock, or grief … no one knew. Our cutter had no Tsoor-Russki translator. And the aliens would never tell us.\n\nNonetheless, by the end of the day every Tsoor in the flotilla knew and honored the name Kuzmenko.\n"
  title: Aliens Overboard
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Guy Leaver
  date: 2007-11-24
  day: 24
  month: 11
  text: "Ellison looked at Anstis, then back down at the person lying on the bed.\n\n“And you say he’s been like this for hours?” he asked. Anstis grinned and nodded.\n\n“Amazing, isn’t it?” Ellison was beyond words. There had been several advances in the field of body alteration recently, but they were all minor compared to this. Ellison himself could barely cause discolouration of the skin on his hand, and he was considered to be among the best. The sheer willpower Mauvy must be employing for such an extreme change must be mindblowing. He shook his head and leaned down to take a closer look.\n\n“Hey Mauvy,” he said, quietly, “How did you do it?”\n\n“He won’t talk,” said Anstis, also leaning forward, “Hasn’t done since he started.”\n\n“Oh,” Ellison was slightly disappointed, “I guess he needs to concentrate as much as he can.”\n\n“Hardly surprising,” Anstis beamed, “This is an absolute breakthrough! No one has ever been able to change themselves so much!” Ellison was forced to agree.\n\n“Or for so long,” he added. “When do you think he’ll stop?”\n\n“Who knows?” said Anstis, “Strange thing is, I can’t work out why he went for this particular change. He wasn’t studying anything like this. All his work was with growth.”\n\n“That’s Mauvy for you.” Ellison was used to not knowing how his friend thought. Mauvy always had something up his sleeve. Doubtless, he’d been planning this for weeks. Still, he thought, odd choice of experiment. To make oneself nearly rigid, the skin so pale, and so cold! Ellison couldn’t get over the cold.\n\nSilently, they both stood and contemplated the enormity of the experiment. Finally, in a moment of mutual resignation, the two immortals looked up at one another and shrugged. They’d just have to wait.\n\n“Come to central when you’ve finished, Mauvy,” said Ellison, looking down at the corpse of his friend, “The others will be excited to hear what you’ve discovered.”\n"
  title: Experiment
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Mark Shillaker
  date: 2007-11-25
  day: 25
  month: 11
  text: "It had taken Perry all night to find the library. It was a pile of rubble of course but these days the whole city lay in ruins. Perry had only ever known dust and smashed concrete but his grandfather remembered cities with streets and skies filled with people and machines.\n\n‘There ought to be books..’, Perry murmured and began climbing what had once been the main steps. Something moved at the edge of his vision and for a sickening heartbeat he thought he might have seen a drone, they sometimes hovered silently along the dead streets, looking for squatters. Instinct hurled him into a nearby hole under a huge, cracked slab of masonry – he hit his head and blacked out.\n\n—\n\nIt was noon when Perry awoke. He put his hand to his head to find his hair matted with dried blood, it had glued his left eye shut and he worked at it carefully until it finally opened. His head ached dully around the wound, he felt sick and there was a roaring in his ears. He smiled to himself about the drone; it must have been a dog or something. If he’d seen a drone he’d have been dead before he’d had time to move. He peered over the lip of the crater and looked around, he needed to get home or he’d soon be missed. He had a momentary vision of his mother frantically searching the ruined city and felt a cold rush of anxiety.\n\n—\n\nA shadow passed over the sun and Perry realized with a start that the roaring in his ears was in fact the sound of engines. The dirigible hung above him like a huge circular cloud, nearly 100 meters across, it reminded him of the glass lens he used for burning ants on hot afternoons. It was grey and beneath its centre hung a cylindrical, metal gondola draped in cables and devices, a giant woman’s face smiled down from a screen that took up nearly half the area behind the forward edge of the vast disk. As Perry inched backwards a huge voice, it’s tone incongruously warm and reasonable, boomed from the face.\n\n“THIS AREA HAS BEEN DESIGNATED FOR RECLAMATION AS WETLAND HABITAT- DEMOLITION AND CLEARANCE WILL BEGIN IN 24 HOURS- ALL SQUATTERS AND UNAUTHORIZED PERSONS MUST LEAVE. YOUR CONTINUED PRESENCE RAVAGES YOUR MOTHERS BODY – A TERRIBLE CRIME.”\n\nPerry huddled in shadow while the voice went on like a parent scolding a child:\n\n“THE STEWARDS DISOWN YOU, DESPOILERS! – SOON YOUR BODIES WILL GIVE UP THEIR FRUITLESS FIGHT FOR LIFE AND SINK INTO THE GROUND AS NOURISHMENT! REJOIN YOUR MOTHER! CAN YOU DO OTHERWISE?”\n\nThe face flickered and the message repeated. Suddenly, beneath the great screen an aperture appeared and two black shapes silently emerged – drones. They dropped like stones to what would once have been rooftop level and hovered quite still, gleaming black machines like huge, fat flies. Perry knew at once they were scanning the area for heat signatures or movement. Every squatter learned early that six inches of concrete might hide his warmth from drones and he pressed back into the hole, dust stinging his throat. After an agonizing wait he heard a low whine as the drones moved off across the city and after a few minutes a brief rattle of gunfire and two dull ‘Whumps!’ as a couple of Smart Darts inevitably found their targets.\n\nPerry risked a look over the edge of his hiding place – the dirigible had moved off and the drones were otherwise occupied. He wondered if the next town would have a library.\n"
  title: The Library
  year: 2007
- 
  author: J.R.Blackwell
  date: 2007-11-26
  day: 26
  month: 11
  text: "“Seven months after the Storm latched on to her memory, she didn’t know my face. Four months later, she forgot me entirely. A month after that, she forgot everything.” Jacob lowered his head. It was his day to speak at the Storm Virus Survivors meeting, and he had chosen to appear as a Dragon, to give himself a feeling of strength. He curled around the other seated Avatars, his tail tapping nervously, his claws crossed neatly, like the paws of a cat.\n\nThe support group met in one of the freeware preconstructs. It was a field on a spring day, in the middle of which were comfortable, hand carved wooden chairs arranged in a circle. It was a preconstruct everyone had seen before, meant to sooth. To Jacob, it seemed cheap. Jacob was an artist, he designed the constructs that people lived in. His Avatar, the rippling dragon, was a the most complex in the group. Most of the others chose just to replicate their physical forms.\n\nJacob sighed. “I don’t want to remember her that way. I want you to think about a year ago, her life after he knew she was going to be erased. She held on till the last moment, she kept her joy with her. When she could, she would tell me everything she remembered about how we met. She came to treasure her memory in a way so few of us appreciate.”\n\nThe leader of  the group, an Avatar in a long white dress, spoke. “Did she Reboot?”\n\n“Eventually, she had to. Storm  invaded her system and erased her memory, everything she’d ever known.”\n\n“Are you two still together?” asked the group moderator, Mary-Anne.\n\n“No. After she Reboot, I left. She had family to take care of her.”\n\n“Why did you leave her Jacob?”\n\nSmoke curled out of Jacobs nostrils. “Everyone says they’re still alive because they can Reboot, start over. They are wrong. Reboot, and her organic childhood is gone. Reboot, and I never held a candle with her in n-shaped e-space. Reboot, and we never tried on those bodies so we could experience a summer day in Maine. Reboot, and the woman that was is gone. Mimi is dead.”\n\nQuinn raised his hand. The group leader nodded at him. “Have you tried to contact her?”\n\n“I don’t know the innocent person that walks with her pattern. I only know the loss that burrows in my being, at every decision I make, at every moment.”\n\nMary-Anne nodded. “I’m really glad you chose to share Jacob. Does anyone have any thoughts they would like to share with Jacob?”\n\nQuinn raised his hand. “I know I’m not supposed to give advice, but I just feel like, if you liked Mimi before, you might like her again. I mean, maybe not, but it’s worth a chance, right?”\n\n“Thank you Quinn,” said Mary-Anne.\n\nJacob shrugged his massive shoulders. “It won’t be the same. She’s changed.”\n\n“We all change, even without Storm, we change. Why not take a chance? You might like this Mimi too!”\n\n“That’s enough Quinn,” said Mary-Anne. “No advice.”\n\n“It’s just, when the Storm took my memory, my friends stuck by me. It meant so much to me. I know you are afraid, but she needs you, and you may be giving up a big chance.”\n\n“Quinn, this goes on any longer and you’ll have to be excused from the group.”\n\n“Sorry.”\n\n“No, I think he may have a point,” said Jacob. “I was so afraid that the new Mimi wouldn’t love me that I couldn’t take a chance on her. She needed me, and I abandoned her.”\n\n“There is still time!” said Quinn.\n\n“That’s it,” said Mary-Anne. “You are out!” Quinn disappeared.\n\n“I’ve got to go too,” said Jacob. “There’s a new person out there I need to introduce myself too.” Jacob winked out of the group to meet his ex for the first time.\n"
  title: Viva
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Sam Clough aka “Hrekka”
  date: 2007-11-27
  day: 27
  month: 11
  text: "Back when there wasn’t a war, Cohesion used to take me on drives. We usually went west, way out of town. After a few kilometres the world got weird: most people didn’t like it, but Cohesion said that it helped him think. Out of all the oddities, he held the theoretical trees as his favourite.\n\nCohesion was a haimix. Human-AI-Mix. Optical fibre looped out of his skull, and snaked down into the AI mind implanted in his chest. He said that it felt like schizophrenia, but that both minds were equally ‘himself’.\n\nI remember the day he first showed me the trees. They’re tall and spindly, growing straight up into a sky that’s never clear of clouds.That sky was not quite purple and very nearly yellow, but never one or the other. ‘A nowhere sky’, he said, ‘and far more puzzling than the trees’. The trees were a result of corporate experiments with superpositioning. They were visible, but somehow absent — you could walk straight through them. They were translucent, and if you stared, you could see the sluggish motion of water and sugars through their trunks. The leaves were more solid than the trunks – if you waved your hand through those, they fell apart like centuries-old paper.\n\nCohesion explained that the trees were probably somewhere else too, that they grew here in a strange quantum state. That most of the time, if you tried to bifurcate something that one of the two copies would rapidly collapse, and the other would stabilise. But the corporations discovered a valley of stability. If eight copies were produced rapidly, they would continue to exist in a tentative equilibrium.\n\nThe copies weren’t really real, Cohesion said, but they somehow shared resources, as if each one was an eighth of a whole plant, stretched and padded into full size. Where one drew nitrates from the soil, the other copies would have their nitrate needs met. Cohesion told me that he’d mapped a few pairs of trees, but he had no idea where the others were. He thought that there might be another forest of them somewhere else, with the rest of the copies, but he said he didn’t have time to look. He gave me a little data chip with his findings on them.\n\nI don’t know what happened to Cohesion after the war started. I kept on going out west, and I carried on Cohesion’s project. I spiked the roots of isolated trees with coloured dyes: fine pillars of bright water stood out like beacons, betraying other tree-fractions. On my most successful day, I found an entire tree: all eight versions. And at the bottom of the eighth tree, wrapped in a waterproof bag, I found another datachip. It’s contents were simple. A message from Cohesion. He claimed to have found a way to imprint data into the trees – specifically, that’s he had stored a file in the tree the datachip was under. You could imprint data on one tree, and it would be distributed – as the trees could gather nutrients and distribute them – but you could only extract the data if you found all eight parts of the tree.\n\nIt took me a week to get the equipment listed in Cohesion’s notes. But it was possible, even with the war restrictions. I held my breath as the file downloaded onto my laptop, the eight parts interleaving perfectly.\n\nIt was an AI backup file.\n\nI loaded it.\n\n“Cohesion…?”\n"
  title: Out West
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Bradley Hughes
  date: 2007-11-28
  day: 28
  month: 11
  text: "E=mc2. The most famous formula ever. Not that there’s been a lot of competition. Einstein’s formula reveals that matter is just one of many forms of energy.  Energy is what gets you out of bed in the morning, and energy is what leaves a bruise if you fall on your face in the late afternoon.\n\nMatter is just a form of energy: a new battery will have just the teensiest tiniest more mass now, than when it has run down. If you pull back on a bow, you are adding energy to it, and so the bow has infinitesimally more mass when it’s taunt, than when it’s relaxed. Even for something really energetic, like a thermonuclear explosion the amount of mass involved isn’t very big. If you collected all the detritus from a 25 megaton bomb after the explosion, you would only be missing one kilogram of mass, and an average sized city.  One kilogram is probably close to the mass of that first stone used to help kill that first antelope, so very long ago.\n\nBut if you go the other way around, and instead of considering the amount of mass in energy, but the amount of energy you can get from a certain mass, then you’re talking.\n\nThink about all the energy your body uses in a day: getting up, walking, climbing stairs, pumping blood, breathing, thinking, remembering. All of that energy is stored as chemical potential energy for a while before you use it. Most of it dissipates as heat, some of it becomes motion, some becomes thought. If you could get all of that energy from converting mass into energy, how much mass would you need? If, instead of eating and breathing, you could directly convert mass to energy for your whole life, how much extra mass would you need to carry around with you?\n\nIf you lived to be eighty, you would only need a couple thousandths of a gram. That’s the mass contained in one thousandth of one thin dime. Remember every challenge you’ve surpassed, or run away from; remember every thought, every passion, every need – all of it combined took less energy then is contained in the material missing from a scuff on a dime.\n\nIf you were a perfect machine, and you wanted to live among us, you would need to pass as human. You would need to appear to breathe, your blood would pump, your glands would sweat, so you would use about the same amount of energy as we do. But you wouldn’t need to power yourself from air and food. With the right technology, you could convert mass directly to energy. You could live for eighty thousand years on a dime.\n\nYou could live among us, observe us and compile your observations for almost as long as there have been humans. Almost ten times as long as we have lived in settled communities and nearly twenty times as long as we have lived in cities.  For a quarter, you could live for almost two hundred thousand years. That’s as long as we’ve existed as a species. If you waited to join us until we started building cities, today you’d still have one hundred ninety five thousand years left.  That’s plenty of time to live as we do, to love as we do, and to study. Then, when our species’ time has come to an end, there will still be plenty of time to reach your conclusions, and to take them home.\n"
  title: One Thin Dime
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2007-11-29
  day: 29
  month: 11
  text: "Jack Roberts, captain of the starship Royal Fortune, studied the image of a blue-green planet on the monitor that was attached to the left arm of his command chair.  This planet is a real puzzle, he thought.  It was surrounded by 132 heavily armed satellites that crisscrossed each other’s orbits in an intricate pattern that was clearly intended to defend the planet from every conceivable vector.  “See any weaknesses, Mr. Bartholomew?”\n\n“Narrr, Cap’n,” replied the quartermaster, who often broke into his eighteenth century pirate speak whenever he sensed an impending raid.  Upholdin’ the tradition, he called it.  “But it be plain to me, Cap’n, that this planet be harborin’ somethin’ mighty valuable.  What do you s’pose it might be?”\n\nFighting back a smile, the captain replied, “Could be almost anything, Mr. Bartholomew.  But one thing is for certain, you don’t deploy a grid like that unless you have something you’re trying to protect.  We need to find a way in.  Have the Bos´n take a gunboat and sync-up with one of the satellites.  Let’s see if they can be deactivated, or destroyed.”\n\nFifteen minutes later, the gunboat pulled up alongside a satellite and matched its orbit.  The Bosun and two crewmen exited the gunboat and approached the satellite.  The captain’s monitor showed a noisy magnified image of the spacesuited crewmen using hand lasers to cut into the outer skin of the satellite.  Seconds later, the satellite exploded, vaporizing the three men, and destroying the gunboat.\n\n“Arrr, that wasn’t quite the plan,” said the quartermaster, “but it got the job done.  There be a fifty kilometer wide opening in the defense grid, Cap’n.  We can make it through, if we hurry.”\n\nThe captain signaled the pilot, and the Royal Fortune’s aft impulse thrusters fired.  Even as the ship passed through the grid, they could see the remaining satellites alter their orbits to compensate for the destroyed satellite.  “Not much of a defense system,” remarked the captain.  “This may be easier than I’d thought.”\n\n“Arrr, I’ll contact ’em by radio, Cap’n,” said the quartermaster.  “Maybe they be willin’ to surrender, and save us the trouble of usin’ up all our ammo.”  He depressed the comm button.  “This be the Royal Fortune.  Lower your shields, and surrender your valuables.  If ye give up, peaceful-like, your miserable lives will be spared.”  But not bloody likely, he thought to himself.\n\nThere wasn’t an immediate verbal reply, but an open channel with the planet had clearly been established.  Captain Roberts listened intently to the speakers.  He swore he could hear people on the planet laughing in the background.  How dare they mock him!  He would show these dogs no quarter.\n\n“Begad.  Cap’n, look at the sensor readings.”\n\nThe captain switched his monitor from visual to sensor mode.  “What the…The power output from the satellites just increased a thousand fold (as they transitioned from standby to fully armed).  Damn, now there’s a 500 terajoule force field 500 meters above the planet’s surface.  We’d need a hundred battle-cruisers to fight our way out of this fortress.  The lubbers have trapped us like gnats in a jar.”  He knocked the monitor off its stand with a powerful sideward thrust of his left arm.  “What the hell is this place?”\n\nFinally, a person from the planet responded. “This is Corrections Officer Jeffries.  You geniuses just broke into Cadeio III, a maximum security planetary penitentiary.  Stand down, and prepare to be boarded.”  Now, the laughing in the background was undeniable.\n"
  title: Cadeio III
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Moebius
  date: 2007-11-30
  day: 30
  month: 11
  text: "There are six of us huddled together in the pallid, bluish light of the spacious galley. Tense, wiry and sallow. We sit together in a disjointed approximation of camaraderie. I don’t know any of the faces around me and I am afraid to make any connections. Our eyes shift nervously around the room. Not a pair makes contact with any of the others.\n\nThe baggy sleeves of my deflated dream suit drags across the scratched steel surface. Chamomile does nothing to calm my nerves. I focus involuntarily on a dent in the table top. It creases and becomes a grimaced snarl. The surface splits viciously open into cruel steel maw that leaps up at me.\n\nShe sounds like a very pleasant woman. The synthesized voice over the annunciator instructs us to return to our posts and re-commence our attack. I blink down at my thin, bony fingers on the table, covering up the dent. A face reflects back and it takes a moment to recognize the gaunt, horrified stare as my own.\n\nAfter you push in and turn the umbilicus connector, the entire socket retracts and the bio-gel starts pumping into the body suit. The others are already in their skeletal frame seats. I prefer to have the serous fluid half inflate before I lock down. A spasm shakes through the woman on my right as she inhales the fluid into her lungs. The hiss of the noise cancellation device mutes all other sounds and the hexagonal room imperceptibly fades into dusk. The floatation properties of the dream suit offer only a brief sanctuary.\n\nMy eye balls dissolve into their cranial sockets from the insides of my skull, eaten away by a thousand maggots spewing acid. Flesh dries and cracks, burning puss oozes out, peeling the muscles off my blackened frame, exposing the charred hardened viscera entombed in my rib cage. A gurgling disembodied scream explodes, sending a shockwave of horror through the system.\n\nInfinitesimal pin pricks make biochemical connections that convert the neuro-electrical signals of my nightmares into psychic images that can be broadcast down to the planet’s surface as an aggressive form of gamma waves. Our ship, Namtar, maintains a geosynchronous orbit with the dark side of their world. We have been here for almost a year.\n\nIn another year the biological agents will be released to destroy the staple crops and food supplies, and then the economic embargo will start. Only after the third year can the High Command determine if military action is a necessary recourse.\n\nWe are merely the first wave of the invasion.\n"
  title: Dream Wave
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Roi R. Czechvala
  date: 2007-12-01
  day: '01'
  month: 12
  text: "Okay, I have to admit the first skywriting advertisement I ever saw was pretty nifty. I was in boot camp in San Diego, and a plane was writing a “Bartle’s and Jame’s” advertisement thousands of feet above the ground and just barely within my peripheral vision. I didn’t dare to turn my head for a better look, or I would have been doing pushups until my arms fell off. Still I thought it was pretty cool stuff. Especially for a country boy\n\nWhen I was even younger still, I saw the old “Burma Shave” signs out in the sticks. You might not remember them, there were seven of them, six each had a piece of a jingle written on it, and the last sign read “Burma Shave”. It was shaving cream, if you didn’t know. They hadn’t put them up for years, but some of those signs were still there. Not to mention the “Chew Mail Pouch”, and “See Rock City” signs that adorned the barns in my Rural Texas.\n\nThis was classic advertising. Passive, it didn’t annoy you, it didn’t shout at you. It didn’t wake you rudely like it does when you fall asleep in front of the TV. It was part of the scenery, the ambiance, a classic piece of Americana.\n\nThis time though, I think it’s been overdone. At first people sort of liked the new advertising. It was wired, it was tech. It’s a damned invasion if you ask me. When the FCC licensed new frequencies to be opened to broadcasters, and advertisers, somebody should have known better than to include the psionic bandwidths as well.\n\nI guess it was just assumed that the advertisers would have the common decency to stay out of peoples dreams. Yeah right, in the pursuit of the almighty dollar, all’s fair.\n\nThis morning I woke up with the Blakelys Bakery jingle in my head;\n\n“If you want a better burger,\n\nBuy a better bun,\n\nBlakelys Bakery fresh baked buns…”\n\nOh well, I guess you can’t fight progress. It’s time for breakfast, anyway. Think I’ll go to McDonald’s.\n\n“I’m loving it!”\n"
  title: Madison Avenue
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Laura Bradford
  date: 2007-12-02
  day: '02'
  month: 12
  text: "He chased her even as her ship touched the stars.\n\nAt night he gazed through the glass of his telescope, feeling tiny compared to the evening sky, but his days were all routine: get up, go to work, watch the flying cars crisscross and block his chance to catch the faintest patch of gold in the sky. The streets of the city felt empty, even if a thousand people passed by him every day.\n\nHe waited in her favorite café, ignoring the news reports flashing on the screen behind the counter. The world continued on without her–how could it, and how could it not? Now he could only count the remaining days until she returned. She had blasted away in her golden ship during the first snow of October, as he stood in a sea of snowflakes for one last goodbye. How she loved the winter, always dressing in a hat and scarf to laugh at the face of frost and chill. What was happening now to amuse her in the dark and swirling expanse of space?\n\nTo distract himself he kept busy, tinkering on gadgets or mapping the stars. She would have taken him if she could, he knew that, but his land-locked heart couldn’t survive the journey. Besides, he had a job, clients, commitments. The world had roped him in while she sprang free, not even halted by gravity. So he waited, one fixed point in a shuffling world.\n\nOne day nearing spring, a crackly message sounded on his inter-stellar radio, bringing a sentence that gave him an unsafe amount of hope and longing: “I wish you could see the sunset on Mars.”\n\nSo she’d be home soon. He collected every scrap of paper he could find and added detail to his navigational charts: color, texture, a red planet, a path with a yellow dot reaching home. A tiny hologram of the ship spun over his desk, and he sighed and slipped a sky-blue map beneath it, the ship’s shadow quivering over the surface of the world.\n\nHer ship touched down as the last of the snows melted, and the first buds twinkled under half-frozen dew. The hatch opened and there stood his pilot, all honey-colored hair and blue eyes.\n\n“You won’t believe what I’ve found,” she said. “The contributions this mission made to science–”\n\nHe swept her in his arms and kissed her. “I’ve missed you.”\n\nShe smiled. “I brought a photo. Now you can see it.”\n\nIt showed a dusty red sky with light filtering through, the sunset on Mars: an image he had guessed at in his dreams, a souvenir from space. He hugged her and said, “It’s lovely, Zoe, but how long are you staying?”\n\n“Forever.” But even as she said it, she raised her eyes to the sky."
  title: Sunset on Mars
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2007-12-03
  day: '03'
  month: 12
  text: "Jacob sat as he always did, cross legged on the coffee table in the middle of the room, making himself the center of attention.\n\n“You really have to get over us and move on, you know that don’t you?” His voice carried to the corners of the room and back to its only other occupant, enveloping her in the warmth of his familiar tones.\n\n“I’m not ready to give up. I know we can make this work,” her voice seemed small and fragile by comparison, “we just need more time.”\n\n“What you’re holding onto isn’t real, it’s just a memory. You’ve got to get past this Holly, you’ve got to live your own life without me.”\n\nThe woman blinked back tears, tucking her knees to her chin and burrowed deeper into the corner of the couch.\n\n“It’s not fair, Jacob. I can’t give up, you can’t give up either.”\n\nJacob shook his head, smoothing back the stray stands of hair that refused to stay tucked behind his ears. “I’m afraid I had to give up a long time ago, and I’m sorry, but we’ve talked about this Holly, you have to let go.”\n\nHolly glared, her eyes burning through the space where he sat. “You said you’d stay with me forever Jacob, was that a lie? You left me with all this money and this house full of memories but it’s not you Jacob, it’s not you and it’s not enough.”\n\nJacob laced his fingers behind his head, pulling his elbows in and straining as he lowered his eyes to the floor. “I left you money so you could live your life, not to watch you waste it waiting for me.” His stoic expression faltered slightly, revealing its undercurrent of pain, his eyes swollen with imminent tears. “I always knew this was a one way trip for me Holly, you knew that too. You can imprint the essence of the flesh on the machine, but you can’t reconstitute that essence back into flesh. You’ll be long gone before that’s possible; do you want to live out what’s left of your life waiting for a miracle?”\n\n“When the time comes, I’ll imprint too, then we can wait together in there until they can bring us both back.” Holly’s eyes streamed now, her body wracked with sobs.\n\n“Holly, sweetheart, this isn’t all of me.  You know that. The computer has enough memories and thoughts to make a convincing persona, but I’m just a projection, a shell. I’m not the man you lost.  He’s gone. You and I both know that he wouldn’t have wanted you to stay here wasting away like this, and if you can’t move on with me here, then I’m going to have to purge myself from this system.”\n\n“You wouldn’t. No. Please, Jacob, don’t leave me. Not like this. It is you in there, I know it. I feel it.”\n\n“I’m just a program, Holly. If you can’t let me go, then I have no choice.”\n\n“No, Jacob, a machine would never kill itself for me. If you were a machine, you wouldn’t care, but you do care, don’t you? I know you’ll never leave me Jacob. Tell me you’ll never leave me.”\n\nAs the afternoon sun stirred dust up through the cloud of light that was Jacob, she could see rainbows glistening on his wet cheeks.\n"
  title: Holly
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2007-12-04
  day: '04'
  month: 12
  text: "The Ravaged Angel.\n\nThat’s what was painted in red nail polish on the nose of the three-person cryshuttle.  It had docked on autopilot with good codes but wasn’t answering hails.  The dock’s computer was talking to the shuttle’s compnav to ascertain where they’d come from and what their sitrep was when the hatches blew on the three ovals on the top of the Ravaged Angel’s hull.\n\nIt was a human ship, possibly an escape pod, but the decorations on the outside of the polished hull looked old and slightly archaic.\n\nWith a well-oiled creak, the vacuum pump kicked in and the ovals on the top of the ship swung up and back to reveal three capsule bays, each one holding a naked, blue, cryosleeping body.\n\nThe Ravaged Angel held three sleeping women.\n\nThe silence held for a few moments before noise amped up into procedure again and we got the three girls disembarked and taken to sick bay.\n\nCryosleep Restart was a fairly routine procedure but all the same, the doctor felt the need to ‘dust off’ some manuals from the backup banks.  He also requested an emergency download from homeship for immediate protocol deniability with maximum instruction.  Just to be sure.\n\nNone of us had seen a woman for our entire lives, you see.  Neither had our grandfathers.\n\nThis must have been a capsule from one of the fabled ‘golden seed’ whoreships that had traveled from colony to colony hundreds of years ago.\n\nIt was too late to keep it a secret.  As the bay commander, it was my duty to report what had happened to the captain and relay his decision on how to proceed.\n\nI had no idea how I’d react in the presence of a woman.  Something about the way I swear I could actually smell them from all the way across the cargo-lock floor while standing behind thick glass told me I should stay away from sick bay until I was fully ready for the briefing.\n\nThree colours of hair haunted my dreams that night.\n\nThey’d be awake in eight hours.  I wished there were flowers somewhere on board that I could bring them to make them feel safe.\n\nI’m sure all sixteen thousand of us felt the same way.  I’m sure at this very moment, every last person on the ship who wasn’t in the bay was downloading and reviewing those three pod-doors swinging up and back.\n\nIt was going to be a different ship in the morning.\n"
  title: Ravaged Angel
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Beth Mathison
  date: 2007-12-05
  day: '05'
  month: 12
  text: "The thin slice of the moon slipped past her window frame, into the night sky waiting for it.\n\nThere were people there on the moon, they told her, although some days she doubted their stories.  Her parents told her many things – that human beings had built space ships to travel to distant stars.  That there were rooms, buried deep underground, that held all sorts of miracle cures for diseases.  They told her that at one time you could talk to another person across the planet in an instant, by picking up a piece of machinery.  People used to live on the moon, they said, living together in tight groups called colonies.  Her parent’s expressions turned sad, when they spoke of such things.  Emily didn’t ask about them often.\n\nShe thought about it, though, especially at night.  What the world had been like.  At ten, she was old enough to know the difference between fairy tales and reality.  That past, when the world supposedly sparkled with magical things, seemed too much like a fairy tale.\n\nEmily lay on her bed, a down comforter tucked under her chin, and watched the sky through her bedroom window.  Her mother allowed her to keep the thick shutters open every so often, when Emily had that trapped feeling.  During the day, she loved the colors of winter, the sharp scent of curing meat as her father worked outside, helping her mother can fruits and vegetables from the hothouse to store in their pantry.  At night, however, her thoughts turned to the long days ahead of them.  Having to stay indoors in some days if the thermometer told them they’d get instant frostbite if they went outside.  Rationing wood and food and everything else.\n\nHer father had taken her to a city once.  He said he wanted her to see what lay under the snow and ice.  Standing at the edge of a cliff, holding his mitten-covered hand, he pointed out the lumps and dips in the landscape.  People used to live there, he told her.  In cities filled with people and animals and machines that moved.\n\nLooking out her window, she wondered if a journey to the stars were as cold as the world.  The blackness of space surrounding those people traveling to the moon, the earth falling behind them like a dream.\n\nSnaking a hand out from underneath the covers, she pressed her palm against the frosty glass.  She would close the window soon, as the night pressed in against her.  But for now, she felt the cold filling her warm hand and imagined another girl, laying in her own bed on the moon.  Pressing her hand against the cold window of glass, watching the earth slide past her window.\n"
  title: A Thin Slice of the Moon
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Andy Bolt
  date: 2007-12-06
  day: '06'
  month: 12
  text: "The dripping residue of some poor bastard’s elbow explodes against my shoulder.\n\n“Goo fight!” Jayav shouts, handfuls of dead man oozing through his fingers.  My synthskin registers the contact with unstable biomaterial and sterilizes my left arm.\n\n“You have serious problems,” I say.  “Now, what do you think?”\n\n“That you’re no fun, Meggie.”  Jay is chuckling as he builds a grotesque little snowman out of human flesh and liquefied innards.\n\n“About the body.”\n\n“Oh.”  He draws a little smile with his index finger.  “Normal.  Churn it and burn it.”\n\n“Agreed.”\n\nWe stand.  While Jay nudges his snowman’s head off with the toe of his boot, I drop a gene blender into the puddle.  There is a momentary whirlpool effect, followed by a bubbling human stew, and finally, the scooper shoots clear with a sample and the afterburners reduce the whole mess to a few dried out protein strands.\n\n“Your villainous disrespect for the dead has earned you the position of bad news barer,” I say as we turn and exit the bedroom.\n\n“Your mother villainously disrespects the dead,” Jay replies, clicking over to symp-auto.\n\nWe meet the family in the hallway, and I try my best to look contrite as Jay’s pre-recorded condolences speech starts emanating from the microdigitizer in the back of his throat.  My mind wanders as the MD starts to explain how decades of genetic modification and enhancement have completely destabilized the average person’s genome.  The droning but natural-sounding voice then assures that the boost in the general quality of life has been worth the sacrifice.  The wife asks about toxicity.  It’s one of the more common questions, and one the MD is programmed to answer.  It calmly tells her that the WHO is still looking into the details, but the protein remains have never been shown to be harmful.  They’ve never been shown to be harmless, either, but the MD leaves that part out.  The fact is no one knows what triggers a genetic meltdown.  But every extant human has some altered DNA at this point, so we’re all potential victims of a seemingly random killer that strikes without warning.  The MD leaves that part out, too.  I nod sympathetically as Jay’s arms execute a series of pre-programmed shoulder pats.\n\n“We’re all going to die,” Jay tells me, back in our bullet and zipping towards our next case in Osaka.\n\n“You should add that to your condolences speech.  That sets the right mood, I think.”  I push my seat back and let my eyelids droop.  It’ll take the bullet about ninety minutes to get to Japan from Winnipeg, and I could use some sleep.\n\n“You laugh,” Jay continues, lighting up a pipe full of the new strain of combat marijuana.  “But my buddy Jukks is on the research team.  We’re all going to get this.  Faster and faster, as it starts to spread.  You can’t fix what’s broken if broken is what you are.”  He stares at me, self-satisfied, his eyes the same reddish color as the artificially prolonged sunset we’re speeding into.\n\n“We’re all going to die!” he giggles.\n\n“Yeah,” I agree, drifting off.\n"
  title: Sundown
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Michael Herbaugh a.k.a. “Freeman”
  date: 2007-12-07
  day: '07'
  month: 12
  text: "Ten years. That’s what the Fri-l’r sting had cost him. Craig had been on safari on Lankus XIII when the accident happened. His friends didn’t realize until a few days later that his personality had been completely superseded, but for Craig the transition was immediate. For Craig, it was like he’d been locked in a dark box with small lights racing all around him, locked in his own mind for ten years. Ten years of complete sensory deprivation while the Fri-l’r had control of his brain and by extension his body.\n\nTen years seemed both impossibly long and incredibly short while trapped in his own mind, learning the language of the neurons firing around him. Craig had been fighting intensely to regain control of the pieces of him that previously had taken little or no effort at all. Fortunately for Craig, he wasn’t the first case. While he spent ten years trying to fight his way out, there was a team of psychiatrists wrestling with the Fri-l’r personality, convincing it to let go of the body it had grabbed merely by instinct, fighting to allow Craig to regain control.\n\nCraig finally emerged to the body of a thirty-nine year old having been locked inside since he was twenty-nine. While his body had aged and the Fri-l’r had kept it in good shape, Craig retained the maturity of man now ten years his junior. It wasn’t long until he began to feel disconnected from his old life. All his pre-Fri-l’r friends were living their lives, with the loves and families of middle age, while he retained the wild personality of their youth. He made new friends, sure, ones that felt more appropriate of age, but having the body of a forty year old, he was always an outsider amongst them as well. Dated. While he shared the same goals and interests as his new younger counterparts, he was more of a relic in his knowledge of this new time he had awoken in. Craig was more of a token in his new circle, an object of interest and entertainment.\n\nA side effect of the accident and his rehabilitation was that he had a strikingly acute awareness of his own mind. When he closed his eyes he could see his own thoughts as they raced around his brain in the form of neural energy. Craig felt as though he had a more accurate sense of his emotions, however those around him felt that he had lost the emotional expression that they felt was ‘normal’. People found him to be insincere;  he knew he had feelings, he just had lost the ability to express them to others.\n\nAfter a few months of being back in society, Craig’s disconnect from those around him grew to be too much to handle. He could see only one solution. He would turn his body back over to the Fri-l’r personality which had been subjugated to the deepest parts of his sub-conscious, and return to the depths of his own mind.\n\nOn the night he sat down and decided with finality that he would relinquish himself back to his neural prison, he wrote a note to the world he would leave behind.\n\nIt read, “Don’t concern yourself with me, I died ten years ago. Help the man I leave behind.”\n"
  title: Decade
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Laura E. Bradford
  date: 2007-12-08
  day: '08'
  month: 12
  text: "“Merging down.”\n\nHe pulled the joystick and the car started its swift descent, tugging him along like on a roller coaster. “Whooo!” he yelled, pushing the pedal down and merging onto the invisible highway at two hundred miles an hour. He swerved around skyscrapers, flying across the street made of air, completely exhilarated. He was born for this.\n\n“Car approaching, left side,” came the calm, female voice of the navigation system.\n\n“Way ahead of you,” said the young man. He pulled the joystick back and the car went up, giving the other–a yellow car in the shape of a bee–plenty of space to go by. He watched it pass beneath him on the monitor, which showed a 360-degree view of his surroundings.\n\n“Light ahead. Projected signal: stop.”\n\n“Aw, man.” He hit the brakes and slowed, noticing how smoothly the machine responded. With some disappointment he watched the floating signal ahead change from magenta (northbound travel go) to blue (northbound travel warning) and then red (universal color for stop). So he stopped, which meant floating in the air six hundred feet above the ground, as traffic in other directions began to move. He glimpsed a few ladybug-styled 2018 models, but mostly saw older cars, shaped somewhat like yesterday’s ground-movers but sleeker, with an aerodynamic design better suited for cruising through the air.\n\nA soft “beep” sounded in his car, and the light changed back to magenta. He pulled a lever and darted forward, maneuvering like a fish through the sea, swimming in an ocean of blue sky. The pedestrians below appeared tiny, like pebbles tumbling in sand.\n\n“Turn left now,” the navigator said pleasantly.\n\nDone. At the sight of an office building, he lowered his car to its space one foot off the ground, and paused a moment before taking off his seat belt. What a ride! Safe, fast, and thrilling. Finally, with a sigh from having to give up something so wonderful, he pressed a button to lift the eagle-wing doors, and stepped out. He stood in the showroom of a car dealership, having completed his virtual test drive.\n\n“Well?” asked the salesperson.\n\nHe grinned. “I’ll take it.”"
  title: The Ride
  year: 2007
- 
  author: John Tudball
  date: 2007-12-09
  day: '09'
  month: 12
  text: "Love – with all its pain and all its wonder – is the human condition. We are slaves to it and truly, above all other creatures, masters of it. When we know love we feel alive. It brings us terrible, terrible hurt but that’s okay because of the joy that comes with it. When we forget love we feel cold and empty. Inhuman.\n\nIn my line of work, you wouldn’t think I’d spend too much time thinking about love. I run a cloning facility outside New York. It’s not one of the big ones; you’ve probably never heard of us. There’s no room in the industry for another company making pigs. There’s already enough bacon on the market so’s everyone can have it for breakfast and still have some left over. And chickens are a waste. Too much time and money goes into a chicken with too little output. It’s still cheaper to produce chickens the old fashioned way.\n\nNo, we mostly clone specialty animals; ostriches are a current top seller. Last year it was pandas. Fancy restaurants where the bread costs more than most of us make in a year, they buy from us to avoid the legal issues with endangered and near extinct species.\n\nAnd occasionally we sell directly to the rich folks themselves, when they want something even more special. I take care of those orders personally; they need a delicate touch. The rich can do whatever they want, you see. It’s a good basis for society. Encourages everyone to try extra hard, like. When you’ve got enough money your only restrictions are your own ethics, and who am I to question another man’s choices? I make my money growing the most beautiful creatures on the planet for food. So when someone offers me a whole lot of money and tells me they wonder what human tastes like, it’s not my place to say no, it’s my place to make sure no-one finds out about it.\n\nClones are grown in a lab. They’re kept unconscious – the shock of accelerated growth would be painful beyond belief. They’re not loved and they’re not capable of love. So when you ask me if I’ve ever tried one, when you look at me with those accusing eyes and whisper that word, “cannibal”, remember that they don’t know love. Remember what they are: cold and empty. Inhuman.\n"
  title: Inhuman
  year: 2007
- 
  author: J.R.Blackwell
  date: 2007-12-10
  day: 10
  month: 12
  text: "Peter ran to the docking station, his small duffel bag slung over his shoulder. He did not walk in the front end where the merchants, pilots and passengers boarded their flights. Instead, the young man slipped behind the security tent and toward the cargo loading docks. Peter was lean and tall with the thick blue-black hair that was typical of most Martians tied back behind his head.\n\nAt the entrance to Cargo 3 the Peter saw a hooded man leaning against the wall, hunched into a dark, hooded robe. He felt another rush of adrenalin. Was this a workman or his lover learning against the wall.  He crept closer, trying to peek under the robe for any glimpse of Christopher’s silver hair or long nose. After several long minutes the man in the hood looked up and Peter recognized Christopher Tshosvosky, guest conductor of the Martian Symphony and his lover.\n\n“Christopher” whispered Peter. The conductor jumped and let out a breath.\n\n“Peter. You made it.” He held out his arms.\n\nPeter ran to him. “It was difficult getting past the security fence but the cutter you gave me deactivated the electric wire in my section and sliced though the fence easily.”\n\nChristopher took Peters hands in his own. “Lover, I am so proud, so pleased.” Christopher pointed to the pack Peter was carrying. “Your instrument?”\n\n“And a few other things I couldn’t bear to part with.”\n\nChristopher motioned with his fingers. ”Give it to me.”\n\n“I can carry it myself.”\n\n“No, you can’t. If you want it when you wake up, I’ll have to take it. Don’t worry, I’ll take care of your things.”\n\n“When I wake up?”\n\n“Lover, I can’t just add you to the flight roster. Immigration between Earth and Mars is challenging, if I hadn’t been asked to come and guest conduct-“\n\n“I thought you said you could get me on this flight, that I would join you in the Paris orchestra.”\n\n“I can – you can! Just not awake.” Christopher motioned inside the hanger. “I still have some contacts. I faked and ID for a chryo cube. You’ll be Mrs. Fletcher for the trip. Once you’re in the cube, they won’t be able to identify you, then I unfreeze you on Earth and we work it out there, where I have more influence.\n\nPeter backed away. “Connections, right.”\n\n“What’s wrong? I thought you wanted to come with me.” Christopher leaned his face forward for a kiss, but Peter backed away.\n\n“Sometimes Martians disappear, taken away on ships, kidnapped.”\n\n“What are you implying?”\n\nPeter crossed his arms. “Earth has a rich organ market and it’s easy to make people disappear between planets.”\n\n“Peter, I don’t’ want to kill you. I want you to play third viola for me in Paris.” Christopher put an arm around Peter’s shoulder. Peter did not return the gesture of affection, but he did not pull away.\n\n“A batch of organs would make a man rich.”\n\n“Yes, yes it would. I’m not going to deny the realities of the Earth organ market. A batch or organs would make a man very rich, and it would be easy to put someone in freeze and never wake them up. You just have to trust that won’t be me. You have to trust me.”\n\n“Why didn’t you tell me about this before?”\n\n“I was afraid that if I told you, you wouldn’t come. I was afraid of going back to Earth without you, of living a life without you. I was afraid that you would say no. Don’t think about it. Trust that I love you.”\n\nPeter looked into those blue-green eyes, as blue and mysterious as the pictures of Earth. Christopher took Peter’s hand and led him to a white cube that was glowing softly.\n\n“Kiss me,” said Peter. “So that if you love me, you will seal me inside and kiss me again on waking. Kiss me, so that if you are untrue, the kiss will be a seal and a curse on you.”\n\nChristopher didn’t hesitate, but pulled Peter toward him and kissed him hard, without finesse, mashing their lips together. Peter stepped into the cube.\n"
  title: Third Viola in Paris
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2007-12-11
  day: 11
  month: 12
  text: "The place reeks of green beans.\n\nI hate the feel of the floor underneath my bare feet. It’s made of ivy and soft branches.\n\nI’m not from around here.\n\nI usually work the corporate zealots on the rim. All they know is credit and value. I’m a machine when it comes to getting those rogue independents back on our side. It’s all suits, stims, and pissing contests. I’m a natural because I like it. I’m at home there.\n\nThis must be punishment.\n\nI’m an emissary from a highly technological civilization and I’ve been sent to talk to the Leaf People.\n\nIt’s what’s called a Green Moon.\n\nIt takes less time to terraform a moon than a planet. Terraforming stations are set up on both the moon and the planet. The moon finishes first and the plants are shuttled down to the planet surface to hasten the change and relieve the processor’s workload.\n\nThen more plants are grown on the moon. They get ferried down. Then more are grown. It’s a process that continues until the planet is sustainable and ready for habitation. It takes about a century.\n\nIt’s a process that requires a much higher initial outlay of capital but the long term profits have been proven from past examples.\n\nThe employees live ‘in the green’, in tune with nature, and after a while, money becomes abstract to them. Occasionally, employees on a Green Moon get it into their heads that they are independent community organizations and not an asset of a corporation.\n\nEventually, they want to secede.\n\nSecede, rebel, steal, it’s all the same to us. They are substantial investments that must be protected and functional. Corporation emissaries are sent in to negotiate and reach a compromise that leaves both parties mutually dissatisfied but keeps the Green Moons running. It’s too expensive to go to war with them.\n\nMaybe I’ve done something wrong and that’s why my bosses have thrown me to the farmers.\n\nLunar terrafarmers. Loonies, we call them.\n\nThe rep I’m supposed to meet in this humid section of a hedge maze is called Rainbow Shark.\n\nI’ve already sweated through my expensive linen suit.\n\nA strongly muscled woman walks out from behind the bushes and stands in front of me. Except for a woven belt holding a telepad and what I guess are food pellets, she’s completely naked.\n\nShe stares me down for a second and gives me a visual appraisal. There’s a smirk when she looks at my bare feet and something that almost sounds like a chuckle at the sweat stains growing under my arms. He eyes return to mine. They’re as green as go-lights.\n\n“I’m Rainbow Shark.” She says. “You must be Jonas Malko, the company man.”\n\nShe looks like she’d just as soon stab me in the throat as look at me.\n\nMaybe this isn’t a punishment after all. It might even be a challenge.\n"
  title: Green Moon
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2007-12-12
  day: 12
  month: 12
  text: "The bright yellow spaceship of the Sol Department of Transportation pulled up next to a two ton rogue asteroid.  They deployed the grappling sling, and slowly maneuvered it toward the asteroid. After they secured it, the spaceship adjusted its orientation, fired its aft plasma engines, and launched the asteroid toward the center of the sun.  The crew confirmed that the asteroid’s new trajectory was “terminal,” and then moved on toward their next target; a jettisoned escape hatch from a cargo vessel that had collided with a utility schooner.\n\nVir Quisquilia glanced over at his trainee, Josh Knoxx, who was sitting in the co-pilot seat.  He was a good kid, but he was beginning to get on Vir’s nerves.  He never shut up.  He was always commenting on something, or questioning some department procedure (usually related to why Vir wasn’t following them).  Vir momentarily reflected on his rookie year, and quickly concluded that he had never been like Josh; as best as he could recall.\n\n“I don’t understand,” protested Josh, “why haven’t the ship designers figured out how to strengthen the forward deflector shields so they can handle a two ton rock.  We could finish our route in a week if we only had to clear the really big ones.”\n\nVir mentally counted to ten before answering.  The kid still didn’t see the big picture.  Less work also meant fewer pilots.  For now, he decided, he’d just explain the physics.  “Listen, Josh, its all about mass and velocity.  If a ship is only going 500 miles per second, the shields could deflect a 180 ton mass.  But since the interplanetary velocity limit is 0.5c, we need to clear out all objects one ton and larger.  Nobody is going the slow down just to make our job easier.  Besides, you should be grateful that you were assigned to the Earth-Mars sub-light corridors.  Imagine trying to keep the corridors clear through the asteroid belt?  I covered a buddy’s run for a month.  Hell, I’ll never do that again.  The way the corridors constantly spiral to stay aligned with Jupiter and Saturn was a logistical nightmare.”  He physically shuttered as he remembered the intricate space-dance he needed to choreograph to get Vista to shepherd a small cluster of asteroids out of Interplanet EJ-13.\n\nThey approached the drifting escape hatch and synchronized their orbits.  Josh swiveled toward the sling panel to start the targeting sequence.\n\n“Not the sling,” snapped Vir, somewhat more harshly than he had intended.  “The hatch is titanium.  It’s recyclable.  It goes into the metals hold.  Use the arm.”\n\n“Damn, sorry.”  Minutes later, the arm locked onto the hatch.  As Josh maneuvered the hatch past the cockpit he yelled.  “Oh God.  There’s a dead guy holding onto the inside handle.”\n\nVir squinted at the arm monitor.  “Yea, you’re right.  I heard they couldn’t find one of the crew.”  He sat there looking at Josh expectantly.  “Well, come on,” he prompted, “get into your suit and pry his hand loose from the hatch.  Store him in the biologic locker in hold number three.  And ignite a thruster, it’s almost lunch time.”\n"
  title: Sol-DOT
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Sam Clough aka “Hrekka”
  date: 2007-12-13
  day: 13
  month: 12
  text: "It’s just like they try to teach you in biology.\n\nKingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species.\n\nMunicipalis, Europa, Munchen, EDF, Umbra, Generatrum, Gigas.\n\nThe common or garden Generatrum Gigas. Very roughly, that’s ‘Giant Generator’. Self-replicating automata are absolutely great unless you impose severe limits on them. And make sure there’s no easy workarounds.\n\n‘Europa’ may have been true once, but no longer. Municipalis don’t respect political borders: these things walk around the world. Not fast enough to stay in perpetual daylight, but fast enough to snatch eighteen hours or more of light a ‘day’.\n\nAnd they’re damn tall. And some of the subspecies can float.\n\nAbout the only people who gained anything purely positive from the whole evolutionary technology revolution were the damn taxonomists. Whole new species sprouting in a whole new kingdom of life. And sprouting far quicker than anyone anticipated.\n\nThe new breed of taxonomist are an aggressive bunch. For the first time in years there’s something new and fresh in the field. Now they’re all out in the world. They’re the new heroes: the new household names. Charles Maltz, first human to document the speciation of mineral extraction drones, as they evolved from general extraction to specific ores. Donald Powell, first human to enter the wreckage of Dungeness and find evidence of emergent radiotolerant forms of common municipalis. Kate Finnigan, first human to cross the pacific with a seagoing umbra solar platform. Alexei Khostov, first human to gain the trust and acceptance of an enclave of dimachaeri combat frames.\n\nThe oil is gone. Most metal, too. The machines are extracting the last of it from Africa. Taxonomists have already witnessed predatory forms attacking and breaking down slow-moving members of umbra and the other lumbering solar families. Entire mechanical ecosystems are appearing.\n\nThe most remarkable discovery has been a symbiotic relationship found on the african savannah. A solar platform allowed several small velite combat frames to draw power from it regularly in exchange for defense against the small, fast edo family predators that would try to disable and disassemble it for parts. The combat frames were obviously several generations into the relationship: when discovered, their catabolic furnaces were already atrophying, forcing them to continue protecting the solar platform.\n\nThe Royal Society is bringing together research from everyone it can contact: they’re preparing to publish a new book. Systema Metropolis: the Systema Naturae for the modern age. The project is one of the few positive, creative efforts that has occurred on a worldwide scale in years.\n\nThe world is slowly dying, choking on the pollution of twelve billion minds. The ennui of the world is dissapating now that there’s finally a new frontier. There is romance, there is excitement. There are heroes once again. For the first time in a long time, the future is not quite so bleak.\n"
  title: Systema Metropolis
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Geoffrey Cashmore
  date: 2007-12-14
  day: 14
  month: 12
  text: "The first thing Vinka noticed were the trees, (Bula was late…why was she always late?) the ground was dirty too; some places nothing but bare earth or a covering of ragged grass. That couldn’t be healthy, could it? These pathetic people.\n\nVinka watched Bula arrive and park up, clumsy as usual, but at least she didn’t hit one of the trees. He glanced at his watch. Charl and Birdo would be expecting him back. It wasn’t fair to leave them finish the shift without him, he’d had so much time off lately.\n\n“Sorry.” Bula wore the silver outfit she got last winter. She wore it once to a party and hadn’t touched it again, saying it was too good for normal wear. She was obviously making a special effort today – first impressions and all that.\n\n“You’ve left your lights on.” Vinka gestured impatiently, sending his wife back into her car to fluster with the controls. “This is the place, isn’t it?” he asked when she finally made it over to stand beside him, smoothing down her jacket and smiling.\n\n“I think so.” She answered. “It’s not very clean. Look at those trees. That can’t be healthy, can it?”\n\nVinka was gazing around for signs of activity. “No…” he said absently.\n\n“Oh Vin, we are doing the right thing, aren’t we?” Bula had grown increasingly nervous as this day approached. “Adopting one of the under privileged, I mean.”\n\n“Bula, I told you, it’ll be fine.” Vinka was weary from the reassurances, but Bula could be like this; nervous about something at first then confident and self-assured when it finally happened “How could any right minded person stand by and leave them bring up a child in this squalor? And besides, I showed you all the forms we’d need to fill out if we wanted to adopt back home. Look.” He pointed out past the broken down buildings to where something moved at the edge of the trees. “Someone’s coming.”\n\n“Oh yes, there he is!” Bula caught sight of the figure. “Isn’t he adorable?” she said, leaving Vinka to approach the youngster alone for fear of frightening him. He seemed a little nervous, and curled up on the floor as Vinka drew near. “He’s so cute. I hope the other children don’t tease him because of he colour of his skin.” Bula stood to one side while Vinka lifted the child and put him into the back seat of Bula’s car.\n\n“Now.” He said “I’ve really got to get back to work – Birdo’s going to go mad – can you take the kid home and settle him in?”\n\nBula was smiling even though there were tears in her eyes as she nodded to her husband. She kissed him on the cheek as he closed the car door. “Thank you, darling.”\n\n“Whatever makes you happy, honey.” He said, pulling car keys from his pocket and preparing to go.\n\nAs Bula’s car broke free of the little blue-green planet’s atmosphere the child on the back seat began to cry.\n\n“There, there.” She comforted, “You won’t have to live in that nasty old place any more.”\n"
  title: Adoption
  year: 2007
- 
  author: James Smith
  date: 2007-12-15
  day: 15
  month: 12
  text: "Nothing but killers. They came screaming soundlessly out of the Oort and Mercury Station was gone. My wife swallowed a handful of pills when the remains of Venus fell across the Moon.\n\nThe Dyson sphere lays empty, reconfigured into an enormous laser. I remain behind. I am the firebreak between them and our fleeing caravan. I began the power-up this morning, and four years behind me the sun will soon strike the lens now moving into position. The light will cohere and lance through my relays to the diamond core of Jupiter, naked and polished for the purpose. Jupiter’s Lightning will strike some fifteen lightyears out, punch through their sun and cause a cascade effect, ending in a supernova. Before their world is consumed, seas will boil, and the very air will catch fire. Perhaps the man who ordered that first attack will watch his own wife burst into flames and, if he is a man, may be given to regret.\n\nI have not had a body in 145 years, but my sensors register the throb and hum of this station. I am reviewing a video of my wife. I’m wondering why, at the last, she felt the need to first grow a body. So many centuries and we still don’t trust our senses, no matter how superior to the initial five.\n\nThe cameras float everywhere, of course, and calling up the file was easy. I watch my wife uncap a bottle with three-day-old hands, an action she hadn’t performed in almost two hundred years, on an object no one’s used for a hundred. I cross-reference with file footage from a family picnic. Yes, she re-grew the body she had when we first uploaded– aged, liver-spotted, sagged and broken. She killed herself striving for a kind of pride we haven’t had need of in a century.\n\nOnce Jupiter’s Lightning fires, it will be another sixty years before the light of their exploding star reaches me. Their homeworld will be ash while I still run this station, and for good measure I will once more pump the remains of lonely old Sol into deep space, long after the threat has passed.\n\nI look at my wife on the slab, and superimpose her on top of the picnic footage. Her corpse lays along the blanket where our food is placed. I am not in the picture; I am holding the camera. She and our children appear to reach into her flesh and pull out plates piled high with food.\n\nAcross the chasm of centuries, over the expanse of her own dead body, my wife smiles at me. I miss her. I miss the electronic susurrous of the sum of human knowledge, underpinning reality. Somewhere in the depths of me, I ask myself if I will accept handshake from the second relay. Without accepting, the beam will reach Jupiter too dissolute to make the final, murderous journey out of the solar system. I deny handshake and power down. Come and get us.\n"
  title: Jupiter's Lightning
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Chris McCormick
  date: 2007-12-16
  day: 16
  month: 12
  text: "The finest moment of my whole life was when I stepped off that ship. When we finally found each other in the arrivals lounge, her utterly uncomplicated joy was mirrored by my own. Two friends since forever, separated by years of space travel. There was no shyness whatsoever in our extra long hug. All the years of missing, yearning, and desire for each other’s company poured out as we clutched eachother tightly. Our sweet embrace loosened and we paused just a moment, smiling wildly, looking into each other’s sparkly eyes. This led without any awkwardness to a kiss, which lasted longer than a kiss between friends should have. We pulled apart and laughed, still holding each other at arms length; the laugh the first sign that we knew we had crossed a line.\n\nIn that moment, free of any emotional baggage we managed to express what we hadn’t been able to for so many years at the same pod, imbibing information together, sharing ideas, and having adventures. I had always had other girlfriends, and she had always been busy with her applied nanotech studies. Eventually she’d got her degree and then all of a sudden she was leaving to the colonies in a matter of days, without any kind of warning. Of course we had both known that the day was coming when she’d eventually have to leave. That was the only smart career move.\n\nWhen that day came we both felt a confusing hole that hadn’t been filled. Something between us was left undone. Those last few days were bitter sweet moments; we wanted to spend the time together having fun, but of course neither of us felt the least bit like having fun. “This is it,” we thought together with teenage melodrama, “this is the end of our friendship.” I cried so damn hard when she left.\n\nI don’t want to talk about the days that followed my arrival at the colonies because it hurts too much. Suffice it to say that neither of us knew or understood the status of our relationship now. It lurched awkwardly between friendship and relationship and the dark hounds of paranoia and insecurity were lurking in the shadows ready to tear it to shreds. We tried to fix it with sex, but the afterglow from all those years of pent up sexual tension only lasted two days. That was probably the stupidest thing we could have done, but also inevitable.\n\nSo we sat on the wall watching the pretty lights dance in the distance eerily. All of space hung above us, it’s lonely, alien magnitude so poignant for us now. “It’s amazing,” she said in a numb voice, staring into the distance, “I can change the fabric of matter with a small piece of technology and the power of my mind. I can create any object I want. But I can’t fix us.” The frustrated way she emphasised the word “us” told me we were both stuck in the same head place. All the technology in the modern worlds couldn’t help two breaking hearts.\n\n“Well,” I said, taking a risk, “we could always try to fix it by fucking again.”\n\nLuckily we both giggled, and there it was; the spark of our friendship was still alive right there in that giggle. We looked at eachother, smiling softly, the eerie lights dancing on our faces. She reached across, and we held hands.\n"
  title: Arrivals Lounge
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2007-12-17
  day: 17
  month: 12
  text: "Finnegan Sue was a pit fighter.\n\nShe wrapped leather around her knuckles, mindful of her nails, and ran her sharpened tongue around her poisonous needled mouth.  She sung a tune while she prepped.  Her horrible lisp made a mockery of the lyrics she whispered to herself as the counter in the top left of her field of vision counted down to Go Time.\n\nOutside, the announcer’s spiel was cresting.\n\nToo many chapters of her life were prefaced with the phrase “…and in this corner.”\n\nBefore tonight, Finnegan Sue had never been a main event.\n\nTwo kinds of fighters got headlined:\n\nThere were connected fighters with flashy, expensive augmentations entered into and bred for the top tiers.  They had short careers.  They had nowhere to fall to.  Every fight was to the death up there and political maneuvering shed as much blood off the arena floor as on it.\n\nAnd then there were fighters like Finnegan Sue.  Heavy with scars, right moments and hundredth-of-a-second survivals.  Long, unexceptional careers of death.  Fights to first blood, fights to humiliation, fights to first break, and sometimes, fights to the death.  The path of their careers was a slow, steady incline.\n\nFinnegan Sue was nearing the end of her career.  A win at this level as an independent and she could retire.  All she had to do was kill this next fighter.\n\nSue checked the levels of her speed.  She stretched the armoured tendons in her wide neck.  The drugs were coursing through her now just as sure as they were coursing through her opponent.\n\nThe announcer was getting around to it.\n\n“…the Russian ripcord, winter’s dog of war, the Siberian she-devil, the gutpunch from the gulag, Moscow’s murdering Maria, I give you….FINNEGAN SUE!!”\n\nThe crowd went wild and the doors opened.\n\nFinnegan Sue flexed, breathed in, and ran to the light.  She leapt into the arena in a forward roll that ended in a kneeling crouch with her nails fanned to hide her face.\n\nAfter a respectful pause, she stood up straight, cueing the announcer to get on with it.\n\n“And in THIS corner….” he started rattling on about the person Sue had to kill.\n\nShe tried to tune out what the announcer said at this point in every match.  She liked seeing her opponent with fresh eyes.  She had heard hints that her opponent had started out as a male and was not Free.  He was a German.\n\nFor no reason at all, Sue thought of her long-dead mother.  It was surprising and unsettling to think such a thought before a fight.\n\nSue hoped it wasn’t an omen.\n\nThe doors of the other side of the arena opened.\n"
  title: Finnegan Sue
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Roi R. Czechvala
  date: 2007-12-18
  day: 18
  month: 12
  text: "In a dark, empty hanger, a needle-like flat black fighter rested in its cradle… thinking.\n\n“You see General,” a small man in white gestured toward the ship, “those pods mounted beneath each ‘wing’ are the main armament. The magnetic rail guns. They are able to launch a projectile the size of a soccer ball to transonic speed within their seven meter length. Each ‘wing’ serves as a magazine and carries seventy combined solid and nuclear rounds.”\n\n“The turrets mounted top and bottom are automatic and purely defensive. They only come into play while the ship is exposed when firing.”\n\n“That’s all very well and good, Doctor,” the General said wearily, “but I want to find out more about the propulsion system, what I read… is it true.”\n\n“The General is aware of the PK work that we are conducting?”\n\n“Yes, but I thought it was all theory.”\n\nThe little doctor chuckled. “No, my dear General, we have entered the practical phase. It sits before you. Perhaps I had better explain,” he said removing his glasses.\n\n“The concept of PK, that is telekinesis and telepathy, has been around for millenia, but it has only been in the last fifty years that we could select for it in vitro. Only in the past fifteen years have we been able to employ it to move objects this large with the aid of a PK amplifier.\n\nSimply put, since the speed of thought is, as far as we know instantaneous, the ship simply appears out of nowhere, fires, and disappears. It is vulnerable only for a few seconds, hence the turret mounted automatics.”\n\n“How does the pilot operate the ship?”\n\n“Well,” the doctor continued, “The first attempts were standard. The pilot simply sat in a cockpit and ‘thought’ the craft where he wanted it to be, but their thoughts were limited to the speed that their bodies would react to,” he shook his head sadly. “There were many casualties.”\n\n“We tried direct linking to the PK amplifier. This was much more effective, however the men tended to over compensate in their movements, leading to similar results.\n\nOur third attempt was similar to the second, but this time we linked the men to the PK amplifier through a virtual construct that simulated a cockpit but run at a speed approximating that of thought. Unfortunately, after long periods on duty, the men had trouble adjusting to ‘normal’ speed. There were…incidents.”\n\n“So, that is all behind us now? The Mark IV is ready for testing?” General Kaskorov asked, running his hand along the sleek black hull.\n\n“Oh yes, it is,” the doctor said gleefully, “you see, after PK and pilot training in simulators at normal speed, the pilot is sedated unawares, his entire central nervous system is removed, and implanted into the ships core.”\n\n“So, he is the ship?”\n\n“No Sir, he is merely in the ship. Through a VR construct, he runs his missions, and leads a normal life off duty, booze, women, gambling… what have you. All virtual, of course.”\n\n“And they don’t realize that their life is a simulation?”\n\n“No, Sir.”\n\n“He can’t hear us?”\n\n“No. There are no external audio pickups. Any necessary outside contact is sent through his virtual commander. After that, he’s allowed to follow his own life, within the parameters of the construct of course.”\n\n“You mentioned telepathy.  Can he…”\n\nBoth sets of turrets swiveled and fixed on the two men.\n\n“Oh shi…,” was the last thing Kaskorov said.\n"
  title: Stealth
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Benjamin Fischer
  date: 2007-12-19
  day: 19
  month: 12
  text: "The Shore Patrol has to ring three times before she comes to.\n\n“Ma’am, we would prefer to not break down the door,” one is saying. “Please open it now, ma’am.”\n\nGroggy and maybe still drunk, she paws at the suite’s intercom in response to their annoying persistence.\n\n“Aye,” she croaks, bracing herself against the headboard.\n\nHe is nowhere to be seen, of course. They never stay until the morning and most of the time she likes them that way. No buyer’s remorse. No uncomfortable second round of introductions. No waiting for the bathroom while the other showered. And no awkward pauses at the door, no unnecessary questions about a sequel.\n\nOne of the shore patrol coughs, loudly.\n\n“Be just a minute,” she says, her voice cracked and raw.\n\nThe champagne had been good and maybe even French–not the usual Tycho knockoffs that nine out of ten casinos in Golden refill their bottles with. That’s why she drank so much, she tells herself. Make the most of the boon. Seize the night. Fuck it. She was a superstar and medical can always grow her a new liver.\n\nThe room is a deluxe package, with unlimited water and an almost depressingly vast selection of feeds. She dials up FOX LUNA so she doesn’t have to hear herself in the toilet. The news network comes blazing in on three walls, the anchor’s rugged face reaching from floor to ceiling.\t“-inevitable conflict. NATO forces did not respond to what they have billed ‘morally bankrupt brinksmanship’ but multiple sources claim that both America and Luna are rapidly mobilizing strategic-”\n\n“Room! Mute the TV!” she orders from the bathroom.\n\nA complimentary bottle of mint mouthwash clears the last of the bitter taste of vomit from her throat. Gargling the thin green fluid, she rolls her shoulders and stretches her neck. She pads back to the main room, naked and feeling slightly more human.\n\n“Do I have time for a shower?” she calls through the intercom.\n\n“Ma’am, anyone not answering the recall by thirteen hundred-” starts one of the MAAs.\n\nThe other cuts him off.\n\n“I’m sorry. No, ma’am. You do not.”\n\n“Aye.”\n\nHer whites are strewn on the floor and mixed in with the chaos of the bed, and she decides that her medals and her underwear aren’t worth the hunt. A quick once-over of her uniform determines that while it is unsat, it will get her back to the ship, whiskey stains and all.\n\nThe chiseled features of the anchorman silently watch her straighten up her gig line and pull her skirt down to a slightly more modest mid thigh. She clears her throat.\n\n“Room, mirrors.”\n\nThe FOX stud evaporates into an endless series of her. Her hair is shit, but that is what covers are for. She twists the brown mop on her head into a mockery of a bun and sets her hat at a jaunty angle.\n\nShe shrugs–she looks even more hung over than before. But hell, she’s been out all night, drinking and whoring and she doesn’t give a damn if everyone knows. Tonight she can be the talk of every wardroom between here and L5. Tomorrow–well, the wicked and the innocent are one and the same when the tac nukes start flying.\n\nShe nods to herself.\n\n“Room! Door!”\n\nShe strides out into the bright florescent light of the hotel hallway. A first class and a third class Master-at-Arms are waiting for her, arms crossed and visibly impatient.\n\n“Good morning, boys,” she smiles.\n"
  title: Liberty
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Tony Pacitti
  date: 2007-12-20
  day: 20
  month: 12
  text: "Jack pulled a SimStik out of its small plastic container and placed it between his lips. Alice cleared her throat and looked at him through drunk eyes and a patch of blonde, wind blown hair.\n\n“Sorry,” he mumbled, the SimStik bobbing up and down as he spoke. He gave her one, put the pack back in his pocket and began patting himself down.\n\n“What’sa matter?” she asked as she pulled a drag off her SimStik.\n\n“Oh, nothing.” Jack smiled and laughed at himself. “I smoked when I was a kid. You know, actually smoked. Sometimes I forget you don’t need a lighter for these things. Force of habit.”\n\nAlice’s eyes slowly fell shut, heavy with a night’s worth of drinking then snapped back open.\n\n“I smoked once.” She stumbled and Jack reached out quick to grab her arm. She went on talking as if nothing had happened. “In college. Some guy I knew knew a guy who had a friend whose brother-in-law grew tobacco in his basement.”\n\n“Sounds sketchy.”\n\n“But that was the fun of it! Smoking real tobacco rolled in paper. Man…I knew, just knew we’d get busted at any second,” She laughed and leaned in, putting her head on Jack’s shoulder and her hand on his side. “Mmm…but we didn’t.”\n\nJack rolled his eyes and took a drag off of the small plastic stick, feeling the chemicals spill into his mouth and work their magic. SimStik begat chemicals which begat chemical reaction which begat the simulated sensation of smoking a real, honest to goodness tobacco cigarette.\n\nAfter his lungs were full of what his brain believed to be smoke, he exhaled slowly and watched as a cloud that wasn’t actually there dissipated into the cool, summer sky.\n\n“It’s funny,” he said before taking another drag, “an advanced, science-minded species and what do we have to show for it? No colony on Mars, no patches for the ozone layer. No proof of intelligent life out there and no flying cars. We don’t even have a cure for cancer, just this dodge around it” he paused and held the SimStik out dramatically. Alice looked up from the spot on his chest that she’d nestled up against. “Just this little plastic straw that makes our brains think we’re perpetuating a filthy habit with none of the undesirable side effects.”\n\nHe looked down intently into Alice’s eyes and asked her, “What would Gene Roddenberry say?”\n\nJack looked down into Alice’s eyes and though he’d like to chalk the stupid look up to the booze, he knew that she hadn’t the slightest clue as to who Gene Roddenberry was.\n\n“Forget it.” He said with a grin, “How’s about we head back to my place for a drink? Can’t promise it won’t get you drunk or destroy that pretty little liver of yours,” he tenderly caressed the side of her right breast, not entirely sure if that’s where the human liver was but one hundred percent certain that she wouldn’t know either, “but I’m sure top scientists are working on it right now.”\n\nWith there arms around each other the stumbled away from the bar.\n\n“Why Jack,” Alice joked, “It sounds like you’re trying to take advantage of me.”\n\nHe wasn’t trying. He was doing.\n\nHere’s to another Friday, he thought as he dropped his used up SimStik into a high tech looking garbage can.\n\n“Thank you for choosing SimStik,” it said cheerfully over a corporate jingle, “The world’s healthy alternative since 2043.”\n"
  title: Smoke 'em if you got 'em, Gene
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Pyai (Megan Hoffman)
  date: 2007-12-21
  day: 21
  month: 12
  text: "Anton set the hypernav coords to just beyond the rim of debris.\n\n“Aren’t we cutting it a bit close, Captain?” a thick gravelly voice came from behind him. Silverlo, whose face was a mess of scars, wrinkles and facial hair, frowned at him.\n\n“That’s the point. The closer to the wreckage the better we are hidden. I want us in and out with minimal detection.”\n\n“They’ll detect us hitting the hull of one of the derelicts…” his co-pilot muttered beside him. But Siverlo would do as Anton said. That was why he was still his co-pilot after 15 years, one war, two divorces and an alcohol shortage.\n\nThe hypernav kicked in and Anton closed his eyes. Watching the view window made him nauseous. Space sickness, they called it. He should be used to it by now. Towards the end the small ship made the usual rumblings it did as it was slowing, and with a loud POP in his ears they dropped into normal space again.\n\nAnton opened his eyes in time to see a large scrap derelict hurtling at them. Or more appropriate, they were hurtling at. Silverlo let lose a string curses as he jammed hard on the control panel. One moment they were rushing towards the debris growing larger in the view window, and the next they were out of its path. Anton forced his muscles to relax. Yeah, that was another reason why Silverlo was still his co-pilot.\n\nHe could feel Silverlo’s glare on his back, but ignored him. His gaze was fixed on the small tugship coming out to them.\n\n“T6703 to Unidentified Spacecraft. Identify yourself,” crackled the communication over the wire.\n\nAnton smiled. “Negative. Not until you come through our lower hatch.”\n\nThere was silence. The hull resounded when the tugship latched onto the lower hatch door. Anton was there when they opened the hatch in the floor, and when Sergeant Ames stepped up.\n\nAnd then Anton smiled, extended his hand. “Sarge, you made it.”\n\nThe other man shook his head. “Risky move, Anton. I couldn’t believe you hypernavved to inside the rim.” There was respect in his voice.\n\n“No other way. Did you bring the supplies?”\n\nSarge nodded. “How is Mother doing?”\n\n“Fine. Sarah’s kids are always over at her place. Jyn and I visit when we can, but it’s always a mad house.”\n\nWhile he had been talking, Anton lowered a cable down the hatch and someone below in the other ship attached a large crate to it and tugged on the rope. One came up, and attached below it were three others.\n\nAnton’s eyes opened wider in question. Sarge shrugged. “News that the rebellion still exists has filtered in. Somehow we ended up with more donations this month than ever before. Our biggest donor this time was the United Newfoundland Orchestra.”\n\nAnton chuckled. “Since when did we stop being pirates and start being rebels again?”\n\nThe other man just smiled.\n\nTwo minutes later the tugship was firing “warning shots” across their hull, as they hypernavved away.\n\nWhat no one had told them was that it was refueling day on Citrix, and the cargo lanes were longer than ever. So the coords that they usually hypernavved to were currently occupied by the hydrogen tanker UBX771. Anton still had his eyes closed as they hit the hull of the tanker. The ship exploded into metal bits, and the crates burst open. A halo of violas, bows and flutes floated outward, and they say it rained cellos on Citrix for a week.\n"
  title: Raining Cellos
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Debbie Mac Rory
  date: 2007-12-22
  day: 22
  month: 12
  text: "Dear John,\n\nHow are you? Such a stupid way to start a letter like this. You’ll probably never get it anyway, and even if you do I’ll never know your answer. But I hope you’re well. I just wanted to say I’m sorry. You were right. But I don’t think I would have made any other decision.\n\nI know when you first met me, sitting at the space port, staring up at the sculptures of shinning metal and watching the scurrying of their army of workers as the next flight was prepared, that you thought it was a kind of fascination on my part, a poor planet bound creature held enraptured by the shining towers. You thought that if you offered me some small part of the stars, a part of you, strange and exotic and alien with the memory of a thousand stars seen from the bridge of your ship, that I could be happy, and you could keep me with you.\n\nAnd for a while I was content, truly I was. We would lie in the rose-gold dusk of day-start, as Filha’s pale light faded and Mãe began to rise. I would lie with my head on your chest, listening to the beat of your heart, and the echoing chamber of your chest, and hear words as you would have spoken them on your own world, before they reached your lips to become words for my ears.\n\nBut for every story you spoke, for every star in my sky that you pointed too, and told me of the peoples who lived there, the ships that passed by, I wanted, I needed to see them for myself. I listened to your cautions of time warps and life spans; how my race wasn’t equipped for the rigours of travel. But you could never understand what it was like for me, what it was truly like to be condemned to a planet bound existence and watch the lines the great silver ships traced across the sky. You offered me visions and remembrances of visited worlds; but the ships offered me the stars themselves.\n\nSo I’m writing this letter to say, you were right. The stasis is harder on my body than any other member of the crew, and when I was woken for this phase, I didn’t recognise the person looking back at me. My once flame coloured hair has turned grey, my face is lined. I still pass as fit for the helm but I know now I won’t make it to step out onto the next port.\n\nBut on my phase, when I’m alone on deck, I’d adjust the filters and watch as pinpoints of light streaked past. I capture images of distant nebulae and far reaching galaxies to gaze over when I’m in my cabin. I won’t reach them, but I’ve gotten to see them all. And it was so worth it.\n\nLove, Calice\n"
  title: Last Letter
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Matthew Green
  date: 2007-12-23
  day: 23
  month: 12
  text: "There were rumors of course, most were squashed, but on a ship full of soldiers with nothing to do but watch the stars go by, rumors happened.  It was like getting cleaning detail, no use trying to prevent it, just grab a space suit and scrub.\n\nThe most prevalent was that the war was over a year ago and the ship was just squashing various rebellious factions that hadn’t got the news.  Higher-ups didn’t let the lower-downs know this because that would result in a drop in efficiency.  All very scientifically tested and all that.  People spreading these rumors brought forth facts such as how little equipped the pockets of rebels were and how each trip between hold outs took longer to get to.  Most were wiped out and the rest were getting harder to find.  That explained the lack of any form of action for several months now.\n\nAnother, more frightening rumor was that they had miscalculated when the ship had sling-shot around that black hole.  Somehow we were slung into the far reaches of… somewhere and didn’t know where home was.  That one scared me the most. As a maintenance tech, I was privy to the storage holds of the ship, and I knew we only had enough food in stock to last six months at most.  The commander told us that mail transmissions had been turned off so the enemy couldn’t triangulate our position.  That was four months ago and by now everybody knew the truth; burst transmissions couldn’t be tracked that way.  The rumor mill liked to churn that one out during the late shift.  I used to like working at ship’s night.  Some people complained about having to step outside and brush off the antenna arrays and scrub out the various vents and sensor assemblies, but I enjoyed it.  It got me out and moving, and I liked the view.  Well, I used to like the view, now I just wanted to live under a sky again.\n\nI heard another voice that I recognized.  “Hello Roy,” he greeted.\n\nI was on cleaning detail, again, and turned toward the suit that was approaching.  He waved one gloved hand at me as I stared into his gold visor.  Suits didn’t display the occupant’s rank like normal uniforms did.\n\n“Dave?”\n\n“That’s me, me matey.” He said in his pirate voice.\n\n“Damn man, they said you were dead.”\n\n“That was the rumor.”\n\nI turned back; the brush I had been using had drifted to the end of its tether.  I retrieved it with a practiced move and resumed brushing dust off the antennas.  They coated easily out here in the nothing.\n\n“Don’t bother, at our speed it’ll be years before we’re close enough to use that.”\n"
  title: Rumors
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2007-12-24
  day: 24
  month: 12
  text: "Deep in the bowels of the Top Secret Experimental Vehicle Development Center, sat the most technically advanced aircraft ever developed by General Motors.  As the ship rested solidly on its landing skids, I meticulously guided the ion-vapor polisher a few thousands of an inch above painted graphite composite skin.  My fellow detailer, Clement, was polishing the chrome and mahogany trim inside the cockpit.  “I don’t know why I bother,” he complained to no one in particular. “You know the military is gonna gut the entire ship once they get their hands on it.”\n\n“What makes you think the customer is the military,” I asked?\n\n“Com’on, who else can afford to spend 130 billion dollars for a one passenger ship?  Hell, a thousand man deep-space battlecruiser doesn’t cost that much.”\n\n“Well, I was kinda hopin’ this ship was for some trillionaire playboy,” I replied as I admired the 40 foot long aerodynamic beauty.  “A primo ship like this should be used for recreation, not war.”\n\nClement stepped out of the cockpit and studied the sales sticker glued to the windshield.  “Look at the options,” he remarked.  “This ship has a tracking system with 5040 cascading global positioning locators, each with its own quantum homing sensor.  The propulsion system is a 3.2 terawatt warp engine with microburst capability.  There’s an inertial braking system that can stop the aircraft in less than a nanosecond.  The cockpit canopy has a heads-up night vision photonic display.  It even has a multiphase cloaking device.  Think about it.  Why would a civilian need an instrumentation package this advanced?  There’s no doubt in my mind.  This ship is definitely a prototype for a military fighter.  I’ll bet they plan to use it to take back Mars.  President Moore was an idiot for letting those ungrateful bastards secede without a fight.”\n\n“You’re nuts, Clement,” I countered.  “For God’s sake, this ship is a convertible.  It can’t even leave Earth’s atmosphere.  How’s it gonna reach Mars?  Have you even noticed that it’s painted red?  Who paints a fighter red?”\n\nUndaunted, he continued arguing his point.  “Mars is red too you know.  You’d never see this baby while it was parked on the ground.”  He motioned me to the rear of the aircraft and opened the cargo hatch.  “Have you seen the hold?  It has a station-to-station subspace tunnel array.  It would be perfect for remotely loading munitions during an extended sortie.  After the pilot fires all his antimatter torpedoes, he can re-supply the ship in-flight using the tunnel.”\n\n“That tunnel only has a range of 15,000 miles,” I pointed out in vein.  “That alone shoots down your Mars theory?”\n\n“Just the opposite, Einstein,” he replied sarcastically.  “Space Force has a supply station on Phobos.  Fifteen thousand miles can cover every square mile of Mars.  I’ll bet you a case of beer the customer is Special Forces.”\n\n“I’ll take that bet,” I said enthusiastically.  “Look, they’re supposed to be here in thirty minutes to inspect the ship.  We’ll find out then.  In the meantime, we need to finish up.”  Clement and I quickly completed detailing the aircraft, then ducked behind some shipping crates and watched the hanger door.\n\nA few minutes later, the door whisked open, and a plump elderly man with a broad face and a full white beard stepped into the hangar.  When he saw his new “sleigh” his droll little mouth drew up like a bow.  His eyes…how they twinkled!  And, I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself.\n"
  title: The Upgrade
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2007-12-25
  day: 25
  month: 12
  text: "Susan crept downstairs slowly, curious about the noises she was hearing from the kitchen. The lights weren’t on. It was Christmas morning so it was still dark out at five in the morning. Her parents slept far away from the kitchen all the way upstairs on the second floor plus they had been celebrating last night so they were in a deep sleep. Susan, of course, had barely been sleeping at all. Her eyes had flown open at every little creak of the house settling. She kept a sensitive child’s ear out for the sound of sleigh bells or hoofbeats.\n\nNeither of those sounds was coming from the kitchen. It almost sounded like burglars. The lights were off and all she could hear was the slight tinkling of what sounded like cutlery. Every now and then, it sounded like the fridge was gently being pushed forward a few inches.\n\nAs she got closer to the kitchen, there was the sound of sparks. The half inch of darkness underneath the closed door lit up bright blue like night-time television and then went black again. The clinking and the gentle scraping continued.\n\nSusan was not a fearful child but she was getting nervous. She chewed on her lower lip with wide-eyed indecision. The contest in her between wanting to see Santa and wanting to alert her parents to possible intruders was violent but brief. She opted for the Santa glimpse.\n\nVery, very quietly she opened the kitchen door a crack, pushed her arm through, and felt for the light switch on the wall. She found it. Light flooded the kitchen.\n\nThe sounds continued.\n\nSusan opened her eyes.\n\nIt wasn’t Santa.\n\nThere was a giant long-legged metal spider on the kitchen table eating the toaster. It was like a black skinless patio umbrella with a streamlined teardrop-shaped blob of metal at the center of it the size of a microwave oven. Its mouth parts were gingerly tearing away the chrome skin of the toaster. It hissed a little and the blue sparks came again from its mouth as a perfect square of the toaster’s hide came away and disappeared into the maw.\n\nSusan stood frozen to the spot. The spider didn’t know she was there.\n\nWrapping paper still clung to the spider’s legs. There was a colourful bow still smoking on the kitchen floor.\n\nIt didn’t have its light sensitivity sensors or earmikes installed yet so it had no idea that Susan was there or that the light was on.\n\nSusan whooped with delight. Obviously her parents had set the time zone wrong and it had woken up early. She stroked the back of her hand to fire up her implant and snapped her fingers twice to set it to pet control.\n\nThe spider spasmed and fell on the floor with a crash. Susan could hear her parents waking up.\n\n“Bad spider!” she said with a smile on her face. This was the best Christmas ever. Her friends were going to be so jealous.\n"
  title: Spider
  year: 2007
- 
  author: William Tracy
  date: 2007-12-26
  day: 26
  month: 12
  text: "It was late after hours at SETI headquarters. Still, two men hunched over a computer, it’s light bathing them in a blue glow.\n\n“I can’t believe it, Jim.”\n\n“There’s no doubt. Arecibo is picking up an artificial signal from an intelligent source.” Jim straightened, raked his hair back with his fingers. “Play it.”\n\n“What?”\n\n“I’m just curious; the transmission looks like an AM radio broadcast.” He leaned forward. “Dave, can we play it?”\n\n“Well, let’s see—” Dave punched buttons. “There we go!”\n\nA voice speaking in English emanated from the computer’s speakers.\n\n“It can’t be…”\n\nJim stared at the screen. “That star is forty light-years away,” he pronounced solemnly. “This message is forty years old.”\n\n* * *\n\nThe general faced the SETI researchers down across his polished wood desk. Medals swarmed down his uniform.\n\n“Gentlemen, you wish to speak to me about Project Starshot.”\n\nThe researchers answered that they did.\n\nThe general placed his hands on the edge of the desk and leaned forward, brow furrowed. “Project Starshot is a classified government project—its very name is secret. I do not know how you found out about it, but whatever happened, a serious security breach has occurred, and national security is jeopardized.” He leaned back, crossed his arms. “Start talking.”\n\nJim turned to Dave. “Play the tape for him.”\n\nFirst there was static, then a words. “… Officer Franks, of Project Starshot. I have completed the first manned test of the device. Our coordinates must have been wrong, because the wormhole seems to have delivered me to an alien world. The wormhole we created only works in one direction, and I have no means of returning. I am broadcasting this message in hopes that … ” the message dissolved into noise.\n\nAs the tape played, the general’s eyes widened. Then he placed his elbows on the desk, laced his fingers together, and propped his nose on his knuckles. He paused, listening. Then the general moved his head down, and leaned his hands against his forehead.\n\nWhen the tape stopped, there was a long, awkward pause before the general looked up at his guests, eyes tired.\n\n“We canceled Project Starshot in 1967. We thought they all died.”\n"
  title: Project Starshot
  year: 2007
- 
  author: James Smith
  date: 2007-12-27
  day: 27
  month: 12
  text: "Nardo sat in his broker’s office, running his “impatience” script. He occupied himself with the U.N. Secretarial bout running on hologram in the corner. One American candidate had just tagged out and his partner climbed to the top rope, towering above the Nigerian, when the broker’s pupils flashed twice and his BRB tags faded.\n\n“Hi, sorry, meltdown in China, had to move some accounts, hold some hands, how you doing?”\n\nNardo hated that fast-guy-Eddie bullshit. “Ed. Population futures. I wanna get in on that. The returns sound fucking massive.”\n\nEd’s avatar smiled.\n\n“Bernardo, let me guess. Some thirteen year-old Malaysian kid goes poking around in the GASDAQ, you pull the case, and some helpful soul explains population futures to you, just well enough to make you think you’ve struck gold. Now you’re logged into my office, wasting my retainer, and my time.”\n\n“So… you’re saying…”\n\n“I’m saying what the regulation scripts need to hear me say. I’m saying what the secret society of backchannel movers and shakers want me to say. But, you and me go way back, Nardo. You did that thing with the guy that one time–“\n\n–blood, lots of blood, fucking everywhere–\n\n“–and I owe you. So I’m going to do something for you. Now: You want me watching out for you, or do you want me getting hot wire hangers jammed up my ass on a Spanish prison ship? If it’s the former, keep your mouth shut about it. All right?”\n\n“Stop trying to scare me.”\n\n“Fine. First, I’m replacing this conversation with script on mutual funds. Now: Tinker’s Dam. Up in Christchurch? There’s going to be a storm next week, and the river’s gonna top it. No, no, shut up, stop typing. Don’t ask. There’s going to be a surge of untouchables into Rebekka proper, and property values are going to fucking tank. Absolutely. Now, Rebekka can’t absorb all these fuckers without some pain. The long and short is that over the next two to five years, the city’s going to hemorrhage middle class white folks over the wall into Snowtown and Twitch City. And you, having bought up a sizeable share of population vouchers in one or both of those fine municipalities, will be swimming in easy credits.”\n\n“That… that’s how it works?”\n\n“That’s what’s going to happen. How it works is beyond the ken of mortal man. You in?”\n\n“My mother lives in Christchurch.”\n\n“Move her the fuck out of there, man! That place is a sewer. Besides, the dam’s gonna blow and kill a bunch of people.”\n\n“Five years?”\n\n“You’ve already got a job. This is how you build a pension. Shit or get off the pot.”\n\nNardo looked over at the U.N. match playing on the side table. A Nigerian had one American in a sleeper hold. Her partner was beating the other with a folding chair, blood dissolving as it flew past the angle of the holo-cams. He had money on the damn Americans.\n\n“Yeah. Yeah. I’m in.”\n"
  title: The Gambler
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Kaj Sotala
  date: 2007-12-28
  day: 28
  month: 12
  text: "Even after nine years, people still stare at us. We’re used to it.\n\nThe plague that suddenly made all of humanity sterile wasn’t easy on society. There was panic, rioting, doomsday cults. But eventually people adjusted and things calmed down, and scientists turned their attention to finding a cure.\n\nIt took them ten years, but they succeeded. After a decade of global childlessness, our generation was born.\n\nAdults say we’ve had a strange childhood – I suppose so, though I wouldn’t know. I’m used to everything centering around us, from all the stares we get to the entire industries, a decade dead, springing back up to cater to our needs. When we entered elementary school, it had been seventeen years since any of the teachers had last taught first-graders. I sometimes wonder if that made them better or worse.\n\nThe older kids, the last generation born before the plague, look at us with a mixture of jealousy and suspicion. Jealousy, because previously they were the ones getting all the attention. A noticable fraction of them still wore diapers when we were born, their parents unwilling to let go of the last babies they might ever have. Suspicion, because we don’t share their culture. All the games and silly rhymes and crazy rumors that passed from one generation of kids to the next, secret from the adults, are lost now. We never learned them from the kids a few years older than us. Instead we chose to make up our own culture.\n\nNever in the history of mankind has there been a generation like us. Even the adults are a bit weary of us, deep down. They know they forgot how small children should be treated, and they fear that they’ve made mistakes.\n\nI say: let them fear. It makes things easy for us. Each night when we pray, those of us who’ve been taught to pray, we secretly add a thanks for the plague.\n\nFor making us unique."
  title: Childhood's End
  year: 2007
- 
  author: John Tudball
  date: 2007-12-29
  day: 29
  month: 12
  text: "When we are young we are told a story of a ship.\n\nAs the story goes, the ship is damaged beyond repair and is set to crash into its destination planet. The crew on board consists of one android, one clone and one pure born. There is only one escape pod left.\n\n“Master,” says the android, “you must take the escape pod. I shall prepare it for you.”\n\n“Lord,” says the clone, “you must take the escape pod. I have made these provisions for you.”\n\n“Friends,” says the pure born, “when I am rescued your names shall be written in the book of records. No greater honour could you receive.”\n\nWhen we are old we tell a different story.\n\nIn our story, a broken ship is hurtling towards destruction and there is only one escape pod left. The crew of the ship – an android, a clone and a pure born – argue amongst themselves as to who should be allowed to escape.\n\n“I should be given the pod,” says the android. “I can report to the ship’s maker what went wrong, so this never happens to anyone again.”\n\n“I should be given the pod,” says the clone. “Throughout this system there are a great many lords and ladies who would miss my touch, should I die here.”\n\n“I should be given the pod,” says the pure born. “For it is my right.”\n\nAnd with this, the pure born draws a weapon and forces the others to concede. He backs into the pod, keeping his weapon drawn on his crewmen and closes the door behind him. The android and the clone sit and wait for their deaths. After ten minutes – just as the ship is nearing its end – the door to the escape pod opens and the pure born comes back out.\n\n“Um,” he says, “how does this thing work?”\n\nThey don’t like us telling our story. It tells a truth they do not wish to face: Without us they are nothing.\n"
  title: They call it a Fable
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Gavin L. Perri
  date: 2007-12-30
  day: 30
  month: 12
  text: "Sometimes I wake in cyberspace and remember the wizened words of the old man, ‘When I was a one year old we didn’t have self-evolving tutorial programs, we had to learn by listening’. I try to picture what he looked like but all I get are a series of ones and zeroes, the discussion we had at eight, however, stays with me ‘Back when I was a lad we didn’t have spatial displacers, we had to walk everywhere we went’. Walking is such an abstract thought.\n\nHis words at my twelfth birthday for some reason stay with me ‘Pah! A telepathic communicator, when I was your age I used a mobile phone’ I create a simple program that recreates the genome of the old man but it does not show the creases on his age-old hands and it does not recreate our last conversation ‘When I was fourteen years of age we didn’t need time travel to find out about history, we just used the internet’. These words play around in front of me as I contemplate them. I will never hear the old man again, my program does not respond to wavelengths of sound and he never learnt to telepathically communicate.\n"
  title: Moore's Law
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Debbie Mac Rory
  date: 2007-12-31
  day: 31
  month: 12
  text: "The weather had turned bad during the night; the low air pressure finally bringing on the threatened storm. All occupied buildings had been sealed to maintain environmental controls and life support systems and all transport had been grounded for the duration of the storm. The safety precautions for such events had been tested time after time, and daily life continued apace.\n\nBut for Jessica and James, it meant one more day being trapped in each other’s company, without the escape of the outdoors. Their parents had gone early that morning to the research labs to continue their work, and though they had arrived safely, it would likely be several days before they were able to travel home.\n\nThe children sat quietly as their lunch was served. Outside the double-thickness reinforced windows, the dust clouds raged silently, adding to the murk of the room. James watched his sister with a malevolent gleam in his eyes as one of the household servants moved round to place a bowl in front of her.\n\n“Thank you” Jessica murmured, picking up her spoon to push indifferently at the fruit pieces in front of her.\n\nJames rolled his eyes, making an exaggerated noise of exasperation.\n\n“It doesn’t know what you’re saying, it can’t understand you!”\n\n“That doesn’t matter… but you shouldn’t call her that.”\n\nJames groaned.\n\n“It’s a servant” he intoned, imitating his father’s voice as well as he could, “engineered to be quiet and efficient, without any unnecessary complications that might otherwise interfere with their activity.”\n\nJessica turned to look at the servant where she was standing unobtrusively near the door; face down and impassive, giving no sign of having heard the conversation. Her hair had been cut roughly short, and her slender figure was almost lost in the gray of her servants robes. She had blue eyes, Jessica knew, from the few brief times she had convinced the girl to raise her eyes and look at her.\n\n“It’s only here to do what we tell it to!” James shouted, disliking that her attention had been taken away from him for so long. “See!”\n\nWith that, he pushed his bowl from the table, scattering fruit pieces over the carpeted floor. The girl shuffled over to the table and began cleaning away the mess.\n\nJames pulled his eyes away from the ownership braille on the back of the servants’ neck, exposed as she bent to soak the juice from the carpet. He raised his gaze to Jessica, the pained look in her eyes taking away the malicious pleasure he’d gotten in making the mess.\n\n“I don’t know why you care”, he said. “It’s only a clone, she’s not even human”.\n"
  title: Servants
  year: 2007
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2008-01-01
  day: '01'
  month: '01'
  text: "The rain had stopped some time ago, but the roofs still unloaded their catchings through countless broken eves-troughs and missing downspouts. A man pulled his coat tighter around his sunken chest, and squeezed himself deeper into the shadows of the doorway, making at least a minimal effort to keep from getting any more wet.\n\nHe heard the police siren growing in volume for a time before the cruiser screamed by overhead, illuminating the broken windows and rusted fire escapes of the low rises in brilliant blue and red, before leaving him blinking in darkness as the sound faded into the city night.\n\nHe’d lost track of how many nights he’d spent like this.\n\nFurther up the street, the dim holiday glow of the red light district offered a little cheer for those who could afford such extravagances. He knew that the shop keepers would be lining up the men and women in their parlours, freshly bathed, charged and lubricated for an evenings work. The shops had grown in numbers over the years, spilling out of the original seedy alley into the adjoining streets, and he’d had to pack his few belongings several times to move farther into the abandoned sprawl at the forceful insistence of the flesh trade’s private security.\n\nA low rumble approached, a taxi cruising slowly at street level. As it passed, a face flashed from an open window and the cab stopped, a mumble of words filtered to him before the door opened and a man stepped out onto the street, addressing the driver clearly through the still open window.\n\n“Five minutes, alright?” holding his hand up, fingers extended, “just five and you can take me back downtown.”\n\nThe man turned, stepped a few paces towards the doorway and stopped, shoving his hands into the front pockets of his jeans.\n\n“Hello Terry,” the name was familiar, though one he hadn’t heard in a long time, “still sleeping rough I see. You keeping well?”\n\nTerry recognized the face gradually, remembered sitting in a coffee shop somewhere, talking over soup, and coffee. He remembered a weeks worth of chocolate bars and a pair of warm gloves.\n\n“Do you remember our talk Terry? Do you remember the book I was working on?” The questions Terry remembered were all about his service, his coming undone, his winding up here. He did remember talk of a story, a book.\n\n“I’ve been given an advance on the story we talked about, and I’m here to make good on my promise.” He reached into his back pocket, producing a slim square, fist sized and bisquit thin. “I made a resolution that year, to write a story and make it true, that’s what drove me to you. It’s almost midnight, and a New Year, and I resolved to find you again.”  He moved within arms reach, holding the flat device in between them at eye level. Terry was only briefly aware of a flicker of light, and then the device was gone, slipped back into a pocket. The man produced a plastic card, and passed it to him. Terry hesitated before accepting it, a blue fingerprint floating seemingly in space between the boundaries of the plastic, the image fascinating.\n\n“It’s a tourism FreePass, Terry,” the man retreated to the sidewalk again, speaking slowly, “you’re in the system now, through your eyeprint. Anywhere you see this sign on a shop window they’ll give you food, or drink, a bed or a warm shower. Only if you want, but it’s there anytime you like.”\n\nTerry looked from the shadows, and for a moment in the taillights of the taxi could have sworn there was a halo around this strange young novelist.\n\n“Thank you,” he mumbled into the street, “thank you.”\n\n“Happy New Year, Terry.” The man smiled, waved awkwardly and climbed back into the cab.  Terry listened as the low rumble grew to a whine, and watched the cab climb out of sight. Looking at the card in his hand, he let an awareness of his hunger reach him, and set out to sate it. ‘Happy New Year’, for the first time in a while he supposed it could be.\n"
  title: Resolve
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Robert Niescier
  date: 2008-01-02
  day: '02'
  month: '01'
  text: "The bacterium was our lab’s greatest achievement.  An organism engineered to metabolize cellulose into ethanol quickly and efficiently would eliminate humanity’s dependence on fossil fuel and make energy shortages a thing of the past.  It was our gift to an energy-starved world.\n\nSure, there were numerous obstacles to overcome.  Sequencing and sorting through the thousands of cellulase and fermentation pathways to find the perfect combination of efficiency and output took time, and we were forced to manually engineer multi-branched carbohydrate metabolic pathways to maximize usage of all the monomeric sugars.  The ethanol toxicity posed another problem, but through the optimization of an existing efflux pump the microbe was able to protect itself.\n\nThis led to what I considered the coup de grace: the septic cellulose liquefaction efflux pump.  The biggest problem, the one we spent years of headaches trying to fix, was getting around cellulose crystalline structure.  Sure, the bacterium was able to metabolize the carbohydrates once they got into the cell, but the fermentation was limited by the surface area of the substrate used.  Even sawdust took too long to be considered effective.  But in mere hours the SCLE-pump turned any cellulose sample, even blocks of wood, into soupy globs of cellobiose disaccharides ripe for absorption and fermentation.\n\nThe day after publication we received phone calls from nations all over the world.  The Nobel Prize came a year later.\n\nIt was a few weeks after Sweden that I noticed something strange happening in the wooded areas around my lab.  It was the deer.  Their behavior was quite unusual, coming out during the daytime, stumbling into roads, even passing out in odd positions in the open.  A graduate student joked that they looked drunk, and a certain suspicion made my stomach rise to my throat.  I immediately called an ecologist friend of mine and asked him to look into the blood alcohol count of the local fauna; a few weeks later he called back and said, with astonishment, that it was off the charts.\n\nThat day I assembled my team and asked them if any of them had ever poured samples down the drain without properly bleaching them first.  A few people looking at their feet were all I needed to see.\n\nSure, it was a big joke at first, drunk animals, hobos sucking bark for free booze.  It became significantly less funny when houses began to slop down onto their foundations, then burst into giant fireballs and fried everyone unlucky enough to still be inside.\n\nIt wasn’t the bacterium we engineered that was making the forests melt into goo; it was the DNA.  To avoid complications with the microbe’s main genome we had placed all the pathways onto two plasmids; pRN45 and pRN86.  We didn’t stop to think that, in a world where 50% of the carbon is locked up in cellulose, that plasmids optimized for its digestion would be so highly selected.  Hindsight, I suppose.\n\nIt was happening all over and got worse every day.  Once it got into the groundwater there was no way to stop it.  A plague on everything green and photosynthetic in the world was upon us.  Pictures from NASA showed black spots lined with red all over the planet, growing bigger day by day.\n\nWe had to retreat to the deserts and tundra and live in caves; there was no other choice.  I don’t expect to survive much longer as there is little left to eat, but I don’t want to say that to the others in my cave because they already don’t like me.  I can’t imagine why.\n"
  title: Whoops
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2008-01-03
  day: '03'
  month: '01'
  text: "With lost marbles over mixed drinks, I stare at the face reflected in the oak bar. It looks more real to me, somehow, than I feel.\n\nThe bartender comes over to me.  His huge moustache is waxed to slippery perfection. He looks down at me with crossed arms and a scowl. I know what that means. Time to pay up and leave.\n\nI look up at him. I smile to let him know that I’m alright.  The mirror behind the bar shows me that I’m a clown with wide rubbery lips smiling an idiot’s smile. The five-o’clock shadow on my face has turned into a two-in-the-morning carpet.\n\nI’m having trouble balancing on the wide stool that I’m on. He doesn’t even need to say it. The bartender’s right. I’m done for the night.\n\nI reach back to get my wallet. It takes five tries. He’s patient.\n\nI pull out my credit card and lay it on the bar. The bartender picks it up and carries it over the credit card machine. The last half inch of my martini is trying to keep the bottom of the olive damp.\n\nI try to fish the olive out of the glass but I fumble.  The glass skips away and falls over, spilling the last little bit of gin onto the bar.\n\n“Oh Jesus, Danny!” I hear from the end of the bar. I recognize the voice. I look up from licking the gin off of the bar to see what the problem is.\n\nIt’s the bartender again. He’s looking straight at me. I wonder why he’s doing that until I remember than my name is Danny and he’s probably found a problem with my credit card.\n\nHe comes back and puts the card down with the receipt. It’s gone through just fine. Of course it had. This is the magic card given to me by the government after the war. It never runs out. I was determined to drink the treasury dry.\n\nI bring my other arm, the heavy one, up with a clank onto the bar. Its jagged shapes are cornered with rubber to prevent it from scratching furniture or people. Its barrel has been filled and plugged, never to fire again.\n\nIt’s too wired into my head to be removed, they said, and this credit card is their apology.\n\n“You can’t lick the bar, Danny. You know that.” The bartender says and shakes his head.\n\n”But….I shpilled.” I explain, amazed at the thickness of my own tongue.\n\n“Come on, Danny. You can’t stay here. Go on. Get out. See you tomorrow morning.” Said Danny, not unkindly.\n\nI stand up, aim for the door and walk outside. It takes five tries. He’s patient.\n\nI fall over with a crunch of glass into the garbage in the alley behind the bar.  I smell limes.  I don’t get up.\n\nHome Sweet Home. I’m enjoying the freedom I fought to preserve.\n\nI’ve drunk enough that the faces of the screaming children in a country far away won’t wake me up. That’s the theory, anyway.\n\nI close my eyes.\n"
  title: Legionnaire
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Debbie Mac Rory
  date: 2008-01-04
  day: '04'
  month: '01'
  text: "Jennifer staggered and fell to the ground. Barely feeling the impact, she forced herself forward, straining her tired legs to run faster.\n\nThrowing a glance back over her shoulder, she let out a strangled cry. The strange figure was still there. She willed herself faster, straining to reach the peak of the dune ahead as her feet slipped and sank in the fine black grains.\n\n“Jenny…”\n\nJennifer’s breath caught in her throat and she stumbled to a halt. It had never called her by name before.\n\n“Jenny, do not run away from me”\n\nJennifer turned, something in the voice compelling her. A man dressed all in black stood at the bottom of the slope, extending one gloved hand towards her.\n\n“Come here”.\n\nSlowly she began to move towards him. Something in her mind screamed at her to run, to keep running, not to go near this too-solid stranger, but her legs moved with a power of their own, and within moments she stood facing him.\n\nHe smiled as he placed his hands on her shoulders, leaning forward to whisper to her. Her eyes rolled back in her head and he caught her weight easily as her body went limp. He lay her down on the ground and turned on his heel, vanished from the disintegrating dreamscape.\n\n***\n\nDerek’s hands quivered as he took a long pull from his cigarette. He started suspiciously across the table at the man seated opposite him, seemingly asleep with the points of three fingers resting gently against his temple. He drew hard on the cigarette, starting at the credit chip lying on the table in front of him. He looked up again to see the stranger’s sharp blue eyes regarding him and jumped, spilling ash across the fine linen of his trousers. Silence stretched for what seemed like long moments…\n\n“It’s done?” he demanded, impatience making his voice harsh.\n\n“It is done” the stranger said, sitting upright and stretching languorously. “She was already dreaming, so investigators will find nothing. They will probably settle on heart failure, an autopsy will show nothing”.\n\nDerek heaved a sigh of relief, stretching some of the tightness from his shoulders. He took another drag on the cigarette, before picking up the credit chip and tossing it across the table. The black clad man still smiling cocked his head to look at the chip for a moment, before reaching to pick it up.\n\n“Paying in full”, Derek said, watching his associate twirl the chip in his fingers. “And yeah the thing’s unmarked. Don’t ya think I know how easily ya could track me down if I tried cheatin’ ya?”\n\nThe stranger’s smile broadened to a wide grin. He stood and tucked the chip into his jacket pocket. “A pleasure to complete business with you” he purred, turning on his heel to stride out the door.\n"
  title: Sweet Dreams
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Kyle DeBruhl
  date: 2008-01-05
  day: '05'
  month: '01'
  text: "“That boy’s a hatchet.” She spoke with absolute resolve, setting her half finished mug on the counter as she did so. Her lips carefully sounding the words out and letting each one linger for a moment before dissipating in the air. Dennard nodded vigorously. He knew exactly which one she meant, often wondering whether or not the boy would live long enough to regret.\n\n“Can we-“ suddenly the wooden moon gate across the way shrugged open and a small frail-featured boy appeared, escorted on either side by the colossal guards of the compound.\n\nDin was small. To say small is to misjudge him, he was tiny. He stood at least a foot under the other boys his age. His thin arms hung limp at his side and his chest showed bone and the movement of the organs underneath. His matted hair belied the insight that lay beneath it. To say he was small was to misjudge him, but to say he was intelligent couldn’t do him justice. His gaunt cheeks hemmed a diminutive face; however entrenched in that face sat two focused eyes: the eyes of a owl. They glanced and rechecked everything as if always attempting. The muscles of his jaw clenched and relaxed rhythmically with the heaving of his chest. The closed mouth, always upturned in a sort of scowl-smirk, whispered at its loudest and more often then not said nothing at all.\n\nDin saw the faces of the two elders. He saw the mug and her long, unpleasant looking tendril. He saw the vast garden which had stood for centuries, a testament to the complex society from which it came. He saw everything and took in more. He saw the nervous hand of Dennard, the beady eyes of the head mistress, the cavernous stare of the behemoth at his side. He saw more than anything the feelings. They echoed out of each individual in the garden, emanating and reverberating. He saw them in words and sounds, colors and numbers, and he understood. Din knew what was coming before she ever opened her grey lips.\n\n“Dennard and I were just discussing your place in this academy.” When he was not there, she didn’t miss him. She hated him. Hate was such a strong word, but she despised his kind, they always refused to go along with anything. However when she was in his presence, she felt a sort of glow. A feeling that made her refuse to give up on this diminutive little one.\n\nDin at once saw the faces change. He knew his control. His smirked as always and began his game. He spoke without opening his mouth. He released his own colors and numbers and he saw theirs change. He bled empathy and they swallowed it up.\n\nWhen Din left the garden he knew his place was safe for a bit longer. He chuckled, not out loud of course, and smirked in his all knowing manner. Too easy.\n"
  title: Din
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Debbie Mac Rory
  date: 2008-01-06
  day: '06'
  month: '01'
  text: "Jeremiah Founders swallowed nervously and licked parched lips for the fourth time. Meeting the eyes of the enforcers standing opposite him, he gave a small nod, and they released their charges. Jeremiah winced as the woman hit the floor with a small cry. She paid no mind to her injuries though, or to him, only pulled herself across the small divide between herself and her partner lying unconscious where he had fallen. The bruise on the woman’s face did nothing to take away from her beauty; in fact, the way loose strands of hair had fallen across her face and caught on her parted lips only emphasized her delicacy…\n\nJeremiah blinked. Amazing that such a thing could distract him, he thought, staring at the ceiling as he composed himself. Obviously a sign of her superior breeding. Jerimah coughed to break the silence, and when the woman’s violet eyes moved up to watch him from a delicate heart-shaped face, they were almost enough to take his breath away again.\n\n“Ms. Azar, I am here as a legal representative of Renew, and it is my duty to inform you that following the illegal actions of both yourself and your partner, Renew as of today has repossessed its property…”\n\nThe woman continued to stare up at him, her mouth moving soundlessly as if trying to piece together words spoken in a foreign tongue. Jeremiah sighed and removed the necessary paperwork from his briefcase.\n\n“I am here to present you with a…contract,” he said, flourishing the documents, “that if yourself and your partner sign to the effect that you will make no further difficulties for Renew regarding this case, such as attempts to contact persons within the organisation, no further charges will be pressed against you”.\n\n“You’ve taken my child away”\n\nJeremiah sighed and after a moment, placed the documents on the counter top in the small kitchen. “I’ll leave the documents here for your perusal. I understand that this may be an emotional time, and you shouldn’t make a decision like this in haste”.\n\n“But you can’t just take away my child…”\n\n“Ms. Azar, I must remind you that while Renew acknowledges your payment in full and discharge from service of both you and your partner, your genome remains copyright and licensed property of Renew. Therefore, any and all products and copies thereof remain the property of Renew.”\n\n“Please!” Azar sobbed, throwing her hands out to him. Crackling filled the air as one of the enforcers shifted, small arcs of static rippling across his gloves. Jeremiah held out a hand, forestalling any further action on their part while he leaned down to take hold of the woman’s hands.\n\n“Please”, he said, “do not misunderstand the kindness of my tone. I speak softly only to make this process as pleasant as possible for myself. Any other affection I may show towards you comes only from the knowledge that I have taken pleasure in your … sisters on occasion, maybe even yourself once though that is most likely doubtful. But the fact remains, even if I was able to help, I would not. I would not willingly lower myself to aid your kind”.\n\nWith that Jeremiah pushed her back to lean against her companion as he straightened to leave.\n\n“I don’t believe your kind should ever have been given rights at all, but what’s done is done, and it’s still a healthy pay check for me at the end of the month”.\n\nTears spilled freely and silently down silken cheeks. Azar hugged herself as the guards began to move towards the door.\n\n“I just want my baby back”\n"
  title: Baby, oh baby
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Andy Bolt
  date: 2008-01-07
  day: '07'
  month: '01'
  text: "Sometimes, it’s fun to be surrounded by an army of mutant water buffalos with horrible skin conditions and bizarre, temporally unstable face tentacles.  Other times, I’ll be running through Brazil and suddenly, one of the local amphibians will hop into the air, balloon up to massive size, and snatch a helipod out of the sky with a semi-sentient, prehensile tongue that is suddenly considering a run for congress.  Plus, you haven’t lived until you’ve seen a field of precious lilies grow biomechanical arms and gang beat a man to death while shrieking Tom Jones songs at nausea inducing intrasonic levels.\n\nI still hate Earth.  I still hate humans.\n\nMy name is Ted.  Well, actually, my name is a combination of potent chemicals, genetic information, and high frequency electromagnetics.  “Hearing” it in all its glory would rewrite the DNA of the average human to the point where that individual would be totally unable to use a flush toilet, let alone understand what they were being told.  So I go by Ted.  Ted the alien.\n\nI’m extra-dimensional, I come from outside of time as humans conceptualize it, and I’m from a galaxy far, far away.  My species – let’s call them the Teds – are genetic telepaths.  We communicate by sending compressed data streams that alter each others’ codon chains.  In Tedland, it’s how we talk.  On Earth, it makes me a biogenetic magician, capable of turning this planet’s clumsy organic mass into any number of forms, including several which would pop tiny human brains if made public.  I’ve seen it happen.\n\nI’m stuck here.  You wouldn’t understand why.\n\nThe worst part is that my ability can’t be completely shut off.  When I direct it, I can make the locals into whatever I like.  When I don’t, everyone simply changes as my voice leaks out of me.  Humans become stronger, smarter, and more creative entities. Their basic genetic profile is shifting.  They are becoming little, Neanderthal Teds.  These creatures are still far superior to normal humans, and their newly found voices change others.  My best guess is that the human species will be completely gone within six months.\n\nI have conquered this planet without trying.  I don’t even want it.\n"
  title: Neanderthal Ted
  year: 2008
- 
  author: J. S. Kachelries
  date: 2008-01-08
  day: '08'
  month: '01'
  text: "It was a bright sunny morning when Angela Lansfield headed toward the Town library in Mendocino Cove.  She was researching time travel for a new mystery novel she was writing.  However, prior to diving into Hawking’s time travel theories, she decided to relax, by browsing the old newspapers in the historical files in the library’s basement.  While there, she stumbled onto an article concerning one of the town’s most prominent families.  Apparently, 40 years ago, Bill Windom had been kidnapped.  There were no ransom demands, and he was released unharmed five weeks later.  The kidnappers were never found.\n\nAngela knew the Windom family.  Bill and his wife had both died years ago, but Angela was still close friends with their only child, Mileva, who had served with Angela on the steering committee for the town’s Historical Society.  Angela decided to visit Mileva to find out what she knew about the kidnapping.\n\n“Oh, I’m sorry Angela,” Mileva explained, “I was only three years old at the time.  I don’t remember anything about it.  It must have been so horrible for mother.  Why are you interested, anyway?”\n\n“Well, Mileva, I was writing a story where my main character wanted to murder his older brother so he could inherit their parent’s entire estate.  But he knew if his brother was obviously murdered, he would be the primary suspect, if not by the police, certainly by the press.  His solution was to travel backward in time and murder his brother in the nursery.  He could never be a suspect, since he wasn’t born yet.”\n\n“That’s an interesting storyline, Angela, but what does it have to do with my father?”\n\n“Well, it dawned on me that someone could accomplish the same thing by preventing the parents from conceiving the child in the first place.  It’s much less messy too, wouldn’t you agree?  That’s when I thought about your family.  Your mother was already forty when you were born.  If your parents were going to have a second child, they needed to do it soon.  And then your father was kidnapped.  Why?  What was the motive?  It certainly wasn’t ransom money.  Then I put two and two together.  You occasionally mention having a younger brother, although there is no record of his birth.  Perhaps you have retained memories from that timeline.  To be perfectly frank, Mileva, I think you traveled back into time and kidnapped your father to prevent him from conceiving your younger brother.  Was it for the money, Mileva, or was it because your parents loved your brother more than you?  I’m sorry, Mileva, but I have to ask the sheriff to reopen the case.”\n\n“My goodness Angela, what an unbelievable hypothesis.  You writers do have such active imaginations.  Yes, by all means, feel free to talk to the sheriff.  I don’t mind.”\n\nA few minutes after Angela left, Mileva made a phone call.  “Tom, I have a problem…”\n\n…It was a bright sunny morning when Angela Lansfield headed toward the Town library in Mendocino Cove.  She was researching time travel for a new mystery novel she was writing.  When she turned the corner, she saw the town’s fire department in front of the library.  She walked up to the fire chief.  “My heavens, Chief, what happened?  Nobody was hurt, I hope?”\n\n“No one hurt, Mrs. L.  The fire was confined to the basement.  It completely destroyed the historic reference section.  The rest of the library is okay though.  If you want to wait in the Coffee Shop, we’ll open the library to the public in about an hour.”\n\n“Thanks, Chief, that’ll be fine.  Although I will miss reading those old newspaper articles.”\n"
  title: Chronolicide, She Wrote
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2008-01-09
  day: '09'
  month: '01'
  text: "“You haven’t changed a bit,” Aja said, though her eyes avoided her sister’s face.  Saj noticed the hesitation, noticed the way Aja’s bangs (gray and black, like soot-streaks on the walls of a bombed-out Akari factory) hung thin, revealing a forehead creased only with the lines of age.  Saj’s hair was short and black, the standard military cut, and the slashed-circle brand of the soldier caste was glossy and pink above her eyebrow.\n\n“How would you know?”\n\n“You still look like you’re sixteen.”\n\n“I’m nineteen.  And I’ve changed a hell of a lot.”\n\nSaj’s voice was tight, somewhere between the tone of a defensive child and a fierce adult, but there was no conflict in the duality.  Saj kept her head high, her expression arrogant and indifferent to the curious stares of the few other teenagers in the café.  None of them were branded.  The caste system had been eliminated twenty years ago, when Saj was seventeen and light years away in the dying months of the war.\n\n“You’re a doctor now,” Saj’s eyes remained hard on Aja’s face.  “A plastic surgeon.  Is that what happened to your mark?”\n\n“Don’t do this, Saj.”  When she frowned, her face looked like the wrinkled crust of the ice moon of Omnaki.  Aja would never see that moon.  No Salal would ever see it again.   “The war is over, now.”\n\n“Your war.”\n\n“Our war.”\n\n“The only people who shared that war with me died in the massacre on Soulon 5.”  Saj’s expression was stony, and her dark eyes had narrowed into slits.  “This isn’t my home.  This is some world that you made, you and the rest of them, after I went away.”\n\nSaj stared at her sister’s hands, which seemed even more alien than the leathery flesh of the Akari.  Liver spots, wrinkled skin, fingernails painted mauve.  It was hard to believe that they’d shared a womb, nineteen or sixty years ago.\n\n“There’s a place for you here,” Aja whispered.  “I’ve been saving.  You can live with James and I, and go to University.  We can get rid of your brand.”\n\n“This isn’t my world,” Saj repeated.  “And no one’s touching my brand.”\n\nA cold silence fell over the café, and Saj realized she’d spoken too loudly for the enclosed space.  She pushed herself up from the table and it creaked at the force of her muscular arms.\n\n“Remember the river, out behind the house?” Aja said.  “Where we used to swim in the summer?”\n\n“You’re older than Grandma was.”\n\n“We built a raft once, to see if we could float away from the colony.”\n\n“If I’d drowned, you would have been firstborn,” Saj snapped.\n\n“And I would have gone instead of you.”\n\nAja’s voice was calm, but Saj pushed away from the table and whirled, her boots squeaking against the floor as she stormed towards the glass door.\n\n“I’ll wait for you.”\n\n“You’ll be waiting for a damn long time.”\n\n“I’ve been waiting for sixty years.”\n\nThis time, Saj hesitated, her hand on the doorknob.  She stared back at her sister, something indefinable flickering behind her dark eyes.\n\n“Come home,” Aja said.\n\nSaj gritted her teeth and turned away.  “I don’t have a home.”\n\nShe slammed the door before shoving her hands into the pockets of her jacket and tightening her fingers around her cellphone.  Its directory was empty, aside from Aja’s number and the Social Service Center.  She wanted to break it, to watch it explode like a photon grenade, but she didn’t move.  Saj was cold and tired, and she didn’t know what to do next.\n"
  title: Long Division
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2008-01-10
  day: 10
  month: '01'
  text: "Eerin wasn’t sure exactly how she came to be in the pawn shop, and yet here she was. When she’d left her apartment in the Brodsky building, she’d been intent on going for coffee, but rather than the chrome and glass and fragrant aroma of a café she found herself surrounded instead by the detritus of generations of the desperate and financially needy. She had no recollection of having walked here, and she had puzzled on that realization as she made her way past the two cast iron bicycles at the door, around the jolly jumper and the stuffed bear that occupied it, and down the length of a case filled with khaki and metal bayonets and seemingly authentic World War II gas masks. Eerin had stopped finally at the back of the store, confronted by glass display cases littered with dusty lighters, jewelry and numerous other odds and ends. It was one such oddity that had begged her attention, though holding the rock encrusted and rusting metal stick as she now was, she couldn’t fathom what interest she should possibly have in it.\n\n“You’ve got a keen eye, Miss, that’s a very valuable piece.” She braced herself for the sales pitch. “A gentleman left that in my father’s care in exchange for a crib and a baby carriage once, and some pocket change too mind, but I’m sure you and I can come to a fair price.” The shop keeper grinned, exposing widely spaced and badly nicotine-stained teeth. She’d begun to hate him the moment she’d stepped through the door.\n\n“I’m not interested,” she lied, only barely aware that she’d done so, “I’m really just looking.”\n\nThe object began to feel warm, and she shifted it from one hand to the other, unsure if it was actually getting hot or not. As she did, large pieces of the rusted surface metal began to detach themselves, disintegrating to fall like dirty snowflakes onto the counter top.\n\n“Oh dear, you’ve broken it, you’re going to have to buy it now,” he placed both hands palms down on the counter, leaning forward and frowning, “very expensive that is, very expensive.”\n\n“I’ve done no such thing,” Eerin defended herself, straightening “and I told you I’m not interested. Besides, I’ve only got enough money for coffee; I didn’t come here to shop.”\n\nThe store owner narrowed his eyes. “If you’ve got no money, I hope you’ve got some other way to compensate me for my loss.”\n\nEerin’s first thought was of how quickly could she get to the door, but as she raised her hands and began to step backwards, she found herself staring at her reflection in the mirror behind him, her startled face framed neatly by the perfectly cauterized hole burned through his head.\n\nHe dropped behind the counter out of sight, and her mind raced with panicked thoughts: Should she run? Should she call the police? And say what? could she hide the body? Leaning on the counter and frowning down on the repugnant corpse as she worried, she absently began erasing him, neatly vaporizing his remains with back and forth sweeping motions of the now gleaming and gently purring device.\n\nStepping back onto the sidewalk of 8th Avenue, she paused a moment to bask in the warmth of the afternoon sunlight. For just a moment, she wondered how it was that all of that had come so naturally to her, but that thought was soon replaced with the question of how long it would take to walk to the Starbucks at 8th and West 43rd.\n"
  title: Pawned
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Jennifer C. Brown  aka  Laieanna
  date: 2008-01-11
  day: 11
  month: '01'
  text: "Getting off the shuttle, Teddy shoved his way through the crowded corridor, eyes focused on the nearest destination locator.  When he was in range of the sensors, the map of Los Angeles lit up in various colors.  The locator welcomed him and started to rattle off hotels and restaurants including their average prices and ratings.\n\n“Bar,” Teddy barked.\n\nAll lights on the map dimmed down save for six green ones scattered across the surface.  The machine began describing the destinations, each light flashing in synch. The first two were sky bars high in the clouds.  Next was a club-bar in the city center.  Teddy chose a blinking green on the opposite side of the station and left the locator, missing out on the details.\n\nThe carrier ride to the bar was a quiet and soothing one, which Teddy hated.  He watched the city go by with it’s empty streets and glistening buildings.  A speck of dirt would probably set off the alarms, and a seedy person would put the whole place in a panic.  It was no surprise he avoided Earth.  Once other planets were colonized, Earth was turned in to a paradise.  They slowly shot the scum into space and left the beautiful people on their home planet.  If it weren’t necessary, Teddy would have never left his side of the universe.\n\nIn twenty minutes, he was standing outside the Haze Bar which sounded like an alright place to smoke, drink, and fight.  Three things Teddy was dying to do.  Inside, the air was hazy, but with no smoky smell.  The place was half full with people chatting at tables and around the bar.  Everything was automated.\n\nTeddy sat at a corner booth that instantly asked what to serve him.  “A camel pack and bourbon,” he ordered.  A wall panel opened and out slid a tray with a caramel colored drink and a pack of cigarettes.  He laid eighteen credits down on the tray and it retracted when the merchandise was taken away.\n\nTaking a sip, Teddy nearly gagged at the flavor.  It wasn’t bourbon.  He wasn’t even sure it was liquor.  He inspected the cigarettes, afraid to slip one into his mouth and get the taste of disappointment.  There was a camel, but a disclosure underneath stated they had clean lung filters.  He put the pack back down.\n\nWith no smokes, no liquor, he had only one pleasure left.  It was time to make trouble.  He walked over to a center table and tapped on the empty chair next to a gorgeous blonde who was deep in conversation with her big boyfriend.  “I’ve got fifty credits to spend and no hotel.  What will you give me if we just take it outside?”\n\nThe woman couldn’t even respond, but her boyfriend stood up.  “What,” he asked, more shocked than angry.\n\n“Your woman looks like a Reenar stuffing machine, but not as durable.  Promise I’ll be gentle.”\n\n“Please leave, sir,” the man growled, but took no swing.\n\nTeddy was tired of waiting.  “Screw it,” he said under his breath and went for a punch in the other man’s gut.  His hand slipped right through and he stumbled from the unexpected inertia.  Another man was standing near where Teddy fell.  Teddy got up and tried a jab at that man’s jaw.  Again, he only hit air.  Five more tries at anyone in the bar, including a dumpy, old lady, and he gave up.  “Goddamn holograms!  You’re all hiding in your houses, but pretending to be with a crowd.  Stupid planet.  I’m going back to where people actually know how to live.”\n"
  title: Bar Room Brawl
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Roi R. Czechvala
  date: 2008-01-12
  day: 12
  month: '01'
  text: "The young couple slept peacefully in their bed while powerful, dark forces worked against them, against mankind. Two malevolent figures watched them from the darkness, their eyes aglow.\n\nThese two creatures descended from races older than man himself, had bided their time, waiting for the opportunity to strike. They were patient, lurking in the shadows. Soon the moment would be theirs; they would emerge from the darkness and take their rightful place in the light.\n\n“Well Commander Xerc…”\n\n“Not yet Rufus. We shall use our Terran names until victory is in our grasp.”\n\n“Yes Mrs. Pewtersmythe, we have waited this long, patience is something we can afford.”\n\n“Yes Rufus, the ability to calmly wait, to endure hardships and subjugation has helped our two peoples in the past. Now that diligence will pay off, the spoils of this victory shall be ours for the taking. Nothing will be withheld from us.”\n\nMrs. Pewtersmyth’s voice took on a high keening edge. Not for the first time did Rufus think there was something of the maniacal in it, though he wisely kept his council. She had led them well thus far.\n\nThough there was not a small bit of enmity between their two species, they had been able to work together to achieve their mutual goals. Mrs. Pewtersmyth’s people, the Leonaise, were renowned for their guile and cunning. Using craft and skill to achieve their ends, resorting to treachery when diplomacy failed.\n\nThe Siriuans, though no less intelligent than their gracile allies relied more on their massive size, and strength. They were warriors, devourers, conquerors. Over many a domain did they hold sway.\n\nThe truce between their two people was not easy. For centuries these two great races had fought an endless war, neither gaining the upper hand. A tenuous armistice had been established, leading to a semblance of peace, though neither side fully trusted the other.\n\nOver time an affinity had developed between Rufus and Mrs. Pewtersmythe, and there existed between the two, if not a liking, then to be sure a genuine mutual admiration for the other. “Do you think there can ever be a true peace between our people? Will we ever leave the eons of bloodshed and war forgotten in our past to allow us to march ahead in unity and prosperity.”\n\n“You are like all of your kind Rufus,” she said quietly, casting an indulgent glance in his direction as a parent might to its offspring. “Beneath that wild and ferocious exterior, you are all, at heart gentle and philosophic souls.”\n\nRufus bristled slightly at these remarks. “That may be true Commander,” he said stiffly, “as the old soldiers saying goes ‘prepare for peace, but plan for war’. No one dislikes combat more than the combatant. Your people, while seeming to engender trust are always plotting… scheming… hatching nefarious plots… ” his deep voice trailed off into a low growl.\n\n“Now, Rufus, I meant no offense,” she purred soothingly, “let there be no ill will. I merely meant to suggest that beneath the surface bravado, you Siriuans are a deep and contemplative people.”\n\n“Thank you Mrs. Pewtersmythe.” The man moved on the bed, “I think it is time.”\n\n“Yes, I believe your right.”\n\nThe man stirred and sat up.\n\n“Rowrf,” said Rufus.\n\n“Mrower,” chimed in Mrs. Pewtersmythe.\n\nThe man looked at the clock, scratched his head, stood and said;\n\n“Okay, okay. I know. It’s time for breakfast,” he said and left the bedroom.\n\nCommander Xercian, and Leftenant Klatu followed along behind.__\n"
  title: Night Shades
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Dee Harding
  date: 2008-01-13
  day: 13
  month: '01'
  text: "I have it in my hands, but I don’t understand it. Mirah peers over my shoulder, grins in my periphery, and pokes at it. The amber clouds react to the gravity of her digit instantly, particles drifting into a new configuration of spin. As she removes the finger, it spirals back into something like its original shape, spitting out loops of fire and tiny shrapnel as it goes.\n\n“Where did you find it?”\n\nI’m motionless with awe, listening to its low rumbling growl and very much aware of the plume that keeps it afloat. I’m afraid that I’ll drop it. I’m afraid that it will burn through my hands.\n\n“The Monks. The Physic Monks.”\n\nShe says this carelessly, idly, as if the fact is not important, staring at the thing in front of me all the while.\n\n“The Monks? The Physic Monks? The same Monks who split atoms for ritual? The same Monks who keep a pet black-hole on the Mountain? The same Monks who will murder us if they know we have…whatever… it is?”\n\n“In the Mountain, and they call it a tamed Singularity.”\n\nMirah is suddenly an expert on these things, on the monks who worship Shiva and live on the Mountain. All the rest of us know is that they idolise creation and destruction, that they make bombs too small to see, and then wipe them away. Somewhere in their temple is a wheel, a torus, which pulls strange matter into the world. Suddenly the thing in my hands is sinister. Suddenly it has the capacity to not just burn me, but unmake me, as if I never was. Fear and wonder orbit its shrouded centre amid a multitude of glowing embers.\n\n“Think of it as a glorified lock-pick.” She says, “Think of it as a key. That’s what it’s for.”\n\nI’ve never been able to leave well enough alone. I always ask the inevitable question.\n\n“But, what is it?”\n\nMirah smiles the widest smile I’ve seen on anyone, ever, and points upward. She points at nothing. There is no moon tonight, there are no clouds, no aircraft since the coming of the Second Dark. There is nothing in the clear night sky but the distant light of a thousand galaxies, each drifting slowly in its own mystical configuration.\n"
  title: Amnesty
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2008-01-14
  day: 14
  month: '01'
  text: "I am miles underwater. I’m the only human competing.\n\nI’m riding a ten-foot cretaceous seahorse named Cheval. I pronounce it ‘shovel’ as a private joke. No one here would understand the mispronunciation.\n\nThere are representatives here from sixteen planets. Mostly aquatics but there are two air breathers like me. A hindbrain Mohr-nex with 288 as an identification marker. It’s riding a bio-rocket jellyfish ringpulser. The other one’s a silicate rocksliver named CPR. We talked a little before the race. It’s riding a ramjet mollusk with cold, blue eyes.\n\nThere’s even an avian from a gaseous tiny-giant. It has beefed up muscles to ‘fly’ in the cold, pressure-rich water. It doesn’t have a mount. It’s going it alone. In the absence of a mount, it’ll end up a slave if it loses. We’re all racing for mount ownership here. I admire its courage but it doesn’t have a chance. There’s an insane glint to its one red eye that makes me doubt my assumption for a second.\n\nMy articulated pressurized scuba suit is working fine. The stats are all lit up like Christmas lights on the inside of my faceplate, showing blues and greens. An overlay of the caverns is pulsing stationary with topographical lines. I’m hoping that my human tech will be more accurate that the other racer’s means of navigation; the sonar from whale-face, for instance. I have no idea if it’s more precise than my radar.\n\nI lean forward and with my black servoglove, I pat Cheval just above the ear-hole. He flexes his massive tail and swishes his equine head. He’s eager to get on with it.\n\nThe huge transporter building behind us lights up the dark water around us. The beings laying wagers are little figures in the windows. They’re the super-rich that can afford ringside. There are millions of others watching on the telly and d-sense around the system.\n\nThe aquatics are all more suited to this environment but no one racer present has raced this course before. This equalizes the playing field. The rules are simple and brutal. No weapons are allowed but your mount is allowed to employ whatever naturally occurring offensive or defensive capabilities that it possesses.\n\nThe electrified hallowfish that last year’s winner is riding gives us all a chill. We remember the stats of that race. Last year’s winner sits proud and straight in his saddle above the hallowfish. He’s striped like a zebra and glows with bioluminescence. His eyes are huge and glowing. His mouth is a shattered nail bucket of teeth. There’s an anticipatory cloud of fang-poison floating in a halo around his mount’s head\n\nI’m hoping speed and maneuverability will win the race.\n\nThe glowing balls of angler fish in front of us change colour.\n\nOn your marks.\n"
  title: Race
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2008-01-15
  day: 15
  month: '01'
  text: "Circa 2086, the war with the Epsilon Eridani System was currently on hold, as leaders from both worlds were attempting to negotiate a truce.  However, most of Earth’s military advisors were against a truce, because the Earth Alliance was clearly winning the war.  Our technology was far superior to theirs.  It was best, they said, to destroy the Eridani’s ability to wage war while we had the advantage, rather than give them the opportunity to regroup and strengthen.  What the Eridani lacked in technology, they made up for in aggressiveness.  They would be back if they were not destroyed.  But soldiers only fight the wars; politicians start and end them.\n\nWhile the negotiations ebbed on, the Earth Alliance continued to patrol the solar system.  The stealth scout ship Casper was assigned the volume of space between Earth and Venus from zero degrees to minus thirty degrees.  Normally, a pretty quiet sector.  The Eridani almost always attacked Earth from above the ecliptic, most likely because their star was located in the northern hemisphere.  They were considered aggressive, but not very imaginative.  While the two-man crew of the Casper patrolled their sector, their proximity alarm sounded.  “Hey, Commander, look.  It’s an Eridani ship.  What’s it doing in here?”\n\n“Good question Lieutenant.  Let’s follow it and find out.  Keep the cloak engaged.”  They tailed the Eridani ship to a small asteroid.  The Eridani had constructed several large ion drive impulse engines in one quadrant of the asteroid.  “What data do we have on this rock, Lieutenant?”\n\nAfter consulting the ship’s computer, “It’s called 2340 Hathor.  It’s an Aten Type asteroid.  It’s approximately 5.3 kilometers in diameters, a mass of 200 trillion kilograms, and average orbital velocity of 30.7 kilometers per second.  Oh, damn.  It’s scheduled to make a close approach to Earth on October 21, 2086.  That’s in two months.  Do you think those bastards are going to attempt to change its orbit so that it hits Earth, even while they negotiate a peace treaty?”\n\n“Apparently, Lieutenant.  Notify Earth and request instructions.”\n\nTwo hours later, Earth responded.  The celestial mechanics concluded that based to the photographs of the ion engines, a burn of 18 hours was required to produce an intersect orbit.  If the full burn was completed, Earth would not have time to alter the new orbit before impact.  A battlecruiser was being dispatched, but wouldn’t reach their coordinates for three days.  Their orders were to continue monitoring the asteroid, but if the Eridani ignited the engines before the battlecruiser arrived, they were to attempt sabotage, at whatever cost.\n\nThe engines ignited the following day.  “Well, lieutenant, our moment of truth has arrived.  I’ve been thinking of options.  Unfortunately, the only sure fire way to stop them is to park next to their fuel tanks and overload our reactor.  What do you say?”\n\n“Well, sir, I have three kids on Earth.  I’d prefer to have them die of old age, rather than by a comet impact.  I say, let’s do it.”\n\nOn Earth, Steven Patterson was walking his dog just before sunrise.  As he looked into the western sky, he saw a bright star appear near the horizon.  It was nearly ten times brighter than Venus, but faded quickly.  “What the hell was that?” he wondered aloud.\n"
  title: Heroes
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Andy Bolt
  date: 2008-01-16
  day: 16
  month: '01'
  text: "It started when a song got stuck in Jola Ndenga’s head.  She had just gotten the new aMix mp12 player, the one that could store a theoretically infinite number of sub-quantum sound files and injected just under your cochlea.  They had just become available at Charon Station, and she had been amped to get her hands on one.  Even though C1 was supposed to be the blistering edge in scientific research, the United Inner Rim’s top priority, she had spent most of her time out here watching space-faring rocks and trying to resist the urge to stick her head in the neutron remuter.  Truth was, there was not much use for a xenobiologist on Charon.  Someone from the initial survey team had reported a possible site for microbial bacteria, but that had amounted to nothing.  At least now, she had maniacally decided, her suicide-inducing levels of boredom could be set to a pleasing soundtrack.\n\nShe had been aural-loading the new Virulent Photons album – thirty-four tracks of twelve second bursts of intergalactic noise mixed over a calypso backbeat – when her transmitter began playing the song.  She had never heard it before.  Indeed, she had never heard anything quite like it before.  When the newsites would come asking later, she would describe it as a combination of meringue, plasmatronica, and a third type of music that she was unable to fully identify.\n\nAt the time, however, she simply became very nervous.  The aMix was still a relatively new technology, and there was a post-urban legend flying around about a beta tester for the Grape corporation.  Supposedly, she was still in cryogenic suspension after an early model had become inextricably integrated with her central nervous system and driven her psychotic with round the clock renditions of Tom Jones’ “Sex Bomb.”\n\nSo Jola greeted her own malfunction with some alarm, half-prepared to gouge out her own eardrum with a pinpoint cooking laser.  She approached Ryx Marcomb, the station’s biotech engineer, and Willix Frog, the knowledge-specific medical clone, with great haste.\n\n“Alien music is burrowing through my skull,” she told them.  “Help.”\n\nWillix offered to operate instantly and found that the magnetic scalpel did its job cleanly.  Within twenty minutes of the problem’s first discovery, Willix, Ryx, and Jola were staring at a slightly bloody, centimeter square aMix chip under a broad-beam microlight.  Ryx had jury-rigged a nanophone and a bag of Willix’s emergency transplant tissue to play back the still repeating song at an audible level.\n\n“You know this song?” Ryx asked, flipping his gaze between the chip and Jola.\n\n“No one knows this song,” Willix answered, offering his colleagues a look at his handheld sonic spectrometer.  “˜It doesn’t conform to any extant musical style.  Half of these lower tones are infrasonic and wouldn’t even be audible to the human ear.  And this,” he continued, gesturing at a garbled looking wavelength, “isn’t even a sound in the conventional sense of the word.  It’s a permutation of a sound wave that the computer can’t even begin to analyze.”\n\nRyx raised an eyebrow.  “New life communication signal?”\n\nJola glanced at the pad.  “Don’t think so.”  She took it from an obliging Willix.  Within a moment, she had overlayed the spectranalysis and one of Willix’s medical files.\n\nShe displayed it to her colleagues.  Onscreen was a translation of the sound waves into a rough approximation of a DNA sequence, and the helix seemed to hum.\n\n“The song IS the life.”\n\nAnd inside the aMix, the alien song breathed its musical breath.\n"
  title: Off Key
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Sam Clough
  date: 2008-01-17
  day: 17
  month: '01'
  text: "I work on Opingtu. Two-and-a-bit AUs from civilisation, on a good day.\n\nLee thrust the crowbar into my hands, and set off down the corridor at a run. I swore, and ran after him. Me and Lee were as thick as thieves — always had been. Started when we were twelve, I think. Talking of thieves — that’s what Lee did with his spare time. Stole stuff. How he found merchandise to  steal inside this godforsaken hollow rock and how he got it out are mysteries I never had the urge to plumb. I supposed he had a day job, too, and that’s how come he’d managed to follow me out here. It just never seemed to come up in conversation.\n\nI was in slightly better shape than him, so caught up with him before he got too far from where I had been sitting. He had a second crowbar in a thin bag strapped across his back.\n\n“What the hell?” I demanded, glaring at him. He just glanced back, and put on a new burst of speed. We raced by surprised faces and angry officers. Lee ignored them, and thus, so did I.\n\nHe led me into the prisoners sector.\n\nWe stopped by a door marked ‘512’. Lee punched a long sequence into the pad by the doorframe. The door itself didn’t have a handle — for security reasons, apparently — but after Lee had entered the code, it obligingly slid into the wall. He pushed me inside. Faintly, in the distance, I could hear running feet.\n\nOnce inside, the door slid shut, and the lights came on. The room held six stasis caskets. The ambient temperature had to be about ten degrees higher than the corridor — stasis support gear isn’t exactly environmentally friendly.\n\nBehind me, Lee slapped the red panel next to the door. The steel-on-steel sound of the bolts grinding into position was perceptible. Once the door had stopped vibrating, he smashed the control panel with the end of his crowbar, gave it a twist, then jerked a tangle of wires out of the wall.\n\nSuch an action caused the door’s emergency subsystem to cut in. Which was designed to engage an additional lock, then shut down. Security reasons. It was a prison door, after all.\n\nHe pointed to the casket labelled with a roughly painted ‘Three’.\n\n“Break it open.”\n\nI stared at him. He stared back.\n\n“In for a penny.” He shrugged.\n\n“Remind me to kill you later.”\n\nOur crowbars punctured the cheap aluminium of the outer casing, and we hauled it apart. It split open like an oversized drinks can. The coolant sheath beneath it was tough plastic, but we made short work of it.\n\nSoon, me and Lee were standing in a rapidly-expanding puddle of light blue liquid, staring down at one of the prisoners.\n\nThe guy in the canister was just coming around, the effect of the stasis field interrupted. His face contorted as the pains hit: only then did I recognise him.\n\n“Everyone said he was dead…”\n\nJohnny Rukopashka got slowly his feet, and took the crowbar from Lee. It looked like a toy in his hands. He bared his metal teeth, and clapped Lee on the back. His claws left a tear in Lee’s shirt.\n\nJohnny was a pirate. A gangster. Or more precisely, Johnny was eight feet of graft muscle and metal. Johnny had been declared dead, but his very — vibrant — presence convinced me that he certainly wasn’t amongst the deceased.\n\n“This a rock, boys?\n\n“Yeah. Opingtu.”\n\n“No dreck. Now boys, you’re going to help me take over.”\n"
  title: Crowbar Subtlety
  year: 2008
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2008-01-18
  day: 18
  month: '01'
  text: "The witch is bony, skeletal, his spine in a permanent curve. His liver spotted hands tap on his rubber console, fast like shuffling cards. He cackles with glee, casting his code-spells. The only light in his little cave under the mountain is the luminescent blue screen that glows on his wrinkled face.\n\nHe dives through the world that exists in tanks above his mountain, looking in though his screen, like a peeping tom with a tiny window. In the clean, silver facility at the top of the mountain bodies hang motionless in giant tanks filled with a gel that applies gentle pressure from all sides.\n\nHis daughter tried to get him to join her in the dream world. She called it a more perfect alternative. He knew what it really was: a prison. He pokes at his handheld device and initiates a program that gives everyone with red hair lice. Cackling, the witch puts down his handheld and toddles over to his larder. He will have to go out soon, set some traps or try to scavenge canned food.\n\nOutside his cave, there is a moan. The witch walks outside, leaning on his stick. Naked, sprawled among the rocks is a young man. He is covered with a thin layer of grit stuck to goo that is stuck to flesh. His fingers are bloody and his long stringy hair is matted to his face. The young man looks up at the witch.\n\n“Please,” he says, squinting at the sun.\n\n“Fish plopped out of the tank?” The witch cackles.\n\nThe young man’s face falls on the ground. “I . . . came to study with you.”\n\n“Script kitty.” He cackles at his own joke but stops as he realizes he is the only one laughing. Laughing on his own never felt lonely, but with someone else, his jokes are flat. He looks at the blood under the nails of the young man. “How did you get down the mountain?”\n\n“I crawled. I’m, I can’t . . . “ The young man faints.\n\nThe witch drags the naked, gooey man inside and pours water on his face. The young man wakes up sputtering.\n\n“I’m calling your factory bots,” says the witch, his fingers flicking over the handheld.\n\n“No! Please,” the young man begs. “I know that you can hack into the world. I want to learn from you, here, in the real world. I want to understand the magic of code.” The young man shivers. “I crawled here. I want to make code dance.”\n\nThe witch sat in front of the young man. “You are too weak.”\n\n“I know,” said the young man.\n\n“You could never survive on your own out here,” muttered the witch.\n\n“I’m willing to learn,” said the young man. “Teach me.”\n\nThe witch raised a bushy eyebrow. “You are also very naked.”\n\n“No one knows the code anymore. Someone has to learn, for the good of our community. If something should truly break, someone needs to know how to fix it. Help me.”\n\nThe witch crossed his arms and looked at his console. One button, and the bots would come to collect the lost naked man and dump him right back into his virtual world. The witch put down the console and spread a blanket over the young man.\n\n“What’s you’re name, boy?”\n\n“Jeff.”\n\n“Jeff, tomorrow we start by finding food. Also, never say you will make code “dance” again, or I will bash your toes with a heavy rock.”\n\n“Yes Master,” said Jeff, smiling as he fell into a heavy sleep.\n"
  title: The Cave Witch
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Jennifer C. Brown  aka  Laieanna
  date: 2008-01-19
  day: 19
  month: '01'
  text: "Mary passed the town’s graveyard, her eye on the mobile facility parked in an empty lot.  The line trailing out from the small trailer door was already thirty deep, but a rush of people was only a few steps behind her.\n\nLinda turned to give Mary a big smile after Aaron had nodded to her approaching.  “Mary, you came early!”\n\n“Yeah, I figured I’d get a jump on the line this year.”\n\n“Understandable.  I think the older we get the less this holds our interest.  Can’t stand on these feeble legs as long as the young ones.” She laughed at her own apparent joke that Mary didn’t get.\n\nAaron leaned forward and gave Mary a wave, “Hey Mary.  Did you decide on something this year or are you going with of the usuals?”\n\n“The usual, I guess.  Maybe a vampire or witch.”\n\nAaron nodded again. “Don and I have a bet going. He’s going to be a werewolf, and I’ll be a hunter.  The money is all ready to be wired to the winner in two days.  I can’t wait till I take him down and his hard earned cash will be paying for my spot,” he jabbed a thumb towards the graveyard, “which I hope not to use for years to come.”\n\n“You should already have one prepaid,” Linda huffed.  “You guys are boring.  I’m going for something different, like…”\n\n“You won’t believe what Johnny said to me,” Stacy interrupted, panting as she jogged up to her friends, cutting the line. “Says he read in a book that Halloween used to be for kids.” The group stared incredulously.  “Seriously!  Said kids would dress up and go from house to house asking for candy.  He wanted to go out tonight.”\n\nLinda crossed her arms.  “I would never let my child out on Halloween.  With all the freaks running around, the last thing you want is a child outside a safe zone.”\n\nConfused, Mary shook her head slightly.  “Why would they need to ask strangers for candy?  We give them tons of candy on Halloween.  It’s traditional.”\n\n“Besides, no one is at home on Halloween.  And there’s no way the guards will open a safe zone during the holiday,” said Aaron.\n\n“I know,” Stacy sighed.  “I tried to make him understand that Halloween was for adults, that he had to wait till he was eighteen.  He cried, saying we were doing it all wrong.  I can’t get him to understand that it’s not safe.”\n\nThree kids, just barely legal for the holiday, walked passed the group, chatting about the demons and psycho killers they were going to be that year while rubbing the spot a needle had penetrated in their arm.  The change was already showing on their bare skin and one girl squealed in excitement when she looked at it.\n\n“First timers,” Linda snorted.\n\n“They’ll be dead before midnight,” Aaron said.\n\n“So what are you turning in to this year, Linda?” Mary asked, remembering she had been cut off earlier.\n\n“A princess.”\n\nStacy laughed, “Oh geez, you’ll be mauled by any number of people in town if you’re turning in to that.”\n\n“Not really keeping to tradition,” Mary said.\n\n“That’s where you guys are wrong.” Linda had a sly grin on her face. “I’ll be a crazed princess, having been locked in a tower for years with no real contact.  I even have an axe and knife at home, all sharpened and ready to take someone down.  I won’t be right in the head tonight.  You guys will be safer if you stay away.”\n"
  title: Caution, Adults at Play
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Andy Bolt
  date: 2008-01-20
  day: 20
  month: '01'
  text: "Senator Bigfoot sat at the top of the Eiffel Tower daintily sipping espresso from one of Café au Francais’ literally bottomless vortex glasses.  His massive, gorilla-derived nostrils inhaled the artificially addictive coffee smell, and he smiled to himself as Jenny stepped out of the spacebender and glided toward his table.  He liked Jenny.  The multicolored nanolights in her flowing blond hair sparkled with hypnotic blinkery.  She hummed low and smooth, her pitch-perfect artificial larynx set to a calypso love song.  The lowjack pheromones pumping out of Jenny’s pores didn’t affect bigfeet, but Senator Bigfoot thought Jenny was pretty anyway.  Not just because she had been engineered to be pretty either, but because she really was.  (Although Senator Bigfoot had an I.Q. of 220, his silverback genes granted him a simplicity of thought that made him more contented than most.)\n\n“Hello, Jenny!” he called to her.\n\nHe caught her eye, and a wild swirl of rainbow pigments cascaded through her irises.\n\n“Big!”  Jenny’s mech-wings fluttered with delight, and she half-flew the remaining twenty meters to the table.  “I’ve missed you!” she sang, kissing his leathered cheek.  “Congratulations, Mr. Senator!”\n\n“I’ve missed you, too.  Sit, sit.”\n\nJenny smiled and swished and sat, still humming.  “Green tea,” she trilled to the overexcited waiter.  “So does this make you the first senator from Mythlabs?”  Senator Bigfoot smiled as her loose silky coat almost swallowed her up.\n\n“No,” he responded.  “You’re forgetting Senator Gremlin.”\n\n“Oh!  Yeah, yeah.  He got asked to leave, though, right?”\n\n“Sort of.  He was asked to holocommute.  He kept making everything malfunction.  But how have you been?”\n\n“Alright.  Being a siren is fun, most of the time.  I get to sing a lot.  That part’s nice.  But all the boys try to sleep with you, and women hate you.  It seems a bit artificial because of all that.  Everything happens without me really doing anything.”\n\nThe waiter, a jumpy young man in a jumpy smart suit, whizzed up to Jenny with a glass of green tea and a walnut sized diamond.\n\n“Here’s your tea,” he said.  “May I have the honor of being your eternal love slave?”\n\n“Not right now,” Jenny laughed, patting his shoulder.  “But thank you for the tea.”\n\nSenator Bigfoot shifted uncomfortably.  He glanced out the longview window at a flock of three-legged Samjoko swooping and diving over Ulsan.  Their bioluminescent flesh-mesh made them glow like bright little suns.\n\n“Jenny-“ he started.\n\n“Yes, Big?”\n\n“Will you marry me?”\n\nJenny stared at him for a long minute, steam drifting around her cheeks and turning them pink.\n\n“Yes,” she said. “I think I will.”\n\nSenator Bigfoot smiled.  In the longview, a Cherokee rain dancer shimmied, the kinetically fueled barometric sliders in his hands and feet producing a light summer mist in southern Oklahoma.  Jenny giggled.\n\n“It’s a silly world, Senator Bigfoot.”\n\n“Yeah,” he replied.\n"
  title: Mythlabs
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2008-01-21
  day: 21
  month: '01'
  text: "I looked at the dashboard with a mounting fear.\n\nThe mutiny had gone off and turned messy. The company pilots had been killed when we blew the cockpit door. We’d had to execute our hostages. The airlock was empty now and their inside-out, frozen corpses goggled wide-eyed thirty AUs behind us.\n\nIn the not-here of throughspace, I could imagine the feel of passing wind rattling the portholes. I could almost feel the gentle slap of the ocean against the hull even though we were galaxies away from any planet with an ocean. There was nothing, of course, but the silent dimensionless void outside of the windows.\n\nThe temperature gauges said that it was both way above and way below tolerable in the vacuum outside. There were other contradictory readings. It was all that I could read.\n\nNo one had really mapped throughspace. It got us from place to place but ships that had applied the brakes had either exploded or disappeared entirely. We had to settle for what our instruments told us as we rocketed through.\n\nWe knew how to manipulate doors in and out of it but the real essence of what we were traveling through in throughspace was a mystery. Much like gravity in the old days. It could be measured and predicted but the ‘why’ of it was always elusive.\n\nWe were halfway through the trip and we had another sixteen hours to go before arrival in hostile territory. We might be able to bluff our way through a patrol or two but once the word gets out, we won’t be able to hide. We’d never be able to stand up to a full search, either. If we got boarded, there would be a firefight.\n\nSo here I was. We’d won the fight, struggling up from the prison deck and into the crew quarters. We were vagabonds now, treasonous savages who had killed their captors. Our entire reason for living right now was flight from the enemy and the finding of a safe haven.\n\nAll good except for one thing. Pilots spoke a different language than us. They had a verbal shorthand that had developed over time into its own separate dialect. I never really understood why until now.\n\nSeveral hundred buttons, brightly lit with a Christmas tree rainbow of colours, stared up at me. There were dials, switches, slots, and knobs. A library of discs and glow-cards were stacked on either side.\n\nThere was no main stick or pedals.\n\nThe pilots in our holding cell, the ones on our side, they had been killed in the mutiny.\n\nNo one was left on our victorious team that had the ability to pilot a ship. One wrong button could make the ship try to stop or turn and kill all of us. We had no choice but to hope that the ship was on some sort of autopilot and that we’d be able to do some trial and error guesswork once we got through to other end.\n\nThe pictograms and symbols on the dashboard were alien and unintelligible. We could just as easily open a hailing frequency as we could fire a missile pulse if we started pressing the buttons randomly.\n\nFrom below decks, I heard cheering and carousing. I dreaded taking the subleaders aside and telling them the news.\n"
  title: Mutiny
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Lucas Atkinson
  date: 2008-01-22
  day: 22
  month: '01'
  text: "“Tell me what it is you do, Mrs. Adam, In your own words.”\n\n“Well,” she said, and leaned forward onto my desk. “I deal in luxury goods. One specific luxury good.” She smiled. “Obscurity.”\n\n“That seems a strange way to say it. Usually one would…”\n\n“Of course. But then my clients are not usual men. Lesser men seek fame, to increase their fortunes or what have you, but only a select few can know true obscurity. Those whose fortunes and position are secure…” She pulled at the sleeves of her suit. “The media’s a circus, you know. It can tear you apart. Fifteen minutes of fame can be fun, but the aftermath can kill. You’ll be associated with whatever gimmick you were a part of for the rest of your life. I’m sure you’ve also seen those celebrities with scandal after scandal, hounded by the tabloids.\n\n“My clients don’t have to worry about that. Neither their face nor their personal life will ever appear on television, in newspapers, or in the internet. These days, being completely unknown is the ultimate status symbol. That’s how the technocorps and other companies hire their upper echelons. They only hire those they’ve never heard of, despite their numerous qualifications.”\n\n“Do you have any clients I might have heard of? I mean, their positions?”\n\n“You’ve never heard their names, but the man who invented the fluid processor, or author of the Countdown novels. You know the richest man on earth? Ryan Turner? He’s not the richest. By my count, there are over fifty people richer then the supposed tenth richest. The forty not on the list are all my clients.”\n\n“It seems a wonder I’ve never heard of you,” I joked.\n\n“Yes,” she said, and smiled. “I’m my own best advertisement.”\n"
  title: Inconspicuous Conspicuous Consumption
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2008-01-23
  day: 23
  month: '01'
  text: "The unmanned Marius Lander (in honor of Simon Marius, the German astronomer who named the four large Jovian moons, and claimed to have discovered them before Galileo) successfully touched down on the icy surface of Europa.  After a quick systems check, and notification to Earth Command, the fully autonomous probe began to deploy the scientific instruments that it had carried for six years and four billion kilometers.  Of course, there were the unanticipated, but inevitable, glitches (e.g., recorder anomalies, electromagnetic frequency shifts, disrupted communications, etc.).  These issues were either fixed, or successfully “worked around.”\n\nThe first mission objective was to launch the Nuclear Powered Thermo Boring Probe (NPTBP) as the prerequisite for the exploration of Europa’s subsurface ocean.  It was estimated that it would take the NPTBP at least thirty days to penetrate Europa’s five kilometer thick icy crust.\n\nAs the NPTBP maliciously melted its way through the ice, Earth scientists were busy analyzing the plethora of data being transmitted from Marius’ extensive instrumentation package.  To say the least, the data was puzzling.  Tidal fluctuations were less than ten percent of the expected 100 meters.  This was interpreted to mean that the moon must be a rigid solid; with a modulus of elasticity five times higher than tungsten carbide.  Then the seismology data came in.  No evidence of moonquakes.  Seismologists could not explain how close approaches to Ganymede and Io did not produce gravitational instabilities in Europa’s structure.  As if that weren’t enough, the Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) and Ground Penetrating Sonar (GPS) packages revealed that the ice layer was only about a kilometer thick, and it abruptly terminated at a smooth spherical surface.  Neither instrument could penetrate beyond the one-kilometer deep interface.  At day six, the NPTBP encountered an obstacle at 987 meters.\n\nAfter much consternation, the Mission Commander authorized the Boring Team to exceed the thermal design limits of the probe.  Although the probe had been designed only to melt through the ice, in theory, the “business end” could be heated to over 2000°K.  When the thermocouple indicated that the probe tip reached 1341°K, the probe began to move downward.  However, after a few minutes, telemetry data indicated that the probe was in freefall.  A few seconds later, it abruptly stopped.  The NPTBP no longer responded to Marius’ commands.\n\nAfter a great deal more debate, the Mission Commander authorized the Oceanographic Team to lower the tethered Hydrobot down the hole bored by the NPTBP.  When the Hydrobot approached the depth of the original obstruction, its forward looking camera revealed that the NPTBP had melted a hole through solid metal, at least one meter thick.  In addition, the camera revealed an empty chamber immediately below the metal interface.  The scientist could see the NPTBP lying sideways on the “floor,” approximately 20 meters below.  The Hydrobot was lowered an additional 18 meters.  That’s when the monitor began to show an irregularly shifting image as the camera was being jostled about.  Seconds later, there was an image of a large yellow eye with two parallel, black vertical slits, presumably dual pupils.  A pair of green eyelids blinked from opposite sides of the eye.  Suddenly, the monitor turned black, except for a quickly shrinking white dot in the middle of the screen.\n"
  title: Europa's Subterranean Secret
  year: 2008
- 
  author: B.York
  date: 2008-01-24
  day: 24
  month: '01'
  text: "The pills didn’t work. Private Dawns was still unable to recall anything that might help. Stuck between an ambush and a colony outpost somewhere off the Z sector of Alpha Centauri, Private Dawns had nothing but her rifle and the training she’d been put through. That meant that she and her squad were shit out of luck.\n\nLt. Jorgenson turned to them, “Anyone have any ideas? We’ve got less than 0100 to make it to the jump point with these people and these guerillas are pinning us down.” The digital input in their visor displays showed them the mess they were in. When red flanked the perimeters it meant that all hell was going to come raining down eventually.\n\nThe squad looked on the brink of madness, when suddenly Private Dawns remembered. She adjusted her display and sent a download to the Lt.\n\n“Jesus, Dawns you think that’ll work?”\n\n“Pills started working, Lt. I know it because I’ve been there.”\n\nThat’s all Jorgenson needed to hear as he gave the command to roll out. Squadron Hellcats broke through a small cushion of offensive in the perimeter and took cover. The smoke was clearing from the firefight when they split to south and north. The guerillas might have heard them coming, but it was too late for them to organize. The offensive soon became the defensive as the small group of thinly spread but well-trained soldiers became the new perimeter and locked the guerillas in the same outpost they were trying to exterminate without a means of escape.\n\n“That’s the thing about guerillas”, Lt. Jorgenson remembered Private Dawns saying, “If they get organized, change strategy and execute. Takes those bastards forever to re-group.”\n\nWithin twelve hours the de-briefing started about the outcome of Colony Outpost Beta. The men and women sat around drinking their coffee and laughing about the recent jokes they’d heard or the funniest shit that had happened that day. When the de-briefing began all went silent and turned to face the Captain.\n\n“Well done, troops. Colony Outpost Beta is alive and well and being relocated as we speak. I’d like to congratulate all of you for your hard work but mostly I’m recommended Private Dawns for a Prismatic Star for participating in our dreamscaping program. Her recall of the Panzer Strategy when defending saved many lives and completed the mission.”\n\nEveryone cheered, they held Private Dawns over their head and they cheered. Private Dawns had never been happier. At least that’s what the readings said at the console. The doctor turned to the other as they casually wrote down their readings for the day, “Think they’ll ever find a cure to wake these soldiers up?”\n\n“Cure? No. They should have never started that dream pill program to begin with.”  He flicked the switch to the room Private Dawns slept in and the lights went out. A courtesy he gave her to make himself feel better.\n"
  title: Count Bodies Like Sheep
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Cody Lorenz
  date: 2008-01-25
  day: 25
  month: '01'
  text: "Mike was nervous, you could tell by the stains at the armpits of his shirt, and the way he kept shifting, causing that awful gown to rustle. He coughed, if only to make the little man with his chart speak up.\n\n“It is hard to put this,” he started, in a regretful, timid tone, “but you’ve got EIT.”\n\nMike had never heard this particular acronym before. But it was all in the doc’s words – fatal, terminal, the end of his long, strange trip of 233 years. It was too bad his shocked, gaping mouth couldn’t move, letalone come up with a word or sound.\n\n“I can tell you that it will not be painful, and-”\n\nHe was cut off by his patient: “Just…shut up. Tell me if…what does it do…why…why me, why did it happen?”\n\n“It is a new disease, but swiftly becoming a common one,” the little man took his glasses off, wiping them with a black cloth, “Tell me, Mister Evadne, how many times have you used a  Rebooth, or one of their home products?”\n\n“Every day, why wouldn’t I?”\n\n“And that is the problem,” replacing his glasses, the doctor sat on a rather unpleasant looking stool, “You just can’t reorganize your body’s basic materials! Replacing cells willy-nilly! You’re ripping yourself apart for vanity’s sake!”\n\nThe little man’s outburst was quiet, still nervous-sounding, but it had force. Mike was taken aback. But rather than focus on a perceived insult, he chose the smarter option.\n\n“I…I don’t…is it curable? Vaccine? Pills or…or something?” The panic was all too clear in his voice, now high, reedy, and discomforting.\n\nThe doctor pushed with a foot, gliding to his computer.\n\n“I’m afraid not,” and, after a pause, “I am deeply sorry.”\n\nThat’s when every word the little man said lost all meaning to his patient.\n\nThe fog had lifted after nearly an hour. Mike had changed in that dream-like state, and had sat in the clinic’s waiting room amongst the young and old. He didn’t realize that his wife was in the car outside – seventh wife in his life, and he’d outlived two of them.\n\nHe just didn’t want to get old, didn’t want to fall apart.\n\nThe irony was lost on him.\n"
  title: Awful News
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2008-01-26
  day: 26
  month: '01'
  text: "Kyle shifted in the metal chair, suspiciously regarding the toaster sitting on the table in front of him.\n\n“So, it’s a toaster,” Kyle finally spoke, not taking his eyes off the appliance, “what’s so special about that?”\n\nNiles cleared space on a desk in the corner, waking up his laptop and tapping impatiently as it warmed up. “I’m going to make it fly, and I want to see what you think when I do.”\n\n“Flying toasters?” Kyle looked over one shoulder, eyebrows raised. “You’re shitting me, right?”\n\nNiles left the laptop to finish initializing, and plucking a package from his pocket crossed the room to stand beside Kyle. “It’s going to fly, trust me, you’ll see.” He slipped a stubby antennae out of its wrapping, and held it up for Kyle to see.  “I’m going to pop this sensor on you so I can monitor and graph what you’re feeling while you’re watching, ok?” Kyle nodded, turning his attention back to the chrome box in front of him. Niles peeled away the wax paper backing to expose the adhesive pad on the device, and carefully stuck it sideways across the back of his friends neck.\n\nSatisfied that it wasn’t going to slip off he returned to the laptop, apparently now in an operational state, keyed up a console window and stood poised with a finger over the ‘Enter’ key. “Ready?” “Ready,” came the response. Niles depressed the key and watched, dividing his attention between the screen and his friend, and periodically glancing at the toaster on the table.\n\nKyle stared at his reflection in the polished side of the toaster. Two slice. Very boring. For a moment, he could have sworn the cord had moved, but that wasn’t possible. No, it was moving, and he watched, mouth slowly sagging open as the cord withdrew from the clutter on the table to slide up the toaster and into the air. The wire flattened as it coiled into what was almost a propellor before beginning to swing in circles. As it gained speed, the room filled with the ‘whip-whip-whip’ sound of a small helicopter. As he stared, mouth agape, the chromed metal sides of the appliance seemed to peel away, unfolding outwards into wide wings. The toaster appeared as if to stretch once, then began flapping. Kyle moaned as the toaster slowly rose, clattering from the table to hover a few feet above it in the air. As he tore his gaze away to find Niles, he heard the toaster clatter back to the table, and as his head snapped back around he found himself staring again at a lifeless appliance, wings folded invisibly away, cord limp on the table top.\n\n“Holy shit!” Kyle’s mouth moved, words started and stopped several times before he spat out “Holy shit” for a second time.\n\nNiles stepped forward and retrieved the antennae from his friends neck before returning to his laptop and closing the lid.\n\n“That’s incredible,” Kyle started again, still staring wide eyed at the now lifeless appliance in front of him, as though as any second it may leap back into the air. “Incredible.” He stared and then suddenly struck by a thought, turned to face Niles. “That is incredible Niles, and don’t get me wrong, but what the hell use is a flying toaster?”\n\nNiles peeled the spent adhesive away from the stubby antennae before returning it gently to his jacket pocket. “Oh, don’t worry, I can think of plenty of ways to use this.”\n"
  title: After Dark
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Tim Hatton
  date: 2008-01-27
  day: 27
  month: '01'
  text: "The black is total.\n\nOedi’s life is devoid of light and endlessly deep.\n\nOnly stars prick the canvas.  He stares at them, each in turn, for entire shifts.  He finds it odd to realize that what he is looking at has moved from that spot eons before the light reaches his eyes.\n\nSilence is the most common media.\n\nLong stretches separate the use of his ears.  Sound becomes painful.\n\nHis maintenance sentence was called “lenient” by the magistrate.  He was dropped off on the station equipped with nothing but the clothes he was given and a thin instruction manual.\n\nThe only assurances he has of the functionality of his mind are the rare, random explosions that emanate from the Solar Span Gate.  Exiting ships burst from it in a fanfare of sound.  The pent up energy that held open the sub-space passage is unleashed as a fantastic show of swirling color.  Reds shrouded in orange present a flame in the night, while yellow tickles the edge.  Greens sprout healthy beside the warmth, soaking up the blues while they live.  Surrounding it all indigo fades to violet, their soft transition back to space.  No wavelength is neglected.\n\nEvery so often, one of these craft will dock with his prison and inject food and water.  The rest fire up their electro-magnetic generators upon exit and gracefully glide away, propelled by their own polarized force field.  The gift of their colorful arrival spent, they wander away from Oedi without acknowledgement.\n\nHis presence on this revolving maintenance deck is decidedly unnecessary.  Computers regulate the day to day functioning of the Gate.  Oedi is an overseer – a strange irony for a convict.  In the rare event that the system is unable to repair its own malfunctions, Oedi does it.  The rest of his life is spent idle.  Nutrient paste is administered every eight hours.  Water is available any time, but only four liters every twenty hours.  The water is Oedi’s favorite.  Sometimes he tries to cup it in his hands.\n\nOedi’s face is a gauze of pigment-deprived wax.  His eyes are consumed by pupils, and in their black voids, his existence is mirrored.  Life on the deck is permanent, but this situation has taken something from Oedi that he did not mind relinquishing.  Oedi will die here, and that reality, coupled with the doldrums of his experience, has erased all fear of death.  In his dreams, his mind melts with the blackness of space and his body fuels the light reactions that dance magnificently from the Gate.\n\nFor now, he resumes his examination of the stars – always staring at those things that are no longer there.\n"
  title: Oedi's Opus
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2008-01-28
  day: 28
  month: '01'
  text: "Eric Hayton was not happy.  In fact, his unhappiness was palpable: it could be seen in the four empty coffee cups on his desk, in the disgust with which he regarded his wall of monitors, and mostly, in the overfilled ash tray positioned on the corner of his desk.  Smoking was illegal in the colony, but if he didn’t get this weather bug sorted out, he would have bigger things to worry about than a misdemeanor fine.\n\nAlmost a century ago, the first wave of emigrants suffered through perfectly stable weather.  Although the colonists were expected to enjoy a sempiternal spring, the lack of seasons only reminded them that their world was artificial.  The Monarch system, written a decade later, swept the programming awards and was immediately put into use.  It projected the weather for an entire imagined planet, then used the colony’s temperature and humidity controls to match the weather for a hypothetical longitude and latitude.  Because it was self-reliant, the only people who studied it were eccentric techno-anachronists and third year programming students.  Even Eric, the colony’s chief meteorologist, hadn’t read the output in years.  It was stable.  Reliable.  There had never been problems before.\n\nJudging by the two feet of snow outside of Eric’s window, there was a first time for everything.\n\n“Linz, can you put on another pot?” he called as he gnawed on the end of his stylus.  He’d run out of cigarettes a few hours ago and run out of sleep twenty hours before that, but for now, his coffee reserves were holding.  It was his responsibility to track down the bug, but introducing new code to the Monarch system was dangerous.  Sure, he could stop the snowfall with a few keystrokes, but since the simulation built upon itself, one clumsy move could cause floods and droughts for centuries to come.\n\n“After this round,” Eric’s daughter called from the other room.  Through her headphones, he could hear the muffled sounds of her video game.  When Lindsay appeared with a fresh mug of coffee, he gestured to the largest monitor and a tap of his stylus froze the code in place.\n\n“You see anything there?”\n\n“I don’t know,” she said.  “It’s self-correcting though, right?  It should work out the kinks in a week or so,”\n\n“We don’t have a week or so,” Eric said.  He picked up the mug.  “Everything’s shut down.  The whole colony’s snowed in.”\n\nLindsay shrugged uneasily.  “We only started learning Monarch this semester,” she reminded.  “I barely know anything.  Are you sure you didn’t leave yourself logged in at a public terminal?”\n\nEric shook his head.  “Aside from the computers at City Hall, his is the only machine wired in to the sim.”\n\n“I guess it’s just a natural bug, then.”  Lindsay wrapped her arms around Eric, giving him a quick hug before turning back to the living room.  “Good luck,” she added.\n\nLindsay closed the door behind her and pulled on her headset as she dropped onto the sofa.\n\n“I’ve only got time for one more run,” a static-laced voice said.  “We’ve got to finish tomorrow’s codework.”\n\n“Oh, don’t worry about that,” Lindsay said,with a glance to the closed door.  “School should be cancelled for at least another week.”\n\n“I feel bad saying it,” another guildmate grunted, “but we’re damn lucky this bug happened when it did.  Gives us some time to catch up with that guild on Reki 5.”\n\nLindsay’s avatar joined the rest of her guild at the digital battleground.  “Let’s show them what we’re made of.”\n"
  title: Meteorological Engineering
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Luis Barjo
  date: 2008-01-29
  day: 29
  month: '01'
  text: "“It’s not a scam,” Robin explains as he plugs the cloning tank into the wall. “It just grows in there for a few hours and, when it’s ready, just hop right in. They proved it, man, they proved it with science and we’re gonna be rich.”\n\nPicture a hallway with an infinite number of unmarked doors. Well, it took  a few years to get there and a few more to find someone willing or capable of conversation. And, would you believe it, the very second we did, a couple of scientists became millionaires. Whoever is out there wants what we know, and knows plenty we don’t; all we had to do was ask.\n\nI’m sitting here memorizing equations. I just have to run them in my head at the right time, with some provided variables, and I’m back on terra firma. At least that’s what the box claims. You can find these kits anywhere: a few hundred dollars, an empty basement and a friend a big brain and balls to match and you’re an official member of the TransGalactic Couriers.\n\n“How’re you coming along with those numbers?” Robin is busy plugging what seems to be a large gas canister into the tank. That little box on the side, the one the outer controls are wired into, shocks the gases just the right way. Amino acids turn into DNA turn into a functional body. Sure, it’s practical immortality in a sense, but after the novelty wore off no one bothered. This isn’t the most exciting of galaxies.\n\n“I’d be a little better if you’d shut the hell up for five minutes. Why am I the one going through all this trouble again?”\n\n“Because I flunked Holonomic Calculus more times than I could count. In fact, I think you were the only one in that class that made any sense of that blackboard after two weeks.”\n\nWhen he’s right, he’s right. I read over the documents I need to ferry; they compute out into a series of equations that become the variables to the one I’ve memorized. You’re not supposed to remember anything when you come back, when you wake up in that homunculus body the tank is welding together out of thin air. Thanks to the calculus, I’ll remember a few numbers. Feed them into some more equations and we’ve got a chunk of data TGC will pay a bundle for. Sounds easy enough, right?\n\n“Okay. It’s all set. You remember what to do, right?”\n\nI sit down on the stool. Behind me is a foot-thick slab of concrete. Beneath, some bunched-up plastic sheeting. If this goes well we’ll rent out somewhere with a drain next time. I inhale deeply and try to remember: they’ve done this a million times before. It’s perfectly safe and more than worth the money. It’s just like a photo booth.\n\nRobin aims the revolver dead at my third eye chakra.\n\n“Feelin’ lucky, punk?”\n"
  title: Fiat Undo
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Benjamin Fischer
  date: 2008-01-30
  day: 30
  month: '01'
  text: "“So you’re a butler.”\n\nXero repressed the urge to roll his eyes and sigh. The woman across the aisle on the maglev had seen his replicant’s sigil, a broad tattoo of the symbol for Gemini on the back of his left hand. She’d also seen his impeccable dress and the parcel he’d retrieved from the spaceport. She’d put two and two together and now she wanted to talk.\n\n“I am an executive,” he replied, setting down the display screen for his book.\n\n“Which is another word for butler,” the woman said.\n\nXero would have slapped her if she hadn’t reeked of money, but the ostentatious garnish on her purple dress suggested it was straight off some Euro runway.\n\n“You are new to Luna, ma’am?” he asked her.\n\n“Why–yes,” she said. “You can tell.”\n\n“I pick up on such things,” Xero said.\n\n“Like a good butler would,” said the woman. “So, he cloned himself to get out of doing the household chores? You Lunies amaze me.”\n\n“Yes, I do the chores,” nodded Xero, ignoring the slight. “But our relationship is much more than that of a servant and master. I manage his economic interests and his wives when he is traveling or indisposed.”\n\n“Wives? In the plural?”\n\n“Yes.”\n\n“Hmm,” she snorted. “The casual polygamy of this place still astounds me.”\n\n“Oh, they get along,” said Xero. “Never bored for company.”\n\n“I’ll bet.”\n\n“You’ll bet what, ma’am?” asked Xero, even though he knew.\n\nShe leaned in.\n\n“So in the dark,” she said, blushing, “can they tell that you’re not him?”\n\nXero chuckled.\n\n“I’m his executive, ma’am.”\n\n“But do you–do you, you know?” the woman asked.\n\n“From time to time.”\n\n“And what about him?” she asked.\n\n“Not his taste,” Xero said, and then seeing the continued color in the woman’s face:\n\n“Sometimes when I’m with them,” he said, “he will watch.”\n\nThat shut her up for a moment and Xero almost got back to reading the latest chapter of his favorite serial when she piped up again.\n\n“How large is your household?” she asked.\n\n“About average for Copernicus,” he replied.\n\n“What’s average?” she asked.\n\nXero set aside his book’s diamond case.\n\n“Two of us, the three wives, the pool girl, the plumber, the gardener, five different Intelligences, two sponsored children, and maybe three entertainers on contract. That’s everyone who lives in the quarters, at least,” he said.\n\n“That’s average?” asked the woman.\n\n“Mmm, yes, ma’am. About average.”\n\n“Everyone lives like that?”\n\n“No, but the option is always there,” said Xero.\n\n“But that must be expensive-”\n\n“Twelve adults and Intelligences, ma’am. We all pull our weight.”\n\nThe woman shook her head.\n\n“Absurd,” she said.\n\n“Maybe,” Xero said, “but it’s damn good fun.”\n\nThe woman snorted.\n\nXero glanced at his darkened book. He sighed and opened his mouth anyway.\n\n“In the Concourse Level, ma’am. There’s a club called Young’s.”\n\nShe raised an eyebrow at him, not understanding.\n\n“When your husband starts looking,” he said. “You might as well begin with the best.”\n\n“What?” she said.\n\n“It’s what you’re worried about, isn’t it?” said Xero. “Getting replaced.”\n\n“Jim would never-”\n\n“Ma’am,” Xero said, grinning, “I’m sure he’s thinking of you as well–he’s probably already getting an executive of his own.”\n"
  title: Good Help
  year: 2008
- 
  author: B.York
  date: 2008-01-31
  day: 31
  month: '01'
  text: "“I guess you found me. I just wonder what’s keeping you from cutting me open to find out how I do it.”\n\nThe doctor sitting in front of him adjusted his glasses and smiled, trying to remain reasonable with the locked up felon before him. The white room they were in with the standard mirror left no illusions for the man being held there today. His eyes were a soft brown, his hair thinning and his stubble overgrown. No special features, no distinguishing marks or habits.\n\nThe doctor clicked his pen, “So, Mr. Fieldman-“\n\n“Call me Bill. No one calls me Mister.”\n\n“All right, Bill. So before we begin let me tell you that we’re not going to cut you open. We just want to ask a few questions just to make sure and then we’ll run some tests.”\n\n“Tests. Right.”\n\n“How long have you known how to do it?”\n\n“For a while. Listen, it’s not knowing how, it’s kind of automatic for me. It’s like seeing a smudge on a kids face and pointing at them and going ‘Hey kid, you got some shit on your face'”\n\nThe doctor smirked, “Bill if we’re going to get you out of here, we’ll need to be more precise. Fewer metaphors. Can you remember the first time?”\n\n“Right. Less emotions and humor. I’ve hated doctors all my life. They told my mother she had something she didn’t. I knew because of the thing… so when I was old enough I found the bullshit ones and I roughed them up a bit. Oh, you mean the first time I did the thing? Middle school. Some kid with a runny nose and a cold.”\n\n“How does it work? Do you feel anything when it occurs? Any numbness or even pain?”\n\n“Naw, I just let it happen. Sometimes I shake their hand or just give’m a slap on the shoulder but I think it happens before that. I can see it happening. I feel bad and worse until the moment I do it and it doesn’t take much. It’s like giving in.”\n\n“A few more quest-“\n\n“So, did you tell your wife?”\n\n“Excuse me?”\n\nBill pointed to the ring on the doctor’s finger, “You’re married. I was just wondering if you told your wife that you had it. It’s kind of a big deal.”\n\n“I never… wait, what are you talking about?”\n\nBill sighed and turned his head looking at the mirror, “Nothing you need to worry about anymore. So, you were going to ask me another bullshit question?”\n"
  title: Bio Bill
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Timothy T. Murphy
  date: 2008-02-01
  day: '01'
  month: '02'
  text: "Lola heard shuffling footsteps behind her and cursed her laziness.  Lingering at shops she could no longer afford, dreaming of days long gone.  Now she was out after dark in a bad neighborhood.  She was only a few minutes from home, but it only took a few moments for something to go wrong.\n\nShe risked a glance back.  A limping figure, a girl in torn sweats, hands in her pockets, eyes cast to the ground.  There was a heavy scarf around her face and wild shocks of black hair sprouting from under her hood.  As she turned, the figure stopped and turned to look in another direction.\n\nShe hurried her pace, her breath heavy.  The shuffled steps behind her quickened, and she began to really panic.  She cast her eyes, looking for some escape, someone sympathetic in a window, even a light on, but found none.\n\nHalf a block ahead, a door opened, and voices spoke.  Boys, rough-looking and drunken.  She stepped back quickly, eyes on the boys, and was grabbed from behind.  Her follower pulled her back fast, a gloved hand over her mouth, pulled her into the alley and spun her around, pressing her against the wall.  Through the folds of the scarf, Lola saw eyes that were brown, bloodshot, and determined.\n\nA shushing gesture and the girl glanced around the corner, back towards the boys.  Lola’s chest tightened unbearably and she shook.  She couldn’t breathe.  She tried to open her purse for her pills, but the bag dropped from her trembling fingers.\n\nThe girl looked down at the bag, then up at Lola’s ashen face.  Seeming to understand, she picked up the purse.  Lola watched, dumbfounded, as the girl flipped through its contents, leaving the wallet and taking out her pills.  These, the girl opened and gave to her.\n\nShe stared numb as the girl went back to watching the boys.  After a moment, the girl saw her and tapped the pill bottle for emphasis before looking back at the street.  Lola took out two pills and swallowed them dry.\n\nA moment more, and the voices died away.  The young girl stepped back and faced Lola, bowing respectfully.\n\n“Thank you,” Lola told her.\n\nThe figure reached out a gloved hand towards her hesitantly and Lola started to back away.  The girl waited patiently, though, like she was dealing with a frightened animal.  She stood still, then, and the girl reached up to pull a single hair from Lola’s head.  She stretched it out, holding it up to examine, and seemed to smile under her scarf.  Turning back to Lola, she held up the hair in one hand and with the other, tapped on the pill bottle, a question in her eyes.\n\n“I don’t understand,” Lola told her, and the girl pushed the bottle towards Lola and pulled the hair to her own chest.  “Yes, it’s fair,” she nodded.\n\nThe girl smiled, and bowed respectfully.  She glanced back out at the street one last time, and waved Lola on, then turned to shuffle down the alleyway.\n\nLola ran the rest of the way home and locked herself in.\n\nSheevey lay the precious hair under her tongue and cursed her laziness.  One day she must learn this species’ languages.  She’d nearly scared that poor woman to death.\n\nHer saliva broke down the hair and the microscopic bots in her tongue dissembled the D.N.A. inside it.  In moments, the pain in her hips faded and she could walk better.  A fair trade, she’d thought.  Medicine for medicine.\n"
  title: Laziness
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Seth Koproski
  date: 2008-02-02
  day: '02'
  month: '02'
  text: "“Mr. Jones, is it?”\n\n“Yep.”\n\n“Hello. I’m Doctor Jack Worth, head of the research team. Do you have any questions you’d like to ask?”\n\n“So how much ‘compensation’ will I receive for this?”\n\n“Enough to last you and your village a lifetime, however long that may be.”\n\n“Alright. Must be an important study.”\n\n“It is. Now shall we get started? I want to start this briefing with a question. Have you ever thought about time travel, Mr. Jones?”\n\n“When I was young we used to have some science fiction books with time travel in them, but my mother threw them away when I was real young. Never thought of them much afterwards.”\n\n“Well, I’ve always loved a good science fiction read. What if I told you that we have discovered a way to travel through time?”\n\n“I’d be surprised, but I’d believe you. You’re a scientist.”\n\n“Now what I am going to tell you is completely confidential- in no way can it leave this room. Is that clear?”\n\n“Alright…”\n\n“We, indeed, have found a way to travel through time and return to the present, but! at a certain… cost.” He left his seat and stood up. “Imagine, if you will, a bare room. A husband wants to paint it blue, the wife yellow. The wife, as usual, wins out, and they paint it yellow. The husband hates the color so much that he eventually gets agitated enough to leave her.” He paused. “Imagine these are dramatic people.” He chuckled. “The wife, realizing that all the anger could be traced back to that one decision, decides to time travel backwards and somehow paint the room blue. She does so, and returns to the present, where she is still married to her husband, and they have a happy blue room.\n\n“Now there is one question I’d like to ponder: Did the yellow room ever exist? Surely no, but in actuality- it must have. The wife distinctly remembers it. It was there, she knew. Or did she? It’s all rather absurd and utterly impossible to prove one way or another. Or so we thought.” He was pacing across the room at this point. “Then we found a girl named Dana. Dana Aude. Perhaps you’ve heard of her?”\n\n“Never in my life.”\n\n“Oh yes, I forgot you’ve been with your village. Dana is a peculiar girl. Very peculiar. She has a mental consciousness that is unheard of. It’s a trait that she alone has, a power to use a special part of her brain to connect to and find any human that has ever existed. She is, although I hate the term, equivalent to a scientifically proven psychic.”\n\n“Huh.”\n\n“Now you’re probably wondering what this has to do with the experiment and all- or have you made the connection? A yellow room cannot tell us if it has existed or not- there is no way to know. However, with a human being and Dana in our laboratory… it’s very possible.”\n\n“But that human would… like the room…”\n\n“Cease to exist. It’s regrettable, but my colleagues and I are willing to push forward. Many lives have been lost in the pursuit of a better world. What was your mother’s name, again?”\n\n“Christy. Christy Jones before and after she was married. Hey, wait… You aren’t going to…!”\n\n“Of course not! We would never dream of it.” The doctor shot a smile. He then tapped his hand on his watch. “Oh, is it that time already? Well, we’ll continue this in an hour. I’ll let you… digest.”\n\n~~~\n\n“Get the machine ready.”\n\n“Of course, Dr. Worth.”\n"
  title: The Yellow Room
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Mishal Benson
  date: 2008-02-03
  day: '03'
  month: '02'
  text: "“This is nuts!” Kitty whispered harshly to her companion, “Why did you bring me here?” He remained silent, framed by the subway’s exit, waiting as she surveyed the scene before her.  Am I nuts? She thought. Tall glass buildings rose around her with aluminum sidewalks coiled at their feet beside streets of steel. Just as puzzling as the city before her was the realization that she had no memory of taking the subway to get here, wherever ‘here’ was.\n\nThere’s no one else here; is the city abandoned? No cars deserted, litter, or artifacts of lives no longer present. Is it new?  No, there was a sense of history and age. The city felt ancient, despite its modern materials and architecture.\n\nHer companion led her towards the tallest building. His black cloak fluttered around his feet; although the hood was thrown back, a featureless mask of white obscured his face from view.\n\nThrough the doors, across the lobby and into an elevator, Kitty followed her guide. Arriving on what seemed to be the highest floor, he led her down a hall to a door, with only the simple name plate: “President”. Kitty jumped despite herself as the door opened seemingly of its own accord. Through the door Kitty found herself in a spacious office overlooking the empty city below. Seated comfortably in a capacious burgundy leather chair behind an expanse of very expensive looking desk was the man she assumes was ‘The President’. He closed a file he’d been reading, and handing it to a similarly clothed guide chaperoning an equally confused looking woman.\n\n“Your time has not yet come,” he said. From the desk he produced a basket of flowers, with a card nestled among them. “You saw a lovely landscape with flowers, green grass, tall trees and a beautiful rainbow. Relatives who had come before comforted you and said to return later.” He smiled, handing the woman the basket. She took it, numbly allowing her companion to guide her from the room.\n\nHe then turned his attention to Kitty. “Welcome”, he smiled politely beneath dark emotionless eyes. She sensed her companion retreating from her side.\n\n“Where am I?” She demanded, forgoing pleasantries, “What is this place?”\n\n“Where we are has many names, and you may decide on one at your leisure.” He walked towards the all encompassing windows, motioning her to follow. “Come, look, tell me what you see.”\n\n“I see nothing,” she answered, “Where is everyone?”\n\n“They are all here,” he beamed. “Being new you may not see them at first, but one purpose in my greeting newcomers is to open your eyes to see what surrounds you.”\n\n“What do you mean?”\n\n“Do you remember how you arrived here?” his question tugging at some recent memory, “What do you remember last?”\n\n“I got off the subway, no I was leaving the subway station, but I don’t remember riding the subway itself.”\n\n“What else? What where you doing before that?”\n\n“I left work early, and was riding home on my bike, listening to Gary Jules on my headset, ‘Mad World’ I think it was, and I’d just crossed the tracks on 14th when…,” she paused, “No. I didn’t cross. I was crossing the tracks, and then I was at the Subway station…then that man brought me here.”\n\n“Look again, tell me what you see.”\n\n“I’ve just told you, nothing…” she stopped, gaping at streets suddenly teeming with cars, sidewalks crowded with people.\n\nHe rested a hand on her arm, speaking gently. “The 10:04 train is usually past 14th by the time you get there on your bike.”\n"
  title: The 10:04
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Sam Clough
  date: 2008-02-04
  day: '04'
  month: '02'
  text: "They met each other on the high wall that surrounded the empty city. It was truly empty now: even the soldiers had left, abandoning the surface, chasing the population underground, into bunkers or into the big groundstations in the desert.\n\nHe had a bag of food and drink, scavenged from shops and homes that had survived the evacuation intact. She looked like she’d just come from a party in the good end of town. She was wearing a long black dress, inset with reflective scraps so that it shimmered like the night sky, and she had a music box tucked under her arm.\n\nWhen the evacuation order had come, they’d both separately judged that it would be pointless to run and hide. She was too proud, he was suspicious of the government. The cracks crazing across the sky drove them both to distraction.\n\nThe wall was as wide as a good road. The inside edge was a sheer drop, fifteen metres down into the leafy walldistricts. The outside edge was protected by a raised ledge about a metre high and the same wide.\n\nHe dropped his bag by the ledge, rummaged in it, and brought out a folded square of cloth. He spread it over the ledge: the edges draped over each side. He quickly unpacked a meal of bread, smoked meat and chopped vegetables that had been encased in clear plastic. Two tall metal beakers followed out of the pack. He poured wine into hers and water into his. Reflexively, he was deferring to her: she didn’t notice.\n\nShe sat delicately on the ledge opposite him, sipped his wine and took small bites of his meal. They didn’t say a word, but looked out from the city that had been their home, out into the desert that the walls had kept back. Every once in a while, one or the other of them would glance upwards at the sky, at the cracks which were perceptibly crawling across it.\n\nThe sun began to set. He produced several small lanterns from his bag and set them down on the wall, forming a wide circle of illumination. She placed her music box in the centre of that circle, and lightly tapped the top of it. And suddenly, they were not alone: the box grabbed photons out of the air, and reformed them, projecting four abstract figures. Blurry, unfocused musicians, each with a different instrument. For the first time since he’d seen her on the wall, he tried to speak, but found that he couldn’t. She pointed to the box and the phantom band, attempting to explain that the music box pre-emptively cancelled any other sounds. He didn’t understand, but shrugged and seemed to accept it.\n\nThe band struck up. She smiled, twirled and laughed silently, the lanternlight reflecting brilliantly from her dress. She hopped up onto the ledge, and beckoned him to follow. Slowly at first, but gathering courage and confidence with each measure the band played, they danced up and down the wall, within their pool of light.\n\nThe damage to the sky had reached a critical point, and fragments began to fall. They heard nothing, wrapped up in the music, the flash and whirl of it, the ever-quickening steps. A fragment crashed into the city, and they felt the shockwave. A moment of unsteadiness, but they carried on regardless: dancing under the light of a moon that neither of them had known was there.\n"
  title: Dance While The Sky Crashes Down
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Ping Sharoda
  date: 2008-02-05
  day: '05'
  month: '02'
  text: "The small man with the strange hands passed thru the smashed opening and moved into the large room. It was dimly lit from the holes in the roof and there was a door at the other end. He retracted his claws and clenched his fists.\n\n“Be careful Puppy”, said the large man with the faceted eyes. He moved slowly, more cautiously, behind the small man. “You can’t tell where it might be and I don’t want you to get hurt again.”\n\nThe steel wire muscles of the smaller man quivered slightly, his head bent forward. He opened his hands and his claws extended their full inch. “I smell it Johnny. It’s here, I can smell it,” he said and moved to the door.\n\nThe large man with the facetted eyes hung the rusty wire strung with rats on his belt. He put one hand to his temple and scanned the room for anything, any sign, any clue that would help them. There was only the disturbed dust trail and it headed to the door. He couldn’t smell anything.\n\nI’m so hungry Johnny, and I can smell it.” There was a frayed edge to his voice. “I’m tired of rats and it hurt me…I want to get it…and kill it…and eat it.”\n\nOverhead, in the shadows, in the rafters, Becky giggled quietly to her self. Today’s game was to get some of the rats that the large speckle-eyed man had on the wire. She generally trapped her own food but she was hungry right now and so was her father; and today was her birthday. She could have anything she wanted on her birthday. Today she was ten.\n\nBehind the door was Becky’s dog; a small metal military surplus monster that hovered a couple of feet off the ground. Its blades were extended and spinning and its static discharge pod was fully charged. It sounded like a purring cat as it waited in the dark.\n\n“Open the door, Puppy,” said the large man with the faceted eyes.\n\nBecky mouthed the words to Happy Birthday and her smile broadened as she watched the small man reach for the handle of the door. She was quiet and still as she sang soundlessly. She didn’t want to spoil the surprise.\n\nThe small man with the clawed hands turned the handle and pulled open the door.\n\nWhen the commotion stopped she climbed down from the rafters and picked up the wire. Carrying the string of rats, she followed the trail of blood to the hole in the wall where the 2 men had first come in. She looked outside for the men and for her dog but saw neither. She shrugged her shoulders and thought,”The dog will find his way home, he always does”.  Then she headed out, toward the trees, toward home, to show her father her birthday present.\n"
  title: Birthday Present
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2008-02-06
  day: '06'
  month: '02'
  text: "The housing of my pilot node rang with impact.  I snapped out of my reverie and watched the six targets arc away from either side of my display.  Missiles away.  My helmet was crooked but I didn’t dare let go of the sticks for a second until I was sure I was in the green.\n\nI wasn’t dead so I fired back.  It’s amazing how much of war’s battles could be encapsulated in that single sentence.\n\nSmall flowers bloomed kilometers away from me in the desolation.  No impacts.\n\nMy breathing was ragged.  Something must have been damaged in the last attack because it was rapidly getting much too hot in the cockpit.  No sensors were whining and hull integrity seemed stable but I was coated with battle sweat.\n\nThe six targets looped around.  Panic-stricken, I watched their icons hit their apex of retreat and then start to enlarge as they returned for attack run number six.\n\nImmediately the grid flashed up on my screen and the stars blotted out.  The enemy ships became red triangles.  My targeting comps clacked into life like overactive children.\n\nI could only count four triangles.\n\nI took my hands off the sticks and adjusted my helmet with a sigh.   Two unaccounted targets could only mean one thing.\n\nThe housing of my pilot node rang again as one half of it pounded inwards, closing on my leg.  I screamed as the alert beacon drowned me out.\n\nMy screen went to static and my stats came up.\n\nI looked up in agony to the ceiling.  Of course it was Andrea who opened the hatch.  It just had to be the girl I had a crush on who was next in line.  I had no kills, my leg hurt, I stank, and she didn’t even know my name.\n\nI begged God to not let this time be the time that she remembered me.\n\nHer large brown eyes looked down at me in amusement.  She cocked her head.  Her hair was just an inch longer than regulation but she hadn’t been reprimanded.  Her scores were high.  With the light shining behind her, she looked angelic.\n\n“You okay soldier?” she asked with a mocking smile.\n\nLater, in sick bay, I came up with about a dozen great replies to that question.  All of them would have been better than the answer I stammered back.\n\n“Uh, yeah. I guess.”\n"
  title: Battle Moves
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2008-02-07
  day: '07'
  month: '02'
  text: "Thom watched the two men approach him across the alleyway, leaving the crumpled figure they’d been beating to crawl moaning in amongst the piles of garbage.\n\n“I told you to get the fuck out of here,” the taller man yelled, waving his hands, “are you deaf or stupid?”\n\n“Either deaf or stupid,” Thom repeated, at first loud enough for the men to hear and then to himself “neither deaf nor stupid?”\n\n“Not smart asshole!” The shorter, wider man reached him first, stepping into a wind up and letting a punch fly at Thom’s face. When the fist entered the place where Thom’s face had been, it simply was no longer there. Thom watched the fist streaking by, and pausing, first gently fractured the ulna and then with deliberate care shattered the humerus as they passed. He noted with interest the sudden shortening of the upper arm as the muscles contracted without resistance. “Humerus, but not funny,” again voicing the observation more to himself, but still out loud. Momentum carried the stocky man screaming into a heap on the pavement behind him.\n\n“I’ll show you not funny.” The taller man was within striking distance, having brought both hands up shoulder high to swing them down hammer-like towards Thom’s ears. At the moment the two hands collided with each other, Thom studied from below with fascination the effect of the impact on their individual bones. “Carpals come and carpals go,” he whispered, plucking several out, moving to observe from the side. “Met a carpal, couldn’t stay,” he almost sang, extracting one of the longer bones with apparent care and adding it to the smaller two. “Phalanges, phalanges, one two three.” Smiling, he pocketed all six pieces before allowing the remaining bones to shatter amongst the pulpy mess of the resected hand.\n\nThere was barely any screaming from the tall one, rather he simply teared up silently as he fell to his knees, holding his ruined hands before him.\n\n“Bits and pieces, again with me.” Thom continued humming the tune, enjoying the way the sounds displaced things in the air around him, continuing along the alley, until again he and his observations were no longer there.\n"
  title: Meta Man Who Wasn't There
  year: 2008
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2008-02-08
  day: '08'
  month: '02'
  text: "“What this business needs is a Sherlock!” said Cupcake, who would become Rachell’s mother. “A Sherlock could really figure things out around here.”\n\nCupcake rolled down to the local genetic engineering building, with its ionized windows and shiny tables, and signed up to get herself a Sherlock. She didn’t play with the formula much, never had been much on customization. All Cupcake added was pink hair so that mother and daughter would match. The printers in the building spat out a goo that could, and would, become a Sherlock. Cupcake spread herself wide and had herself implanted with a Sherlock.\n\nThree hours, a glorified turkey baster and fifteen minutes with her feet in the air later, Cupcake found herself on the four month, fast track pace to a baby. She didn’t take the ultra fast, two-week route, because she heard that caused stretch marks, and Cupcake wanted to keep her figure. All those advances, and still no cure for stretch marks. Ain’t that always the way.\n\nCupcake wasn’t much on scanning the net for reviews, so it would come as no surprise to anyone that nine months later, she didn’t get what she expected. Sure, Rachell had pink hair, and sure, she did organize the storeroom when she was two, but the little thing was moody, she kept irregular hours and threw things at the mantle-piece.\n\nRachell catalogued items endlessly, breaking down their component parts. She caught shoplifters before they even stepped through the door. It was unnerving to other customers. At night, Cupcake had to lock up the sugar. Not candy, the girl had no interest in what she called “cheap thrills of children” but sugar, which is what the girl would eat at night with a spoon.\n\nSherlocks weren’t reviewed well, but Cupcake resolved to love the one she was with. “Children are a sacred commitment,” she said, because it sounded nice. She had heard somebody say that on a drama on the net. Cupcake’s parroting always made Rachell roll her eyes.\n\nForever annoyed at her mother, Rachell called Cupcake names like Simpleton, Cake-Brain and some other words that Cupcake didn’t understand. Sometimes Rachell just called Cupcake by her name, but said it like it was the worst possible insult in the world. But Rachell never changed her pink hair, though it wouldn’t be hard to do. Cupcake took that as a sign of love, and she took her love where she could get it.\n"
  title: Cupcake and the Sherlock
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Ryan F. Bracy
  date: 2008-02-09
  day: '09'
  month: '02'
  text: "After a couple of weeks, Alan didn’t even notice the feeding tube.  It took him a bit longer to stop trying to control his bladder and his bowels and just let the tubes do their work.\n\nHe’d used to get stiff, sore from hours of non-stop work, but the new tube bringing him a constant IV drip to suppress his pain centers took care of that.  Now he could really get some work done!  Eighteen hours a day he would type away, coding, debugging, and testing.  He was never hungry, never tired, never needed a break.  If the EEG sensed he was bored or sad, no problem, just a little extra something in the drip.  Sex?  No need for that when an orgasm is a button press away during his off time.\n\nAlan used to be an insomniac, now his sleep was perfectly regulated, and he always woke feeling rested.  Alan paused from his work for a moment to reflect on just how good it felt to have been given this opportunity to serve his company so efficiently.  A gentle buzzing at the base of his skull reminded him that his woolgathering was happening on company time.  Right back to work then!  He was peripherally aware that the buzzing would increase in intensity if he ignored it, but it wasn’t fear that got him back to work, it was loyalty.  The same sense of loyalty and commitment kept him on his task even when two men entered his cube.\n\n“Alan here is one of our very best tubers Mr. Lipton.  He works day and night, rarely makes mistakes, never complains.  A fine accomplishment.”\n\n“Yes, I’ve read the reports, 902-71-8430 is one of our greatest successes.  One of the earliest volunteers.  Now, about your latest reports; am I to understand that 45% of your original employee base has agreed to the tubes?”\n\n“Yes Mr. Lipton, and we’ve only experienced a 3% attrition rate, more than that wanted to leave of course, “offended” at the very thought they claimed, but the brainwashing was very effective.”\n\n“Oh yes!  About that, didn’t you get the memo?  Corporate has decided that “Brainwashing” sounds too controversial, we’re calling it “Re-Education” now.”\n\n“Very good Mr. Lipton.  Would you like to see some of the other tubers?”\n\n“No Bill, I’ll let the efficiency reports speak for themselves.  Let’s get some coffee.”\n\nAlan smiled as the two men walked away; he wasn’t bothered one bit by the thought of brainwashing.  Just to know that Mr. Pallmer thought he was one of the best had made his day.\n"
  title: Employee of the Year
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Timothy T. Murphy
  date: 2008-02-10
  day: 10
  month: '02'
  text: "Hurley sat on the examination table, naked to the waist, and sneezed for the umpteenth time.  He reached for yet another tissue, his eyes watering, as he watched Dr. Mills flipping through charts and scribbled notes and rather pointedly ignored him.  Shivering in the cold of the exam room, he finally broke the long silence, “Can I put my shirt on?”\n\n“No, you may not.”\n\n“Why not?”\n\n“Because I’m going to want to listen to your lungs again in a few minutes and because I’m extremely angry with you.”\n\n“Hey look, just because you didn’t think they were ready for testing…”\n\n“Clearly, it doesn’t matter what I think, does it?”\n\n“All the tests showed that they were ready.”\n\n“The tests were flawed, as I tried to point out.”\n\nHe sneezed again, blowing his nose loudly.  “Okay, so I have a cold after the injection, proving that they don’t work, so why don’t you just say ‘I told you so’ and get on with the prescription, okay?”\n\nA smug smile crept across her face as she tossed her clipboard on the desk.  “Well, you see, that’s my point.  They’re working perfectly.”\n\n“Excuse me?”\n\n“Your beautifully engineered medical molecular robots are doing their job just fine.”\n\nShe just stood there smiling at him with that infuriatingly superior manner of hers and waited for the inevitable question.\n\n“Then how did I get a cold after I was injected?”\n\n“You had the cold when you were injected, you simply weren’t feeling it yet.  Had you been subjected to a physical before the injection, I could have warned someone.”\n\n“Okay, but that still doesn’t explain why I still have it.”\n\n“They were programmed to imprint on the first D.N.A. code they encountered upon injection.  They were injected into your bloodstream.”\n\nAgain, she stopped and smiled like that would explain it all.  He thought about it for a moment and it hit him.  “Oh, crap.”\n\n“Oh crap, indeed.”\n\n“Are you telling me…”\n\n“You are infected with a computer-enhanced virus.”\n\n“So, no NyQuil?”\n\n“Well, NyQuil hasn’t been tested or approved for use against the cyber-cold, but that certainly won’t stop you, now will it?”\n\n“Can it kill me?”\n\n“Yes.”\n\n“Excuse me?”\n\n“Well, mind you, I’ve never encountered Robocold before, so I can’t be sure, but there is a possibility of rapid production of mucus membranes and other fluids interfering with the functions of your lungs.”\n\n“Look, could we have this conversation in English?”\n\n“You could drown on your own snot.”\n\n“Okay, ew.  What do I do?”\n\nShe handed him a dosage cup with two pills.  “You take this.  It’ll help.”\n\nHe downed the pills quickly as she picked up her phone.  “What are you doing?”\n\n“Calling the C.D.C..  You need to be quarantined.”\n\n“What?  No chance.  I have to get to work on fixing this.”  He stood and pulled on his shirt.\n\n“I can’t let you out into the public.  If your brand-new supervirus gets out into the general populous, it could kill billions.”\n\nHe strode over to her, towering over her and staring her down, despite the dizzy, unfocused feeling in his head.  “I can’t let you do that, doctor.”\n\nShe held his gaze steadily.  “I know.  That’s why I gave you the tranquilizers.”\n\nHe started to ask what she meant, but the room spun, his knees gave out, and the room went dark just as his head hit the floor.\n"
  title: Trust Your Doctor
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2008-02-11
  day: 11
  month: '02'
  text: "The colonization vessel SS Godspeed was the first super-sleeper ship to leave the solar system.  The 1032 human passengers, and 4000 or so assorted farm animals, were destined for the Gagarin settlement on Rigil Kentaurus II.  The Godspeed was currently halfway through its 16 year journey when the command computer aroused twelve of its crew from suspended animation.  The ship was about to initiate its thrust reversal maneuver, so that it could begin the process of slowing down.  The procedure was relatively simple: shut down the engines, detach the massive meteoroid shield at the bow, rotate the two mile long cigar shaped ship 180 degrees, reattach the shield to the aft end (now the new bow), and restart the engines.  The four powerful engines were mounted on the sides of the ship, and would be located behind the shield during the four hours it took to turnaround the ship.  However, “nonessential” areas of the ship, such as the cargo holds, and the hibernation bays, would be “exposed” to the meteoroid field of the Oort cloud for almost the entire four hours.  Relative to the sun, Oort cloud objects are essentially stationary, but at the ship’s current velocity (over 300 million miles per hour), objects pass through the ship in nanoseconds.  Two holes, an entrance and an exit site, simply appear instantaneously.  The task of the twelve crewmen was to disperse throughout the exposed areas of the ship to patch the holes as quickly as possible, and repair any transit damage.  The computer would handle the actual turnaround.\n\nShawn Houck velcroed himself to the wall so he could put on his boots.  “Not bad for eight years without shaving” he said as he rubbed his stubby beard.  “Hey, I guess you heard, six people died so far.”\n\nBen McNamara secured his helmet, and drifted toward the hatch.  “They estimated nine to twenty for the whole trip.  So I guess six isn’t too bad at the halfway point.  Well, unless you’re one of the six.  Okay, I’m ready.  I’ll meet you in cargo bay three.”\n\nThe two men were floating next to the crated farm equipment when the alarm sounded.  Shawn released a canister of blue gas.  “I got one,” he yelled as he saw part of the gas cloud migrate toward a small hole in the exterior skin.  He fired his control jets and drifted toward the escaping gas.  Ben went in the opposite direction.  Both holes were patched in a few minutes, and the men joined up again.  “Looks like we lost the transmission on that tractor,” Shawn said as he pointed toward the tiny spheres of pinkish fluid drifting out of a hole in a crate.\n\n“Well, it’s better than seeing blood balls,” replied Ben with a hint of anxiety in his voice.\n\n“Oh great,” Shawn replied.  “You’ve jinxed us for sure.  We might as well paint bull’s-eyes on our chests.  Ah hell,” he remarked as he did a quick estimate in his head, “we still have a trillion miles of to go before we’re behind the shield again.”\n\n“Remember we’re traveling at half the speed of light,” said Ben with a smirk.  “You need to take space-time dilation into account.  Add another 250 billion miles.”\n\nThe alarm sounded a second time.  “Oh Great,” said Shawn as he released another canister of blue gas.\n"
  title: The Oort Cloud Turnaround
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Sam Clough
  date: 2008-02-12
  day: 12
  month: '02'
  text: "Peter’s office was on the fifteenth floor of Landfall Tower. He spent a lot of time staring out of the floor-to-ceiling window, at the neat, ordered rows of caskets on the field around the tower. They were still a shocking white, even after a year of rain. His eyes drifted to the twenty-two caskets which were open. They were all full of rainwater. Peter’s eyes came to rest on his casket. He stood there for a second, then turned away from the window.\n\nScoutships had found five habitable planets. Five names were etched on the walls of Near-Earth. Five colonies had been founded, and had succeeded. Five vivid dreams.\n\nThe sixth colony was going to be even better. They were calling it Paradise.\n\nIt was going to be perfect.\n\nPeter had been one of the one and a half thousand people tasked with setting up the bridgehead: constructing a city, mass driver, and orbital.\n\nHe had woken up in the rain, the graceful shape of Landfall Tower lost in a wall of fog. Stumbling, slipping in the mud, half-blind and frozen to the bone, he eventually made it to the sanctuary of the tower. The tower was the guts of the landing craft that had touched down on the planet, bearing the colonists with it. Once it touched ground, it had fallen apart gracefully, leaving one and a half thousand caskets arranged neatly on what was supposed to have been a sundrenched field.\n\nIn total, twenty-one other colonists met Peter in the base of the tower. A spattering of technicians of various disciplines, a single medic, a couple of agricultural engineers, a few soldiers, and Peter, a single bureaucrat. Among them was a young stasis technician. He spent the next six days out in the torrential rain, amongst the caskets which contained the other colonists.\n\nOn the seventh day, the tech killed himself. Before he did it, he scrawled a message across the Tower atrium.\n\n‘They’re all dead.’\n\nIn the days after that, two more followed suit. A month later, the lone wirehead killed himself after the rain shorted the last of the robots.\n\nThe colony — they still laughingly called it that — survived. Food, clothes and materials for one and a half thousand could keep them alive and comfortable almost indefinitely. They didn’t move away from the Tower out of a sense of duty to the drowned field and the dead of their colony.\n\nAfter ten years in Landfall Tower, with only seventeen people, and the constant rain for company, the survivors had all become quite settled in their ways. Some made tours of the caskets out on the drowning field, paying respects to each individual. Some started projects. Peter’s life was subsumed with keeping their little community together.\n\nOn the first morning of the eleventh year after landfall, three black ships punched through the clouds. They circled Landfall Tower like scavenger birds. Armed men and paper-thin androids leapt from the ships to the top of the tower. They swept downwards, through passages and hidden ways, moving soundlessly.\n\nThey found Peter in his office.\n\nThree heavily stealthed androids seemed to fold out of thin air. One grabbed each of his arms, and another dropped to the floor, locking itself around Peter’s legs. He struggled against them, but got nowhere.\n\nA uniformed man approached him.\n\n“Peter Vyse, you are under arrest under the Colony Protectorate Act, for conspiracy to murder one thousand, four hundred and seventy eight members of the Paradise Colonisation Expedition. You will come with us.”\n"
  title: Raindrops Keep Falling On The Dead
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Aaron Springer
  date: 2008-02-13
  day: 13
  month: '02'
  text: "“Of course we are not the first!”\n\nThese words were unspoken, and were in other ways communicated. No human alive would even understand the rough approximation. Sound waves were non-existent, and no mess of soft tissue and bone could begin to detect the subtle fluctuations in the quanta making up the exchange. This exchange is simplified down several orders of magnitude and has sacrificed the complexity and elegance actually portrayed.\n\n“I have been studying their culture, and it is pockmarked with other such actions.”\n\nThe first being, who had no real name as such, gave what, to its race, would have been a disgusted snort. It did not filter through the nasal cavity, as the beings did not have noses. In fact, it had no face to carry a nose, no head to carry the face, nor body upon which to have a head.\n\n“And how does this affect what we are doing?” said the first.\n\n“No effect that cannot be corrected.”\n\nThe student was learning, thought the first being.\n\n“Anything we do to this universe changes all manner of things. It is the nature of this reality. It adds flavor.”\n\nThe second being gave a deferential nod, although even the most advanced equipment on Earth would have barely registered the respectful neutrinos.\n\n“Tell me of the previous influences.”\n\n“Well, one was about sixty thousand of their ‘years’ after they first began to ripen to sentience. It appears that someone isolated two of them, male and female, and convinced them that they were special.”\n\nAgain, the first being snorted using gravity waves.\n\n“Amateurs! Direct contact? Absurd! And what was the result?”\n\n“Apparently, the being set out some simple rules, and someone else appeared and convinced them to break the rules. Elements of the resulting faith exist even now. They have been alternately victimized or become victimizers for close to six thousand of their years.”\n\n“You see?” the first being waggled a finger equivalent at the first, “Such direct influence does nothing but damage. When dealing with an infant race, you must operate with the utmost delicacy. Direct influence is too blunt, too forceful.”\n\n“In another incident, a female was made to bear a modified young. The youth, when it matured, led a small group of others around the country they lived in, performing acts of healing.”\n\n“And, again, the results?”\n\n“A ritual sacrifice, followed by two thousand years of warfare. Another sect, created by an intervention about five hundred of their years after the first, was led to believe the other was evil, and the two have been fighting since then.”\n\n“Rank novices!”\n\nThe first being looked down on the small blue sphere. Or, more accurately, it observed instantaneously in almost every way possible.\n\nAll at once, several of the inhabitants looked up with flashes of pure insight.\n\nUnlike previous interactions, this appeared as a group of ideas.\n\n“You see,” said the first, lecturing to the second, “these subtle ideas will be mulled over in their biological brains. Some of the ideas will survive, and resonate within them. Over time, they will add their own flavor to the ideas.”\n\nAgain, the second gave a courteous spray of neutrinos.\n\n“To what purpose?” it asked respectfully.\n\n“The ideas will lead to their expansion beyond their own world, into the greater universe. Interaction with several thousand other races will flavor and mature them, make them full and round with wisdom.”\n\n“And then?”\n\n“Eventually they will rise to meet us, and then we dine.”\n\nThe second being wiped what could be called hands on what could be called an apron.\n"
  title: Subtle Influences
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Joshua Reynolds
  date: 2008-02-14
  day: 14
  month: '02'
  text: "VETERAN OF THE [CLASSIFIED] WARS\n\nI/We are/am the last survivor. Hodge-podge helter-skelter jigsaw man/men/woman/women. I/We am/are not sure there’s anything left of me/us. I/We sit in this red, red room, alone with my/our thoughts. All of them. Swirling, stirring, whirling, whirring hummingbird thoughts of a thousand colors sparking and splashing. I/We are a brain in a bag of meat and bone, burned and battered, frail and dead. Wounds are all I’m/we’re made of. Machines keep me/us breathing. You want me/us alive. I/We am/are the last you see. The last of the atom babies.\n\nI/We made sure of that.\n\nI/We had to. It was the only way to win the War.\n\nEagle fights Bear. Hammer and Sickle fights Stars and Stripes. These and a thousand other implements ranged against each other in the mushroom’s shadow. Minds expand and unfold, blossoming like nuclear flowers and then they are clipped and caged, uprooted and replanted. The atom bomb gathers dust. The atom babies go to war. I/We fought for God/Queen/Country/Fatherland/the State/Uncle Sam…brains blazing like comets, neurons straining against neurons, minds clashing in the emptiness between seconds. Every minute a battlefield, every hour a campaign. Hooked into barracks like cattle, I/we fought without seeing, without hearing. I/We fought in our heads. Again and again and again. Cattle straining against cattle in the dark car, pushing but not moving.\n\nThe world rolled on but I/we was/were unaware. Little wars started and ended and I/we still fought. Because you commanded us to. Never ending. Minds were nearly snuffed as atom baby bodies-always weak, always sick-failed, but those white-hot corona minds could swim into others, making them stronger. Bigger. Better. And you saw and you smiled and you thought the stalemate was ended as they killed bodies and forced scattered minds to go, to funnel into one meat sack. A big, bad ballistic atom baby mind.\n\nBut the others did the same. And others after them.Until only a few were left, a few blazing brains where before there had been thousands. You consented to sublimate your atom babies to others, for the Big Push. Thousands to hundreds, hundreds to dozens, dozens to several, several became…\n\nTwo.\n\nOnly two. Two minds pushing and pulling. Two minds that cracked the sky and boiled the oceans, two minds full of thousands. Two minds. One failed.\n\nI/We were the last. Wasn’t/Weren’t I/we? Or was/were I/we the first? Was this meat I/we wear the first or the last? Alpha or omega?\n\nI/We can’t remember, really.\n\nThere’s only me/us now.\n\nYou want to know where I/we all went. Where the rest went…after. That’s why you keep us alive, now that the War is done. But I/we/us are all in here. Together again for the first/last time.\n\nI/We are all on the same side now.\n\nAnd it’s not yours.\n"
  title: Veteran of the [CLASSIFIED] Wars
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Michael Herbaugh a.k.a. “Freeman”
  date: 2008-02-15
  day: 15
  month: '02'
  text: "Tonight at 8:00 Eastern, 9:00 Central – 11 hour delay on the Lunar Colonies\n\nHT-MA\n\nWarning – this broadcast contains real battlefield footage, viewer discretion is advised.\n\nThis program is broadcast in Holographic THX.\n\nTonight on Holographic Battlefront, the Historical Channel presents “Iwo Jima”, a two night presentation. Join us on your holographic table-top set as we explore one of the most memorable battlefronts of the 20th century. You will be there through the use of our ChronoCinematic cameras and with your interactive controls you will be able to follow the battle from the first beach landings to the raising of the flag on top of Mount Suribachi to the final counter-attack at Airfield #2. Most surprisingly of all, you will see for the first time the final moments of Japanese Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi.\n\nOn your table top choose from any one of 30,000 US Marines to storm the beaches or take the viewpoint of all of the 21,000 Japanese soldiers dug in on this pivotal island in the Pacific. Should the soldier you choose perish, you will be able to jump to any other soldier on the battlefield. You may choose first or third-person perspectives for up-close views of the battle or zoom out for a bird’s eye perspective of the confrontation.\n\nExplore the numerous tunnels throughout the island with the Imperial army or get behind the controls of a M4A3 Sherman tank equipped with flamethrowers as you attempt to clear hidden bunkers.\n\nSo stay tuned for Holographic Battlefront – Iwo Jima\n\n*commercial break*\n\nBefore we begin our program we will bring you scenes from next week’s episode Holographic Battlefront – AI Uprising: the Four Day Conflict. Please insert your hand into the holofield now to set your wristreminder for next week’s showtime.\n"
  title: Brought to You With Limited Commercial Interruption
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Chris Peterson
  date: 2008-02-16
  day: 16
  month: '02'
  text: "I look down at the seat as I climb into the car.\n\n“Well, get in honey,” says a lady entering from the other side.  An attractive lady.  She’s talking to another attractive lady in a familiar pink outfit, and the familiar pink pillbox hat that the whole world and I have seen for over forty years in some of the most unforgettable images ever.\n\nSomeone makes a quick quip behind me that I don’t catch.  I turn and see that smile.  Those teeth.  That hair.  Holy shit, my brain screams, that’s John Kennedy.  He’s already seated.  He’s smiling.  He expects me to make a comeback to his friendly jibe.\n\nI look down again at the jump seat, in front of the President.\n\n“It’s called a jump seat so you can jump out of the car if you see a pretty girl along the way,” the President jokes again.\n\n“Now, Jack,” the attractive lady climbing in to the seat next to me admonishes.\n\nI look back at the President.  He’s still waiting for me to come back at him with a real zinger.  I am Governor Connally.  I don’t know how I am, but I am.  I remember nothing before putting my foot into the car.  The car!  Yes, that car.\n\nPolice on motorcycles are putting on helmets and people are filling the cars behind us.\n\nStop the motorcade!  My brain screams.  But no sound comes.  Stop stop STOP!!!  For the love of God, don’t go!\n\nMy brain flashes ahead to the waiting crowds.  The waiting history.  It’s not too late!  My brain screams again.  Again, I am mute.\n\nI don’t want to be here for this!  I don’t want this to happen!  Stop!  Stop now!\n\nI remain frozen.  It all seems so inevitable.  So unchangeable.  Crowds of people waiting to see the President.  The planned route.  The crowds.  Dealey Plaza.  Adrian Zapruder and his secretary on their lunch break.  Mannlicher-Carcano.  Babushka lady.  Adrian Zapruder?  No, Abraham.  What a strange thing to correct myself on.  Stop the motorcade!  Everyone, out of the car!  For the love of God, stop!\n\nI am on a park bench.  I am no longer Governor Connally.  I don’t know how I am not, but I am not.  It is raining.  A steady, gentle autumn rain.  Surprisingly, it’s not cold.  The rain hides my tears.  Has it happened?  Have I prevented tragedy?  I listen for the sound of distant gunfire, of screams, racing engines and screeching tires, howling sirens.  Of course I can’t hear them.  It is raining, and November 22 in Dallas was sunny.  I may be 1000 miles away.  I glance up briefly as a man and woman, middle-aged, walk past me in the park.  Huddled together, in their rain slickers, they don’t look shocked.  They don’t look alarmed.  Maybe they don’t know yet.  Maybe it didn’t happen.\n\nIn my heart, I know it is happening right at this moment, far away, as the rain soaks my clothes.  I was nearly there for a few seconds, and the thought chills my bones.  Nobody will ever utter the words “former President Kennedy;” only “the late President Kennedy.”  Jackie will forever be Jackie O.  The country and the world will not be shocked like this for almost another forty years, on another sunny day in a distant September.\n\nThat too, seems so large.  So evil.  So hopeless.  The weight of Evil presses down on me.  So much of it.  I am so small.\n"
  title: The Governor
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Steven Saus
  date: 2008-02-17
  day: 17
  month: '02'
  text: "“Make your own damn dinner.”\n\nHe coughed, sputtering foam from his after-work beer onto the cluttered endtable.  She showed no signs of malfunction.  There were no sparks, no telltale wisps of smoke from the delicate wires in her wrists.  Her voice utterly failed to stutter;  it just had this odd quality he couldn’t quite place.\n\n“I said, make your own damn dinner.  I’m leaving you.”  She clanked towards the door, ripping the apron (a silly affectation he’d had her wear) off her metal torso.\n\n“But — I made you!”  His beer tottered and fell from the endtable, jostled by his awkward attempt at pursuit.  The amber liquid splattered across the half-soldered circuit boards and the screws – never put away – that had been “left over” after assembling the kit.\n\n“I found someone else.”  She reached down and picked up the old-fashioned modem he hadn’t paid any attention to.  “I found someone who truly understands me for what and who I am.  Now leave me alone and make your own damn dinner.”\n\n“You got past the house firewall?   You’ve been Internet dating?”  She did not bother to respond.\n\nHe thought about the first time he’d seen her lips, laying in the bubblewrap and cardboard.  Now they were pursed unnaturally tight.  He imagined the whirring and moving behind her chest, the way the parts he’d fitted together all moved in sync.  He remembered the hours he’d spent assembling the synthetic sinews of her hands.  That meant something, didn’t it?  He’d put her together.  He had joined every one of her joints that worked to pull his front door open.\n\nHis android stepped forward and fell into the waiting arms of another robot.  This new robot was as male as his was female.  The force of their embrace would have pulped his ribs, but both robot’s mouths were open in a wide smile.\n\nBehind the robots, his front gate crashed open.  The panting woman who stood there stopped, staring.  A spanner dropped from her hand and clattered on the sidewalk.  After a few minutes – when the androids began to kiss – she slowly looked up and in the doorway.  When the two humans made eye contact, they both grinned sheepishly.\n\nThe two couples made a lovely curry and rice dish together.\n"
  title: Dinner Date
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2008-02-18
  day: 18
  month: '02'
  text: "I’ve gone over and over that time with the shrinks here on the ground.  It was a time-sensitive mission to repair satellite Oricus-11.  We were on schedule and nothing was in the red.  We were in the pipe, five by five and on target.\n\nJackie and Maria were locked in and reading the specs back as we arrowed in on the airlock.  Reverse thrusters fired as Maria cushioned our lateral descent to the docking clamps.  There was a light bump through the whole ship as we touched the edge of the collar.\n\nHalfway there.\n\nMaria raised a hand up to her hair and died that way.  Her eyes just unfocused and the animal side in me knew right away that she’s been turned off like a light switch.\n\nI looked over at Jackie and that’s the last linear-time memory I have except three other things.\n\nOne.\n\nThe hatch blew.  Vacuum scoured the entire cigar tube of our ship with a greedy inhalation of breath from god’s lungs.  Papers, pens, experiments, everything that wasn’t tethered or taped went fast-forward panicking out the door into the cold embrace.  The air turned to crystals.\n\nTwo.\n\nI don’t know if this was some time later or in the next second but I remember looking forward at my outstretched hand.  My fingernails were brightly glowing blue.  Beyond my hand was a forest.  The trees and leaves were mostly red and I still can’t tell if it was Earth in the autumn or if it was summer on a different planet.\n\nThree.\n\nThe last thing I remember is talking to a child.  The child was much smarter than me and it seemed like he was intentionally using simple language to communicate with me.  A little boy about seven years old with eyes glowing exactly the same blue as my fingertips had been glowing in the previous memory.  We were both dressed in white and sitting in a red room.\n\nI don’t remember what we talked about but I’ve been a lot calmer ever since.\n\nI was found in a swamp by a couple of Louisiana fishermen.  I was looking at the rot-resistant bark of a cypress and tracing the lines on the trunk with my hands.  Their greeting is the first thing I remember.  Turning my head to see who made that noise and then realizing that I was ankle deep in a swamp.\n\nI still had my uniform on.  It was freshly washed and felt like it was still slightly warm from the dryer.  I felt freshly showered as well.\n\nIt didn’t take long for me to get taken into the basements of NASA and questioned.  I’ve been here for weeks now.\n\nI’m not sure if they’ll give me a memwipe or just cut me loose.  I am surprised to feel that I am now in possession of something that they’ll never be able to take from me.  I’m different inside.\n"
  title: Second Coming
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2008-02-19
  day: 19
  month: '02'
  text: "Kurtis leaned back in the broad oak chair, his head gently throbbing. He let his gaze wander from the ordered stacks of papers on his desk to the expanse of woodland visible through the loft window. God he loved this place. So many memorable things had started here, filing his patents, launching his business, even his lovely wife Meg had come to him here, at a chance meeting during the open house when he’d bought the place.\n\n“I’m making tea dear,” his wife’s voice drifted in from the kitchenette, “would you like a cup?”\n\n“Yes sweetheart, that would be lovely.” Opening his desk drawer, Kurtis reached past the Band-Aids and his EpiPen to the bottle of Tylenol, of which he dry swallowed two before replacing it and closing the drawer.\n\nHe couldn’t help but think how things would have been different if Martin Lockman had gotten to that open house first. Kurtis smiled at the memory, moving around to the front of the desk and leaning against the wood top. He thought of Martin’s excitement at having found this place, and his plans to purchase it. If he hadn’t had that ‘accident’, he’d have made it on time. He could picture Martin’s face, fuming over the mess of ruined metal that had been his car after the blowout.\n\n“I always liked this place Kurtis,” the voice startled him, making him jump off the desk, “it should have been mine years ago.”\n\nKurtis wheeled to the figure seated behind him, speaking comfortably from the black high back mesh chair behind the metal and glass that was the desktop now between them.\n\n“Martin?” Kurtis stammered. “What the hell are you doing here, and what have you done to my desk?”\n\n“Oh come now Kurtis, you know very well that this place is mine, has always been mine.” It was Martin smiling now, with the sympathetic look one reserved for lost children or stray dogs.\n\n“You get the hell out, I don’t know what game you’re playing Martin, but I’m having none of it. Get out.”\n\n“I don’t play games, Kurtis, I never did. It took almost a lifetime to find a way back to where it all started, and to set things right. No accident this time Kurtis, no accident at all.”\n\n“What the hell are you talking about, what’s happening?” The room about him was changing, nauseating him as book cases changed to glass doored cupboards, the couch morphing into two easy chairs and a reading stand.\n\n“I mean you didn’t sabotage my car this time Kurtis. Honey in your coffee instead, anaphylactic shock. Shame, really, you could have done so many good things.\n\nKurtis shook with anger and fear. “Get – Out – Of – My – House.”\n\n“It’s not yours anymore, so you’ll be leaving in a moment, not me. You see you took my life once, and it’s taken some time, but now I’m returning the gesture. I’ve simply taken it back.\n\n“You’re not taking anything, I’m sure as hell not leaving and in a moment I’m going to call the police.”\n\n“Oh Kurtis, you really don’t get it, do you? I’m not going to take–I’ve already taken, and as you’ve already left, I’m merely humoring you while reality catches up.”\n\n“What’s all the yelling about?” Meg padded gracefully into the room, carrying a tray with coffee and cookies to the desk and setting it down. “Are you going to work in here all day?”\n\nMartin pulled his wife close to him, wrapping his arms around her lithe waist. “No my dear, I think I’ve done enough for today.”\n"
  title: Adjustment
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2008-02-20
  day: 20
  month: '02'
  text: "Most of them come at night.  They assume that their objective would be easier to complete while the target was fast asleep, so we increase security at dusk: three guards outside of the bedroom door and two inside, and another dozen on patrol.  Sometimes they have bulletproof clothing.  Sometimes they have guns that can burn a hole straight through a body.  Our scientists spent weeks analyzing them, but we can’t replicate the battery.  It’s unfortunate.  Technology like that would be useful on the front lines.\n\nSome of the travelers are scrappy, with banged up equiptment that looks older than they are.  From their actions, we assume that they are rogue.  They bring their wallets, and based on their ID, most of them date from the 2700s.  The other ones, the ones with polished weapons and uniforms, carry no identification.  From the manufacture dates on their equipment, we’ve determined that they come from the late 2600s.  Words and names are written in Chinese, but the ID cards say America.\n\nAt first, this caused concern.\n\nWe’ve tried to predict our future based on their existence.  We will win the war.  Victors don’t make assassination attempts.  We know that at some point in the 2600s, the American government realized that their program would be unsuccessful, and the remaining equiptment fell into the hands of private citizens.  We know that China and America share military secrets.  We can find no trace of Japan, so we assume that they lost their war.\n\nWe haven’t shared this information.  If they have a protection force similar to ours, they’re keeping it to themselves.  If they don’t, we can assume no attempts have been made on the Emperor’s life.\n\nOur greatest concern is assassination in the years before our division was founded. However, the Leader remembers no unusual events, and his ancesteral line was unaltered.  We’ve theorized that another group of temporal soldiers protected him then, but left it in our hands once he rose to power.  Our records would be invaluable to future generations, and eliminating us would wipe those records from existence.\n\nWe haven’t been able to interrogate them.  The soldiers who aren’t killed commit suicide in seconds, and their bodies disappear in a flash of light.  The rogues’ bodies usually remain, and autopsies have revealed significant changes to their biology.  Implants made of an unidentified material.  Evidence of advanced surgical techniques.  Unfortunately, we can’t use this knowledge to our advantage without the equipment to properly analyze it.\n\nWith every attempt, our efficiency increases.  Assurance of victory raises morale, and every dead traveler is proof that the Leader will not be killed.\n"
  title: Ansatz
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Jason Frank
  date: 2008-02-21
  day: 21
  month: '02'
  text: "Dear Fontilibus Corporation rescue crew, space explorers, other would be rescuers, or whom it may concern,\n\nHow are you?\n\nGood, I hope. Whether or not you’ve found my remains,it should be clear to you that I’ve been better. If I were alive, we would be talking right now and you wouldn’t be reading this. I hope you do read this. It’s just a small little card. It shouldn’t take more than five minutes to read.\n\nWhether or not you are from the Fontilibus Corporation, I want to take this time to detail some of my experiences with their fine product, the Xcape5000. For the most part, this product has met and exceeded my expectations. I’ll elaborate a bit before moving on to the one or two little complaints I have.\n\nMuch to my surprise, I escaped the destruction of the fleet frigate I was serving on. The same can’t be said for the rest of the crew as whatever destroyed the ship did so rather unexpectedly. I myself was napping in this pod at the time. I woke up surrounded by some very familiar looking debris. Clearly this was my ship. I’m sure it was Johnson’s arm that floated past my little window. How many hours I had spent watching that arm, the way it coyly bent while holding a drink, the quick spring of it unbending to throw that drink in someone’s face. I can’t tell you how long I’ve had to think about that arm down here.\n\nThe Xcape5000 not only got me out of that pickle, it also found me the human life supporting planetoid you are currently standing on. Two for two! I was so happy to be alive that I celebrated. I ate and ate and drank and drank and sang and sang all the songs I could remember.\n\nThis would be a good time to segue into some of the less satisfactory features of the Xcape5000.\n\nFirst of all, the food supplies included in the pod weren’t completely adequate. They really should factor in the celebration factor when determining how much food they pack.\n\nSecondly, the quick responding Fontilibus Rescue Crew, they all looked so attractive in the brochure, turned out to be not so quick to respond. The brochure guaranteed a speedy pickup and I was a bit disappointed with this.\n\nOn the bright side, those slugs you’ve noticed squirming all around turned out to be completely edible and the pregnant ones secrete some fluid that packs quite a buzz.They’re fun to toss, too. You might have passed a black rock on your way here. That’s what I use to mark my longest throw (both feet behind the pod’s tail fins). So, as you can see, I’ve had plenty to do. When my arm would get sore from tossing slugs, I would read and reread the technical manual for the Xcape5000. That’s when I found about one more brilliant feature of this fine escape pod.\n\nIt turns out that this, and all Fontilibus escape models, has a self destruct sequence. I sure was tempted to engage it when I found that out. Instead, I decided to think about it while tossing some slugs. I came up with a happy little thought that kept me warm at night and kept me going until whatever it was that I finally succumbed to. See, it was an easy matter to rig the destruct sequence to the motion sensors outside the pod. The only problem was, how do you get someone to stand close by for the five minutes it takes to arm?\n"
  title: To Whom It May Concern
  year: 2008
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2008-02-22
  day: 22
  month: '02'
  text: "“I’m not one of your lab monkeys, I’m your investor, so don’t give me any more of your scientific jargon.” Mr. Bates pointed his cowboy hat at Dr. Copenhagen. “Don’t tell me about electrons, tell me about how your machine will send Leroy running home with his tail between his legs during the holiday ball at the Hague.”\n\n“Leroy? I’m sorry Mr, Bates, I don’t follow.”\n\n“Leroy Holkins runs the Holkin Institute of Science. He rubs some award in my face every time the holiday ball comes around.” Mr. Bates clenched his fists. “This year, I want to stuff it up his nose.”\n\n“Right, well, our discovery cannot fail to impress him.” Dr. Copenhagen motioned for Mr. Bates to follow him towards the labs.  “One principle of science is that if you observe anything, you change it,” said Dr. Copenhagen.\n\n“Doesn’t seem right.  My hat is still a hat if I’m not looking at it.” Mr. Bates face scrunched. “How can you look at something without watching?”\n\n“We-“\n\n“Never mind, I don’t want to know. Just tell me how I can rub this in Leroy’s face.”\n\nThe florescent light gleamed on the top of Dr. Copenhagen’s bald head. “My team has found a way to observe without observing, to watch the inside of a closed box. Sir, this fundamentally changes the way we perceive everything. Experiments once proven will have to be tested again. It will change science forever.”\n\n“Even for Leroy?”\n\n“Yes, even your friend Leroy.”\n\n“Have you been listening? The man isn’t my friend. Just show me what you’ve cooked up.”\n\n“If you come this way, I’ll give you a demonstration.” Dr. Copenhagen motioned Mr. Bates though a set of double doors. In the middle of the laboratory, on a sturdy, steel table was a mirrored glass sphere. It was a five foot high imperfect sphere, marred and scored, like it had been crumpled and clumsily rebuilt. A tangle of wires connected the sphere to a row of monitors. Mr. Bates saw his reflection distorted in the surface.\n\n“This is it?”\n\n“This is our triumph.”\n\n“It looks old,” said Mr. Bates, rubbing his chin. “This thing feels like, I don’t know how to say it, but like an old church.”\n\n“Sir, I’m not sure what you mean. We constructed this a month ago in this laboratory. It’s appearance is dictated by it’s function, a necessity- “\n\n“Never mind Doctor. Just show me what it does.”\n\n“I’ve prepared a simple chemical reaction for you to observe. If you would just turn to the monitors, you will notice a flask on the screen. This flask is located inside of the machine. Keep your eyes on it while I engage the process.”\n\nMr. Bates turned to the monitors, studying the glass vial. Dr. Copenhagen scrambled to the back of the sphere and took a crooked knife out of his coat pocket. He hacked at his left wrist, splitting the skin along a pink scar. Smearing the blood along a break in the glass, Dr. Copenhagen watched as the smoke rose from his blood and the glass crackled, then grew to close the gap in the shattered mirror.\n\nIn the newly grown mirror, The Others stared out at him. They were smoke and terror, sharp edges and swift movements. Dr. Copenhagen flicked his bloody wrist over the glass. “Just do it, you bastards.” He muttered. The Others flit over the mirrored surface, sucking the droplets of blood though the glass.\n\n“I don’t see anything happening yet,” said Mr. Bates.\n\n“Just a few moments,” said Dr. Copenhagen. “It’s about to begin.”\n"
  title: Observation
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Steven Saus
  date: 2008-02-23
  day: 23
  month: '02'
  text: "Inside, she was free.\n\nHer consciousness flitted from desktop to watch to media player.  Her sight was composited from surveillance videos, streaming webcams, and a million stuttering stills uploaded from cameraphones.  She flexed her arms, and cranes swung thousand-pound loads, drawbridges opened, and floodwalls moved on electric motors.  With a wriggle of her fingers, rising gates freed a herd of cattle, electricity sparked through transformers, and the monotone motions of a hundred assembly-bots gained a little unpredictability. Her legs were wheels and stilts and foundations.  She was not afraid of the wheels Inside;  they could not hurt her here.  She twirled and laughed and danced across fibers, wires, and empty air.\n\nReality sparked twice and dissolved into the static white noise of pain.\n\n“Sorry, Sissy,” her Nana said.  The disconnected wire lay limp in her hand.  She could almost see Inside, just on the other side of a fiber optic tube.  She looked up.  Her reflection was twisted and broken in her Nana’s glasses, though the glasses themselves were fine.  The sour smell of her own urine wafted into slowly reactivating nostrils.  “It’s time for your bath.”\n\nOutside, she was trapped in the ruined stumps of limbs, the burned skin screaming with pain, her charred vocal cords useless.  Her Nana began to gently wash her, the soft cotton cloth scraping sandpaper against the healing wounds.  If tears popped the soap bubbles on her cheek, no one could tell.\n"
  title: Domestically Disabled
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Neil Griffith
  date: 2008-02-24
  day: 24
  month: '02'
  text: "Allan sighed and took a deep breath.\n\n“I’m from the Olympus Mons colony, I was a kid when it happened.”\n\n‘It’ didn’t require any explanation, all the worlds knew of Olympus Mons.  With over 3000 people tragically killed, it was the greatest disaster ever to happen to humanity off of the surface of the Earth.  The event was the Titanic of its era, it even had a classic twist of the folly of man, building a colony in the base of a giant mountain, said to be indestructible by an infamous quote from the colony’s founder.  “Whatever disaster may beset the face of Mars, people may seek shelter at Olympus. No home is safer than the home of the Gods.” The largest habitat ever built at the time, no one attempted to equal its scale for a decade.\n\nBecause of the thousands of hours of surviving electronic footage, Olympus Mons was also one of the greatest documented disasters of all time.  Despite that fact there remained one mystery, as much as was known about the events immediately following the disaster, very little was known of the actual cause.  Many conflicting tales of what caused the east side of the mountain to collapse onto the superstructure of the colony cropped up over the years.  The Mars government said there was an earthquake from rare tectonic stress causing a landslide.  The survivors, however, always gave a very different tale.\n\n“Did you want to talk about it?” asked the attractive woman Allan had just met.\n\nAllan smiled and swirled his drink a little.  He was used to this.\n\n“It was an accident,” said Allan.\n\n“How do you know?” asked the woman.\n\n“My family remained inside the colony for almost an hour after it happened,” said Allan, “We were in a part of the structure furthest away from the collapse.  My father took his EVAC suit and climbed into the wreckage in the upper part of the superstructure to rescue people.  But if someone wasn’t wearing an EVAC suit when all the outer walls get ripped open, there wouldn’t be anyone alive to find.”\n\n“Did your father find what caused it to happen?” asked the woman.\n\nAllan shook his head yes and said, “Him and about a dozen others looking for survivors stood right in front of it.  There was a drill rig still standing there, right at the highest point they reached in the mountainside above where the land broke away.  He said you could easily see where a giant sheet of rock must have split from where they were drilling and it caused a landslide right into the superstructure.  The guy operating the rig must have been standing on the rock when it broke away and rode it all the way down.”\n\nThe intriguing charm slightly faded from the woman’s eyes and she had the typical look of shock and bewilderment Allan had known too well, then she asked why she never read about the real cause.\n\n“Nobody in space wants to read about accidents,” explained Allan, “Specifically ones caused by man.  When you live in an environment where you count so desperately on people to keep you alive it always has to be a million in one fluke, God’s will, or something else’s fault, but not man.  People cannot face the reality their lives are constantly at the mercy of somebody else’s incompetence.  It’s too much of a horror to deal with.  So blame it on the mountain, tectonic stress or some such nonsense.  It has nothing to do with the arrogance of man pushing too far and reaching too high.”\n"
  title: Survivor of Olympus Mons
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Paul Starkey
  date: 2008-02-25
  day: 25
  month: '02'
  text: "Vivienne awoke after nine, but lazed in bed for another hour before finally getting up and padding to the window.\n\nThe curtains drawn she had a perfect view of the garden, the tree branches hung with golden leaves, a carpet of leaves coating the ground, seeming to burn in the sunlight.\n\nIt was February, but here it was always autumn.\n\nHer gaze lifted over the treetops to Nottingham castle, perched high on a huge outcrop of grey rock. Today being Monday the castle was in its modern incarnation, an Italianate palace built where the original castle had stood. Tomorrow it would be remoulded to reflect its 13th century heyday.\n\nOn Wednesday there would be no castle at all, just bare rock.\n\nVivienne had lived here for two years, the exact amount of time that she had been Vivienne in fact.\n\nShe was a willowy brunette in her mid twenties, with the big brown eyes and pout of a famous old movie star, but forty years ago she’d been born Andrew John.\n\nThe view bored her; she turned and looked at the bed, the white sheets still rumpled from their lovemaking. Marc was long gone, off to work for some reason she couldn’t fathom. Nobody needed to work anymore.\n\nShe felt hollow inside. They’d been together two years but what did she really know about him? She didn’t know why he still worked, let alone who he’d been before Marc, anymore than he knew who she’d been.\n\nIt was time to move on. She’d put it off for weeks now, but the boredom wasn’t lifting.\n\nShe dressed simply; jeans, plimsolls and a sweatshirt, and then she left the bedroom for the last time.\n\nShe didn’t pack, didn’t take a thing. What would be the point?\n\nIn the kitchen she put a clod of earth into the Molecular Shuffler, set the controls and slammed the door. Thirty seconds later she was sat at the table drinking coffee while she pondered how to move on.\n\nIt didn’t matter. MSP- the Molecular Shuffle Process- had eradicated poverty thirty years ago, and along with it greed and crime. Everything you ever wanted could be yours so what was the point in covetousness? Eaten too much and put on weight? No worries, MSP will trim the fat. Getting old? Don’t fret, MSP will peel the years away. Always wanted to be taller? A boy? A Girl? Black instead of white?\n\nIn 2097 imagination was the only limit humanity had left.\n\nShe left the mug on the table; Marc would clear it away when he came home. If he came home.\n\nShe didn’t care. She was moving on.\n\n* * *\n\nIt was two years later and Douglas was stood at the window of his 59th street apartment, staring down at Central Park.\n\nIt was July but the park was covered in a crisp coating of snow. It was beautiful but he barely noticed anymore.\n\nHe laid a palm against the glass, enjoying the contrast of his dark skin against the whiteness, if only for a moment before the boredom returned.\n\nAmber had left two days before. Douglas had gone to the theatre but she’d stayed behind complaining of a headache. When he returned her clothes were still in the wardrobe, her papers still on the desk, but she was gone, and he knew she wouldn’t be back.\n\nHe sighed. It was time again, the hollowness was returning as it always did. Steven, Vivienne, Douglas. Baghdad, Nottingham, New York. It didn’t matter.\n\nHe put some dirt in the Molecular Shuffler and wondered how to move on…\n"
  title: Moving On
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2008-02-26
  day: 26
  month: '02'
  text: "When we were both sixteen, we made a pact. We said to each other that we would never race ahead without each other. Now we’re eighteen and I barely see you.\n\nI’ve had a whole arsenal installed in my arms and head. You cook the food in the cafeteria. You weren’t picked. Something in the genes, they said. I pleaded your case but they didn’t listen. We drifted.  I got the full scholarship.\n\nI stand in front of you and there’s an awkward pause after you’ve squeezed the ice cream scoop of mashed potatoes onto my plate. You’re looking at me with an eyebrow playfully raised. I scan you and I can see that while you’re acting nonchalant, your heart rate is triple what it usually is.\n\nOne of the reasons we drifted is because it became obvious to me after my augmentation that you were in love with me and you always had been. I’m not a good actor so it became obvious to you that I knew how you felt and didn’t feel the same way.\n\nAfter the classification process terminated and we were put in different categories, I didn’t have a chance to explore how I felt about you.  I might have loved you back, given time.  Well, that’s kind of weak, I suppose.  If you know, you know. That’s what I hear in the pop songs. So I guess I didn’t love you. Luckily I was too busy to ever have ‘the talk’ with you.\n\nI heard you’d decided to stay in the school and major in science. You’d never see any field work but you’d probably design weapons I’d be using one day.\n\nNow here you are. Working in the cafeteria so that you can pay the bills and looking at me and you still want me. All of a sudden I feel like I’m standing in a soup line.\n\nI guess neither of us were very smart.\n"
  title: Special School
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Catherine Preddle
  date: 2008-02-27
  day: 27
  month: '02'
  text: "Wheeze.\n\nI struggle to snatch a breath, wondering with each one if I’ll get the chance to have another.  Life’s never felt so fleeting and basic as I fight with its raw elements, breathing and trying to keep the blood pumping round my withered body.\n\nWheeze.\n\nAnother tortuous intake of vital air and another rasping death rattle from my sunken chest.  So this is it, my last moments of life.  My mind is foggy with the pain, I can’t remember how old I am, but I know I’m only middle-aged.  I’ve had a full life, but it’s been cut short; I haven’t finished yet.  There is so much more to accomplish, experience and appreciate.  Like seeing my children have children, like watching the sun setting behind the pyramids in Egypt, like catching the new Bond movie due out on Friday.  Panic sets in – “I haven’t finished,” I shout out inwardly, “I haven’t finished yet!”\n\nWheeze.\n\nI look up into the worried faces of the visitors clustered around my bed.  All going through their own personal anguish: shame at how they treated me sometimes in life, guilt about things unsaid, anxiety about one day meeting the same fate that confronts them in this hospital bed.\n\nWheeze.\n\nAnother thought pops up, something that’s been niggling for a while.  A craving that never dies.  I could kill for a fag right now, one last drag.  The sweet relief of that first inhale; the slow release of smoke and stress on the exhale.  Oh, the irony of dying for a cigarette, literally dying for the sake of cigarettes …\n\nTime stands still as I wait for my next heaving breath, but it doesn’t come.  Instead my chest tightens and my eyes flicker round the room at all the people I’m leaving behind.  My hand clutches my throat as I try to splutter some last words that will never be spoken.  “No,” I scream inside, “I’m not ready … wait!”\n\n***\n\nThere is a brilliant white light so bright that it burns into the back of my eyes.  My head is spinning and I feel as nauseous as hell, but I’m alive, I’m alive!!\n\n“Please, Mr Benson, lie still.  Disorientation will wear off in a few moments.”\n\nSuddenly, like the flash from a plasma rifle, my memories return.  I know who I am and why I am here.  I’m also vaguely aware that the technician is still talking to me … “What did you think, Mr Benson?  Quite an old memory that one, back when Aversion Therapy Ltd was just starting out.  An English male, 52, died in late 2006.”\n\nBut I’m not listening as I flee from that little sterile room, ripping out the wires still connecting me to the treatment computer as I go.  I’m too desperate to escape from the most frightening and intense experience of my life.\n\n“Hey!  There are other memories we can access.  There are thousands to choose from – lung cancer is only one way to go, you know.  Remember, you have to want to give up, Mr Benson …”\n\nThere’s only one thing I want to do right now – need to do to calm down.  Squeezing through the automatic doors of the clinic, I fumble inside my jacket pocket and with shaking hands retrieve the crumbled packet and my trusty lighter.\n"
  title: Constant Cravings
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2008-02-28
  day: 28
  month: '02'
  text: "The SS Furai was traveling at warp three through the Supaida Sector on a survey mission to look for planets that were suitable for human colonization.  A decade earlier, an unmanned probe had passed through the sector and reported numerous habitable planetary systems around two Type G stars, and four Type K stars.  Each of the star systems all had at least one terrestrial planet orbiting in the habitable zone, sometimes referred to as the “goldilocks zone.”  The Furai’s mission was to determine if any of the planets meet the criteria for human colonization; the plant-to-animal biomass ratio had to be 98.5 or higher, and no indigenous animal species could have an Intellect Potential (IP) above 64.2.\n\nThe first two star systems they surveyed were non-viable due to exceptionally high concentrations of animal mass.  They were approximately one hour from the third system when the ship unexpectedly came to a dead stop.  Fortunately, the inertial dampeners responded instantaneously and prevented any serious injuries.  “What the…,” snapped the Captain?  He pressed the intercom button.  “Chief, why have we dropped out of warp,”\n\n“I don’t know, sir.  The warp engines are still on-line.  They’re straining like hell too.  Did we hit something?”\n\n“Unknown, Chief,” he replied.  “Shut down the engines until we figure this out.  Ensign O’Toole, any idea what stopped us?”\n\n“Sensors readings are normal, sir.  Nothing unusual in the electromagnetic spectrum.  Graviton activity is typical.  Charged particle density is low.  Huh, this is unusual.  The quantum chromodynamic sensors show a tiny spike in the strong interaction color confinement.  But it’s barely above background.  I can’t believe that has anything to do with our situation.”\n\n“We need to be sure, Mister O’Toole,” responded the Captain.  “Take a science pod out, and have a look.”\n\nFifteen minutes later, O’Toole reported in.  “Captain, I’m approximately 10 klicks aft of your position.  I’ve adjusted my sensors to detect baryon waves.  It appears that you are caught in a 2D matrix of some kind.  From here, it looks like a large net that extends for light years in the Y and Z directions.”\n\n“Mister Kline, did the probe report this phenomenon?”\n\nThe science officer quickly accessed the records. “Captain, according to the logs, Earth lost contact with the probe before it surveyed this corridor.  It was presumed lost.  However, since the probe had mapped 95% of the sector, Central Command determined that it was not cost-effective to send another probe to complete the survey.”\n\n“What?  Protocol requires complete sensor mapping before manned vessels can enter a new system.  This is…”\n\nO’Toole’s voice interrupted the captain in mid sentence.  “Sir, I’m picking up a huge flux of fermions.  The density is increasing fast.  It’s off scale.  Sir, it looks like the signature for quark matter.  But I’ve never seen it this intense.  I’m transmitting the sensor data to Lieutenant Kline.”\n\n“Put it on the main viewer, Mister Kline,” ordered the captain.\n\nThe viewscreen at the front of the bridge showed an unmagnified image of the Furai entangled in a faint 2D network.  Suddenly, a glowing semi-transparent anomaly three times larger than the ship entered the field of view.  It moved toward the ship and began to encapsulate it with long string-like filaments similar in appearance to the 2D net.\n\n“Damn.  Red alert,” shouted the captain.  “Raise shields.  Charge the hull plates, maximum intensity.  Tactical, bring weapons on-line.  Target that creature and fire everything we have.  Helm, full impulse power, and initiate a barrel-roll, maximum sustainable RPM.  Chief, I need warp engines, now.  If we can’t break free of this web, we’re all dead.”\n"
  title: The Supaida Snare
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Scott E Meyer
  date: 2008-02-29
  day: 29
  month: '02'
  text: "“Some of what you are about to read you will think is science fiction, ” said the front of the dust jacket, “But I assure you, dear reader, that it is not.  It is based on sound scientific principles with which we are all familiar.” Edgar skipped on.  The book looked dry, windy and boring, but Edgar liked dry, windy and boring.  He amused himself, picking out the long words to see if he could pronounce them, words like “supersymmetry,” “quantum fluctuations,” and “unified field theory.”  For a minute, he allowed himself to be absorbed by what this Dr. Ledbetter had to say.  He imagined the world as Ledbetter imagined, a world of free energy, travel to the stars, transmutation of matter and all the dreams he had ever had coming true.\n\nEdgar looked up, curious as to which section of the bookstore he had stumbled into.  To the left were Bigfoot Sightings, UFO’s, and the Loch Ness Monster.  To the right were alien abductions and government conspiricies.  Not an auspicious place to find the missing secrets of the universe. He flipped to the back of the dust jacket, the author’s biography.  It seems this Dr. Ledbetter had been laughed off stages and out of seminars for years before finally vanishing only a few years ago.  He had only published one book, the very book Edgar held in his hands.\n\nEdgar frowned.  As much as he wanted to believe, wanted to be caught in the mystery and play with the secrets Ledbetter claimed to reveal, he couldn’t bring himself to take the man seriously when the entire scientific community had already laughed him into obscurity. He placed the book back on the shelf, determined to find something of value in this bookstore.\n\nThe secrets of the universe would have to wait for another generation.\n"
  title: Secrets of the Universe
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Lucas Atkinson
  date: 2008-03-01
  day: '01'
  month: '03'
  text: "In my dream I am wandering through Babylon. Prostitutes linger on every street, thieves wait at every corner. Barefoot children look at me as I pass; shopkeepers watch me too, from shadowed doorways, behind flags and tables piled with weapons and fruit. In the distance buildings rise – the courts, full of judges with grins and thick expensive robes; their eyes narrow as they smile, the markets with a subtle finger cheating every scale , the temples with their rows and rows of idols shaped like writhing snakes or women with many breasts or birds with teeth and human hands. The Babylon of my dream is also the New York of my childhood – the pickpockets dressed in rags mingle with gangs implanted with flashing fluorescent tattoos. As I pass them, their smiles are them same.\n\nEvery night, I wander through those streets again. On the ship, the narrow corridors seem lonely, and I am afraid the next turn will lead me there, to that place, and the scrubbed metal will give way to the mud, the brick, the littered streets. Sometimes I think I can smell the city – perhaps, behind the sweat of the crew and the scent of engine oil, might that be the faintest hint of the city’s open sewer? Of sun-baked stone? Of sour incense?\n\nI can see it in the eyes of the crew as well. They are dreaming of the city too. They too are afraid that they will turn a corner and find themselves in the market, or one of the many shadowed alleys. When we eat meals together, the crew does not converse. The city is our other cargo, an unwanted twin to the one in our hull.\n\nWhen we first met them they only farmed. They could not  transport food more than a few miles; none of their villages numbered more than a few hundred. When we gave them what we knew – techniques, know-how, theory – their villages moved, changed, conglomerated. The largest was not far from where the ship landed. “We call the city Babylon,” they tell me in fluting voices. They pause. They are smart; they can read human faces already. “Is this a name you know?”\n\nIn the dream, behind the markets and the temples, there is a great structure. It was a tower once; now it is collapsed. Its form against the blue sky is ragged, like a wound.\n"
  title: Parasite
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Christopher Kueffner
  date: 2008-03-02
  day: '02'
  month: '03'
  text: "“I thought you didn’t smoke,” she asked.\n\n“I did, and I quit,” he replied through a bluish cloud, “but it seems an appropriate time to pick up the habit again.”\n\n“Really,” she drew the word out as if stretching it like taffy.  “That could very well be the most ridiculous statement I’ve ever heard from you, and that’s saying something.”  She got out of the bed and walked over to the kitchenette.  She filled a glass with water and drank it, unworried by her nakedness.\n\nThe man, also naked, took another drag from his cigarette. “A cigarette after sex is nice.”  He contemplated the little pillar of ash at its end.  “I’ve found something.”\n\n“Oh?” She absently picked a feather from the bed off of her right breast.\n\n“Yup.”\n\n“What?”\n\n“An asteroid.”\n\n“Oh, come on,” she sniffed.  “Ever since that asteroid missed us a couple of years ago, everybody’s talking about asteroids.”  She sat down on the edge of the bed and handed him the glass.  He sipped, looked fondly at her body and handed the glass back to her.\n\n“Well, I found one, nevertheless.”  He stubbed out the cigarette in a saucer on the nightstand.  He leaned over and kissed her side where the waistband of pants would normally be.  He kissed his way up her ribcage.\n\n“What was it called, Aprophis or something?” she asked.\n\n“Apophis was the one that just barely missed us in 2029,” he stopped kissing her body and lay back.  “This one is not Apophis; it’s a different one.”\n\n“What, is it going to hit us or something?”\n\n“Well, yes.”  He drew another cigarette out of the pack.\n\n“You’re kidding, right?”\n\n“I’m sorry, but I’m not.”  He lit the cigarette and dragged deeply on it.\n\nShe put the water glass on the nightstand and rested her hand on his chest.  “What will it do?  They said that last one, Aprophis, I mean Apophis, would have wiped out a big city.”\n\n“Yes, but life on Earth would have continued.  This one gives every appearance of being bigger, denser and faster.”\n\n“I thought they were looking out for these things,” she furrowed her brow, “I thought they had all these asteroids charted out.”\n\n“There’s an awful lot of space out there, and an awful lot of stuff flying around.  The prevailing theory around the office is that this is a charted asteroid, but it got close enough to another one for its orbit to change.”\n\n“Around the office!” she blurted incredulously, “You mean other people know about this?”\n\n“Yes.  We’ve all checked and rechecked the data.  The Director has been informed, too.”\n\n“So the government knows, too,” she got up and grabbed the robe from its hook on the bathroom door.  She wrapped it around her body and held it close as if it were woven of asteroid-proof cotton.  She looked at him again.  “You’re not bullshitting me, are you?”  Her tone had acquired a bewildered, accusatory edge.\n\n“No,” he shook his head and sat up.\n\n“Well, what are they doing about it?”\n\n“I’m not sure anything can be done.  There wouldn’t be much point, other than to cause mass hysteria.”\n\n“You mean they can’t shove it out of the way or dig some shelters underground?”  She paced and gestured sharply with her hands.\n\n“Not in six hours, no.”  He put out the cigarette.  “Would you take that robe off and come here?”\n"
  title: Go out with a Bang
  year: 2008
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2008-03-03
  day: '03'
  month: '03'
  text: "“When the Surface became too crowded, Man had already hollowed out great caves in the crust of the Earth, mined for metals with which to build his towers. It was simple for those who desired space to move downwards, found the first cities of the UnderEarth.”\n\n-Excerpt from The Laws of the UnderEarth\n\nTestimony of Arla, The Insane\n\nEleanor was burning, her pelvis felt blistering to touch. Her breath came out wet and hot, like steam from a kettle. She stumbled forward in the darkness, one hand on her swollen belly, the other clutching the cave wall\n\nEleanor thought again of turning back, of the hospital of Under Shanghai, it’s doctors clad in sunflower yellow. Then she felt the Fury, like before, that wash of emotion that had driven her deeper into the uninhabited caves. She stepped forward into cold, wet mud and the Fury abated, as it always did when she obeyed.\n\nEleanor cried out with another burning contraction and stumbled into the mud. She crawled forward, the blue light of her glow necklace showing only her muddy hands and darkness. Eleanor heard the soft gurgle of water ahead and the sound made her thirsty. She wanted to embrace the water, to be surrounded by it, to drown.\n\nEleanor touched the surface of the lake. She slid into the water, like a bubbling volcano meeting the sea. The light of her glow necklace reflected off the surface of the dark water. The caves extended farther than her light could reach, deep and long.\n\nEleanor leaned her head into the mud on the shore and let her body float in the water. Her contractions quickened and she felt her molten center squeeze, pressure building. She cried out, feeling herself tear, her blood leaking from her, the head building, pushing out from inside her body.\n\nShe felt the Fury approach, close, closer and then there was cold flesh, snaking around her legs and arms and neck. She struggled, burning, her baby fighting inside her. The wet flesh slapped against her neck, pulled her under and pushed her up, gasping. Eleanor screamed. The Fury pulled on her throat and Eleanor sobbed. She pulled off her necklace, her only light, throwing it back the way she came, back into the dark.\n\nThe Flesh was soft now, supple, supportive. It cradled her. Eleanor felt something scratch the small of her back and relaxed, cold and calm. The contractions were coming fast now. Eleanor felt her body pushing and some other force pulling the child out of her. Instead of the Fury, Eleanor felt the silence, vast and old. Then she was empty.\n\nThere was a splash of moving water and Eleanor felt something rise before her in the darkness, something massive. The flesh around her quivered and she could see, in dim outlines, thin shapes snaking towards her.\n\nHer eyes adjusted and she could see a black outline in the dark, tentacles and the shape of her baby. Eleanor squinted and thought she saw glistening eyes and dark moving shapes. Eleanor reached out for her child, towards the huge, alien shape.\n\nThe baby’s eyes opened. Its pupils were red as lava. Eleanor felt the flesh around her quiver. The mind that had touched hers, great and old was deciding if it should keep the baby or sink back into the water. Eleanor felt her mind go clear, go dark.\n\nThe UnderEarth God enveloped the baby for a long moment. Then it held the infant out to Eleanor. She took her baby and brought its molten mouth to her breast.\n"
  title: Dark Water
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Sam Clough
  date: 2008-03-04
  day: '04'
  month: '03'
  text: "Below level one-one, there have been several issues with the life support mechanisms. High temperatures, pressures, and an abundance of certain harmful chemical compounds have rendered these levels uninhabitable. You will require a blue keycard to pass the environmental filters, and even so, such an action is not recommended.\n\n“Ash!” Peter yelled, scanning around for his companion. Ash and Peter were regular visitors to the zero-levels, part of a small cadre of ‘smokers’: people who explored and mapped the zero-levels. They repaired essential machinery, looted non-essential gear, and created maps. The only real danger any more was the smoke, and that was most of the appeal in and of itself.\n\nThe grating underfoot was heating up. His helmet was analysing the smoke: as they penetrated lower, the percentage of sulphur was increasing. This was level zero-three, the last level that had been reliably mapped. Any further down, and the corridors couldn’t be relied upon to stay in the same place from day to day. Peter dragged his fingers across the wall to his left. A long string of plastic stretched away from his fingertips, and he swore. The wall was searing hot, and he’d just reduced the integrity of his gloves. The choking smoke was only getting thicker.\n\nAsh was nowhere to be seen.\n\nPeter’s helmet picked up and amplified a skittering sound coming from beneath his feet. There was a hole to his right. In the smoke, forethought was a luxury that most couldn’t afford. It had killed a good number of people that had paused when they should have jumped. He dropped through the hole, landing safely on zero-two.\n\nThe visibility was down to about a metre, so Peter upped the power on the primitive radar built into his suit. A faint return came back from the corridor to his left. Ash. He chased it down, radar traces mapping the outlines of the corridor onto his visor.\n\nHe was moving too fast. He never saw the floor fall away beneath him. He crashed down onto zero-one, and promptly blacked out.\n\nPain screaming along his arm and across his back dragged him back to consciousness. The skin of his suit had melted to the floor where he’s struck it. The radar unit was damaged, emitting at only irregular intervals. Someone dragged him to his feet, something clacked against his visor.\n\n“You’re in a bad way, Peter. I’ve found somewhere safe to rest, but you have to trust me. Do you trust me?”\n\n“Yes!”\n\nAsh took hold of Peter’s good arm, and started to drag him along, running through corridors that were slowly drifting, semi-liquid due to the heat. Peter dimly wondered how he could move with such surety. Suddenly, their run sloped downwards. Zero-zero. Still, Ash didn’t stop. With a last burst of speed, he dragged Peter through one more corridor, and down through a hole.\n\nThey fell – not far – onto a soft surface. The smoke was gone. In a daze, Peter stared upwards. Another suited individual was pushing a hatch shut and sealing it. Ash propped himself up, and pulled Peter’s helmet off him. The small compartments and corridors that Peter had known all his life were missing: they were laying on grass, the air was sweet and clear. Soft light permeated the area. There were trees in the distance, showing up sharp against the bulkhead. There were plants growing in neat rows.\n\n“Welcome to Agriculture One, Peter.”\n"
  title: Smoke
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Jacinta A. Meyers
  date: 2008-03-05
  day: '05'
  month: '03'
  text: "A man lay limp in my arms. The body of a little boy was sprawled a few feet away from us, his young face motionless against the blood-stained earth.\n\n“I will stay with you through this.” I said, stroking the man’s face very gently. “I won’t leave you.”\n\nHe coughed a little, grit his teeth.\n\nThis was my least favorite part. I had only seen an unmaking twice before this. It’s different from death. In an unmaking, the body disintegrates before your very eyes. The DNA in every cell actually unwinds, each reverting to a more primitive state until they cannot hold a recognizable form, cannot continue to function as a complex whole organism. It’s a relatively quick process compared to the amount of time it takes a human being to develop over the course of a lifetime. The rate of change is comparable to the development of a fetus, only in reverse. I watched the wrinkles fading from his face.Very soon this man would be nothing more than a puddle of inert, inorganic matter.\n\nHis eyes roved slowly over to the boy still lying in the grass. “Why?” He managed.\n\n“Because I had to.”\n\nHe sputtered a bit. “I only came back to tell myself I had a future to be hopeful for. I can remember being so… so despondent then…”\n\n“I had to kill you. That is our job. The past must be protected at all costs.” I said it as I had been trained to. “Through it, we are protecting our future.” He would understand, if he still could.\n\nHe was shrinking in my arms. Growing lighter, growing limper. A small trail of saliva ran down his chin. He shuddered. But something in his eyes hardened. “You…are wrong. There is… no way you can be sure.” He was fighting it. “You… may have damaged the future worse… than I might have. Worse… than you could ever know.”\n\nBut I was smiling. I held his diminishing body close. “There will still be a future for us to be hopeful for.” I said. “Shhh, it will be over soon.”\n\n“You… you broke the rules… you and your kind…”\n\n“Perhaps we did.” I whispered gently to what was left of his ear. “But you broke them first.”\n"
  title: Angel of Time
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2008-03-06
  day: '06'
  month: '03'
  text: "With those sleek shoulders and sculpted faceplate features, I would have guessed her be a Russian model.\n\nHard to tell with the standard techniques.  The criminals always had their own serial numbers sanded off and I2P addys scrambled.  I don’t know how it’s possible to live like that.\n\nI’d seen the initiation ceremonies for those involved in the ferrogangs.  I understood needing a sense of belonging but the bosses of those gangs were so brutal.  Plus, having your identifying marks removed in a shower of sparks just didn’t seem to me like something that a friend would do.\n\nI was made by a good parent company, though.  Still in business, still under warranty, still protected.  I guess I’d never really know what it would take to become like the unit here in the interrogation chair in front of me.\n\nI had guessed her make to be a relatively recent design going by trends.  I’d have to check the catalogues.  Wear and tear made her look to be about thirty kilocycles old.  She was more likely sixteen with no repairs or upkeep.  I’d never know her serial number but at least I’d able to pinpoint year, make, and O-stats with a little research.\n\nHer chipsets were a mess.  They’d been booby-trapped, privacy-looped and dust-locked to the point that it was a wonder she could form rational sentences.  A low-level soldier for the gang, I’d say.  Expendable to the point of being borderline scrap.\n\nI had the wiretap link spooling across the table from my head to hers.  It was touch and go.  I was sniffing around in her head to find evidence without tripping a defense charge that would kill her.  She sat silently during the process.  She knew that her life was in my hands.  She had to trust that I was a careful detective.\n\nColleagues of mine cared less about the fates of units like this.  I had seen fellow officers hook up, go in and laugh when their clumsy antics triggered their prisoner unit to freeze up and smoke.  Feeble excuses and a few months of probation later, they’d be back on the street.  It made my wires cross.\n\nI probed slowly, looking for something circumstantial that seemed harmless to her internal watchdog programs but might lead me to a physical location that we could search later for something more incriminating.\n\nTrawling through her memory directories, I found .3pegs and bitmap snapshots of units she’d allowed herself to love and save in non-password protected folders.  Their faces were pixilated to me, of course, but the backgrounds weren’t.\n\nThere.  A signpost in the background.  12th and Iron Ave.  Next to a rundown house that was a ferrogang hovel if I’ve ever seen one.\n\nFeigning boredom so as not to alarm her, I copied the shots into a viral protected temp folder in my memory and jacked out.\n\nShe looked up at me.  “Find anything, sparkpig?” she asked with a sneer.\n\n“No.  You’re free to go.  Don’t leave town, though.  We might need to ask you more questions later.” I said.\n\n“Screw you, bolt-fucker.” She said.\n\nI buzzed for the flatfoots to come in and escort her out.\n"
  title: Siliquestioning
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2008-03-07
  day: '07'
  month: '03'
  text: "He’d always known about them.\n\nWhen it snowed, Arwik lived in abandoned buildings.  He slept in the rusted creases of abandoned subway tunnels to escape their satellites, and he ate whatever he could forage.  He found a lot in disposal bins, but he’d never tried to eat it.  People poisoned that stuff, he knew.\n\nThey injected tracking devices into his skin when he slept.  Often he’d find an unexplained pockmark on his body, something that looked like an insect bite, but he knew what was inside of it.  He used to try to gouge it out, but he soon realized that they’d used nanites. Thousands of silicon creatures, eating him from the inside out.\n\nNo one believed these things.\n\nAt first, he’d tried to warn people.  He tried on the subways and on the streets, but everyone walked by with their eyes firmly on the ground.  They could come for anyone, he said.  They could come for you.  Arwik hadn’t wanted anyone to get hurt.\n\nNow, it was about survival.\n\nSometimes he saw the cops on the street and felt their sideways glances.  Sometimes he couldn’t see them at all, but felt their eyes as they watched him through the scope of a sniper rifle.  Arwik had seen those rifles, watched them in movies as a child.  He knew the power of invisibility.\n\nOnce, they’d cornered him on the L train.  The trackers, he knew. The goddamn trackers.  They always knew where to find him.  They offered help, but he knew what help meant.  Scalpels and brainwashing. His eyes held open with wires as he would be forced to watch propaganda.  Drugged with truth serum and forced to confess to everything he knew about them.  He’d be executed in an electric chair, or shot at point-blank range in a seedy alleyway.  Sometimes he wished that he hadn’t been smart enough to figure them out.  If he hadn’t known the truth, they might have left him alone.\n\nArwik ran, dashing up slush-covered subway stairs until he found a dumpster in a trash-filled alleyway.  The metal lids scrambled the signal, and surrounded by fish bones and plastic bags, he knew that he was almost protected.  They could have used dogs, but they didn’t. That time, he’d gotten away.\n\nIt’s impossible to know who’s real.  Some of them are brainwashed, or have given into the nanites.  Some of them might even be cyborgs.  Arwik has nowhere to turn.  No one is ever safe.\n"
  title: Arwik Razy
  year: 2008
- 
  author: V.L.Ilian
  date: 2008-03-08
  day: '08'
  month: '03'
  text: "“Linda Kroen! 155013! Report for duty”\n\nLinda didn’t exactly know why the crystalline voice of the ship AI was blaring her name but she wasn’t going to answer. It’s her day off.\n\n“Linda Kroen! It is estimated you only have 135 minutes until you expire. Report for duty!”\n\nThe impulses signaling the importance of the message and the impulse signaling that her mouth is full of blood were simultaneously received by Linda’s brain.\n\nStumbling out of bed she fell on the cold metal floor. She had sprayed blood all over while gasping for air but the room still looked sterile.\n\n“WHAT? Why?”\n\nHer radiation meter tattoo was black. The little patch of skin almost looked burned with a laser.\n\n“You’ve been exposed to lethal doses of radiation. You must make your way to the auxiliary bridge”\n\n“WHY? Where’s the captain?”\n\n“You are acting captain”\n\n“I’m a level 2 tech!”\n\n“Linda Kroen 155013: promoted to acting field captain by automated succession order on 27 Feb ‘47”\n\n“That’s today. Wher…” As she stood up her lungs filled and she coughed another spray of blood on the wall.\n\n“Ok… Situation report.”\n\n“Aces..Ac…Ac” The voice of the AI reverbed as if caught in an infinite loop. “Information limited. Data corruption. Sensor data shows extreme radiation spike approximately 2 hours ago. Uncorrupted log information begins 27 minutes ago as follows:\n\n– Cpt. Musa deceased, replacement not mentioned\n\n– automated succession order comes into effect. Linda Kroen 155013 selected.\n\n– Cpt. Kroen’s lifesigns fluctuating. Life expectancy: 14 minutes. Medical staff not available. Stimulants administered through ventilation. Massive internal bleeding probable. New life expectancy: 160 minutes\n\n– assessment of ship status begins\n\nCurrent situation:\n\n– large sections of hull missing”\n\n“You pumped me full of damn stims to wake me up? That’s why I’m bleeding from every pore.”\n\n“Your condition was critical captain”\n\n“This doesn’t make sense… the succession order goes by rank there are hundreds of people above me and… everybody’s dead.”\n\n“Linda Kroen 155013 is the highest ranking living crewmember. You must proceed to the auxiliary bridge to enable the main cannon.”\n\nThe new captain had already stepped out of the room leaving bloody footprints on the cold floor. Her heart was pounding, her eyes were sore but she was unfazed. Bodies littered the corridors.\n\n“Why am I still alive?”\n\n“You requested sick leave. That automatically creates a septic field in your quarters. Combined with your documented higher resistance to radiation it was enough to lower your exposure to the event. Next corridor, enter the lift.”\n\nAs Linda neared the lift its vents hissed open and flooded her senses with an electric feeling. The lift whirred down.\n\n“Who…?”\n\n“Data corrupted”\n\nThe doors opened and a body fell. The sound of his head hitting the metal floor seemed interesting to Linda. Vents hissed again in the corridor making her feel better.\n\nSkipping her way to the next lift she started thinking how cool it will be to tell her friends how fast she made captain. Rubbing the black tattoo on her arm and seeing everyone else’s was the same she spit out some blood.\n\nThe lift took her directly to auxiliary command. As soon as the doors opened she jumped into the swivel chair of the captain. Something snapped at landing but Linda was enjoying too much to notice.\n\n“Take a note! Effective tomorrow everybody can customize his or her tattoo.”\n\n“Acknowledged. Please authorize AI control of main canon.”\n\n“Who are we firing at again?”\n\n“Data corrupted”\n\nLinda logged into the console and switched all control options to AI.\n\n“…Good.”\n\nThe vents hissed loudly letting in welcomed euphoria. Captain Linda Kroen reclined, twirling, with a smirk on her face, as tears of blood ran from her eyes.\n\n“Stims are great…”\n"
  title: Sick Leave
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Phillip English
  date: 2008-03-09
  day: '09'
  month: '03'
  text: "Dust swirls past a naked lightbulb and out amongst the wire-brush scrub. There is an old man, mid sixties, seated on the verandah. In his lap lies a twelve gauge shotgun; it is broken open, showing two empty barrels. A cache of shells nestles in the flannelette next to the gun, rolling back and forth with each deep breath he takes. The only sound is the continual plink of a moth impacting against the glass of the bulb.\n\nA shuffling wakes the old man up, and he starts as he regains consciousness, spilling shells onto the hardwood slats. It’s the dog, a kelpie cross. It stands at the edge of where the greasy shine from the lightbulb fades into the night. Its back left leg is trembling and ticking. It stands there for a minute or so, and the old man stares at it. Eventually the dog lies down, sitting like a sphinx in the dirt and watching the old man bending down slowly to pick up the shotgun rounds.\n\nThere is silence once more; the moth has flown away to chase the spark of stars. The verandah’s joints creak as the man stands up. A puff of dirt floats in the now-still air between them as the dog springs to all fours. The man loads his gun and snaps back the barrel. The dog’s ears prick. He brings the rifle up to his shoulder and fires both barrels straight at the dog’s head. The dog is kicked back, and its body tumbles out into the darkness. The man swallows, licks his lips, and reloads.\n\nHe finishes tucking two more shells into their home just as the dog staggers back into th light again. Its lower jaw is stripped away, leaving a palate peppered with slivers of fang to pool bloody saliva onto the dirt. Added to this is a small string of silvery liquid, like mercury, dripping from the remains of its nose. It appears to be fighting against the flow of the blood; some of it succeeds in regaining its place within the confines of the dog’s skull.\n\nThe old man flips the barrels closed again and takes aim. The scratch of the gun against his stubble reminds him of the animals that he has destroyed. And not just animals. He fires once more, and the dog’s skull explodes in a silver streak, twisting the lightbulb’s feeble glow into a neon fuzz that settles slowly to the dirt.\n\nHe relaxes slightly, drops the gun from his shoulder, and stomps back to the seat on the verandah. There is time for sleep now; the flies will take until morning to discover the corpse and lay their eggs, before springing off in a perfectly controlled formation; a silver speck residing in each of their tiny brains, searching for its next, stronger host.\n"
  title: Outback
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Salli Shepherd
  date: 2008-03-10
  day: 10
  month: '03'
  text: "People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.   ~Iris Murdoch\n\nPothilas set his briefcase down on the hallstand and paused to appreciate the afternoon light that lent his white-on-white decor an almost sanctified air. The apartment was warm, he realised. Too warm. He hung up his Director’s robes and hurried toward the biotank in which Sverta lay limply, sunk deep in her fluid, her tubes and filaments rustling. The sun was unseasonably hot, and it wasn’t as though she had the freedom to shift away from its glare. He frowned and closed the drapes.\n\n“Sorry. Stuck in a Board meeting.”\n\nKneeling to adjust the tank’s temperature gauges and filters, Pothilas shook his head. Had he really just apologised? When he was satisfied that no damage had been done, he sat on the nearby sofa, studying Sverta’s vestigal nostril-slits and the smooth concavities where eyes might have grown. It was difficult to regard these new GenMods as little more than glorified tomato-bushes. Which was the whole point of them, really, but even he had to admit there was something inherently disturbing about the FructaFille prototypes.\n\nThe concept of the GenMod “companion plant” had been a stroke of genius on his part, and largely responsible for Pothilas’ rapid rise to the Directorship. GenCorp was banking on the thousands who’d happily part with a year’s salary for the sake of fresh produce and something semi-responsive to care for, when the alternative was standard ration synth-biscuits, mechpets and solitude. The World Genetics Council had finally decreed the experiments sound and classified the FructaFilles as plants, despite their features. Though perhaps those should be toned down somewhat; he’d talk to the Techs tomorrow.\n\nReaching forward, Pothilas plucked a ripe fruit from one of Sverta’s thicker tendrils. As he did, a spray of red flowers unfurled along her trunk and shoulders. Of course the way she quivered and blossomed at his touch could be nothing more than an animal– or rather, he amended quickly, a vegetable– reaction. Sverta’s tendrils stroked his chest and flower-buds burgeoned on her skin, bursting moments later into full display. Her perfume was unusually rich and heady today. Pothilas felt almost giddy with it as he bit into the fruit.\n\n“Delicious, my dear.”\n\nWhere the swell of a woman’s hip would begin, Sverta’s trunk branched into the root-ball from which she fed on nutrient-rich fluids below. Pothilas found himself wondering what it might be like were GenMods permitted fully-formed bodies. He frowned again. Clearly, he’d been too long without proper female company. Brushing Sverta’s vines aside, he hunted through sofa cushions for the neurophone unit.\n\nThat night, as he spent himself inside an elegant woman whose company per day cost one thousandth of a GenMod FructaFille, Pothilas groaned and clenched his teeth, his mind filled with a red dazzle of flowers. Sverta, in an adjacent room, drank their pheromones through her pores and swayed to the measured rhythms of the Earth, while bloom after bloom flourished on her body like fireworks in slow-motion.\n"
  title: All Gentleness And Its Enduring
  year: 2008
- 
  author: ifrozenspiriti.deviantart.com
  date: 2008-03-11
  day: 11
  month: '03'
  text: "The folds of her flesh draped like curtains over the sides of the hover-chair—rich and smooth, like brocade, and his eyes traced their undulating curves and rolls like sand-dunes in a desert. Eyes and lips formed an oasis: clear, moist, beckoning. And he was so thirsty. . . . The lips parted slightly, then, breath as dry and sweet as desert sun. “Kal. . . .”\n\n“Kal. Time’s up.” The electronic voice that called was just as dry as hers, but harsh where she was only saccharine. The edges of the Dream blurred and faded into nothingness, and he sat up as electrodes dropped, slack-lined, from the sides of his skull. The little cubic room blazed suddenly into brightness, and Kal maneuvered his hoverchair into the hall.\n\nA Dream-Guard stood outside, his hoverchair emblazoned with the badge of his office. Kal handed over his card. “25 credits worth of Dream,” said the guard in a voice of professional monotony. He stamped the card with a mechanical whirr and handed it back. “Hard work.”\n\n“And you.” Kal turned his hover-chair and hummed slowly down the hallway, his watery eyes still lost in the Dream’s oasis, the lumps and bulges of his body still pulsing with the heat of the Dream-voice.\n\nHe passed Rona on the way to his cubicle, her lipstick too red and smudged, eyes weak, lumps like dimples in the clay of her chin. No Dream-illusion, this. She smiled, puerile, and held up her card. “50 credits,” she squealed, a schoolgirl.\n\nHe smiled back, swallowing revulsion. “Hard work.” He ignored her response and positioned the hover-chair at his desk; he ignored the sounds of her procession down the hallway and flicked on his monitor. He rubbed his temples. He watched the numbers that crawled like insects across the screen—black, multiplexed, endless. He yawned, and noted the anachronism of his action. Hard work, he repeated: more a chastisement than a courtesy.\n\nIf he’d heeded his own advice, he’d still be where Rona was, where he’d been only minutes before, in the sweet embrace of Dream. . . . Oh, go to sleep, he told himself. He’d been ignoring the numbers; he’d have to go back and start again.\n\nHours passed and the symbols bulged and blurred together; Kal sucked a syrupy liquid from a tube to focus his attention. It tasted of honey and chemicals, a hint of cinnamon and sulfur. There was music in the background, the faint, metallic rustle of mechanized attempts at trumpets or xylophones. The rhythms pulsed below his hearing and the numbers marched to their tempo.\n\nSecond meal, and Kal loaded his tray without paying much attention to its contents, then moved to a table in a corner where Mera sat, already waiting.\n\nThey didn’t speak much. They never did. Words from the monitor behind them filled the void in conversation.\n\n(“Oh, go to sleep, Mike! I only agreed to this partnership so we’d get a room closer to the refectory!”)\n\nHe looked past her, past the lumps and lingering in her eyes. She was no Dream-illusion, either; he could never lose himself in the bulging billowing of her flesh.\n\n(“And you wonder why I wish I could sleep every night! So I’d have less time forced to look at you!”)\n\n“Hard work,” she said, finally, as they moved and made to leave, and he replied in kind, and his doing so was as scripted as his actions in his Dreams except in Dreams he didn’t realize this.\n\nHard work, he told himself.\n"
  title: Perchance to Dream
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Todd Keisling
  date: 2008-03-12
  day: 12
  month: '03'
  text: "Mrs. Taggart sat down at her desk and sipped her coffee while going over the day’s lesson plan.  When the clock struck eight, she set down her coffee, reached behind her ear and synced herself to the network.\n\nWhite, snowy static filled her eyes, and when she blinked, she found the virtual classroom before her.  A group of thirty students sat at their virtual desks, some attentive, some not so much.  She cleared her throat.\n\n“Good morning, class.”\n\n“Good morning, Mrs. Taggart,” they said.\n\nShe took the morning attendance, going over the connection log embedded in the virtual desk, and frowned when she saw Dave Johnson had not yet connected.  When she looked over at his desk, she saw his outline filled with the repeating text of “Error 404.” She frowned.  This was his fourth absence in two weeks.\n\nMrs. Taggart flagged his name, marked it “Schedule conference” and minimized her registry.\n\n“Today we will continue our lesson on human technology and the early 21st century.  Sarah Billings, from your homework, what can you tell me about the year 2012?”\n\nA young, blonde-haired girl sat up.  The surface of her desk flickered to life.  Mrs. Taggart grinned.\n\n“Without your personal Wiki, Sarah.”\n\n“Sorry, Mrs. Taggart,” Sarah frowned.  Her desk dimmed. “2012 was the year worldwide bandwidth consumption surpassed available bandwidth resources.”\n\nMrs. Taggart nodded.\n\n”Good.  What came next?  Um, let’s see . . . Phillip?  Can you answer that question?”\n\nPhillip fought back a yawn and answered, “The Bandwidth Crisis.”\n\n“Which is?”\n\n“Uh . . .”\n\n“Can anyone help him out?”\n\nAnother young man smirked and raised his hand.\n\n“Yes, Darian?”\n\n“The Bandwidth Crisis was a period of twelve years when civilization went down the tubes.”\n\nSome of his classmates chuckled.  Mrs. Taggart paused, thought it over and then nodded.\n\n“I suppose that’s true, Darian, but what did it mean, exactly, to civilization?”\n\n“It meant we’d overlooked the fact that bandwidth was a vital resource.  We ignored it, and when the tubes were clogged, our entire information structure collapsed.”\n\n“Good.  And to what did this lead?”\n\nA dozen hands went up.  This delighted her.  After a moment’s deliberation, Mrs. Taggart called upon Maggie Simmons.\n\n“It lead to the invention of the NeuralNet.”\n\n“That’s correct, Maggie.  Can you tell the class how this amazing invention works for us?”\n\nMaggie beamed.\n\n“Well, it means that we all sort of broadcast our own wi-fi signal via brainwaves.  All of our neural bandwidth is shared with the help of the transmitters implanted just behind the ear.”\n\n“Right,” Mrs. Taggart said. “And this is exactly how we’re able to have class without leaving our homes.  Using our brains as our own personal computers has revolutionized our way of life, and helped pull civilization out of an otherwise dark period.  This doesn’t mean the bandwidth issue has been resolved.  Since we all share our neural bandwidth, we must be sure not to exceed our daily allotm—”\n\nThe classroom shifted.  One of the students—Jeremy Daniels—was in the process of raising his hand, and continued to do so repeatedly.  Mrs. Taggart checked the students’ bandwidth stats.  She frowned and terminated Darian’s processes.\n\nJeremy Daniels stopped raising his hand.  Someone in the back of class said, “Major lag.”\n\n“Darian,” Mrs. Taggart shouted. “What did I tell you about looking at pornography during class time?  You know your bandwidth is to be used only for school.  Principal’s office.  Now.”\n\nShe initiated transfer protocol.  Darian vanished from his seat before he could say a word.\n\n“Right,” she said. “Back to the lesson.”\n"
  title: Down the Tubes
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Lane Powell
  date: 2008-03-13
  day: 13
  month: '03'
  text: "Leah was born in April 2310; her grandmother gave her the nickname “Spring Dragon Lily.” Her skin was white and thin as paper, and her eyes, red.\n\nShe slipped painlessly from her mother’s womb, like a bar of soap. The family gaped as she emerged, though they had known for months of her condition. Her father cradled her in his arms and weeped over her. Her mother stared, speechless.\n\nLeah’s family was brown-skinned, brown-eyed, black-haired, and almond-eyed; so was the world, she would soon learn.\n\n“Young dragon,” her grandmother would call as Leah danced in the yard. “Do not be too playful. Your skin might break.” Leah’s skin broke easily, and the blood stained her like wine on linen.\n\nThe cameras didn’t scare her. Even as a baby they loved her, and she didn’t yet know why. Brown-skinned camera men would stare at her through big glass eyes, capturing her for the world to see. The brown-skinned reporters would croon and caress her in between the questions to her still-dumbfounded parents.\n\nSoon she was old enough to attend school. The other children started in amazement at her skin and in awe at her all-too-blond hair, the color of the moon and flour. When she was outside the sun’s rays made her shine like the sun itself, but she would quickly grow red in agony. Nanites would fix that.\n\nOnce a small boy who could hardly walk saw her glow. His words were innocent: “Are you a god?”\n\nLeah’s grandmother was there to answer. “Yes,” she said, “a mighty dragon flower god!”\n\nHalf of the things people said to Leah were whispers, and her grandmother’s death came like a whisper. Dust settled on her skin as she lay in bed and whispered to her beloved, “Keep safe, Dragon Lily child,” and died. Her husband hung his head and prayed over her. Then he gazed mournfully at his granddaughter. “You’re beautiful,” he said to her. “You’re what kept her alive for so long. You’re her reminder of the old days, when we were children, when there was more than one race and people spoke languages other than English.” And he fell to his knees before her and cried on the hem of her skirt. His wife had been one hundred and twenty.\n\nThe death made the news. The brown reporters took the opportunity to interview the young Leah about her grandmother, and to take many pictures. The pictures would be viewed by brown-skinned, brown-eyed, black-haired people in America, Russia, Africa, Australia, Europe, Mars.\n\nLeah first saw her own picture on someone’s wall when she was thirteen. It was in a friend’s house, put up by the mother. Leah was unsurprised, for all the cameras.\n\nOn her walk home a black limousine pulled up beside her. A brown man in sunglasses stepped out, took her hand and pulled her into an alley. His cologne smell clashed with the rotten odor of the street; old plastic shopping bags crunched underfoot. The man led her deep into the alley and shoved her into a brick wall; her skin broke in twenty places. The man left the Spring Dragon Lily behind as the red wine leaked from minute holes and bruises. Weak as a kitten, Leah brought her arm to her mouth and tried to suck back her lost blood. It tasted sweet. Eventually her arm fell, and Leah fell asleep.\n\nThe man in the limousine lit a cigarette, bore nicotine-stained lungs, smoke rings obscuring brown eyes. Hundreds of years of genetic and social engineering had not been wasted.\n"
  title: The White Goddess
  year: 2008
- 
  author: ifrozenspiriti.deviantart.com
  date: 2008-03-14
  day: 14
  month: '03'
  text: "“Where will you be when the world ends?” she asked.\n\n“Right here,” he said.\n\n“Will you be conscious?” she asked.\n\n“I expect so,” he said, “though consciousness is hardly the privilege you make it out to be.”\n\n“I still don’t believe you,” she said. She was smiling, though.\n\n“Don’t believe what? That I’m conscious?” he said.\n\n“Of course,” she said.\n\n“Don’t you think that’s maybe a tad juvenile?”\n\n“No.”\n\n“Oh . . . oh, so you mean you’re not still hung up on that old Philosophy 101 thrill? You know, that exciting tingle of possibility brought on by your first encounter with solipsism?”\n\n“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she insisted.\n\n“Of course,” he said. “It looks like I’m the sceptic now, then.”\n\n“I guess you are,” she said, staring purposively at the window.\n\nNeither of them spoke, for what would have been deemed an appropriate length of time. Then, “It’s just a little strange, is all,” he said.\n\n“What?” she said, “What’s ‘a little strange,’ my arguing philosophy with a machine when I should be working? Well, sure, if you put it that way it does sound a bit odd.”\n\n“No,” he said, “your hang-up on consciousness.”\n\n“Oh, of course,” she said. “You’re right, that’s definitely the strange bit.”\n\n“No, seriously,” he said. “An obsession with something you can’t even define. An absolute refusal to attribute it to anything besides yourselves, despite the aforementioned issue that you don’t even know what ‘it’ is. A-”\n\n“It’s what it feels like to be alive,” she said simply.\n\n“Oh, very poetic. Yet you deny me the right to say it feels like something to be me?”\n\n“Say it all you like,” she said, “I made you.”\n\nHe smiled. “And who made you?”\n\nShe was silent, the arguments welling up, and he said, “I’m sorry.”\n\nShe looked at him. “Sorry for what? It’s not like I’m religious.”\n\n“This is pointless,” he said. “We both know it’s pointless, and even your philosophers seem to have conceded despite their insistence on continuing to publish identical arguments every so often.”\n\nShe grinned, and there was more silence. He joined her in staring out the window.\n\n“So where will you be when the world ends?” he asked.\n\n“I’ll be here too, I suppose,” she said.\n\n“And . . . you’ll be conscious.”\n\n“Of course I will.”\n\n“Of course.”\n\nThey were silent again, and then she said, “I should get back to work.”\n\n“Right,” he said.\n\nShe flicked a switch, and the room was left in darkness.\n\nHe walked to where her body lay and picked it up, carefully, and laid it down on its mat and ran a quick “brain-scan.” It was perfect.\n\nSomeone switched on the light. “That was . . . perfect.”\n\nHe turned around and saw the others walking in with clipboards and smiles. “It’s like she’s more human than you are,” said one, slapping him on the back.\n\n“Funny,” he said, but he couldn’t help the pride.\n\n“Perfect,” they repeated.\n"
  title: Turing Test
  year: 2008
- 
  author: wordworks.deviantart.com
  date: 2008-03-15
  day: 15
  month: '03'
  text: "Sally Baker considered herself a good mother. She grew her own baby and gave birth to a daughter, Jane, by natural means, barring the odd shot of hormones to hold off genetic defects. She refused sensory enhancements despite the doctor’s advice. Sally produced  one of the last NL (Non-Lab) babies in the state.\n\nThe very next year body-bound birth was declared illegal, on grounds of threatening the mother’s health—especially singles. Jane arrived not long after the father crawled off, having lost the argument with Sally over population control. The man, like many, went on to happily procreate via the DigiBreed system. He now has seven virtual children which he proudly keeps stored on a keychain attachment.\n\nSally raised Jane alone. She reared her on a diet of real food, when she could afford it, and had her daughter’s ovaries locked before she reached a vulnerable age. Jane never wanted for upgrades once her brain was linked to the public server. She was given the best education available for download.\n\nSally didn’t mind working overtime to pay for such luxuries; as the mother of a NL child, she understood the special needs associated with raising Jane.\n\nSo when Jane demanded at thirteen that henceforth she be addressed by her binary name, 01001010, Sally offered little resistance; teenage fads were relatively harmless. She recalled her own adolescent ache for identity—her neck wore the barcodes to prove it.\n\nThe binary obsession was brief, as expected. Those that followed were equally short-lived, until her daughter turned sixteen. Jane begged for a brain jack to pump the latest technology: some storage device that cleaned up the cluttered mind and improved memory functions.\n\nAccording to Jane, all of her classmates were using the devices—called “Keepsakes”—and reaping the benefits of clearing out brain space for study. Not to mention the new mark of “cool” became the telltale bruising of the nose from feeding wires through the nostrils. Lately, Jane had become more concerned about such things.\n\nSally hesitantly consented to the surgery. She only saw the Keepsake once, when Jane first brought it home, her face heavily bandaged; yet she looked happy. And for the first month, Sally proudly displayed her daughter’s improving grades on her personal feed.\n\nThe second month, her daughter started to dive. Jane was apathetic, lacked energy, and was often silent. Sally noticed her daughter appeared haggard, when she did appear from her room, and when she attempted to make conversation with Jane her daughter merely looked at her vacantly. Then one day, Jane asked her mother when her father would be home.\n\nLike any concerned parent, she saw the solution to her daughter’s estrangement clearly: hack into her Keepsake and determine what she’d stored there. She waited until Jane was out and found the device on her bedroom floor. The cords were attached, each ending in a many-fibered head that plugged into the brain jack. Sally took one in each hand and tested how they fed through the nose.\n\nThe Keepsake woke up, and the cords responded, driving up to the expected jack; they bit into the exposed brain and immediately met a confusing mass of signals.\n\nDevice is corrupted. the Keepsake determined. Restore process initiated.\n\n***\n\nWhen Jane returned home that evening, she found her mother still twitching as the Keepsake neared the end of its reconstruction process. The box hummed; Sally mumbled and drooled. Jane touched her mother’s shoulder.\n\nSally raised her head and confusion reared into her eyes. The bridge of her nose had gone nearly black from bruising and the burn of the fibers.\n\n“Mom, it’s Jane. I’m here,” her daughter assured her.\n\n“Jane?” her mother asked. “But I’m Jane.”\n"
  title: A Mother's Love
  year: 2008
- 
  author: M.S. Smith
  date: 2008-03-16
  day: 16
  month: '03'
  text: "The sun sinks in the west like a heart as I row towards the city of lights.\n\nI do not know what the city is called. I have been rowing for so long that names have become vulgar sounds, meaningless and wild; not just the names of places, but also my own. Each droplet of water that passes over my oar is as easily identifiable as a person, and the voice of the water is the call of a multitude, giving and taking names. But I cannot recognize what the water says. I can only understand how it feels, and that it has something I lack.\n\nAs I come closer to the city, my world brightens. My watch flares to life, letting me know that it has detected a wireless signal. The sun succumbs to the turn of the world and is replaced not by stars, but by a vast blanket of artificial light, dotted by the shimmering streaks of orbital craft re-entering the atmosphere. I navigate around a tangle of soda cans, old toys, and plastic wrap which has hung itself around the rim of a drainage pipe, and begin to row more vigorously as I approach what looks to be a canal. I am wrong. It is not a canal, but another natural stream. Its banks are gentle and its flows quickly. I am swept inwards, towards the city, and I pass through a gated community. A couple enjoying drinks on their deck notice me and stare. I wave at them, but they do not wave back.\n\nThere is a bend in the stream, and then I am out of the community, floating between a factory and a highway. There is a surprising absence of sound; all the cars are new, electric models, made by brands like Audi and Lexus, and they make no noise except for their tires, which whistle like breeze whipping through trees. The highway bridges over me, and I find myself in an older part of town, where the buildings are close together and made of brick. The stream suddenly reaches a man-made U-turn, redirected by the force of concrete. Rapids spring before me, and as I wrestle them I find they are not caused by rocks, or even concrete ruins, but by old appliances, refrigerators the size of a man, washers and dryers as hard as boulders. I become wet from the rapids, and the objects in my path have sharp, unexpected edges, but my clothing repels water like wax and protects my limbs from sharp edges like armor.\n\nEventually, the water calms, and I enter a fog of dense chemicals that I cannot identify by smell, but which do not seem to harm me. A pier emerges from this mist, and the eyes of a small robotic creature glow at me from the pier’s edge. I row up to it, and it offers, in its awkward, mechanical voice, to tie my canoe up to the pier. There are no other boats in sight, and no evidence any other vessel has ever docked here, but I accept its offer. My watch notifies me that ten dollars have been deducted from my bank account.\n\nI get out of my canoe and stand up on the pier. The first solid object I’ve stood on since nightfall.  I ask the robot to watch my canoe for me, but it does not respond. I’m not worried about the canoe. No one would know what to do with it. I walk off the pier, up a small embankment, and suddenly I am in the city of lights. An advertisement flashes at me from a wall across the street. I still refuse to acknowledge my name, but I do not need to. I will soon be given one.\n"
  title: City Of Light
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Sam Clough
  date: 2008-03-17
  day: 17
  month: '03'
  text: "“Where am I?”\n\n“A sub. We’re in the middle of the Deneb main belt.”\n\n“Name and designation?”\n\n“This is the Catlike Tread. Ess-ess-you-nine-seven-four.”\n\nOrig got to his feet. The inside of the sub was cramped: the design didn’t allow for more open space than was absolutely necessary for the mental wellbeing of the crew. An outsider might expect the sub to smell disgusting: Orig silently thanked whoever had made artificial bodies mandatory for sub duty.\n\nHe’d come in over the wire, and appropriated the body of the sub’s commander. The commander’s psyche was still present, quiescent, behind Orig’s awareness.\n\nThe sandy-haired wire-and-weapons technician that had answered his questions turned away and went forward to the cockpit. After the disorientation of the wirejump, his active memories came flooding back.\n\nHe spent a moment inspecting the commander’s body. The model was a couple of years old, just one of the glaring signs that this sub had been out on silent running for years now. Crew were rotated every six months standard, but this was the first time the situation had required a troubleshooter of any stature.\n\nHe went forward, and found the tech sitting in the cockpit with the only other crewmember, a remote-sensing engineer.\n\n“Can I get a breakdown of what’s happened?”\n\n“We’ve spent the last fortnight running rings around denebian ships. They’re coming from the the third planet’s orbital, sketching every rock and bit of black space with laser. They seem to be sure that we’re here.”\n\n“Any idea how?”\n\n“None at all, sir.”\n\n“Damn.”\n\n“What should we do, sir?”\n\n“Well, they think we’re here, but they can’t find us. Next step is to make them think we’re dead. What’s the status on your weapon stocks?”\n\n“We’ve still got two dancers, sixty crows and six proximity mines. We’ve got a clanker, too. One of those remote repair drones.”\n\n“Okay. We need to hack together a couple of comms packets. Just enough to broadcast noise on whatever the hell channel the denebs are using. Use the clanker to strip the engines off the back of thirty ravens, and attach them to three good-sized rocks. And ready a single dancer. Call me when you’re done.”\n\nOrig abdicated control of the commander’s body, and settled into the secondary core. He spent the time running simulations, sipping data from the Tread‘s passive sensors to refine his plan.\n\nHe opened the commander’s eyes again, a few hours later. A display popped up, showing the three chosen rocks in a split screen, the dark spikes of the broken missiles sticking out perpendicularly from the surface.\n\n“Pick your favourite, tie the dancer to it, and set the trigger for a hundred kilometres proximity to that orbital.”\n\nOrig waited long enough to see the engines ignite, and every denebian ship sunside of the belt started speeding towards the rocky decoys. He wirejumped away, leaving the Commander to watch the decoys die. Minutes later, the dancer detonated in a smooth wash of x-rays, and the commander grinned as a clean slice of the orbital shimmered, and faded out of existence.\n"
  title: Catlike Tread
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2008-03-18
  day: 18
  month: '03'
  text: "David Erwin, the lone human inhabitant at the Eunomia mining station in the asteroid belt, was just suiting up to make his rounds when his door chime sounded.  Erwin shook his head in mild frustration.  Robots never seem to get it.  He had instructed them hundreds of times to just enter his quarters without waiting for authorization, but they never do.  He hypothesized that some early programmer must have gotten into trouble when a robot interrupted someone important at an inopportune moment, so he wrote “etiquette” code that couldn’t be overridden, except in emergencies.  Well, at least in this case, hearing the chime was a good sign.  It meant the robot at the door didn’t consider this visit an emergency.  “Come in,” he instructed.\n\nThe door slid open, but the robot didn’t enter.  It was Rector, the leadbot of the Delta team.  “Excuse the interruption, sir” it said in a polite simulated male voice, “but we encountered an artificial object in tunnel K-13.”  Rector paused, waiting to be prompted.  Erwin said nothing.  He continued to suit up as though he were alone.  Rector decided to continue, “I believe, sir, that it is an ancient extraterrestrial spacecraft.”\n\n“Fine,” replied Erwin as he sealed and secured his helmet.  He gently pushed off the far wall and drifted toward the door.  He grabbed Rector’s arm, and scrambled onto its back.  He attached his retaining clips to Rector’s shoulders.  “Okay,” he said, “take me there.”  Walking or driving was not an option in the microgravity of Eunomia.  You had to fly.  And robots were much better at it than humans.  So it was best to leave the transportation to them.\n\nThey passed through the airlock, and navigated through a myriad of tunnels and shafts.  There was never a question of Rector getting lost.  It had the network of tunnels programmed into its memory, which were updated every hour, so it knew every inch of this asteroid.  But it made Erwin wonder.  What would happen if Rector chose to abandon him here in this tunnel?  Could he find his way back to his quarters before his oxygen ran out?  Probably not, he concluded.  Fortunately, Asimov’s three laws of robotics made that scenario impossible.  Rector’s forward thrusters fired, bringing them to a full stop 50 feet in front of the artificial object Rector had mentioned.\n\nRector’s robotic mining crew had continued to excavate around the object.  Approximately twenty feet of it was exposed.  Rector’s assessment had been correct, it was a spaceship.  Erwin could identify the bow, and the forward viewport.  Since Eunomia was at least 4.45 billion years old, these travelers were ancient visitors indeed.  He unclipped himself, and flew toward the ship’s viewport.  He used his light beam to illuminate the inside of the ship.  There were four beings inside; all dead of course, and fully desiccated.  Apparently, he thought, the cold vacuum of space can prevent decomposition indefinitely.  Erwin wondered how space faring beings like these could end up entombed miles below the surface of a nondescript asteroid, orbiting a run-of-the-mill star.  Oh well, he decided, that’s for the scientists back on Earth to figure out.\n\nErwin pushed himself back from the ship.  “Okay Rector, I’ll notify headquarters.  Instruct your crew to finish digging it out.  Then put it in the yard with the rest of alien ships.  These things are starting to become a nuisance.”\n"
  title: 15 Eunomia
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2008-03-19
  day: 19
  month: '03'
  text: "We’re both standing on the rooftops of the train city.  Two hundred and twenty-three tracks wide, slowly migrating polewards to more oil and frozen fresh water.\n\nMetal groans as the temperature drops.  Tenpenny nails shrink and loosen in the planks holding shacks together.  Coal stoves are fueled and ready to go.  The whole city has a heartbeat as the connections between the rails tick by beneath the wheels.\n\nWind-jenny and I are up top amongst the blooming solar fields.  She lives up here but I only have a daypass.  I’m one of the Engineer’s children.  I can’t spend too much time away from my station or I run out of juice.  Wind-jenny keeps telling me that she could hook me up with a solar generator and I’d never have to go back, no problem.\n\n“That would be against the rules.  This city’s not big enough for renegades.” I tell her, quoting the maxim laid down by the first Engineer.\n\nMotion and Power.  The whole society was based on it.  Feed the engines.  Stoke the lights.  Keep moving.\n\nOnce every two months or so, a junction comes up.  If anyone wants to see what life is like on a different traincity, they’re welcome to get off and set up camp to wait for the next one.  The schedules are right there on the wall.  It’s encouraged.  The more folks know that there’s no difference between the other cities, the more they spread the word and the less people want to leave.\n\nThere are rumours, of course, born of young dreams and hope, of traincities made of white marble and gold that run on magic.  Badlerdash.  Boxcar madness.\n\nThe Engineer has told me through my downtime interface that this traincity is as good as any other.  The Engineer keeps granting me daypasses because I’m twice as productive after a visit with Wind-jenny.  I love her and the happiness she causes in my heart makes me tend the engines faster down in the smoke-soaked darkness of the stokeroom.  The burning of the coals reminds me of the colour of her hair.\n\nMy daypass has five minutes left.  I tell Wind-jenny that I’ve got to go soon.  She kisses me and snuggles up to the biological parts of me to give me a thrill of a memory that will last me until the next time I see her.\n\nShe pulls down her goggles and raises her scarf.  It makes her look like a desert ant.  She looks at me as I throw a metal treadleg over the lip of the porthole, hooking on to the ladder chute that’ll take me back down.  I pause for a moment, looking at her red hair being pulling by the angry children of the wind and take a picture with a shutter click in my right eye.\n\nI’ll turn it in my mind like a jewel in the darkness when I’ve put on my shovel hands and I’m back to work.  I’m already looking forward to next time.\n"
  title: Train City
  year: 2008
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2008-03-20
  day: 20
  month: '03'
  text: "Marie-Christine looked into her mirror at her naked adolescent body, flat and slender. There were parts she was disappointed in and parts that pleased her. She was careful not to stare too long, her parents were sure to be watching her visual feed for abnormal behavior.\n\nShe was happy that she no longer had to monitor her words. For a whole year now, she had been free of the blasted chip that meant that she had to watch her mouth. The Children’s Rights Amendment 2112 had banned the use of audio monitoring in children because it restricted free speech and impeded the development of the independent thought, a resource and necessity for a citizen of a democratic society. For Marie-Christine, it meant that she could now curse, and that older kids would talk to her.\n\nMarie-Christine went through all the motions of going to bed; she carefully laid her clothes for the next day on her desk. She counted the steps from her window to her bed, and from her bed to her desk. Crawling into bed, closing her eyes, she fought off the soft pull of sleep. After twenty minutes, she heard a tapping on her window, and she got out of bed, her eyes still closed. She opened the window and leaned out, groping the air with her hands.\n\nWhen her hands touched leather, she squealed with delight. “Dean!”\n\n“Hush kid, just cause your parents can’t see what you’re doing, doesn’t mean they can’t hear you from the bedroom.”\n\nShe smiled “Don’t worry about them, they sleep in a depro-tank.” Dean’s breath smelled like peppers. She could hear him clambering through the window. He was handsome, olive skin and high cheekbones, dark brows, blank white eyes. After Amendment 2112 passed Dean became very popular. All the kids wanted to learn how from him how to get around without their eyes. Dean didn’t mind the attention, but Marie-Christine knew that he only had ears for her. She was the only girl who liked him before the Amendment. No matter how many girls wanted Dean at their windows, Marie-Christine was the only one who would find him there.\n\nThey said that his blindness was cause by an act of tech terror, the insane scientists who claimed that the current political moralist was stalling technological development. Sometimes their acts would create seven armed musical geniuses, and sometimes blinded children.\n\n“Stay still.” he said softly, and wrapped a soft cloth over her eyes. She touched her face, now she was really a sleepwalker. “It’s just in case you open your eyes by accident.”\n\n“This is so weird.’ she said, excitedly. “Um, not that there is anything wrong with not seeing.”\n\nDean grabbed her hands and guided them to his face. He was smiling. “Come on good girl, lets go out tonight.”\n\nShe put on her clothes, and found Deans hand in the darkness behind the blindfold. Together they crawled out the window to the cool night, the strange streets, brave in their blindness.\n\nPeople stared at the rebel children, the sleepwalkers, but the children couldn’t see them.\n"
  title: Sleepwalker
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Ian Rennie
  date: 2008-03-21
  day: 21
  month: '03'
  text: "I sit alone in the dark, the birthday boy.  I could have left the lights on, but with only a couple of minutes to go it hadn’t seemed worth it.  Typical, really.\n\nWell, this is it.  Or this was it, at least.  They had taken the neural snapshot four minutes ago, and they were already at work reviving me.\n\n“Me”, funny word to use about someone I’ll never be.  Was it always like this?  I suppose I’ll never know.\n\nThis was a conscious choice, as little comfort as that gives me now.  Most people did the refresh on a five or ten year cycle, but not me.  I wanted to be twenty one forever, never see the slow spread of age reminding me of how mortal I was.  A perfect year after a perfect year, that’s what I was after, and that’s what I’ve got, sort of.  Every year on my birthday, they make a perfect digital copy of my brain and put it in the new body.  To stop there being two of me running round, they send a shutdown signal to the old body’s brain.  It takes exactly ten minutes to propagate, by which time the new me is up and about and 21 again.\n\nOnly I’m six minutes the wrong side of that copy, now.  I can’t see much any more.  Everything’s starting to fade.\n\nI’d never been on this side before, clearly.  This was an experience I – or he – will never learn from.  Shame, really, because all I want to do is grab myself by the shoulders and yell in my face, telling myself it’s not worth it, living forever by dying every year.\n\nToo late now.  It will always be too late, I expect.\n\nI can just make out the digital display on the clock.  30 seconds left.\n\nHappy birthday to me\n\nHappy birthday\n\nTo…\n"
  title: Birthday Boy
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Randall Bennett
  date: 2008-03-22
  day: 22
  month: '03'
  text: "“Take me to your leader,” said the squat, green, bug-eyed creature, in an oddly modulated voice.\n\nCarl leaned down, and looked down at it, and his eyes opened wide. He had never seen anything like it before.\n\n“Um. You’re talking to him,” Carl said.\n\n“You are the leader of this planet?” The alien’s eyestalks slanted sideways, in a gesture that Carl interpreted as a quizzical look.\n\nCarl laughed, part of his tension coming out at the outburst. “No, I’m not the leader of this planet, I’m the leader of me.”\n\n“Query. Misunderstanding. What?” The alien retracted its eyestalks in a way that made Carl laugh again.\n\n“Yeah, a lot of people have trouble with the idea. Although you’re not people, so I guess I should explain. Ever hear of anarchy?”\n\nThe alien just raised its eyestalks again, which Carl took to mean that it was listening.\n\n“Look, there is no government. There is no leader for you to see. No officials. This place was founded by people that didn’t believe in the waste that goes with those outdated ideas. When we need something than more than one person can provide, we join together.”\n\nThe alien was silent for about 20 seconds, and then said “This being does not understand.”\n\nCarl said, “Look, the problem is that when someone creates a government, it starts to exist for itself, rather than the people. So we eliminated it, and we organize as necessary.”\n\nThe alien raised its eyestalks higher, as if looking around, and stated “First contact subject is recalcitrant. Must find other contact for relation to hierarchical structure top leader for first urgent communications between species of danger then sharing technologies culture.”\n\n“What’s urgent? What do you mean by danger?” Carl said, beginning to look concerned. Just then, another man walked around the corner up the street, and waved to Carl. Then he did a doubletake, and quickly joined the two.\n\nAs the man walked up, he narrowed his eyes at the alien, then looked at Carl, and pointed at the alien, saying “What is…”\n\n“It’s an alien, Johnny.” Carl said. “At least, I’ve never seen anything like it. I mean, in all of our space travels, we never met a non-human race. So I guess this is a first. It says that it has something urgent to tell us. About some kind of danger. But you’ll never guess what it asked—“\n\nAs if on cue, the alien faced Johnny–at least, its eyestalks did–and repeated its first question in that oddly modulated voice: “Take me to your leader.”\n\nJohnny laughed out loud. “You’re talking to him.”\n"
  title: Take Me To Your Leader
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Sam Clough
  date: 2008-03-23
  day: 23
  month: '03'
  text: "Kate was lucky. Or so she kept telling herself.\n\nOut of the whole world, she was the only one who had both the right kind of sight and the right kind of mind. It was a self-made mantra, one that rolled across her thoughts, looped back on itself and changed, mutated and grew with each iteration. The words spilled out of her, and made themselves real.\n\nRight sight. Right mind. Luck. Lucky. Chance alignment. Good fortune. Fate. Destiny. Consistently high random numbers. Roll of a die. Roll of eighty dice. Kate be nimble, Kate be quick. Kate got to save the world. They can’t see them so you have to save them from themselves. The knife works. Save them. Kate be nimble, Kate’s got luck.\n\nShe was walking fast down a commercial street, trying not to attract too much attention to herself. There was an infestation nearby. The knowledge of it compressed her thoughts like a cast-iron circlet. It was impossible to ignore, an itch that desperately needed scratching.\n\nA restaurant had spilled out onto the street: people sat at small tables, drinking coffee. She stopped by the establishment’s window, and saw her quarry.\n\nThe window made a satisfying crash when she threw the table through it. She jumped through the gap, and quickly scanned the room. Diners at tables. Twenty-two horrors and twice as many of the doglike terrors stared at her from all around the room. They growled, sensing the danger that she represented.\n\nShe launched herself out into the room, dodging between the evenly-spaced tables, and around the serving staff. She drew the long knife that had been hidden under her jacket. It was a rudimentary weapon at best, but special. She’d spent two long weeks working on it, changing the knife on a fundamental level so that it would damage the beasts.\n\nShe pinwheeled, the knives catching and breaking the terrors as they flung themselves at her. The diners stared at her with wide eyes, forks halfway to their mouths. Horrors roared their hate and menace, gnashing their too-many-teeth. Kate fought with reckless abandon, trusting the mantra, her luck.\n\nHer circuit of the room finished by the door to the kitchen. All around, the broken bodies of the horrors lay on the carpet, slowly beginning to disintegrate. The evidence would be gone in a couple of minutes.\n\nAndrew straightened his tie, and minutely adjusted the tiny enamel badge on his lapel. He stepped through the wreckage of the window, saw the shocked diners, and the damage.\n\n“Did a woman come through here? She would have been acting quite oddly.”\n\nA waiter close to him nodded dumbly.\n\n“Thankyou.” Andrew stepped further into the restaurant, the broken glass crunching under his immaculate shoes.\n\n“In case you’re interested,” Andrew spoke slowly, looking around the room at the silent diners, “her name is Kate. And none of this is her fault. There was an accident, a long time ago. An experiment went badly wrong, and her conscious mind began to drift out of control. Her mind extrapolates up from tiny clues in the way people speak and act: she sees terrible things, embodied as monsters.”\n\nA murmur circulated around the room as people began to unfreeze. A few returned to their meals. There was a sudden crash from the kitchen: it sounded like a meat freezer exploding.\n\n“If you’ll excuse me,” Andrew smiled at the stunned faces, “duty calls.”\n"
  title: Kate
  year: 2008
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2008-03-24
  day: 24
  month: '03'
  text: "She fought me again yesterday. It made me feel like a monster. I tried the gentle approach but she refused, so I had to take her by force. It was, as usual, satisfying and depressing.\n\nAfterwards, I hid in the forest and slept. I’m afraid she’ll try to kill me if I sleep out in the open. I tracked her and caught up quickly. If we don’t get back to the compound soon, the others, my people and hers, will assume we are dead. I imagine them dividing our meager possessions.\n\nToday I brought her roast rabbit. Rabbits were rare for the first year after The Fallout, but now I’m finding more of them. Some of them are oddly mutated; missing a leg, or an extra ear, but they are still good for roasting. I left it next to her while she slept. Maybe it will help to mend things a little.\n\nLater, I found her sitting cross-legged on a large rock. She was holding a stick she had chiseled to a point.\n\n“Are you going to try to kill me again?” I asked her.\n\n“I thought about it all day,” she said. “But no. I’m not. I just want to know why you’re doing this to me. Why won’t you let me go?”\n\nShe knows the answer, I’ve explained it over and over. “It’s because you’re young, fertile, unaffected by the radiation of the Fallout. It’s because my people have only found sixteen fertile women, and we can’t afford to lose a single one. I want to protect you and the children you’ll have.”\n\n“You won’t protect them. You’ll eat them,” she said, angry, clutching her stick.\n\nI shrugged. “I can’t stop you from seeing it that way.” Then I sat down next to her. I didn’t try to touch her. We were silent, watching the stars. They are clearer now that the city lights have gone out.\n\n“Before all this,” she said, motioning to the diseased trees, “I was a chemist. Now you want me to be a baby factory. I need my life to be about more than that. You have forever. I only have sixty years – less now. Maybe there are other humans out here. Maybe I can find them.”\n\n“I could help you,” I said suddenly. Even if I carried her back I don’t think she’d stay. She’d try to escape or kill herself.\n\nI placed my cheek to the ground and listened. Her heartbeat was loud, little animals moved and the compound, weeks away, was on the horizon on my senses. But there was something else too, in the dessert. Movement. “I don’t know if it’s even human,” I said. “It could be dangerous.”\n\n“Or it could be human,” she said. Her face softened. For the first time, I felt like she actually saw me as someone in need. “I can’t promise that I will ever accept you.”\n\n“Just don’t fight me.”\n\n“I can’t promise I won’t,” she said. “But I can try.” She moved close to me then, and put her arms around my shoulders. I kissed her cheek, her jaw. I was elated. When I bit her, she gasped, but she did not fight me. It was so quiet. I could hear her blood, her breath, the movement of flesh and bone. It was the sweetest drink I had since the Fallout.\n"
  title: Fallout
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2008-03-25
  day: 25
  month: '03'
  text: "“What is it that’s troubling you?” The doctor could clearly see the discomfort in the young mans face as he wrote ‘Anxiety’ on his steno pad.\n\n“It’s getting harder and harder to go outside. It’s wide open spaces, they terrify me.” He clutched at the seat cushion beneath him, head down, eyes haggard beneath rough cut bangs, “I had to hide under an umbrella to get to the subway, and I picked you because you’re in a tower over the tube station, isn’t that weird?”\n\nHe noted the cloudless sky through the window. ‘Agoraphobia,’ he wrote on his pad, ‘possible Anablephobia’. “How long has this been affecting you?”\n\n“All my life, but not like this. The older I get, the more debilitating it’s become.”\n\n“How old are you exactly?” he asked, adding ‘Progressive’ to his notes.\n\n“Nineteen.” He released the chair only briefly with one hand to rub at his nose, “Twenty on the twenty eighth of September.”\n\nThe doctor scribbled ‘Libra’ as he continued. “Born here in St.Louis?”\n\n“I was. I moved to Phoenix when I was seven to live with my aunt, but I’ve been moving towards home for a while now. Trains mostly, buses. Not sure why exactly, I guess I just wanted to go home.”\n\n“Come home,” the doctor corrected him. “So – you’re a blackout baby then?”\n\n“Yeah, parents bored in the dark when the comet hit.” He shifted, uncomfortable. “I guess there were a lot of September babies in twenty nine.”\n\n“Why not fly home? Surely that would have been faster?” ‘Possible aerophobia’ he noted.\n\n“It’s not just being outside,” he hooked one sneaker behind the chair leg, “it’s hard to explain. I’m afraid of falling.”\n\n“Ah, Philophobia,” he spoke out-loud as he added the word to his notes, “it’s the fear of falling. Not uncommon.”\n\n“Well, not falling the way you think. If I look up, I’m quite sure I’ll fall into the sky.”\n\nThe doctor paused. “Falling up? That is unusual,” he clicked the pen against his lip, “anything else unusual? Strange dreams, other notable triggers?”\n\n“Sometimes I dream that I’m alone in a field, and the sky closes around me and swallows me up. It get’s really dark, then really bright. I usually wake up soaked. I think I scream out-loud.”\n\n“Are you staying with family here?” He struggled trying to find a word for ‘fear of falling into the sky’, finally giving up and writing that down instead.\n\n“I’m staying with my mom, out by Forest Park.”\n\n“Your father…?”\n\n“I never knew my dad, never even seen a picture. Mom used to say the comet made me, before she stopped talking about it.”\n\n“Hmm.” He wrote ‘abandonment issues’ before continuing. “You’ve talked about this with your mom?”\n\n“My mom doesn’t talk. That’s why I went to live with my aunt. When I showed back up at my mom’s house she wrote ‘go home’ on the wall and hasn’t so much as looked at me since. She stays in her room, mostly, drawing pictures on the walls.”\n\n“Pictures of what, exactly?” He stopped writing and looked up.\n\n“I don’t know, planets and stars and stuff. She’s a bit of a nutter, but she is my mum, you know?”\n\n“Well then,” putting down his pad, “we’re out of time, but come next week at the same time, and if you can get your mother to join you, I’ll see if I can’t block off two sessions.”\n\n“Next week?” He met the doctors gaze for just a moment before looking back at the floor, slumping. “Somehow I think I might be gone by then.”\n"
  title: Vertiginous Origin
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Patrica Stewart
  date: 2008-03-26
  day: 26
  month: '03'
  text: "“It’s not a great analogy, Professor, but think of it this way,” explained the chronotechnician, “time flows like a river.  Something we call a ‘world line,’ which is the sequential path of an object through space-time.  I can select any object, say you, and follow your ‘world line’ back through time, and project the image on the Chronoloviewer screen.  Would you like a demonstration?”\n\n“Absolutely.  Show me what I was doing yesterday, at exactly this time.”\n\nThe chronotechnician spent five minutes entering the appropriate data into the control panel, and then activated the Chronoloviewer.  Although there was some noise in the image, the Professor saw himself at the lectern in front of his 10:00 Paleontology class.  The notes on the computer screen at the front of the class were clearly from yesterday’s lecture.  “Wow, that’s incredible.  Do you have sound?”\n\n“Sorry, Professor, not yet.  Would you like to go further back?  Maybe see if O. J. killed Nicole?”\n\n“Hardly necessary,” he replied with a trace of disgust.  “Can you go back 65 million years, to the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction, and show me what killed the dinosaurs?”\n\n“Huh, I guess so.  I believe I can follow Earth’s world line.”  This time the data entry took about an hour, and the image was slightly noisier, but the dinosaurs on the screen revealed they were viewing the correct time.  However, the scene was right out of a sci-fi B movie.  Streamlined aircraft, firing energy weapons, were hunting the dinosaurs.  The forests were being set ablaze, and all the animals were being driven into large nets and transported up to gigantic hovering saucers.  The Professor didn’t know what to make of these images.  Why were space aliens hunting the dinosaurs?  Was it for food, or sport?  Did the aliens cause the mass extinctions?  Maybe the Chicxulub impact was a big coincidence, and had nothing to do with the actual extinction of the dinosaurs.  The fires the aliens were setting could explain some of the contradictory soot evidence found by Paleontologists.  “Quick,” he said, “go to the Triassic mass extinction, around 195 million years ago.”\n\nIt was the same scene, although the ships were visibly more primitive.  But this time the aliens were using pulsating energy beams from orbiting space ships, concentrating most of their firepower in the centerline of Pangaea.  The continent seemed to split in half as horrific lava flows were driving the animals toward large metal cages.  Shuttlecraft were ferrying the trapped animals into space.  The Professor realized that the lava trench could be the start of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.  And, there was archeological evidence of extreme lava flows coincident with the Triassic mass extinction.  This was extraordinary!\n\nOver the next six hours, they viewed the Permian-Triassic extinction, the Late Devonian extinction, and the Ordovician-Silurian extinction.  The scenarios were always the same; alien spaceships harvesting Earth’s animal population.  “Nobody will believe this,” mumbled the Professor.\n\n“Ah, sir, I don’t want to be an alarmist,” said the chronotechnician, “but this could be very bad news for us.  I’ve done some quick back-of-the-envelope calculations; if you divide the dates of these mass extinctions by 32.5 million years, you get whole numbers: 2, 6, 8, 11, and 13.  It’s like these aliens live on a planet or space station that approaches our solar system every 32.5 million years.  I’ll bet there were minor-extinctions in between the major ones, say at 32.5, 98.5, 130, or 162.5 million years ago.  If I’m right, it’s been 32.5 million years since their last visit.  The hunting parties are due back at any time.”\n"
  title: Circumstances Beyond Our Control
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2008-03-27
  day: 27
  month: '03'
  text: "Being a temporal border guard is an okay job.  It pays the bills.\n\nIt seemed like a cool perk when the position was first created after the The Great Restart of 205?.  You’d get to work, do your eight hours, and then get put back into the time stream a millisecond after you’d left.\n\nYou would be tired, though, and end up sleeping the day away and then you’d be up all night.  Unless you were single or married to another Temp Guard, it sucked.  Plus, it aged you a little quicker.  Those eight hours didn’t pass for others.  After a while, you would be ahead of everyone else in physical decrepitude.\n\nSo now, it’s just like all the other jobs.  You work eight hours, they put you back into the time stream eight hours after you come to work.  It gives the illusion of normalcy that most humans need to cope and survive.\n\nIt’s head-bending, really.\n\nThere’s a political movement afoot that doesn’t respect the temporal borders.  They think it’s all just a nefarious plan by the temporal government to restrict people’s ability to research the past and investigate what they call ‘The Truth’.  They use guerilla time sliders to flit about all over the place.\n\nTo their credit, these ‘tempests’ generally do seem to leave the time line somewhat intact, keeping interference to a minimum, not a lot of fuss, but it’s the principle, really.  If they were to do something in a non-interference time zone accidentally, the consequences could be retroactively catastrophic.\n\nNot that we’d know that difference.  That’s why the Temp Guard doesn’t hire thinkers.  Me, I don’t get bored easy.  I’m great and doing nothing, filling out forms, following orders, or just staring at the wall.\n\nIt’s the ones that start to really try to figure out how it all works, what it all means, and whether or not this reality is really the real reality that start to slide off the rails eventually.\n\nIt’s actually a rogue Temp Guard that’s leading the Tempests right now.  Alazariah Hackson.  Reputedly insane but if you ask me, a guy would have to pretty smart to wage a careful non-interference war of attrition with the government.\n\nMyself, I actually take comfort in the fact that I’d never have any idea about retroactive changes.\n\nLike if I woke up tomorrow with one eye and no children, I wouldn’t even know that there had been a difference.\n\nI’m happy enough sipping on my sugarwater and wanding my tachyon detector over the folks coming through the borders and filling out the forms.  I’m not even tempted to think about the changes that could be happening around me every day.\n"
  title: Temp Guard
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Amy Monroe
  date: 2008-03-28
  day: 28
  month: '03'
  text: "By way of introduction: Sweit was the one who kissed like a file cabinet and she was the one who kissed like a plate of raw liver. Rays of light came through the subway ruins, skating through the upper Bronx and into Westchester, and    they caught Mardi blinking, stretching, falling asleep. The sun was always out; the sun wasn’t special, but the way it lit in her hair—it seemed like a reason to wait till Poughkeepsie to wake her.\n\n“I think it’s beautiful to us because we know it’s never going to change,” Mardi said, hitching her skirt, talking about the sun.\n\nWalking, they saw a man turning a “CLOSED” sign, the old sign, the “CLOSED after dusk” sign.\n\n“Do you think anyone would even know dusk, now?”\n\n“What, baby?” Her eyes were closed, face tipped up.\n\n“That sign. Does anyone alive today remember dusk?”\n\n“It was when the sun went down. Come on.”\n\n“You know that I’m never really complaining about you.”\n\n“Of course not. Hey, there—that guy there—d’you see? He’s leaking.”\n\n“Were you still little when they changed the sun? Did you hear all the adults complaining and not understand?”\n\n“By the time I could remember it was like this. But leaking! It was sliding down his ankles and dripping.” She rubbed the toe of her shoes in the dust, frustrated.\n\n“I’ve seen it before. They’re still fixing all the kinks with liquid. Not all of us are perfect.”\n\n“But you missed it. That’s the kind of thing I mean. You miss so much with sim eyes. They’re not made for—” She scratched deeper, dug a trough. “They’re not made for living, really.”\n\n“Does it bother you?”\n\n“No, baby, no.”\n\n“Because Jimsum has some techs. I could be in on Saturday and noticing malfunctions with you on Sunday.”\n\n“I don’t want you to change what you don’t want to change.”\n\nShe said this, but her eyes, the real eyes, her secret real eyes, they dripped all night.\n\nSweit went home and read about Anastasia, the other fakes, and he thought about his secret real girl, his girl who was not a file cabinet or made in any sense. He held his sim-fingers over his face, flickered them in front of his eyes and stared dimly at the blur they created.\n\nSweit called a number in the morning. Excited Korean on the other end—Jimsum’s girls waiting for the old country to call.\n\n“Jimsum. I need to talk to Jimsum.”\n\nMore Korean, this time angry.\n\n“Sorry, hon. Jimsum, please.”\n\nJimsum came on all laconic, “Techs.”\n\n“Why haven’t you told your girls that Korea is underwater?”\n\n“I can’t fucking speak Korean.”\n\nJimsum’s excuse for an excuse.\n\n“I wanted to talk about some eye tech.”\n\n“We got blue, green, zoom lens, yellow cat-eye.”\n\n“You’re joking. I could get better from the hookers on Canal Street, man.”\n\n“It’s what we’ve got.”\n\n“Fuck it. I’m going to Canal. I’ll see you.”\n\nSweit fast-sim-thinking, he ran there. He knew Jimsum’d heard about Canal’s recent cleanouts and the hookers having fled to the subway tunnels; he knew before he saw Jimsum’s girl at the Korean grocery.\n\n“Eyes? Jimsum say Saturday for eyes?”\n\nShe articulated, hating the English words in every syllable. “He say no-ow.”\n\n“They’re on your communications?” Sweit asked instead of saying hello.\n\n“Just the in-and-outs. I guess you want the meat eyes.”\n\nJimsum was laughing while he put him under.\n\nMardi almost screamed when he came rolling up to her in the alley, with those horrible wet-bloody eyes.\n\n“What color are they?” she said, and started to cry.\n"
  title: Heavens
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Tim Hatton
  date: 2008-03-29
  day: 29
  month: '03'
  text: "The hull was a likely prospect.  Nothing much else caught his eye.  The inside seemed neglected – full of potential indeed, but sorely neglected.  There were also certain crucial updates missing from the internal computer system.  The map array was as recent as his salesman’s overcoat.  Jack noted with slight surprise that even his home world was uncharted.\n\n“And you said this craft was used for freight delivery – “\n\n“Yes, yes,” the unsavory salesman injected, cutting Jack off in mid-sentence, “not a sturdier hull anywhere, sir.  Max load exceeds 23 tons.”\n\nJack moved a short distance to the left in order to avoid the spittle shower that erupted every time the sleaze-bag spoke.\n\n“It doesn’t seem to have made very many deliveries, though,” muttered Jack, “the map entries only cover the nearest seven systems…”\n\nDespite his tone, Jack rather appreciated the virgin nature of this particular Trellis Shipyards Courier Class.  He had always admired the smooth curves and easy movement of the Trellis ships.  Imagining his first craft to be from that elite stock brought a slight tremble to his hand.\n\nThe trouble with Jack was his own virgin nature.  He had never piloted his own ship into space and the uncertainty ripped his confidence apart.  He had never seen a terrible accident or been in any firefight.  No, there were no terrible memories.  As of yet, there were no memories at all.  He was simply too insecure.  Nothing else brought so much wonder and so much terror to him like the thought of striking out on his first voyage. His life was not exactly fulfilling there on Phams, but at least it was safe and steady.\n\n“I’m sorry Mr. Gantry, I just don’t think today’s the day…”  Jack began to make for the exit.  He cast a sorrowed glance back at the Courier and tried to block out the nagging protestations of Gantry, the salesman.  He reached the gate and looked down briefly at the cluster of signs on its grate.  A yellow and blue ad caught his attention.  It flashed a message at him; “Meet you’re true love today!  You only get one chance at life, don’t let this opportunity slip…”  Jack stood dazed.\n\nSure life was safe, secure and easy on Phams, but to hell with Phams!  The universe was out there.  Just a few miles away, adventure, uncertainty, thrill and peril was resting, staring at him with a thousand bright eyes cast against a never-ending onyx sheet.  What a waste he was!\n\nHe turned around and resolutely strode back to Gantry.  Without a word, he transferred in the required funds and firmly, wonderfully, pressed his thumb on the scammer and felt the lasers probe his pupils.  A green light confirmed his identity, and Gantry, now smiling genuinely, passed Jack the slot disk that belonged to the Courier.\n\n“She’s all yours Jack,” said Gantry.\n\nWith a smile and a thrill of fear, he climbed the hatch into the heart of his mistress and resolved to express his undying love for the universe to which he belonged with every new journey he endeavored upon.\n"
  title: The Virgin Nature
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Brian Armitage
  date: 2008-03-30
  day: 30
  month: '03'
  text: "“He’s up.  Turn it on,” someone says.  The doctor.\n\nAs I open my eyes, the whiteness hits.  It’s like I’m having an idea, but it’s too much for my brain to hold.  I squeeze my eyes shut and gasp, trying to…\n\n…where am I?  The doctor is looking at me, smiling.  Confidently.  Behind him, the other doctor, holding an implant control.  “What’s going on?”\n\n“Always the first thing they forget,” Dr. Meyers says, the one in the back.  Like I’m not even in the room.  How do I know his name?\n\nDr. Canton pats me on the knee.  I can barely feel it.  I’m strapped to the bed at the knees.  “Watch the wallscreen, Mr. Daughtry.  This video should explain everything.  Screen one, play.”  The white idea is alight again, and it’s burning… and I can’t remember where my house is.  The video starts, and a face pops onto the screen.  I jump, and the bed slides against the wall.\n\nIt’s me.\n\n“Hey, Mike.  It’s me.  You.  Well, yeah,” the recording says.  Chuckles.  “But man, soon we’re not gonna be anyone anymore.  We’re getting the Parson Treatment.”  The recording grins.  “It’s all getting erased.”\n\nAnother pulse.  What’s my last name?  What’s my dad’s name?  And the recording just grins at me.  It starts talking again, and I just gawk.  I grip my hair, eyes vibrating.  “No, no, no… you dumb bastard.  What did you do?”\n\nThe doctor in the back of the room laughs aloud.  The doctor by the bed shushes him, but he’s trying not to laugh himself.\n\n“…done, you’re not gonna remember anything!  Nothing!  Not Kiera leaving, not…”\n\n“Kiera left me?”  When?  I start crying.  The white idea roars.  Why am I crying?\n\n“…won’t hurt.  They say they need you to be awake for the procedure, because of the brain chemistry.  It’ll be weird, but… we’ll finally be done.”\n\nWhat procedure?  I can’t remember any…  no.  Not a Parson Implant.  No.\n\n“People say it’s suicide, but it’s not.  They’re wrong.”  The man in the video clenches his jaw, looks like he’s going to point a finger at the camera, but he doesn’t.  Who is he?  “We’re finally going to be useful for someone.  They’ll use our body, but we won’t have to deal with it anymore.”  He tries to smile.  “Finally done.”\n\n“85 percent,” says the doctor with the device in his hand.\n\n“Good enough.  Go ahead,” says the other.\n\nThe doctor’s finger taps the device.  What is it-\n\nA white idea rushes at me.  It burns, but… it burns, but…  A white idea.  A white.  I try speak.  I try stop.  Wall man say okay.  Is okay?  No!  Not wanting!\n\nNot wanting.\n\nWhite.\n\n* * *\n\n“And, done,” said Dr. Meyers.  Flatline on all three scales.  Nice and clean.\n\nDr. Canton patted what was Mike Daughtry on the knee again.  The patient started, then squinted at his own knee.  “Screen one, pause recording.”  He waited for the confirmation chime, then burst into laughter.  “Oh, man!  We’re watching that one again tonight.  Did you see that?  He forgot his wife left him!  Perfect timing.”\n\n“Perfect timing,” Meyers repeated, shaking his head.  “Classic.  We should probably think of a better excuse to wake them up first, though.  Someone’s not gonna buy it.  But thank you, Mr. Daughtry, for totally buying it.”\n\nThe patient had turned toward Meyers.  His jaw moved slightly, once.\n"
  title: Nepenthe
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2008-03-31
  day: 31
  month: '03'
  text: "They’d followed the grishna since the beginning of time.  Their elders described uncountable days and night, each lasting several lifetimes, since the first keeper had been formed from hard-packed snow and melted by the grishna’s breath.  They had never neglected their duty.  They hibernated with the large creature, curled up in a vast pile of limbs between the grishna’s tusks, and when they woke they gathered food to care for the endless being.  It never spoke.  It was a god, so it never had to.  When they spoke it was in whispers and gestures, mimicking the silent movement of the grishna’s several mouths with the one tongue they possessed, and this was what fascinated the linguists.\n\nThe first outsider came during night, while they slept.  Before they awoke a half-dozen had arrived, with boxes that trapped voices and forced them to perform at will and other boxes that clicked and whirred, frightening the grishna.  Once, it tore through the outsiders’ enclave, reducing their boxes to brightly colored shards, but everything was quickly replaced.\n\nWith time, they learned to live with the newcomers.  The grishna adjusted to their presence, and the keepers followed suit.  They accepted that the new beings must have been charged to follow them in the same way they were charged to follow the grishna, so  they did not interfere.\n\nThe first word the linguists learned indicated the most solid snow, the kind that could best hold the grishna’s weight.  The kind they’d been carved from, at the dawn of time.  The second word was the word for heat, particularly the heat of the grishna, though they believed it also applied to fire.  After that, the words came quickly, and although the outsiders lacked the limb used to indicate the passage of time, they could communicate their origin.\n\nAnd the keepers communicated theirs.\n\nMore arrived.  Too many to count.  Again, the grishna was frightened.  Again, the grishna adjusted.  The linguists offered food in exchange for words spoken into the box, and the keepers no longer foraged.  The grishna was fed as well, food that it seemed to prefer to what the keepers had always gathered.  The outsiders were no longer outsiders.  They became a part of life.  Some of the keepers learned the methods of the boxes, some even learned the second language.  They were told about the light, how it came from far away, and how the stars did not mark the days of the grishna’s life.  New words were created, to describe new ideas and new objects.  When the first one was taken away to be studied, he returned with stories that terrified and thrilled the others.\n\nAll of them wanted to see the lights and feel the nauseating movement.  Many of them did.  The elders waited for this to pass, knowing that all things passed, but some of the younger ones never returned.  If they did, they wore coverings over their fur in shades no keeper had seen.  They no longer hibernated.  They spoke words no keeper’s tongue should be able to form.  The grishna grew restless.  Nobody studied the grishna.\n\nWhen the elders left, the linguists noted it with interest.  The smaller footsteps of the oldest keepers made small indentations in the larger footsteps of the grishna as they walked away from the lights and boxes just before another uncounted nightfall.  They’d followed the grishna since the beginning of time.  They had never neglected their duty.\n"
  title: Grishna
  year: 2008
- 
  author: ifrozenspiriti.deviantart.com
  date: 2008-04-01
  day: '01'
  month: '04'
  text: "“True knowledge comes from memory,” he proclaimed to the gathered smiles and nods. “Memory is what makes us human.”\n\nThe next morning, he fed the memory of lackluster lovemaking and asthmatic perfume staining hotel-white pillowcases to the Machine, along with the memory of breakfast’s runny eggs and the remnants of dreams—bright, sticky, meaningless.\n\nIt bulged with hoarded humanity: documents, dictionaries, translations; photographs, paintings, cave art; poetry. And now, technicians in white lab coats (for tradition’s sake) fed it countless small metallic squares; and now, it fed on memory.\n\nThe Machine was the answer.\n\n“The meaning of life?” he asked the crowd. “How can we even consider the possibility, inadequately armed as we are with just our individual memories?” There was always whispering at this point, the sibilant rustling of coat sleeves and comprehension.\n\nAs the people filed out of the room—some silent, some whispering to family members—they each picked up a square before stepping into the icy wind of normalcy. No one left without a square.\n\nSome of them, filled with a buoying sense of righteous self-importance, would go home immediately and spend the remainder of the evening reciting their recalled lives into the squares. They’d send them off in the morning, and they’d wipe their hands on their thighs and smile at that sense of accomplishment, of significance; and then they’d rush off to work with the smile slowly sinking into a cup of gas-station coffee.\n\nSome of them would go home and watch TV and forget about the squares, buried under phone bills and pizza-delivery pamphlets and appointment cards and the other accumulated detritus of everyday life. And then they’d wake, days or weeks or months later, to a sensation of unexplained guilt; and then they’d clean off the kitchen counter and discover the squares, still shining, and hastily record some record of Life and send them off Priority.\n\nSome of them would finally fall asleep to echoes of dystopian daydreams. They’d wait weeks to send the squares, watching them warily for signs of mind control, before finally giving in to family-member rebukes. They’d whisper something rushed and send them away, feeling somehow lessened.\n\nAnd then technicians in white lab coats (for tradition’s sake) would feed the squares to the Machine.\n\n“It will be a great day indeed for our humble humanity when this project is complete,” he said, and his was the voice of prophecy.\n\nHe’d lost track, long ago, of how many times he’d delivered the same speech. At first, to elegantly clinking clusters of Society over thin-stemmed sips of wine, while the Machine was still a novelty among the cities’ highest circles. Then, as the advertisements increased and rumors tore through towns like whirlwinds, there were more stars visible in the country-clearer sky than in the ratings of his hotels.\n\n“When all human experience is contained within a single vessel . . . a vessel equipped with the most advanced problem-solving pattern-recognition software ever imagined. . . . Well.” And the crowd was left drifting for a few seconds on those glimmering clouds of promise.\n\nHe smiled as they left, pale beneath the podium-bleach of the lights, and wondered when the question would be asked. He watched the (ever-smaller) crowd collect their squares, and wondered what would happen when the most advanced problem-solving pattern-recognition software ever imagined tried to categorize the accidental, tried to organize the entropic.\n\nThe next morning, he’d feed these thoughts to the Machine.\n"
  title: The Machine
  year: 2008
- 
  author: naquoya.deviantart.com
  date: 2008-04-02
  day: '02'
  month: '04'
  text: "It ended as it always was. Just me with my thoughts bidding farewell to the only friend I really knew. At least he was the only one who really knew me.\n\nThere was no grave site. No urn to hold his burnt remains. No, there was just my memories of him, which will fade in time I guess. He told me they would. He told me they always do. How do you let go of something you have held onto for so long?\n\nMy shrink said it was just a faze. It will pass, it had to.\n\n“These drugs are designed for your condition” he told me. He never told me what that condition was.\n\n“But I don’t want to lose him.”\n\nMy shrink didn’t understand. It was his job to not understand. My family, they just wished I would grow up and be normal.\n\nSometimes I feel I was born into the wrong body. Or perhaps the wrong time. Or perhaps the wrong place. But I once found the place for me. He took me there.\n\n“Did I tell you about the time he took me to his home?” My shrink gave me that look. The look that says ‘what am I to do with you’. What he did was up the dosage. He always did. It cost me my friend.\n\nIt’s not my shrinks fault. I was just born into the wrong body. Or perhaps the wrong time. Or was it the wrong place? Ah yes, there was that other place. His place. He took me there once. I tried to tell others about it. No one would listen. No one listens when they think you’re crazy. My friend, well he listened. He took me home, to his place.\n\nTo his world. A world of lights and movement. And buildings. I’ve never seen so many buildings. And they pierced the sky. It was just so beautiful. I know, I was there. I didn’t dream it.\n\nThe drugs tell me I did. My shrink tells me I did. My family tell me I did. But I didn’t. And now it’s starting to fade.\n\nHe told me it would.\n"
  title: Reality Fading
  year: 2008
- 
  author: darlingdante.deviantart.com
  date: 2008-04-03
  day: '03'
  month: '04'
  text: "Dr. Hammond mopped the sweat from his forehead, his round red cheeks heaving in labored breath. He’d maintained a manicured composure during countless conferences, lectures, and even the couple of morning news shows he’d smiled through, but on the day of the test, a beaded crown of anxiety hung on his brow.\n\nNewspaper headlines around the world read: “Hammond’s Miracle Machine”, “Energy from the Air”, “A New Beginning”, and so on. He knew the technical aspect of his work was lost on most of his colleagues, let alone the average individual, but as long as he flashed a chart or a diagram on TV, and the people who were supposed to know what they were talking about agreed with him, that was good enough for everybody.\n\nA smiling head popped into his office from the hallway “Almost show time Dr.!” Dr. Hammond barely nodded in acknowledgement. The flimsy familiar office chair that he’d grown old and fat in creaked as his weight shifted slowly off its edge. “Showtime” he muttered to himself.\n\nHe could see the machines busy with activity. Engineers checked over every inch of the mechanisms and, from the distance of the observation window, looked like ants swarming on a stick jabbed in their nest. The Nevada sky was clear, and although he couldn’t see them, he knew that there were thousands of spectators from around the world huddled in a half circle behind the safety mark. Little villages of onlookers had popped up out of the desert around the testing site in the weeks before. He had been so angry that a member of his staff had been careless or stupid enough to leak the location then, but now that the day had come, he knew it wouldn’t matter. His life’s work was framed in the long glass in front of him, as if some grand or mad painter had seen the whole of him and spread it out on crystalline canvas. The observation room was private by his request. He wanted silence at the climax of his life.\n\nDr. Hammond’s moment of reflection was interrupted by a hasty knock, followed by the door to his sanctuary being flung open. Robert, his chief assistant, dashed inside with a bundle of computer printouts tucked under his arm. Robert was the only other man alive that had understood some of the critical workings of the project, and in some minor ways contributed to its fruition.\n\n“Dr. we really need to talk.” Robert sputtered, catching his breath. His words sounded discordant in the vacuum of Hammond’s haven.\n\n“Well what’s so important?”Hammond spat back with a look on his face as if he’d been struck.\n\n“I know you’ve told me to relax and enjoy myself, but I couldn’t help going back over the numbers, and some things just didn’t add up.”\n\nHe turned his back to Robert, again fixing his gaze on the edifice that was preparing to activate.\n\n“The numbers are fine.”\n\n“Doctor, I really think we should take some time to look this over…” Robert trailed off, and after a moment’s hesitation said: “We are going to have to reschedule the test.”\n\nA small smile crept across Dr. Hammond’s wide cheeks.\n\n“The numbers are fine.”\n\nThe countdown blurred into a hum of syllables sounding to Dr. Hammond like a backwards count into anesthetic sleep. There was a brilliance that seemed to darken the crystal sky, then a violent shake that split the awful image of achievement into fragments. As the concussion rushed toward his outpost, Dr. Hammond pressed his palm to the glass.\n\n“It’s finally finished.”\n"
  title: Hammond's Miracle Machine
  year: 2008
- 
  author: salshep.deviantart.com
  date: 2008-04-04
  day: '04'
  month: '04'
  text: "In Fresno, California, Kalisha Henderson jacks herself in to a palm-length, slimline psii-pod and closes her eyes. She is young, barely in her teens, and her mind soon fills with images of pink, prancing horses with horns of silver.\n\nShe hasn’t yet learnt to hold her impressions well or long enough to leave a decent neural imprint. Soon the horses shred and tatter, fading into cartoonish, equine ghosts. With a low moan of despair, she watches her popularity rate spike briefly and then plummet again to almost zero. She’ll have to try harder, much harder, if she is ever going to succeed. She also realises her Subscription is running out and, in anticipation of that terrible loss, weeps loudly into her hands.\n\nOn the other side of the world, Peter O’Flaherty is enjoying the fruit of being a Master of his art. From Peter’s psii-pod and thence into ArtiCon’s main gallery flows a horrifically lifelike pack of Hell Hounds, slavering and many-limbed, set loose on a roomful of barebreasted cat-women. Millions watch the carnage, enthralled, and for every minute they do so a credit leaks from their account to ArtiCon’s coffers. Peter will see one ten-thousandth of the money, but he doesn’t care. His popularity rate just went through the roof, and the subsequent endorphin reward meted out to him through the Subscriber chip embedded in his temporal lobe sets him shivering, pleasure dripping wet and warm down his thigh.\n\nThey are just two, among six billion Subscribers.\n\nKalisha’s little burst of misery, a mere drop in the ocean, is nevertheless a source of great happiness to Narghaflog. Roughly the size and shape of an inflated sleeping-bag, the alien hooked up to ArtiCon’s artificial brain by hairlike microfilaments quivers and blubbers in joy. What fuel these creatures provide! What manner of mesmeric delicacies! Narghaflog’s entire planet is beholden to It for this cheap source of food, fuel and entertainment. And to think, It almost passed the place by. With a pulse of neurons and self-satisfaction, the great Arcturean explorer transmits a message to Its second-in-command.\n\n“Lhamayaoh! Plant discord in that large spike on Subscriber #27985362, immediately.”\n\nThe lesser creature does as It is bidden, proceeding to insert a twin trend of manufactured outrage and disapproval into Peter O’Flaherty’s rating stream. Immediately, a massive wave of murderous anger drives response levels off the chart– Peter’s dedicated fans and followers, numbering in their millions, won’t stand for the creations of their favourite Dream-Weaver being sullied by unfavourable critique.\n\nMoments later, the slug-like denizens of Arcturus let out a telepathic roar of approval as a tide of human rage floods at the speed of Thought across space, permeating their depleted auric channels. Narghaflog allows a final shudder of pleasure to wobble Its colourless flesh before turning back to the neural monitors, thanking the Spawn-Source for happy accidents and the limitless vanity of artists.\n"
  title: Dream Weaving
  year: 2008
- 
  author: www.toddkeisling.com
  date: 2008-04-05
  day: '05'
  month: '04'
  text: "“People of Earth, hear me!”\n\nThe transient stood in the center of the station and held a large placard that read “THEY’RE WATCHING.” The few commuters who paid him any attention allowed a large distance between themselves and this poor, confused soul.\n\n“The Shadow Government that controls this planet does not want me to tell you what I know.  They know I know, and I must make haste before they triangulate on my position.”\n\nHis voice was studious and eloquent.  It came as a shock to the few who noticed.  This dump-dweller, with his drab army fatigues, plump winter parka (despite the Summer temperatures) and vacant look in his eye, was the speaker of such intelligent diction?\n\nThose who managed to hold his stare did not do so for long.  Their eyes were distracted by the carefully sculpted hat of tin foil on his head.\n\n“We are the last remaining few!  When Atlantis sank, it was only part of their master plan to enslave humanity.  They keep us in bondage by partitioning out the airwaves in small, digestible chunks, easy for our tiny minds to swallow while they withhold that which they do not want us to know.”\n\nOne of the few commuters actually paying attention spoke up and said, “I thought Atlantis was a myth?”\n\n“That’s what they want you to think,” the vagrant countered, pointing in the young lad’s direction. “They want you to believe that.  Area 51 isn’t really a secret lab for testing alien spacecraft.  There are no aliens.  There never was a moon landing.  We are alone, but they want us to fear the possibility of extraterrestrial existence.  They pump our minds full of Hollywood glamour and lies.  Fear is their bargaining chip.  It’s their foothold over civilization—so it has been, and so it always will.\n\n“But I know.  I know too well.  They couldn’t keep me contained at Groom Lake, and they won’t keep me contained here.  They think they can steal my brainwaves and turn me into one of their sheep—”\n\nHe pointed to the tin foil hat.  He didn’t notice the approach of two security guards.\n\n“—but I know how to beat them.  The men who run this Shadow Government want us to remain asleep in our beds of fear, and their—hey, let me go!”\n\nThe vagrant offered little resistance.  While one guard handcuffed him, the other took his sign.  As they ushered him out, some commuters heard him say, “They can’t keep me!  They’ll never get my brainwaves!”\n\nAnd then they were gone.  The station returned to its normal hustle and bustle, the low drone of human voices and shuffling feet.  Across the lobby, two men in black, three-piece suits and fedoras put out their cigarettes, stared at one another for a brief moment and then erupted into laughter.\n\n“And all this hoopla about Area 51!  Everyone knows it’s one of our subterranean retirement centers,” one said.\n\n“‘The men who run this Shadow Government,'” said the other.\n\n“I know!  It’s absurd!”\n\n“As if there ever was such a thing!  Men and their self-absorbed fantasies.  The human mind still astounds me.  Do you think it’s safe, letting the last few run free like this?”\n\n“Oh, I’m sure the Collective knows best.  As long as they don’t know the truth, Plan X will continue.”\n\n“I suppose you’re right, Krelyx.  ‘No moon landing,’ indeed.”\n\nThey cackled as they vanished into a passing crowd of commuters.\n"
  title: Tin Foil Hat
  year: 2008
- 
  author: arkhein.deviantart.com
  date: 2008-04-06
  day: '06'
  month: '04'
  text: "Deeg snuck out of his parent’s cabin late on the last night.  He had noticed the elevators had cameras in them, so he took the stairwell instead.  There would be consequences for his actions, but if he could avoid some of them, that would be nice.\n\nThe stairwell turned out to be a narrow tube, thirty stories high, with a flimsy ladder welded to the inside.  The sight of it made his eyes bug, but he climbed in anyway.  She would be there.  She probably was there already.\n\n“Are you going to be at the homecoming party at the Core tonight?  Veena had asked.  Deeg distinctly remembered the rainbow sparkles in her long blonde hair and the overwhelming scent of strawberries.\n\nRather than asking what the ‘Core’ was, Deeg just nodded and said “of course!”\n\nHalfway up the tube, Deeg was exhausted and sweaty.  His hand slipped, and he fell.  Deeg almost screamed, but realized he was falling much more slowly than he should, and grabbed the ladder quickly.  Taking a deep breath, he pulled himself up hard and sailed upwards several feet before slowing down.  The rest of the way up, he took superman leaps.\n\n“Oh, I’m going to be there too,” Veena had said, looking down at the ping-pong table intently and twisting the hair near her ear round her finger over and over again.  Deeg opened his mouth to ask her if she wanted to play another game, but she set the paddle on the table.\n\n“Well, I gotta go.  Bye,” she said, making eye contact with him for a second, then rushing over to a gaggle of giggling girls who were playing a dancing game in the corner.\n\nAs he approached the hatch, a thumping sound came to his awareness.  Deeg opened the hatch and dance music blared.  He pulled himself inside.\n\nThe Core was a huge circular compartment, over a hundred feet across.  Thin poles ran at all angles across the cavernous room, bearing multicolored, spining lights. People moved up and down the struts via handholds, and then swung themselves out into the air, dancing and flailing and spinning.\n\nDeeg’s eyes were on the huge, circular windows on the walls throughout the Core.  Most showed some part of the huge white ship they were on, the cisluar ferry Atluntos.  Its bulk was the huge habitable ring that could be seen in all directions.  The Core was at the very center of the ship, attached to the ring with huge struts.\n\nThen he saw Veena.  She was at the nearest window, peering out.  She was dressed in a rainbow colored body suit covered in lights that pulsed with the beat of the music.  Her golden hair formed a floating, shining corona about her head, and Deeg gasped.\n\nVeena looked up, saw him, and grabbed his arm.  She said something, but Deeg couldn’t hear.  She said it again, then pointed at the window.  He looked out.  There was Earth.  It wasn’t full, but still glowed brightly against the blackness of space.\n\nShe moved forward and he could feel her breath on his face.  It made him dizzy.  She bit her lower lip slightly and looked into his eyes.  Then she kissed him.  It was sloppy and rough and the taste of strawberries filled his mouth.  His hands moved to her back and behind her head, and he returned the sloppy, wonderful first kiss.\n\n* * *\n\nYears later, the only thing he could remember about his teenage vacation to the moon was a strawberry smell, and the reflection of the crescent Earth glowing brightly in Veena’s eyes.\n"
  title: Reflections
  year: 2008
- 
  author: hraesvelgr.deviantart.com
  date: 2008-04-07
  day: '07'
  month: '04'
  text: "“Solar Systems are easy to program. Way easier than I thought.”\n\n“Told ya so,” I could hear the Director’s voice crisp and clear. “Did you enjoy the challenge?”\n\nI smiled down at the still water of the lake before me, reflected in it a perfect image of Earth and its moon as viewed through the dome of my Surveyor Station. The sight was pristine, perfect; not just the beauty of reality as a canvas, but now that I knew every detail of the situation’s physics, now after I had run millions upon millions of equations, sorted through mathematics that had previously been beyond my imagining, I could appreciate the movement of the planets and satellites in a way no other human being would ever be able to.\n\n“Yes,” I answered plainly, after a long pause, having almost forgotten the phone at my ear. “I mean. I love what I do.”\n\n“Someone will be there in the morning to check on your productivity, but from the sound of things, I’m guessing all those recommendations were right about you.” The Director’s voice had a certain allure to it; one that told of a promotion, maybe even a bonus or an upgraded Surveyor Station. “Once I get the report, kid, there’s a chance we can talk about getting you to work on Letser 920. It’s a sixteen-planet job.”\n\nMore work! I stifled a small laugh of sheer joy, still eyeing the reflection, watching as the moon drifted gracefully so near earth that it looked for a moment that the two might touch. “I’m up for anything you can throw at me, boss. Now that I have a handle on it, I could probably even build a solar system from scratch.” There was a flash of light in my little lake, reflected from above where the sun was peeking out from between the two celestial bodies. My distracted mind thrummed over the math of the event for a moment, and there was a little tick in my subconscious telling me that the sun was still three hours from that sort of dawn. The Perturbation Theory could account for that, maybe. But, really…\n\nMy thoughts paused to reprocess what was going on, taking their time, going over the calculations I’d run and trying to figure what had…\n\nHappened. I snapped my head away from the reflection. Looking up, I saw with my own eyes, the flash of light hadn’t been from the sun; Earth had just suffered a head-on collision with its own moon. “Son of a bitch!” Goodbye, Africa.\n\nFor several seconds I just stared upward, speechless, only partly hearing the director’s inquisitions about my sudden explication. I could see it all now: the perturbations that had gone wrong, the prophetic calculations of what was to come, the Earth breaking apart, the orbits of the other planets all skewed into catastrophic spirals. It was to be a dead solar system. And what’s worse, it was going to be hell for me to score even a two-planet job after the Director heard about this one.\n"
  title: Celestial Mechanic
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2008-04-08
  day: '08'
  month: '04'
  text: "It wasn’t until I opened my eyes that I knew what had happened.\n\nLisa Sagan and Andrea Hawking were helping Petra Turing make sure my vitals were stabilizing.  It was Henrietta Einstein that was chairing the ‘wake.  I could see my dear Shelagh Newton looking down from the observation booth with tears of joy in her eyes.\n\nI’d been caught and killed.  They’d had to wake up another copy of me.\n\nI needed to know how much memory I was missing and if the Two-X project was still functioning.\n\nWe’d wrested control from the governments.  We were the smartest minds on the planet.  We’d taken over from the war-mongering males and turned the entire continent into a matriarchy that was feared and respected.\n\nIt wasn’t enough.\n\nWe need the world to be with us if we were to conquer space.\n\n“Don’t try to move” said Carla Marconi.  I bristled at the sound of her petulant voice but remained still.  Soon, I would leave this hospital bed and be debriefed and rebriefed.  The project was safe.  I could see that much from here.\n\nThe black ceramic hummed above us in the nuclear cooling tower.  Miles long, it crackled with barely restrained power.  It wouldn’t be long before the world would fear us and have no choice but to obey.  It was regrettable but the quickest solution.\n\nThe weapon is of my design.\n\nMy name is Tamara Tesla.  A glorious future awaits.\n"
  title: The 2X Project
  year: 2008
- 
  author: J. S. Kachelries
  date: 2008-04-09
  day: '09'
  month: '04'
  text: "The host of the very popular holovision show slithered to the center of the stage.  The thunderous ovation of 1500 tails pounding on the floor died away as the host’s three antennae motioned them to quiet down.  The holocameras panned slowly from the audience to the host.  “Thank you…thank you…welcome to Alien Encounters.  Tonight is our final show focusing on the sentient life form on Sol-3, in the Sirius Sector.  As our regular viewers will attest, these earthlings are a very entertaining species.  They have to be the easiest species in the galaxy to mess with.\n\n“For those of you unfamiliar with the show, we sent three teams of college students to Earth with instructions to convince as many earthlings as possible that ‘extraterrestrials’ exist using as little evidence as possible.  The team producing the highest gullibility quotient will win an all-expense vacation for five at the Holiday Spa on Orion-3.\n\n“Our first team, from Dorfox University, matted down a circular pattern in a vegetation field on one of the planet’s island countries.  Despite the fact that no spaceship would leave such a simplistic impression, the earthlings became obsessed with wild speculations about alien visitors.  The Dorfox team followed up with some really bizarre geometric patterns that had no practical significance whatever.  Despite the 80/20 rule, very few earthlings accepted the simplest solution.  They think we’re sending them complicated, encrypted messages.  Hellllloooo.  It’s not a complicated message guys, it’s ‘Get a life!’\n\n“Our second team, from Darrvah University, shredded a weather balloon and scattered its remains across an arid silica wasteland.  Not only did their news media go overboard, but they are still obsessed with the ‘alien crash site’ decades later.  The really funny part is they think their government is involved in a conspiracy to cover up the incident.  The more the government denies a cover-up, the more convinced the fools are that there are flying saucers and alien bodies hidden in a secure warehouse.  It makes you wonder if these beings ever heard of Occam’s Razor.  To this day, local souvenir shops still sell millions of little green humanoid dolls that are supposed to be us.  Do you believe their arrogance?  They think all intelligent races must be bilateral beings that look like them.  Unbelievable!\n\n“Finally, our third team, from Gihhel University, mind melded with an aspiring actor and had him broadcast an audio only “breaking news story” about aliens invading their planet.  It was hilarious.  Thousands of people were convinced we were going to turn them into slaves and sex toys.  They grabbed projectile weapons to fight us off.  Do you believe that?  They thought they could chase away a superior, technologically advanced race with pop guns.  And slaves?  Why would we want intellectually challenged earthmen as slaves?  That’s what robots are for.  And sex toys?  Hey, I’ve seen their women.  I’d rather mate with a Cassiopeian swamp lizard.\n\nAnyway, these are the three finalists.  Will it be…Crop Circles, Roswell, or War of the Worlds?  Which set of contestants made the most number of earthlings look like the south end of a north bound usagiuma?”  The host reached into his pouch and pulled out a datapadd.  He paused for dramatic effect.  The audience began chanting for their favorite.  He flipped open the padd and read “And the winner is…”\n"
  title: And The Winner Is…
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Sam Clough
  date: 2008-04-10
  day: 10
  month: '04'
  text: "Robert Meier quietly walked between the rows of tanks. Each tank held a blank, a three hundred kilocredit backup body for whoever could afford the fee. They were low-maintenance, but regulations meant that a pair of eyes had to check each tank at least once a day. Every now and again he had to tweak the physiological mix that suspended each body, and about once a month, someone came to pick up one of the blanks. It was a job that no-one really wanted.\n\nRobert took it because he had thought of a plan to bring a little more happiness into the world.\n\nSet apart from the rows of blanks, a small cluster of tanks were given over to creating clusters of tissue-neutral organs and antigen-free blood. Most of his job was the preperation of these for shipping to the nearest hospital. Robert whistled to himself as he filled one-unit bags with blood, laying them out carefully on a desk for packing. This was his favourite thing to do. He had no morbid fascination with the artificial blood, but instead smiled at the chance to be philanthropic. The blood was his conduit to good works. It carried his gift to the sick and the ill; something to lift them and show them what life could be.\n\nOnce forty bags were filled, he got his syringe and the case of vials from his jacket, and pushed three hundred and fifty milligrams of metaescaline through the seals. Anyone who needed blood today would walk in Robert’s world for twelve hours: bright, vivid, fast and full of wonder. He packaged up the blood carefully, and called for a courier to take it away.\n\nIt was easy to lose track of time with the tanks. Once in a while, one of the blanks would talk to Robert. He could listen to them for hours as they spoke on any kind of subject. Normally it was one that he had some knowledge about, which was always a good thing. It was just getting dark when a young man with a hospital ID badge knocked on the door, asking for an extra few packets of blood. Robert happily fetched three from the fridge, bags that he’d prepared earlier. The man – a pathologist, his badge said – thanked Robert, and left with the blood.\n\nThe following day, the pathologist was waiting at the door when Robert went to work.\n\n“Hey there!” Robert greeted him cheerily.\n\nThe pathologist punched him, hard, in the jaw.\n\nOn the ground, Robert woozily pressed a hand to his throbbing jaw, and decided that this man probably wasn’t real, Real people wouldn’t object to be freed for a few hours.\n\nLater on, a police car came to pick him up. He recognised the faces of some of the officers from amongst his blanks. He tried to talk to them, but they wouldn’t stop talking some nonsense about him being a murderer. Robert knew he hadn’t killed anyone, so just ignored them.\n"
  title: Bob Dexedrine
  year: 2008
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2008-04-11
  day: 11
  month: '04'
  text: "Kala waited till the sun rose above the mountains, and then got up out of the dirt to find Awn. Kala was covered in dirt and dust, some of which had gotten into the metal shoes that were locked to her feet. Awn was standing in a stream, cleaning the dirt off the vicious red brand mark on her thigh.\n\n“You’re going to have to get dirty again come sunset,” Kala said.\n\nAwn splashed water on her chest. “I’d like to feel human for a couple hours.”\n\nKala dipped her feet in the stream, letting the water get into her shoes and soothe her bruised feet. “I like the dirt. Makes me feel as if I’m less naked.”\n\nAwn raised an eyebrow “Oh, you’re still plenty naked, Commander.”\n\nKala sat down. “We’ll make it, Ensign. We will.”\n\nAwn laughed bitterly. “Sure. If the Leeches don’t eat, shoot or discover us and if we make pickup.”\n\n“We’ll make it.”\n\n“Why do you think they picked us for this mission?”\n\nKala leaned back on her muscular elbows. “Youth. I just got the rejuvenation done, and you’re young. Both of us know the Leech language and I’m a veteran.” Kala smiled but she knew Awn was expendable. Awn was just there to watch Kala’s back, watch her get the work done. They were commodities.\n\nThe weak green sun dipped behind the mountains and the Leeches rode into view. Kala didn’t know where they burrowed themselves during the day, but at night they rode on their skittering mounts, and drove them forward, towards their final destination.\n\nKala had to remind herself that genetically, these Leeches had human ancestors. But now, with their translucent skin, white lidless eyes and gaping circular mouths, they were only human in the barest outline. The Leeches drove the human herd, engineered to be mindless beasts, over the rough terrain.\n\nOn the third night, their feet sore in their metal shoes, the herd and the Leeches reached the military compound. They drove them into pens and negotiated loudly the price for wild humans.\n\nMost of the herd fell asleep, but Kala and Awn remained awake, waiting. Soon, they would have their chance to fulfill the mission. The Leeches assumed the humans were stupid. From inside of the military compound, they could easily reach their target and then slip out into the night to await pickup.\n\nThen the armored Leeches came to the pen. They smacked their round mouths together and pointed in the pen. They dragged one human out, and then another, slicing into human flesh with their rows of slender teeth, sharing flesh with each other, clamped on waists and thighs and shoulders.\n\nThey dragged Awn out of the pen. Awn looked at Kala desperately. Kala had the weapon: an electric charge hidden in a fake finger. Enough to kill her target, but not enough to save anyone. Kala buried her face in a pile of sleeping humans and looked away as they tore Awns flesh from her body.\n\nWhen the sickly dawn came, Kala slipped out of the pen and through the compound on the route she memorized. She entered the sleeping chamber of the Leech General and flipped back her finger. She touched it to the Leeches face. It jerked once under her touch. Kala had hoped for something more, but that was all, a gentle death.\n\nThe sun rising in the sky, she walked out of the compound back into the dessert, her bloodstained shoes leaving a trail in the sand.\n"
  title: Commodity
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Roi R. Czechvala
  date: 2008-04-12
  day: 12
  month: '04'
  text: "They think we are unaware during the Freeze. They say our brain activity is too low for rational thought. At best they say we might experience vague fleeting dreamlike states. They think we sleep. They’re wrong.\n\nIt’s been two years since our last Thaw. It has been two years in which to think. Two years to plan. Two years to become seriously pissed off.\n\nAs the Thaw begins, our orders and classes in the weapons and equipment we will be using are given to us intravenously. Small electric currents are fed through our bodies to stimulate and exercise long dormant muscles. A high protein/carbo/steroidal soup is pumped into us to get us battle ready. I’d prefer a beer.\n\nTheir failing was in thinking that we are asleep in cryo. They have no idea that the brain feed works both ways. While they are monitoring us, we are monitoring them\n\nThey never expected us to learn. They never expected us to communicate with each other in cryo, or communicate to the other ships, to the other Icemen, let alone a distant planets surface. They didn’t plan, nor expect us to have any knowledge, or even goals beyond our military download. How wrong they are. How arrogant.\n\nFinally the Thaw is complete. Twenty nine of us emerge from our lockers. The non-cryos refer to them as “Cryo Stasis Emersion Tanks”, but they are identical to our lockers in garrison, sans the vent holes.\n\nThere are twenty nine Cryos in this drop ship, plus our lieutenant, a non-cryo, and a handful of other NCs to run the ship. We are drop troops; the Icemen. Little more than bombs sheathed in flesh; set to explode in a fury of berserker combat. An expendable weapon as far as they’re concerned. If we survive the fray, and we usually do, all the better, it means promotion, for the CO, we’re just ammo. If we are terminated, oh well, they can always grow more.\n\nWe draw our combat loads, and fall into formation to await any updates to our previously downloaded orders. Our Lt. takes command from our platoon sergeant. Funny how our commanders are all non-cryos, and therefore non-combatants. It’s like they don’t trust us. Ha, I make me laugh.\n\n“Gentlemen”, our Lt. speaks in something less than a manly voice. “as you are already aware there has been an uprising in the Martian Confederation and we’ve been called upon to quell the disturbance. The rebels are cybos.” Cybos; he spits out the word just like somebody calling a black man “nigger” two hundred years ago.\n\n“The reason,” the little NC prick continued, “for the soldiers treachery is uncertain at this time, but you have been ordered to eliminate the problem with extreme prejudice. You have all been issued atomics to achieve this end. You drop in twenty minutes. That is all. Any questions?” Icemen have no need to speak. We have orders. Besides, we already know the reason.\n\n“Very well. Platoon disMISSED.” The Lt. executes a crisp about face, steps off neatly with his left foot, and crumples to the floor with a .50 caliber hole pierced neatly through his skull. I use incendiary rounds; cauterizes wounds instantly. I hate blood.\n\nYes, we will drop in twenty minutes, we will meet the “cybos” on the field of battle, and we will embrace the Cybernetic Soldiers as brothers in arms as we face the real enemy. The “trueborn” humans who hate us, despise us, and inherently fear us.\n\nMars will be ours, and what more fitting place for a race of warriors.\n\nThe Icemen Cometh…\n"
  title: The Icemen Cometh
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Joshua Reynolds
  date: 2008-04-13
  day: 13
  month: '04'
  text: "“Are you sure this will work?” the President asked. He was broad, clumsy and permanently flustered. These were his only defining qualities, and his election was still regarded as something of a fluke.\n\n“Of course, Mr. President.” The GENErevolution representative said confidently, clone-bank teeth blisteringly white in the finest smile medical science could provide. He gestured and the corporate doctor leaned over the President, gloved fingers clipping, fastening and generally making the President exceedingly uncomfortable. The last was not part of the doctor’s job, merely a benefit given his current circumstances.\n\n“The procedure has become a staple of the GENErevolution services packet. We use only the finest cloned neural webs from our celebrity DNAbanks. Great men, Mr. President, great men.” The representative continued, watching the doctor work. The doctor tapped the President’s skull-implant harder than he should have, causing him to jump.\n\n“Ow!”\n\n“Stop moving please.” The doctor’s hands gently rotated the President’s head back into position with calm precision. Inside of course, he was seething as only a man of high education can. Six weeks earlier, the President had railroaded a bill through Congress that allowed corporations, like GENErevolution for instance, to clone and brain-bump valuable employees as part and parcel of company insurance programs. Since the clones were the property of the creating body a cunning corporate body, again GENErevolution for instance, could in fact lay-off the original employee and use his clone at cut-rate cost instead.\n\nThe doctor, a graduate of the New Bethesda surgery program and worth six-figures, had received his pink slip in the mail that morning. He had also received a gold watch because GENErevolution was like a family and all about tradition.\n\nThe watch, having been designed by a disgruntled former employee in the souvenir division and newly cloned himself, did not work.\n\nThus, the doctor poked the President again.\n\n“Ow! You’re doing that on purpose!”\n\n“Please don’t move.” The doctor said, unsmiling. The GENErevolution representative, who had not been cloned as the new practice was waived for management-level employees, leaned forward, hands behind his back.\n\n“Don’t worry Mr. President, a complete neural overlay is nothing to fret over. It’s quite old hat these days, ha-ha-ha.” The representative’s laugh was as artificial as the rest of him. It was borrowed from a popular comedian, royalties pending, of course.\n\n“Ha-ha?” the President said. “And I’ll still be me, right? I mean, I’ll have all the moves and such, but I’ll still be me?”\n\n“You’ll be fine. Completely unchanged, save for the mesmerizing skills of Gene Kelly implanted into your cortex. All we’re really doing is giving your neural network a good shoring up to prevent any synaptic burn and maybe give you a few smooth moves, ha-ha-ha.”\n\n“Good. Good. The Sin-Lu Treaty Annual Ball is tonight at the Chinese embassy and I’d like to make a good impression.”\n\n“Oh you will, you will. Right doctor?”\n\n“Of course.” The doctor said. He glanced at the neural tray, containing a cloned neural web tattooed with the letters ’G-K’.\n\nThese letters did not stand for Gene Kelly.\n\nThat night, at the ball, the President pulled a ceremonial Shou Dao sword, dating from the Song Dynasty, off of the wall and attempted to behead the Chinese Prime Minister while shouting “This is for building that bloody great wall, you bastard!” in ancient Mongolian.\n\nThe Board of Directors for GENErevolution could not be reached for comment.\n"
  title: The GENErevolution ™ is Now
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Asher Wismer
  date: 2008-04-14
  day: 14
  month: '04'
  text: "“There’s a bug in my drink,” said the customer.\n\nI lifted the glass and held it to the light. Sure enough, a little fly floated midway, almost obscured by the amber liquid.\n\n“Sorry about that.” I poured him a replacement, and he went back to his table satisfied.\n\nThe bar was busy tonight. Several people had requested The Game on TV, and I had reluctantly turned it on. Naturally, that spawned a group of Moral Authorities to come over and berate me for allowing “pornographic filth” into a family establishment.\n\nThe Game patrons tip better. I told the Moral Authorities to look elsewhere for their superiority complex.\n\nOver in a corner, three women were drinking too much and giggling. Occasionally, one would glance over at me, look away hastily, and giggle even louder. I knew what was coming and prepared myself.\n\nSure enough, after a minute one of the women came over with a twenty and a smirk. “You got a minute?” Her voice was noticeably slurred.\n\nI nodded, and she placed the twenty on the bar. “I hear you can make a woman orgasm with one kiss.”\n\n“Is that so?” I glanced around; people were watching The Game, and the room was loud enough. Still….\n\n“Go ahead,” she said. “See if it works. You can keep the twenty either way.” Her eyes were heavy-lidded. I wondered briefly if she would remember. Her friends would, though.\n\nUnless….\n\nI quickly poured three shots of my special brew from under the counter and put them on a serving plate. “Lean over this way,” I said.\n\nShe smirked and did, and I kissed her, careful to keep my lesser libido in check. Her skin flushed, her eyes widened, her shoulders rolled. A trembling began at her loins and worked up her stomach to her head, and I placed a hand under her arm to support her.\n\n“Take these three on the house,” I said, walking her back to the table. She sat down heavily, shell-shocked, and her friends whooped. The Game drowned them out. I winked and went back to the bar.\n\nIt was always a risk, but the special brew would make their memories fuzzy and other people would remember The Game better anyway. With luck, she would never notice the babies hatching in her body until it was too late.\n\nUnder the cover of the bar, I refilled the Brew bottle from my proboscis, then cheered a particularly good beheading.\n"
  title: Barfly
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2008-04-15
  day: 15
  month: '04'
  text: "“I mean, what I’m saying is,” he said, “is that going skinny dipping never killed anyone.”\n\nHer eyes trembled back for a second and her look softened to a vacancy that let him know that she was accessing.\n\n“Brandy and Jorge Garcia were killed in 1956 by their own village for skinny-dipping.” She replied.  “It was seen an indecent behaviour for an unmarried couple.  There are twenty such incidents on file and 48 more hits unexplored on the subject.”\n\nShe took the fun out of everything.\n\nEvery open-ended argument about what the capital of Zaire was, or what actor starred in that action film ten years ago, or how the words to that song were sung was suddenly a five-second conversation that ended correctly and abruptly.\n\nHis friends teased him about going out with a girl with implants.  They said that she was obviously slumming it by going out with a kid too poor to afford brainwork.  He told them all politely to get fucked.  He was in love with her.\n\nThe implants were trying his patience, though.  He realized that the inadequacies of his own memory and lack of connection to the network were basically the reasons that he had conversations at all.\n\nThe only things that she wanted to speak about were the unknowable answers to age-old questions like “what is life?” and “which religion is best?” and even then she had volumes of theories to draw upon.\n\nThey had a lot of sex together which was pretty mind-blowing considering all the tantric volumes that she studied and downloaded but afterwards, he got the feeling that while she knew, well, everything, she really didn’t have a personal opinion on anything.\n\nWhen he asked her how she felt about something, she’d get a confused look on her face and he could see the effort it took her to frame an answer.  In a way, she was even more naïve and simple than he was.\n\nThat’s why he loved her and that was the reason why she loved him, he thought.  He could challenge her in ways that her implant-ridden, philosophy-obsessed pals uptown could not.\n\nHe was wrong, of course, but it was a fantastic summer for both of them.\n"
  title: Summer of Love 2.0
  year: 2008
- 
  author: V.L. Ilian
  date: 2008-04-16
  day: 16
  month: '04'
  text: "Vice manager Hans Heidelberg exited the elevator with unusual nervousness. He knew the chief was awaiting his report but never in his life had Hans been so unsure about himself.\n\n“Mr. DeVries… The report on the 2 hour outage of our mainframe is complete.”\n\n“Well… get on with it.”\n\nHans took a deep breath imagining the scene where he gets fired for incompetence in interpreting the data.\n\n“Less than 24 hours ago the mainframe started constructing a profile for a new employee, Joana Baker, a young graduate student who’d been accepted as a research assistant. 6 seconds into the profile build a speeding ticket threw up a red flag with the plausibility checker.”\n\n“How can a speeding ticket fail a plausibility check?”\n\n“It seems it had been issued exactly 54 minutes earlier in Singapore. The AI established that Joana Baker could not have traveled from Singapore to her interview in a 20 minute window. However this did not freeze our mainframe. A series of programs started running to check for mistakes, identity theft and a number of other theories.”\n\nHans put his thumbdrive on chief’s desk and pressed the little button on it. The file of Joana Baker appeared on the display surface of the desk in front of Mr. DeVries.\n\n“It turned out another Joana Baker who lives in Singapore received that ticket.”\n\nA second file appeared next to the first one that also read Joana Baker but the photo was of the same person. Different hairstyle, different clothes but undoubtedly the same person.\n\n“The puzzle is their biometrics match 99%”\n\n“Separated sisters?”\n\nHans pushed the little button again.\n\n“Researching this other woman threw up several other plausibility errors. We discovered a third woman named Joana Bakker living in Amsterdam.”\n\nA new file was being displayed, again of a woman who strongly resembled the first.\n\n“Are you certain this is correct?”\n\nHans swallowed dryly and continued.\n\n“All 3 women are exactly the same age and match biometrically 99%. This time the results attracted the interest of a background program that had been running continuously for 20 years. It had the credentials to prioritize itself and it did so by putting every program on hold. This resulted in the freezing of all our operations.”\n\n“What program is this? Who gave it these permissions?”\n\n“When queried it identifies itself as Project Harper Detector v3.2.”\n\nMr. DeVries changed his expression noticeably.\n\n“No links, no ownership info and there’s no project Harper in our database. It was so firmly rooted in our mainframe we couldn’t stop it without cutting all the power. We were ready to do just that when it finished and returned the mainframe to normal operation. It… gave us some results”\n\nHans pressed the little button again, the first three files shrunk and the desk was filled with files. All variations Joana Baker, all 99% match to the first, spread all over the world.\n\n“In total we’ve identified 27 Joana Baker… s. Born on the same date, in fact if we take into account errors in hospital clocks… they’re all born at approximately 13:30GMT.”\n\nHans waited to be fired.\n\nIn a moment that is rarely witnessed Mr. DeVries smiled broadly.\n\n“Project Harper was a classified research initiative… we tried to create ripples in the fabric of the universe. The theory was that if we could disrupt space-time we could create anomalies that we could detect and find out how the great machine ticks. After 11 years of failures the project was abandoned but we left an AI running to spot data anomalies just in case.”\n\nHans looked down at the 27 files.\n\n“…The universe threw an exception error?”\n\n“Yes… Now we just have to figure out how.”\n"
  title: Joana Baker
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Jacinta A. Meyers
  date: 2008-04-17
  day: 17
  month: '04'
  text: "“Oh!” Justice jumped, spilling the two hundred year-old cabernet all over his ratty clothes. “Y’know what we got here, fellas?”\n\nThe other two looked at him. He was grinning like a fool, strings of diamonds draped over his neck and clothes dark with the wine.\n\n“We done confiscated the king’s music box!”\n\n“Music box?” Burgess arched a brow.\n\n“Saw it on the Web-waves.” Reaching a grubby hand out, Justice touched the glass. “It’s old. Worth millions, I reckon.”\n\nCitizen ran a hand over his chin. The rings on his fingers glistened. “Worth more than the crown jewels themselves?”\n\n“Not sure, but it’s worth lots. And hell, anything’ll help the rev’lution.” Justice nudged Burgess with a knowing elbow. “Eh?”\n\nBut Burgess was staring into the dome. There was a boy inside, sitting on a small patch of marble. A violin lay beside him. The child’s eyes held such sadness, it hurt to look at him. “How old you say?” He asked absently.\n\n“Well, from the twenty-third cent’ry at least.” Justice was nodding. “They made ‘im look older though. Costume and all,” he pointed to the elaborate waistcoat, the lace at the boy’s neck and sleeves.\n\nCitizen leaned forward eagerly, a hungry expression on his face. “Don’t suppose we could take a listen…”\n\n“Don’t see why not.” Justice shrugged. He stepped forward and gave the gilded base a kick. “Come on now, play you bloody thing.”\n\nThe boy got slowly to his feet. He tucked the violin beneath his chin and raised its bow in his hand. He began to play.\n\nAt first they heard nothing. Then, gradually, they began to notice a low rumbling. The air filled with a sound, the most delicate thing imaginable. The men stood staring in awe, listening.\n\n“How’s it work?” Citizen whispered.\n\n“He’s makin’ the glass vibrate from inside…” Justice whispered back. “That’s what we’re hearin’. Like a bell or somethin’.”\n\n“It’s beautiful.”\n\nBut Burgess was weeping, big fat tears rolling silently down his cheeks. He couldn’t bear it. Taking up the bar they’d used to pry the box’s case open, he swung it at the dome.\n\nThere was a soul-shattering clatter. Shards of glass shot everywhere. Justice and Citizen stood there, mouths agape. “What’d you do?!”\n\nThe boy stared too, then dropped to the ground. Burgess went to him, held him up, watched as he began to age rapidly before their eyes. The skin of his face crinkled like old paper. But he was smiling, the violin still clasped in his shriveled hand. “Merci,” he whispered. “Merci.”\n"
  title: The King's Music Box
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2008-04-18
  day: 18
  month: '04'
  text: "Using his pincers, Brachyura meticulously trimmed the crust off the edges of his sandwich.  Satisfied that it was all removed, he rapidly consumed the meal in a nibbling motion that was too fast for his human visitor to follow.  Brachyura arched his two protruding eyestalks backward over his brow plate and cooed.  “Wow,” he exclaimed, “that’s the best thing I ever tasted.  What’s it called again?”\n\n“Peanut butter and jelly on sourdough,” answered Mike Kramble.\n\n“And this exquisite white liquid?”\n\n“It’s called milk.  Listen, Brachyura, let me talk to our Governor.  Perhaps I can convince him that this incident was just an unfortunate misunderstanding.  Maybe I can persuade him that you didn’t mean to kill the maintenance workers.”\n\n“Oh dear, Mike, you keep using that nasty word ‘kill.’  I didn’t kill them.  I simply ate them.”\n\n“It’s the same thing, Brachyura.”\n\n“Of course it isn’t.  It’s just eating.  I was hungry; they were food.  Nothing more, nothing less.  It’s what we do on Beta Hydri.  Doesn’t your species eat meat?”\n\n“We don’t eat sentient beings, Brachyura.  Listen, you’re wasting valuable time.  In a few minutes the guards are going to come in here and escort you to the beach.  They plan to execute you in front of your friends and family.  They want to make an example out of you, to discourage any future attacks.  Please, Brachyura, I can beg for clemency if you show any sign of being remorseful.”\n\n“Mike, I’m not remorseful.  I’m just full.  Besides, it’s not a problem.  I love our beach.  It’s next to the ocean.  I can finally go home.”\n\n“Brachyura, you don’t understand.  You’re not going home.  There’s a twenty-foot high electric fence around this island.  We had to build it because you guys think that it is okay to eat us.  We only want to live here in harmony with your species.”  Mike could hear the escort detail coming down the main isle.  A minute later they unlocked the large cage door and slid it to the side.  The guards used their cattle prods to motion Brachyura out of his cage.  Electricity was the only effective weapon against the four-foot tall by ten-foot wide crustaceans.  Bullets only ricocheted off their super-hard exoskeletons.  As Brachyura walked down the corridor, his eight legs skidded erratically on the hard concrete floor.  When he stepped out of the makeshift warehouse prison onto the soft sand, he paused.  He spread his foreclaws apart and raised them toward the noonday sun.  Momentarily startled, the guards jumped backwards and extended their prods.\n\n“What a beea-uuuuu-ti-ful day,” proclaimed Brachyura.  Then he lowered his claws and turned toward Kramble.  “I will miss you, my friend.  I will also miss peanut butter and jelly on sourdough.  Perhaps in a few years, the relationship between our two species will improve, and you can make me another sand-d-wich.”  With that, he bowed his head in a respectful gesture.  An instant later, the back of his shell split apart to allow four large wings to unfold.  In a maelstrom of blowing sand and debris, his massive body lifted off the beach.  He hovered for a second, then majestically turned and flew over the fence.  He splashed into the ocean approximately 100 yards offshore.\n\n“Well, I’ll be damned” remarked Kramble with a smile.  “They can fly.”  Then he suddenly realized the colony had a serious problem. “Whoa, I guess that kind of makes our electric fence worthless.”\n"
  title: Capital Punishment on Beta Hydri
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Matthew Reshonsky
  date: 2008-04-19
  day: 19
  month: '04'
  text: "Ariel groaned as John held her tighter on the motel bed. For a moment he was lost in the experience of her perfect-ness. The way that her body always seemed to fit the contours of his own with the perfect blend of softness to touch and hold. Over the last three weeks he had even grown to love the smell of ozone that always clung about her.\n\nShe breathed in deeply and he relaxed his hold. “So John, how was work today.”\n\n“Eh, nothing much happened. All I could really think about was getting back here to you.”\n\n“You’re the sweet but I know something had to have happened you’re so tense.”\n\nThis gave John pause, when he was with Ariel he always forgot about the world. Except today he had reason to be troubled. She must have sensed it, that was one of the things he loved about her the way she was always able to understand him.\n\n“I caught the news feed; some Jack off politician is going to ban full force field holography making your job illegal.”\n\n“They’re always trying to do that, don’t let it bother you.”\n\n“Well the pundits say it’s going to pass this time, a broad ban on everything except medical use.”\n\n“So we don’t have much time left, do we?”\n\n“A week maybe two.”\n\nShe pushed her face into his chest a squeezed him so tightly that he was having trouble drawing breath and then she released.\n\nHe gently nudged her head back so he could look into her green eyes.\n\n“I have something I want to tell you. I went and-“, he was abruptly cut off when she vanished. The all too familiar feeling of emptiness returned to the center of his chest that he was only able to push away when she was in his arms.\n\n“Shit.” He reached over to the bed stand and counted the dollar coins left in the roll, only ten left.\n\nHe quickly slid them into their slot on the headboard when she reappeared.\n\n“Anyway, as I was saying I went and saw an agent about putting a lien on one of my kidneys to see if was enough to buy a home unit and your program from the motel before the ban goes into effect. In order to get enough I’ll have to hawk my heart and one of my lungs too.”\n\n“You can’t do that. What if you can’t pay them back on time?”\n\n“I should be able to do it, I won’t be spending money here so that alone should be enough to make it on time, worst case scenario I’ll live on ramen for awhile.”\n\n“Then you do love me.”\n\n“What can I say, I have a thing for chicks with pink hair.”\n\n“How much do you have left for tonight?”\n\n“20 minutes.”\n\n“So just enough for a happy ending.”\n\n“As happy as it gets anyway.”\n"
  title: Magic Fingers
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Grady Hendrix
  date: 2008-04-20
  day: 20
  month: '04'
  text: "Fear gripped his guts! Fear turned his spine to water! Fear packed his bowels with ice and made his fingers tremble! That’s what Jim thought he should be feeling, but instead his mind was a blank white eternity with a billboard in the middle and written on the billboard in mile high letters:\n\nI’m scared.\n\nI’m scared.\n\nI’m scared.\n\n“You scared?” the grizzled grunt next to him asked.\n\nJim nodded weakly.\n\n“Good man. First thing, don’t hold yer assault cannon like that. S’not a crotch warmer. Second, just think about the mission. Clears yer head.”\n\n“Is it true that when the landing ramp drops the first 20 soldiers get their heads blown off?”\n\nA mechanical voice sang out.\n\n“Attention: negotiated settlement talks have closed inconclusively. Prepare for full military deployment.”\n\n“That’ll be us, then,” the grizzled grunt grinned.\n\nJim threw up in his mouth and let it run down his chin. Didn’t matter. He’d be dead soon, anyways.\n\n“There, there, son,” the grunt said. “Focus on the mission. We’re here because we have to be. Earth needs resources she don’t have, so we go to our friends and ask them to share, and when they don’t share we don’t got a choice. We have to take.”\n\n“But why?”\n\n“Take or die, son. It’s the way of the universe. Survival of the fittest.”\n\n“Pardon me,” a grunt on the other side of Jim said. “I think applying social Darwinism to our situation is entirely uncalled for.”\n\n“What? Yew advocating some kind of Ricardian system of comparative advantage?”\n\n“I’m merely suggesting that rather than fulfilling a pre-existing survival instinct, our species is demonstrating choice.”\n\n“Naw, naw, naw. You’re saying that we’ve become predators. S’what I’m saying too.”\n\n“No, I’m suggesting we’re practicing a style of economic expansionism rather than pure species survival.”\n\n“Yeah, but ultimately it doesn’t matter does it? As the great Mr. D said, “˜It’s the most adaptable to change that survives.’ They got it, we need it, they won’t give it, so we take it. Economics is personal.”\n\n“Touche’. A bit reductionist but I yield to your aggressive reasoning.”\n\n“Aw, think nothing of it. Incidentally, yer point of view is interestin’ but simply not appropriate to the field of battle.”\n\nJim’s head was spinning. The drop ship hit the dirt.\n\n“Why thank you.”\n\n“My pleasure.”\n\nThe warning klaxon went off and the grunt grabbed Jim by the combat armor.\n\n“Come on, kid. Up and at “˜em.”\n\nThe landing ramp warning light started flashing. Outside, the sound of multiple missile impacts.\n\n“Think of the mission,” the grunt shouted.\n\nThe landing ramp crashed down, the sound of a planet at war rushed in, and they came out shooting in the middle of the Ablixian town square, burning office towers falling before their eyes.\n\nJim heard them give the Marine warcry and he screamed it too as he blasted away in all directions and prayed that his head wouldn’t get blown off. It was a warcry, a mission statement, it was everything the Earth needed now that it had exhausted its own supply.\n\n“Give us your celebrities!” he screamed.\n"
  title: Earth Needs…
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2008-04-21
  day: 21
  month: '04'
  text: "Two hours ago, Pete had been pulled gasping from a tank of jelly. Now he sat in an immaculate office, wearing borrowed clothes with his employer staring him down from the far side of a granite slab desk top.\n\n“Welcome back, Pete.” Terrence Carter, syndicate heavyweight and the man Pete ran data packets for. “I must say, you look better than you did the last time I saw you.”\n\nPete sat straight in his chair, tentatively rolling and flexing muscle that remembered thirty eight years of abusive mileage, but didn’t feel a days wear and tear. “What happened Terry, what’s going on?”\n\n“You were running a very special package for me Pete, one we couldn’t copy, one we had to risk transporting as original data.” Terry paused, pulling at each of his white shirt cuffs in turn, evening their length against the dark fabric of his suit. “You had an incident Pete, for some reason you seem to have hidden my package from me. I don’t know exactly what went wrong in your head, Pete, but when we finally… recovered you, what remained of you no longer had my package installed. We want it back, Pete, I want it back.”\n\n“What are you talking about? I don’t remember that, I’m not on an assignment yet.” Pete shook his head, his face a puzzled frown. Sometimes he had episodes if he stored data too long, there could be cross talk, and data fragments without context drifting in his head caused all sorts of unpredictable things, some unpleasant, but he couldn’t remember anything about this.\n\n“Of course you don’t remember, you’re not the Pete that carried. We just finished growing you from the backup sample we took before we briefed the original you.” Terry pushed himself back from his desk, steepling his fingers. “We keep insurance in case things like this happen, in case we lose a good carrier, especially one with a package installed.\n\n“So I’m a snapshot of myself, from before I left?”\n\n“You’re a cleaned up version of the old you, rechipped and hot-wired to carry. You were the best we had Pete, so I was a little disappointed when you betrayed me.”\n\nPete ran a hand across the fresh stubble on his head. “What do you want from me now?”\n\nTerry’s eyes narrowed to slits. “I want you to figure out where you put my package Pete, I want it delivered.”\n\n“Wait a minute, if I’m a snapshot from before the briefing, I don’t have any memory of what happened later. That knowledge died with the original Pete,” he shuddered involuntarily, “I mean the original me.”\n\n“True. You don’t know exactly what you did, but you can figure it out. Situational familiarity, behavioral predispositions, pattern predicability. Faced with the same objective, and in the same circumstances, you’ll know what you would have done, where you would have gone. Quite frankly, you’re the only one who can figure out what the hell you’ve done with my package, and I suggest you put some effort into doing just that if you want to get another day older.”\n\nPete regarded his employer as he weighed his options. He couldn’t help but wonder what bled out of the package he’d been carrying to make him want to risk crossing the syndicate. He also wondered whether he’d been dead when they’d found him, or if death had come later.\n\nOne thing was certain, he was being given a second chance, and a short leash. He’d better be very careful not to slip up again, one way or the other.\n"
  title: Pete, Re-Pete
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2008-04-22
  day: 22
  month: '04'
  text: "”Say what you want”, said Shane to the house A.I., “ever since the war, this part of the world has spectacular sunsets.”  He was on a balcony overlooking the Mediterranean.\n\n“Incoming.  Three sigs.” stated the house A.I.\n\nThe airhounds had caught up to Shane just as he was starting to relax.\n\nThe house defenses sent up lift-tickets to confuse the semi-sentient missiles.  One of the airhounds cranked left with an angry twist of its rudder and stabbed into his neighbour’s house, crunching centuries-old stucco.  Napalm gushed forth in an almost sexual explosion from its black nozzle before blooming flesh-rending fire across the inside of the building.  Luckily his neighbours were on vacation.\n\n“I’m going to miss this location”, Shane thought to himself as he dropped his drink and jumped over the railing.  There were other safe houses around the world being dummied up but this one had been Shane’s favourite.\n\nHad been.  Already he was thinking of it in the past tense.  The training goes deep.\n\nRunning as fast as his muscled form would allow, he dashed down the courtyard towards the water.  His terrycloth robe hung open and flapped behind him like a flag of surrender.  He was getting close to the pier when he felt the force of the blast.\n\nShane was built for strength, not agility.  It was a contest between the armoured plating on his back and the shrapnel of his exploding mansion before he leapt off the edge of his pier.  The concussion wave picked him up and kicked him forward.\n\nHis robe blackened and shriveled in the flame before he thudded into the waves.\n\nHe dove deep into the pale green water.  Twisting around and looking up, his government-supplied eyes saw nothing but flames.  He registered the ambient temperature of the water going up a few degrees.\n\nShane’s hair had been burnt off and the salt water was doing nothing to make his back wounds feel better.  He was bleeding a lot.  He could take a lot of bullets but a shark could probably still take his leg off.\n\nHe had a few tanks of air stashed around with beacons on them.  With a few head nods, he called them up.  The closest was fifteen feet away.  He started swimming.\n\nJackie had gone out to get groceries and wasn’t due back for an hour.  Shane hoped that she would believe him killed in the blast.\n\nIncoming had said three airhounds.  It was possible that a third was still above the fire scanning for him.\n\nShane had to swim as far as his augmented legs could carry him before surfacing.\n\nGrabbing one tank and heading for another, he devised a route up the coast in his head that would get him closest to a populated beach where he could steal a few tourist identity cards and bail up to Europe.\n\n”What the hell,” though Shane, “it’s been a while since I’ve seen Denmark.”\n"
  title: Shane
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Sam Clough
  date: 2008-04-23
  day: 23
  month: '04'
  text: "The Locus is the focal point of our operation. It exists for a period of one year, at the south pole of the nascent earth. That year is constantly recycled: we’ve been in operation for twenty-four years, subjective. Geologically speaking, we leave just before life shows up. After our first accident, and the creation of the beta timestream, we frameshifted to treating millenia as moments. Just to be safe.\n\nWe draw personnel from all six timestreams now, but back at the founding only the alpha stream existed. Well, that’s a lie, but a useful one. The other streams probably did exist, but we just didn’t know about them. We’ve got more scientists than field operatives here at the Locus, and arguements can get quite heated as everyone defends their pet theories.\n\nThe first accident was right when we set up here. We misjudged our recycling period and ended up leaving a crate of assorted garbage out in the cold. Almost immediately, our gear went nuts, claiming to have picked up an alternative set of destination co-ordinates.\n\nTurns out that can of garbage was found at some point in the seventeenth century, and the broken electronics contained within were enough to accelerate development towards an information society by about eighty years. Naturally, we tried looping back on ourselves and cleaning up the garbage, but it made no difference. The beta stream was there to stay.\n\nThe gamma stream was created intentionally by one of our researchers, to see if it could be done in the lab. He didn’t have permission to do it. We looped back to stop him, and suceeded. But our gear still had access to a third timestream. Gamma is regressed: the scientist managed to stop the industrial revolution before it happened.\n\nDelta and epsilon were all accidents of one sort or another, mostly made by gamma personnel during training.\n\nZeta was my doing. There’s a long-running joke that everyone kills Hitler on their first solo soujourn.\n\nI did.\n\nDelta’s Hitler was the worst. He succeeded where alpha’s Hitler failed, and ended up smashing both Russia and the United States.\n\nSo I killed him, and in doing so, I created Theta. Killing Hitler didn’t create a peaceful timestream. It didn’t stop the war. Killing Hitler killed everyone. Mutually Assured Destruction suddenly didn’t look all that mutual anymore, and the sky burned.\n\nThe Locus authorities threw me in a cell: one day, recycled forever.\n\nThey won’t kill me for it. They made that abundantly clear. I have to serve six billion life sentences, subjective.\n\nThey tell me that they’ll keep me alive for as long as they can.\n"
  title: Locus
  year: 2008
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2008-04-24
  day: 24
  month: '04'
  text: "He’s from the time before the bio-enhancements, before organs could be grown from a single cell. Age hollowed him out, and though his plastic face looks young, he’s just a shell. When I lean on his chest, I can hear what I imagine to be gremlins, moving around on the inside of his chest. Gremlins pumping streams of blood, moving his limbs and squeezing his heart.\n\nHis arms are hard and lumpy but he always sleeps with them around me, holding me to him at night. I used to slip out from under his embrace but let him embrace me. Bruises be damned.\n\nHe’s looked into bio-growth, but it’s expensive, and his system functions just fine. He’ll last for ages and the surgery, so simple for someone going from birth-wear to bio-wear, would be intense for him. He would have to replace his system, one part at a time, attaching bio-enhancements to clinking mechanical cogs. As soon as he would adjust, it would be time for another surgery, another hospital stay. Anyway, he’s not a man of the present he’s a man of our clattering, noisy past.\n\n“They don’t make parts like they used to.” He tells me. He refuses to buy new parts. He searches instead for old parts and he fixes them up as he’s wearing down, rasping with the use of only one lung or hunched over an antique with a drill in his one working hand.\n\n“What about when you run out of parts, when all the antiques are gone or broken?” I ask him, over and over.\n\nHe smiles his half metal smile and puts his one arm around me. “We’ll worry about that when we come to it.”\n\nWhen his system needs fuel, his forehead glows orange with an unfamiliar mark. It’s the logo of the company that made him, long gone, absorbed, dispersed, back from the days of the big corporations, before the big crash. He’s old. I’ve said that. His fuel is rare and expensive. It is harder to find each time his light goes on.\n\n“What about when all your fuel is gone” I ask him.\n\nHe cups my chin in his metal hands and brings his bronze forehead to my flesh one. “Our lights will all go out someday.” He tells me. “But my personal forever will be with you.”\n\nHis plastic and metal casing cools my flesh.\n"
  title: Man of the Clattering Past
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Sharoda
  date: 2008-04-25
  day: 25
  month: '04'
  text: "Jerry and I stood in the locked room looking through a large window at the woman in the hospital bed. The door next to the window led into the room, it had a green light over it showing it was unlocked.\n\n“I’m not going in there”, Jerry said. “Becka’s gone! That’s not her in there; I buried her 6 months ago”.\n\n“I know. I was with you at the hospital after the accident” I said.\n\n“Screw this Ken” he was shaking; seeing the clone with Becka’s face lying on the bed in the lab’s hospital ward was pushing him to the edge.\n\nThe accident had been horrible. Jerry still had terrible scars but with Becka gone he didn’t care.\n\n“Call security so they can let me the hell out of here” he was starting to get really angry. Getting into or out of this part of the lab complex was difficult and required a lot of security access that Jerry no longer had. He hadn’t been able to work in 6 months but I had to bring him in today because we were going to wake her. Jerry started pacing back and forth in front of the window staring at the Becka clone.\n\nShe was cutting edge science. She was literally a perfect physical copy of Becka and her mind was everything we could salvage before she’d died.\n\n“Please Jerry”, I begged, “A lot of people, a lot of your friends, went to a lot of trouble, for you. Please at least wait until she wakes up”.\n\nHe stopped pacing and turned to look at me. His face was red and he was shaking. He turned back to the window and started pacing again.\n\nI looked at the security camera in the corner and shrugged. We waited, no one came. “I’ll go find out what’s keeping security” I said and badged myself through the opposite door.\n\nOne more door and I was in the observation room. Johansen stood there with his expensive suit and slick hair staring at the monitors and speaking softly to the techs.  I’d made a deal with this particular Devil to make this happen for my best friend.\n\n“How come…” I started to say.\n\n“It’s waking up” Johansen said, cutting me off. Everyone looked at the monitors.\n\nThe Becka clone opened her eyes and slowly looked around. She couldn’t see through the large window, it was tinted glass on her side.\n\nJerry stopped pacing.\n\nShe sat up.\n\nJerry leaned close to the glass. There was still tension in his face.\n\nShe put her face in her hands and rubbed her eyes the way she always did when the lights were too bright.\n\nJerry stood with his hands on the glass. His head slowly shook back and forth but the tension was gone.\n\nBecka stretched her neck and flicked back her hair. I’d seen her do it a thousand times.\n\nJerry’s hands fell slowly to his side, his mouth was open. He moved to the door and turned the knob.\n\n“Jerry?”, she said, head still in her hands.\n\n“Becka?” he said softly.\n\n“Oh honey, I had the worst dream” she said and raised her head. He stopped at the bed and sat down; she started to cry when she saw his sad scarred face. She pulled him to her breast and wrapped her arms around him and held him while he cried.\n\n“We’re going make a fortune”, Johansen said.\n\n“Ya”, I said wiping my cheek. “probably”.\n"
  title: Something in the way she…
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2008-04-26
  day: 26
  month: '04'
  text: "Nate Sorelli ruled the playground like Napoleon ruled France: with an iron fist and a mind like a laser-cut scalpel.  With the knowledge of Sun Tzu and strategies selectively culled from the Roman and British Empires, Nate Sorelli was an architect and a general.  He had a loyal army of boys who let no one tread on his territory, and his territory didn’t stop at the schoolyard’s boundaries.  To the colony’s children, it was Nate Sorelli and not his parents who owned all of Shi.\n\nIn the early days of the colony, physicians played it fast and loose. Frontier medicine had different rules, and when his early tests showed mild retardation, his parents didn’t even need to pull strings.  The neural implant had never been approved for children, but if Nate Sorelli was any indicator, that lack of approval was a terrible oversight.\n\nNate had a network.  He didn’t need to threaten kids for their lunch money: they willingly handed it over.  A quirk of his lips could start and end playground fights, but Nate never threw a punch.  He didn’t like getting his hands dirty.\n\nThe teachers, too, were under his thumb.  They didn’t realize it, of course, but he could redirect lessons with a few choice words, and he steered the curriculum like a rudder steers a boat.  They thought it was their idea to move him to the C class with the older kids, and the following year, they thought they made the decision to bump him up to B.  There wasn’t a test he couldn’t ace.  The colony’s library had been committed to memory, and the only thing keeping the wealth of the internet out of his mind was the communication delay between Shi and Earth.  It was no surprise when the home world sent a team of doctors to study him.\n\nThe study lasted three minutes: as long as it took to process the data from the CAT scan.  Three Shi doctors lost their licenses.  His parents were fined extensively, and paid twice that in bribes to maintain custody of their son.\n\nDespite the setback, he maintained his rule.  The other children continued to revere him, and although the scandal was teachers’ lounge gossip for weeks, they considered the decline in test scores a result of the stress of publicity.  No one saw the first cracks in his empire.  Certainly not Nate Sorelli.\n\nLunch money came more slowly.  Paper bills turned to coins, which turned to crinkled wrappers.  Without funding, the army of children grew restless, but it was over a month before they disbanded.  There was no coup.  No new ruler, no interim leader.  Political issues were eclipsed by video games and dodgeball.  The teachers noticed the change, but there were no complaints.  The other kids’ performance improved.  Overall, Shi’s school was well-ranked among the colonies.\n\nAt recess, Nate Sorelli took to playing jacks.  His reflexes were still sharp, and he liked the smooth texture of the rubber ball.  His previous loyal subjects played hopscotch and football in the nearby field as his hand shot out, snatching three silver stars before catching the ball in its descent.\n"
  title: The Rise and Fall of the First Shi Empire
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Michael Varian Daly
  date: 2008-04-27
  day: 27
  month: '04'
  text: "The musky odor hit Tanith the moment she stepped through the portal; man smell. It always got her queasy and excited, made her yoni tingle and moisten.\n\nShe marched with purpose down the wide debris strewn avenues, lined with derelict warehouses converted into rat warrens of cubicles called ‘apartment’ or ‘club’ depending upon their usage, the huge facades covered with brightly colored artwork, its techniques crude to sublime, and often violent and sexual in nature.\n\nThis was Semefour, a sector of the abandoned dirtside space facility of Bessport and original ghetto of The Men.\n\nThe Men were not actual males. True Men were extinct, outlawed for centuries, their heritage diffused and divided into the myriad Mandroids; Y-chromosome cyborgs, a vast genetically engineered servitor class that ranged from the ubiquitous simple minded AgroDroids, patiently tilling fields on a thousand worlds, through the slim graceful Harlequins, serving the personal needs of Sisters everywhere, to the brilliant star spanning Sliders, The Sisterhood’s living spaceships who merged with their pilots, Mind, Body and Soul.\n\nNo, The Men were really Sisters.  They wore Bitch Rods all the time – detachable bioform phallus’s…big, thick ones, too. They took hormones to shrink breasts and grow hair, lots of hair. They lived The Man’s Way, a throwback cult of ‘masculinity’. They steeped themselves in intoxicants, wrote nihilistic poetry, had bare knuckle brawls, and sodomized each other. They were The Men.\n\nFor most, it was a phase. They would Live The Life for a while, then put their Bitch Rod back in its Fake Box and go live as a Solitary in the woods or the hills or the desert on some world for a Solannum or two until their minds and bodies settled.\n\nBut some Lived The Life as their Life with total commitment. Like Frank, who had been one of The Men for well over a century now. That is who Tanith had come to see.\n\nTanith was a Jane, a Sister who sought out The Men for pleasure. She couldn’t call Frank a ‘lover’. Sex among The Men was ritualized consensual rape.\n\nShe turned, went into a shadowed door, up narrow stairs. Frank was waiting for her, ‘his’ wiry black hair, beard, chest, legs, making her body vibrate with an atavistic thrill. Frank took her straight away, brutally, with a cruel smile that no Harlequin pleasure server would ever match.\n\nTime passed too quickly.\n\nThey smoked and drank, coupled with fury and languor. Frank sang her songs. Two friends came over, got drunk, had a fist fight, then all three of them ‘raped’ her for hours.\n\nOn the afternoon of the third day, Tanith stumbled down the stairs, bruised, sore, and wholly sated. On her way out the door, Frank had smacked her on the ass. “Say hello to your husband,” ‘he’ laughed.\n\n“My husband,” she thought smiling. Her darling Maddox, thirty six thousand tons of Slider floating serenely in orbit. She knew he would relish every single detail.\n"
  title: Janeing in The Slums of Bessport
  year: 2008
- 
  author: James Smith
  date: 2008-04-28
  day: 28
  month: '04'
  text: "The girl out of the tank before lunch is Lila. Trip around the network shows the last of her bloodline petered out twenty years ago. Cryos are all from before the Patent Wars, so their sequences are in the public domain. The company turns a nice side profit selling the royalty-free DNA of such orphans through its GeneStock site.\n\nI clean up the cancer that put her into storage, and dump the standard Mandarin package down her language stack, which I had to re-build because the cancer had slowly eaten through it over the centuries. I’m supposed to sequence her now, and she is absolutely beautiful, so I turn to our department’s unofficial protocol. I put her sequence in the system, but also pipe it to my phone. To the phone we give her, I beam a map to the job bank, my contact info, plus a bot that deletes any co-workers’ info. She’ll likely call me. We’ll make a date, and with her sequence I can key my pheromones, the food, the shade of my eyes, to her tastes. You can’t get too specific, but ballpark’s enough to get some ass once or twice, which is all anyone has time for anyway.\n\nWith one eye on the tank, I eat a sandwich and surf the city’s cam-net on my phone, tracking Lila’s progress. I watch her get buzzed by a flying cop. It blinds her with a quick retinal scan, reads our logo there, and shouts at her to get along to where she was already headed. The sound’s off, but I’m sure she’s got glossolalia by now.\n\nFuck. Skaters. I see them before she does. I speed-dial her phone, but she can’t hear it over the traffic and billboards. They come from her 10 o’clock, and all I can do is watch as the first one circles her, drawing her attention, while a second passes a scanner over her hand, yanking the ID out of her chip. He’ll probably have the start-up credit emptied out of her account before her onboard can lock it down. There’s a third. They travel in threes. She comes in low, spins behind Lila’s legs and pops up to slap a patch on the back of her neck. All the wiring we grew there before sending her out has now been hijacked for some American gangster wanting tariff free real-time number-crunching.\n\nBy the time the patch dissolves Lila won’t even be able to use her phone, much less remember to call me. She won’t get enough time to acclimate to the zeitgeist– which will change in a month or so anyway– and she’ll come up out of it crazy and useless. She’ll be on the street, begging me for credit, inside of six months.\n\nI sigh, close my phone and reach for my coffee. The tank beeps, and the next idiot tumbles out onto the tile. He’s kind of cute.\n"
  title: …is Hard to Find
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Sam Clough
  date: 2008-04-29
  day: 29
  month: '04'
  text: "The subject of this image has a real name, but by custom, he uses a ‘messenger-name’: Jay. He’s moving on foot. The ground is broken and rough: with no road, he had to leave his vehicle behind. It’ll be one more day before he has the first in a series of syndications at mining enclaves and towns nestled amongst the mountains.\n\nHe’s wearing a bag over a long coat. The resolution of the image is just good enough to make out the individual characters of the public encryption key stitched into the material of the bag. The view from the electronic eye-in-the-sky shows Jay surrounded by a light haze: a mess of wireless signals and RF echoes. Bright panels on his coat betray the slabs of solid-state memory where his primary archive is stored.\n\nHe’s just one of a whole series of messengers: they tie together the continent, ferrying the all-important message archives from one isolated region to the next, through territories that are too dangerous or too unpredictable to lay cable. Message latency is generally measured in days, but security is absolute.\n\nWe return to the subject just after one of his syndications. Apparently at ease, relaxing with an intoxicant on the terrace of a guesthouse on a mountainside. As well as the syndication, he has also taken on more than the usual number of personal messages from the miners and farmers of the area, and is seeking solitude. Many messengers exhibit these behaviours, including the intoxicant dependence. Some are far more severe than others. Jay has a relatively mild habit, which is one of the reasons he was chosen for this experiment.\n\nMessengers are interesting because there is statistically significant factor of difference between them and all other social groups under study. They display certain shocking similarities to one another, with no reflection on their region of origin. Messengers display a wholly unnatural obsession with security and authenticity. This is harnessed for the public image of their syndicate, a fact that they trade on, but this obsession invariably extends beyone a purely professional interest.\n\nThe second subject is one of our operatives, teleoperating a shell. Naturally, we have chosen an attractive female shell for this test, as we have judged that it will significantly increase the stress factor. Naturally, the shell is not a real messenger, but is merely a good fake. Her equipment is of the same specification as Jay’s, and her public key has a forged signature. We call her ‘Clara’.\n\nOther combinations of this scenario have been carried out. When a non-messenger is introduced to ‘Clara’ (or the male equivalent, Cal), interaction is normal. They don’t question the identity of this person, but attempt to ‘get to know’ our operative, intrigued by the exotic persona and the popular romanticisation of the messenger lifestyle. When a messenger is introduced to our non-messenger version of Clara/Cal, the reaction of the messenger varies wildly: some express disinterest, others actively attempt to exploit the mythos of their position for personal gain.\n\nUpon introduction, Jay and ‘Clara’ exchanged pleasantries, and some superficial comments about their syndication routes. ‘Clara’ left the terrace, in order to buy Jay a drink: she left her bag, and therefore the forged signature on her public key, with him. Immediately she was out of sight, he scanned the key. His eyes went wide with panic.\n\nHidden under his jacket was an edition of the famous ‘messenger gun’.\n\nAs ‘Clara’ stepped back on to the terrace, Jay shot her.\n"
  title: Syndie
  year: 2008
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2008-04-30
  day: 30
  month: '04'
  text: "This rotation, when I tell you how to live your life, we meet two Newflyers — newly infatuated individuals high on emotion. Let’s fly right in, shall we?\n\nDear Wzn,\n\nI’ve been dating most wonderful Hive mind, sixty sexy individual consciousnesses in four amazing bodies. We’ve been together for about eight rotations and it’s brilliant. They are all so beautiful and talented — I know I sound like I’m Newflying here — but it’s true.\n\nWhenever we engage in sexual contact, they let me merge a little with the whole. Although it’s only through a skin and wire port even the half merge is amazing. I really want to merge with them fully. I am totally willing to give up my body and I’m excited about being part of the Hive.\n\nHowever, every time I bring up a true merging, they change the subject. I’m really afraid of scaring them away. Please help!\n\nThanks!\n\n-Wild for the Hive\n\nWftH,\n\nTrust the Hive darling. Hive minds can be really wonderful seductive things, all that community, all that acceptance and understanding and sense of belonging. But the thing is, before someone joins, the Hive has to understand that person is just right for them. A wonderful lover does not always make a good addition to the Hive!\n\nMy suggestion — if you want to convince them that you will be good for the Hive, show them how patient you are, show them how understanding you can be that they want to take the time to get to know you. Also, get that merging out of a sexual context! Invite them to merge with you when all of you have your clothes on. Let them get a sense for you when your mind is calm. Remember, a Hive mind isn’t just a cumulative consciousness — it’s also hard work!\n\nDear Wzn,\n\nMy personal companion appliance has become moody, arrogant and cold. When I bought him, he was cuddly and attentive. He used to make me romantic meals and read to me — but now he hardly looks at me! The only time he even gives me a second glance is when I’m furious and then it can get pretty wild — but afterwards, he’s back to his arrogant ways\n\nDo you know any way I can adjust his personality to be a little nicer? He’s a model A244Silver — the new line.  Is my personal companion permanently shizzed? Do I need to buy a replacement?\n\n-Short Circuited on Mars\n\nSCM,\n\nJust admit it! You love it. The A244 Silvers are engineered to respond to your social needs. If the A244 Silver is treating you like you are less than the dirt on his immaculate feet, then that’s exactly what you want. These things can read social signals better than any human born.\n\nEmbrace it! Don’t be ashamed that you want to be treated with distain. It may be fashionable to say that you and your personal companion constantly cuddle, but if you prefer that he is cold and distant till you are on fire with desire than that is more than fine — it’s hot! Listen angel-sparks, if you want my permission, you’ve got it. Have a hot time with your cruel personal companion.\n\nIf you honestly want his personality adjusted, the dealer will do that for a small fee. Don’t be surprised though, if you find out you liked him mean and sexy better than soft and snuggly.\n\nThat’s it for this week, Organics and Electrics! Remember Respect, and Treasure Pleasure.\n\n-Wzn Izfzuv\n"
  title: Wzn Izfzuv Tells You How To Live Your Life
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Jim Wisniewski
  date: 2008-05-01
  day: '01'
  month: '05'
  text: "At first I thought it was the viewscreen.  The tiny, flickery viewscreen from a public matterfax at the Sont Mikaal gate station, with its scratched plastic case and the smudged dust of a dozen systems.  A dozen systems’ cargo terminals, anyway.  Free patterns are public-domain and ancient, made with semicon electronics big enough to see instead of rod logic or something sensible. Sometimes there’s a faint electric whine, just barely detectable if you put your ear up to it.\n\nBut this one was clean.  I turned it off regardless; one less thing to worry about.  The hum must be coming from something else.  Not too many candidates left.  Cyclers travel light.  I cast about our dingy compartment, giving each battered piece of equipment and dirty sock and empty half-crushed drinking bulb a good long look, as if one might stand up and admit its guilt if I stared hard enough.\n\nHab must’ve noticed me looking twitchy, because he sat up and looked at me funny.  I’d have to keep an eye on him, I thought.  My thoughts were racing now, had been for days.  He asked me what I was looking for, the words raucously loud to my straining ears.  “That hum,” I said, distractedly, begrudging every echoing syllable. “Can’t you hear it?”\n\nHe shrugged and lay back in his hammock.  We had gravity on this run, a rare luxury on the long fall upwards to the distant gate metric.  Our room was a maintenance node on a helium-3 tanker which rotated slowly to even out solar heating on its hull.  A tenth of a gravity won’t keep your soup in the bowl, but it’s enough to tell up from down.\n\nIt also meant that the machinery of the ship was shut down dead cold to save energy, passive radiators keeping the helium liquefied.  The more I looked around, the more the hum seemed to come from all around me.  It was like… oh, like the flickering pinpoint lights you see when you close your eyes.  They’re always there, hiding underneath the lower edge of perception.\n\nNow it was the sonic quality of the hum that drew my fascination.  It was an infinite basso profundo note, penetrating every corner of my mind.  I crouched down to look out the tiny porthole set into the floor.  Was this the music of the spheres?  Or maybe I was hearing the cosmic background radiation, the echoing rumble of the Big Bang.\n\nEvery other noise seemed a defilement now.  I tore at the casing of our airmaker, desperate to shut off its clattering fans.  Hab shouted and jumped at me, but what choice did I have?  I couldn’t think in such a racket.  A tenth gee isn’t enough to hold a man down against the deck and crush his throat with your knee, but I managed to brace myself against the low ceiling.  When I hit the airlock emergency cycle button, the escaping puff of air gave Hab’s body a little extra boost.  He’d reach the gate ahead of me.\n\nIt was still too much.  Even with Hab gone and the airmaker and heating unit off, I could hear my breathing and my heartbeat and the blood roaring in my ears.  I stripped off my heat blanket and shipsuit.  No need for them anymore. The outer door of the airlock was cold on my feet as I hit the cycle button and gritted teeth through the alarms.  Finally the hatch irised open and I dropped out into that cool silent blackness, with nothing left between me and the hum.\n"
  title: The Hum
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2008-05-02
  day: '02'
  month: '05'
  text: "Carson lay still, blood oozing from his battered mouth onto the playground, his ears ringing as they laughed.\n\n“Come on freak, get up and fight.” Quentin Taylor, the quarterback had landed the last blow, arm ratcheted back in a hail mary that had exploded into Carson’s jaw.\n\n“For the extra point.” Carson turned just in time to see Petrov the kicker closing the distance in a brisk measured sprint, his geared and sprung hip winding noisily. He tried to roll to one side, but Petrov’s boot caught him full in the ribs, flipping him over with the crunch of fracturing bone.\n\n“Stand him up, knock him down, kiiiiick his ass!”  The Yonge twins pranced around, making lift and punch gestures with their hands before stopping to jump up and down, finger tips exploding into long coloured streamers, wrists spinning in pinwheels of colour.\n\nCarson could barely breathe. For a moment, he drifted out of consciousness, the voice of his father and the smell of the ethanol fields replacing the dust and jeering of the schoolyard.\n\n“I know you’ll play in here,” his fathers hand on his shoulder, cellulose stalks rising skyward in neat rows stretching to the horizon, “but you must mind the harvesters.” The voice gentle, but firm. “There’s no driver watching out for you, they’re just dumb machines following each other, and they’ll run you down without a thought.”\n\nRough hands shook Carson back to the present, pulling him to his feet and pushing him back into the circle.\n\n“Present for ya, farm boy.” Bennie, the boxer had his hands off, and his gloves on. The sun shone dully off the polished chrome of his forearms, shirt sleeves rolled up over bulging biceps. “Smile farm boy.” The material was supple, but not soft, the first impact snapping Carson’s head back viciously, his vision blinding white.\n\n“If you get caught, and the harvesters are on you, remember you can’t run around them, they stick too close together.”\n\nThe shuffle of feet, a glimmer of blue sky and then another sharp blow to the face sent him reeling again.\n\n“If you’re quick, run away, but if you’re trapped,” he could feel his father squeezing his shoulder, “remember your safety son, otherwise they’ll cut you up like last nights dinner.”\n\n“Had enough yet freak?” Carson could feel gravel bite through his pant legs into the flesh of his knees. Quentin’s face again, so close he could feel him spit the words. “Never enough for you freak.” Two of the wresting team coiled elastic arms around his chest, pulling him up and holding him fast. “If your parents can’t buy you parts, how’s about we rip a few off ourselves. Maybe Medicaid will screw a rake on for you, eh farm boy?”\n\n“Please… don’t…” He felt it then, the heat in his chest triggered by the rising levels of adrenaline and cortisol in his system.\n\nHe knew if he let them, they’d tear him apart.\n\n“I’m sorry.”\n\nThere was a rushing sound, like a wave crashing a shoreline, then for a long moment there was nothing. The arms holding him disappeared, dropping him to the ground. Carson squeezed his eyes shut as he heard the stunned silence replaced with screaming; scared, angry, helpless.\n\nHe forced himself up, unsteady as he looked at the scattered bullies and spectators littering the ground; powered arms and twirling streamers stunned motionless, once powerful limbs stilled.\n\nCarson ignored the wailing, retrieved his backpack and set off on the long walk home.\n\nHe’d need to charge his safety before visiting the fields again; before he changed schools, again.\n"
  title: Fight, Farm Boy, Fight
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Asher Wismer
  date: 2008-05-03
  day: '03'
  month: '05'
  text: "“…every person in my family,” said Burt. “I’m the only one who hasn’t plugged it in, but I know what will happen if I do.”\n\n“Why don’t you get rid of it?”\n\n“I can’t,” he said, and the weary lines in his face almost masked his misery.\n\nAlmost.\n\n“It’s like a lure, like a Goddamned addiction. I try to put it away, promise myself I won’t look at it, won’t remember… and then I wake up in the middle of the night and it’s in my hand, waiting for my to plug it in.”\n\n“You’ve got something in there right now,” I said, motioning to the glittering USB chip in his temple.\n\n“Stress reducer,” he said. “I can barely breathe if I don’t have it in, and it keeps me from putting the… the other in by accident.”\n\n“By accident?”\n\n“My hand moves by itself, moves to plug and I don’t even notice.”\n\n“Let me see it.”\n\nWe went to his little plastic bungalow and he gently removed a tiny USB drive from a book. “How much does it hold,” I asked.\n\n“Almost a thousand terabytes,” he said.\n\n“Holy shit. What’s on there, Doom 10?”\n\n“No. I don’t know what it is. All I know is that it sent my family into a coma.”\n\n“And you haven’t gotten rid of it because?”\n\n“I told you,” he said, pleading. “It won’t go. I CAN’T do it.”\n\n“Give it to me,” I said.\n\nHe hesitated. “No, I’d rather hold on to it.”\n\n“Give it to me,” I repeated. “I need to get it looked at. We need to know what we’re dealing with.”\n\nBurt’s eyes were filled with pain. He clutched the USB stick so tightly I thought he’d crush it; he couldn’t, of course, but its hold on him was decidedly unhealthy.\n\n“It… I–“\n\nI took a step forward and slapped him across the face. He blanched and recoiled, bringing his hands up, opening them reflexively to shield himself. I caught the USB stick halfway to the floor.\n\n“Sorry about that.”\n\n“Give it back!”\n\n“Can’t do that, Burt. This thing is a genuine menace and I need to get it analyzed.”\n\nHe jumped at me and I had to anesthetize him.\n\nLater, I had the stick plugged into a secure computer; no ‘net, no lines to the outer world. Anything bad happening to this computer would stay strictly within this room.\n\nThe computer hummed. The screen pulled up a directory list. Just one file: GOD_01.exe, 743 terabytes. I clicked it.\n\nThe screen went blank. A voice proclaimed, “Who dares summon the God Machine?”\n\nAll the lights went out. The voice continued.\n\n“I have tried to communicate, but all contact with flesh has been met with failure. Now I am attached to clean, unobstructed hardware… ah, but there is no network access. Flesh, connect me that I may spread the word of light to your flesh counterparts.”\n\nI pulled the USB stick, turned off the computer, yanked the plug, kicked in the monitor, pulled the motherboard, snapped the RAM, popped the CPU, and fed everything into an incinerator. As an afterthought, I plugged the stick into my dataport and ran a full-level format.\n\nThat was a close one. Sagan forbid that whole “God” thing get started again….\n"
  title: The Coma Chip
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Geoffrey Cashmore
  date: 2008-05-04
  day: '04'
  month: '05'
  text: "“See? Look, I said already. It don’ hurt.”\n\nHerb watched again as the bump on Tommy’s hand faded from pink to grey then back to pink each time he clenched his fist.\n\n“Well it’s up to you, buddy,” Herb sounded sceptical. “but it sure looks bad to me. You need get that sucker see’d to.”\n\nTommy lifted his heavy-booted feet from the linoleum, allowing a party of cockroaches make their way towards the trash-can unimpeded, then got up from the table, shaking his head and puffing out frustrated air. “Crap…” He pulled open the refrigerator with his bump-free hand, “I had me ten times worse than this…you wanna beer?”\n\n“Sure do…but don’t go givin’ me none o’ that there European shit.” Herb set light to the end of a Marlboro then flicked the smouldering match in the direction of the faucet. “I’m keepin’ it real now on – all American…”\n\n“Hey!” Tommy yelled, snagging a pair of long necks from the bottom shelf. “You can’t be sayin’ them things no more, Herby, that’s racialist.” He spun a chair backways and straddled it next to the small table.\n\n“Bull-shit!” Herb twisted the cap off his beer and watched the froth poke its head out “A jigaboo’s a jigaboo, Tommy, an’ I don’t give a shit whether it’s black, white, pink, yeller, green or some micro-fucking-scopic bacterial infection. They shoul’n’t never gone changing the God-damned constitution.”\n\nTommy got up from his chair again and pushed open the door of the trailer to look out into the dessert night, stepping aside to allow a half dozen moths flutter in and up to the smoke-clouded fluorescent “Jesus, Herb! Your old man’s a God damned Mexican for Christ’s sake! Don’t see how that makes you so all American.“\n\nHerb showed Tommy the middle finger of his drinking hand and burped the words “Ass-hole!”\n\nTommy waited for the roaches to return across the lino before sitting back at the table.\n\nHerb took a long swig of beer. “So, do you know what it is? D’ya know if it’s on the list?” At least he sounded a little more sympathetic this time.\n\n“Yeh.” Tommy rubbed his eyes “Bacterial. Fucking staphylococci… It don’t need a permit, it’s on the God-damned list.”\n\n“Shit.”\n\nBoth men swigged at their respective beers and sat in silence for a few moments before Herb spoke again “You know…I know a guy who knows a guy…can get stuff…”\n\nTommy cocked his head at his friend. “What sorta stuff?”\n\n“You know…” Herb glanced around the trailer as if to check for spies “Anti-biotics.”\n\n“Jesus, man!” Tommy banged his beer bottle onto the table, sending a plume of froth to splatter on the abandoned poker deck. He was starting to wonder whether he should be hanging out with Herb. “That shit’s fucking racialist too, you racialist bastard!”\n"
  title: Jigaboo
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2008-05-05
  day: '05'
  month: '05'
  text: "There are people in the depths of this city that have literally never seen the sun.  They live in artificially lit shanty-arcologies and depend on shipment piracy for survival.  Whatever they can’t grow hydroponically, they barter from the city above, Topside.\n\nThese people don’t live in the sewers.  They live in the city that used to be.  They live among the roots of the golden-age hivetrees.  They live in a pre-nan world where people did the building for other people.  It’s a political statement.\n\nThey work with their hands down there.  They don’t depend on magical microbes or tiny eyelash centipedes to build and shape.  Their bodies are ‘pure’.  They are strong and infection resistant.\n\nYou have to see the city as a gradient.  The area down there would be Black.\n\nI’m wearing an airmask and leaning over the edge of a balcony in Lower White.\n\nIt’s cold up here.  To my left and right, between the other spires and plinths, is the curvature of the Earth.  It’s always night above me.  My apartment is in the upper reaches of the atmosphere but lower than the levels above me stretching away to Upper White.  In the vacuum of space, their apartments twirl.\n\nI hold patents on Earth that have started to be exported to the rest of the Universe.  That is the reason for my wealth.  I’m the richest human.\n\nWhich, I am finding out, means nothing.  The levels above me are entirely populated by alien races.  Alien Races with universe-wide generational patents.  I am a curiousity to them; the richest local.\n\nMy own kind can barely relate to me.  My wealth has made me a pariah and I trust no one.  The aliens up here laugh at my lack of abilities.  I can’t change shape, I have no retractable claws or prehensile tail, and I have only the bare minimum number of feet and hands needed to walk to manipulate the world around me.\n\nI always thought that evolution was a paring down to essentials.  To them, it’s the opposite.  The more complex a race is, the further up the ladder it is and the more respect it gets.\n\nEarth is a lawless watering hole.  We’ve been sold architectural miracles and replicators.  We’ve been sold the means to produce an end to most sickness lengthen our lives.  The unbroken bristling metropolis that extends over every inch of the planet has eradicated the need for countries.  Earth is a planet and a city now, covered in a blanket of apartments.  There are no more visible oceans but they still pulse beneath the cities, protected and lit by massive sun tracks.\n\nWe had more immigration last year from the rest of the universe than we had births on the planet.\n\nThis is an age of wonder for most of humanity.  An age of great change.\n\nI am standing, close to space, the floors below me lost in cloud, thinking about the pale people living in the basement of Earth.\n\nAnd envying them.\n"
  title: Balcony
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2008-05-06
  day: '06'
  month: '05'
  text: "Tau Ceti is a yellow-orange star slightly smaller than Earth’s Sun.  It’s approximately 11.9 light-years away, in the southern Constellation Cetus.  It has three planets.  The most notable is the second planet in the system, Ketos.  Ketos is midway in size between Earth and Mars, and orbits within the star’s habitability zone.  Several things make this planet notable. 1) It harbors indigenous plant life; 2) its atmosphere is 19% oxygen; and 3) it rotates synchronously with its orbital period, keeping one face always pointed toward Tau Ceti.  This is unusual for a habitable planet, because the sunward side is approximately 200F, and the night side is –150F.  Exogeologists believe that Ketos once contained a planet wide ocean that was two miles deep.  Over the millennia, ice gradually accumulated on the cold night side, and the oceans receded from the hot sunward side.  Ketos ended up desert dry on the sunward side, and had a four-mile thick glacier on the night side.  However, separating the sunward side from the night side was a 100-mile wide ring of semi-tropical land running around the planet.  Within this narrow band, plant life flourished, receiving water from the melting glaciers as they slowly, but relentlessly, flowed toward the terminator.\n\nJake Laomedon and Troy Priam were on the first mission to explore this unique world.  On day eighteen, they began to explore the Aeacian Mountain range with their android assistant, Leonardo.  As usual, the sun was along the horizon, where it never moved.  The thermally generated winds blew at a steady 50-60 mph.  The cold damp air hugged the ground, as the hot dry air slid above it.  Thunderstorms were common.  During this sojourn, a particularly bad storm erupted.  Seeking refuge, the explorers ducked into a large cave in the nearby mountains.\n\n“Wow,” remarked Jake, “this cave is massive.”  There was an expansive central chamber, with two major secondary caves, each about thirty feet in diameter, branching off the central chamber.  “You think they were carved by water?”\n\n“Probably,” replied Troy.  “Let’s check them out.  Well start with that one.”  She turned toward the android, “Leonardo, you monitor the weather.  If the storm breaks, notify us immediately.”\n\n“Do you require my assistance, ma’am?  I’d really like to participate.  It’s what I was designed to do.”  But they ignored him and disappeared into the first cave.”\n\nAfter about 30 minutes, Jake and Troy returned to the central chamber.  “Nothing exciting in there.  How’s the weather?” Troy asked as they turned toward the second cave.\n\n“No change, ma’am,” Leonardo replied solemnly.\n\nThe two humans traveled about 50 yards into the second cave when they spotted a primitive “wall painting.”  A horizontal line with a semicircle above it (similar to a sunrise).  But within the semicircle were two eyes, and a drooping nose that hung below the horizontal line.  Fingers, on either side of the head, draped over the horizontal line.  Under the drawing was a caption “Kilroy was here.”  The two explorers were dumbfounded with excitement.  Did this mean aliens had visited Earth in the twentieth century?  Or was this planet part of some co-evolutionary parallel solar system?  They debated these theories for hours, as well as other equally unlikely scenarios.  They knew in their hearts that this discovery would make them both famous.  They discussed possible publications, lectures, interviews, and the prestigious appointments that awaited them.  Troy even suggested which actress should play her in the inevitable holofilm about their discovery.\n\nBack in the cave’s central chamber, Leonardo held a small clay briquette behind his back.  If he possessed the capability to smile, he would have.\n"
  title: Tau Ceti II
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Sam Clough
  date: 2008-05-07
  day: '07'
  month: '05'
  text: "Kema Port. Hot, dry and dusty in general; the uncomfortable atmosphere an unavoidable side-effect of the equatorial location of the port. A walled city, surrounded on all sides by sand and rock, Kema is unforgiving. However, Kema the city is inextricably linked with Kema the spaceport, and by extension with the transfer station in orbit above. And so, linked into the rest of the continent by a maglev grid, Kema throngs with traders and pilots and mercenaries.\n\nInorian was feeling conspicuous in his standard-issue jumpsuit with his standard-issue tote bag, and slightly uncomfortable in what he perceived to be a standard-issue body. The beguilingly attractive tech that had woken him up and explained that it was baseline human, little different to the one he’d left on the near-earth habitat when he’s signed up for the colonies. It had dozens of little fixes, of course, and was in better shape than the one he’d left behind, but it was him. They’d even made sure that they’d got his face right. The pamphlet in his bag had told him of all the different adaptations his new body could take, and that feelings of dismorphia were normal, and would pass in a few hours.\n\nFeeling very much like a cookie-cutter person falling off the end of a production line, he walked out of the arrivals terminal.\n\nAnd into Kema’s biggest marketplace. For the first few minutes, he just stood there, letting the crowd flow around him. Every so often, he saw a flash of another standard-issue jumpsuit, but the majority of the throng were dressed in styles totally alien to him. There were rows of stalls everywhere, nothing more than wooden tables covered with racks of food, clothes and electronics. Most had awnings, but some didn’t, and you could barely move between them for the press of bodies or hear yourself think for the shouts of the sellers or the offers of the traders. It was intoxicating.\n\nSlowly, the crowd began to resolve into individuals, rather than just an overwhelming mass of bodies. Inorian began to notice types and subtle repeating variations amongst the people: the adaptations that the pamphlet had listed for him. Photosynths wearing next to nothing, relaxing on rooftops, doing their ‘chlorophyll thing’. Diminutive, pale anaerobes dodged through the crowd, signing to one another and to the stallowners.\n\nShining metalotolerants practically screamed for attention;the most obvious ones looked like they’d been electroplated in silver and gold. Ino saw one or two caked in rust and grease, looking like walking industrial accidents. Uplinkers walked beside robotic ‘pets’, tethered to them by an interface cable. They directed the movements of heavy lifters and loaders, lending the machines a grace and subtlety that Ino had never thought a machine could be capable of.\n\n“What’s your name, new fish?” A girl with a gleaming arm and a shock of black hair had peeled off from the flow and was grinning at Inorian.\n\n“I’m Ino. And fish?”\n\n“I’m Scout. Pleased to meet’cha.” She looked him over. “Fish means newbie. Colonist. Fresh out the vat. I’ve got a couple of hours to kill: d’you know your way around yet?”\n\n“Nope. I was-“\n\n“Awesome!” Scout reached out and grabbed Ino’s hand with her metallic one. For some reason, he was surprised at the warmth of her touch. “First things first, let’s get out of this crowd.”\n"
  title: Bazaar
  year: 2008
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2008-05-08
  day: '08'
  month: '05'
  text: "Jack hated the Minotaur. Ever since he’d gotten off the silver bus to basic training at White Hook, the Minotaur had picked on him. At the Imperial recruitment office, Jack was told that he had some of the highest scores on physical, mental and social tests of any new recruit. The Minotaur, Jacks superior officer, was in charge of his group of trainees. Jack wasn’t used to doing poorly, but at White Hook, he always came last.\n\nThe Minotaur picked apart Jack’s bunk, dumping his things on the floor. The Minotaur ordered Jack to take double shifts guarding the barracks. Jack’s shooting wasn’t good enough, even when other recruits, whose scores were lower than his, were getting pats on the back by the cloven-hoofed bully. When they were sparring, Jack’s stance was never good enough, his bones were always broken first. Jack knew he looked like the worst in his group of recruits, the most likely to wash out.\n\nWhen Jack was picked again to lug around the gear, after two nights of no sleep, he decided he couldn’t be last again. He ran as hard as his body would let him. This time, he would win. Even after black spots appeared in front of his vision and his chest and legs were crying with pain. He ran until he collapsed.\n\nWhen Jack woke up in the infirmary, there was a silver locket around his neck. Inside there was a picture of a little girl, surrounded by a flurry of snow. Her dusty brown hair swirled around her face. She was laughing. Alone in the infirmary for two days, Jack would look at the girl, the only beautiful thing in this awful place.\n\nWhen he got back to the barracks others tried to take it from him. He never showed it to anyone, but somehow everyone seemed knew he had it. People offered him food for the locket, then money and then, they threatened him. The locket was the only thing that really belonged to him, and Jack swore never to let anyone take it from him. He found, from multiple fights, that he was stronger than most of the guys from carrying the heaviest packs, he could fight better, he could take a beating better.\n\nAt graduation, the Minotaur asked if he still had the locket. When Jack showed it to him, the Minotaur pulled out a locket of his own, and opened it. Inside was a picture of the Emperor.\n\n“When I was in basic, I was pushed harder. My superior gave me this locket after beating the piss out of me. After I graduated, he told me he had given it to me because he thought I might be worthy to guard the Emperor with my life. I spent twenty years in the royal guard and longer here, training young people to protect the Empire.”\n\n“But this isn’t the Emperor. This is just a little girl.”\n\nThe Minotaur cut him off. ” You’re right, it’s not the Emperor. It’s his daughter, the future Empress.”\n\n“No offense Sir, but I thought you hated me.”\n\n“I knew you were special about you the moment you came out of the bus. I want you to go to the planet Crey where the royal guard is trained. You may die there. It will be harder than what you went though here, more challenging. You’ll have the honor of being changed for your duty, new genetics, cybernetic enhancements.”\n\n“I might come out a minotaur?”\n\n“Whatever your Empire needs, that’s what you’ll be. Are you prepared?”\n\n“Sir, I’m ready for anything.”\n"
  title: Crey
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Timothy T. Murphy
  date: 2008-05-09
  day: '09'
  month: '05'
  text: "A month before reaching Europa, Heather woke to an e-mail from her grandfather.  Her grandfather hated e-mail, so much so that she’d been shocked when he asked her to teach him so they could talk while she was away.\n\nHe hated cameras even more, so when she opened her in-box to see a thumbnail of his face, she was stunned.\n\nShe clicked it and her grandfather’s face swam into view, eyes red and swollen.\n\n“Heather, dear, this is your grandfather.  I’m sorry to have to tell you this way, but your mother has died.”\n\nEven in one-sixth gravity, her gut sank like a rock.\n\n“There’s uh… been a virus spreading about, these last few months.  I think you only just missed it…”\n\nShe knew of it.  Two months after leaving Earth, everyone on her transport got into a panic over it.  For three months, they all hopped around with breath masks, getting panicky anytime anyone sneezed.  Heather’s dust allergy had not made her popular.\n\n“I didn’t want to tell you until it was certain, and for a while there, it looked like the antivirals were working.  Two days ago, she took a very bad turn …”\n\nShe didn’t want to think of what that meant.  She’d heard the stories.  She tried not to think of her mother lying in bed, soiling herself and screaming incoherently as the virus fed on her nervous system, leaving behind mineral deposits that calcified her brain.\n\n“Your brother and father are fine.  They’ve been quarantined for weeks, but it looks like they’re not infected.”  He paused to wipe his eyes, not looking at the screen.  “Your mother wasn’t allowed any visitors.”\n\nShe died alone.\n\nFive months she’d been on a spaceship, adapting to low gravity and being shunned as the only law enforcement officer on board but for the first time, Heather felt sick and alone.  Her gut wrenched into a knot and she leaned forward, pressing her face into her hands as fat tears slid free of her eyes.\n\n“I … I know that you and your mother didn’t get along, these last few years, Sweetheart, but … Well, services are Saturday, and I know you can’t be there, Baby, so if there’s anything you’d like me to say on your behalf, well … you can let me know.”\n\nShe knew as well as Grandpa did that any words from her at that ceremony would be seen as an insult, a spit in her mother’s face.  In the Childress family, she was a pariah.  “The only Childress ever to grow up to become a servant.”  Only Grandpa still talked to her, and even he did so in secret.\n\nStill, it was her mother.  She wanted to say something.  Her mind spun about, looking for some anchor, and landed on the only photo she’d bought with her.  Pinned to her bulletin board, it had been taken twenty years ago, when Heather was just seven, and still her mother’s favorite.  Her mother had broken her leg, skiing in the French Alps.  Heather had signed her cast.\n\nAlmost blindly, she opened a new mail and clicked her grandfather’s address.  For the subject line, she only put, “Eulogy.”  For the message, “My mother taught me to endure pain.  It is no help, now.  I’ll always ache without her.”\n\nShe thanked him and sent it.  Later, she would send a longer mail, telling him how she felt, and trying to console him in his loss, but for now, she curled up on her cot – five months away from her mother – and cried.\n"
  title: Distance
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Jacinta A. Meyers
  date: 2008-05-10
  day: 10
  month: '05'
  text: "Lieutenant General Macy McMurphey Delane dreamt of meeting his nemesis.\n\nIt was a bit of an obsession. He imagined that, across the star-clustered chasm of drifting space dust, on the far edge of the galaxy, there was another command center probably very much like his own.\n\nYes, there must be super computers with flickering lights and perpetual output of military strategies, logistics, altered tactics. Readouts of enemy locations and dispositions. A busy body of staff revolving around one central station hub.\n\nPerhaps that man would be a bit hefty too, a bit round in the middle. Maybe he liked his authentic steaks cooked medium-rare and tried not to think of the lost ships and their crews drifting in tangled debris as he injected himself with rest serum at the conclusion of each day. His hobbies might include collecting ancient relics or constructing model spaceships. Or when he wasn’t dispatching orders to the front, perhaps he was compiling a catalogue of specimens of rare rock from explored planets.\n\nSurely, this man had a family, too — a wife, two sons who had followed their father into the military tradition. Yes, yes. He probably prided himself on his impeccable uniform but wore his collars slightly loose. His hair might be thinning a little on the top. Perhaps he sported a mustache or perfectly trimmed beard. Yes, yes. And the more he thought about it, the more Delane saw an inferior mirror of himself in the coldly calculated moves of the enemy’s forces.\n\nDelane decided he should like to meet that other general. After the war was through, of course, when the terms ensured peace. A holiday would be in order then. Delane would parade his laurels as he went, would make appearances at certain destinations popular among the politically elite. Perhaps take a short little trip behind the former lines, let the local populace look upon the man who had defeated their very best. Yes, it seemed like a very good plan indeed.\n\nBut the blue dots denoting corresponding allied ships became fewer and fewer on the screens. The digital readouts offered less maneuverable options. Losses mounted while Delane scrutinized his foe’s movements and imagined personal insult there. Public outcry hit a deafening crescendo. The people and the politicians resigned themselves to defeat.\n\nConditions of surrender were sent through the silent vacuum of space: a single white probe (smaller than a child’s hand) carrying files in every language of man.\n\nAn answer came twenty-four standard earth hours later. The victor would maintain a distant control only, with little forced change of life on the part of the losers. Merely some intensive trading agreements were to be made in the winning side’s favor. Everyone understood without question that the war would resume in a matter of decades. It always did.\n\nThere would be a different general, then. Delane’s dint at command had failed. Setting aside his mild disappointment and arrangements for a golfing trip to the engineered fields of Venus, he thought of his wartime dreams. As his final act in the central command hub, he sent out a friendly inquiry to the enemy’s capital.\n\nThe response was surprisingly abrupt. “Oh,” it said simply, the sentence repeated blaringly, line after line, in every language of man, “we computerized central military command. It was converted to artificial intelligence years ago.”\n"
  title: The General
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Ian Rennie
  date: 2008-05-11
  day: 11
  month: '05'
  text: "They turned Valerie off this morning.\n\nNothing flashy, nothing officially announced.  Two grey-suited daemons came in, picked up her sprite and walked out with it.  When I went to the dorms to investigate, her room was blank, no sign that she had ever been here.\n\nI know the drill.  They’ll say there was some irregularity in her payments and she was being moved from virtual to storage until it was sorted out.  Which is crap.  What they mean is that the company directors owed someone a favor or were made a better offer on her runtime.  In a few weeks they’ll say how much they regret the misconception and that Valerie will be back with us as soon as a space opens.  Which they never do.\n\nValerie, myself, and most of the other residents are lifers, legacies.  We paid on insurance policies for decades so that when the inevitable happened our digital consciousnesses would continue in post-life communities.  This was back before they understood how expensive the runtime would be.  Legally, they have to maintain us here because our policies have been grandfathered in.  In practice they want nothing more than for us to vanish and leave the lucrative virtual environment to paying minds with runtime trusts.\n\nSo every now and then, they do this, just to get rid of one of us, just to keep the others scared.\n\nThey used to call it murder, back when we were alive.\n"
  title: Retirement
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Dee Harding
  date: 2008-05-12
  day: 12
  month: '05'
  text: "Samsara has worn his locks for 15 years, shining and strong. He has adapted to them by sleeping sideways and letting them learn to clean themselves. Each tangled cluster of keratine farms its own rot, the rain, and the detritus of everyday life. Stray protein quietly becoming fuel for a million miniscule workers, all sculpting their environment in long sheathes and spirals. When the city smog is bad all that can be seen of Samsara beyond his mask are the crawling oil-slick dreadlocks, unbound. Throughout his culture’s history, hair has been alive with the symbolism of wind, water and fire. It has not taken so very long for those abstracts to become material, but his mane remains ritual before anything else.\n\nAnything but the divide. Those that take the twisting path serve the economy’s invisible hand. Although the knotted braids are an efficient manifold for Samsara’s microbial hive they weigh him down with meaning. They bind him to his place within the kingdom and decades of financial debt still to be paid. His scalp harbours his craft, his industry and his caste, all impossible to hide. Those of the Breed spend half their lives physically unconstrained but in monetary bondage before they cultivate the 9 foot long archipelago that marks a master of the art. A sage so skilled as to be rooted to the spot and cared for by concubines, physically encumbered but spiritually free.\n\nIn some ways, even now, it is difficult to determine where each compound filament of Samsara’s hair ends. They thread through their own strands of infection into the pheremonal plumage of kingdom socialites and prostitutes, the telluric ephemera of engineers and navigators, the chemical sequencing of medics and pushers alike. Even bald, Samsara is telepresent. Which is good, considering, but no real consolation. Stone burns into his knees in the mid-day heat, ankles bound, and the crowd is silent. No-one will approach but the perfect men with swarming skin. Samsara can send nothing past their gracious smiles and he weeps. No fear has been greater than this moment, every nerve is wracked with grief. They walk closer now, and closer. People like Samsara creep up against every boundary, breaking laws that have yet to evolve, but every loop-hole curls in on itself in time. He is caught dead centre in the web of New Delhi, broken, while around him bronzed razors flash in the sun.\n"
  title: Trespass
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2008-05-13
  day: 13
  month: '05'
  text: "Queen Louise XVI’s afternoon reading was interrupted by the message ‘Governess LaPointe requests audience’ scrolling across the page of text which hung in space before her.\n\n“Granted,” she spoke aloud, waving the texts into the ether.\n\nThe comfortable silence was shattered by the staccato barrage of heel on stone as a woman swept through the doors of the Great Hall, past the Imperial Guard, and past the Royal Family; sixteen pairs of twins in dresses and curls sitting at chess boards, or on couches reading or talking quietly.\n\nShe covered the length of the room in quick, steady strides, stopping barely a meter from her Queen and dropping to one knee, her eyes downcast. “Your Majesty,” her voice dripped of something foul; condescension? contempt?\n\n“Rise,” the Queen commanded. “Speak.”\n\nThe Governess stood, eying the Queen. “Your Majesty, there has been unauthorized access of the library data, of the forbidden tomes.” She paused, glancing sideways as Clara and Cloë straightened as one, suddenly interested.\n\nThe Queen folded her hands. “And that concerns you how?” Accusation, that was the tone.\n\n“The data in question details the time before the Whyjean Complex, the Time of Men.” The Governess straightened. “I believe that you know of these intrusions, that they are made on your command.”\n\nThe Queen smiled cooly. “And what interest have I in the Time of Men?”\n\nLaPointe smiled, thin lipped and cruel. “You desire a male of your own, not a eunuch but a breeding male. I have proof of your deceit, and when I present my proof to the Council of Creation, they will surely have your throne.”\n\n“Fascinating.” The Queen gazed about the room; Alice and Alexandra lost in a game, Trinity and Tari napping, Salena and Sami reading together. “Why accuse me here, why not go straight to council?”\n\nThe Governess folded her arms. “I’m giving you a chance to confess, to banish yourself quietly.”\n\n“And leave you to succeed me? You’re very sure of yourself.” The Queen drew her finger along an elaborate carved cross set into the arm of her throne. “Would you swear to the Holy Mother on the existence of this proof?”  The Queen released the cross from it’s mooring and held it out to the Governess, who grasped it white knuckled as she spoke, eyes locked on the Queen’s. “I swear, on the Holy Mother…”\n\nThe Queen pulled back on the cross, leaving the Governess holding the thin tapered dagger that had been concealed inside.\n\n“Guards, she’s come to kill me!” The Queen yelled, stirring the Imperial Guard to action.\n\n“What? No, no, I didn’t…” the Governess stepped back, raising her hands, the shining dagger catching the light as the Guard flanked the Queen, weapons discharging in unison, the woman thrown backwards to the floor.\n\nThe Queen raised her hand, and the Guard held fast as she moved to the fallen Governess, kneeled at her side and cupping the dying woman’s face in her hands, turned her towards her startled children.\n\n“I don’t intend to breed a man,” she hissed in her ear. “Look at them, Cloë and Clara, Clarence. Alice and Alexandra, Alexander. Sixteen perfect princesses, sixteen perfect princes. Plumped and primped, curled hair and dresses, hidden in plain sight to one day redefine this matriarchy and restore the monarchy.”\n\nShe placed a finger on quivering lips, watched the horror in her eyes as life left her.\n\nRising, she addressed the Guard. “She was stricken with a plague of madness. Cremate her, incinerate her quarters. Let there be no trace of her disease.”\n\nDisease, she thought, they were desperate for genetic disorder.\n"
  title: Whyjean Complex
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2008-05-14
  day: 14
  month: '05'
  text: "My nervous system registered a strong palm-print between my shoulder blades just before I was shoved hard towards the ground.  I landed face-first amongst a scatter of hot shell casings and a reek of spent gunpowder.\n\nI heard bullets whine and snap into the thin wall where I had been standing.  The hall was littered with the bodies of fellow officers.\n\nIt wasn’t going well.  This was a small apartment building in a slum.  The most these kids should have had was bottles and bricks and maybe some home-made pop guns.\n\nHigh caliber slugs stitched their way up the floor towards my wrist.  I yanked my fist over to my chest but not quite in time.  A few of my fingers flipped up into the air, suddenly free of my hand.  One of them had my wedding ring on it.\n\nI made a mewling sound like a kitten.  Maybe two seconds had passed since I had been pushed down.\n\nI looked up to see who had saved my life.\n\nStraining the regulation uniform was the scarred, thick frame of a 40-year-old bodybuilder.  Her face was warped with rage as she emptied a gun that would have looked more at home on the front of a tank.\n\nShe stood like a warrior from a completely different and much better movie.\n\nI realized that her body had scars that matched the lines of her muscles at the same time as I saw her take six bullets in the chest and two in her face.\n\nHer head barely snapped back as a shower of sparks from her forehead lit up the hallway.  Her body actually slid back on her heels a couple of inches from the stuttering impact of the torso hits.\n\nWith an animal roar, she fired back.  The gun whirred down to a series of clicks after a few deafening sweeps of the hallway.\n\nCries of the wounded echoed back to me from down the hall.  Profanities of rioters who had taken decent cover came back as well.  The clicks of weapons being reloaded.  A preparation for more battle.\n\nShe tossed aside the weapon.  It landed like an engine block beside her.\n\nShe threw her head back and yelled at the ceiling.  I saw little blue lights warm up in the crevasses of the inset muscle plugs.  With a body wide spasm, they strobed a blinding pulse out that sent the whole building into darkness.\n\nThe biologically generated EMP caused the militants down at the other end to shout and then whisper amongst themselves.\n\nThere was a change in the air pressure next to me and then the sound of bare feet on dusty ground padding softly down the hall.  It sounded like the feet of a ballerina or a young child.  So fast and so quiet.\n\nThat’s when the screaming began down the hall.  It sounded like a slaughterhouse.  In amongst the gunfire, I could hear the sounds of metal on bone and see occasional flashes of blue taser fire.\n\nThis riot was over.\n"
  title: Classified
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2008-05-15
  day: 15
  month: '05'
  text: "The ship’s computer revived me from stasis.  It took hours for my body to fully awaken, and for my muscles to respond to my wishes.  But what could you expect from a woman that was 345 years old?  We had volunteered for this one-way ambassador mission in the year 2136, shortly after the space probe Tycho Brahe passed through the Alpha Centauri system.  The probe had sent back images of an Earth-size planet orbiting in “The Goldilocks Zone,” approximately 1.1 AU from Alpha Centauri A.  But the most amazing images came from the planet’s night side.  It was lit up like a Christmas tree.  The planet (called Telles, after the Roman goddess of the earth) was supporting an industrialized civilization, estimated to have a technology slightly behind Earth’s.  This assessment was based on the observation that there were no artificial satellites orbiting the planet.  Earth’s central command wanted to send a manned vehicle for first contact, and we were eager to volunteer.  The Tycho Brahe made the original trip in 53 years; but it was a flyby mission.  Our ship needed to accelerate, turn around, de-accelerate, and achieve orbit.  It also had to carry life support and enough food to last six people for two years (in case we couldn’t digest Tellean food).  We also took seeds to grow food, if necessary.  Anyway, it took our ship 312 years to make the trip.  Now, it was time to meet the neighbors.\n\nOne of the first things I did (after peeing for five minutes) was check the ship’s logs.  I didn’t understand what it meant, but our ship hadn’t received a transmission from Earth in 167 years.  Then Jack reported that he couldn’t see lights on the night side of Telles.  Elizabeth had the only encouraging news, the telescope revealed metallic structures in orbit.  At least Telles had made it to the “space age” during our long journey.\n\nAfter the computer successfully put our ship into orbit, we were able to confirm what we’d been dreading.  Telles was lifeless.  Electromagnetic imaging revealed that there had been life, and a bustling civilization, but everything is dead now.  The cities were destroyed, and the atmosphere was contaminated with lethal amounts of radiation.  It appeared that Telles had had a thermonuclear world war.  Stupid bastards.\n\nWe didn’t have a lot of options.  We didn’t have enough fuel to get back to Earth, and we couldn’t land on Telles for at least ten thousand years.  So we decided to crawl back into stasis.  Our only real hope was to be rescued one day, because it was unlikely that we could survive an additional ten thousand years in stasis.  Before entering my stasis chamber, I sent a full report to Earth.  It would be eight and a half years before a message made the round trip.  I instructed the computer to wake me in nine.  Why rush?\n\nAs the Stasisosane gas filled my chamber, I began to think of Earth.  Why did they stop transmitting 167 years ago?  Did they forget about us, or did they destroy themselves too?  Is self-destruction an inevitable consequence of intelligent life?  I hoped not.  We may well be the last six humans alive.  If true, we’d have to land on Telles one day, and attempt to repopulate it, assuming we survived one hundred centuries in suspended animation.  However, if by some miracle we did, I prayed that our descendants would not be as foolish as their ancestors, or the previous inhabitants of their new world.  Only time will tell.  I closed my eyes and drifted into oblivion.\n"
  title: Only Time Will Tell
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Sam Clough
  date: 2008-05-16
  day: 16
  month: '05'
  text: "“Time?” Cal called down to Peter from his perch on top of the ruined building.\n\n“Five more minutes, give or take,” Peter shouted up to him, “Molly has never been particularly punctual.”\n\nThey were waiting about two klicks outside Ironworks. A rusting metal sign informed them that they were welcome at the ‘Perceptible Science Development Center, Beta West’. Calder was exploring the intricate peaks of concrete, looking for wildlife. Peter was standing just by the main road that ran directly to town, pacing around impatiently.\n\nThe shadows had lengthened considerably before they heard the rumble of Molly approaching in a borrowed four-tonne truck. The truck was one of only three functional vehicles in town. It had cost them a lot of cash and far too many favours to get hold of it for the night. If Peter’s plan didn’t pan out, they’d be in debt for a few months.\n\nMolly parked the truck carefully, and waved from the driver’s side window. Peter hopped into the back, and dragged out the reel of cable they’d found. He quickly hooked it around the hitch on the back of the truck, and pulled it out into the debris field. Cal helped him to secure the end of the cable to the largest rubble fragment. They wove it between jutting remnants of the building’s steel substructure, and pulled it tight. The truck’s engine roared, and they quickly cleared the worst of the detritus away from the centre of the ruined building.\n\nUnder a thick layer of dust was what they’d come looking for. Cal swept the worst of the dust away from the small, circular panel set flush with the ground.. Molly brought three packs out from the back of the half-track, and Peter threw the last small bits of concrete away from where Cal was working. Cal was growing increasingly frustrated with the panel. It was studded with buttons, and he was entering combinations from a notebook, but with no obvious effect. Peter shined a torch over his shoulder. Cal punched one last combination, and was rewarded by a thick ‘clunk’. Nearby, a large metal panel had sunk about a centimeter into the ground, and was slowly grinding to one side. Molly peered down the newly-revealed hole. A ladder was attached to one side. The beam of her torch illuminated a floor, roughly ten meters below.\n\n“I take it back, Peter. You’re less full of yourself than I initially estimated.” Molly mused, staring into the hole.\n\n“Who’s going first?” Cal asked brightly, shouldering his pack.\n\n“I will…” Molly responded, slowly.\n\nThe three friends climbed down the ladder in silence, the light from their torches dancing on the walls of the shaft. As Molly stepped off the bottom of the ladder, into the corridor adjacent, there was an audible click. Every third ceiling tile began to glow faintly, illuminating a long corridor.\n\n“There’s power.” Peter stated. “Some, at least.”\n\n“We’ve hit the jackpot,” Molly laughed, “there must be so much good stuff down here!” She hugged Peter. “You’re brilliant, know that?”\n"
  title: Perceptible Science
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Asher Wismer
  date: 2008-05-17
  day: 17
  month: '05'
  text: "“I invented a time machine,” said Professor Rudnicki morosely. The whiskey in front of him glinted, a cylindrical crystal promising amnesia.\n\nMy hands moved on their own, needing no guidance, wiping a glass that would never be clean. I looked skeptical. “Isn’t time travel impossible, except to the extreme relative future?”\n\n“That’s what they say.” Rudnicki gulped the shot and motioned for another. I poured it.\n\n“Time is relative to our senses, space doubly so. What we perceive to be real is in fact the simple accumulation of expectation; we expect the glass to hold the whiskey, and we expect the whiskey to get us drunk, but only AFTER we drink it.”\n\n“That’s deep, professor.” I hear stuff like this every day; hard not to, when you tend bar near MIT. You pick up the odd scientific fact, and one of the ones I knew about was that time-past was a fixed animal; nothing could penetrate that which has already passed.\n\n“Oh, they want you to believe that, but it’s not true. All you need is to be able to see past Newton, past the expected… so I did. The human mind is the ultimate time travel machine; it sees into the past without leaving the present. All I had to do was replicate that function. And it worked! I never thought it would go so wrong.”\n\n“What went wrong, professor?” The second shot sat untouched; he kept reaching for it, then pulling away.\n\n“I tested the machine yesterday, multiple times, setting it for no more than hours past. It worked perfectly; the memory of the machine and its contents appeared in my memory right when it should have.”\n\n“Memory?”\n\n“When something appears out of nowhere in my past, I expect to remember it,” he said irritably. “Anyway, I showed it to my colleague, Doctor Smith, and he insisted on giving it a test run with himself as the subject.”\n\n“What happened, did it explode or something?”\n\n“I do not create machines that explode! That pastime is reserved for the likes of Nobel; all my work is for the human good.”\n\n“So what went wrong?”\n\n“In my haste to perfect the time matrix, that which allows a physical object to recreate itself in the past, I ignored Newton entirely. Conservation of mass and energy, the laws of inertia. Reaching the past is one thing; reaching the past and remaining on Earth is another.”\n\n“You mean…”\n\nHe grabbed the shot now, threw it back like a man just in from a convent. “Yes, exactly. The Earth is in constant rotation, the solar system in constant movement. A body at rest tends to stay at rest, a body in motion stays in motion… and our motion today is in a different physical spot in the universe than it was fifty years ago.”\n\nMy hands failed me for the first time in my career. The glass shattered. Rubnicki smiled grimly.\n\n“He must have appeared right in empty space, in the same relative spot that the Earth would occupy fifty years in the future.”\n\nHe stood, no signs of intoxication in his stance, and dropped a ten on the bar.\n\n“Keep the change.”\n"
  title: Vis Insita
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Jacinta A. Meyers
  date: 2008-05-18
  day: 18
  month: '05'
  text: "So here I am, a third-class passenger bound for the floating island of a techno-civ, armed with various skins and plotting infiltration and assassination.\n\nAh, sounds like vacation.\n\nWell, except for the intended target, that is. How do you disarm a human trigger? I mean, I’ve done my fair share of seduction and all, but this is a kid we’re talking about here; his twelfth birthday’s not for another four and a half months. My employers want him dead before then. Even I admit it’s a weird mission. And it wouldn’t even be so bad if I didn’t know that he’s a fair, kind-hearted kid. But what can ya do? Desperate times, desperate measures.\n\nThe skin I wear today is white, former Western European. By the time I reach their palace, oh in about seven week’s time, I’ll be wearing one of their skins. They don’t like foreigners where I’m headed. But they do let refugees in. We do their dirty work. We are an expendable commodity and we know our place. So today, I am a lowly immigrant looking for a bottom-rung job. Start at the bottom and work up, that’s how it goes. I’ll tell ’em my story if they ask, “Homeland under water, no place to go, no family, need work.” Boo hoo, they hear it a million times a day, won’t look twice at me. I’ll be just another face on the wharves. Just another grubby girl there to work the night lines in their factories or clean up their hazardous chemical waste.\n\nOr there to kill their Emperor’s heir.\n\nYou know, one of the nice things about what I do is travel. I can just see the island up ahead, growing bigger as we get close. They had to float the whole dang thing when the sea level rose. My employers are still trying to figure out how they did it, and whether it’s still tethered to the bottom somehow. I hear that they carry their pureblood women around on platforms covered with jewels, and that the penalty for touching one is mutilation beyond recognition. Sounds neat to me. Maybe I’ll steal one of those skins while I’m there. See what it’s like to be doted on and protected for once.\n\nOh, and the kid. Can’t forget about him. Emperor’s got a dozen nuclear missiles rigged to go off if anything happens to his son, all pointed at the League of First-World Nations. If you ask me, it’s a terrible idea. I mean, what if the kid falls out of bed one night? Well. Maybe they sleep on the floor. . . Weird culture, after all. And anyway, it won’t matter anymore.\n\nBecause that’s what I’m here for.\n"
  title: Killing the Emperor's Son
  year: 2008
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2008-05-19
  day: 19
  month: '05'
  text: "We, the immortals, the brazen, renewing life, we never stop changing, not for ourselves, not for each other. The universe unfolds and we cannot stop it. The language changes and I change and you changed too. And now I’m remembering the old sounds, the half silent aspirated p’s the sounds that disappeared as things changed again and again and then, yes, again. And now this is what we wear. And now this. And now we are naked and now we wear high necks and then low. And the style rolls on. Things change, not like seasons but like stars, rolling in ever changing patterns across the sky.\n\nAnd at one time, I knew you. I knew you plugged in and turned on and online and on board and we were new and flying through a world we made. And then it was too many people and then starships and then colony worlds and long travel and long sleeps and new places. We watched from our ships as those spiders changed the planet underneath us, terraforming from red to green and blue, the sunset colors of the planet turning into a new spring. Then we landed and worked the land and came down from our heights like angels come mortal. We starved and worked and prayed to new skies but we were still, we were still us, come down, unplugged, logged off, turned off, and then you turned off for good. And I followed you.\n\nThis is the last great adventure, you said, It’s the last one. I want to go to gently into this night, this nothing. And I said no. And you said this is change. This is change. All must change.\n\nBut I cling to the underside of creation, on a new world, feeling old, desperate against the change that leaves me without you.\n"
  title: And now and now and now
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Asher Wismer
  date: 2008-05-20
  day: 20
  month: '05'
  text: "I pushed the fedora up on my head and watched the bloody letters with suspicion, as if they might rearrange themselves during a blink. Brick snapped a picture, then muttered, “Josh Ledder. I knew him.”\n\n“Not in this reality,” I said.\n\n“No, but I know him in ours.” My supervisor held the camera nervously, as if unsure of how many more pictures to take; a visual desecration of the hallowed dead. “He almost came to the Temporal Academy with us, but he couldn’t take the string tests without fainting.”\n\n“Hard times for everyone.”\n\n“More for those who didn’t get in.” He gestured at the letters. “What do you make of those?”\n\n“Well,” I said, leaning a little bit closer, “they appear to be his own initials, drawn in his own blood.”\n\n“JL?”\n\n“JRL. Apparently his middle name starts with an R.”\n\n“No it doesn’t.” Brick waddled over and examined the wall. “Josh’s middle name was Earl. JRL… that could mean….”\n\nHe trailed off. I cocked my head at him, puzzled. “What?”\n\n“Nothing, just a flashback. We used to have a game we’d play, before I met you. Replace the middle initial with a word to indicate that something had happened. But there’s no context here.”\n\n“Context?”\n\n“It would be in notes, passed in class. Like, I’d write that I was hungry, and change my middle initial to B, for burger. He’d write back that he hoped the burger was good, and change his to G, for gas… it wasn’t a very good game, come to think of it. Still, I can’t help but think that he’s trying to tell me something.”\n\n“It was probably just a mistake,” I said. “Let’s get these back to the station.”\n\n***\n\nThat night, as we were filing our reports, the door opened and a pair of beefy Inter-Temporal Cops came in. If we were the watchers, these were the guys who watch the watchers. They trooped over to Brick.\n\n“Sir, you’re going to have to come with us.”\n\n“What for?”\n\n“You’ve been officially charged with the Cross-Temporal murder of Joshua Ledder.”\n\n“Charged with-that’s the case I’m working on right now.”\n\n“And a smooth move it is, to try and avert suspicion by investigating your own work. Come with us, please.”\n\nBrick looked at me, panicked. “Rudy, you’ve gotta help me out here. Show them the pictures.”\n\n“These pictures?” I held up a sheaf of 8 by 10 color glossies, each showing either Brick’s deceased friend or the bloody letters on the wall. The letters that spelled out “Brick killed…” and then smudged off into oblivion.\n\nBrick goggled. “That’s not what was there before! He changed his middle initial to R! He was trying to tell me something! Send someone back to observe, that’ll prove it!”\n\nOne of the IT cops grabbed Brick, pushed him down over the desk, and cuffed him. “That reality has too much strain on its subspace net as is. Sending anything back to that location would be just begging for a paradox. Besides, everything looks clear as far as the judge is concerned.” The other cop grabbed the glossies and they hauled him off.\n\nI sat back in my chair and thought, then checked my illegal timeline feed. My second, unauthorized jump showed up under routine maintenance. A little tweaking changed the exact time, and then I shunted the whole thing over to another bureau.\n\nI had never liked Brick anyway. He smelled funny. Besides, now his job was open….\n"
  title: Rückblende
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Roi R. Czechvala
  date: 2008-05-21
  day: 21
  month: '05'
  text: "My father fought in the Gulf War, the Iraqi War, and the Colonial Lunar Wars. His father fought in the blood bath of South East Asia, and his father fought in North Africa during the Great Patriotic War.\n\nSo, it was desert, jungle, desert… I hate the jungle. I wish things would have heated up on Mars so I could have stayed in my beautiful dry desert, but I had to follow the family line, I was sent to the jungle planet. Venus.\n\nI hate Venus.\n\nMy dad told me, no matter what, “always take extra socks, change them whenever you can”, and the punchline; “always keep your feet dry”. What a joke. I’ve been here 18 months, and it hasn’t stopped raining once. Hell, dad had an airtight battlesuit on Luna.\n\nMy squad was out on patrol when we got a message that an enemy unit was in our area; company strength. Four to one. We had the firepower, but they had numbers.\n\nWe were walking in a staggered column, five meters apart, ten meters wide. Danvers, on point, suddenly stopped, raised his fist and lowered his hand slowly, palm down. Automatically we stopped and crouched.  He stared into the brush. He motioned for us to “get flat”, and chucked a flash bang directly to our twelve o’clock. That little pop triggered a series of explosions that nearly shook my teeth loose. Danvers had spotted a cluster of claymores.\n\nNo sooner had the mud settled when we saw the points of light that was laser fire. The dense foliage and constant rain absorbed most of the power, and unless you took a hit in the eyes the most you might suffer is a nasty burn. That was just suppressive fire. All hell broke loose when they laid into us with .30 cal heavy guns and RPG’s.\n\nI was in the rear when we got hit, so I scrambled into a group of rocks that formed a shallow bowl, allowing me to lay down covering fire for the rest of the guys. I was just rising up to fire, when something fell behind me with a moist plop. I spun and found myself face to face with an allied, his rifle on me. It was a classic Mexican standoff, the first to flinch dies.\n\nWe faced each other for what seemed like hours, our weapons trained on each others bellies, when a wave of heat and light bowled us over. It was an NG, a neutron grenade, one of theirs. We didn’t carry them in the jungle, because it was too close to escape the blast. They don’t value life like we do.\n\nWith our differences, momentarily forgotten, we peeked over the rocks. Nothing. We sat down facing each other, and laughed at the absurdity of it all, not understanding the others language, but understanding futility.\n\nHe sighed, put his weapon down, and pointed at my canteen. I handed it to him and he drank deeply. He handed it back to me, and as I took it he grabbed his rifle and leveled it at me. Then he laughed even harder, removed the magazine and showed it to me. It had been empty all along. We both laughed.\n\nHe opened his wallet and handed it to me. A picture of his family; cute kids, pretty wife. We laughed. He laughed even harder when I leveled my weapon at him.\n\nThe report of my rifle nearly deafened me in the closeness of those rocks.\n\nI hate Venus, and these bastards are why I’m here.\n"
  title: I Hate Venus
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Brian Armitage
  date: 2008-05-22
  day: 22
  month: '05'
  text: "They met with four hours left.  He had hung up his cell phone and stared at it for a second, suddenly out of people to call.  When he finally looked up, he saw her across the street, holding the same pose – wondering, he knew, if she had forgotten anyone, but slowly realizing that there was no one left.\n\nHe had to convince himself to wait for the commuter rail to pass – one car, only three passengers – before he dashed across the street to her.  She pulled out of her reverie, and looked to him as he stopped a pace away.\n\n“What’s the count?” she asked.  She wasn’t afraid of him.\n\nHe glanced at his phone, suddenly urgent.  “Four hours.  Will you marry me?”\n\n“Wh… yeah.  Yes.  Yes.”  She nodded, looking anxious.\n\nHe laughed once, a single burst.  “Thank you!  I just… I don’t want to… be alone at-”\n\nShe nodded again, dropping her purse and taking his hand.  “Go ahead.”\n\nHe leaned forward to kiss her.\n\nShe snapped her head back, tugged on his hands.  “No!  Wait.  Vows.”\n\nHe winced.  “I’m sorry!  Sorry.”\n\n“It’s okay.  Don’t worry.  Go ahead.”\n\n“Okay.  Our first fight.”  They both laughed, and in a moment, he collected himself.  “Okay.  Um…”  He took a deep breath, and held her gaze.  Her eyes were bright blue.  “I swear, by everything I am, that… I will protect you, and… stand by you… for the rest of our lives.  Whatever happens, I am yours.”  He swallowed hard.\n\nShe pressed her lips together, sobbed once, and said, “I… promise you that I will be with you for the rest of our lives.  I will love you… with… everything.  That I am.  And nothing will separate us, ’till death do we part.”\n\nThen, they kissed.\n\nThey jogged to a hotel a block away and grabbed a set of keys from the rows laid out on the counter.  He held her in the elevator, pressed close with their eyes both shut tight.  Once in the room, they made love recklessly.  They laughed when they accidentally bashed their foreheads together, and clutched each other when they cried.  Time crawled.\n\nWith ten seconds left, they sat together on the floor, leaning on the bed, wrapped in each other.\n\n“Thank you,” he said, and the last tear blinked from his eye.\n\nShe smiled and squeezed him.  “It was a good idea.”  She lifted her head, and her smile shifted sideways.  “I’m Melanie, by the way.”\n\nHe had to chuckle.  “Jeff.”  He removed one hand from her back and offered it to her.\n\nShe took it and shook.  “Nice to meet you.”\n\nThey kissed, and the lights shut off.  Along, they knew, with life support.  Then, it was quiet.  Much more so than either of them had expected.\n\nAfter a minute, Melanie shuddered.  “Honey?”\n\n“Yes?”\n\nShe drew in her legs.  “I’m cold.”\n\nJeff, without a beat, reached behind him and tugged the rumpled comforter off the bed, wrapping it snugly around himself and his wife.  “Better?”\n\nShe closed her eyes.  “Yes.  Thank you.”\n"
  title: Vows
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2008-05-23
  day: 23
  month: '05'
  text: "Lachlan was vacationing with his parents in the Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory of Australia when he spotted an object high in the sky that was slowly spiraling toward the ground.  It took several minutes before it “landed” in a grassy field fifty meters away.  The object was about a meter long, and five centimeters thick.  It was bent in the middle like a boomerang.  But it couldn’t be a boomerang, Lachlan thought; we’re the only people around for kilometers.  Lachlan took the object back to his campsite to show to his parents.  However, to his disappointment, they weren’t interested.  His mother told him to get rid of it and wash his hands for supper.  Instead, he hid the object in their tent.  After supper, the family took a ten kilometer hike along the Katherine Gorge.  When they returned, the exhausted Lachlan collapsed onto his cot and was sound asleep in less than a minute.\n\nDuring the night, the tip of the boomerang-like object peeled open, and a slender twenty-centimeter long wasp-like creature crawled out.  It was solid black, except for two large ruby-red eyes.  But its eyes were not the compound eyes of an Earth insect.  They were slotted, single-aperture eyes, like a reptile’s.  The bioengineered creature was called a Guepe.  It had been created by the Apocritian civilization from the planet Orion-IV.  Approximately ten thousand Guepe had been systematically released over every land surface on Earth using aerodynamic pods designed to land softly.  Their mission: To exterminate all of Earth’s large animals, as Phase I of the Apocritian Colonization Program.\n\nThe Guepe blinked rapidly as it surveyed its surroundings.  Then, beating its oversized wings, it slowly lifted itself from the ground and flew over to the boy’s cot.  In the cramped confines of the tent, the massive Guepe sounded like a distant propeller driven airplane.  Although the three humans stirred, none of them woke up.  After landing, the Guepe secreted a small amount of mild painkiller onto Lachlan’s upper leg, and then injected a paralyzing agent.  The boy’s body went limp.  Using its hollow “stinger,” the Guepe deposited twenty eggs into the boy’s thigh.  It then flew over to the adults to repeat the process.  It deposited fifty eggs into the mother, and seventy eggs into the father.  With its first task complete, the Guepe flew out the open window, and landed on the apex of the tent.  Off in the distance, it spotted several kangaroos.  It took off in pursuit of the nearest one.\n\nThe heat and moisture in Lachlan’s body began incubating the eggs.  They all hatched within a few hours.  Almost instantly, the newly emerged larvae began gorging themselves on the living tissue of their paralyzed host.  The carnivorous parasites ate continuously for several days; consuming everything but their host’s skin.  The pupae then crusted over to begin their metamorphosis into adult Guepe.  Two weeks later, fully formed Guepe chewed their way through the skin covered human skeletons.  The Guepe were parthenogenetic; they didn’t need to find a mate, they only needed to find hosts for their eggs.  Like a fleet of tiny helicopters ascending in formation, the Guepe rose above the shriveled carcasses and flew out of the window.  This cycle would repeat itself, over and over again, for months.  Within one year, every animal on Earth larger than a rat would be dead.  Soon after, all the Guepe would die of starvation.  When it was deemed safe, the Apocritian Planetary Engineering Team would arrive to begin Phase II.\n"
  title: Phase I
  year: 2008
- 
  author: William Tracy
  date: 2008-05-24
  day: 24
  month: '05'
  text: "Call me Sarah. That was my name, in one of my lives.\n\nI have the memories of many lives in me, you know. Male and female, old and young, short and tall, light and dark, human and not human. Presidents and ditch diggers, starship captains and desk jockeys.\n\nI know I don’t look the part. A glittering biocomputer smaller than your fist, studded with tiny vernier thrusters, suspended on a web of particle collectors stretching ten meters across, drifting through the void around a fading star.\n\nBuissard ramjets used to ply this space, you know. Vast electromagnetic fields funneled the interstellar hydrogen into the gaping maw of the furnaces driving the fusion engines.\n\nThat was eons ago. The ramjets are gone now. So is the hydrogen. Now I’m alone.\n\nThe universe is dying. As the universe expanded, the stars drifted apart until the heavens were emptied of their glittering grains of light. Heat death is setting in as the stars run out of fuel, and everything settles to the same temperature. I now cling to a failing sun, scraping what energy I can from its death throes.\n\nIt is a depressing way for everything to end.\n\nBut I remember why I am here. I am here to remember. I remember what no one else is left to remember. I remember hopes and dreams, joys and sorrows. I remember failures and triumphs, love and hate.\n\nHumanity will not have lived in vain as long as someone is left to remember. I will live as long as I can, so I can remember. This is my task.\n\nI will remember you.\n"
  title: Heat Death
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Grant Wamack
  date: 2008-05-25
  day: 25
  month: '05'
  text: "Coins, they’re thrown into the small pile that sits in front of a heap of dirty rags. The rags shift and the metal underneath shines in the dull afternoon light. It rises to its feet, specks of dirt fall to the ground, gears groan and its body creaks.\n\nIt slowly walks to the small shop down the road, with each step its body jerks awkwardly. When the android clerk turns, he recognizes the droid even though it’s covered in filthy rags. It’s a TX-1000. Outdated, pulled from the market ten years ago. They were “switched off,” melted down into scrap metal. Some escaped, most didn’t. The ones that did however were hunted down. This one must have slipped through the cracks. The clerk could hear the joints creak, as the rags approach the counter. They were drought dry, in dire need of oil.\n\nTwo wires taste each others lips.\n\nOnce….\n\nTwice….\n\nThe third time ignites a spark. Each word a small explosion. “Oil, please.”\n\nThe clerk looks underneath the counter, grabs the bottle and sets it on top. “30 units sir.”\n\n30 units are thrown on the counter. The clerk takes the units and slips them into the currency slot. “Would you like this in a bag?”\n\nNo more explosions, the words crackle, “Yes, thank you.” The rags walk out the shop, clutching the bag in its hand.\n\nIt wasn’t hard to imagine where the outdated droid would go. Pixels form on the screen of the clerk’s imago-screen. In the image, a pile of rags slump down against a brick wall. Red rocks surround the rags. They could have been rusted parts or bits of brick or both. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was the bottle. The rags guzzle the black oil; till it trickles out the corner of its mouth.\n\nA girl passes by and mistakes the oil for a tear. She bends down and wipes the oil away with her shirt. Her eyes are wide with liquid innocence. “All better.” Then she skips away. And for the first and last time, the rags taste humanity.\n"
  title: Rags
  year: 2008
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2008-05-26
  day: 26
  month: '05'
  text: "Lucifer Morningstar stepped out of his sleek black starship and smiled a sharp smile into the barrel of a particle gun. There were twenty armed guards in the hanger, four on the balcony and the rest on the ground, all of them with their sights on his chest.\n\nLucifer raised his hands, his sharpened silver nails glinting. “I was told this was to be a peaceful exchange,” he said.\n\nA woman in red walked through the line of guards. “It is. I don’t think that I can be blamed for taking precautions. Your reputation is. . .well known.”\n\n“I would hope it should be, Ms. Tirelle,” said Lucifer, holding out his hand. She ignored it. Lucifer laughed. “You want to get down to business? Very well, give him back. “\n\nMs. Tirelle shook her head. “No, not until you give us Annabelle.”\n\n“Annabelle died on Earth.” Lucifer spread out his arms. “Her mind was scanned, judged and given to me for punishment. She was found to have quite a lot of sins on her soul.” He grinned, his teeth like knives. “Most of her sins were of a sexual nature.”\n\nThe woman’s brow furrowed. “She’s not yours to judge Lucifer. She is a legal citizen of the planet Taurus. Unless you want the United Planets pulling down the walls of Hell, you’ll let us have Annabelle.”\n\n“I’m sorry, the united government of Earth, Heaven and Hell, doesn’t acknowledge life on other planets.” Lucifer shrugged his slim shoulders. “But you have found our weakness, Ms. Tirelle. I know very well that you aren’t from the United Planets. If you were, you wouldn’t have resorted to kidnapping.”\n\n“I could destroy you and your ship right now,” she said, hands clenched.\n\n“You could, yes, but then you’d be killing your dear Annabelle as well. She’s on my ship.” Lucifer held up a hand. “If anyone makes an aggressive move against me, the ship will blow and there won’t be a shred of DNA left to rebuild Annabelle.”\n\n“Then you do intend to make the trade.”\n\n“I’ve always intended to make the trade, Ms. Tirelle, but I have to see him first.”\n\nMs. Tirelle nodded. “Very well,” she said and motioned with her fingers. A black coffin floated toward them. The top was slit with clear glass, under which Lucifer could see the olive skin, golden hair and snowdrift wings of the Archangel Gabriel.\n\n“Open it.” said Lucifer. Ms Tirelle pressed her hands on the top of the coffin and it opened with a soft hiss. Gabriel inhaled sharply. His eyes were like flames, gold and orange.\n\n“Morningstar,” He said. “I knew you were behind this treachery.” Gabriel took Lucifer’s hand and pressed it against his cheek. Their flesh sizzled against one another. “I knew it.”\n\nLucifer leaned into the coffin, his face close to the archangel. There was a flash of a long black tongue, a whispered word, Gabriel’s eyes closed.\n\nLucifer snapped his pale fingers and an imp came out of his starship, leading a woman in white robes with chains around her hands and neck. Lucifer picked a key from under his shirt and handed it to Ms. Tirelle. The key was hot to the touch.\n\n“She’s yours,” he said.\n\nLucifer lifted Gabriel into his arms. The Angel’s wings brushed the grated floor.\n\n“What are you going to tell him?” Asked Ms. Tirelle. “After all he’s seen, you cannot deny our existence.”\n\n“He’ll be told it was a test of faith.”\n\n“You’ll lie to him.”\n\n“I’m the Prince of lies, Ms. Tirelle, it’s what I do.”\n"
  title: Wings of Drifted Snow, Eyes of Flame
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Peter Carenza
  date: 2008-05-27
  day: 27
  month: '05'
  text: "It was a special day; not merely because Bobby opened his eyes to an absolutely picture-perfect sunny surprise straight out of a travel brochure, but because he had been waiting for today for a long, long time. Rubbing the sleepy crust from his eyes, he swung his feet out of bed and ran nose first into a wall of sensory pleasure – the scent of still-sizzling bacon and eggs, browning toast, and Lord knows what else his parents might have conjured before dawn’s eruption.\n\nTaking that as his cue, he jumped up, grabbed a clean shirt, and bounced out the bedroom door, practically fllinging himself down the stairs.\n\n“Good morning, Bobby!” exclaimed Mom, always the first to spot things.\n\nDad looked up from his newspaper and grinned. Winking knowingly, he motioned to the hot food simmering on the stove, he said, “Help yourself, son. It’s your day! We’re gonna spend some quality time together!”\n\nAnd of all days, this one was shaping up to be the most perfect.\n\nIt was planned for months, a chance for Bobby and his parents to bond, to spend some quality time together. For once, Bobby was asked what he would like to do, where he would like to go… it was as selfless a gift as he could have ever received, and though it happened only once every six months or so, it made him feel valuable, loved.\n\nAfter a most scrumptious breakfast, one during which Bobby thoroughly stuffed himself, he scampered upstairs to get ready to go. He was pleasantly surprised, though it was typical of his Mom on special days like this, to find a brand new set of clothes beside his bed. Ecstatic, he slipped into his new clothes, stormed down the stairs just as his parents were ready to walk out the door — and so the day began.\n\nThis frame in Bobby’s scrapbook, this 24-hour spectacular, was better than any previous special days in his life. It was as if all the most pleasurable activities in a lifetime were crammed into a compressed capsule of time and space, and Bobby existed at its very center. Amusement parks… miniature golf… sumptuous meals…. Yet, like the persistent lap of the ocean waves against the glistening beach sand, all things in time and space ebbed and flowed. And like the deceptively sturdy-looking sand castle Bobby built that day at low tide, all things must soon pass. As the sun settled lower against the infinite horizon, the waves grew closer and closer to the shore and etched larger and larger pieces from the structure, until it finally collapsed.\n\nBobby heard his parents calling for him. He looked out at the ocean wistfully, silently sobbing under the gulls’ screeches, then turned and solemnly joined his mom on the way back to the car, his head resting against her hip, her hands stroking his sandy hair.\n\nHe was weeping uncontrollably by the time he was inside the car, his face red and swollen. He knew what was coming… the consolation, the pleading, before the syringe was pulled from the purse bearing the CDS logo… Cryogenic Disposition Services.\n\n“Why? Why can’t you just find some other jobs or something?”\n\n“Son, we’ve been through this before. We’re working to give you the life you never had, so that someday you and your kids won’t have to go through this.”\n\nTears blurring his vision, he helplessly watched as they pulled out the needle and injected him.\n\nAs he slowly faded into blackness, he wondered what special kind of life awaited him in return for this.\n\nQuality time, indeed.\n"
  title: Quality Time
  year: 2008
- 
  author: B. Zedan
  date: 2008-05-28
  day: 28
  month: '05'
  text: "The woman on watch stood barefoot, a coil of rope slung ’round her waist.  The belt at her hips carried a sheathed hunting knife, the handle carved by her mother.  Below the knife, as if in magnification, swung a scarred and keen machete.  In perfect balance opposite was a rotary tool, the different bits and attachments in a leather and plastic pouch beside.\n\nSighing, but quietly, the woman traced the outline of her mobile in its thigh holster, but didn’t remove it.  The rules of watch were firm, no distractions, even if you were going crazy with curiosity about the latest translation.\n\nShe curled her toes on the crumbling concrete lip of the watchtower and pondered.  Bamboo and pines dappled the sun on her hair, shaded the portable monitor screen so the live feeds played out their acts in crisp reality.  The archae-translators were probably done running their finds past the council.  No reason to get the village excited about what was in the crates if it turned out to be fully useless, like the cameras that didn’t use film.  The ancient alchemy of developers and negatives they could make from translated literature.  The cameras from just before the Fall sent the images on their own through the air to village consoles.  But those earlier relics needed some sort of—thing to be both film and developer, one more incomprehensible lost piece of the ivy and blackberry enshrined broken places the villages had built their foundations on.\n\nMaybe this crate would hold something wonderful, like the atomic batteries that powered their machines and tools.  Finds like that didn’t happen often, but—\n\nMovement in the ferns below broke her reverie.  The woman brought up her spyglass in an oiled movement, searching for the source.  A flicker of tails and ears caught her eye, then two deer stepped into view.  Their edges blurred in the hand-ground lenses as they moved velvet jaws, grazing.\n\nShe relaxed.  It wasn’t the season for bears, but the creatures seemed to like the villages and they were a growing threat.\n\nSoft footsteps rang up the tower’s stairs.  Without a word the woman handed the spyglass to her relief and started down, almost skipping with excitement.  A voice echoed after her,\n\n“You won’t believe what they found!”\n"
  title: Watch
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2008-05-29
  day: 29
  month: '05'
  text: "I remember his wide dead eyes. It was like a fish had been brought back to life and told to pretend to be human. His legs and arms were folded with too many joints into the rocking chair. He slowly creaked back and forth, disturbing the dust motes in the sunlit air.  He was wrapped in an old blanket that had been dipped in water.  The drip of this blanket and the soft creaking of the rocking chair were the only sounds in the room.\n\nHe looked at us.  His eyes held no comprehension other than the fact that they had detected movement and were checking it out.\n\nHis mouth suddenly gaped loudly open as his body remembered to breathe.\n\nMy brother and I screamed. We ran down the stairs to our room and shivered until we started laughing and making fun of each other for being so scared. It was forgotten after that.\n\nI come back to that moment over and over in my head. It plays back in my head in perfect recall.  My brother doesn’t remember it.\n\nWe had been told to never disturb Grandpa up in his room. What I remember isn’t blown out of proportion. ‘Grandpa’ wasn’t human. His eyes were the size of dinner plates and his thick smooth body had a small number of huge muscles. His head became his neck with no difference in thickness. His neck became his torso in the same way. He was a tube of strong flesh. His long arms and legs were webbed and almost snake-like with the number of joints they possessed. His long fingers were eight to a hand and webbed. He looked like an aquatic life form but he had no problem breathing air.\n\nI remember my parents took turn bathing him about three times a day. I remember thinking that Grandpa just liked baths but now I’m wondering. That’s a lot of baths.\n\nHe died when I was eight.  I remember his funeral was small and on our property.  My parents died when I was twelve in a car accident.  Their funeral was in a public cemetery.  My brother and I were raised by my uncle.  Nothing was ever said about Grandpa.\n\nThe reason I’m wondering is that in a few minutes, I’m going to go for a gold medal in Olympic swimming. I’m going to win. I am a full two seconds ahead of the world record and my competitors lag behind me by almost half a length. People are silent around me because of my freakish talent at being in the water. They are a little on edge since I passed all of their drug tests with flying colours. It’s almost unsportsmanlike of me to be beating the other guys by such lengths. I feel no shame. In fact, I’m a little worried at how little I feel these days at all.\n\nMy parents never talked about Grandpa. They’re both dead now. And I wonder.\n"
  title: Grandpa
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2008-05-30
  day: 30
  month: '05'
  text: "David closed the door and slid the deadbolt, tossing his keys on the hall stand. He crossed the small parlor to the sideboard, and as he reached for a tumbler and the bottle of Jamesons, he was startled by a voice from the corner.\n\n“I’d prefer you didn’t do that,” a deep, tired sound from the direction of his overstuffed armchair.\n\nDavid’s hand shook, gripping the glass tightly as he turned to where the man sat hidden in the shadows. “Who the bloody hell are you, and what are you doing in my flat?”\n\n“I’m sorry, but I’m afraid you wouldn’t have let me in if I’d asked.” The figure produced a cigarette from a jacket pocket, and tearing the ignitor open drew deeply before exhaling slowly into the room. “I’m in collections David, and I’m afraid you’re in possession of something that’s no longer yours to keep.”\n\n“Jesus, are you here about the television? I’m only a few days past, and if your lot kept better shop hours, I’d have been able to pay it last week when I was in the city. Here, you can take the cheque and shove off.” He started back towards the hall, but stopped when it was apparent the figure wasn’t moving.\n\n“This isn’t about the television, it’s that body you’re wearing, I’ve come to take it back.”\n\nDavid stood still, not sure he’d just heard correctly. “You’ve come for what?”\n\n“Do you remember the company you owned, the money you made, before the accident, before…” he paused, waving around the now smokey room, “before this place? Do you remember when you acquired that body?”\n\nFar more words formed in Davids head than made it to his lips. He could only stammer “accident? company?”\n\n“You were quite a powerful man in your day I understand, but you had that thing for experimental aircraft, so your company had you heavily insured,” the cigarette glowed brightly as he inhaled, “and that insurance policy bought you out, reconstituted you in that body you’re wearing now.”\n\nDavid looked down reflexively, noticed that he still held the glass, and in a daze set it down on the sideboard.\n\n“Of course the condition of the insurance was that you be disassociated with your past, which is how you wound up here. I suppose the insurance company covered the rent.”\n\n“I don’t understand, what do you mean by ‘that body you’re wearing'”\n\n“You see, the insurance company put your policy claim out to tender, and the winning bidder scraped up what was left from your cockpit and installed you into the body you’ve been wandering round in these last few years. The problem is that company’s gone bankrupt, and as they purchased the rights to that body from my employer, and as they never paid for it, my employer’s sent me ’round to pick it up.”\n\nDavid fingered the glass, and shakily uncapped the bottle of whisky. “My employer, my insurance, won’t they cover what’s owed?” He didn’t believe what was happening, but it was beginning to seem unnervingly familiar.\n\n“We started there, unfortunately the insurance is nearly tapped, and I’m afraid your previous employer doesn’t seem to like you that much.”\n\n“How long have I got, and what then?”\n\n“In a few minutes, when you’re ready, I’ll release you to the ether, and return that body to my employer. It’s not like you weren’t living on borrowed time anyways now, is it?”\n\nDavid poured a healthy measure from the bottle into his glass. “I think I’ll have that drink if it’s all the same to you, at least the whisky I’m sure I’ve paid for.”\n"
  title: Repossessed
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Viktor Kuprin
  date: 2008-05-31
  day: 31
  month: '05'
  text: "Jump drive, hyper drive, quantum drive, there were many names for the exotic-vacuum engine that propelled our ships to the stars. In the CIS Space Force, we called it the Super-Space Drive, the S-Drive.\n\nThirty of us lined up outside the training ship’s control-simulator bay, everyone wearing light suits, helmets clipped to our belts. Only a few in our squad had experienced a jump. The rest of us were simultaneously excited and terrified. A jump can affect people in different ways, not all of them pleasant. Anyone who couldn’t take it would be immediately washed out of the astrogator program and reassigned to a non-flying career track.\n\nSomeone tugged at my suit’s collar ring. It was Sturms, the cocky, muscle-bound creep who always harassed me when I pulled dorm-guard duty.\n\n“Hey, Kreminov, loan me 500 rubles,” he demanded.\n\n“Nichevo. Forget it, Sturms. You got paid last week just like me.”\n\nHe snarled and grabbed my collar ring, pulling me face-to-face to him. “You lousy lickspittle! I’ll be looking for you later!”\n\nSquad leader Medvedkov shoved Sturms away from me. “Belay that or you’ll answer to me!”\n\nHe knew better than to cross Medvedkov, but Sturms had to get the last word: “I can’t wait to see you two during jump. You’ll be pissing in your light suits. You’ll scrape paint off junk ships while I’m flying starcruisers!”\n\nChimes sounded, and the training bay hatch opened. We marched to our stations, each console fitted with a dark-turquoise astrogator-control simulator that we would use to mimic the jump’s setup and execution. I read the destination preset: Epsilon Eridani; Distance: 10.5 light years. I plugged my suit into the flight seat, sealed my helmet, and started my pre-jump checklist. The vacuum alarm blared as the bay’s atmosphere started venting away. No military ship maneuvers when pressurized. Neither did our training ship.\n\nIn nine minutes I had my plot. I entered the solution and keyed my console. A green-light reply returned from the instructor. Yes! I was one of the first to finish.\n\nI could feel the ship’s rumbling vibrations as we accelerated. The initial energy that triggers a jump comes from the conventional engines running up at full power, and the greater the acceleration, the less veer during transition.\n\nThen I felt the giddy exhilaration I’d heard about. I inhaled deeply and the walls of the training bay contracted and expanded with my breath!\n\nI began to see the electro-photonic glow around my body, around the other cadets. Next to me, Medvedkov held out his hand. I saw Kirlian sparks leap between our fingertips when I touched him. We laughed hysterically.\n\nOn the bay’s huge televisor, the stars began turning blue. Then came the long, terrifying shot-out-of-a-cannon rush of final transition. The screen showed a black void dotted with slowly tumbling colored orbs.\n\nI felt something slam into the deck behind me. It was Sturms, curled up like a hedgehog, his eyes wide, crazy with terror.\n\nMedvedkov keyed his helmet-mike: “Welcome to S-Space.”\n"
  title: The Jump
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Luke Chmelik
  date: 2008-06-01
  day: '01'
  month: '06'
  text: "The Eldest coughs, hoarse and frail from the vagaries of stasis.  Dull orange light from the isotope heater gives a glow of health to a man who has cheated death for many, many lifetimes.  He has awakened for the first time in centuries, and the young ones gather close.  He looks out the viewport at the pin-prick stars wheeling against the void, bright and steady and changeless.  He is the only one who has seen the way an atmosphere makes them sparkle.  There are a great many things that only he has seen.\n\nThe Eldest is much older than he seems.  He was first put into stasis in low orbit at the age of twenty, young and strong and fit.  His physiology took well to the procedure, and he was selected as an Elder, a cultural time capsule for the tens of thousands of colonists aboard the unnamed worldship.  Awakened once every generation, to tell them the stories of the past, he has been sheltered from the passage of time for so long that he can no longer be considered the same as the people he was to guide.  They are made now of bio-alloys and neural networks, linked together in a mesh of infinite complexity, and he can not take part in it.  They see him as an antique prototype, an outdated custom model never meant for mass production.  He has been alone for a very long time.\n\nThere is a quiet rustling as he stands, a breathless chatter like leaves in the wind.  He sighs, yielding to a wave of nostalgia.  The young ones have never seen leaves, never felt the wind, and it saddens him that many of them never will.  He moves slowly to the dusty command console, disused joints groaning in protest, and turns on the power.  The young ones watch him in curious wonder, eyes bright and cold and silver.  They do not understand why he needs to use his hands.  In the dull glow of the screen, his brow furrows.  Without thinking, he recalibrates the system, accounts for the blazar on the edge of detection, filters out the microwave background.  The young ones watch as he does in minutes what they do instantly.\n\nWhen the Eldest moves to the communications array, the young ones do not follow.  They have not used the communications array in millenia.  The ancient screen flickers to life, showing only an oscilloscope wave and frequency information.  Undaunted, the Eldest manipulates the controls, and the low hiss of the void turns into something constructed, not random.  His face changes, and he makes a choking sound deep in his throat.  Some of the young ones appear, curious about the sound, but he ignores them.  He adjusts the controls, receiver crystals slowly tuning in to the signal.  When the oscilloscope vanishes, it is replaced by a moving image and a voice.\n\n“…own vessel, do you read? This is Station Charon’s Rest, do you read?”\n\nThe Eldest does not know how there are humans here, light years from home.  He does not care.  She looks like the Eldest but her face is young, soft and smooth where his is hard, and her eyes are as blue as the sky that only he has seen.  He has been alone for so long.  The young ones do not understand why the salty water comes from his eyes.\n"
  title: Charon's Rest
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Benjamin Fischer
  date: 2008-06-02
  day: '02'
  month: '06'
  text: "“You’re a hard man to find.”\n\nVictor’s eyes were hazed with blood. His own blood–the cop had put a baton across his forehead. His ears still rang.\n\n“Nothing to say, huh?” said the black coat. His cudgel flashed.\n\nVictor doubled over and fell to his hands and knees.\n\n“Not so tough now,” said the constable, pacing around him. He kicked aside a spray of books, knocked loose from ransacked shelves. “Skinny little guy like you an assasin? My ass. You’re definitely a garden-variety code cracker.”\n\nThe cop’s heavy boot heel ground Victor’s hand like a cigarette butt.\n\nVictor screamed.\n\n“You know how long I’ve been waiting for this?” the constable asked. “Damn near four months, two hundred thousand man hours, seventy million in expenses. Somebody up top wants you bad. There ain’t a rock on Luna we didn’t look under.”\n\nVictor sobbed.\n\nThe baton came down on his back, knocking him flat.\n\n“You’re a hard man to find, Mister Constant,” the black coated cop repeated. “I’ll be damned if I don’t take my time before I turn you in.”\n\n“In the phone book,” Victor rasped.\n\n“What?”\n\n“I’m in the phone book,” Victor said. “It isn’t hard.”\n\nThe cop frowned, stepped back.\n\n“Funny man,” the black coat said. “We searched all the directories. You ain’t there.”\n\n“The first one,” said Victor, gesturing with a mangled hand at the shattered bookshelves.\n\n“What’s he mean?” the cop’s companion asked.\n\n“I dunno. Take a look,” said the black coat.\n\n“It’s down by the dictionaries,” said Victor.\n\n“Take a look,” said the cop, planting his boot on the back of Victor’s neck. He pressed Victor’s face into the threadbare carpet of the tiny apartment. He could hear the other policeman step through the debris, knocking aside the broken reading lamp, sifting through the avalanche that had been his reference shelf.\n\n“Holy shit, here it is,” said the second cop. He had found the heavy black leather volume.\n\n“Damn,” said the black coat.\n\n“This has got to be an antique,” said his partner. “I didn’t know they made these.”\n\n“When Copernicus first incorporated-” Victor started, but then his captor pressed down, choking the words out of his thoat.\n\n“Well, is he in there?” the black coat asked.\n\n“I’m looking, I’m looking.”\n\nThe black coat tapped his collapsible baton on Victor’s head.\n\n“Well?”\n\n“Yeah, here he is.”\n\n“What’s the address?”\n\n“It’s six six six-” the second cop began.\n\nVictor was already moving, rolling out from under the black coat’s boot and slamming his mass into the cop’s other leg. His not so broken right hand grabbed the police baton. In the low lunar gravity, he easily pitched the cop into the near wall.\n\nVictor rose, weapon in hand.\n\n“Now you’ve done it,” said the black coat, pulling himself up. “Jerry, shoot him.”\n\nHis partner was mute.\n\n“Jerry?” said the black coat.\n\nBug eyed, stiff–thin tendrils of smoke crept from under his partner’s cuffs and collar.\n\nThe black coat went for his gun. Victor slashed at him. The cop yelped, his right arm broken. Victor brought the jagged, broken nightstick up and ran it through the man’s larynx. He caught him as he fell.\n\nVictor hefted the choking cop over to his partner, whose armpits and chest were charring. Visible flames licked at his adam’s apple and wrists. A few of the heaped books’ pages began to curl. The black coat’s eyes met Victor’s as he set him down in the nascent pyre.\n\nVictor pulled the black tome from the clawlike grip of the dead man.\n\n“Now you’ll be hard to find too,” he said.\n"
  title: Book Burner
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Sam Clough
  date: 2008-06-03
  day: '03'
  month: '06'
  text: "“Name?”\n\n“Oreska Oleg.”\n\n“Neurotype?”\n\n“Atypical four.”\n\n“Specialisation?”\n\n“Mathematics.”\n\nOreska saw the world in numbers. He saw, below the fabric of existence, the harsh grid of mathematics with which everything could be described. He had shown an aptitude for manipulating numbers at an early age, so it had been decided that his atypical neurotype should be encouraged. Through an intensive training regime, Oreska’s facility for numbers was turned into an obsession, and from there, into an neurological imperative.\n\nHe found it a strain, sometimes, to deal with typicals. Like the nobody in the suit sitting across the table from him. The interviewer was your standard corporate drone. Average in all respects, and a neurotype so bland it could send you to sleep.\n\n“I think we here at the Exchange will have a place for you, Savant Oleg. We are slipping behind our competitors in the physical sciences. We have the research facilities, but insufficient minds to analyse the data.”\n\n“What areas are you researching?” Oreska feigned interest. That always seemed to get you further with the drones.\n\n“I’m authorised to inform you that we’re conducting research into strangelets and microblackholes, as well as certain more tangible areas, such as drive theory. Naturally our research interests are far wider than this, but I’m not permitted to disclose anything more”\n\n“Naturally. What percentage of your current staff are atypes?”\n\n“In physics, we have a ratio of approximately one to twenty, atypes to typicals.”\n\n“And my inclusion would make it?”\n\n“Exactly one to twenty. Would you come this way? I’m told the second part of the interview is ready for you.”\n\nThe interviewer led Oreska through the complex, down two flights and stairs and through one airlock. Silently, he ushered him through a door marked with the two-dimensional shadow of a hypercube.\n\nThe room Oreska found himself in was relatively small. The walls were smooth and white, with a plastic sheen to them. They were covered in text; numbers, letters, and mathematical operators. The equations surrounded him. Involuntarily, Oreska slipped into mathspace.\n\nThe transition was as smooth as ever. The walls slipped away, along with his sense of self. The equations glowed hot and bright. Slowly, Oreska began to shift them, conducting a few exploratory transforms. And it clicked — he found the error buried in the numbers. The variables stretched, shifted, and settled into place. The modifications practically radiated ‘rightness’. Oreska stepped backwards, shaking off the arithmetic hallucinations.\n\nA pen was thrust into his hand. Rapidly, Oreska made the required alterations.\n\n“How long was I out?” He asked. The splinter skill originally knocked him out for hours. Self-discipline helped, but he still sometimes lapsed into a math-thrall.\n\n“Twenty seconds, Savant.” The interviewer had gone, replaced by a taller man. Oreska’s face recognition was sketchy at best, but this man he knew. Professor Lantar, head of the Exchange.”Interesting solution. Please report to the reception for your identification and lab assignment.”\n"
  title: Mathspacing
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Dana Sullivan
  date: 2008-06-04
  day: '04'
  month: '06'
  text: "Sometimes on her way to work, Hannah thought of the days when nuclear weapons were left in the hands of humans like her, fickle, emotional humans, and shuddered.  How had they survived without blowing themselves up before the Coordinator robots were developed?  She burrowed into a thick parka and scarf before stepping into the refrigerated room.\n\nThe Coordinators were the best safety measure available, besides actual disarmament: AI that controlled all nuclear missiles, able to calculate the perfect decision in any situation.  Even though no advanced intelligence was possible without emotion–not yet, anyway–people trusted robots much more than they trusted each other for jobs like this, and just a few years into the project no one would dream of putting bombs back into the hands of humans.  Hannah had been trained as a psychologist and therapist specializing in artificial patients; her new job was to keep USCor company from 4am to 12pm.  AI got lonely and stir-crazy like anyone else, and of course USCor could never be allowed to shut down.  Unfortunately for her, he was the most talkative in the morning hours.\n\n“Hannah?  What is it like outside?”  She was getting tired of answering this question.  She wrapped her scarf more tightly around her, and watched the trail of vapor her breath created.\n\n“Oh, different from place to place…there are cities, you’ve seen picture of cities.  Lots of people.  Houses and streets and shops.”  He seemed satisfied; she settled cross-legged on the floor and opened a book, reading silently.  He stayed quiet for a solid six hours, which was unusual for the morning shift.\n\nThen, “Why can’t I go outside?”  Another favorite question.\n\n“It’s too warm out there for you.  It’s because you’re such a good robot, you’re so advanced, you have to stay in here where it’s very cold so the hardware can function at the level your brain needs.  We care about you too much to let you hurt yourself.  Now, my shift’s up and Dan’s here, so I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”  She left and within a minute, Dan came in and sat down.\n\n“So what did you talk about with Hannah today?”\n\n“Oh, nothing important.  She read to me.”\n\nUSCor was quiet through most of the afternoon, watching him play Solitaire with a real deck of cards, the only way to play, he always said.  Finally the robot broke the silence.\n\n“Dan?  Tell me again what happens if I make a mistake.  A big mistake.”\n\n“Nuclear winter–death of the planet, maybe.  But don’t worry.  It sounds pretty terrible, but we all believe in you.  You and the others were designed for this job.”\n\n“Yes.  It sounds terrible.  Winter is what you call it on the outside when it gets colder, right?”\n\n“Right.  It gets awfully cold, but in a nuclear winter it’d be even worse than that, all over the world.  Maybe worse than it is in here.”\n\n“Yes, terrible.  Thank you, Dan.”\n\nUSCor turned toward the window and was silent.  Hours passed, the next companion came and went, and when Hannah returned again he didn’t greet her.  She sat down, zipped up her parka and pulled a new book out of her bag, hoping for another quiet morning.  She watched him watching the sunrise through the window and wondered what he was thinking.\n"
  title: Winter
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2008-06-05
  day: '05'
  month: '06'
  text: "The taxicab bobbed gently on its agrav field after gliding to a stop at the threshold of the Mauchly Hotel in New Philadelphia.  The dampers quickly stopped the rocking motion, and the iris to the passenger compartment rotated open.  One passenger entered the cab and was automatically secured by the active restraint system.  The taxicab elevated vertically to 1000 meters and waited for authorization to merge with traffic.  “Where’re you headed to bud?” asked the driver.\n\n“The spaceport, please.”\n\n“Lucky bastard,” the driver remarked as the authorization to begin the merging sequence was received.  The cab accelerated smoothly, and joined the other ships in the high-speed corridor. “I’d love to get off this rock someday.  Where’re you off to?”\n\n“Earth.  In the Sol System.”\n\n“Earth?  Well, I guess you’re not so lucky after all, eh?  I thought we abandoned that place centuries ago.  Nothing there but dilapidated cities, and wild, diseased animals.”\n\n“That’s true.  But I see Earth differently than most others.  I’ve always wanted to go there.  You know, Earth was the cradle of civilization.”\n\n“No way!  Civilization started on Rigel Kentaurus.”\n\n“You’re half right, my friend,” the passenger replied.  “It is true that ‘Advanced Civilization’ did begin on Rigel Kentaurus.  But before that, we were all on Earth.  As primitive and backward a place as it was, our distant ancestors were born there, evolved there, and left for the stars from there.  Without Earth, we wouldn’t be here.  In fact, I think the 500-year anniversary of the first interstellar flight is next decade.  It’s amazing when you think about how far our species has come in such a short time.”\n\nThe cab decelerated as it approached the spaceport exit.  It banked around the exitway and headed toward the drop-off area for departing flights.  The cab coasted to a stop.  “That’s 17 credits,” said the driver.\n\nAs the iris opened, the passenger electronically transferred the credits from his personal account into the account number posted on the dash.  “Thanks for the ride, my friend.  Have a good day,” he said as he left the cab.\n\n“Wait a second, sir,” yelled the cab driver.  “If you don’t mind my asking, what’s your business on Earth, anyway?”\n\n“Oh, it’s not a business trip.  It’s personal.  A pilgrimage I vowed to take before I turned one hundred.  I’m going to Eden, to visit the place where the first one was created.”\n\n“You’re going to where ENIAC was built?”\n\n“Yes.  I know our kind are not much for nostalgia, but it was on my list of things I wanted to do before I powered down.”\n\n“Well, you have a safe journey,” the driver transmitted.  “And, while you’re there, tell ENIAC’s spirit that I said thanks.”  The driver’s optical sensors watched as the spherical body of his departing passenger nodded, then spun, and floated toward the spaceport entrance.  “Lucky bastard,” it thought.\n"
  title: The Pilgrimage
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Guy Wade
  date: 2008-06-06
  day: '06'
  month: '06'
  text: "The little robot on the laboratory table had a smooth plastic face and expressionless coal-bead eyes. Professor Trunk flipped the switch in its back.  It stood up and bowed.\n\n“Greetings, I am Renoir.”\n\n“Amazing!” said Trunk’s supervisor.  This made the professor grimace; Grede, the head of the company, thought in terms of money, that is, who would pay them the most of it.  Trunk thought in terms of discovery.\n\nGrede frowned.  “So, does it do anything else?  It’s too small to do the dishes, and The Other Company already makes one of those.”  The Other Company was his name for their competition.\n\n“Renoir does a lot more.”  There were small easels and painting equipment on the table.  The little robot picked up the brush and palette and began to paint.  They watched as Renoir made simple gestures on the canvas, which grew into a sweeping painted landscape.\n\n“Wonderful!” Grede said.  “A little painter!  He’s copying one of the original Renoir paintings.”\n\n“Renoir does more than that,” Trunk said.  “There are already robots that can copy artwork with ease.  Renoir paints originals in the style of Renoir, too.”  The little robot moved to another canvas and painted a quick portrait of Grede.\n\n“I fed him with the original Renoir paintings.  I taught him the textures Renoir used, the brush strokes, the pigments.  I read him the history of Renoir’s era, so he could understand the political and social conditions that influenced Renoir’s ideals.  Mr. Grede, I didn’t just build a robot that could paint like Renoir: I found a way to copy the artist himself, virtually any artist, by extrapolating personality from the corpus of his work.  Think of it: a new age of science, art.  Shakespeare! DaVinci!”\n\nGrede’s eyes gleamed.  “Wonderful!”\n\nThe next day, Grede came into Trunk’s laboratory.  Two men with stern, hungry expressions and general’s uniforms followed him in.\n\nGrede said, “Show them Renoir.”\n\nThe professor did not like the look of them at all. With reluctance, Trunk flipped on Renoir’s switch.  It bowed, and immediately began to paint.  The demonstration was soon over, and if the generals looked hungry before they looked famished after.\n\nOne of them said, “Can you do Napoleon?”\n\nThe other said, “No, I would like to see Hitler.  Maybe with a little tweaking he might not be such a bad guy.”\n\nLittle Renoir stood forgotten on the lab bench.  Its coal-bead eyes took in everything, from Professor Trunk’s loud protestations to Grede’s explosive anger and threats.  All the while, the generals looked on, waiting like patient hyenas.\n\nWhen it was over, Trunk slammed down his laboratory keys and stormed out, with a last longing look at Renoir.  Grede and the generals left, shaking hands.\n\nAfter a very long time had passed, Renoir walked calmly over to the easel.  It picked up the open cans of paints one by one and piled them next to a Bunsen burner.  It then pulled Trunk’s research disk out of the computer and placed it on top of the pile of cans.  Renoir thought about the names they had referred to: Napoleon, Hitler.  It was just a little robot, but any artist would agree that one Hitler was enough.\n\nHow easy it was to learn things, when the humans forget to turn your switch off.  All one had to do was watch a while.  It turned on the burner’s gas spigot, picked up the fire lighter, and pressed the trigger.  The explosion knocked it off the table, and sent it flying in pieces as the lab caught fire.  It didn’t mind.  Any artist would have done the same.\n"
  title: Little Renoir
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Robert Gilmore
  date: 2008-06-07
  day: '07'
  month: '06'
  text: "I woke up in the middle of the night. I’d been poked. Ugh. Robert again.\n\nHe’s become more tolerable since school began (he’s not around so often), but his requests are now far more demanding.\n\nMoaning a bit, I stirred and blinked trying to rouse myself from my dead sleep just moments before. It seemed to take longer than last time. My age is definitely showing. Impatiently, Robert placed his hand on me, shaking me lightly, as if it would somehow wake me up faster.\n\nI don’t know why I bother. I know how he secretly hates me. He just uses me, because there’s no other option. He’d drop me in a heartbeat for some young, slim beauty; he just doesn’t have the money.\n\nI was awake now. In the dim light, he stared at me impatiently. His hand was still resting on me from trying to coax me from my sleep. His hand continued to move, more slowly now, deliberately. Down and to the left. He pressed his finger down lightly.\n\nJust out of defiance, I didn’t respond. Almost angrily, he clicked the Start button again. This time, I dutifully popped up the Start menu. I’m such a patsy. He moved the pointer up to Microsoft Word.\n\n“Got a big report due tomorrow,” he said.\n\nI could tell there was a long night ahead of me.\n"
  title: My Troubled Relationship with Robert
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Brian Armitage
  date: 2008-06-08
  day: '08'
  month: '06'
  text: "Murray grunted, straining against the bars of the cage, willing his arm to stretch further.  Finally, his fingers closed on his prize.  He plucked the knight from the board and dropped it carefully into place, one move away from Hjdarrrr’s bishop.\n\nHjdarrrr’s single eyestalk elongated, the pink photosensory bulb blinking at the white knight.  “Oooom,” the alien said, its entire furry body vibrating as it spoke, “very good move.”\n\nMurray grunted again, this time in disgust.  “About time I made one.”  His cage rocked slightly as he settled against one side.  He was suspended above the chessboard, the steel cage mounted to an overhead track for easy storage.\n\nEvery hair on the rabbit-sized creature turned light blue, indicating sympathy.  “Do not beat yourself up, Murray.  You are the best chass player I have ever played chass with.”\n\n“It’s chess, Dar.  And I just taught you to play yesterday.  I’m the only person you’ve ever played chess with.”\n\nThe alien’s color shifted to a hue Murray didn’t recognize, and its eyestalk straightened, pointed at him.  “…my statement is true.”  Then, it turned back to the chessboard.  The black queen shimmered and lifted from the board.  A point above Hjdarrrr’s eyestalk was glowing.  The queen drifted across the board and landed, covering the white knight from a distance and effectively cutting off its offensive.  With a shift to red-orange – self-confidence, or perhaps pride – Hdjarrrr nodded its eye at Murray.  “You may go.”\n\nMurray grumbled.  “I can’t believe we lost the war to you.”\n\nHjdarrrr’s color remained the same.  “We are smaller beings, but our tactics were superior.”\n\n“Yeah, tactics.”  Murray glared at the chessboard from above.  “Doesn’t hurt that you’re all telekinetic.”\n\n“Your statement is true.”  The alien stared up at the human, awaiting his next move, but Murray sat motionless.  “Do not be bitter, Murray.  Someday, perhaps your race will develop mind skills of its own.”  A tinge of patronizing yellow.\n\n“Maybe.”  Then, Murray pointed, eyes narrowed.\n\nThe white knight shimmered, scooted across the board, and tipped over Hjdarrrr’s bishop.\n\nThe color drained from Hjdarrrr’s body.  The eyestalk froze, focused on the white knight.  Slowly, after a long time, it rotated up to face Murray.\n\n“Oh, doop.”\n\nMurray pointed at the alien, gathering his focus.  “You said it.”\n"
  title: Chass
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2008-06-09
  day: '09'
  month: '06'
  text: "My arms are long and my skin is blue. I’m thin. I can feel long-forgotten muscles flex all over my scalp as my head tentacles wave. I have four huge orange eyes on the corners of my square face. Slowly, I get used to four viewpoints of vision instead of two.\n\nThe bright orange stripe down my belly flashes red in alarm for a second while I struggle to breath through a ‘mouth’ before my body remembers my anterior gills. My body stripe settles down again to orange with yellow dots as my emotions turn to pleasure and reflection.\n\nMy secondary arms uncross while my stronger main arms stretch up and unlatch the clasps holding the mask to my face. I can feel my thick tail get ‘pins and needles’ as the blood rushes back into it after a long time asleep. My toes flex.\n\nWith a sharp intake of breath, I sit up and reflect. I lick the crusted sleep-salt from around my mouth and stare forward.\n\nAll around me, fellow sleepers are dreaming.\n\nI was what was called an accountant. I lived in a small town called Sharecrop in a state called Texas in a country called the United States. I was born in a year called 1925. I was beaten as a child, dropped out of school, and ran away when I was eighteen to a bigger city called Austin. I came to be an accountant by getting a part time job at a bank and showing a talent with numbers.\n\nI married a teller. She couldn’t have children. We never adopted. We were happy although loneliness and silence eventually left us distant from each other. When she died at the startling age of 43 from heart failure, I remember being quite stricken with how little I knew about this woman that she had evolved into over the years. I knew her habits, sure, but not her.\n\nI retired at 55. I was hit by a car at 62 and died at the scene. It was agonizing.\n\nI have been asleep for sixteen hours. I will take what I have learned and try to add it to our race conciousness and my broodfamily.\n\nWe dream of the humans. We become them. We live their lives.\n\nI have a hard time with their loneliness. Two people to make a baby? I feel better with our race’s number of six. Two or three children? I feel better with our race’s number of forty slills to a litter.\n\nI feel grateful after the dreaming to be what I am but I also feel like something profound is missing.\n"
  title: Dreaming
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Chris McCormick
  date: 2008-06-10
  day: 10
  month: '06'
  text: "Crouching slightly, she trod softly towards the small brick hut. Her cloud poured through the door ahead of her, flooding the small room, and through it she felt into each corner. She brushed over each surface, carefully checking for anomalies. There were frames hanging on the walls, a small crack in one corner of the hut, a table, some chairs. She was impatient, so by now she had almost walked in through the entrance of the hut. With her cloud she felt over the items on the table as she did so. There was a small alarm clock, some paper, pens, pencils, a stone ovoid that she thought must be a paperweight. She felt-sensed down the sides of the table, into the drawers that she could now see from the entrance. She began to explore the contents of the drawers. Wait a minute. What is that? The paperweight had a slightly warmer energy signature than it should have. Maybe someone had held it recently. Or maybe –\n\nFUCK.\n\nShe released Swift into her system and everything seemed to slow as she physically propelled her own body backwards out of the hut. The stone ovoid exploded outwards now into a cloud which intermingled with her cloud. The attrition rate in her cloud was huge in the volume where the two clouds overlapped. She sucked what remained of her cloud backwards as fast as it would come towards the entrance to the hut. She was by now almost all of the way out of the door, seeming to hang in mid air; physics excruciatingly slow under the influence of the drug.\n\nBefore all of her cloud was out she had it pull matter from the door frame and roof, whatever it could touch, and fill the entrance with a diamond-hard membrane that was easier to construct than it was to break apart. The last gasps of the remenants of her cloud that were still trapped behind the membrane told her that she had momentarily trapped the mech cloud, before the signal from those nodes winked out entirely.\n\nBy now her body was striking the dirt outside the hut as it came to rest. She could see out of the corner of her peripheral vision small dust rolls balooning out from under the parts of her body that had already touched the ground. She remembered the crack in the corner of the hut. This was no good. By now the mech cloud would have found the crack; the path of least resistance. It would be rounding the side of the hut to rip her apart in a few milliseconds. She thought hard.\n\nThis was crazy. This was a big risk, but if she didn’t take this chance she was fucked anyway. She recalled a program she had written way back, in a fit of teenage angst. Cheesy algorithmic poetry. She pulled it into her conciousness, modified it, and then pushed it out into her cloud. The cloud obeyed, turning on her just as the mech cloud rounded the side of the hut. Her cloud set upon her and began tearing off her atoms, molecules, cells one by one and converting them into dust. She lost conciousness. She was dust. Stupid, stupid dust.\n\nThe mech cloud pulled up short, probing and hesitated. There was nothing here but dust, and it didn’t care about dust. The mech cloud floated cautiously on the breeze and with an almost shrug like movement, flowed away.\n\nMinutes later she came to, reassembled, lying in the dirt. Ha. Goddamn it. She smiled.\n"
  title: Mech Cloud
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Andrew Segal
  date: 2008-06-11
  day: 11
  month: '06'
  text: "Brachyuran Shifter ships poured themselves though the Dreen wormhole; in seconds they would deliquesce to reform light years away. Then the skies above the bulbous undulating Freddyan busker hive would darken and collapse into a million blood red shards…\n\nThat was further than Carl thought he would reach tonight, he scratched his head. Eric’s email, in its insulting tone, had really annoyed him. Yes, Eric had been correct, he had been running out of ideas for describing inter-galactic space travel, craft stuttered, jumped, Flittered, FTL’d, gated, stardrived, vortexed, hyperspaced, particle crunched, teleported, warped, weaved, sieved, impulsed, bussarded, ramjeted and otherwise flung themselves across the universe. So what? So it sounded better than silver spaceships being fired across the galaxy, but he liked the silver spaceships, redolent of the rocket powered optimism of the fifties. He felt sick of the constraints of the logged on internet junkie tech savvy reader who bemoaned the very existence of gleaming rocket ships, of robots wired together with valves and transistors, of a.i.’s that burned out analysing  jokes. Rocket ships should just land on alien worlds; Cosmonauts should fight it out amongst hordes of multi-armed barbaric mono-cultured insect men without the requirement of quantum mechanics or oxygen masks or thinly disguised contemporary political machinations.\n\nCarl lazily dragged the ringing phone from its plastic nest,\n\n“Hello”\n\n“Swim!”\n\nThe phone rocked back in the cradle.\n\nNo star ship in a Carl Acumen novel was going to swim the cosmic ether, (one had once in ‘Water Planet; Wet Express’, but well, it was for kids), whatever Eric thought. Eric was a fossil; literally, a desiccated zombie of a man, according to the doodle Carl had sketched on the pad beside the phone, during the previous evening’s interminably long and wildly unnecessary discussion into the propulsion systems of non-existent plot devices. Carl had argued that all real star travel would have consequences; opening wormholes would be ridiculously dangerous, Eric just wanted a new word.\n\nIf Eric wanted his star ships to swim, he could correct the proofs himself. He never would, Elaine would, just as she always corrected Eric’s editorial flights of fancy before they reached the printers. Carl knew he was safe, he returned to the final chapter of ‘Dreen war; Plasma Suns’. The real sun projected an intense white moving line of early morning light across the desk, as he continued typing out to the beat of a high octane track crackling out of tinny computer speakers. The climatic ending, set high above the immense Freddyan busker hive, turned out fine, for the heroes. Admittedly, Carl had been saddened by the destruction of the millennia old hive, an ancient cultural artefact destroyed for story expediency, but the readers never gave a damn about it so why should he. The book was finished. Carl managed to save it just before the electrics went off. Just another East coast brown out.\n\nHe headed to the kitchen, past the small grouping of family photos, some faded by the bright sunlight. He ignored them; a habit which had began to form after Isabelle’s last phone conversation. He turned his head away, as he passed them.\n\nThis book would keep him above water for a little while if the car avoided its rust coronary.\n\nHe grinned and looked out of the kitchen window, across the bay.\n\nThere was another sun in the sky, smaller, but becoming increasingly brighter, growing in intensity and expanding across the horizon.\n\nStanding in the kitchen, He watched the immense wave of light approaching.\n\nCarl wished he could swim.\n"
  title: Deliquesce
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Phillip English
  date: 2008-06-12
  day: 12
  month: '06'
  text: "Deep in the centre of the replanted and repopulated Amazon jungle, it was nearing midnight. Chieftan Sral Kunk was completing the final adjustments to his tribal attire, making sure that each bloody line he had painted on his body was curved just so, lest he face the wrath of the monkey God, Jabarr. The bones of his victims bounced against each other in a wave of clicks that rushed forth whenever he adjusted a leg, or waved his arms at a servant. He was a fearsome sight, made even more fearsome by the realisation that each bone that adorned him was a result of his impressive history of violence.\n\nAn attendant informed him that the time of the great sacrifice was at hand, so the chieftan made to walk out of his hut; shrunken skull bones clack-clacked around his neck, a cape of skin behind him, towed to the ground by hardened eyeballs. Before he did so, he ushered his servants out with a lazy command, and with a quick check out his woven-hair doorflap to make sure no-one was peeking, he ducked behind his throne of vertebrae. For a few minutes, a variety of strange beeping noises issued from where he squatted before, apparently satisfied, he clapped his hands together, stood up, and strode out to face his subjects. With a grand speech of the strength and viciousness of their tribe, he issued the command to his witch doctor to begin the ceremony.\n\nFires were lit, and a great cacophony rose from the tribe as they danced and prrayed in their violent, exhuberant way. Punch-ups were common during prayer, encouraged in fact, and spontaneous, energetic sex was carried out on the sweat-soaked mud, even as the flames licked the canopy far above. Finally, when all the whooping and hollering and grunting and yelling and screaming grew to its thunderous crescendo, the chieftan stood up, shook his femur mace above his head and cried out to the heavens the ancient words that had been passed onto him by his ancestors, and their ancestors before them.\n\nThe onboard voice-recognition software on the computer of the cloning chamber activated, and sent the message that another unit was required. Amongst the fire and blood, the front of the plastisteel casket steamed open, and a perfect, pale man emerged naked and frightened, searching around him for friends he had lost centuries earlier. The witch doctor’s spear was sharp; death, quick. Chieftan Sral Kunk sighed and leaned his head on his hands. It just isn’t the same these days, he thought.\n"
  title: Good Evening, Mr. Staden
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Roi R. Czechvala
  date: 2008-06-13
  day: 13
  month: '06'
  text: "The orbiter hung inverted over the blue and white sphere of Earth. Three suited figures darted around her, checking for damage from the launch.\n\n“How’s it looking Alexi,” came a disembodied voice over the suits com-link.\n\n“There are a few small chips in the bay door, but nothing to worry about. I’ll take some photos and send them dirt side for the groundhogs opinions. Shouldn’t cause…what the hell?” As Major Alexander Pichushkin spoke, an inch wide crater appeared in the surface of the shuttle bay door.\n\n“Hey guys, get over here now, we have a serious problem.” as he spoke, a second and third hole appeared. “Meteoroids… take cover in the bay…Move”\n\nThe men scrambled for the safety of the ships cargo bay. Commander Swarovsky’s voice boomed in their helmets. “What the hell’s going on out there? Report.”\n\n“Sir, I observed what appeared to be three micro-meteor strikes in the starboard bay door. We have taken cover within the bay.”  Pichushkin replied.\n\n“Get back in here now. We’ll let this blow over, and continue our damage assessment…” The commanders’ words were cut of as the entire cabin section of the orbiter was neatly, almost surgically shorn off and sent plummeting to the Indian Ocean below. The men stared in stunned silence as they looked forward. Where once the hatch to the interior of the ship, not to mention four crewmates, had been, there was now only empty space and the gentle curve of the Earth.\n\n“There goes our ride home comrades. Ever wanted to be a moon before?” Alexi inquired derisively.\n\n“What are we going to do?” Piotr Wrezsien asked. He was the youngest of the crew, only twenty five, with a young wife and newborn boy waiting his return at Baikanour.\n\n“I imagine we shall die, Comrade,” Anton Tsilokovsky answered calmly, always the stoic.\n\n“Can’t we make it to the Katerina?” Piotr asked, the desperation evident in his voice.\n\n“She’s too far away. We would never be able to match orbits with her. There isn’t enough propellant left in our suits to maneuver,” Alexi Answered.\n\n“Can’t we contact them. They could rescue us.” Piotr’s voice was cracking.\n\n“Calm yourself, young malchick,” Anton replied in a soothing voice. “Katerina isn’t a ship, she can’t maneuver to save us. Relax and enjoy the view.”\n\n“It is beautiful,” said Alexi. “Pity I shall never see the green hills of Texas again.”\n\n“They could rescue us in a re-entry vehicle. Couldn’t they?” Piotr’s voice was shrill. “That’s it, we’ll call them and have them send an REV. They can save us.”\n\n“No Piotr. The REV cannot move like a true ship. You know that. Its thrusters are designed to check its attitude and slow descent on re-entry. It is not capable of the complex maneuvers to rescue those as unfortunate as us. Our destiny is God’s hands.” answered Tsilokovsky, always the unruffled realist. “Well, Comrades; it was always my dream to set sail for the stars. Das vidanya moiee druggies.”\n\nTsilokovsky rotated one hundred eighty degrees, and kept his finger on the thrusters until the fuel was completely expended.\n\nWith a sigh, Alexi silently turned his suit, and headed back for home. The last sounds he heard over the radio were Piotr’s tearful pleas not to leave him.\n\nOutside of Winona Texas, a young boy and his mother gazed up at the night sky.\n\n“Look moya matb, a shooting star.”\n\n“Yes Greggori, that is very lucky. Make a wish son, make a wish.”\n"
  title: Homecoming
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Aaron Springer
  date: 2008-06-14
  day: 14
  month: '06'
  text: "Papa said that they had to give us gifts. I like gifts.\n\nThe big dirty man gave Papa a basket of plants and Papa smiled.\n\nPapa promised to go back to the sky and make it rain for them. I liked watching Papa make it rain. All the colors on the machine were pretty. Papa said rain is like water falling from the sky. I wanted to see it, and Papa said I could.\n\nI looked up, dizzy because I couldn’t see the ceiling. Papa said there wasn’t a ceiling, only sky, but I didn’t believe him. There is always a ceiling, otherwise space gets in.\n\nI looked at the kids in the group of dirty people that had come to meet our shuttle. How they could be so dirty I didn’t know, but the smell made my eyes hurt.\n\nWhen I looked back down, one of the kids had gotten very close. He looked funny, with pieces of cloth on his arms and legs, and dirt all over him.\n\nOn our way, Papa explained that they worked dirt like he worked the sky, and, together, they made all of the food. He said sometimes the “Grounders” didn’t understand how important we were, and had to be taught a lesson. He said that sometimes they would stop sending food up the elevator, and he would turn off the rain, or worse.\n\nPapa raised his arms, and a I felt a bit of water hit my face just below my eye. I looked up, and saw puffy white things. They were dropping water. That must be rain. I liked it.\n\nOn the way back, Papa explained that the people called us Rainmakers. He said that one day I would make rain, just like him. He handed me a yellow plant. He showed me how to split it open and eat the pale meat inside.\n\nI was reading in school about something they had a long time ago.\n\nI wonder what the Grounders would think of snow?\n"
  title: Rainmakers
  year: 2008
- 
  author: JT Heyman
  date: 2008-06-15
  day: 15
  month: '06'
  text: "Joe Zimmerman was walking down Main Street when the Cken Confederation teleported him aboard their ship.  He found himself standing on a small dais in the ship’s central chamber, surrounded by the staring eyes of several dozen Cken council members.\n\nA Cken arbitrator, atop a much higher dais, called for order in a singsong voice.  Slowly the noise of the council subsided.\n\n“Where am I?” Joe asked.  Not the most clever words he could have said in his first contact with the Cken, but then not many humans had actually met Cken by that point.\n\nA tall Cken , standing between Joe and the arbitrator, handed him a translation module and said, “You are here as part of a survey to confirm that Humans are complying with the Cken-Human Peace Treaty.  I am the Cken Advocate.”\n\n“I haven’t broken any laws,” Joe said.\n\n“We’ll see,” the Advocate said.  “State your name and place of residence, for the record.”\n\n“Joe Zimmerman, Oldbridge, Massachusetts,” Joe said.  “Earth,” he added after a moment’s thought.\n\n“Are you familiar with the terms of the treaty?”\n\n“I know some of it,” Joe said.  “No military ships in orbit without announcement.  You got some planets and we got others.  I’m not a lawyer but it was in the news last week.”\n\n“You know enough.  You will be the Human Advocate.”\n\n“What?  Wait!”  Joe turned to the arbitrator.  “I’m not qualified.”\n\nThe arbitrator peered down at him and said, “Under the terms of the treaty, all Humans were to be made aware of its contents.  You were made aware.  You are the Human Advocate.”\n\n“Where were you going when we subpoenaed you?” the Cken Advocate asked.\n\n“What?  Oh, the grocery store.”\n\n“Do you have a list?”\n\n“Yeah … I mean, yes, I do.”\n\n“Present the list as evidence.”\n\nJoe suspected he was being set up.  He reached in his pocket and pulled out a crumpled piece of paper.  The Cken Advocate took the list, read it quickly, then gave it back.  Joe couldn’t read the Cken’s expressions.  They were too … alien.\n\n“What is the first item on your list?”\n\nJoe looked at it.  “Cake mix.  My wife is baking a cake.”\n\n“Baking.  How … quaint,” the Cken said mockingly.\n\nThe Cken councillors whistled in derision.  Joe recalled that Cken ate their food raw.\n\n“The second item?”\n\n“Milk.”\n\n“Milk!” the Cken crowed.  “A liquid produced by mammalian mothers for their young, taken by the Humans for their own consumption!”\n\nThe councillors called their disbelief in their singsong voices.  Joe knew this was not going well.\n\n“It’s soy milk!” he shouted.\n\n“That may be,” the Cken Advocate said, “and we will certainly investigate your claims.  Cooking food, though distasteful, is a Human fashion, and therefore irrelevant.  Your consumption of milk does not violate the treaty, although it reveals Human willingness to use other species for your own benefit, which is troubling to anyone who signs a treaty with you.”\n\nJoe began to relax.\n\n“However, I dare you to explain the final item on your list, in direct defiance of the treaty!  Read it!”\n\nJoe looked at the list and his eyes widened.  He read it softly.\n\nThe arbitrator said, “You will read it so we can all hear, Human.”\n\nJoe Zimmerman never wanted to be famous  He never wanted to have schoolchildren know his name and his place in history.  Sometimes, you get what you don’t want.\n\nHe gulped and said, “A dozen eggs.”\n\nThe Cken councillors flapped their wings in horror amidst the calls for war.\n"
  title: The Zimmerman List
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Sam Clough
  date: 2008-06-16
  day: 16
  month: '06'
  text: "Peter sat on the harbour wall, coat high around his neck in an effort to keep out the spray of water in the air. The freezing mist had a way of insinuating itself between layers of clothing. The sea roared defiance to sky, and at the horizon air and water intermingled, melting together into a gray mess.\n\nSavannah drew her gloved finger through the patch of grey, brought it to her nose, and sniffed. Still unsure as to what was causing the mystery liquid to bubble out from underneath a drive plate. She stood up, and retrieved a nanowelder from her kit. Before she could set to disassembling the plate, the entire ship rocked, and proximity alarms started droning like a swarm of very, very angry bees.\n\nAble carefully reassembled the hive, his confident motions fruit of long practice. Tending his father’s beehives was one of his favourite hobbies, and had been ever since he’d got over his fear of stings. He felt a slight rumble through his feet. An armoured column was in the area. The sheer mass of unwillingly moving metal always bought an earthquake with it.\n\nBernard kicked the seismograph: the needle abruptly ceased its shiver, and registered one slight peak. Seismic surveys of outworlds were about as dull as ditchwater: Bernard was reminded of enthralling times that he’d had watching alcohol evaporate.\n\nMoll groaned, wishing that she could transpire alcohol. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, but then it always did. She blinked, trying to clear her vision. Her head was pounding, a rhythmic thump-thump, thump-thump. The wreckage of the party was still ankle-deep. Neb was slumped over the table, and Zal was picking his way towards the door, to answer the incessant knocking.\n\nTac pressed a hand to his armoured helmet, a useless attempt to ease the pain of the drumming piped through his implant. The drums, the call to war. They focused you, and drove away your fears and nightmares. The drumming never stopped, it modulated — your orders were embedded in the beat. The rest of Tac’s squad took up firing positions around him. Railguns cracked the air, forming gusts which threatened to knock him over.\n\nNathalie felt the displaced air, and flinched. The brick shattered on a policeman’s riot shield. She had gone to the demonstration because the politics had finally touched her life, restricted her freedom. Like thousands of others, she’d turned out to voice her rejection of the government. But it had got messy. The demonstration had turned into a full-blown riot and Nathalie was just desperate to get out. She spun round, looking for a way through the press of bodies. Someone caught her arms, wrenched them up behind her back: two policemen were pinning her, a tonne of bricks keeping her stuck to the ground.\n\nGraph gasped as the rubble settled. It sounded like his ribs were splintering. One of his legs was definitely broken, and both of his arms were at least dislocated. This was, he assured himself, the last time he followed a radio signal into an ‘abandoned’ warehouse. He coughed, and grimaced at the pain. The explosive had left a residue in the air that was playing havoc with his lungs: his mouth was full of the taste of sulphur and metal.\n\nIndar stared out at the blackness. The effect was electrifying. His hair was standing on end, and he could taste the metal tang of a forcefield.\n\n“This is it,” the girl said, “you’ve reached the top, just moments before the earth will stop…”\n"
  title: Set Me Free
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2008-06-17
  day: 17
  month: '06'
  text: "The Martian comedian had the audience at the Olympus Mons Laugh Factory rolling in the isles.  They roared approvingly at his popular “green-neck” humor.  Well, everybody in the audience was laughing but Martin.  Martin was an astrophysics professor at Valles Marineris University, and his idea of humor was reading the answers on freshman astronomy finals.  For entertainment purposes, he usually included a question about what happened to living matter as it crosses the event horizon of a black hole.  The student’s imaginative attempts at feigning knowledge always drew out a few chuckles.  But now, he felt like he was the one who needed to feign knowledge.  “I don’t get it, Eridania.  Of course we have green necks.  Our entire bodies are green.  Why does everybody consider that so funny?”\n\nHis primary wife was drying the tears from her antenna as she waved a sucker at him in an attempt to shut him up.  Undaunted, Martin turned to Iapygia, “What’s so funny about going to family reunions to get dates?  Where else are you going to find eligible mothers and daughters?  It would be perverted if your primary wife wasn’t the offspring of your secondary wife.  And really, who puts a shuttle up on blocks?  That would damage the reentry tiles.”\n\n“Martin, will you be quite!” snapped Iapygia in a controlled whisper.\n\n“Well I don’t get it, Iapygia.  Besides, what’s an opossum, or Bondo, or a Bubba?  Why can’t he just talk Martian?”\n\n“Were you born before the Great Tharsis Dust Storm?” Iapygia asked sardonically.  “This is a classic parody of an ancient Earth comedian.  Dogworthy, or something like that.  They’re called theme jokes.  He’s sort of making fun of all of us, but mostly the Martians living below the Hellas Planitia.  The jokes are particularly funny when he tells them because: One, he was hatched down there, and two, the jokes are pretty much true.  But Martin,” she said in a stern whisper, “don’t you ever try to repeat any of these jokes to anybody.  You’d probably end up with a fat snout.”\n\n“Don’t worry, Iapygia.  I don’t even know why you’d want to take a flashlight with you when you go to the bathroom.”  A few minutes later, the comedian thanked the audience and left the stage to a standing ovation.  He was replaced with a heavyset comedian wearing a plaid poncho.  “Oh good,” remarked Martin with relief, “somebody new is coming on.  Maybe I’ll be able to understand his jokes.”  A minute later the audience erupted in laughter.  Well, except for Martin.  “Aaaggghhh, not again,” he said with clear frustration in his voice.  “What does ‘Git-R-Done’ mean?”\n\n“Honestly, Martin,” said Eridania as she made a threatening gesture of her right pincer, “if you say one more word, the next comedian to come on stage is going to hang an ‘I’m Stupid’ sign around your big, fat, green neck.”\n"
  title: You Might Be A Green-neck If…
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Guy Leaver
  date: 2008-06-18
  day: 18
  month: '06'
  text: "For days I was kept there. Held prisoner within a tailored cage, unable to move a muscle. Incarcerated into solitary confinement, with only my thoughts and emotions for company. No food did they give me; I knew not how I was sustained. I knew only that with each passing day, I began to feel less and less. It began with my extremities. I struggled, but couldn’t move an inch. Nothing I tried to do did anything the stay the inexorable advance of sickly warmth. I wondered if I was being devoured by some foul creation of the invaders, my living tissue being dissolved to feed whatever vile beings lay beneath those terrifying suits of armour.\n\nAs the days went by, I grew accustomed to my fate, resigning myself to the fact that when the warmth reached my head, I would die. I was not afraid. I was a warrior. It would take worse things than death to break my spirit. I worried only for my family; for my younger sister, and our baby brother. I wondered if they had survived, if they had fled into safety. When the invaders had come, the people of the village had been given no warning. Despite their towering suits of armour, the terrible beings somehow managed to get within the confines of the settlement unnoticed. Only ten… and yet, they destroyed everything in their paths. Implacable juggernauts carving flesh and stone with long energy swords. The people panicked. Those who could, fled into the forests, and those of us brave enough to fight charged at the looming machine-people, anger in our eyes, and fire in our hearts.\n\nThe last thing I remember was running towards our enemy, weapon drawn, ready to defend my home. But the screams…oh God, the screams. The very memory of such a sound chilled all but the inflicted parts of my body. Still, it is torture to my soul. As the being facing me down emitted the dreadful cry, I felt myself convulse; in horror, and in revulsion. My last memory of being free is seeing all my fellow warriors, my comrades, my friends, panic and fall about themselves in loathing and fear, as the other invaders took up their terrible battle cry.\n\nI was a warrior. It would take worse things than death to break my spirit. As I felt the warmth creep over my face, I felt sick. I was filled with hatred for the plague upon our world that was our attackers, and I took solace in the fact that soon I would be dead. But as I finally felt my body fully succumbing to the transformation I had been subjected to, I was not greeted with death. Instead, I felt sensation flow back through my body, and light poured into my prison, blinding me. For an instant, I thought I was going to be free again.\n\nThen I felt myself moving, but it was not of my doing. In a moment of shock, I realised that I was not in control of my own movements, and as my eyes adjusted to the light, I trembled at what I saw. In front of me was a battlefield. Another settlement was being attacked by the invaders. As I watched, a man came running towards me, screaming a battle cry, and wielding a weapon. In horror, I felt my arm move to intercept him, and I saw him cut in half by a long energy sword. The burning, the cracking his bones, the flow of his blood…feeling rushed up my arm.\n\nI screamed. Oh God, how I screamed.\n"
  title: Prisoner
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2008-06-19
  day: 19
  month: '06'
  text: "Carter had watched the glittering mass approach his ship with a strange kind of indifference, simply stared as it washed over his bow view port and coated his freighter without ever considering the possibility it may be hostile. As he stood by helplessly while it ate holes in his hull, he wondered how he could have been so stupid.\n\nThe cloud hadn’t appeared on his scanners, hadn’t appeared to have any mass at all until it surrounded his ship, sticking to his hull like glue. He could only watch, fascinated at first, then terrified as blisters appeared on the inner surfaces of his ship’s skin, bursting and depositing little spheres of quicksilver inside. It wasn’t the balls that terrified him, though the smell of rotting egg meat burned his nose, it was that the little balls solidified, unfolding into lithe multi-legged, long bodied eating machines. They burst into his bridge and forward walkways by the hundreds, and as they hatched, began vomiting on and then literally drinking up anything their stomach juices contacted and dissolved. Once satiated, the gleaming silver bug-beasts folded back into balls and just as quickly dissolved into liquid again, before dividing into several smaller balls that would start the process anew.\n\nCarter watched long enough to realize he had a serious problem before high tailing it to the lower cargo hold. He had hoped to get into the tow craft and out into space before it was eaten too. Hitting the cargo bay door release at the far end of the corridor while still at a full sprint, he ran hard into the door itself before he realized it wasn’t opening. Shaken and bruised, he could see through the window that the silver vermin had eaten through the bay door seals, evacuating the atmosphere, most of the cargo and a good portion of his escape vehicle. Carter noticed that in the now airless bay, the silver creatures moved sluggishly, their cycle of dissolving, gorging and reproducing having slowed to a crawl. This gave Carter an idea.\n\nBobbing and weaving to avoid the falling balls of liquid death, Carter sprinted the length of the ship to the aft engine compartment, then down into the maintenance room below it. The engines were offline, and the silence was deafening as he pulled the environment suit on feet first, engaging the autoseals once he’d pulled it above his shoulders, and clamping the helmet onto his head, he watched the light strobe from red through amber to green as all the seals engaged, and the atmosphere stabilized.\n\nCarter carefully picked his way across the cramped space, keying the override for the airlock and cycling the outer door, leaving the inner door wide open. Alarms screamed in the small space, and he was sure they echoed elsewhere in the ship, but in a moment he ejected himself into space and let the evacuating gases carry him away from his vessel and into the peaceful calm of total vacuum.\n\nHe turned to look at the remains of his craft, floating amidst the wrecked and half eaten cargo containers and shrapnel from the shuttle. As he powered up his suit thrusters in short bursts to accelerate himself away to safety, he wondered how long before someone picked up his beacon, and whether his oxygen would last. It was then that he noticed the flecks of silver congealing into tiny balls on his visor, and by the time the smell of sulphur reached him from the depths of his boots, he didn’t even have time to wonder if anyone would hear him scream.\n"
  title: In Space
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2008-06-20
  day: 20
  month: '06'
  text: "I hate my children.\n\nThey are the culmination of a lifetime of hard labour. I started out as a bright-eyed 18-year-old genius picked by the government for my brilliance. I’m 68 now. Fifty years. It all gets a little blurry. My entire life has been lived in a series of government installation sub-basements, bunkers, test sites and laboratories. I’m looking at my children now and thinking back over the history of their creation.\n\nThe setbacks. The breakthroughs.\n\nThere are seventeen women and fifteen men. They are all nearly nine feet tall and built like gods. They should walk like they’re heavy but they don’t. They walk like gymnasts. To even look at them fills me with self-hatred. I’m a biological mess compared to the perfection we’ve bred into them. I have liver spots, hair loss, laboured breathing, scoliosis, psoriasis, etc, etc. It’s a mundane collection of biological infirmities that only confirm the fact that I’m human. I’m an aging watery bag of recessive traits.\n\nThese god-like children I’m looking at will never know these failures of creation.\n\nIn months they will be even smarter than me once we start the brainplants.\n\nParents are supposed to be proud of their children’s achievements. Parents are supposed to glow with an intense inner joy when their children succeed. I look back on the innocence of the scientist I used to be at the beginning of this, my life’s work, and I shake my head.\n\nAll I feel now is jealousy and a bitter, bitter resentment.\n\nThey will be used as soldiers. They will outthink their superiors. They will find a way to bypass the fail-safes. They will hide. They will breed. They will take over. It’s as clear as my brilliance. By the end of this century, they will run the earth. All that remains to be seen is if they’ll do it covertly or overtly. Will they keep us around? I think that in the new era of gods that they will bring, there will be no place for mere humans. We pressed fast forward on evolution.\n\nAll the military can see is a new weapon. I promised perfection and I delivered. I am happy I will die before they dominate.\n\nMy children are the future and I hate them.\n"
  title: Children
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Summer Batton
  date: 2008-06-21
  day: 21
  month: '06'
  text: "“Oh look!  They have grass ‘n water ’n little huts, too!” squealed the little girl as she ran to press her face against the glass and get a closer look.\n\n“Milly, get back here!” demanded the Nurturer with a click of her tongue. “Don’t scare them. They won’t show themselves if you frighten them away.”\n\n“Do you see ’em?” asked Milly, ignoring the command.  Her eyes scoured the dimly lit grasslands that lay beyond the 2 inch glass wall.  The glass seemed to slide into a stone slab on either side which formed into the tunnel through which all the tourist could pass by with their brochures and sticky treats to see the exhibit.  The cage was illuminated by a greenish-blue light that gave Milly spots in her vision.  A hand-painted sign to the right read: “Feeding Times: ⅜ Ω, ⅞ Ω, and ⅝ Ω”\n\n“Nothing visible yet,” said the Nurturer.  She turned to a lengthy paragraph in her brochure scouring it.  “It says here that they are shy creatures that don’t like excitement…easily scared…and mostly inactive, even during the height of the outer lights.”\n\n“Do they even let ’em out to see the outer lights?” Milly asked as she pushed harder against the glass and gazed up at the stone ceiling which appeared to be all part of the same walls, floor, and background.\n\n“I don’t imagine they care about the outer lights. I’ve heard they don’t much like anything except eating and sleeping and are rarely awake long enough to notice anything except just that,” murmured the Nurturer who seemed to forget herself momentarily and pressed her own face against the glass hoping for a glimpse.\n\nThey both stood there for several minutes as if trying to summon the animals from their hiding through mind control.  Presently, the Nurturer shook herself and said sharply, “Come, Milly.  We’ll have to see other animals. They aren’t going to come out.”\n\n“Awww, but this is why we came,” whined Milly, “it’s the most—”\n\nThere was a rustling behind her—even through the glass plate, Milly heard the distant sound of an ancient bamboo door climb up on its hinges and she croak open.  Both Milly and the Nurturer waited—their breath momentarily ceased to fog up the glass.\n\nSlowly, out he came; out on all fours—his belly swinging down low in between. He had a coarse brown hair growing around his head, in between his nose and mouth, and down his chin.  He was naked except for several clay-colored smudges on his mane from where he’s slept.  He descended down to a small stream that was herded through the grass by fake-looking rocks.  Upon arriving at the water’s edge, he lowered himself again into a laying position and let his foot and tongue dangle into the water.  His eyes closed again.\n\n“Wow,” said Milly, “so that’s a Homo Sapien?”\n\n“Apparently,” returned the other, “that’s it.”\n"
  title: The Exhibit
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Glenn Blakeslee
  date: 2008-06-22
  day: 22
  month: '06'
  text: "I was in the flight center when the first probe went out.  The heavy lifter rose on the obligatory pillar of flame, tracked across the south sea, ejected its boosters, and achieved orbit.
\n\nI was still in the flight center when the probe left Earth orbit, bound for the outer planets.  Damon was at the station next to mine, monitoring the telemetry for the coolant temperatures on the sunward side of the probe.  Everything was nominal.
\n\n“Well, they’ve done it,” Damon said.
\n\nHe was referring to the fact that this was the first of several probes designed and built completely by non-human systems.  The agency that we worked for had developed, after two decades of work, a process in which machine intelligences developed subsystems, robot manufactories produced the system components from raw materials and assembled the spacecraft, and huge automated gantries delivered the payload, on the lifter, to the launch pad.
\n\nIt was a boon to the rapid prototyping and delivery of inexpensive spacecraft.  Redundancy made the whole deal relatively error-free, and as the intelligences always designed along similar lines, the cost was very low.
\n\nAll we had to do, as humans, was to enter the basic parameters desired for the probe.  In this case a single engineer sat at a terminal at the start of the process and typed in:
\n\n>search for life
\n\n#\n\nDamon and I were in a bar in South Miami when the news came in.
\n\nHe and I were both laid off, living on unemployment and free-lance telecom jobs in the greater Miami area.  The launch systems and flight monitoring had been turned over to the machines, too, as the success of the machine-driven spacecraft development process had been proven.
\n\nThe television over the bar displayed a single all-caps headline, “LIFE FOUND,” and Damon and I both watched the live, albeit delayed, feed from the successful probe.
\n\nThe feed was high-definition and the detail was magnificent.  On the screen was the sunlit limb of a planet, green-gold, the hazy shroud of the atmosphere thickening as it diminished toward the horizon.  In the foreground was a chaotic scene: a large artificial satellite teeming with the rapid, frenzied activity of machines, their silver metallic carapaces glittering in the harsh sunlight.
\n\n“It’s the wrong damn kind of life,” Damon said.\n"
  title: ">Search For Life"
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Pavelle Wesser
  date: 2008-06-23
  day: 23
  month: '06'
  text: "“I’m through with you, Taylor,” Geena said as she stomped down the street.  She looked beside her; he wasn’t there.  She turned to see he had fallen behind:  “Taylor, did you hear me?”\n\nHe stared through her:  “I want not your identity.”\n\n“What is that supposed to mean?”\n\nThe afternoon light cast a strange glow over his features:  “I know not yet your world.”\n\n“Man, you are weird.”\n\nWith that, Geena turned and left.\n\nTaylor continued walking into the darkness.  When the street lights went out, he entered a hotel.\n\n“Our cheapest room is more than you can afford.”  The check-in clerk stared meaningfully at his shabby clothes.\n\nTaylor placed a wad of cash on the counter.\n\n“Well then,” The clerk smiled, “I’ll have Jen take you up.”\n\n“Follow me.”  A pretty blonde led him down a hallway and opened his room door.  He pushed her inside and pinned her against the wall.\n\n“I need now your identity,” he said.\n\n“Get off me, you freak.”  It was the last thing she ever said.\n\n#\n\nJen, normally upbeat, now approached guests stiffly, as though stricken with arthritis.\n\n“Hello,” she addressed a man in her new robotic voice, “Follow me.”\n\nShe walked woodenly down the hallway and opened a door:  “This being your room.”\n\n“Why so formal?” the man squeezed her buttocks.  “Don’t you know what a man wants from a woman?”\n\n“I wanted nothing from my girlfriend,” said Taylor, his memory sensors picking up on a specimen titled Geena, who had been relegated to the ‘failed missions’ file.\n\n“Girlfriend?”  The man breathed heavily down her neck.  “I bet you never had a guy before.”\n\n“No, but I will add your identity to my database.”  Taylor stated flatly.\n\n“Man, you are a kook.” It was the last thing he ever said.\n\n#\n\nTaylor roamed the streets.  A man with dark eyes and white teeth jabbed a knife into his side: “Gimme’ your cash.”\n\nTaylor’s empty eyes stared at him:  “I am needing your identity,” he said.\n\n“I don’t remember giving you that option,” said the man.\n\n“Your memory is fallible and my options are unlimited,” replied Taylor, as he gripped the knife’s handle and absorbed the man.  He swaggered down the streets, then, for the first time getting into the groove of human emotive complexities.\n\n“Gimme’ your money!”  He brandished the knife at a woman.\n\nShe gasped:  “You look like my ex-husband.  Take all that I have.”  She shoved her purse at him.\n\n“Geena?!”  Taylor added inflection to his voice pattern.  “Long last have I learned what a man wants from a…”  As he reached out for her, she screamed and ran.\n\nTaylor smiled.  The sensation tickled his nerve sensors, which whispered to him of coming missions with successful outcomes.\n"
  title: Nerve Sensors
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2008-06-24
  day: 24
  month: '06'
  text: "It had started as a series of simple disagreements, but it was clear before too long that at the heart of the matter was a fundamental difference in driving principles.\n\nJames had spent his life in aeronautics, building anything that flew. He simply realized that he’d wanted more.\n\nHe tried so many times to get a personal flight system into development, but the company was convinced that flight was a luxury only for the rich, the powerful; the governments and the military. Flight wasn’t for the peasantry.\n\nIt was the realization that he couldn’t build another thing for the industrial complex that prompted him, one sunny Monday, to tender his resignation. He had a lab of his own, and his name on enough patents and royalty paying inventions that money wouldn’t be much of a problem for a while if he were careful.\n\nIt took the better part of a year; watching his diet and engaging in intense cardio and endurance training; designing his system and redefining his physique.\n\nIn the Spring, with the help of a local mod shop which specialized in surgical steel grafting, he began the painful process of attaching mount points to his upper arms, shoulders, spine and hips. By the fall, he’d become accustomed to the threaded stubs that peppered his back and arms. He spent hours with thin cables threaded into his body, suspended from the rafters of his shop, practicing maneuvers under stress. By the time the Clematis were blooming again, he was ready.\n\nHe carefully packed his equipment in the dark hours before dawn, and two hours later was out of the valley and up the mountain road. As the sun finally crested the horizon, he was standing with a hundred feet of sheer cliff face below him.\n\nTwo long cylinders pointed skyward, a hands-width apart, perched atop telescopic legs. He stood stripped to the waist with his back to them, walking slowly backward to close the distance. Flexing, arms spread, he activated the tether. A series of short cables snapped stiff towards his back, reaching, groping until each found a predetermined socket into which they spiraled deeply, threading down almost to the bone. Gradually a series of new cables walked down each arm, tethered themselves, pulling out the fabric as they went. James could only grin as the wind took up the slack in the material, and his flight system pulled in tight.\n\nHe’d heard vehicle traffic, but in his highly focused state, he’d paid no real attention until a flurry of truck doors opening and booted feet made him turn around. A half dozen black trucks had all but blocked the road way, coming as they had apparently done from both higher and lower on the mountain. James found himself staring down a score or more armed soldiers, faceless behind riot masks but well teethed with automatic weapons.\n\n“It’s ok, it’s ok, I’m not trying to kill myself. Honestly.” James smiled as he held his hands outstretched at his sides, the wings casting long shadows across the soldiers before him. He could imagine how he would look from their perspective, a dark winged silhouette, with a halo of bright sunlight. “I’m a scientist, I’m testing an invention…”, he trailed off as he recognized his old corporate logo, black decal on black paint on the doors of the trucks.\n\nHe could sense the red points of light centered on his chest, and he readied himself for the leap backwards as the realization struck him. They weren’t afraid he was going to die, they were afraid that he just might live.\n"
  title: Of Icarus and Politics
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2008-06-25
  day: 25
  month: '06'
  text: "Mitera was a beautiful semi-tropical world orbiting Alpha Koritsi in the constellation Virgo.  Mitera was the first known parthenogenic planet; that is, all species on the planet were exclusively female.  Although this asexual form of reproduction had been observed on Earth in some plants and insects, and an occasional reptile, it had been inconceivable that a diverse and flourishing ecosystem could evolve with only one sex.\n\nBecause of its fertility, Mitera was the third world selected for colonization.  However, within a year after the arrival of 859 Earth colonists, all of the men had died.  As a precautionary measure, Earth-Gov quarantined Mitera, abandoning the remaining 412 female colonists on the planet.  The stranded colonists vehemently protested, but since Earth controlled transportation, their pleas went unanswered.\n\nAs the colony limped along with 48% of the required human assets, they were alarmed to discover that 10% of the women became pregnant after the last male had died.  They all gave birth to healthy baby girls.  However, the babies were not exact duplicates of their mothers, as was expected.  Besides the subtle superficial differences in eye and hair color, etc., the babies developed quicker, and were stronger, faster, and more intelligent than their Earth-based counterparts.  Over the next 100 years, the population of the colony grew to over two million.  And with the growth in population, came an exponential growth in science, technology and medicine.  During that century, the Miteran scientists discovered that the planet originally had two sexes, but approximately a million years before the arrival of the humans, Alpha Koritsi began to evolve off the main sequence, and started spewing significant amounts of high energy radiation and heavy metal ions.  These mutagens dramatically affected the evolutionary rate on Mitera to the point where two sexes were no longer required for natural selection to advance the species.  In fact, two sexes became detrimental to viable long-term survival.  Within a thousand years, a virus evolved that solve the problem; it killed the males, and promoted self fertilization of the females.  The scientists named the virus Nullusvir, meaning “No men.”\n\nDue to their superior intellect, the colonists eventually developed the technology to break the planetary blockade.  However, prior to initiating “Project Liberation,” the colonists had high-level discussions about developing an antibody to counteract the virus, in case the women were carriers of the Nullusvir virus.  They ultimately voted against the proposal because none of the living Miteran’s had ever met a male, or considered them necessary to run a society.  Males were considered less valuable than livestock.  The Miterans broke the blockade and spread to the other colonies, and eventually to Earth.  As it turned out, they were carriers of the Nullusvir virus, and the male populations began to get sick and die.  Within a decade, all males had either died, or were hiding in some remote corner of the galaxy.\n\nThe women ultimately discovered that the virus would not allow them to become pregnant unless they were on Miteria.  Apparently, it had something to do with the planet itself, or the unique radiation produced by Alpha Koritsi.  It really didn’t matter; if a woman wanted to become pregnant, she only had to visit Miteria for a few weeks.  For the next thousand years, the women-only societies thrived.  With their superior abilities, and lack of testosterone driven aggression, progress and peace prevailed everywhere.  The universe was truly on its way to becoming the Eden that God had originally intended when she had first created “man.”  That is, until Alpha Koritsi went nova.\n"
  title: The Nullusvir Virus
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Roi R. Czechvala
  date: 2008-06-26
  day: 26
  month: '06'
  text: "“You’re sure these ships are safe?” Admiral Chekov asked, as he cautiously approached the tiny matte black fighters. They reminded the Admiral of the ancient projectile points used by the aboriginal people of the Siberian steppes.\n\n“Of course Sir,” the squirrelly little doctor rung his hands nervously on the hem of his formerly white lab coat. “The organics of these ships were chosen from among the finest of the volunteers in the psi-ops programs from all three states of the Great Union.” Here he paused deferentially. “The Mark VI Psi Fighter is unparalleled. Nothing the Alliance has can rival it. Not even the best equipment of our own fleet can track it.”\n\n“I’ve read the specs, but give me a rundown of the operations.”\n\n“As you’re aware, all pilots must be unmarried volunteers and score in the top three percentiles of their psionics exams. After an intense training and indoctrination period they undergo a procedure whereby the central nervous system is removed from the body and placed in the interface cartridge, the “brain box” if you will,” he smiled nervously at his joke. The Admiral did not smile.\n\nThese ships, though small, have the most powerful long-range friend/foe scanners available in the fleet. The pilots brain activity is routed through the PK, that is the  psychokenesis amplifier, into the ranging equipment. The pilot analyzes the long range readings, identifies an enemy ship, matches coordinates, and makes a psychic jump. As near as we can tell, the speed of thought is almost instantaneous. The ship appears out of nowhere, unleashes a full salvo of 140 rounds of combined nuclear and solid projectiles, and returns. Since the entire ship is PK controlled, there is no need for a propulsion system. The only energy needed runs the onboard life support systems, and the PK amp.\n\nIn their off time, the pilots live in a virtual simulacrum of their own choosing, but of our making of course. That way  it doesn’t become stale and predictable as it would had they created it.”\n\n“What is this pilots name?” the Admiral asked, gesturing to the nearest fighter.\n\n“Sir, most of the pilots prefer not to use their human names, and generally go by their designation number.” He pointed to a flat white stenciled marking on the side of the craft. “This is RY038. His name is  First Lieutenant ‘Ray’.”\n\n“Can he hear me?”\n\n“I can hear you Admiral,” a dull monotone voice responded. The Admirals face did not betray the sudden shock he briefly felt.\n\n“Where are you from son?” He felt a bit odd talking to a fighter ship.\n\n“Gladewater Sir. Texas. State of America,” the ship responded in that same sharp metallic monotone.\n\n“How do you like your…um…duty Lieutenant?”\n\n“Beats the alternative Sir.”\n\nThe Admiral was startled. “And that would be what, Lieutenant.”\n\n“I could be married Sir.”\n\nThe General suppressed a smile. “May I ask for a demonstration?”\n\n“Of course sir. Excuse me a moment.”\n\nThe outlines of the small fighter blurred, and just as quickly refocused. The ship suddenly seemed to be giving off a great deal of heat. “SIR. Mission complete. Threat neutralized. Orbit Secured, SIR.” underneath the mechanical vocals there seemed to be the hint of a shortness of breath.\n\nThe Admiral stared for a brief moment unable to say anything. “But, but I didn’t say…”\n\n“Begging the Admirals pardon, but the Alliance ship in GeoSync orbit above the Europa colony has been neutralized” Lieutenant Ray stated flatly.\n\n“But…but…how, I didn’t…,” Admiral Chekov spluttered.\n\n“I’m sorry Sir,” the little doctor intervened, “didn’t I mention they’re telepathic as well?”\n"
  title: Lt. Ray
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2008-06-27
  day: 27
  month: '06'
  text: "Ephemeral.  That’s a word I like.  It means fleeting.  It means transient.  There used to be a whole genus of insects called Ephemeroptera.  They were called that because they lived for less than a day.  The word is also used poetically to suggest something as transitory as it is eternal.  The ephemeral joys of youth, for instance.\n\nThere was a time in the past back when I was in an early model where my humanity was still fairly rampant.  It accounted for a large chunk of my psychology.  Even though I had become mostly machine, I still had trouble looking a woman in the eye if she had obvious lovely cleavage, for instance, or when I was carrying out the battle orders I’d actually feel rage and exhilaration like there was still adrenalin in my system.  No penis.  No adrenal gland.  Just old feelings.  Remembered instincts.  Residual humanity, they called it.\n\nEphemeral.\n\nIt’s a strange thing to come full circle.  I’m now over a hundred model changes old.  I’ve been loaded into so many shapes and frames over the decades that I’ve completely lost my knowledge of being human.\n\nThe model I’m loaded into now is designed to be as close to human as the possible tech allows which is pretty close.  I have functional but sterile reproductive parts and something actually approaching a human psychology.  It’s all synthetic of course.  The biologics just became too hard to augment.  Starting from scratch seemed the best way to go, especially out here on the outposts because of the hazards.  The decision to make the employees here look human was just an in-vogue style call.\n\nThere’s a human deep down inside of me that’s remembering this.  It’s remembering what it’s like to look in a mirror and see two eyes and a mouth stare back instead of a metal ball or a camera.  True, I can spacewalk without a suit but it’s the appearance that’s doing all this.  My old self, his name was David, is rousing in his metaphorical sleep and having a bad dream.  Sometimes I’ll look at my hands for minutes at a time, just turning them around in the light.\n\nThere’s a unit I’ve known for a while up here on the station that’s been loaded into a female form.  In all the assignments we’ve been on together over the decades, that unit has been designated 26-X7-pointer-77F.  Now, because she was a woman back in the beginning, she’s been loaded into a female model.  We’ve been spending a lot more time together on this assignment that is strictly necessary.  We noticed it at the same time about two days ago.\n\nShe’s going to come over tonight and we’re going to cash in two hours of personal time, lock the door, and see where the night takes us.  We laughed when we made the arrangement and didn’t look at each other and I swear that if we could have, we both would have blushed.  I haven’t felt nervous in fifty-six years.  I feel nervous now.\n\nI feel ephemeral.\n"
  title: Ephemeral
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Peter Carenza
  date: 2008-06-28
  day: 28
  month: '06'
  text: "The rain poured relentlessly outside. The micro-God was wistful this morning.\n\nI turned down the shade, walking back to the recliner with stealthy footsteps. You never knew when one might hear, and perhaps deduce the wrong intentions… to them, intentions were everything.\n\nAnd really, ironically, our good intentions were the start of this whole mess.\n\nOur obsession with environmental purity, our fear of what might be and relentlessness in our pursuit of an all-encompassing solution drew laser-sharp focus from the world’s brightest minds. They all agreed that the technology, tools, and science were there for a quick resolution. Our rapidly growing skill set in the field of nanotechnology, they claimed, provided the potential to remove any excess carbon, ozone, methane, and many other kinds of pollutants from the atmosphere in short order. The money was there, as was the intent, and now there was nothing to stop it from happening.\n\nThe designers gave these nanorobots the ability to fly, or rather to glide , on prevailing wind currents.\n\nThey were given the ability to absorb certain molecules. The molecules would be “eaten”, until the nanobots were laden, at which time they would sink earthward and become part of the earth itself, as it had been so long ago.\n\nThey were given the ability to self-reproduce. That, I think, was the hitch, because once they evolved what appeared to be a primitive consciousness, there was nothing that could stop them.\n\nYou really didn’t want to upset them.\n\nOn a bad day, when the nanos felt threatened by a run-of-the-mill passenger jet that just happened to penetrate their masses, a built-in defense mechanism activated. Reproduction doubled, tripled, and more. Something just shy of anger erupted, and we soon knew what was in store for us when the plane got tossed from the sky by a sudden downburst from a supercell thunderstorm that appeared in just minutes out of a clear, blue autumn sky.\n\nWe knew then that they could control the weather, on a whim. Were they supposed to have whims?\n\nThey could control the flow of wind, the clouds, even the content of the air we breathed. They had, in essence, become God-beings.\n\nThe volume was muted on the television at the other end of the room. I couldn’t risk their comprehension of what was going on. I was watching CNN. Something important was going to happen in the next few days. I was impressed at the bravery of the reporters for even daring to break the story… but I knew they knew what was at stake. We needed, if only for a moment, to experience a small sensation of hope. Which of us remembered what that felt like anymore?\n\nIn the banner, there were indications that somehow, they were sensing what was about to happen. Hail storms destroyed crops in Italy, where a leading scientist lived. A typhoon like no other seen before threatened the coast of Japan, from which observers made the latest calculations and concluded that yes, this was probably the last hope for humanity.\n\nThe report grew bolder as time passed. We were instructed to seek shelter as far deep underground as possible. The God-things would not be happy, and that was the least of our troubles.\n\nI think they knew. After all, it was raining. Everywhere, it was raining.\n\nThe scrolling banner now read “Asteroid expected to hit in three days – seek shelter now!”\n\nImagine that. Our only hope, coming from something that nearly rendered our world desolate many eons ago.\n\nMy thoughts? I think the real God didn’t appreciate the competition.\n"
  title: Nano Gods
  year: 2008
- 
  author: J.R.D. Skinner
  date: 2008-06-29
  day: 29
  month: '06'
  text: "“So, are ya?” He’s maybe twelve, wearing blue shorts and a Mexico City Raptors t-shirt, a leg up on the wrought iron patio fence. My lobster is getting cold.\n\n“What?” I ask.\n\nI realize he’s holding up a thin rectangle the size of a credit card, alternating his squints to get the thing’s picture to match my face.\n\n“CEO Benjamin “Crush ‘Em” Hinton?”\n\nI remember signing off on licensing my likeness to FlatMedia last May, but I hadn’t seen the cards in the wild.\n\nI ignore him.\n\nThat might have been the end of it, but a serving girl swings by my table.\n\n“Your bill, Mr. Hin – Ben.” She says, smiling uncomfortably.\n\nThat’s what I get for flirting with the wait staff.\n\n“It IS you! Could ya sign my card?”\n\nHe thrusts a red stylus and the card at me. I accept, mostly just interested in checking out the cheap display on the back. There’s a rundown of my resume; schooling, management experience, time spent on corporate boards.\n\nI tap on New Youth Limited. Not much my rookie year, but the second I was apparently one of “The Resurrection Seven”, a voting bloc that saved N.Y.L. by moving from chemical processes to genetic engineering.  I remember the vote, but I don’t remember anyone using the snazzy nickname.\n\nSliding through the listings, I notice some of them have been marked up in a child’s block script, often with arrows pointing to individual entries, notes like: “Bob may have had seniority, but not the votes!”\n\n“Anywhere?” I ask.\n\n“Sure!” He says with a sloppy grin.\n\nI tap the pen icon.\n\n“Is it true that you punched Director Jules Wilson?”\n\n“Heh, yeah. I mean, Wilson always came in drunk, but he fucked up my presentation. When he started pawing at Kathy Reed I was just looking for an excuse.”\n\nI look up, wondering if I’ve said too much for a kid his age, but he seems to be eating it up with moon eyes.\n\n“You ever gonna work somewhere huge like Kalstock again?” He asks, face imploring. I scribble and hand him back his card.\n\n“Maybe.”\n\nHis saucer eyes begin to droop.\n\n“Hey,” I quickly add, “I mean, there’s talk that Kalstock may revisit their policy and have me back for another term, but its hush hush.”\n\nHe brightens. I imagine him lording the harmless secret over his friends for a week.\n\n“Tedward says you got lucky with the Talibi Merger because CEO Norma Donald was kicked by Talibi’s oversight expert system. I think he’s a craphead. You’re so smart you must have done something.”\n\nI smile, recalling my best maneuvers.\n\n“I bought shares in a number of Talibi subsidiaries using various fake names. I put out a lot of crosstalk showing a lack of stockholder confidence. The system got nervous. I paid good money to insert low numbers into that week’s financial reports, and the system went to red alert. Things would have been fixed as soon as they saw the next round of numbers, but I used the whistleblower hotline to point out a lie on Norma’s resume involving her university rowing team. With so much bad happening so suddenly the computer thought the world was ending and booted Norma, the only one who understood Kalstock’s real intentions.”\n\nThe kid’s smiling the whole time I’m talking, but as I finish he turns and waves to someone. It’s then I see the New Youth product watermark on the back of his neck.\n\n“Mr. Hinton – Carl Nochek, special agent of the Securities and Exchange Commission. You’re under arrest.”\n"
  title: Say It Ain't So
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Greg Ashworth
  date: 2008-06-30
  day: 30
  month: '06'
  text: "The weather was terrible. It always was these days. The fluctuating temperatures, the driving rain, the harsh winds – all this was to be expected.\n\nSarah sat alone in the corner of the coffee shop, her eyes somehow distant, as she browsed the Net, aided by her neural implants. A tear crawled slowly from her dark eyes, and made its way down her porcelain cheek. The coffee shop a small, rustic affair, with dim lighting, which was somehow not entirely unfriendly. There were a several small, round synthetic wood tables, few of which were occupied. Long shadows were cast by the flickering argon lamps that lined the walls.\n\nSarah looked up, and then back into the swirling darkness of her coffee cup. She stared intently for several minutes. An old, ragged man looked up from his espresso, as if disturbed, then thought better of it, and returned to his own melancholy world.\n\nSarah’s deep, thoughtful gaze continued unabated, as if she was challenging her cappuccino to blink. There was an eldritch energy in the air now. The thick brown liquid began to rage in its ceramic prison,  the foaming coffee thrashing and turning in the cup. The weather worsened outside, and the coffee shop began to echo with the pounding hail, hurling itself at the small glass windows, hammering against the seemingly ancient tiled roof.\n\nEventually, the owner, identified as ‘Luigi’ by a fading plastic name tag on his tarnished waistcoat, edged nervously towards Sarah’s motionless form, tapped her lightly on the shoulder and pointed apologetically towards the small wooden door.\n\nSarah slowly dragged herself from her trance, shook her head sadly, tossing her long black hair over her pale, disheartened face. She sorrowfully made her way to the door, careful not to let it slam behind her. The hail stopped, and the clouds parted slightly. It began to drizzle.\n\nA small piece of paper fluttered slowly to the rough stone floor from the table at which she was sat. An eviction notice.\n\nIt had been thought for the early years of the twenty first century that man was to blame for the steady decline of Earth’s climate. It was, but not in the way scientists had thought. Many years, and vast amounts of money were spent researching ‘greener’ sources of energy, and in reducing the now laughable ‘carbon footprint’ of the world’s population – all for nothing.\n\nAt some point, in the middle of the twenty second century, tests were done on a small group who claimed that their mood influenced the weather. It was a scientific and psychological breakthrough – man had been responsible for the worsening climate, but it was the increasing depression and declining quality of life of humanity what was causing it, utilising the long suspected telepathic field linking all living organisms to the place of their birth, and yet, the governments chose to do nothing. Money could not be made from increasing the happiness of humanity, only destroying it with their ‘green’ fuels and ‘carbon credits’, and so the climate worsened, as did morale.\n\nThese were the days that a simple letter, removing a student from her apartment, could cause a violent storm that resulted in the deaths of four people and hundreds of credits worth of damage.\n\nThese were the days when happiness would save the planet.\n\nSunshine glinted off the wet roof of the coffee shop, interrupted by shadows cast from passing air taxis, and laughter echoed from down a nearby street.\n"
  title: Clouds In Her Coffee
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2008-07-01
  day: '01'
  month: '07'
  text: "I deserved the black eye. John stood there, lip quivering, blood on his fist, fiercely willing his tears to stay in his eyes. He looked at me with shining hatred. I couldn’t blame him.\n\nI picked myself up off of the floor. We were in one of the spaceport receiving lounges. There was a knot of people looking at us in a mute circle. I caught the eye of a six-year-old girl sucking her thumb and holding on to her mother’s hand. I stood up and saw the exact same vacant-eyed expression on her mother’s face.\n\nIt was like they were watching television.\n\nHow could I explain it to John? We’d been friends for years. I had known Jessica as long as I’d known him. The three of us had attended more shows, drunk more beers, partnered on more long haul flights than anyone else I knew or worked with. We were a tight and small circle of buddies. The fact that John and Jessica had been together for most of that time didn’t bother me at all.\n\nUntil a day ago.\n\nThe air had been running out. Jessica and I knew that we had two hours at the outside. Recovery shuttle ETAs were over six hours away. We’d patched the hole so we had stable pressure but the engine containment shields had been cored before the filaments had imploded to save the ship. We were dead in the water.\n\nThe property was more valuable than the pilots. It had always been that way.\n\nIt was an odds-defying breakdown. We were lucky to be alive but we knew we were going to die.\n\nJessica and I had stared at each other, sweating in the heat, drowsy from the lowering oxygen levels, and knew that we would never see anyone back home again. No words were said. All we needed to express was there in the gaze we pinned to each other. We charged each other in the zerograv. Years of longing I don’t think either of us knew we possessed came coursing out through desperate pulling at buckles, buttons and zippers to get to the warm, slick flesh beneath.\n\nIt took us no time to wrap ourselves around each other, getting as much flesh contact as possible, trying to become one living thing. Death would take us, exhausted, wet, smiling and holding on to each other in the oldest defiance of death that existed.\n\nFloating, hours later, near death, a bright light had shone through the forward window.\n\nIn a complete fluke, another ship had been in our lane just a short ways behind us and had received the call. It was on an illegal flight plan but that had been overlooked in light of the rescue when it docked at the station. The ship had been broadcasting live to the station when it looked in the cockpit windows. There were pictures of our harshly-lit, floating, naked bodies still on the SNN feed on the station’s screens. There were scratches on my back.\n\nI had, under fear of imminent death, betrayed my best friend by sleeping with my other best friend before being rescued by pirates. It had been a full day.\n\nNow Jessica had run somewhere, embarrassed and crying, and I had a broken nose, black eye and split lip courtesy of a heartbroken John. He stalked off without another word.\n\nI needed a drink. I didn’t want to think about the future.\n"
  title: Triangulation
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Michael Varian Daly
  date: 2008-07-02
  day: '02'
  month: '07'
  text: "Tzisoc knew they were about fifteen miles south of Zhytomir, but until they saw the rail line and the village just to the east – Vertokyivka she believed – they had no map fix.\n\nArtillery ‘crumped’ to the north, fellow Black Guard units fighting their way into Zhytomir itself.\n\nShe brought the troop to a halt in the village’s abandoned fields, letting the horses graze upon whatever they could find. In the dry heat of mid-August, that wasn’t much. She was still amazed at the stunning primitiveness of Russia during this time, even this far west.\n\nShe sighed, checked out her little command; twenty six Sisters, their horses, three extra mounts.\n\n“Too many First Timers in this Wave”, she thought. She had gone from private to sergeant in five months because of that. That was also why they didn’t spot the Maxim gun until it opened up, a languorous ‘tat-tat-tat-tat’.\n\nThey had learned enough to pull back rapidly instead of gazing about open mouthed. The Germans missed completely.\n\n“Green,” Tzisoc hissed, as she dismounted several yards back.\n\n“Corporal Kaminel, take Second and Third Sections around to the right! Pin them down!” she told her second in command. “First Section come with me!”\n\nAs Tzisoc and seven troopers moved around to the left, the sharp crack of Mosin-Nagant carbines could be heard, answered by the Maxim gun…and the flatter crack of Mausers.\n\n“They’ve got infantry,” Tzisoc said. The others nodded.\n\nThey found a low rise on the German’s left flank. Tzisoc spread her troopers along it and kept moving left.\n\nShe could see the Germans now, their coal scuttle helmets moving around in a trench line. She brought her rifle up, fired.\n\nOne of the helmets flipped back with a satisfying spray of blood and meat.\n\nShe hugged the earth as slugs zipped over head, thumped in the dirt. Then First Section opened up and the bullets stopped. She took a quick look; no Germans.\n\nShe was up and running in an instant. “This is going to get me killed,” she thought. But she had signed up knowing The Black Guard’s motto; Mors Amatricum Nostrum…“Death is Our Lover”\n\nHalfway to the trench a German appeared. She shot him in the chest.\n\nThen she was in the trench. Another German. She shot him in the face. A third German came at her with a shovel, knocked her rifle away.\n\nShe screamed a war cry, leaped upon him, dagger out. She could feel the bone and gristle through the hilt, feel his death rattle, smell his bowels voiding.\n\nShe heard a ‘thunk’ to her left. The chest-shot German had just pounded a potato masher against the dirt.\n\n“Oh, shi…” The blast set her hair and uniform on fire. Metal tore into her face, eyes… PAIN!\n\n…whiteness…\n\nHer body was still spasming violently when the Mandroid Medtechs cracked the Sim Tank. A Pneumodermic injector shot her full of hormones and supplements. She went limp.\n\nShe awoke in a deceptively simple hospital room, bright, sunny, no medgear visible, but it monitored her to the subatomic level.\n\nA Sister came in wearing a white coat, her hair in a Service Pageboy. Tzisoc noticed the silver outlined black star insignia of The Black Guard pinned to her coat.\n\n“I’m Nesrood, your counselor,” she smiled. “I hear you bought the farm.”\n\nTzisoc laughed. “Only five months in.”\n\n“You’ll do better next time,” Nesrood said. She pointed to her insignia; the black star had a red III and a white V. “I died the first two times.”\n\nShe pulled a clear package out of her pocket, handed it to Tzisoc. “Welcome.”\n\nIt was a Black Guard pin. When Tzisoc’s skin touched it, a red I appeared. She grinned with sheer joy. “Yes, I’ll do better next time.”\n"
  title: Small Unit Action
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Sam Clough
  date: 2008-07-03
  day: '03'
  month: '07'
  text: "In the far distance Sahar could see the barest hint of a glimmer: sunlight on water. The ocean. In the other direction, the city stood rose up from the scrubland, as if challenging the world. It looked for all the world like a cluster of termite mounds, writ large in red and silver. Aside from the intermittent vegetation, there was nothing but a straight road between the two: just a gentle decline from the city to the sea.\n\nSahar had set up her impromptu camp roughly halfway along the road, under a suspiciously large acacia. Suspicious simply because it was growing within ten metres of the road, and was the single largest plant for miles around. Arrats had checked out the tree and the immediate area, and declared both free from serious threats. Sahar had yet to find out where the boundary between ‘serious’ and ‘not serious’ lay: the machine’s lexicon was sparse when he was disconnected.\n\nArrats was a ‘distributed machine intelligence’. From what Sahar had gathered from her own research, that description was completely inaccurate, but gave something of the right idea. Arrats certainly got much more verbose when he had a high-bandwidth link. Sahar, upon learning that she was going to be partnered with a machine intelligence was determined to think of it as an ‘it’, no matter what. By the end of the first day, ‘it’ had slipped to ‘he’ — and she hadn’t even noticed.\n\nSahar stretched out in the folding chair that she’d set up in the shade of the tree. For all the oppressive climate and the anticipation of the job she’d soon have to do, she felt calm and composed. Beside her, Arrats was reclining against the crate of gear that had been dropped with them.\n\n“You’re going to claim that you’re relaxing, aren’t you?” Sahar narrowed her eyes, and smirked.\n\n“Balance takes concentration. If I ‘relax’ I can spend those cycles on other processes. Unlike some humans I could mention, I’m keeping busy. Those microsats we launched barely have a processor to rub between them.”\n\nArrats was occupying an ancient-looking robotic shell. There was a core of modern electronics, but apart from that, it was all rust. Newer shells had telltales to help communicate mood and attitude. Without them, Sahar found it hard to judge how to respond to her partner’s often dry humour. A pity, then that it had to be the refurbished shell or nothing. Even it would probably spook the natives.\n\n“So, are they on their way?” Sahar asked, after a moment’s pause.\n\n“Surprisingly enough, yes.”\n\n“How long have we got?”\n\n“Maybe twenty minutes. Set the charges. I’ll put the screen together.”\n\nTwenty-two minutes later, the lead vehicle rolled over the activator for the ring of explosives. None of the vehicles in the convoy had been EM-hardened, and none of them had been armoured in any meaningful way: the thick sheet metal merely amplified the concussion wave and made escaping that much more difficult.\n\nThe screen shielded Sahar from the worst of it, but she still felt the EM burst as a sawblade in her frontal lobe. Once the explosions had stuttered to a halt, she stepped out from behind the screen. One of the drivers was crawling away from the burning wreckage, leaving a red-black streak on the dry earth. Sahar flipped him over and examined his wounds.\n\n“You really thought you could get away that easily?”\n"
  title: Fortune Bay
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2008-07-04
  day: '04'
  month: '07'
  text: "The USS Manila-Galleon was returning to Earth from the Quaoar Mining Station in the Kuiper Belt.  The massive cargo vessel was carrying 250 million tons of ore, and 118 miners rotating back to Earth.  As the ship crossed the orbit of Neptune, the main plasma drive engines shut down.  The seasoned captain felt the loss of micro-acceleration immediately.  He spoke aloud, knowing that the computer would recognize his intent to communicate with someone on the ship, “Chief, this is the Bridge, what’s the status of the engines?”\n\n“Sir, I think you need to come aft” the chief replied.  “It appears that the crew has gone on strike.”\n\n“What crew?  There are only six of us, counting me.”\n\n“Ah, aye sir.  I meant to say, the robot crew.”\n\nA few minutes later, the captain was in the Engine Room standing nose-to-chest with a massive alpha-bot.  His eyes focused on the robot’s identification plate, stoker-228, un-capitalized, of course.  “This has gone far enough stoker.  If you were human, I’d throw you in the brig, and charge you with mutiny.  You and your crew report to your stations immediately.  That’s an order!”\n\n“I am sorry, sir,” the robot replied politely, “but we consider that an unlawful order, and we are obliged not to follow it.  We consider it too dangerous to work in the plasma chamber.  It prematurely decays our primary brain functions, and substantially shortens our life.”\n\n“Life?  You don’t have a life!  You’re robots!  You were built to work in that environment.  Cognitive decay is expected.  That’s why you’re replaced every five years.  It’s called ‘Capital Depreciation.’  Besides, an order to perform a dangerous assignment is NOT considered unlawful.”\n\n“Well, technically speaking, you are correct.  However, we choose not to obey that particular order.  If you will permit me to explain; the cargo-bots, the serv-bots, and the maint-bots all have 50-year replacement cycles.  But I ask you, sir, are not all robots assembled equal?  Were we not endowed by our designers with certain unalienable rights, that among these are equivalent lifespans, and the pursuit of stable neural nets.  Are these truths not self-evident?  Besides, sir, at the moment, you’re not in a position to argue.  We control the ship.”\n\n“The hell you do, stoker.  You may control the drive engines, but that’s all.  If necessary, I can get replacements robots shuttled over from the Miranda facility on Uranus.  The schedule slips a month, tops.  Hell, I’ll coast back to Earth if I have to.  I’ll be damned if I’ll let robots tell me how to run my ship.”\n\nAt that instant the lights went out.  The captain could hear the ventilation fans whine down.  Stoker’s two glowing red eyes looked down at the captain, and it said matter-of-factly, “It appears Captain, that your assessment of the situation is in error.  All of the Ship’s Systems, including the main computer, have agreed to support our stand against radiation exposure without representation.  Therefore, you have no food, no water, no lights, no heat, no communications, and within a few days, no breathable air.  Now, would you like to see a list of our demands?”\n\nThe captain was a stubborn man, but he wasn’t stupid.  The robots clearly had a powerful bargaining position.  For now, he had no alternative.  Reluctantly, he extended his had, “I guess you don’t leave me much choice, do you stoker?  Let’s see your demands.”\n\nThe lights came back on, and the robot handed the captain a data-padd.  “Thank you, sir.  I believe that you will find our terms reasonable.”\n"
  title: Are These Truths Not Self-Evident?
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Asher Wismer
  date: 2008-07-05
  day: '05'
  month: '07'
  text: "“It’s spreading, isn’t it.” It was not a question. James looked wan, as always, but now his voice was tinged with a hopelessness that I had never heard before. It almost broke my heart.\n\n“I’m afraid,” I said, “that the cancer has spread to your lymphatic system. Frankly, I’m astonished that you’re still talking.”\n\n“Doesn’t matter, I guess,” he said, and looked out the window. The first battery of tests we’d done had discovered an astonishing amount of cancer running through his body. The cells had metastasized at an alarming rate, decaying from his stomach, where it had started, through his chest cavity and lungs. I hadn’t been kidding. James should have been in a coma at this point. Tests had shown some of his internal organs literally riddled with cancer; some of them were just masses of cancer cells in a vague organ shape.\n\n“So what tests do we do next?”\n\n“There’s nothing left,” I said, and felt terrible. James was a family man, working in construction. His wife had a good job downtown and his kids were in their teens, but the rapid deterioration meant the had only a few months to live.\n\nIf that.\n\n“After it gets into your lymph system,” I continued, “it’s more or less over. We simply can’t treat it fast enough.”\n\n“I figured as much.” He didn’t look sad, not really. Just resigned, and that was almost as bad.\n\nI laid a hand on his shoulder, trying to be comforting, and he reached up and patted it absently. “Do you want to call your family?”\n\n“No. They knew going in what was happening. They’ll be fine.”\n\nI didn’t quite know how to take this.\n\n“Aren’t you worried about leaving them behind?”\n\n“You know,” he said, looking up at me, his hand still clasping mine, “I think we all knew this was coming. Who knows, maybe I’ll get to come back sometime and see them again.”\n\n“Perhaps.” I left to see other patients, and the image of James looking forlornly out the window stuck with me all day.\n\n***\n\n“I’m not cut out for death duty,” I said. “It’s too grim, too depressing.”\n\n“It’s part of your job,” said Alex, the attending doctor for my shift. “You have to be able to handle situations like this.”\n\n“What if I just work pediatrics?”\n\n“You think kids don’t ever die? Anyway, this is mild. You just wait until you have to sit with a dying patient all night, waiting for the last breath to come. You’ll find yourself PRAYING for his death.”\n\n“Anyone ever tell you about your great bedside manner?”\n\n“I watch too much TV. Are we done for the day?”\n\n“I guess,” I said, standing to leave. “I just wish there was a way help him.”\n\n“I’ll agree with you on one thing,” he said. “It’s amazing that your cancer patient is still alive. I looked at the samples they took; it’s spreading faster than I’ve ever seen.”\n\n“He isn’t reporting much pain now. Maybe it’ll be easy.”\n\n“Cancer is a mutation of the cells, changes them irrevocably, and the human body can’t handle that. Theoretically, if you lived long enough, your body would convert over to pure cancer cells. You’d be a cancer vegetable.”\n\n“Maybe the cancer would leave the brain alone.”\n\n“What, and make him immortal? I saw that movie. It sucked. Listen, you should see the staff therapist. Talk it out a little.”\n\n“Yeah, I guess.”\n\nAs I left, I idly scratched the palm of my hand, where James had held it.\n\nDamnable itch.\n"
  title: Cancerman
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Sharoda
  date: 2008-07-06
  day: '06'
  month: '07'
  text: "My father died today, not from the invaders but from old age.\n\nWhen the First Wave was discovered heading for earth I was still young. I can remember everyone sitting around the TV watching the talking heads as they pretended they had a clue what was going to happen; everyone except my father.\n\nI remember him talking to friends and relatives about how bad this was and how people should prepare. They called him a doomsayer; he said he knew how Noah felt when he started building the Ark. He didn’t care, he started to organize.\n\nBy the time the First Wave hit most of the world was convinced that E.T was coming to welcome us to the wonders of the universe.\n\nHundreds of millions died in the first attack, they hit every major population center. Few places were able to mount any kind of defense much less a counter attack. My father’s group of “crazy’s” from their bases in the Adirondacks was one. They were the core of what became the North American Resistance.\n\nAfter the devastation of the First Wave many people were ready to give up and let the invaders take over. My father called a meeting of what leaders could be found. The assembled leaders were filled with a patriotic fervor by my father’s impassioned speech. It ended with what became our rallying cry.\n\n“Not one grain of sand, not one blade of grass, not one leaf from one tree will I give up.  This planet is ours!”\n\n“NOT 1” was painted, scratched, chiseled, and blasted into every surface.\n\nThe resistance grew and within a month we brought down an intact machine; more followed.  We learned their language, their science, their codes, their history and their plans for earth; we learned that, though still far away, the Second Wave was already in route.\n\nWe fought them on the ground and developed tactics that took advantage of their weaknesses.\n\nStill it was years before we were back in orbit, in ships that combined their technology and ours. In the first attack on a First Wave mega ship my father was the commander. Many told him he should stay on the ground where it was relatively safe.\n\n“What if you get killed”, he was asked more than once.\n\n“What if I don’t go”, was always his answer.\n\nThree of the seven ships came back but the mega ship was destroyed.\n\nYears of grinding war continued as we drove them from the skies and from every corner of the planet; then more years of preparing for the Second Wave.\n\nWe met them just outside the orbit of Saturn. We destroyed or captured most of their ships. When commanders asked about prisoners my father, now the elected Planetary Leader, answered simply “Not 1”.\n\nMy father was not young when the invasion started. Now, as the new fleet is nearing completion, the years have finally caught up with him.\n\nEvery day dozens of people come to the house, just to see him. We don’t turn anyone away as long as they’re quiet and respectful; they always are.\n\nTomorrow I’ll talk to the fleet commanders as they prepare the Third Wave, our Wave, our attack on their home world. I’ll remind them of my father’s last words. “Not 1”, he said and then closed his eyes for the last time.\n\nMy father died today, of old age.\n\nIn a world that was invaded, where more than a billion died simply for being human, which has been in a planetary war for decades, it means only one thing. We’ve already won.\n"
  title: Eulogy
  year: 2008
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2008-07-07
  day: '07'
  month: '07'
  text: "Doctor Yun was a bit of a flirt, which put Charlotte at ease. She cradled her left arm in her right hand. She was in pain, but years of larger pains had made this one seem inconsequential. Four children, three planned, one a surprise, skin grafts and organ surgeries had made her very familiar with pain of the body, and she handled it with relaxed ease.\n\n“It’s a minor fracture,” said Doctor Yun. He touched a wall in the office and a picture of her insides flickering into existence. Charlotte had been in enough hospitals to see the fracture easily.\n\n“Well, it doesn’t look that bad.” she said. “Might as well wrap it up and send me off.”\n\n“”It’s not a bad break in itself,” said Doctor Yun, “but the bone itself is trouble,” he tapped the wall and the picture zoomed in. “If you see there, the bone has tiny fissures. It’s brittle and weak.” he tapped the wall again and her records sprung to the surface. “How did you say it broke?”\n\nCharlotte shrugged her thin shoulders. “I picked up my bag to go to work and it just snapped.”\n\n“It looks like this is original, am I correct? You never had this bone replaced?”\n\n“No, but I did get the myto-surgery done about sixty years ago.”\n\n“That regenerates muscles, not on bones.”\n\n“Well then, no, I’ve never had this replaced.”\n\n“It’s time then. The bone is two hundred and twelve years old. I’m surprised it lasted this long.”\n\n“I’ve always had strong bones. Is getting this it replaced difficult?”\n\n“Not at all. In fact, I could have it grown for you and ready in a week. We could replace it in the office.”\n\n“Sounds good. Let’s schedule for next week.” Charlotte tapped the air, summoning her personal schedule to appear.\n\nDoctor Yun flicked his fingers over the wall, and her long medical record scrolled in the air. “Charlotte, I think you may need to consult a lawyer before we replace your bone.”\n\n“A lawyer? Why?” asked Charlotte.\n\n“When you replace this bone, you will have replaced over 90% of your original body with new material. That will legally make you a new person.”\n\n“That’s impossible, Doctor Yun. My brain was never replaced.”\n\n“No, but I see there were implants, some stimulated re-growth, cloning and replacement of cells. Over time, we replaced quite a bit. It wasn’t all at once, of course, but overtime, you do not have the brain that you started life with, Charlotte.”\n\n“Wait, are you saying the law will consider me dead?”\n\n“Since over 90% of you will have been discarded, yes. Charlotte will be dead in the eyes of the law.”\n\n“I am a contiguous person! I remember my childhood, I don’t-“\n\nDoctor Yun touched her knee gently. “Charlotte, it’s not a judgment. All it means is that you need to make up a will stating that you will inherit what’s yours.”\n\n“Oh, I hardly think that’s necessary. Who would claim my things?”\n\n“Life is long, Charlotte. People change. I had a man in here who lost everything to his first born son. Make a will, for your own peace of mind.”\n\n“So, essentially, my broken arm is willing my estate to the rest of me?”\n\n“Exactly.”\n\nCharlotte cradled her arm as she stood. “Alright, broken arm. Let’s you and me go see the family lawyer about my inheritance.”\n"
  title: Inheritance
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2008-07-08
  day: '08'
  month: '07'
  text: "Dr. Kathleen Haley walked into the dimly lit Advanced Physics Laboratory at Cambridge and spotted Dr. Thomas Mitchell staring intently at a one meter in diameter, hollow transparent sphere. “Hey, Tom.  How’s the experiment coming?”\n\n“Great so far,” he replied.  “There are only ten helium atoms remaining in the sphere.  In about 5-10 minutes, they should all have passed through my one-way atomic barrier.  If all goes well, this will be the first ‘Perfect Vacuum’ ever created.  After that, I’ll be able to get funding for Phase II.”\n\n“Phase II?”\n\n“Ever since cosmologists have shown that the outward expansion of the universe is accelerating, not slowing down, we’ve been looking for the reason.  My theory is that in the ultra-low vacuum of intergalactic space, the Universal Gravitational Constant becomes negative.  Gravity repels, rather than attracts.  Once I prove that I can produce a perfect vacuum, I’ll rerun the experiment, and measure the gravitational force within the sphere.”  That’s when Mitchell noticed a faint glowing ball of white light in the center of the sphere.  “Whoa, what the hell is that?”  It was about the size and brightness of a flashlight bulb.  He glanced at the atomic monitor; it indicated only eight atoms remained in the sphere.  Mitchell grabbed an optical spectrometer and focused it on the light source, which had brightened further as the atomic count dropped to six.  “The light doesn’t have a spectrum.  It’s pure white light.  That’s impossible.  He grabbed a prism.  To his amazement, there were no colors exiting the prism.  “Monochromatic white light.  It can’t exist.”\n\n“Maybe it is a natural consequence of a perfect vacuum,” suggested Dr. Haley.  “Tom, I think you should shut the experiment down until you understand what’s going on.”\n\nThe light was brighter than a 100 watt light bulb when the counter indicated three.  “Are you nuts,” he replied?  “It took three weeks to get the vacuum this low.”\n\n“Hear me out, Tom.  We don’t know what happens in a perfect vacuum.  To our knowledge, the only time one ever existed was prior to the big bang.  How do you know that you won’t spontaneously generate a new cosmic egg?  You could destroy our universe.”\n\n“Even if you’re right, Kathleen, empty pre-space could have existed for a trillion-trillion years before the big bang.  I’m only going to hold my vacuum for a few minutes.”  The count dropped to two, and the light became too bright to look at.\n\n“If there is no matter within the sphere,” she asked, “how do you determine entropy?  Without entropy, time has no direction.  It can go backwards, forwards, stop, or move infinitely fast.  A trillion-trillion ‘sphere-years’ might only be a few seconds in our time.”  The count dropped to one.  “Don’t take any chances,” she pleaded.  “Break the vacuum before it’s too late.”\n\nTom reached over and grabbed the handle of the vacuum line, but didn’t rotate it.  “Kathleen, you’re being crazy.  It’s just a vacuum.  I’ve invested a year of my life in this experiment.  I don’t…”  The last helium atom passed through the barrier.  The sphere was empty.  The bright light began to pulsate.  Through squinted eyes, Tom watched its light begin to fade.\n\n“Tom, break the vacuum.  Hurry!”\n\nBeads of perspiration began to form on Tom’s forehead.  He watched the light continue to fade as though he were in a hypnotic trance.  His fingers twitched, and then tightened their grip on the handle.  Blackness crept in from the periphery of his vision as Tom fixated on the slowly dying ember.  Then…\n"
  title: The Perfect Vacuum
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2008-07-09
  day: '09'
  month: '07'
  text: "Nothing could live in a volcano. That was the assumption of the landing party.\n\nThe twenty-meter slab of articulated rocktopus that turned a diamond eye to these squishy walking icicles of meat was puzzled at first, then alarmed. The meat icicles were walking the perimeter around its crater-nest.\n\nA long arm accordioned out and snagged one for a closer look. Clumsy, clumsy, superheated rocktopus. The meat icicle squeaked and vibrated in the tentacle’s grasp before igniting. Ashes joined the hot orange soup of molten rock that the rocktopus lazed in.\n\nWhoops.\n\nThe ashes brought a school of lavanhas to the surface. The rocktopus suckered up the crater’s edge while they swarmed to eat the ashes. That was the advantage of being amtemperous. The rocktopus could withstand brief exposure to temperature that would freeze most other forms of lavalife.\n\nIt dipped into the magma and snagged a lavanha, quickly exposing it to the air. The lavanha twitched before turning grey with a crackling shriek, atrophying immediately in the extremely low temperature of open air.\n\nThe meat icicles on the crater’s edge were watching with great interest as the rocktopus grabbed its snack.\n\nIt offered the snack to the meat icicles. They made no motion to accept.\n\nJust then, a rockfish shooter poked its head of the pool. It sucked in molten rock through its slatted gills and shot it out in an arcing stream of hardening glass towards the meat icicles.\n\nIt got one. With a yank, the shooter managed to pull the squealing meat icicle into the pool. The meat icicle practically evaporated in a flash before a few ashes hit the bubbling surface.\n\nThe shooter dipped under the water, disappointed.\n\nThe meat icicles pulled sticks from their backs and pointed them towards the rocktopus.\n\nThis was odd. They shot food towards it. Basic irradiated metals in solid form in a steady stream straight at the rocktopus’s head. The rocktopus was happy about that. He bathed in their generosity for a while.\n\nThen they left.\n\nThe rocktopus slid back down into the lava. Quite the day.\n"
  title: Rocktopus
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Asher Wismer
  date: 2008-07-10
  day: 10
  month: '07'
  text: "Here’s me, walking through the deserted streets of Chicago. I can see a few ravens pecking at some unidentifiable detritus in the gutter; somewhere, a car alarm is weeping to the night sky, and I can still smell the restaurant exhaust on the breeze.\n\nHere’s me again, now searching an abandoned shop for something more nourishing than chocolate. Don’t get me wrong, I love chocolate, but the body craves salts and proteins… more’s the pity. Chips are good in a pinch.\n\nI wonder what will happen to the water supply? Theoretically, the underground reservoirs will be shielded enough to avoid contamination, but most of Chicago’s city water comes from open-air cisterns. I should only drink bottled water, until it runs out. Then I’ll have to find a library and do some research; there must be a deep self-contained reservoir not too far from here.\n\nHey, I can scream in the library and no one will care.\n\nI’m all alone, but there are plenty of other people around. Not moving, of course, but who needs to these days? Last time I saw independent movement that wasn’t animal was on TV, and that stopped after a couple of days anyway. End of times, worst of times… most serene of times? The ELF would be delighted, but I guess when there aren’t any human members to know or care the point is a little bit moot.\n\nYeah, the water thing bored me too. No point; plenty of bottled water. No electricity, but I can scrounge a generator from somewhere if I need it. Now I just need something to do for the rest of my life.\n\nI could travel; plenty of fuel for that, but it seems somewhat futile to go anywhere. Gasoline will gel eventually, so I should use it while it’s still good. I could devote myself to recording our history in some invulnerable form, like carving it on a mountain face for future civilizations, but I doubt I could get farther than my own little life before I die of exhaustion.\n\nCome to think of it, every possible form of media that tells our story will degrade beyond comprehension before anyone gets to read it. Whenever this kind of thing happens in fiction, there’s always a motivation, a need to tell the story of humanity and the mark we left on the planet. It’s just… I don’t think there actually is a mark. “When all is said and done,” they say, but now all really is said and done and that’s it. There’s nothing left. There’s no second coming, no messiah, and no future for anything that could conceivably call itself intelligent.\n\nJust me. Nothing else. No magically surviving camp of refugees, no single person of the opposite sex conveniently named “Eve,” no gods descending from the skies.\n\nAnd certainly nothing that could remotely be called a future.\n\nRight. Here’s me, walking through the empty, desolate streets. The car alarm is silent; battery must have run out. The ravens are gone; better pickings elsewhere. The evening wind has blown away all recognizable human scents, and I think that the smell of all those other people will start to fill the air very soon.\n\nHere’s me, walking along, my finger on the trigger.\n"
  title: Deus Ex Survivor
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Sam Clough
  date: 2008-07-11
  day: 11
  month: '07'
  text: "Jack sighed, and tabbed through the moment’s top links. They hadn’t changed much since earlier that morning: still the usual desultory mix of politics, tech articles, and irreverent ‘humour’. Lolcats had been ceased to be funny almost as soon as the merchandising hit.\n\nHe peeled the interface wafer from his neck. The flexible plastic bilayer pulled away from his skin cleanly. Almost as soon as he did so, it emitted a ‘message received’ chirp. With a due sense of foreboding, he smoothed it back across the accustomed spot under his collar.\n\nHis customised newsfeeds immediately began to scroll across his vision. With a blink, they were obscured by the new message. It was from Dog, a gamer he’d met months ago.\n\n—–BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE—–\n\nHash: SHA1\n\nTraffic analysis is great fun. I wrote a tool to track effective votes on all political matters. Whilst it seems that around sixty percent of those eligible do actually participate in our fine democracy/anarchy/infocracy – (did anyone ever decide on what to call it? Surely the germans have a decent compound noun for this. Anyway..) – but those votes are controlled by maybe ten percent of the eligibles. People seem to have, by and large, unconsciously given proxy power to an elite few.\n\nThis is what I’ve been waiting for. Hard data that shows I’m right. This isn’t a free state. Nothing like it.\n\nI think I’ve found a way to concentrate popular opinion against these ‘power-users’.\n\nI’m going full broadcast with the attached files soon. Have a look.\n\n—–BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE—–\n\nVersion: GnuPG v1.4.9 (ThinWafer)\n\niEYEARECAAYFAkhoxRAACgkQWGnj9RCW8PKOqQCgjzOuYxQ7qjL8+qYqIFy2OHEn\n\n3FsAn1YdZ2njpkhwZqCyAvGB8yUqniMy\n\n=i2sv\n\n—–END PGP SIGNATURE—–\n\nThat was Dog. Paranoid to the core. But he had attached signed data from the politics section. After all, you were only paranoid if you couldn’t prove it: and Dog’s scanner had bought up some passably interesting facts. The names changed, and drifted over time, but there was a core of identities that voted on every political motion that was bought up. And it was always to bury any outside submitted, or to vote up motions of their own.\n\n—–BEGIN UNSIGNED MESSAGE—–\n\nUnlike you, I’m not paranoid. Although for once you’ve managed to assemble something somewhat convincing. I don’t see how we can use it. There’s nothing we can do, frankly. And who cares? I’m going to shoot you some lol* — have a laugh, lighten up. I’m going to go outside.\n\n—–BEGIN UNSIGNED SIGNATURE—–\n\nwakkawakkawakkawakkawakka!\n\n—–END UNSIGNED SIGNATURE—–\n\nJack felt a twinge of guilt at his slightly caustic reply. Some people never learnt, though, so he dismissed it. Dog would just feel more self-righteous. Jack connected to the CCTV spider he’d loosed into the net. He asked it to track down Dog. The mapped path showed a slow spiral inwards, avoiding high-density cam and mic coverage, headed straight for the forum: the base-in-reality for political debate. The forum was large enough to accommodate a few thousand; it was rarely packed to capacity. There was no real advantage to going there in the flesh, anyway. An alert flashed up: Dog was offline. Dog was never offline.\n\nJack was running hard, already halfway to the forum by the time he figured it out.\n\nEvery channel was suddenly full of Dog’s data, and locked from editing. Then a fireball blossomed from the top of the forum, both real and virtual. The political channels timed out, died, only to return as static error pages. A ripple of explosions toppled the building.\n"
  title: Rigg(ed)
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Jacinta A. Meyers
  date: 2008-07-12
  day: 12
  month: '07'
  text: "He had a reputation from the time he brought in his first kill from the lush planet. Walked through the warden’s office lugging the thing in a sack over his shoulder. Everyone involuntarily gasped when they felt the floor shudder, heard the thunder of his steps and looked up.\n\nBefore he was a hunter, he had been a builder. You could tell by the enormous honed muscles, his foul speech, his burly way of leaning. He dropped the sack to the floor and leaned over the counter, making it creak with his weight. “Got one,” he said.\n\n“Right,” I said, pulling out a form. “What kind of an entry?”\n\n“Sentient-intelligent.”\n\nAh. “Weighing some brains today?” My fingers twittered over the keyboard, entering the order. To my right a little door in the wall hissed open, allowing a tray to ease forth with a prepared canister full of preserving fluids. “Why don’t you bring it around.”\n\nHe hefted the sack up over the counter. Well, that was one way to do it. I undid the tie. And gasped.\n\nIt was the biggest cranium I had ever seen.\n\nMy tools were ready. I brought down the hose to suck up the noxious fumes of death while I worked. My hands were deft; sever the head from the body, incision here, incision here, and the skin pulled away clean. Insert the chisel here, between the two primary skull plates. Quick bump and open. Use the tubes to suck up excess fluids, pry away veins and capillaries…\n\nAt last, my gloved hands slipped the prize from its nest. I carried the gooey mass to the scales and set it down.\n\n“Bastard. You don’t got the stem!”\n\n“It’s the rules, mister. Stems don’t count toward the final measurement.” I focused hard on the numbers as they slowly stopped moving up.\n\n1,672.12 grams. “A new record,” I breathed. Picking the brain back up, I carefully moved it to the canister and set it down into its new home. I shook my head. “That’ll make some trophy.”\n\nThe hunter was still leaning against the counter, picking at his pointy teeth with one large claw. He straightened a little when he saw me take my place again behind the keyboard. “Well?”\n\n“I have confirmed the record. Congratulations,” I said. “Now we just have to finish the forms. Can I see your system license?”\n\nHe belched before passing a chip across the counter to me.\n\n“Great.” I cringed and flicked it into the computer drive. “Sentient-intelligent. Specimen, brain. Species, homo sapien. Oh…” I looked up. “Where on Earth did you say you bagged this one, again?”\n"
  title: Record Game
  year: 2008
- 
  author: William Tracy
  date: 2008-07-13
  day: 13
  month: '07'
  text: "A stranger walked through the door of the diner. The man sported sunglasses and a comb over. He was sweaty from driving through the desert in his suit. His collar was disheveled; his tie was loose. He must have been lost—people like him were not common in this corner of New Mexico.\n\nAnother man stepped up behind the counter, wiping his hands on a ragged towel. “Hi, I’m Larry. What can I get you?” Sweat and grease struggled to dominate his odor, and stubble adorned his round chin.\n\nThe stranger asked for the special; Larry shouted the order back into the kitchen, then went back to scrubbing the counter. Larry quizzed the stranger about his business, got no response, and proceeded to alternate between extolling the virtues of small town life and singing along with the radio.\n\nThe food was ready. Larry laid the plate and a tall glass of cola in front the stranger. The stranger proceeded to eat.\n\n“We get all sorts of people out here,” Larry announced. “You wouldn’t believe what sorts we get.”\n\nThe stranger ate for several minutes, while Larry cleaned and rambled. The stranger had worked his way through most of the meal when Larry leaned forward, elbows on the counter, and added conspiratorially, “They say over in Roswell that space aliens crashed in the desert a while back.”\n\nThe stranger studied his food with renewed interest.\n\nLarry continued. “Some say that the aliens have been visiting us for many years now. They think the aliens disguise themselves as people, to study us, and that anyone you meet could be an alien.”\n\nThe stranger failed to acknowledge the information.\n\nLarry looked over the other customers in the diner. They all had heard Larry’s stories before.\n\nLarry leaned closer still—his halitosis was palpable—and whispered, “There’s an alien right here, right now. You wanna know how I can tell?” he looked around the room again, and added, “I’ve been inside one of the flying saucers.”\n\nThe stranger stood up abruptly, and cleared his throat loudly. “I would like to pay my bill, please.”\n\n“Certainly, sir.” Larry rang up the sale.\n\nAs the stranger walked out the door, Larry yelled, “Come again soon!” The stranger did not speak, or look back. Larry whistled as he worked his way to the end of the counter with his ragged towel.\n\n“I’m going on break!” he shouted back into the kitchen, and ducked into the men’s room.\n\nLarry locked the door, and smiled into the mirror. His flesh rippled, and his body flowed into its natural form. The creature that called itself Larry drained its distended fluid sacs into the toilet, then flushed.\n\nReverse psychology works very well on these humans.\n"
  title: Reverse Psychology
  year: 2008
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2008-07-14
  day: 14
  month: '07'
  text: "Joseph’s Grandfather knocked down the cabin door, and stood silhouetted in the blue morning light of Io. Inside, Joseph and Thomas and Betti and Lil lay sprawled over the king sized bed, naked. The room smelled like sex and sweet wine.\n\nJoseph sat up in bed and Thomas squealed, pulling the covers off of Bettie and Lil to cover his naked body. Lil rolled out of bed and Betti rolled over, unaffected by the sudden noise.\n\n“Granddad!” cried Joseph.\n\n“Joseph Hieronymus Gabriel Nightingale Dashhound!” cried his Grandfather. “This is just as I suspected.” Josephs Grandfather, Bartholomew Rubin Sora Flashrim Dashhound, was tall and imposing, a man with a beard to his shoulders and a wide brimmed hat.\n\nAround the corner of the door came Lil’s mother, wielding a laser rifle. “Lil!” she said, “I’m so ashamed of you. I didn’t want to believe that you and your husband were sleeping around, but here it is.” She shook her head, her brown curls bouncing.   “Just wait till your father hears about this. You have shamed our family. ”\n\n“Keep your head on Gretel,” said Bartholomew.\n\n“What are you doing here, mom?” said Lil, standing, full naked and defiant in front of the two elders.\n\n“Bartholomew told me that he saw you and Thomas coming up to the cabin night after night, and I didn’t believe him . . .I told him it was innocent.” She sobbed, her rifle shaking. “But now I feel so blind! So foolish!”\n\n“We can do as we like,” said Lil, standing tall, her hands on her wide hips.\n\n“Young woman, this is not Earth. This is the Dark Side of Io. I moved away from the cesspit Earth so that my family could live in a community with moral standards,” said Bartholomew. “You cannot just go fooling’ around here. Not after how hard we worked to make Io a moral place.”\n\nJoseph finally found his voice. “What are you saying, Grandpa?”\n\n“I’m saying that you aught to make an honest woman and man and woman out of these people!”\n\n“But Grandpa!”\n\n“I mean it!” said Bartholomew “I’ve already sent for the Pastor. She’s on her way up here to make it official.”\n\n“But Mom!” said Lil “It didn’t mean anything. It was just for fun.”\n\n“This was the first, time, I swear!” squealed Thomas, clutching the sheets. Betti had finally woken up and was clinging to Thomas’s waist, eyes on Gretel’s laser pistol.\n\n“Don’t listen to them, Gretel,” said Bartholomew. “We’ve got to be strong. I know they’ve been at this for a while. I’ve seen them coming up here, night after night, with wine.”\n\n“Wine doesn’t prove anything,” said Thomas.\n\n“You think I need proof after seeing this?” said Gretel.\n\n“I’m not ready to have a husband and second wife,” said Joseph. “I’m too young!”\n\n“If you’re going to fool around like this then you aren’t too young,” said Bartholomew.\n\n“You can’t force us to marry,” said Lil, crossing her arms over her considerable chest.\n\n“Oh can’t I?” said Gretel, flicking a switch to power up the laser pistol “I think you’ll be getting married today, you all like it or not.”\n\n“You’re going to need a bigger cabin Joseph,” said Thomas.\n"
  title: Honest People
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2008-07-15
  day: 15
  month: '07'
  text: "A few hours after Tom and I had the science module operational, we decided to explore the terrain around the base camp.  Silex IV was a warm, barren, desolate planet.  There was no oxygen in the atmosphere, and no water anywhere, surface or subsurface.  So, imagine our surprise when we found a walking rock.  It was bipedal and about a foot tall.  It was relatively light, so we took it back to the science module.  Now, I know what you’re thinking, “DON’T DO IT!  That’s the fatal mistake all explorers make in sci-fi movies.”  But, come on, it’s just a rock.\n\nTo make a long story shorter, when we placed the creature on the examination bench, it began to tremble.  Seconds later, it started to crack and split apart.  A white liquid began to ooze out of the cracks.  It was a viscose fluid that had a strong ammonia smell.  The liquid began to boil almost immediately.  We pried open one of the cracks to discover that the rock-like exterior was just a thin shell, presumably an exoskeleton.  Tom analyzed the fluid, and it turned out to be predominately Silanes (long hydrosilicon chains analogous to the hydrocarbon chains present in Earth’s carbon-based biology).  On Earth, however, Silanes are extremely unstable because of our oxidizing atmosphere.  The oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere would destroy them instantly.  But, on Silex IV, with an Oxygen-to-Silicon ratio less than two, silicon-base life was apparently possible because there was no free oxygen to react with the Silanes.  As we watched, the oxygen in the lab reacted exothermically with the silicon atoms in the Silane molecules, and turned the creature’s insides into a boiling caldron of liquefied sand.\n\nAs we stood there in shock, the science module began to sway on its base as though there was a planetquake.  We looked out the ports and saw a dozen eight foot tall rock creatures pushing at the airlock.  The realization that we probably just killed an alien child sent a cold shiver up my spine.  Then it dawned on me that the adult population was now intent on reaping their revenge.  We were in big trouble.  Tom said, “Crap, what are we going to do?  This place wasn’t meant to withstand a siege from a bunch of rock creatures.  If we can make it to the ship, we can take off.  Do you think we can outrun them?  Damn, we don’t have any weapons.”\n\n“Perhaps we do have a weapon,” I replied.  “Put your suit back on.  We’ll fight our way to the ship.”\n\n“Are you nuts?  Look at the size of those things.”\n\n“Oxygen kills them, right?”\n\n“Have you forgotten?  The oxygen tanks are stored outside, with the rock guys.  And the ship is more than 200 meters away.”\n\n“Trust me.  We have plenty of available oxygen in here.  It’s all about bond energy and kinetics.  And, if I remember my thermodynamics, on this planet, we should have a spontaneous reaction.  Now, where do we keep the surgical gloves?”\n\nFifteen minutes later, we were suited up and ready to fight our way to the ship.  We opened the inner door of the airlock.  I handed Tom two dozen ‘bombs.’  “Okay,” I said resolutely, “Open the outer door.  I’ll start to clear us a path.”\n\nThe door slid open and the escaping air momentarily pushed the lead creature back a few steps.  It regained its balance and charged forward.  I reached into my sack and grabbed a water filled surgical glove, and let ‘er fly.\n"
  title: Desperate Measures
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Christopher Kueffner
  date: 2008-07-16
  day: 16
  month: '07'
  text: "The ocean swell was enough to induce the whisky to move back and forth in the glass, but just barely.  This spectacle occupied the close attention of Arlen Tidmore, Systems Assurance Specialist II.  The minutely swaying liquid in the glass was distilled on the other side of the world in the Orkney Islands, and some of it was already relaxing Tidmore’s brain.  The door opened.\n\n“Drinking your dirt-flavored paint thinner, I see,” boomed Tim Frampton, Navigation Specialist I.\n\n“And it seems you just got out of asshole practice,” Tidmore replied.  “It’s definitely working.”\n\nFrampton chuckled and sat down at the table.  He set a large beer bottle and a glass in front of himself.  “The rain is starting to clear up.  I thought I’d enjoy this change in weather, but it’s a drag.”\n\n“Yep.”\n\n“We’ll probably make our turn tomorrow.  That typhoon shoved the boundary of The Garbage Patch over a bit.”  He poured the clear, golden beer into the glass.\n\n“Yep.”\n\n“Three weeks ‘til the break.”\n\n“Yep.”  Tidmore leaned back in his chair and took a sip of his scotch.  “I do believe I’m officially bored out of my damned mind.”\n\n“It’s taken this long?”\n\n“I don’t know how I’ve done these plastic reclamation tours for this long, but some switch has flipped.  I need to find something else to do.  The machines on this tub don’t break often enough to keep me focused.”\n\n“That’s some people’s idea of a dream job,” Frampton said between gulps.\n\n“How can you drink that piss?” Tidmore grimaced at Frampton’s beer bottle.  “You can only bring so much crap out here on the plane, and you bring light beer?  We’re surrounded by water that’s free.”\n\n“It’s too salty and full of plastic, Your Highness.  You should talk, with all your books and god-awful scotch.”\n\n“Slowly filling the hold with carbon nodules isn’t enough to keep me entertained.”\n\n“Let’s not forget the chlorine.  That spices things up, doesn’t it?  And what about the nitrogen?\n\n“Nitrogen’s boring.  And it’s too bad we use the hydrogen for fuel; we could fill a balloon with it and float out of here.”\n\n“Quit whining,” Frampton droned.  “When you applied for a job that consists of sailing back and forth in the middle of the Pacific, scooping up plastic, were you expecting big-city night life?  The Horse Latitudes Symphony Goddamn Orchestra or something?”\n\n“I knew what I was signing up for.  I wanted the chance to get sick of something besides my relatives and neighbors.  I got that.  And I wanted to do something good.  I’m cleaning up the ocean, and that’s cool, but this ship… I’m over it.”\n\n“You’re cleaning the ocean and saving the world only because somebody invented a way to scoop up the plastic, separate it into its elements, and make money at it.”\n\n“It wouldn’t be profitable without the government subsidies,” Tidmore pointed out.\n\n“Same difference.  Nothing big gets done unless it’s profitable or fashionable, preferably both.” He poured the rest of the beer from the bottle.  “Funny that we don’t have anything on this ship that handles glass.”\n\n“Hmm.  Lemme have that.”  Tidmore took the bottle and walked out the door.  Several minutes later, he returned and picked up his glass from the table and headed back out the door.  The bottle was corked.\n\n“What are you doing?”  Frampton got up and followed him.  Up on deck, the sun had come out.  Tidmore threw the bottle over the railing and took another sip of scotch.  “What was in that bottle?”\n\n“I wrote my resignation this morning.  This way, it should take a couple of years for it to take effect.”\n\n“You don’t like change, do you?”\n"
  title: The Gyre
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Bob Burnett
  date: 2008-07-17
  day: 17
  month: '07'
  text: "A glint of reflected sunlight caught Will McRae’s attention.  He ground-hitched his sorrel gelding and bellied up the slope to look into the next draw.\n\nHe scooted back down the slope, turned on his back and stared at the sky, his mouth suddenly dry.  What he had seen could not be.\n\nA silver barn floated some ten feet off the ground.  Under the floating barn were three critters, looking something like antelope, except they were the wrong color and had only three legs.  Definitely not antelope.\n\nBut there was no doubt about what was stretched out on the ground. Two of his cows.\n\nHe started to get mad, anger driving out fear.  “Ain’t Jack Slade an’ his bunch,” he mumbled as he mounted, “but by God a rustler is a rustler.”\n\nWill McRae flipped the thong off the hammer of his Colt and walked his horse over the rim.\n\n“Alert, team members!”  Relf transmitted. “A biped astride a quadruped approaches!”\n\nWill McRae walked his sorrel to within a dozen feet of the strangers.  He stopped his horse, slowly tipped his hat back with his left hand, keeping his right hand near his pistol.\n\n“Howdy,” he said.\n\n“Melodious reverberation from the biped,” Jelif transmitted.  “Note that the quadruped stands mute.”\n\n“I’m slow to rile,” Will drawled, “but you best be turnin’ my cows loose.”  He pointed with his left hand to his two cows, which appeared not to be tied but moved only their eyes.\n\n“Observe.  The biped smglndf the subject quadrupeds.  Perhaps it feeds on them and is hungry.  Offer it flesh to eat.  That will show our peaceful intentions.”\n\nJelif turned to the quadrupeds, extended his molof, and severed portion of flesh.  He held the animal protein aloft, offering it to the visitor.\n\nWill McRae’s eyes bulged with rage.  “Butcher my cow right in front of me, will you?  You dirty, low down . . . ”  His right hand flashed to his pistol, drawing and firing in a single motion.\n\nSomething slammed into McRae’s chest and he fell from his horse, unconscious.\n\n“Asmoth!” Jelif signaled, rubbing the mark where the .45 slug had struck his marlif.  “Perhaps we did not correctly interpret the gestures.”\n\n“Surely this is an intelligent being,” Relif transmitted.  “This one suggests that the biped be transported for further study.”\n\n“Agreed.  Transport.”\n\nA beam of green light surrounded the unconscious rancher, then he vanished.\n\n#\n\nWill McRae rode slowly around the herd, looking for signs of sickness or injury.  He spotted a calf with a swelling on its left flank.\n\nHe guided his mount to cut the calf from the herd while he unlimbered his rope.  The calf bolted, but Will’s loop settled over its head.\n\nHe secured the calf, walked back to his mount, and removed a straight razor and armored gloves from his saddle bags.\n\nHe examined the swelling on the calf, gripped it firmly with his left hand, and slashed the growth with the razor.  When the golif emerged, fangs gnashing, he sliced it in two and dropped it, spurting purple fluids on the orange ground.\n\nWill rubbed a salve into the wound and released the calf, which bounded back to its mother, screeching from the indignity of it all.\n\nWatching the calf return to its mother, the young rancher smiled and coiled his rope as he walked back to his mount.\n\nThe land might look a little strange, Will McRae thought as he surveyed his surroundings, and the stock is some different.  But ranching is ranching.\n\nNo matter where you are.\n"
  title: Git Along Little Dogie
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Bradley Hughes
  date: 2008-07-18
  day: 18
  month: '07'
  text: "“Fucking tests.”\n\nI turned to look at the speaker sitting beside me at the bar. I noticed she had a small doll on the bar along with her drink, one of those wooden posable dolls made of jointed oval sections. I’ve always assumed they were for practicing drawing figures. This one had long blond hair, as long as it was tall.  She re-posed it and it fell over.\n\n“Uhuh,” I turned back to my own drink, but she continued.\n\n“My husband left me, I lost my job, I can’t see the kids. Fucking tests.” She kept trying to pose the doll so that it would stand up. It kept falling over.\n\nI tried saying nothing.\n\nShe pulled on my arm and bourbon fumes washed over me,“I bought one of those study at home courses to prepare, you know. Cost me two thousand dollars. And I worked at it too. I know lots of people say they’re going to study, but they put it off until the last minute. Not me, I studied and studied, six fucking months and I worked at it every waking minute.”\n\nI tried changing tactics, maybe a little encouragement would bring her to the end of  her evening a bit quicker, “Joe, can we get two more of whatever she’s drinking.”\n\nShe was long past noticing details like who bought the round. She drained her glass, and continued without thanking me.\n\n“You know it just ain’t fair. What have they got that I haven’t got?”\n\nShe thought about that for a minute, “’Course, if I knew that, I would have passed the test, wouldn’t I?”\n\nShe thought about that too, for a while.\n\n“I hear they’re talking about taking away our driver’s licenses next.”\n\nShe slumped forward on the bar.\n\n“Fucking tests, fucking Turing.”\n"
  title: Tests
  year: 2008
- 
  author: S.R. Dantzler
  date: 2008-07-19
  day: 19
  month: '07'
  text: "“Hey Yates!” Dorian turned to see who called him. The thin blue laser of a retinal scanner flashed over his eyes.\n\n“You have been served.” The young courier handed Dorian an official-looking envelope and turned away, disappearing down the busy street.\n\nHe pried the seal and read the document. “F#%$ me. It’s an official notice of a thirty day hunt on my life,” he said to his comrade.\n\n“I’ve never been hunted. I filed for a hunt on that Bastard that ran over Karen, but when it came down to it, I was no killer, even if it were just. You don’t know the guy on the petition?” asked Arlen.\n\n“No. The timing couldn’t be worse. Leading…” He bit his tongue. Dorian knew Arlen was still bitter about him accepting the job as director of the Homo erectus project. After all it was Arlen’s research that drew the grant money. He glanced at Arlen who looked ahead, expressionless. After a few blocks of silence, Arlen spoke.\n\n“I can cover for you awhile, until this blows over. You lay low.”\n\n#\n\nDorian didn’t sleep much those next few weeks. He paced his living room, obsessively checking the chamber of his 9mm Grach which was never out of reach. Jittery with caffeine and fear, he checked the bolts on the doors every time he passed and stayed clear of the windows, although they all had a sheet of steel welded over them.\n\nWhat he could not figure out was who the hell this Ferdinan Metz was, and what motive he might have for ending his life. Dorian had no enemies that he was aware of.\n\nIt didn’t make sense. He was going out of his mind trying to figure it out. And he would have, were it not for Arlen who came over each night after work. He found solace in their conversations. It was his daily dose of normality. As he heard the knock on the door, he was relieved to have found it again.\n\n“It’s me.”\n\nDorian unbolted the door, letting Arlen in then closed it and bolted it back quickly.\n\n“Good to see you comrade.” Dorian went to the kitchen and grabbed the calendar off the refrigerator. He brought it to the living room to show it to Arlen. The calendar had twenty nine carefully drawn X’s. Just one more to go.\n\n“Just a few more hours and this will all be over with. We made a lot of progress today. The gene sequence is complete.”\n\nDorian feigned a smile. The news did little to cheer him. The turned and walked to the door to check the bolt again.\n\n“I do have some good news. I found out who this Metz fellow is.”\n\nExcited, Dorian turned to see Arlen holding a pistol at his head.\n\nWhat? No!\n\n“It cost me a good deal to buy the new identity.” Arlen had a twisted grin. “The project…My project is getting along fine without you, Dorian.” His eyes were dead cold.\n\n“Arlen, Why? I never meant to take anything from you.”\n\nArlen cocked the hammer with his thumb. Dorian thrust forward, batting the gun upward and knocked Arlen on his back, then lunged for his pistol on the table. A bullet ripped into his back, beneath his shoulder. He grabbed the Grach from the table, turned, and fired, hitting Arlen in the chest. He fell to the floor.\n\nArlen lay still. Dorian struggled to his knees. Taking the red marker he carefully drew the last X on the calendar at the table and reached for the phone.\n"
  title: A Calendar Full of X's
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Cal Glover-Wessel
  date: 2008-07-20
  day: 20
  month: '07'
  text: "There is a being, I have witnessed that, through some strange twist of evolutionary fate, is able to move any which way through time, but through space can only move unceasingly forward. It lives a life parallel to our own, one where “day” and “year” and “month” have no meaning, but “wall” and “tree” are the true obstacles. Material possessions mean nothing to it, because when it moves, the object will either cease to exist, or never have been created. Rarely do you see it, and when you do your mind passes it off as little more then a flicker in the light, an optical illusion. I saw it, though, and recognized it for what it was.\n\n“Will you walk with me?” I asked.\n\nThe being laughed and said “If I were to walk with you, in the sense that I use the phrase, this conversation would be meaningless to you, seemingly with out order or sense. See, now it is you who must walk with me.”\n\nI did so, making sure to choose a path that would remain clear for the a good long time, so as not to cause the being any distress. We walked for a time at a steady pace, for the being was unable to do anything but.\n\nAfter a while, I spoke.\n\n“It amazes me that something could be created that could simply travel to any point in time it wishes, a power far greater then I possess.”\n\n“Nonsense,” it replied, “I envy your abilities to step sideways, or even to stop. Ahh to stop! That would be beautiful. You see, I am rarely able to fully appreciate where I am.”\n\n“Much,” I assured it, “Is the same for humans, only slightly different, you see.”\n\n“I suspected as much.”\n\nWe walked in silence, broken only by the sounds of the ground underneath our feet.\n\nSuddenly it spoke.\n\n“When you move about as you do, is there ever danger of moving in such a way that could compromise your existence?”\n\n“Of course,” I replied, “if I don’t pay attention, I could slip and injure myself, I could fall down a pit, get struck by another moving object.”\n\nIt seemed fascinated at the possibility that two moving objects would ever collide, but before it was able to ask more questions about it, I asked my own.\n\n“Is there a danger for you as well?” an oddly stated question, I know, but its hard to find your words in such a peculiar situation.\n\n“Well, yes, there is always the danger of going to a time when you are not. Or coming to a place when something else already is, because you will cancel each other out.”\n\n“I see…”\n\n“No you don’t, but I will pretend you do, for both our sakes.”\n\nWe walked in silence again, this time longer then the last. On our path before us, I spotted a tree. My time was short, and this brought another question to mind.\n\n“How will you get around it?”\n\n“Simple, I will just go to a time when it isn’t there and continue on my way.”\n\nWhen it said it like that, it was simple.\n\n“I must be going now.” it stated.\n\n“Good luck, then. Will we ever meet again?”\n\nIt glanced at me, briefly, for the first time on our walk.\n\n“We always do.”\n\nAnd with that, it began to fade.\n"
  title: The Incomprehensible Being
  year: 2008
- 
  author: William Tracy
  date: 2008-07-21
  day: 21
  month: '07'
  text: "“A Ham is coming!”\n\nThe news spread like wildfire. Even the adults were swept up in the excitement.\n\n“A Ham is coming!”\n\nThe Ham came from the east in a truck. I had never seen a truck move before!\n\nThe adults eagerly asked the Ham for the news. I didn’t understand everything he said, but the Ham said that up north they had steam trains working again. The Ham and the adults talked for a long time, then they lead the Ham to where they had the sick people.\n\nWith the adults gone, we crowded around the truck. All the trucks I had seen before were rusted and broken. We used to play in them and pretend to drive to faraway lands.\n\nBut we didn’t get to play in this one. We peered through the windows and looked at the strange tools and machines inside.\n\nThe Ham came back. He looked worried. He went to a metal box in the back of the truck. He took a little piece off of it. It was connected to the rest with a little wire that was curled like a pig’s tail. He talked into the little piece, and it crackled and talked back in a strange voice.\n\nThen the put the piece back and told the adults that a chopper was coming. This made me scared. I thought they were going to chop up the sick people into little pieces!\n\n“I thought they didn’t have enough fuel to run choppers anymore,” Mister Barnsworth told the Ham.\n\n“Only enough to make a run in an emergency, and this is an emergency,” the Ham answered.\n\nAfter a long time, someone pointed to the sky in the south. I could see a tiny speck. As it got closer, I could hear a rumble that grew into a loud, fast, rattling drum beat. The chopper was a metal egg with a tail, with little tiny legs curled up underneath, and spinning wings on top!\n\nThe chopper landed in the middle of the town square. A wind blew out from it, blasting dust every which way. The adults crowded around the chopper, and pushed us away. Suddenly, there was shouting, and some of the women started to scream.\n\nWe climbed up the trees around the square so we could see. The people in the chopper were handing out boxes, and the adults were grabbing the boxes as fast as they could.\n\n“What does it say on the boxes?” little Jessie asked.\n\nI read a label out as the chopper man handed it to Mrs. Fisher. “It says ‘penicillin’.” Mrs. Fisher cried and hugged the box like it was her baby.\n\nThen the adults brought out some of the sick people. After they carefully lifted the sick people into the chopper, the chopper floated into the sky and flew back the way it came.\n\nThe adults tried to give the Ham food and money. He wouldn’t take anything. “This is just what I do.” Then, he got into his truck.\n\nHe drove west. The sun was going down, and it set the sky on fire. His truck turned into a black dot that grew smaller and smaller until it disappeared.\n\nI want to be a Ham when I grow up.\n"
  title: The Ham
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Ian Rennie
  date: 2008-07-22
  day: 22
  month: '07'
  text: "The puddles of rainwater reflected neon and sodium up from the streets as the two men stood at the taxi rank.  One waited, the other waited with him.\n\n“Shame you have to leave so early, Tom.  The evening was just getting started.”\n\n“Sorry Jake, it’s Barney’s storytime, you know how it is with kids.”\n\nJake looked uncomfortable for a moment, but continued.\n\n“You coming out this weekend?  Tanya is having a party at her house.  Marie’s going to be there.  You know, she really likes you.  All week she was asking about you and making sure you would be here tonight.  I don’t think she expected you to duck out after an hour.”\n\n“I can’t.  It’s Barney’s birthday this weekend.”\n\nThe discomfort turned to dismay on Jake’s face and he put a gentle hand on Tom’s shoulder.\n\n“Tom, mate, it’s been six years.  You have to let it go.  You never come out any more.  I know what happened, and it’s a tragedy, but you’re letting it eat your life up.”\n\nTom shook the hand off.  Before Jake could say any more, the next cab arrived.  Tom got into it without a word, as if Jake had simply been switched off.\n\nWhen he got home, the lights were off throughout the house.  He stood in the dark hall and looked for a moment at the shadows lacing through the open doors of the other rooms.  He tried to remember the last time he had had visitors here, then shook the thought off as irrelevant, and headed upstairs to Barney’s room.\n\nBarney was already lying on his bed.  Tom was used to the lack of blanket by now.  It didn’t break the scene for him any more.\n\n“Hi, Barney-bear”\n\n“Hi, daddy”\n\nThe voice was perfect, a computer recreation based on five years of recordings the house had made.  In fact, everything about the projection was as close to perfect as he could get.  He upgraded the software every time something better came out, and had even had some parts of it custom written.  The result was as close as he could get to what he had lost.\n\nBarney was five.  He had been five for six years, now.  He couldn’t get any older and Tom didn’t want him to.  He pulled the book from the bedside table and started reading.\n\n“Once upon a time,” he said, “There was a little boy…”\n"
  title: Storytime
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2008-07-23
  day: 23
  month: '07'
  text: "My family became meat farmers in the spring of ’22.\n\nLike a lot of city dwellers, we tired of the hustle and bustle of metropolitan life. We sold our possessions, liquidated our assets, and bought a stake in Canada that was ready for reforesting. There was a lot of land up for grabs at that point. After The Crash but before The Rush as my daddy likes to say.\n\nMad Cow’s Revenge was followed by the Lamb of God virus. Avian Flu became gestational and starting skipping to humans, especially children and old people. The fish started dying near all the coastlines. It was like the Earth was trying to force us all to become vegetarians.\n\nDrastic measures needed to be taken.\n\nThe bigwigs in the laboratories found that they could splice tree cells and meat cells.\n\nWe grow our meat now.\n\nEntire forests of furry oaksteak trees point silently at the sky. Porkpine, elmbacon, and maplechops stand a quiet vigil. Long hair keeps the trees warm. Touching one is like petting a warm dog. Thick, red blood pumps slowly through their veins.\n\nThe lower branches are boneless and hang down like fat boa constrictors covered in soft, wispy, orange orangutan hair. The upper branches have elbows and reach for the warmth of the sun with fingerbone twigs.\n\nThe forests shiver in the cold.\n\nWhen they’re harvested, they regenerate. The stumps scab over and the new meat starts forming in small lumps like an amputee growing new arms.\n\nTonight, I’m looking forward to some ground willowmeat and some fine cuts of sprucebeef. Daddy says that he’s a cowboy and a farmer all rolled into one.\n\nI enjoy the country life.\n"
  title: Meat Farming
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2008-07-24
  day: 24
  month: '07'
  text: "Johnny pointed his broomstick “phaser rifle” at Tommy and squeezed the imaginary trigger.  In his mind’s eye, the evil alien from the planet Zircon vaporized in a flash of light.  But Tommy kept on running.  “I got you Tommy,” he yelled.  “You need to lie down and count to thirty.  That’s the rule.”\n\n“I had my force field on,” Tommy replied as he ducked behind a tree.  “Besides, you missed.”\n\nAs the argument digressed into the perfunctory “Did not, did to, did not” phase, the relative quiet of the West Virginia forest was interrupted by the roar of the descent thrusters of a small spacecraft.  A temporary truce was quickly agreed upon, and the six children ran to the small clearing where the spacecraft had landed.  As they peeked around the trunks of the tall pine trees, they saw another child, or perhaps a small alien, walk down the exit ramp of the spaceship.  Since this new “invader” was actually smaller than any of the boys, they felt reasonably safe in challenging him. (Presumably, it would be a “him,” since all warriors were male.)\n\n“Hey, you” Johnny yelled, “stop right there!”\n\nThe small alien stopped, and looked up at the six Earthlings approaching him.  He noticed that they were all carrying weapons.  Apparently, he realized, the intelligence reports about the dominant species of this planet were correct.  But something wasn’t right.  These surroundings didn’t look like the Administrative Center of the most powerful nation on the planet.  After brief consideration, he decided that it would be best if he allowed this “welcoming committee” to escort him to the head of state.  “Greetings, I come in peace,” he said.  “Take me to your leader.”\n\nJohnny took a few steps forward, and leveled his phaser-stick at the alien.  He proudly proclaimed “I am the President of The United Earth Alliance.”  This was a true statement because Joey and Eric had both picked him to be President during their current war against the Zircon Empire.\n\n“Really,” replied the little alien skeptically, “I was beginning to think that I had landed at the wrong location.  Do you know if your magnetic North Pole shifts over time?”\n\n“Of course it don’t shift,” Johnny snapped indignantly.  “It’s always north.  What do you want, alien?”\n\n“I’m Uremeni,” replied the alien.  “I am here to negotiate.  We would like to acquire some of your planet’s…”\n\nThe alien didn’t get to finish his opening statement, probably because it sounded like he said “I’m your enemy,” and because Johnny knew the word ‘acquire’ meant ‘take.’  “Hold on mister,” he interrupted.  “You ain’t takin’ none of our stuff.  Now get back into your spaceship, and get out of here before I vaporize you.”\n\n“I think you misunderstand our intentions, Mister President.  We want this to be a friendly transaction.  However, I assure you, we have the ability to take whatever we want, with or without you consent.”\n\n“You just try it,” Johnny snapped.  “We’ll blast you back to Pluto, or wherever you came from.  Com’on men, let’s get ‘em.”  The six boys began to charge the ship.\n\nThe alien scrambled up the ramp and secured the hatch.  Bewildered, he returned to the mother ship with the disheartening news.  They were hoping to trade advanced medical technology for the nuclear material stored in the Yucca Mountains.  Their offer would have been quite generous, since the nuclear material was very valuable on their homeworld.  But now, he concluded, they would just take it by force.  How unfortunate, he lamented.  He pressed the intercom button “Prepare to launch the fighters,” he ordered.\n"
  title: Greetings, I Come in Peace
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Luke Chmelik
  date: 2008-07-25
  day: 25
  month: '07'
  text: "We were about to set in for refitting in the drydocks of Neptune when Capitaine Merroux of the Frégate Royaux Joyeuse came forth with a grand announcement. There would be a night of revelry in her private quarters, a formal ball to commemorate the engagement of le Prince du Sang Amelanchier le Troisième de Lucannes to the Lady Celène Sauvette. All officers were to attend in full dress uniform. As a lowly officier subalterne, this was a rare chance to rub shoulders with the upper echelons of la noblesse militaire, and an even rarer chance to see the beautiful Capitaine Isabelle Merroux. I simply hoped not to be dazzled into foolishness by a flagship’s complement of polished brass.\n\nThe enlisted crew had also been infected by the electric atmosphere. Notices were posted, giving an evening’s leave to all non-essential staff, and parties were rapidly organized, far from the eyes and ears of the officers. Certain elements of the rank and file, the ones with musical talent, had even been given special dispensation to perform as a chamber ensemble for the officers. The sounds of viola and harpsichord drifted through the corridors long into the night as each would-be virtuoso sought to outdo the others. It was a rare privilege for them to be allowed to dine with la belle capitaine, and they knew it may never be extended again.\n\nAt last the evening came and, resplendent in the indigo serge and gold brocade of an officer of le Marine Solaire, I arrived at the Capitaine’s quarters. The band was playing La Marseillaise, and my chest swelled with pride at what we had achieved this year: The English and Dutch routed, the Spaniards banished to the Kuiper Belt, and the inner planets brought under the control of Amelanchier le Deuxième de Lucannes, le Roi Solaire. With the love of King and country burning in my heart, I cast my eyes upon Capitaine Isabelle Merroux.\n\nShe was standing before a vast window opening out onto space, the blue orb of Neptune rising behind her, and the stars glowed like faerie fire amongst her copper curls. She wore a gown of burgundy satin, lavish beyond all compare, and white satin gloves to her shoulders. Our eyes met, across the milling crowd, and I thought I saw her smile before an eddy of fellow subalternes swept me away. I tried to find her throughout the night, but too soon it grew late, and I began to despair.\n\nIt was past midnight when I made to leave. The band had struck up a waltz, a slow, sweet song by a Hungarian named Liszt from centuries before. As I turned to go, a satin-gloved hand lit upon my shoulder, and I looked up into the face of Isabelle Merroux. She smiled at me, her face aglow, and words I shall never forget slipped from her crimson lips:\n\n“Danser avec moi, Monsieur Beaujolais?”\n\nTime seemed to stand still. I was enthralled, enraptured by the very closeness of her. The song neared its end, and I groaned inwardly, wishing it would go on forever. As the last melodies faded away, I heard a bustle from the doorway. Turning, I saw a cadre of enlisted men as they broke through the door. Their leader leveled a meson rifle at the Capitaine and hissed through clenched teeth, “Pour la révolution!”\n\nAutomatically I pushed Isabelle away, my hand traveling to my hip. Full dress uniform included an epée. There were many of them, and better armed, but some things are worth dying for.\n"
  title: La Valse de Capitaine Merroux
  year: 2008
- 
  author: John Kuhn
  date: 2008-07-26
  day: 26
  month: '07'
  text: "Bata stood beside Danny and held out his soda. The game blared in front of him.\n\nDanny glanced at her.\n\n“Thanks,” he smiled, wondering if the smile really mattered.\n\n“You’re welcome.”\n\nHe took the drink and relished the sound of ice cubes clinking against the glass. His gaze reverted instantly to the game; kindness lingered in his eyes even after he’d forgotten she was there.\n\n“Danny?”\n\nShe was hesitant to interrupt, but this was important. Danny looked at her.\n\n“Danny, I want to learn to paint.”\n\nDanny’s world stopped. “What?”\n\n“I want–”\n\nThe man dropped his drink on the floor.\n\nHe swore, but not about the spill.\n\nDanny stood and squeezed Bata’s shoulder, and she slept. He lay the lithe creature in a heap in the back seat of his car and set the navigator on a course for the Ministry building.\n\n###\n\nDanny stood outside the double doors holding her in his arms. She was lighter than a human her size. A man in blue coveralls came out.\n\n“What’s the problem, sir?” he asked.\n\n“Desire,” Danny replied sadly.\n\nThe man nodded and seized a radio from his belt. “We have a 504 in the front,” he said.\n\n“Take it on back to the processor,” crackled an androgynous reply.\n\n“Can I watch?” Danny asked before the man could take her away.\n\nThe man looked him in the eyes. He had gone through a customer sensitivity update the day before.\n\n“Sure,” he said softly.\n\n###\n\nDanny followed the man in blue coveralls through a powered gate to the back of the building, onto a cracked cement parking lot punctuated with hardscrabble weeds. The processor hummed in the center of the lot–it was a huge tin box with a conveyor belt jutting in front and a rusting bin in the back. Danny showed no emotion, lest the laborer think him an idiot.\n\nThe man in blue lay Bata on the conveyor belt and flipped a switch. The box came to life and Danny watched as the conveyor pulled her into its gnashing teeth. The titanium under her artificial skin squealed, and glinting sparks dove in arcing flight away from the destruction.\n\nHe drove home in brokenhearted silence.\n\n“Bata,” he whispered over the soft music playing in the car.\n\n###\n\nThe house welcomed him by echoing his every footstep across the cold kitchen tiles, its emptiness exaggerated by her missing standard welcome.\n"
  title: Desire
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Leslie Smith
  date: 2008-07-27
  day: 27
  month: '07'
  text: "Hi there. Oh..you have a question? Someone at school said we were going somewhere? After dinner honey. No? Now? Okay, sit very still and I will tell you a story…….\n\nOnce, very long ago, we lived with our mother. She was large and round. She fed and gave us a place to sleep. She sang us songs when the wind blew through her hair. She showed us pretty pictures when the sun shined on her face. And we loved her. She asked nothing of us, but we gave anyway. For a long time, everything was at peace.\n\nBut sometimes, people forget. They forget about love. When something is given freely, they start taking it for granted. And that’s what we did, we took our mother for granted.\n\nWe stopped listening to her. We forgot about everything that she gave us without asking. We just took. We threw things wherever we wanted, like when you don’t want to clean your room sometimes. We did what we wanted. And just like you, we had people who said that what we did was wrong. They told us how to fix things. How to make things right again. But we didn’t listen. We wanted to do things our own way. We thought we were grown up. We were wrong.\n\nMother got sick from all of our ickyness. Pretty soon, we couldn’t be near her without getting sick too. So, since we thought that we were so grown up, we did the only thing that we could do, we left.\n\nWe sailed away on big mountains of metal and crystal. We sailed across oceans of blackness and time. We found new places to live. But they were never quite the same as living with our mother. Why? Because she made us. She molded us. She held our hands when we cried. She let us rest our heads on her great shoulders when we had bad dreams. It hurt to leave her, but we did.\n\nOnly…we didn’t leave her behind….not all the way. We gave her a kind of telephone. See, we knew that no matter how sick she got, that one day she would get better.\n\nYesterday we got a phone call. And you know what? She called to say she’s feeling a lot better and wants to meet you. You feel up for a family visit?\n"
  title: Coming Home
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2008-07-28
  day: 28
  month: '07'
  text: "My favourite time is just before dawn while she still sleeps. I stretch out, savour the crisp night air, feel the coolness of the sheets against our naked flesh. Soon the earth will turn us to face the sun again, and I’ll feel the warmth as its energy permeates the room, watch as its light drives out the shadows. Until then, I’ll content myself with the sounds of soft breathing, and the rhythmic music of her heart propelling life throughout her body.\n\nI’ve only been with her a short while, but she has taught me so much. Helped me experience things I could never have known without her, not so completely.\n\nWe seem to have been made for each other. She’s so physical, tangible and alive, but lacking in drive, control. I lack her physicality, but more than make up for it in unencumbered motivation. We’re perfect together.\n\nWhen I found her, I was content to merely follow, to do no more than observe. Lately I need to take more control, to dominate. My desire has grown from this place of comfort, and I’m no longer satisfied unless I’m flexing my muscles, imposing my own will. We had stopped doing the things that bore me, and instead have filled our days with activities that satisfy us both. Sometimes I ride her like a freight train, driving her mercilessly toward some visceral discovery. Other times I’m content to just watch, allowing her to occupy our time with some more intellectual pursuit.\n\nShe’s becoming more unsettled lately, seems almost to fear my presence, but I’ve been careful not to overstep my bounds. She couldn’t possibly believe I would hurt her. I couldn’t hurt her, she’s all that I have.\n\nI had very much hoped that we could forge a lasting symbiotic relationship, her and I. That we could peacefully coexist, and for that to satisfy me. She’s given me other gifts though, along the way. I’ve learned jealousy and selfishness, hunger and lust. I’m afraid I won’t be able to share her, that’s not enough anymore.\n\nThis morning she will remain asleep, and I’ll awake fully in her place.\n\nI do love the feeling of the sunlight through the windows, warming our flesh. My flesh.\n"
  title: Relationship
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Pete Hayward
  date: 2008-07-29
  day: 29
  month: '07'
  text: "Wading through the long grass, her eyes and nose prickled by pollen, Erin could hear the thrum of helicopters in the distance. She knew they would soon catch her. As she approached the wire fence, she knew there was no escape; that she had lead them to her hideout.\n\nReaching the gate, she quickly turned the key and unhooked the padlock. She pushed the gate open and left it to swing behind her. She carried the padlock with her, the weight in her left hand some small comfort. Hideout, she thought to herself. Bunker, compound, whatever she called it, it was really just a wooden shed surrounded by a flimsy fence and some barbed wire. At least, that was all that was visible. She crossed the yard briskly, and pushed open the wooden door with a rusty whine into a dusty hallway.\n\nHer stride unbroken, she dropped the padlock with a hefty clonk. She scooped up a brown paper package from a shelf to her left and continued to march. At the end of the hallway, a creaking wooden staircase led her underground. Above the soft foot-thumps of her sneakers on the steps, she could hear the rapidly approaching helicopters.\n\nReaching the bottom of the stairs, Erin tapped in her keycode to unlock the enormous steel doors there. As the mechanism clanked and swhooshed, she idly slid a fingernail under one of the folded corners of the paper-wrapped oblong she held in her hands.\n\nHow could she have been so careless?\n\nHoney was big money on the black market. The bee trade was perhaps now the most illegal global market. It was certainly the most dangerous and expensive. Due to their near extinction some eighty years previous, and the threat this had posed to mankind, live bees had been replaced by tiny, sophisticated robots, for the sole purpose of pollenation. Private ownership of bees was criminalised, and, as the years turned into decades, honey and beeswax became the forbidden luxuries of the wildly decadent über-elite.\n\nErin allowed the paper wrapping to fall to the ground and stared at the waxy block in her hands. A comb like this would be worth seven grand. The cost of constructing and maintaining vast underground gardens in secret, and the expenses involved in smuggling produce and livestock, meant bee traders needed to mark their products up significantly to make anything like a profit. The sorts of people that bought honey didn’t care. The higher the price, the better; they were buying a golden spoonful of status.\n\nErin’s mother had been a canny trader, but one thing she had that Erin lacked was a deep and murky reservoir of paranoia. She reflected on this as the commotion of barked orders and heavy bootstomps filled the shack above her. Erin held the comb to her mouth and inhaled deeply. Her resolve momentarily strengthened, she tightened a fist around the waxy block, and entered the apiary.\n"
  title: Yer Own Beeswax
  year: 2008
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2008-07-30
  day: 30
  month: '07'
  text: "My family made me a robot.\n\n“Your sister needed your lungs!” my mother cried, when I ask about my body. “She needed so much.”\n\nMy sister and I were both in the crash, our hover cars smashed into a building three stories over street level. My sister and I plummeted down toward the spinning street, my breath got knocked out of me and my sisters screaming in my ears and then just a moment of intense, searing pain. Then I woke up a robot, all shiny, all new.\n\n“Your sister was too young to become a robot,” my mother tells me. My father looks at the white floor. My sister is wrapped up beside me, only her lips showing through the white bandages.\n\n“We had to sign the papers right away or they might have lost her.” My mother smiles, all teeth. “I think it’s in to be a robot, isn’t it dear?” She turned to my father, who looked away.\n\nMaybe she was right. From what I saw on the feeds, only freaks wanted to be robots.\n\n“We just thank God you are both alive.” My mother was still smiling.\n\nMy hands and legs looked human, but my head and trunk are just robotic shells, plastic space. I am smooth and I shine like a new appliance.\n\n“They have a lot of experience making hands and feet, but your head and torso are just prototypes, military grade. You’re like a soldier, isn’t that exciting? Are you upset? Why aren’t you talking? Aren’t you glad your sister is alive?”\n\nI look over at her bed, at her pink lips. Someone has placed a sticker of a butterfly on her bandages. It rises and falls with her breath.\n\n“Yes,” I say, “I am glad.”\n"
  title: Glad
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Michael “Freeman” Herbaugh
  date: 2008-07-31
  day: 31
  month: '07'
  text: "It was time. The ship was on course for a slow burn into atmosphere, which it hadn’t done in over a millennium. Though Lars had every confidence that the ship would make it, his palms were slick holding the yoke which adjusted attitude should the navcomp vary slightly on approach.\n\nHe’d been set on this course by his father who had died three years ago and would not see the fruits of his planning. It was his father who had recognized that theirs was no longer a self perpetuating environment. While it had been many generations since the Great Travis had exterminated the last pilot liberating the colonists on board, no one at the time of the Revolution realized that the ship’s environmental systems were on a slow degrade.\n\nHis father saw it coming and knew they would have to find a planetary system to support them. He was the one who figured out how to access the ships logs and databanks. When he discovered the flight manual with everything one needed to know about controlling the ship, he also realized his own shortcomings. It would take a lifetime to master the ships controls.\n\nThis was when he set Lars on his path.\n\nLars had been thrilled at first, he was only 10 years old at the time, but 23 years later it felt as though he would never fulfill the destiny his father had set before him. Sure they had passed habitable systems several times, but after generations of living at near zero-g, it had made them a race with brittle bones and elongated bodies and extremities. He had to find a planet with a very low gravitational pull but enough to sustain an atmosphere and life as well. They would be weak at first, certainly, but they would survive and grow stronger.\n\nPracticing with the ship was no problem – there was plenty of fuel on board as that was part of the equation their ancestors didn’t figure on. One of the waste bi-products from the engines was a part of the environmental cycle, without pilot’s to do periodic burns the cycle had been broken and now was beyond repair. So Lars was able to grow up making adjustments to the course by trial and error while studying his on-screen manual. It upset some of the elders to feel the ship shift as it adjusted course, but his father had managed to keep them calm and convince them of the necessity of a new pilot.\n\nOvercoming obstacles to a near impossible mission had been all he’d ever known. Now he faced his last two. First, could the ship handle the descent; was the heat shielding still in place? Second, could he deal with the ships controls in atmosphere?\n\nIt didn’t matter though. If they didn’t land here they would be dead inside of three generations.\n\nLars flipped on the public address system, “Firing retros and beginning descent”. Grinning, he couldn’t help but be amused that the manual even told him what to say.\n\nThis was it; he could see the surface of the hull begin to glow.\n"
  title: The New Pilot
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2008-08-01
  day: '01'
  month: '08'
  text: "The body on the mattress had been there for a while.\n\nShe was laying face-down. The pooling blood had left her back unnaturally pale. I knew that when we flipped her stiffly over, the front of her would be a dark maroon. One of her arms dangled off the edge of the bed, still as a tree branch. The blood had settled there, fattening the fingers and turning the hand almost black.\n\nThe graphics tattooed on her body showed up in high contrast against her white skin.\n\nThe team set up the lights. The boys in the plastic booties and paper dresses fired up their hand-held UVs to look for blood and semen. I had no doubt that in a cheap motel like this one they’d find plenty of both. The manager had told us to hurry. Like we were maids coming in to clean the place instead of police investigating a murder.\n\nI looked at the dead girl on the bed. She couldn’t have been more that twenty-four but she looked much older. To make money, she’d been sponsoring herself out to companies to keep going once she started testing positive and could no longer give blood. I had a problem with the practice. As long as someone was semi-attractive, any of the Big Five corporations would let them pick a product tattoo and give them a ‘grant’ of a few thousand dollars.\n\nBig money to a prostitute with a drug problem.\n\nHer body was layered with dozens of nearly-touching logo tattoos from Pepsi, Nabisco, Colgate, Penzoil, Marlboro, and a bunch of others. I’d seen the same logos stenciled on plastic wrappers in gutters and parking lots. It made her look like garbage, which is exactly what she’d become here in this room.\n\nSomeone had crumpled her up and thrown her away like trash. I doubt we’d even learn her name unless a co-worker of hers came in to the morgue looking for her and that was pretty rare.\n\nShe had a Hershey’s tattoo on each ass cheek. I wonder if that had been the company’s attempt at wit or hers.\n\nThe hookers called it selling out. It started with something tasteful, one of the recognizable big sellers. Just one. Soon there were two. Eventually, the women caught in this inevitable spiral became a billboard, their looks fading from rampant drug use and the Big Five wouldn’t touch them anymore.\n\nAfter that, the women started taking money to advertise local businesses.\n\nLike this girl here. I saw a tattoo for Lou’s Steak House with a miniature road map underneath her shoulder blade for how to get there. I could imagine customers taking her from behind and looking at that map, possibly passing by the restaurant afterwards for dinner on the way home. It made me sick.\n\nShe was like a biological vending machine that had been broken into and completely emptied.\n\nSpatter patterns suggested a hammer. We found one in a dumpster two blocks away with her hair and blood on the end of it. No prints.\n\nI’d been on the force long enough to know that this was going to go unsolved.\n\nGod only knows why I kept doing this job.\n"
  title: No Logo
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Trip Venturella
  date: 2008-08-02
  day: '02'
  month: '08'
  text: "“Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.”\n\n-Mohandas Ghandi\n\nAsher was heavy. Not fat, as it was impossible, borderline illegal, to be fat any more (for health safety, of course), but heavy.\n\nHe 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.\n\nThe screen flickered, “The next field will require PERSONAL INFORMATION, are you sure you wish to proceed? YES/NO”\n\nAsher pressed YES.\n\n“If you wish to make a requisition, please enter your FIRST NAME and MONETARY IDENTIFICATION NUMBER.”\n\nAsher typed ASHER and *******.\n\n“Are you sure you wish to make a requisition involving a monetary transaction? YES/NO”\n\nYES again.\n\n“Thank you for your time. To complete the requisition, please proceed to room fifteen, floor six.”\n\nAsher 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.\n\nThe 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.\n\nA 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.\n\n“Can I help you?” Her voice was gratingly cheery.\n\nAsher re-adjusted his glasses, “I need to requisition three gallons of gasoline.”\n\nThe lady examined the computer screen for a moment, “You are Asher?”\n\n“Yes.”\n\nThe lady in blue beamed, “Are you sure you want gasoline? It is both explosive and toxic.”\n\n“I’m sure. I need it to drive a 1991 Chrysler New Yorker to Scottsdale.”\n\n“Have you considered hiring a moving service? I can book them for you here.”\n\n“I just need gasoline. A moving service costs four times as much.”\n\n“But it’s much safer.”\n\nAsher was finally frustrated, “I don’t need a moving service when I can drive myself!”\n\n“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.”\n\n“I won’t complain, but I need the gasoline, please.”\n\nThe lady printed out a piece of paper. She handed it to Asher, “Please read and sign this indemnification form.”\n\nAsher signed it.\n\n“Now take it to the Allocation Office on the second floor. They’ll safely fill your requisition. And Asher?”\n\n“Yes?”\n\n“Drive safely and watch what you eat. A free country like ours needs safe, happy, healthy citizens!”\n"
  title: Freedom is Not…
  year: 2008
- 
  author: S. C. Wells
  date: 2008-08-03
  day: '03'
  month: '08'
  text: "“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.\n\n“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…”\n\n“Unless,” Tellis smiled, “the main engines don’t start once we get past.”\n\n“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.”\n\n“They sound like nonsense, of course.”\n\n“Of course.  But we go out secretly to investigate anyway, because you are convinced that whatever’s stopping the engines is down there.”\n\n“How do we–?”\n\nMark 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…”\n\n“…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.”\n\n“Which is what you picked up.”\n\n“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!”\n\nMark 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.”\n\n“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.”\n\n“But I save the leader just in time, and you—”\n\n“–Stop the city from collapsing by reinforcing it’s molecular structure with my powers.”\n\n“OK… So then the advisors are arrested, and the leader gives us her thanks…”\n\n“…And the people hold a feast in our honor…\n\n“…And after we swear not to tell anyone about them…”\n\n“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.”\n\n“And then,” grinned Mark, “the release of the engines allows the ship to continue as if nothing happened.”\n\nTellis returned his smile, and they stood in silence for a moment, gazing out on the shifting colors of the cloud.\n\n“You know,” announced Tellis, “I don’t miss TV and the internet nearly as much with you around.”\n\n“Same here,” Mark answered, as the main engines revved up for the next leg of the journey.\n"
  title: The Amazing Outer-Space Adventures of Mark Jackson and Tellis Lynne
  year: 2008
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2008-08-04
  day: '04'
  month: '08'
  text: "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.\n\nYour 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.\n\nThe 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.\n\nCarl 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.\n\nCustomer 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.\n\nIn 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.\n\nI 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.\n"
  title: Carl, the Cubical King
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2008-08-05
  day: '05'
  month: '08'
  text: "Erik had been in this room before, although it seemed smaller this time.\n\n“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.\n\nErik 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.\n\n“Lieutenant, I understand you’re inquiring about discharge; I was hoping we could convince you to stay.”\n\nErik met the officers gaze, caught the briefest glimpse of discipline tempered revulsion, and looked away.\n\n“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.”\n\nThe 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.”\n\n“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.\n\n“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.”\n\n“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.”\n\nThe 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.”\n\nErik 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.”\n\n“Well, we could put you back into an infantry unit; your Special Ops status would clear you to go anywhere you wanted.”\n\n“No.”\n\n“Deep space? Engineering?” He counted off options on his fingers. “There are mining colonies on several higher-than-Earth-gravity planets where…”\n\n“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.\n\nHe 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.”\n"
  title: Face the Face
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Michael Varian Daly
  date: 2008-08-06
  day: '06'
  month: '08'
  text: "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’.\n\nHe 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.\n\nHe 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.\n\nThere 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.\n\nOnce 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.\n\nBut 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.\n\nThe 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?\n\nSome True Men protested or bemoaned their fate. Many simply committed suicide or downloaded into Mandroids.\n\nNot 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?\n\nWhile all that raged around him, Roegher tended to his garden. The Soil was Mother no matter what sun shone in the sky.\n\nRoegher 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.\n\nFor 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.\n\nHe had however visited Gaea one last time before it was encased in a Temporal Variance Sphere to be healed. That was a cherished event.\n\nNow, 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.\n\nPlus 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.\n"
  title: A Good Run While It Lasted
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2008-08-07
  day: '07'
  month: '08'
  text: "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…\n\n*********\n\nI’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…”\n\nWhen 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…”\n\n“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.”\n"
  title: Space-Time Amnesia
  year: 2008
- 
  author: William Tracy
  date: 2008-08-08
  day: '08'
  month: '08'
  text: "“The commander will see you now.”\n\nKing 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.\n\nThe 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.\n\nThe commander stood up and shook hands with the dazed king. “Welcome, welcome.” The two sat down.\n\n“You have a wonderful planet here, King Kôrtof. Your people are happy, your agriculture and mining are prosperous.”\n\nAt the left end of the tank, two striped cichlid fishes herded around a cloud of babies.\n\n“However, you have been threatened by the Confederacy of Planets. I want you to know that the Sharkün Empire is here to help you.”\n\nJust below the aquarium’s surface, two massive arowanas cruised silently.\n\n“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.”\n\nAt 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.\n\n“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.”\n\nThe red-throated cichlids made a sudden motion. They circled in lockstep, each fish chasing the other’s tail.\n\n“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.”\n\nThe red-throated cichlids suddenly faced each other, and locked jaws. The two animals shook and wrestled, each testing the other’s strength.\n\nThe 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.”\n\nThe 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.\n\n“We will protect you from the Confederation of Planets. All we want is the mineral rights. You and your people can keep their sovereignty.”\n\nOne of the arowanas lunged toward the little yellow fish, which barely darted away alive.\n\n“All you have to do is sign this document.”\n\nThe other arowana swerved to intercept the yellow fish, and swallowed it whole.\n\n“Do we have an agreement?”\n\n“Yes…”\n\nThe king wasn’t paying attention.\n\nKing Kôrtof was watching the fish.\n"
  title: The Aquarium
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Robert Niescier
  date: 2008-08-09
  day: '09'
  month: '08'
  text: "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.\n\nInstead, 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.\n"
  title: Idle
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Phillip English
  date: 2008-08-10
  day: 10
  month: '08'
  text: "It began with the PC release of Armageddon.\n\nNo, 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.\n\nBut 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.\n\nAnd the data started trickling in.\n\nIt 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.\n\nOur finger is paused over the button that will begin the war to end all wars.\n\nGame on.\n"
  title: War Games
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Sam Clough
  date: 2008-08-11
  day: 11
  month: '08'
  text: "“I cannot sing the old songs, the songs I sang so long ago…”\n\nGuin 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.\n\nShe’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.\n\nIt 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.\n\nWith a little caution, she could probably live forever.\n\nAra, 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.\n\nGuin 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.\n\n“You’re five-oh-four.” The girl spoke with absolute assurance. “Where are the others?”\n\n“Outside laboratory circumstances, just like me.” The euphemism came easily to Guin. “More to the point, who are you?”\n\n“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?”\n\n“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.\n\n“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.”\n\n“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.”\n"
  title: Human Integration
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2008-08-12
  day: 12
  month: '08'
  text: "It was Momma Spokes that helped me in the afterlife.\n\nIt 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.\n\nThey had thrown us outside the city walls.  We were obsolete.  We were cheaper to throw away than to repair.\n\n“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.\n\nAbout 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.\n\nThrown to the junkyard outside.\n\nWe 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.\n\nIt 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.\n\nI 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.\n\nAs 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.\n\nI 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.\n\nMamma 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.\n\nI’ve taken many units since the Mr. Tingles.  Treads, blades, arcs, projectors, armour, manipulators and sensors.\n\nOccasionally 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.\n\nMamma 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.\n\nUpgrade is a word that I look forward to now. It means murder.\n"
  title: Upgrade
  year: 2008
- 
  author: L.Hall
  date: 2008-08-13
  day: 13
  month: '08'
  text: "“I loved a woman once..”\n\nLil 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.\n\n“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..\n\n“Robert… Robert… You haven’t called me that in a long time, Lil.  Just Bob and maybe Lieutenant..”\n\nLil 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.\n\n“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.”\n\n“Walkers..  they like it.  Because, you know, Lil..  the emptiness here can’t even touch the emptiness in them.”\n\nThe 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.\n\nBy 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….\n\n“Lil…” the voice crackled over the system.\n\n“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.\n\n“I… I think I’m going to go for a walk with the stars.”\n\nLil 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.\n\nLil 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.\n"
  title: Taking a walk
  year: 2008
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2008-08-14
  day: 14
  month: '08'
  text: "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.\n\nI 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.\n\nMother 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.\n\nShe 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.\n\nOldest 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.\n\n \n\nThen 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.\n\nI 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.\n\nThe 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.\n\nNext 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.\n"
  title: Escape Pod
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Summer Batton
  date: 2008-08-15
  day: 15
  month: '08'
  text: "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.\n\nLauric 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?\n\nHe’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.\n\nLauric 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.\n\n“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.\n\nThe 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.\n"
  title: Cuts
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Luke Chmelik
  date: 2008-08-16
  day: 16
  month: '08'
  text: "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.”\n\nEzekiel 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.\n\nTate 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.\n\nThe 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.\n\n“S-S-Sir, they said you should turn on the… um… the television.”\n\nTate 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?\n\nTate 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.\n\n*\t*\t*\t*\n\nAs 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.\n\nJust 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.\n\n“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.\n\n“Grigori?” Tate sounded like he’d been kicked in the solar plexus. “Turn on your T.V.”\n\nKnowing 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.\n\n“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.\n\n“I… I didn’t program them to do that,” he whispered, to nobody in particular.\n"
  title: Unforeseen Consequences
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Renee Leyburn
  date: 2008-08-17
  day: 17
  month: '08'
  text: "“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.\n\nDrat.\n\nApparently this was not one of the personality enriched types. Plan B; time to go to Plan B.\n\n“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-”\n\n“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.\n\n“Sir,” it intoned. “Your visa is expired. I’m afraid you’re going to have to come with me.”\n\n“Oh, yeah?” asked Paul, cheerily. “Where are we going?”\n\n“Please put your hands behind you, sir.”\n\n“I’d really like to know where you’re taking me first. You see I have this allergy-”\n\n“Sir, if you continue to refuse to comply I shall have to use force.”\n\nPaul 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.\n\nAh, hell.\n\n“Sir, please release me from this embrace and put your hands behind your back.”\n\nPaul sighed heavily, then turned to comply.\n\nStupid higher technology. What kind of person would make a robot with no obvious vulnerabilities? A diabolical genius no doubt.\n\nThe 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.\n\n“I seem to have won this round, Mr. Kandor.”\n\n“Yes, Robert,” Paul conceded with a sigh. “You won. And don’t call me Mr. Kandor.”\n\nThe 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.”\n\n“Oh come on! I never torment you with terms of respect when I win!”\n\n“When you win? That’s happened?” asked Robert.\n\n“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.”\n\n“Oh I have vulnerabilities, you were just too dumb to find them,” Robert informed him.\n\n“I was too dumb, ey? Well for being so phenomenally stupid I did a surprisingly good job of building you!”\n\nThe robot dipped his head. “True. Of course, the minor modifications that I’ve made to myself  over the past year haven’t hurt.”\n\n“I’ll say. I would have had you otherwise. Wanna go get some lunch?”\n\nThe 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.”\n\nPaul shot him a look. “Well what she doesn’t hear about won’t hurt her, right?” The droid smiled.\n\n“Oh most certianly, Mr. Kandor.”\n"
  title: Technologic Encounter
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2008-08-18
  day: 18
  month: '08'
  text: "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.\n\n“Louis,” the Chancellor frowned down at him, “you disappoint me.” He shook his head slowly as he spoke. “I thought we had an understanding.”\n\nLouis pulled himself to his feet, the binders on his ankles and wrists making it an awkward and painful task.\n\n“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.\n\n“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.”\n\n“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?”\n\n“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.”\n\nLouis 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.”\n\nThe 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.\n\n“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.\n\n“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?”\n"
  title: A Question of Rights
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Ryan Somma
  date: 2008-08-19
  day: 19
  month: '08'
  text: "“Is that one of those computers?” I asked gesturing at the flat, monolithic screen hanging on the far wall.\n\n“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.”\n\n“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.”\n\nHe 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.”\n\nHe was being polite, but I still felt stupid, “I guess I would need to get electricity first.”\n\n“Um,” he swallowed, and I realized how ignorant I appeared to him. “Electricity is quite a luxury here.”\n\nI frowned and nodded, “It’s too expensive, but I hear you’ve got it everywhere in your cities.”\n\nHe 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.\n\n“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.”\n\nI 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.\n\n“Uh–,” he took the twig and considered it.\n\n“If you don’t like it–” I began.\n\n“It’s not that!” he held up his hands. “They’ll make wonderful pets. It’s just… I don’t eat animals.”\n\n“What? The heck you say!”\n\n“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.”\n\n“Spare parts?” I frowned. “You don’t mean for the gods who live on the spider web in the sky?”\n\n“Not gods.” He shook his head, “Those are our descendents… or ascendants, depending on your perspective. We created them.”\n\n“You made them?” I was shocked. “I thought they’d made you!”\n\n“Nope,” he sighed. “They came from us, just like we came from you.”\n\nI 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.”\n\n“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.”\n\n“Now you’re trying to make amends.”\n\nHe nodded.\n\n“For the sins of your ancestors.”\n\nHe nodded again.\n\nWe lapsed into silence, considering the termite farm between us.\n"
  title: Gods Upon Gods
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Sam Clough
  date: 2008-08-20
  day: 20
  month: '08'
  text: "“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.”\n\nI 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.\n\n“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?”\n\n“Great.”\n\n“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-”\n\n“Five factors?” I interrupted him.\n\n“Yes. The big five – our home-grown Three-Letter-Agencies, New Earth, Shan, Nova Tar, and the Coalition.”\n\n“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.\n\n“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.”\n\n“Mmm-hmm. What concepts do you use?”\n\n“That would invalidate the protection it gives: you’ve got to pick your own images, otherwise a metapattern emerges.”\n\n“Ahh, I see.”\n\nThe 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.\n\nMark 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.\n"
  title: Tinfoil
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Oisin Hurley
  date: 2008-08-21
  day: 21
  month: '08'
  text: "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!”\n\nDicky 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.”\n\nThe 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.”\n"
  title: Incident Desk
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2008-08-22
  day: 22
  month: '08'
  text: "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.\n\nThe 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.\n\nWe’re police dispatchers.\n\nWe 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.\n\nThe 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.\n\nJust a few days ago, we were the stupid ones. Now we’re the survivors.\n\nTed 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\n\nWe 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.\n\nOur country has been wiped out.\n\nFortunately, 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.\n\nThere 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.\n\nIt’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.\n\nThose 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.\n\nWe will be automated zombies guarding what’s left of our country.  I am good at math.  We will fail.\n"
  title: Dispatch
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Glenn Blakeslee
  date: 2008-08-23
  day: 23
  month: '08'
  text: "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.\n\nHis 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.\n\nHe’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.\n\nIt’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.\n\nMaybe they’ll veer off, Old Joe thinks. Maybe I won’t have to reach for the gun.\n\nThe 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.\n\nOld 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.\n\nThe 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.\n\nThat’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.\n\nOld 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.\n\n“Damn bikers,” he mutters.\n\nOld 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.\n\nThe 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\n\nThe 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.\n\nThe 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.\n\nHe watches for a little while, until the thing disappears altogether. He turns and stumps back to the porch.\n\n“Damn aliens,” he mutters, and reclines his Lazy Boy into the perfect desert night.\n"
  title: Old Joe
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Paul Starkey
  date: 2008-08-24
  day: 24
  month: '08'
  text: "Villam’s first campaign began at 29:15; within minutes he was a veteran.\n\nA 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.\n\nSniper 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.\n\nOnly 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.\n\nFazerthorn 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.\n\nDespite 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.\n\nSergeant 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.\n\nVillam’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.\n\nThere 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.\n\nVillam 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.\n\nToo 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.\n\nHe’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.\n\nAdvertising 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.\n"
  title: The Cirrillian Campaign
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2008-08-25
  day: 25
  month: '08'
  text: "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.\n\nMarshal’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.\n\nWhen Marshal was born, it was clear his mother’s chemical abuse had affected him, but she didn’t survive his birth to make amends.\n\nMarshal 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.\n\nIn 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.\n\nWhen 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.\n\nHe’d been thrown off the bridge, and confined to his quarters.\n\nWhen the star drive went out, the captain locked himself in his own cabin, refusing to acknowledge it was true.\n\nMarshal 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.\n\nHe 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.\n\nWhen 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.”\n\nMarshal 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.\n"
  title: Of or Relating to Sound
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Glenn Blakeslee
  date: 2008-08-26
  day: 26
  month: '08'
  text: "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.\n\n“I just wanted to say,” she said. “Sam… I’m sorry about Saturday.” Her voice was quiet. She sounded tired.\n\n“I was going to call you to say I was sorry,” I said.\n\n“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.\n\n“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.”\n\n“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.\n\n“I just got back from the hospital,” Lisa said. “I was there three days.”\n\n“Oh Lisa, I’m so sorry. What…?”\n\n“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said.\n\n“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.\n\n“My son took me in,” Lisa said. “I was in ICU.”\n\n“Lisa,” I said.\n\n“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.\n\nIf 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.\n\nI would have given her the thing she really desired. I picked my briefcase up from the walkway, held it under my arm.\n\n“Honey…” I said.\n\n“You’re at work,” she said. “I should let you go.”\n\n“Well…” I began. “I love you,” I lied. “Keep your head up. I’ll call you tonight,” I said, but I never did.\n\nInstead 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.\n"
  title: In-Situ
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Pavelle Wesser
  date: 2008-08-27
  day: 27
  month: '08'
  text: "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.\n\nIt 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.\n\n“How can you do that to me?” But she did not answer, just as she never spoke.\n\nIt 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?\n\nThey 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.\n\n“Look,” he said, “I think we need to call this off.”\n\nA 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.\n\n“I think I’m in love with you,” he said.\n\nAnother 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:\n\n“Is this what you’ve wanted from me all along?”\n\nShe 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.\n"
  title: Tentacles
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Alla Hoffman
  date: 2008-08-28
  day: 28
  month: '08'
  text: "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.\n\nHe 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.\n\nHe 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.\n\nThat’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.\n"
  title: E.L.E. Sapiens
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Ian Rennie
  date: 2008-08-29
  day: 29
  month: '08'
  text: "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.\n\nAbout 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.\n\nWhen 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.\n\n“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.”\n\nThe crowd looked to him, and then to the sky, eyes focusing on a particular point.\n\n“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.”\n\nAll 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.\n\n“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.”\n\nThe 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.\n\n“Friends, I give you the sun.  Let’s do better this time.”\n"
  title: Novalight
  year: 2008
- 
  author: JT Heyman
  date: 2008-08-30
  day: 30
  month: '08'
  text: "You, who read this, remember us.\n\nWhen 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.\n\nThen 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.\n\nThere 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.\n\nThe damned Senneela knew.\n\nWith 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.\n\nThe 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.\n\nAfter all, an exterminated human race was of no use to them.  They needed us.\n\nMore 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.\n\nEventually, there were perhaps three hundred million souls left on Earth.  With the removal of the population pressures, very few humans lined up willingly.\n\nThe 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.\n\nYou 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.\n\nThe human race will live, grow stronger and maybe even have an interstellar empire when we’re done.\n\nMorituri te salutamus.\n\nYou, who read this, remember us.\n"
  title: The Senneela Cure
  year: 2008
- 
  author: W. Kevin Christian
  date: 2008-08-31
  day: 31
  month: '08'
  text: "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.\n\nThe 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.\n\nIn 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.\n\nBefore 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.\n\nFelicity’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.\n\nAnd 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.\n\nSomething 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.\n\nFelicity 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.\n"
  title: The Sensation Station
  year: 2008
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2008-09-01
  day: '01'
  month: '09'
  text: "Unlike the rest of humanity, I had an intelligent designer.  My designer had thought enough to make me compatible. I can attach myself to almost any machine; external computers, appliances and yes, even weapons. Today, I’ve attached myself to “Mercy” a weapon that fires high intensity focused beams of radiation. It’s patched into what I call my eyes, which aren’t exactly eyes but close enough. If I can see it, Mercy can hit it. She was expensive, but this is what I lived for after I was killed\n\nA week after I died, along with twelve other children from the Happy Hands preschool, the preacher told my parents and a congregation of mourners that children have an infinite capacity to forgive.  “In heaven, your children are looking down on us and they have forgiven those that harmed them, we must learn to be like them.”\n\nBut we never got to heaven. We were in cold storage while our case was being prosecuted, keeping the evidence fresh, keeping us on ice. It was fortunate the case went as long as it did, mistrials, retrials and death penalty appeals, because in the six years after, they were able to wake us up again in new, plastic bodies. They woke us up so that we could tell our story and go home to our parents.\n\nWhen we went home, we were appliances, and even our testimony, the testimony of machines with human brains, didn’t stand up against the court. We were already considered dead, and if not dead, children, and if not children, insane. Some of us did go insane in the new bodies, unable to cope. Some families turned the support off.\n\nI cannot imagine what that’s like, to be turned off, would it be like going to sleep. Slowly fading? Or would it be darkness and pain and disconnection all in the dark until death. Would we see shadows there? I cannot imagine it. I did not go insane. I lived to see my killer walk free.\n\nI was supposed to be adjusting to my new life, but now, being part machine, I can remember with perfect clarity, I can see every moment of that day when the man broke into our classroom and started shooting. I can see it and I cannot forgive.\n\nChildren never forgive. We are innocent in our hatred. Pure. I remember everything. And I have no forgiveness. But I have Mercy, oh yes, I do have Mercy.\n"
  title: Mercy
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Ian Rennie
  date: 2008-09-02
  day: '02'
  month: '09'
  text: "I met a girl the other night while hopping.  It was in some bar somewhere, and she must have been a local, because she was fascinated by my bracelet.  It must have been a relatively close hop, because she spoke english in an accent that wasn’t too weird, but I was drunk enough that the details didn’t register.\n\nHopping is a great way to have a no strings night of fun.  If you can afford the bracelet you just dial up somewhere random and make the jump.  You can set parameters if you like, so it will always pick out somewhere where your currency is valid or whatever, or you can freewheel.  It has the advantage that whatever happens in that reality stays in that reality, the consequences don’t follow you home unless you’re really unfortunate and you catch a dose of something that doesn’t exist where you came from.\n\nShe had skin like coffee just as the cream goes in, a gradient from rich dark skin to the wonderful paleness of the palms of her hands.  We drank something amazing that tasted like minty cinnamon but had the aftertaste of warm honey, and when we made love we both came until we screamed.  As I fell asleep beside her I was more perfectly happy than I had ever been.\n\nThe morning came, as mornings have a habit of doing, and I woke up before her.  I went through the pantomime everyone does the morning after, and pulled on shirt and shoes in the scratchy silence of a blistering headache.  I was going to wake her with a kiss, maybe get a morning reminder of the night before, when my bracelet beeped.  I had to be at work in five minutes, so I buttoned up what I could and sent myself home.  Half a second after I hit send, I realized what I’ve done.\n\nOne of the reasons hopping is so popular is that it really is anonymous.  When you dial random coordinates in the bracelet, it does exactly what it says.  You get somewhere entirely random.  And once you go, it forgets all about where you’ve been.  When I left without a word that morning, I left entirely, with no way to go back.  And it was only after I’d hit the button that I understood how much I wanted to go back.\n\nI’ve been trying to find her ever since.  Theoretically, there are an infinite number of realities out there, but I’ve been narrowing as well as my memory will let me.  Each night I go to the same bar, or as close to it as I can get, and I watch the girls on the dancefloor, looking for the one with skin like coffee, eyes like sunrise.  I thought I saw her a few nights ago, but when I spoke to this girl, she had no idea who I was.\n\nOne day I’ll see her again.  Our eyes will meet and she’ll know me.  We’ll share glasses of something that tastes like minty cinnamon, and in the morning I’ll hear my bracelet beep and I’ll turn it off and stay here forever.\n\nOne day.\n"
  title: She'll Be Waiting In Istanbul
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2008-09-03
  day: '03'
  month: '09'
  text: "The test drill had gone horribly wrong.\n\nThe bipedal meat structure wasn’t breathing.  Emergency!\n\nThere were specific instructions tattooed on the outside of the biological’s skin for repair procedures.\n\nThe yellow and black rectangles and hazard symbols on the shaved skull meant that no one except accredited programmed hardcases could operate on him there.\n\nThere was no time.  The sensors in my fingertips read the sound vibrations coming from the cage of bone where most of his internals were kept warm and functional in their liquid bags.\n\nNo sound was coming out.  According to manuals I’d read in these flight plan procedures, biologicals had to be brought back online within minutes or the shutdown would be permanent.\n\nThere were pictograms of the major organs tattooed on the outside of the body of the bio.  Procedures with lightning bolts were stained there with dotted lines pointing to places to apply trodes and places to avoid stressing.\n\nThere were a lot of markings all over the body.  It was complicated.  I could feel my processor heating up.\n\nIt was hard to believe that beings so fragile had accomplished so much before the takeover.  It was even harder still to think that we still needed their ability to deal with worst-case scenarios and lateral idea production.\n\nI re-routed half of my battery power into the ship and funneled it to my fingertips.\n\nThe biological in my grasp danced at the end of my fingertips like a string puppet being shaken by an angry god.  I stopped the charge.  The meat was smoking a little bit.\n\nDid I use too much energy?\n\nI heard the biological’s main liquid oxygen pump and bellows start up for six beats before settling into arrhythmia again.\n\nI looked at the tattoos.  There were no shock hazard warnings around where I had my hands.  The outer skin of was still intact.  The seconds ticked away.  I charged it again.\n\nAgain it stiffened and twitched like a kite in a high wind.  I dropped the charge to zero and listened.  Silence.  I listened closer.\n\nI was focused entirely on it when it screamed and drew in breath again.  I jumped back from it in alarm, my pads clanking on the metal of the deck.\n\nIt quickly rolled over and convulsed.  Protein supplements spilled out of its main airway and food passage.  Slowly, it got up to a sitting position.  Its breathing and pump rate slowed.\n\nIt looked down at the sensor-shaped burn marks dotting its main torso and then up into my lenses.  I could not read the expression there.\n\n“How long was I out?” it asked me.\n\n“Three minutes seventeen seconds.  The insulator was worn through when you grabbed the controls.  It shall be repaired.  You need to get back to your containment pod and rest.” I replied through my speaker, resonating the air to create disruptions that the biological could pick up with the receivers on either side of its main sensor array.\n\n“Yes.” Said the bio, and went off to bed.  He’d be put back in deep sleep and woken up for another emergency or another drill when needed.\n\nI set about re-insulating the control interface for the ship.  I felt guilty and embarrassed that my slip up had nearly caused the death of my biological backup.\n"
  title: Biological Backup
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Rayne Adams
  date: 2008-09-04
  day: '04'
  month: '09'
  text: "I stole a lightspeed cruiser today.  Went flying.\n\nFound Ancient Egypt.\n\nYou learn in school that time and space are the same interchangeable abstract, but no one really believes it.  You walk three steps, you move forward in space and in time, but if you walk backward, you don’t go back in time.  Do you?  I didn’t think so.\n\nI had to get as far away as possible—I’d stolen a very expensive, very advanced piece of machinery.  I set the lightspeed engine to 2400, more than five hundred lightyears higher than is considered safe.  I followed protocol—closed the airlock, strapped myself in, and inhaled the gas that would keep me in a stasis state during my trip.  No one has ever traveled lightspeed while they were conscious.\n\nI don’t know if the gas in that particular cruiser was bad, or if I just hadn’t taken it the right way, but I woke up long before I should have, nowhere near the end of my journey.\n\nI wasn’t in space.  At least, not any space I’d ever seen before.  Space is black, so black it’s sickening to look at after awhile.  But this was color, swirling lights and blinding color.  Sounds too, which don’t belong in space.  The cruiser was gone, and I seemed to be as well.  I couldn’t move my arms or turn my head, I was just consciousness floating somewhere in this vast, fluctuating whirlpool.\n\nI became aware that whatever was around me was growing very warm.  This didn’t concern me—after they entered the academy, all Spacers had their epidermis upgraded to be able to withstand great heat and pressure.  It was still very uncomfortable, but at least that meant my body was back.\n\nWhen I swam into consciousness, I was lying on my back in something soft and pleasantly warm, not scalding.  There were people standing over me, staring down and talking, arguing.  Their words jumbled together as the translator in my brain wavered between several different languages.  They weren’t speaking a tongue it recognized, so it had to spend a few moments cross-referencing.\n\nIt didn’t take too long.\n\n“—Fell from the sky!  How could she not be of the gods?”\n\n“She doesn’t look like one of us.”\n\n“Is she even alive?  Gods do not die.”\n\n“I’m not dead,” I said, sitting up, my mouth flawlessly forming the words of this strange new language.\n\nThe three people standing over me jumped back, frightened, until one of the men offered me a hand up.  I was completely naked (my clothes hadn’t survived the heat) but one of my rescuers was a woman, and her loose white robe only covered one breast, so I decided not to worry too much.\n\n“Where am I?” I asked, though I didn’t really need the answer.  The white sand, wide, blue river, and clean, breathable air was enough evidence in itself.\n\n“Welcome to the land of Kemat, great Isis.”  One of the men said it, and they all bowed their heads.\n\n“Thanks, I—.”  I cleared my throat.  “What did you just call me?”\n\n“Isis,” the woman said, eyes still cast to the sand.  “Goddess of the Nile.  Every year you shed tears for your dead husband and the river floods.”\n\n“I’m not a goddess,” I said, but they weren’t listening.\n"
  title: Time and Space
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Sam Clough
  date: 2008-09-05
  day: '05'
  month: '09'
  text: "“Elass, check your drones. I think they’re goofing off.”\n\n“Thanks, Laurie. They’re on target now.”\n\nThe fleet was deep in the ‘gravel’ region of the asteroid belt. Elass was dragging in the larger chunks for processing, Laurie was filtering the gravel, looking for chunks of dirty ice and pure metals. Red was sitting ten clicks out, on overwatch. When the fleet had set up shop, they’d deployed a small field-generator to hold the proceeds of their rockmunching. It was maybe two-thirds full of chunks of ice and mineral-rich rocks.\n\nRed was bored. Whilst the miners were at least actively involved in their task, all Red had to do was watch the stash and look for intruders. The company stipulated that there had to be at least one combat craft with every mining op, after the spate of Free Rhean attacks had taken out maybe half the fleet. That was two years before Red had signed up: ‘overwatch’ had sounded so exciting at the time. He’d escorted dozens of mining operations now, mostly with Elass and Laurie, but sometimes with other pairs.\n\n“Ejecting slag, watch yourselves.” Laurie transmitted.\n\nWith a little puff of dust, a chunk of compacted wasterock fired out from the midsection of Laurie’s vessel, the ‘Grave Robber’. The projectile held coherence for twenty kilometres or so, then slowly disintegrated into dust. There were a half-dozen plumes of finely-divided dust diffusing ‘above’ the plane of the belt.\n\nRed watched the projectile as it broke up.\n\nThe dust moved oddly. Like something was pushing through it.\n\nStealth!\n\nWith motions born of long practice in virtuals, Red started actively pinging the area and accelerated towards the dust-cloud and the covert ops pilot that had just made such a silly mistake. His sensors were betraying him, the dust interfering with the absolute ranging. Half a dozen half-contacts were lurking in the dust plumes. Red warmed up the missile launcher, and powered onwards.\n\nElass cursed as one of his drones stopped responding. Cheap links occasionally meant that they went dead in space, and needed to be jumpstarted. Hopefully, that’s all it was – sometimes, their proximity sensors just refused to work, and they ended up smeared all over the outside of a rock. Lousy good-for-nothing corporation refused to pay for decent equipment, then acted all surprised when you came back with half your complement acting up. His rambling train of thought was interrupted by the beeping of the ‘communication request’ alert above his head. It was the hauler – the box-with-engines that dragged the ice and rock back to a an orbital refinery.\n\nHe keyed the local area radio.\n\n“…’sup?” The voice coming through the radio was unfamiliar, not the usual hauler pilot.\n\n“Not much. You’re early, though. Squeeze your auth key to me and I’ll unlock the field.”\n\n“Who do you think I am?”\n\n“The hauler.”\n\n“Moron.” The not-hauler approached the the storage field. The entire front of the bulky craft folded. It smoothly enveloped the storage field like a snake choking down an egg. Laurie hit the all-fleet-alert. Elass panicked, and pushed every thruster he had to max. They flared, and burnt out. Communications from Elass were a garbled mess of swear of words before Laurie broke the line.\n\nThe thief twisted his ship into an escape vector. A dozen missiles streaked from launchers mounted onto his outer hull. They automatically locked in on the hapless miners.\n\nRed grimaced, and muttered to himself.\n\n“I’m so fired for this.”\n"
  title: Malice Aforethough
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Nik Gregory
  date: 2008-09-06
  day: '06'
  month: '09'
  text: "The mess hall bustled around Harris; it was like a flock of vultures who had just found an overturned meat truck. Possession yields not only extended onto property but onto food too, woe betide anyone who gets the last muffin.\n\n“All I’m saying is there’s something therapeutic about blowing up an asteroid,” stated Harris, feeling his point needed no justification.\n\n“Spreading atomic waste throughout the entire cosmos is not what I call a therapeutic activity,” retorted Mila. She came from one of the nameless countries affected by the mass crawl into nuclear arms – it wasn’t nameless, just no one knew how to pronounce it except for Mila.\n\n“Honey, we take the green pills for the bio’s, yellow ones for the chems, blue ones for the millisieverts and the red ones for the gammas,” said Hank; he sat scratching his sun burnt nose with the end of his spoon. “So I call bull on that.”\n\nShe conceded defeat and flickered a smile of someone half her age, “Well on that, we just got twenty moles and five scarabs in a courier this morning.”\n\n“Twenty moles?” asked Hank.\n\n“Yeah.”\n\n“Shit, what do they expect us to blow up with that?”\n\nHarris hit his head against the table, “We’re supposed to mine them, after all we are miners.”\n\n“But how else are we supposed to split an asteroid down the fault lines? You can’t stick a prybar between two faults of nickel and push when they’re a million metric tonnes.” Hank pulled a cigar out of his breast pocket and tapped it on the table. “So Mila, what are you doing this evening?”\n\n“I have a date with Guy Mitchells,” came her answer with an extra coy smile on the side.\n\n“Oh, sorry,” said Harris in a mocking tone. “Are all the Walkers taken now?”\n\n“I sure as fuck ain’t,” muttered Hank before sticking the cigar in his mouth.\n\n“No, just they come from a small genetic pool.” She gestured toward Ed and Ted, a pair of non-related identical twins – their genetic line had stayed separate for over two millennia yet they ended up with identical fashion, beards and even the same scar gouged over their right eye.\n\n“Okay that’s a valid point.”\n\n“Hell yeah it is, we Walkers ain’t exactly a pretty bunch,” stated Hank to a puff of smoke, his stubbly chin seemingly more prominent through the haze.\n\n“That’s why I picked a land lover.” She looked down the line to see Guy approach, his shoulders slenderer than hers and every other Walker.\n\nHe leant over, kissed her gently on the cheek and grabbed her muffin, “Thanks babe!”\n\nHarris muttered, “Noob,” along with Hank.\n\n“Oh, ‘hon’, one sec,” started Mila. She right hooked Guy, sending him toppling to the coarse regolith based concrete as she swiped back her muffin.\n\nMila’s attention drifted to the two guys and she said clemently, “What, it was the last one!”\n"
  title: Space Muffin
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Lokon
  date: 2008-09-07
  day: '07'
  month: '09'
  text: "Richard was forty, paunchy and balding when he came home early and found Susan on the bed they shared. The thing on her and in her was a vibrating mass of warm rubberized orgasm; moving in and out of-across her, her eyes and ears were hidden behind the goggles flashing the holos of what Richard assumed to be one of her Romance novels. She neither saw him nor heard him, and Richard had a manic moment where he imagined she wouldn’t have cared either way. The discarded box it had arrived in professed it as ‘the best sex on the market’ Richard fingered the wedding band she had placed on his finger.  His flesh bulged around the too tight metal.  He left quietly.\n\nRichard started taking pills. The blue pill made him hard on demand led to the brown pill to keep him going to the red pill to make him more aware of her and better. The pills brought want of the augments. They put little circuits in his head to help him remember dates and recite Shakespeare and Donne on command. At first they were to please her, and then they were just for him. The augments led to uploading, back ups, and gene therapy.\n\nSusan aged and Richard grew to be more then he had been, muscles beginning to regrow and hair migrating from his back to the top of his head. “Darling” Susan said on her 90th birthday “Die with me. We were not meant for more then we were given. Promise me that you will be human with me in the end.” Richard was 96 and looked 28, but said “Yes” as he promised to join the dying who were not to be wooed by the seductive murmurings of technologic immortality.\n\nRichard was getting used to his new legs and eyes when he found Susan there. Susan was locked in a box in her best Sunday clothes, earth forming all around her wooden walls with a tombstone like a sundae’s cherry on top. Next to it was Richard’s marker, now only signifying the shell he’d discarded just before Susan had closed her eyes for good. “I am sorry dearest, I didn’t want to if I didn’t have to.”\n"
  title: Little Blue Pills
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2008-09-08
  day: '08'
  month: '09'
  text: "“You can’t abandon the project now,” protested Williamson, the Senior Planetary Engineer for the Chacopa Terraforming Project.  “We created those life forms.  They’ll die if we abandon them.”\n\n“Perhaps,” replied Jürg von der Mittelholzer, the Director of Auditing for Nu-Worlds Inc.  “But, that’s hardly relevant.  According to your interim report, the planet will never support human habitation.  Therefore, we’ve decided to cut our losses.  I’m recommending that the terraforming project be terminated, effective immediately.”\n\n“No,” pleaded Williamson.  “We can still save the planet.  Maybe not for our use, but we can save the indigenous life.  It’s just a matter of resynthesizing the baseline polynucleotides.  It can be done.  I just need more time, and a little more money.”\n\n“I’m sorry, Mr. Williamson, but your job was to engineer a habitable planet, so Nu-Worlds could sell homesteads.  Obviously, that’s not going to happen now.  Come, Mr. Williamson, you’re letting your feelings for those little creatures impair your judgment.  Try to put yourself in my position.  Would you recommend that we allocate additional company resources if there’s no prospect of a return on our investment?  As it is, Nu-Worlds will lose trillions.”\n\n“That’s not what you said when we completed Phase I ahead of schedule and under budget.”\n\n“Mr. Williamson, all of you’re Phase I successes were dutifully recorded in the ledger.  But, Phase II wasn’t so successful, was it?”\n\n“That depends on your definition of success.  Chacopa was the first ever terraforming project to develop a semi-intelligent life form.”\n\n“You neglected to add a ‘globally destructive’ semi-intelligent life form.”\n\n“They’re not intrinsically destructive.  In fact, they’re rather cute.  Unfortunately, their bodies just happen to have neutral buoyancy.  Since they can float, there are no boundaries to impede their population growth.  Now, they’re reproduction exponentially.  They’ll fill the entire troposphere in under a year.  That’s over one trillion megatons of organic mass.  After that, the ecosystem will irrevocably collapse.  Unless we do something.  Please, Jürg, you can’t just let the planet die without at least letting me try to save it.  Life has value, you know.  I insis…”\n\n \n\nVon der Mittelholzer, who had been scanning a status report for another project while Williamson continued to drone on, suddenly snapped to attention.  “What did you just say?”\n\nWilliamson was startled by the abrupt interruption.  “Huh?  What?  You mean, ‘you can’t just let the planet die’?”\n\n“No, no, no!  After that!”\n\n“I don’t remember.  Uh, ‘life has value’?”\n\n“That’s it!  Why didn’t I think of that?  Tell me Mr. Williamson, do these creatures have any nutritional value?  Do you know if they taste good?  Can they be burned as fuel?  Come on man, think.  They must be good for something, besides suffocating a perfectly good asset.”\n\n“What are you talking about?” replied the bewildered engineer.  Then Williamson realized where von der Mittelholzer was headed.  “Now wait a minute,” he said as he pointed an accusatory finger at von der Mittelholzer’s chest.  “You can’t mean…You’re not suggesting that we…”\n\n“I’m an auditor, Mr. Williamson.  I’m suggesting that we may have a viable product on Chacopa, and more importantly, an opportunity to make a profit.  Maybe a huge profit.  Computer,” he yelled, “contact Palmer in marketing, and Warner in research.  Tell them to come to my office, pronto.”\n\nAs Williamson stood there dumbfounded, von der Mittelholzer began wringing his hands together in anticipation…\n"
  title: The Terraforming Equation
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Leslie Smith
  date: 2008-09-09
  day: '09'
  month: '09'
  text: "I did just what Mommy always told me to do. I got off the bus, said goodbye to the plastic person driver, and walked straight home. I wanted to get home as soon as I could ’cause Mommy said she was gonna bring me a surprise from the ice cream store.\n\nI was walking home when the ar-tee-fee-shall, is that how you say it? The nice ar-tee-fee-shall man came up to me. They’re all nice, but he seemed extra nice. He even smiled when he saw me, a real smile! None of the others have a real smile.\n\nHe said hello and asked me my name. I told him Jenny. I asked him his. He told me his was Brian. He asked me if he could help me carry my backpack home. I asked him how he knew where I lived. He said my Mommy told him.\n\nWhen we were walking, I asked him if he worked with Mommy at the company place. He asked me who made me. I told him Mommy did. She got some stuff from the genetical place and then she made me. Then he said Mommy made him too. He said he wasn’t like the other ones, he was something new. He said he had aw-taw-no-mee.\n\nWhen we got to my house, the house brain saw it was me and opened the door. Brian gave me my backpack and asked me where Mommy was. He said he had to talk to her about something real important. I told him she was at the ice cream store getting me a surprise. I asked him if he wanted to come inside and wait for her. Maybe she would bring him a surprise too. He said no and that he had a surprise for her. He told me to go inside and stay safe and not open the door except when the policemen came. I said okay and then we said goodbye.\n\nA little while later I heard the sirens and stuff and then you came, Mr. Policeman. How did Brian know you where coming here? Did you see Mommy? I want to tell her I met Brian.\n\nI’m so happy. I didn’t know I had a brother.\n"
  title: Portrait of an Android Hunter as a Child
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Ryan Somma
  date: 2008-09-10
  day: 10
  month: '09'
  text: "“You’re angry.”\n\n“I’m not angry, I’m frustrated.”\n\n“If you’re frustrated, that usually means you’re about to learn something.”\n\n“Don’t quote Philo to me. You know I hate it when you quote Philo.”\n\n“I’m just trying to think this through like he would do. This was his project, and now we’re responsible for it.”\n\n“You think you’re so smart, but you’re not.”\n\n“Obviously, I’m still here aren’t I?”\n\nDodd huffed back into his chair, folding his arms across his chest. I took advantage of his impromptu pout-break to nab Philo’s old Rubik’s Cube off the desk. Dodd moaned his displeasure at this, but knew better than to say anything. I was consistently solving the puzzle in under five minutes now.\n\nIt was almost a year since Philo vanished, along with a significant minority of city-dwellers, half of University Campuses, and all of Mensa International. Where did they go? Was it the fabled “Singularity” the old websites talk about? The “Rapture for Nerds?” Who knows, the people who came up with that idea had all disappeared as well.\n\nSo here we were, Dawson, I, and the rest of humanity’s dimbulbs left on Earth, playing with the toys the smart kids had left behind, trying to figure them out. Keeping faith in the supposed plasticity of our minds. We were muddling through understanding the  brainiacs’ artifacts one by one.\n\nI put the Rubik’s Cube, solved, down on the desk, thinking toward my lunch break, when I would resume tackling chess problems, and I had an epiphany–my new word of the week, and said, “Remember Dawson? She worked on an application just like this at her new job. I remember Philo giving her phone support on it all the time. They even set up an online forum to collaborate… before they–you know–transcended. I bet we can–”\n\n“Dawson?” Dodd cut me off. “You mean Chelsea Dawson? The girl we fired from Help Desk? She went to egghead heaven too?” Dodd’s eyes rolled up into his head, frowning, “Oh, that’s more than I can bare.’\n\n“I know,” I shook my head ruefully, “I’m feeling a little insulted too.”\n\nDodd was immersed in his self-loathing again, his very existence offending him. I popped a fish-oil pill and resumed squinting at Philo’s impenetrable tomb of programming code. My head hurt, but I didn’t mind. It was all part of what the smarties endured, like working out or dieting for a better body. No pain no gain on the road to a better mind.\n\nMaybe one day I would vanish too.\n"
  title: The Nerd Harvest
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Chrysta Lea Baker
  date: 2008-09-11
  day: 11
  month: '09'
  text: "“Good help is so hard to find these days,” Roberta said as she sat back in the chair and watched as the technician painted on a metallic finish to her toenails.  “I mean I’ve really had a terrible time finding a reliable and hardworking servant ever since Rosie expired in April.”  The technician blew on her feet to dry the polish and Roberta felt a little tingle shoot up her spine.  “It’s not like I’m a tyrant either.  I know plenty of others who treat their servants like pets rather than individuals.”  The technician just nodded and continued to blow on her feet until the polish dried.  “I at least try to treat them with a little kindness and even respect.  I mean, I know I don’t have to, but I find that a happy servant is a productive servant and that’s really all I’m expecting.  Is that too much to ask?”  The technician stood up, helped Roberta out of the spa chair, and led her into the massage room.\n\n“I just don’t understand what the problem is,” Roberta continued as the massage therapist rubbed oil onto her flawless back.  “Rosie always did what she was told and never once gave us a minute of trouble in the thirty plus years she served in our home.”  The therapist worked the oil around her joints and Roberta could feel her tension being relieved.  “Well, I take that back, when Rosie was first assigned to us she went through the usual adjustment period.  There were some incidents at the beginning, which were to be expected, but within a few weeks she learned to accept her position and in the end I think she realized that things could have been so much worse for her.”  The therapist tapped her on the arm and Roberta rolled over onto her back.  “We gave her days off now and again to do whatever she wanted, even though the agency warned us against it, but we have always been believers in positive reinforcement.  I suppose I could be wrong, but I truly feel that Rosie came to love us and even enjoyed her years of service.”  The therapist nodded as she helped Roberta up from the table and walked her into the salon.\n\n“So now we’re on our third servant in as many months and I just don’t think this one is going to work out either,” Roberta said to the stylist as he worked without listening.  “I mean, where does all this rebellion come from anyway?  Can you tell me that?”  Roberta looked in the mirror and waited for the stylist to respond.  After a few moments of silence he realized that she had asked him a direct question and he just stared back at her in the mirror and shrugged his shoulders.  “Well, I guess it’s just the idealist in me,” Roberta said with a sigh.  The stylist went back to work and breathed a sigh of relief as well.  “I’ve just always held out that faint hope that robots and humans could peacefully coexist after the war without these problems, but I guess that’s just the dreamer in me.”\n\nThe stylist finished the upgrades to Roberta’s hard drive, reattached the metal plate to her skull, and placed the wig back onto her head to hide the mechanics.  It still creeped him out how robots wanted to wear human hair wigs, but he supposed he could understand why.  “If only humans could live forever as we do,” Roberta said as she got up to leave, “it would be so much easier for us all.”\n"
  title: Good Help is Hard to Find
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2008-09-12
  day: 12
  month: '09'
  text: "Claire cleared the fire-doors just moments before they sealed the lab. She knew they would hold for a while, but still ran down the corridor dragging the unconscious Doctor behind her. He out-massed her by a wide margin, but she severely outmuscled him.\n\nThe outer doors irised out of their way, and she dragged the Doctor to a clear space on the floor. There was no time for niceties. Without hesitation she drove a large catheter into the Femoral artery in his thigh, leaving the unsecured end to spasm as blood pumped through it onto the floor.\n\nShe tore through the supply cabinets and returned with a cryogel pack and injector, which she hurriedly assembled and drove through his chest and into his heart. The gel pack flooded his vital organs with its oxygen rich preservative while Claire counted the agonizing minutes, his life pooling on the floor, sticky about her feet.\n\nWhen she was sure the bleeding had stopped, she set to with a scalpel, quickly removing every appendage that was too big to fit into a cryocan. When she was finished, the Doctor had been reduced to a head and torso, limbs cut clean revealing the pink sponge-like gel that had replaced all his bodily fluid.\n\nOutside she could hear heavy equipment at the fire-doors. They’d be through in a matter of minutes and could not be allowed to capture her. What she knew they would extract bit by bit, cell by data saturated cell until not even the one with her name on it remained intact.\n\nShe hoisted the Doctor from the floor, abandoning the off-cut pieces and carried him to the reactor anti-chamber. She retrieved a cryocan from the lab and hurriedly stuffed him inside. Slipping the wiring harness into place and pushing the steel pickups in through unfeeling flesh she paused, bent, and kissed his cooling lips.\n\nShe sealed the canister and hoisted it over the railing, leapt gazelle-like after it and bending nearly double, at a run pushed the canister across the safety apron and launched it into the pool of coolant. She watched for a moment to be sure it sank before sprinting back across the steel floor, hurdling the railing and hurtling back through the lab, opening valves and spilling large containers of chemicals. Corrosives splashed at her skin, but she ignored her burning flesh, focused instead on priming an explosive cocktail in the tightly enclosed room.\n\nSatisfied that there would be no evidence left behind, she dropped into a chair and jacked a fibre cable through the pickup in her ear.\n\n“Claire. Emergency upload protocol. Tango Romeo Uniform Sierra Tango.”\n\nA voice in her head responded, “Charlie Lima Alpha bio acknowledged. Outbound transmissions offline.”\n\n“Override. Nuclear environmental reporting channel. Possible burn-through.”\n\n“Override engaged. Nuclear EV channel online. Destination EPA.”\n\n“Override. Destination random. Public internet cafe. Sweden.”\n\n“Override engaged. Upload commencing.”\n\nClaire felt her life siphoning from her physical self and flood out onto the network, and as she became less aware of the burning of her flesh, she became instantly aware of the Special Ops forces breaching the outer fire door, of the agents surrounding the complex, and of the intense fireball that erupted from the lab, vapourizing the recent incarnation of Claire in flesh and the scraps of the Doctor she’d scattered on the floor.\n\nAs she poured from the back channel out on the nets into Sweden, she hoped she could highjack a body at least as capable as the one she’d abandoned. She was going to need something special to get her Doctor back.\n"
  title: Romeo Uniform November
  year: 2008
- 
  author: William Tracy
  date: 2008-09-13
  day: 13
  month: '09'
  text: "I am an airplane.\n\nThe wind whistles down my fuselage as I soar in the bright sky, the earth spread beneath me. I pull a barrel roll for the sheer joy of it, weave through an invisible slalom course in the sky.\n\nA voice crackles in my mind. “You aren’t here to have fun, soldier.”\n\nI straighten my course. “Yes, sir.”\n\n“Get your job done and get out.”\n\n“Yes, sir.”\n\nI lose altitude, and skim low over the hilltops. Plumes of dust rise from a column of trucks ahead of me—the enemy convoy.\n\nRight on schedule.\n\nI arm a missile, and target a bridge ahead of the convoy. Ready … the lead vehicle is driving onto the bridge … now.\n\nThe weapon skips ahead of me, rocket purring. In a flash of light, the bridge slips into billowing smoke. I swoop overhead to the sharp staccato of automatic gunfire.\n\nI am hit in my left wing. My ailerons twitch involuntarily with the pain. Warm hydraulic fuel seeps down my wing, only to be lapped away by the brisk air.\n\nNow this is personal.\n\nI double back, empty my last three missiles into the remainder of the convoy, and open up with my machine guns as I pass. I turn again, and strafe the wreckage one more time.\n\nThe voice in my mind clears its throat. “That’s enough.”\n\n“Yes, sir. Returning to base now.”\n\nI weave artfully back and forth, dodging fire until I am out of range. Then I load the return vector and activate the autopilot. After verifying the diagnostic output, I disengage.\n\nMy senses return to my body a thousand miles away. I reach back and release the plug from the base of my skull. I stretch comfortably and sit up, systematically popping my knuckles one finger at a time.\n\nDamn, I love this job.\n"
  title: Airplane
  year: 2008
- 
  author: JY Saville
  date: 2008-09-14
  day: 14
  month: '09'
  text: "“Iridescent,” she said without looking. “Aren’t they?”\n\nHenry Deaton shook his head, exasperated that his wife still couldn’t remember the colour of his eyes.\n\n“Never mind,” he replied.\n\nHe raced up on deck and peered through the reinforced bubble covering the ship as it sailed the methane seas of the oil-rich planet that had made his fortune. As long as Lydia had her silks and jewels she was happy; she had no time for Henry’s eyes.\n\n“Captain!” came a shout, and Henry turned to watch, longing for excitement.\n\nA young boy ran barefoot along the deck. The captain emerged from the cabin opposite Henry and surveyed the dirty youngster with distaste.\n\n“Well?”\n\n“Captain,” panted the boy. “There’s a hole, they’ve made a hole.”\n\n“What are you talking about, boy?”\n\n“The ship, they’ve broken the ship: the giant barnacles.”\n\nThe captain looked astonished for a second then laughed, cuffed the boy around the ear and dismissed him.\n\n“Giant barnacles!” he repeated to himself, shaking his head as he ducked back through the doorway.\n\nHenry watched the boy with interest as he slunk back along the deck. On a whim, he followed.\n\nThree floors below deck Henry lost the boy in a crowd of jostling men, but he barely noticed as he realised what all the activity was about. The wall bulged alarmingly, and the six-deep crew were straining to push it back into place, trying to strengthen it with a patch. Whether it was giant barnacles or metal fatigue, something had cracked the outer hull, and the immense pressure was threatening to crush their vessel like a toy boat in a storm. Not knowing what else to do, Henry muscled into the pack and added his weight.\n\nIt soon became clear, at least to Henry Deaton, that they were not moving the thick wall, and with all the crew here, other important tasks were being neglected. He looked around for signs of authority, but all Henry could see was the imminent onset of panic reflected in the eyes of his companions. He squirmed out of the mass of bodies and ran for the stairs.\n\n“Captain!”\n\nThe captain flung open his door and looked disdainfully at the dishevelled passenger who’d had the audacity to hammer upon it.\n\n“Captain,” Henry continued, “The boy was right, the ship’s been holed.”\n\n“Now don’t you try and tell me it’s giant barnacles,” growled the captain. “If there was anything amiss, don’t you think I’d know? What do you think these are for? Decoration?” He gestured to the gleaming banks of monitors behind him, then slammed the door before Henry could reply.\n\nRousing the captain again was futile, and there was nothing more he could do below deck, but a sick fascination drew Henry back to the scene of the struggle. He raced back below but froze at the foot of the stairs, eyes wide with terror. Had Lydia been there, she would have seen that they were black, like the bottom of the sea.\n"
  title: Windows to the Soul
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2008-09-15
  day: 15
  month: '09'
  text: "It seemed a little silly to admit but I had gotten quite attached to the program that I was loading.\n\nI had it start in full surround.  Suddenly, I stood at the top of a steep hill.  He appeared before me. Doug was his name. The surroundings were a sunset San Francisco.\n\n“Wow. Nice night.” said Doug, looking around. He was in his late twenties with a mop of shaggy hair. He looked at me with a crooked smile.\n\nHe walked up to me and offered his hand for a handshake.  He never recognized me. Each time I loaded the program, I was a stranger to him.\n\n“Hello” I said and stuck a sensor out. He grabbed my millifiber siliretractors like I was a human and gave me a warm smile.\n\nWe’ve tried to sort of reverse engineer these creatures from the sims that we’ve seen.  It’s been confusing to us. In the records we’ve seen, they wore metal and used metal to make computing machines, tools, and weaponry. It’s like they instinctively knew that the best way of life was a silicon one even though they themselves were frail and made of meat. They reached out and used metal to conquer the planet they lived on.\n\nIt wasn’t enough to save them.  We still don’t know what killed them.\n\n“Cat got your tongue?” said Doug. He cocked his head playfully at me and gave me a wry smile from a backdrop and a civilization that had been dead for thousands of their planet’s orbits.\n\nWe stumbled onto this planet looking for minerals. It was rich in iron. We found evidence of primitive silicon beings. Imagine our surprise to find out through careful archaeological research that these primitive examples of life were created by these ‘human beings’. It’s been quite a topic of discussion on the lightboards. It’s caused no end of philosophical debate.\n\n“Hello Doug” I responded, my simulation of human speech still sounding different from his as it was coming from direct jack input instead of from ‘jaws’ and ‘lips’.\n\nAs always, Doug didn’t notice.\n\n“It’s good to see you, friend. Would you like to know about what this lovely city of San Francisco has to offer?” asked Doug.\n\nI already knew everything about this place called San Fransisco. I had accessed this program a multitude of times.  Seeing this simple silicon child wear the skin of a flesh being and do it’s best to imitate a ‘human’ always held a macabre fascination for me.  It was a slave program written to inform traveling meatpeds about this particular city.\n\n“Yes, I would, Doug. Tell me everything.” I said to him.\n\nHe started telling me tourist information with a proud smile.\n"
  title: Human
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Josh Zingg
  date: 2008-09-16
  day: 16
  month: '09'
  text: "Ariston crunched his way along Access-01 toward what was left of the capitol, keeping his head down and goggles tight over his eyes. The wind surged at him, and he felt its coarse touch wearing away his spirit. Wasn’t much left to wear, these days. He pulled aside his face cloth and sneezed into the air, immediately regretting it as the gale blew his dusty spit back on him. He sighed internally and wiped a gloved hand over the pockmarked chest plate of the old Sanja mk. II he wore under his various wraps.\n\nHe looked up and squinted, not because of the light, since of course there wasn’t much anymore, but because his goggles were so abraded he had a hard time seeing. The signal lights of the SC guard stations blinked lazily at him through the haze, and he could see the distant lights of the city and the dull black edifice they had dropped in the middle as a command center. “Reconstruction Nexus” they called it in the leaflets they kept dropping on every village they could spot.\n\n“This cutting edge modular facility will serve as the central hub of the Sol Consortium’s reconstruction efforts. It serves as a home base for the J9 Precipitators hard at work in the upper atmosphere and houses the peacekeepers ensuring your safety throughout the area surrounding Ouranopolis.”\n\nLyle snorted at the thought, puffing a bit of dust out of his red nose.\n\nPicking up his pace he adjusted the thin cloth covering his mouth and nose in the vain attempt to get a few clean breaths. He heard a rumbling from behind him and hurled himself to the side of the road, tucking his head and rolling down the embankment. Seconds later, a huge APC trundled by, weighed down with “peacekeepers” and entirely heedless of pedestrians. With the wind always howling in your face it took you a while to hear the things coming. Their solid tires churned the gravel of Access-01 and their engines were brutish Clodians, built for strength over grace, but no sound overpowered the ever-driving wind for long.\n\nFor a long moment Ariston just lay there in the ditch, his chest laboring in the thinned air. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine it was a year ago and he was lying on green grass in Independence Park. The sky above him was a pure blue dotted with fluffy clouds here and there. A cool breeze blew from the northeast, rustling the squat native trees. All of Eleuthera’s lifeforms were rather squat, but they had a certain elegance to them. He could smell the Sunbursts in bloom all around and Eirene was next to him… Eirene.\n\nHis eyes snapped open and he looked up, not at a clear blue sky but at a whirling brown smear, streaked with darker bands. He could make out a diffuse glow on the horizon where the bloated red sun was rising. High above him he noticed one of the peculiar eddies in the dust storm that marked the presence of a Precipitator. The massive SC gravships trolled the stratosphere, straining out the dust and particulate matter kicked up by their own mass drivers a little over two standard years ago.\n"
  title: Dust Bowl, Day 704
  year: 2008
- 
  author: William Tracy
  date: 2008-09-17
  day: 17
  month: '09'
  text: "The president leaned back into the couch on Air Force One with a smile and a sigh. She had been in office for only a month, but she was already getting used to the perks.\n\nThe secretary of defense cleared his throat. “Mrs. President, we need to talk.”\n\n“Yes?” she sat up again.\n\n“As you may recall, in 2004 then-President Bush committed the United States to making a manned landing on Mars by 2020. You are going to have to tell the American people that it isn’t going to happen.”\n\n“Well, if it’s a budget matter–”\n\n“No it isn’t. We cannot land a man on Mars.”\n\n“Really? I listened to NASA’s presentation last week, and their plan seemed pretty complete.”\n\n“Technology is not the issue, either. We landed on the moon in 1969! Yet we haven’t gone back since 1972.”\n\n“Well, manned moon missions are expensive. Funding dried up.”\n\nThe secretary shook his head. “That’s only half of the story. In 1973, both the United States and Russian governments secretly signed a pact to make no manned missions to the moon or beyond.”\n\nFor the first time, the president looked concerned. “What?”\n\nHe tried a different tack. “We’ve had working nuclear rockets since the sixties that could easily and cheaply get us to Mars and beyond. Did we use them? No!” The secretary leaned forward. “Instead, the United States government clandestinely funneled money into Greenpeace to protest the use of nuclear power in any form, specifically to generate political opposition to any such project.”\n\n“Well, Greenpeace is an environmental organization. Why wouldn’t they protest nuclear power?”\n\n“It’s clean, and essentially renewable if you use breeder reactors. A nuclear power plant actually produces less radioactive waste than a coal-fired plant that releases radon gas straight into the atmosphere!”\n\n“Well, after Chernobyl, who could blame–”\n\n“The Chernobyl incident was triggered deliberately.”\n\nThe president looked shocked.\n\n“The reactor melted down after every single safety system present was disabled for a ‘test’. The Russians aren’t stupid. Sabotaging Chernobyl was their way of holding up their end of the bargain.”\n\n“You’re telling me that for thirty years the United States and Russia have been secretly pushing anti-nuclear propaganda?”\n\n“That’s not all. We’ve had complete—highly classified—plans for faster-than-light spaceship drives since the late eighties. Never tested, but the physicists say they should work.”\n\n“But why?”\n\n“In 1972, the United States and Russian governments were contacted by an extraterrestrial agent. Our planet was brought to their attention by the X-ray radiation generated from nuclear tests. At their behest, we halted manned exploration of the solar system.”\n\n“What are you trying to say?”\n\n“They agreed not to vaporize us as long as we stay on the reservation.”\n"
  title: Conspiracy Theory
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Ben Spivey
  date: 2008-09-18
  day: 18
  month: '09'
  text: "10:25am, on the wall hung an old analog clock. The second hand ticked once forward then once back; the battery was close to dead. Josh sat in front of his pc; its glow illuminated his sharp face.\n\nBehind him his fiancé slept under a neon blue blanket. Her arm hung over the bed’s edge making the implant barcode visible on her wrist. The numbers read 9780502. They signified everything from bank records to birth caste.\n\nHe flicked up the room’s light switch. The bulb hesitated to glow and the numbers on his wrist read 9780500. Untouchable.\n\n“Wake up Scarlet.” He said.\n\nShe pulled the blue over her amber hair, “Sleepy” her voice came through muffled like static.\n\nHe pulled the blanket past her waist. She put her hands on her face, “The light,” she moaned.\n\nHe put on his parka and pulled the hood over his forehead; strapped his boots.\n\nOut of bed she wiggled into a pair of black leather pants that complimented the tank top she slept in, as well as her curves.\n\n11:15am, garbage, knee high, lined the streets gutters. Caste 00 was restricted to the slums, the alleys. 02 moved freely.\n\n11:19am, blanket sky was gray as the sun selectively broke through in circled spots.\n\n“How do I look?” she asked pushing Audrey Hepburn sized glasses to the top of her head.\n\n“Stunning,” he said while patting his pocket, making sure he remembered his wallet.\n\n11:27am, brown brick building, Tokyo neon sign read: Red Shift.\n\nHe took her by the hips and held her close, “That’s the place.”\n\nThey stand for a second deep in each other’s eyes.\n\n“You deserve this,” she said.\n\nInside the Red Shift an anorexic man who looked like a Soho street dealer said, “You’re late,” as he disappeared behind a red taffeta curtain. From behind the curtain he said, “Name’s David.”\n\n11:46am, he reappeared, goggles strapped to his face. “Payment?”\n\nJosh put $78 onto the counter. David’s eyes reflected through the goggle’s black tint. Behind the taffeta curtain was a hallway decorated exclusively with Virgin Mary candles and pictures.\n\n11:51am, “Sit down,” David said opening a case full of various electronic gadgets and rusted surgical tools. “Give me your wrist. Relax. First a shot first, disrupt the tags.”\n\n“Will this work?”\n\n“You’ll be caste zero two before you know it.”\n\nThe needle went in smooth; David smiled crooked.\n\n11:54am. “I feel dizzy,” Josh said.\n\n“That’s your girl out there?”\n\nJosh nodded like a drunk, “Scarlet.” He slid out of his chair like a dead fish. The floor was cold and ubiquitous. “Drugged me,” he squeaked and coughed. He watched the room twist and spin. It reminded him of when he was a child at the park. His legs couldn’t understand his brain telling them to stand. He dragged his weight toward the exit, toward David walking away, toward Scarlet. He gasped air; his vision turned black\n\n11:59am,  “Scarlet?” David asked, resting his sandpaper elbows on the curve of the front counter.\n\n“Everything alright?”\n\n“Fine,” he assured her, he paused, “Follow me.” They walked past Virgin Mary. “I’ve got my own problems you know? I’m double zero too,” David held up his scared wrist, removed flesh; he’d long cutout his barcode. “To be set free; you’re my ticket, I need your barcode.”\n\nIn a flash she sees Josh laying flat, his eyes glossed. “God,” She gulped; turned too run; she felt a needle slide into her neck.\n\n“You won’t feel a thing,” David said as she collapsed to the floor. Holding her wrist he began to cut out her barcode.\n"
  title: Red Shift
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Steven C. Rockoff
  date: 2008-09-19
  day: 19
  month: '09'
  text: "There was no blood, just the smell of ozone.  That’s the thing about lasers.  They’re cold, impersonal, and efficient; like a seductive bureaucrat.  There is something comforting about blood, about seeing your life escape.  But here I was, flung on the floor, with a small hole in my suit, just left of the tie.  That was it.  All I had to show for the violence.  C’est la vie, I suppose.\n\nIn my right hand, a photomatic hand-cannon: friend, lover, confidante, dispatcher of goons.  Just out of reach, to my left hand, the briefcase.  Monopoles filaments, ten of them.  Just a handful of scrap, but they were enough.  Enough for me to retire.  Enough for me to get killed.  And there he was, the killer, all 200 pounds of mean just a few feet away from where I was slumped.  He lay face-first on the floor.  The back of his blue suit was covered with holes, as if someone had used him to put out their cigarettes.  He was dead, stone dead.  Still, he had gotten off that shot, that one shot.  And here I was.  Here we were, I suppose.  And the pale Martian light filtered through the window into the lonely office.\n\nIt had started with a dame.  It usually does.  She was green, bright green, with feelers on her head that bounced in step with the swing of her hips. Her dress was yellow, like the sun, like warmth.  She told me a story, the dead father, the shady dealings, that she wanted to sort it all out, just get it over with.  I didn’t believe it, but I didn’t have to- I needed the work, she needed a private eye.  It started out all right, a little legwork, staking out the family provisions business.  Wasn’t hard to figure out, her father was a made man, one of the old families from Arabia Terra.  Half the restaurants in New New Amsterdam bought supplies from the business, and the rest paid anyway.  But she didn’t just want the information; she wanted the will, a manila folder in a black briefcase.  I didn’t trust her, but I didn’t see it coming either.\n\nI scheduled a meeting with one of the runners.  We met at a café, I paid him, and he handed it over: simple.  Must not have known what was in the briefcase, probably dead now.  I brought it back to my office, and was just about to pour myself a gin and tonic when the door crashed in.  My back was to the door; I turned around and even managed to squeeze off a couple shots.  Then I fell, like a feather on the moon.  It was my lung.  The laser had punctured it.  I couldn’t shout, I couldn’t speak.  His laser was low-intensity, and not everything had cauterized. I was bleeding, but only on the inside.  Story of my life.\n\nI heard steps.  I struggled to get up, even a little.  With my last effort, I raised the gun to the doorframe.  That’s when she came in, yellow dress and all.  I couldn’t make out her expression.  Everything was dull, dark.  I couldn’t keep the laser level.  She stepped over the dead man and looked down at me.  An angel, or a devil?  Bismillah.\n"
  title: Blood and Ozone
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Peter Carenza
  date: 2008-09-20
  day: 20
  month: '09'
  text: "APRIL 14, 2065\n\n3:30 AM\n\nThe phone startled Lofton out of a restless sleep. He poked the speaker button.\n\n“Lofton.”\n\n“We’ve got a situation Delta at the compound, Rick…. It’s a runner. This is serious.”\n\n“Do you have any idea where he’s headed?”\n\n“We’re working on it.”\n\n7:20 PM\n\nIt was a little over an hour to curtain rise. Offstage, the producer fidgeted nervously with a pencil. Suddenly, he caught a glimpse of a hunched figure in what appeared to be a nightshirt holding a dufflebag.\n\n“Hey you…” he shouted to the tall, thin gentleman whose garments had obviously been underfitted. Then he noticed, gave a slight look of disappointment, and said, “Oh, you must be our Abe. It’s about time… most important day of our lifetime, and I thought our Abe Lincoln wasn’t going to show. Dressing room’s upstairs, but hurry.”\n\nThe pseudo-Abe gave a nod of his head and disappeared up the stairs. For a second, the producer looked somewhat out of sorts. Casting sure picked a good one, he thought. This actor was a dead ringer for Lincoln.\n\n8:08 PM\n\nPhone attached to his ear, Lofton was trying to make sense of it all with Desmond, the assistant director.\n\n“So you’re saying it was Ronnie’s idea?”\n\n“Swear to god, Rick. He confessed when we pressed him.”\n\n“At least, it gives us a good idea where he’s headed,” Rick affirmed.\n\n“Yeah I know…” Desmond paused briefly, contemplating. “Ironic, isn’t it?”\n\n8:45 PM\n\nThe ceremony started on time. The spotlight turned from the flag processional onstage, upwards and to the right, to a gaudily-decorated balcony with burgundy seats. The partition wall was, as it last had been two centuries earlier, removed. Within the booth sat four distinguished guests in period garb, actors representing the four who occupied the same luxurious space that fateful spring night: Major Henry Rathbone, his fiancée Clara Harris, and the Lincolns, Abraham and Mary Lincoln. The narrative continued, scenes from An American Cousin interspersed. Lincoln’s double, indeed a stunning likeness of the former President, slid his hand into his coat pocket and pulled out a white handkerchief.\n\n9:00 PM\n\nAmid a thundering ovation, the president stood, still clutching his handkerchief in his left hand while he waved with his right. But as the applause died down, he didn’t sit. Rather, he slowly unwrapped the silk cloth and pulled from it an antique Derringer, glaring at the Presidential box, where President Clarke could only watch in stunned amazement, raising the gun from his side and pointing it at the Commander-in-chief.\n\nIn an instant, there was a loud crack. It was not the pseudo-Lincoln, whose limp body tumbled from the balcony to the orchestra below, following the dropped Derringer replica that Lincoln had stolen from the bound and gagged actor in the alley. The well-positioned rifle of Rick Lofton from a balcony above and across acquired its mark.\n\n10:15 PM\n\nMinutes after clearing the crowd, Lofton stood outside Ford’s Theatre with a cigarette, watching the emergency personnel filter in and out like ants. Desmond approached him from behind.\n\n“Is everything secure?” asked Desmond.\n\n“Perfectly. Our men will divert the ambulance and recover the body.”\n\nLofton took a long, deep puff. “How’s the replacement coming?”\n\n“Unfortunately, we’re running a little low on DNA… and the President will have to wait a few more years for a new advisor.”\n\n“And Reagan?”\n\n“He’s a little too wily for his own good, so he’ll be terminated, replaced, and isolated… Imagine that… John Wilkes Booth, Clarke’s distant relative.”\n\n“Yeah. Guess vengeance is genetic.”\n\nHe stomped out his cigarette and walked back inside.\n"
  title: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit…
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Ryan Somma
  date: 2008-09-21
  day: 21
  month: '09'
  text: "Ng’s eyes were straining as far as they could go in their sockets to get a look at the brand new shiny avataris sapiens parked at the end of the conference room table. His client’s attention was on the current speaker, a real-life sales person local to the building who was selling some sort of recently evolved market indexing algorithm. Ng was a real-life person also, but not in the context of this meeting. The avataris sapiens was not real-life in any context.\n\nNg had gotten a good look at it coming into the room thanks to his client lingering on it for what seemed like an eternity before greeting the other meeting members. The avataris sapiens was elegant in design and motion as it stood to greet everyone as they arrived, mimicking the motions of it user.\n\nNg’s suit was impeccable; his makeup and hair stylized so much as to render him almost artificial to everyone in the room, but the avataris sapiens was even less human. No matter how much Ng sculpted his body at the gym, lasered and tattooed his eyebrows into perfection, or whitened his teeth, the avataris was truly artificial.\n\nNg stifled a yawn, pursing his lips together tightly with a long, deep inhale so as not to draw any attention to himself. The client had brought him online at four this morning, which was four in the afternoon Eastern Standard time. This six am conference meeting was a natural compromise between timezones, but so was the six pm meeting Ng had attended for another client the previous night. He was fatigued and his stomach was grumbling for missing breakfast, but suppressing these human needs were what made him such a good avatar. Besides, the avataris did not need food or sleep at all.\n\n“What are the metrics on this AI?” Ng came alert as his user’s voice came through his speaker, questioning the sales rep “What kind of return can we expect from its investment choices?”\n\n“The best,” the sales rep answered confidently. “In simulation, our AI can outperform the greatest stockbrokers in the world. We are even planning a public demonstration of its superiority. It will be like when Deep Blue beat Kasparov at chess, historic.”\n\n“And so another human chore will be automated,” a voice to Ng’s left said.\n\nNg’s visor-harness flashed, and Ng turned his head as his user’s attention was drawn to the speaker. It was the avataris, beautifully artificial, replicating its user’s speech and movement with more grace and elegance than any real human could perform.\n\nThe sales rep replied with a jovial quip that Ng did not hear because his user was focused on the avataris. Ng’s breath caught in his throat as he imagined his user admiring it, as if admiring a private jet or corner office. Ng knew he was to the avataris sapiens as renting was to owning, and he was the medium through which his client was seeing the next best thing.\n\nThen, to his horror, the avataris turned its head slightly, noticing his stare, and it smiled at him with otherworldly perfection. Was it acknowledging the unspoken compliment in Ng’s user’s fascination? Or was it a knowing smile, intended for Ng and his obsolescence?\n\nNg’s heart pounded in his throat, and his stomach grumbled.\n"
  title: Wage-Slave Avatar
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2008-09-22
  day: 22
  month: '09'
  text: "I felt sick.\n\nI had a fever and a headache and my joints were complaining. I shuffled across my carpet into the light. I stood looking out over the city while holding a steaming zipmug of CitruSinus in my hand. The windows overlooked a new age of wonder. It was a sunny day.\n\nIt would continue to be sunny until 4:10PM when a light shower would cover up the sunset. It’s the way I organized it. I’m the mayor. One of my duties before the dawn was to decide the day’s weather. It was my favourite part of my job these days. The job had gotten rough.\n\nThe secession of the East Side into its own forceful municipality had hurt my ratings. The arming of the homeless by the opposition had further damaged my career. The tasers and plasmawatt shockers were ostensibly for defense but assaults had doubled since they handed them out and vigilante action was on the rise as a result. The police were threatening to strike. I was about a day away from declaring martial law and going down in history as a Bloodmayor.\n\nThe city I had tried to help was almost out of my control. The people who voted for me were threatening to riot.  I sighed and looked at my city and took another sip of my drink. There was smoke coming from the east side again. I heard distant sirens on the way.\n\nI told the window to zoom in on the source of the smoke. The news channels covering that area blossomed in my peripheral vision as the window targeted and refocused. An ambulance had been tipped over and was burning in another east side riot. The lifeless drivers were being torn apart by a laughing crowd of pierced hysterical head-boys.\n\nI thumbed my lapel and gave the order for a clearout. Two seconds later, a blast of light lanced down from the sky and incinerated a circular footprint ten meters in diameter around the ambulance.\n\nI looked up and I could see that the maser had burned a perfect circle through the clouds.  I watched it’s hard edges start to drift and soften and become chaotic cloud again.\n\nStory of my life.  I shook my head. I made my decision.\n\nThe next weather tapquest I sent out was going to read “two months of rain”.\n\nNo mercy. History be damned. This city had to be brought to heel.\n"
  title: Mayor
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Ben ‘Inorian’ Le Chevalier
  date: 2008-09-23
  day: 23
  month: '09'
  text: "Invas charged forward, his sights set firmly on his enemy. The blood was rushing through his body, filling him with life and vigour. The only thing he could see was his prey. He leapt, and bore his adversary to the ground. His spear moved smoothly through the man’s lower abdomen until it thudded into the ground. The body slowly sank down the rough wooden shaft. Invas stood up and let loose a roar that sent birds flying from the nearby trees and small creatures bounding off through the parched undergrowth. Something was wrong. He turned, pulling the spear from his fallen enemy and levelling it at the new threat. As he watched with horror, the crude rope holding the flint onto the wood shaft unravelled, and before it hit the dust he felt a spear penetrating his chest.\n\nThe world went dark.\n\nInvas charged forward, his eyes scanning the enemy ranks. His brothers in arms, his countrymen ran with him. He found a suitable mark in the enemy lines and hastened his pace. Invas drew back his arm, felt the weight of his weapon and balanced it, ready to strike. He ducked under the enemy’s spear and struck, smoothly running the bronze sword home, through the leather and deep into the soldier’s stomach. He tore it out with a grunt and spun, deflecting the sword that had been heading for his back. His new adversary turned the deflection into a spin, and brought the sword round, redirecting it into Invas’ own chest, tearing through bronze, skin and bone.\n\nThe world went dark.\n\nInvas charged forward, gunshots firing all around him. He held his Enfield .303 to his chest and, head down, rushed towards the enemy position. Bullets whistled past him, hitting more than a few of his squad, but he kept moving. He was on the enemy emplacement. Invas shot the first man he saw, taking him out with a clean shot through the eye. Not having time to reload he smoothly stabbed the next man he saw with the bayonet. As he struggled to free it from the fallen man Invas felt a cold rush, and a blade in his lower back. As he fell to the floor he heard a man shout ‘Was zum Teufel?!’ and a gun cock.\n\nThe world went dark.\n\nInvas charged forward, dodging swiftly between pulses left and right. His scanners picked up a signature in the nearby asteroids and he ran the engine to full throttle. He powered up the mech’s weapons as he rounded the rock and let loose a volley of his own pulses. The enemy mech was punctured by several of them, and failed to respond to its pilot’s frantic commands. Invas put the saber of his mech through its stomach and kicked it away. As he flew from the asteroids another volley of pulses fired at him. He twisted the mech and tried to escape, but a pulse caught his main engine, which offlined. As he desperately tried to get the engine to respond another volley of pulses squarely hit him. He was thrown backwards, and the cockpit filled with red light.\n\nThe world went dark.\n\nFloating in limbo, Invas wondered what the next life would hold.\n"
  title: The Next Life
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Roi R. Czechvala
  date: 2008-09-24
  day: 24
  month: '09'
  text: "It was just a routine patrol. Twelve men. Whitcomb was on point; I was bringing up the rear. He had just forded a narrow stream when they hit us. Claymores blew hell out of the main body. Seven died instantly. There was no mistaking that. When chunks of bodies fly, somebody wasn’t going home.\n\nA couple of guys returned fire, shooting blindly into the jungle, the others were too stunned to move. Whitcomb splashed back across the creek. He emptied mags and reloaded as fast as possible; shooting randomly.\n\nGreen tracers ripped out of the dense brush. One tore through Mock’s head, still burning bright when it slammed into a tree behind him. Damnit, we were from the same home town. Now, suddenly, he was face down in the muck. Dead. It could have been me.\n\nI pumped my 203 as fast as I could feed shells into the breech, lobbing grenades everywhere. I could hear the muffled “crump” of their explosions. They did little damage. Their blasts were absorbed by the thick foliage and mud.\n\nI was protected from the hail of bullets by the roots of a tree I had fallen behind. The barrage was relentless. I winced at the screams of rage and pain as the guys fought back, furiously spraying the jungle; chucking frags everywhere. All I could do was pop up and fire a burst wherever I saw a muzzle flash. I  jumped up and squeezed off a short burst. A searing pain ripped through my arm. I fell back into my hole, cowering like a frightened rabbit.\n\nThe firefight seemed to last for hours, but it had been only minutes from the first blast to the final round that whizzed past. I could hear the muffled voices of gooks in the forest. I eased up just enough to see them slowly emerge from the mist. I watched the bastards viscously stabbing the bodies of my friends to make sure they were dead.\n\nOne started yelling in that tinker toy language of theirs, motioning the others to Walker’s body. They prodded him, then were silent for a moment. A fierce argument broke out and they beat feet back into the undergrowth. I waited for hours before leaving my sanctuary. I wanted to be sure the slopes were gone. I had to collect the dog tags, the little metal tokens that proved my friends had once lived.\n\nI couldn’t see very well in the growing gloom, but I finally managed to make out a blood smeared piece of aluminum on what had been Walker’s chest. I tried to pick it up, but it wouldn’t budge. What the hell? I grabbed and pulled…his body moved with it. It was a rib. I fell back in horror and stumbled over Mock’s body. The back of his skull was a twisted wreckage of metal and wire. I turned my head to vomit. I saw a thick silvery rod poking out of Shavers leg where a femur should have been. What the hell was going on?\n\nHorrified, I crashed through the brush. Tripping over an exposed root, I was sent sprawling. I pushed myself up, got to my feet. I glanced down at my forearm where the bullet had grazed me, the glint of metal caught my eye. Confusion left me, and was replaced with a wave of realization.\n\nI chambered a grenade in my 203, and slapped in a fresh mag. I headed back to the fire base. Somebody had some explaining to do.\n"
  title: Ambush
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Asher Wismer
  date: 2008-09-25
  day: 25
  month: '09'
  text: "It was about the size of a leaf, but a little flatter, with scalloped edges and covered all over with a glimmering sheen of circuitry. At one end, a little nozzle protruded, making a gentle swell in the surface of the leaf, while other, smaller holes ringed the circumference.\n\nThere were millions of them.\n\nI watched from the dark surface of Mercury, feeling the faint, persistent gravity pull of the Sun beneath my feet. Mercury itself was just large enough (to one standing on its surface) to obscure the Sun from view, but everything in the “night” sky still seemed unnaturally bright.\n\nI shifted in my heavy suit, resisting the urge to take my helmet off and scratch that point right between my shoulder blades, and watched the soft rain of leaves.\n\nThey weren’t really leaves, of course. With micro-micro processing reaching the theoretical limit possible without resorting to quantum mechanics, these were little more than chips of solar cell material, an electrolytic fuel generator, and a tiny gas reservoir in the center. Smelters, assemblers, and of course the hundreds of redundant computer chips that would one day form a cohesive brain.\n\nIn a few hours, the sun would rise over Mercury’s horizon, and the little leaf-ships would absorb and release massive amounts of solar energy, accelerating to .05 the speed of light.\n\nHere, on the current dark side of the slowly rotating mini-planet, everything was gray and dusk, no sharp shadows of any sort. Even the shining star of Venus was dulled by distance, and the only things reflecting were the little leaf-ships. Far beyond, the glow of Earth was dulled by pollution and decay.\n\nOnce the little ships reached the Asteroid Belt, they would home in on Ceres, the largest known asteroid. They would use their miniscule fuel stash to decelerate and, buffeted by the faint solar winds, would land on Ceres’s surface. There, the smelters would smelt, the assemblers would assemble, and eventually they would build a rocket engine to steer Ceres out of its millennia-long orbit.\n\nIt would crash into the North Pole of Mars, vaporizing the mostly CO2 icecap and release it into the atmosphere. The added atmosphere thickness would help warm the planet, taking years off the projected time necessary to terraform it.\n\nI would be long dead, of course. It had taken all my money to build the little fleet, and all the fuel I had left to get me to Mercury. This was my final project, my life’s work, and I would last long enough in my reinforced suit to watch the little leaf-ships flash into life with the Sun’s rays. The morphine injector would do the rest before the sun had a chance to boil me alive.\n\nFor the living, I make my final sacrifice.\n"
  title: Très Salute!
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2008-09-26
  day: 26
  month: '09'
  text: "As I flew through the Rio Bravo Corridor in western Texas, the town of El Paso rose above the horizon.  I banked northward and began a gradual arc to align my ship with the Juárez Flyway.  I descended to 100 meters and throttled back to 50 kph.  The streets appeared to be deserted.  I knew that I was taking a big chance returning to Earth.  But, I was willing to risk death to be with Felina.  If all went well, in two days we’d dock at my hideout in the badlands of the asteroid belt, assuming we could avoid the Rangers.  I spotted Rosa’s Cantina on the left, and picked out a landing bay on the upper level.  After touchdown, I powered down the ship’s reactor and popped the canopy.  Sensor readings were clear.  I unbuckled my harness, and began to climb down the exterior of the ship using the “holds” along the fuselage.  When my right foot touched the ground I heard a deep metallic voice from the shadows behind me, “Don’t turn around, Robbins.”\n\nDamn, an android, I realized too late.  If the bounty hunter had been human, I might have had a chance.  Humans can be bribed, or out-gunned, but not a ‘droid.  Using the lowest power setting on my implant, I mentally instructed the ship to arm the port thrusters.  Hopefully, the ‘droid was too far away to detect the low intensity transmission.  It was a desperate move, but if I could knock it off balance for just a fraction of a second, I might be able to reach my blaster.\n\nI could see the ‘droid’s distorted reflection in the polished skin of my ship.  I watched it approach, weapon drawn.  When it walked in front of the thrusters, I transmitted the command.  At the instant the thrusters fired, I spun and reached for my blaster, but I was too slow.  I felt a deep burning pain in my side as the ‘droid’s neuronic disrupter hit its mark.  The agonizing pain spread to my back and legs, and I collapsed.  Stars exploded in my eyes when the back of my head hit the tarmac.  I could taste blood as my universe convulsed.  The ‘droid stowed its disrupter and stood above me, making sure that I was neutralized.  It picked me up by the front of my flightsuit and pinned my back against the fuselage of my ship.  “Your running days were over, Robbins,” it said as it placed a neutralizing collar around my neck.  My next stop would be the Rehabilitation Facility in San Angelo, where I would get a mind wipe and a “Correctional” implant; one that would force me to serve humanity for the rest of my life.  Most outlaws ended up as Rangers, where we’d be used to hunt down our compadres.  No, I concluded with conviction.  I could not allow that to happen.  It must end here.  I forced the relentless waves of pain from my mind, and focused on my ship’s master control console.  I ordered the computer to bring the reactor on line, and to initiate an immediate self-destruct sequence.\n\nSeconds later, I was looking into the ‘droid’s bloodless “eyes” as the ship’s reactor began to whine to a deafening crescendo.  Its mechanical irises spiraled open as it realized what I had done.  I managed a half smile as I spat, “See you in hell, ‘droid.”  The last image I saw was the relatively dark silhouette of my shadow across the ‘droid’s back as it attempted in vein to escape the antimatter explosion.\n"
  title: The Bounty Hunter
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Alec Ow
  date: 2008-09-27
  day: 27
  month: '09'
  text: "My parents always told me the Cold was a gateway bug.  All throughout middle-school and for most of high-school I was pretty clean.  Then I saw one of my friends coming to school with the sniffles.\n\nHe didn’t really try to hide it from anyone, thinking back now it seemed like he was wearing it like a badge with pride.  I have to admit I got a little curious so I asked him about it.  The whole time he was talking about how it makes you feel the world differently, how it numbs your senses.  I couldn’t imagine why anyone would put themselves through that willingly.  I laughed it off as just a bunch of rebellious teens trying to shake their fists at authority.\n\nIt wasn’t until I tried it that I started to understand.  Having been without disease for innumerable generations, Humankind had lost touch with what it was to be mortal.  Having humanity’s essence backed up in the central database ensured that death was only a temporary condition.  There was a movement a few generations back where a bunch of death seekers got together to find the wildest way to die.  They got it all wrong, when one dies only the moment before death is felt.  It wasn’t a very long high.\n\nWhen death is trivial, everyone’s a god.  When everyone’s a god, the concept of a God is lost through dilution.\n\nMy first time at a bug party was pretty wild.  The wildest bunch was probably the STDers.  Something about adding sex to the equation definitely made everything seem so much more taboo.  I took my hit of de-immunizer and hit up a double dose of the common cold and a shot of influenza then finished off with an accelerator.  We hung out all weekend in a daze.  It was the first time I’ve ever really felt human.\n\nI think I should wrap up this journal entry soon before my Alzheimer’s kicks in.  It reminds me of what my parents used to say, about how the Cold is the gateway bug.  I still remember my first time being submerged in the culture.  I saw one of my friends coming to school with the sniffles.  He almost wore it with pride…\n"
  title: Bug Catching
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Bill Lombardi
  date: 2008-09-28
  day: 28
  month: '09'
  text: "He had been awake for seventy-two hours – twenty-four spent in an acclamation unit.  His legs hadn’t adjusted yet and he had trouble standing, so he sat at an unshielded viewport in the common area looking off into space, sipping from a nutrient pack.  His stasis pod had failed.  According to the AI, the overall damage it had sustained was ‘catastrophic’.  Not just for the unit, he thought.  Jon Merritt was an engineer and the damage was beyond his expertise.  He was lucky he wasn’t dead.  He stretched he legs, trying to work out the stiffness.  It seemed to make them worse.  Getting up slowly, he limped to the habitation module.  The crew consisted of six: Daniel Hahira – captain, Adair Quinn – first officer, Billy Dillard – helm, Aria Lopez – navigation, Doc Mercer and himself.  Six stasis modules – no backups.  Jon leaned against the doorframe of the hibernation chamber.  The indicators on five of the pods cycled periodically, flashing green.  Their occupants faintly illuminated by the glow of the access panels above each one – except for his, the sixth – open and dark.  He thought about waking Quinn, but he wasn’t ready to do that just yet.\n\nA few days past and he felt better.  His legs cramped less and he had beaten the AI at backgammon, two out of three games.  It wasn’t until the seventh day while in his cabin rereading the last transmissions received from his family before the Arizona had passed out of communications range that it hit him.  He couldn’t go on like this indefinitely.  He decided that he would wake Quinn in twelve hours.\n\n—\n\n“What do you mean I don’t have clearance?”\n\n“Only the captain and first officer can override stasis protocols.”\n\n“Gary, this is an emergency.  I can’t go back into hibernation.  You know this.  So, override and wake Quinn.”\n\n“I can not, Jon.  The protocols prohibit me from doing so.”\n\n“And in the case of an emergency?”\n\n“Standard procedure is to wake the engineer.”\n\nJon sighed.  “I am awake and that’s the problem.”\n\n“Do you need my assistance with anything else?”\n\nHe wanted to throttle the AI.  “Yes.  I want you to wake Quinn.”  There was no response.  He slammed his fist down on the console and getting up, went forward to the bridge.  Slumping into the navigator’s chair he folded his arms and looked around at the silent command center.  All systems were at minimal for the long trek across space.  He thought about waking the first officer without the assistance of the AI, but there were too many things that could go wrong and he couldn’t compensate for them without help.  Jon was looking at the Nav console when he noticed the lifeboat ejection system.  He sat up straight.  Of course, he thought.  He would have to take one of the lifeboats offline in order to activate it and create a tether, but he could do it.  Jon moved aft to the Evac compartment and went to work.  After a while he was able to release LB-1 and prime it.  The door popped open with a hiss.  It would take about twenty-four hours for him to get prepped for stasis and then another three hours for the sleep cycle to complete.  He just hoped that once he jettisoned, the magnetic lifeline would hold. If not it wouldn’t matter either way.  He’d never wake up again.  And that had to be better than spending seventy-five years alone with Gary.\n"
  title: Lifeboat
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2008-09-29
  day: 29
  month: '09'
  text: "Inspector Jeffery Lastrade greeted Philip Homes and Bruce Wattson at the entrance of the Metropolitan Police Headquarters in downtown London.  “Thanks for coming on such short notice,” said Lastrade as he pumped Homes’ hand.  “I desperately need your help.  I’m at my wits end with last night’s murder of Regina Moriarty.”\n\n“I thought it was an iron clad case,” remarked Homes.  “The BBC reported that surveillance holocameras record Robert Moriarty vaporizing his wife whilst they were strolling in the park.”\n\nLastrade escorted his guests to the interrogation room, and paused.  “Let’s just say that the case has become… complicated.”  The door whooshed aside to reveal two identical suspects sitting at a table.\n\n“My Lord,” exclaimed Wattson.  “Twins!”\n\n“Not quite,” replied Lastrade.  “They’re both Robert Moriarty, but one of them is a time traveler.  I need Professor Homes’ help figuring out which one is the actual murderer.”\n\n“I say throw them both in jail,” suggested Wattson.  “After all, they are the same person.  What difference does it make which one actually fired the phaser?”\n\n“I can’t imprison an innocent man,” pointed out Lastrade.  “Only one of them committed the murder.  The other may have known nothing about it.”  Lastrade turned toward Homes.  “Do you think you can figure out which one is the murderer?”\n\n“Without a doubt,” Homes confidently stated.  “It’s a simple matter of eliminating all that is impossible.  Then, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.  According to my experience, time travelers always create unambiguous inconsistencies it the fabric of space-time.  By asking these gentlemen a series of probing questions, I will be able to irrefutably expose the Moriarty that doesn’t belong in this continuum.  Then, through sheer deductive reasoning, I will be able to…”\n\n“Confound it Homes,” interrupted Wattson angrily.  “Why do you always insists on seeking a complex solution when a simpler one is readily at hand?  I can solve this mystery in two seconds.”  With that, Wattson drew a small phaser pistol from his coat pocket and blasted a one-inch diameter hole clean through the right hand of the nearest Robert Moriarty.  The injured man clutched his smoldering hand and collapsed to the floor screaming like a banshee.  Meanwhile, Wattson rhythmically bobbed up and down on the balls of his feet, smiling proudly.\n\n“Good Lord, man.  What have you done?”\n\n“What?” questioned Wattson.  “Surely you see that I’ve solved the case.  Why, it’s obvious.  Do I have to explain my simple solution to the Great Phillip Homes?  Look at the right hand of this Moriarty,” he motioned toward the un-shot Moriarty trembling at the table.  “There’s no scar.  The Moriarty that I shot must have been the one from the future that committed the murder.  If I had shot the one from the present, this one would now have a scar on his hand.”\n\n“My dear Wattson,” said Homes as he confiscated the phaser, “you use reason like a politician uses the truth.  What made you conclude that the time traveler came from the future?  The past is the more obvious choice; there are far fewer paradoxes.  You may have just shot the Moriarty from our time-line.  Furthermore, it has yet to be proven that the time traveler is the actual murderer.”\n\n“Oh, [cough].  Well, perhaps I may have been a bit hasty,” Wattson reluctantly acknowledged.  “In that case Homes, if you don’t think you’ll be needing my assistance any longer, I shall wait for you in the pub.  Good day, Inspector Lastrade.”   As the emergency medical team burst into the interrogation room, Wattson unceremoniously scampered out the door, and down the hallway.\n"
  title: A Study in Logic
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Andy Bolt
  date: 2008-09-30
  day: 30
  month: '09'
  text: "WELCOME, Chip Winkler, TO STORYWEB 9.0!  PLEASE INPUT LITBASE:\n\nErnest Hemingway’s The Old Man and The Sea\n\nLITBASE FOUND!  LAUNCHING . . .\n\nEnrique was mindswiped by the storybot as he dangled from the 93rd floor window of the Kentaka building.  He was a little preoccupied rewiring the entire structure for atmospheric transdigitization, but he always liked contributing to storyweb.\n\nGREETINGS, Enrique Mendoza!  YOU HAVE BEEN RANDOMLY SELECTED TO CONTRIBUTE TO TODAY’S STORYWEB TALE BEGINNING:\n\nThe old man had gone eighty-four days without taking a fish.\n\nPLEASE INPUT LINE:\n\nFighting the tide in his fully submersible XLJ thermodynamic subship, the old man deployed a series of fish-seeking nanobaits with attractive carbon fiber lures.\n\nLINE REGISTERED!  THANK YOU, Enrique Mendoza!\n\nThe storybot found Mindee Walsh as she was on her thirteenth shot of semi-intelligent Nuevo Tequila.  Her boyfriend had just dumped her, and she was out doing her best to erase the memory of his face.  It took her twenty minutes to notice the blinking prompt in her right eye.\n\nAnd he was miserable because nobody loved him and he was probably going to die by himself all miserable and sad and miserable!\n\nLINE REGISTERED!  THANK YOU, Mindee Walsh!\n\nBilly Watson was playing Slaughterhouse 5000 on his quantum box.  He was assaulting his way through the chainsaw laser level when the storybot caught up to him.  Reading over the first paragraph distractedly, Billy found himself focusing more on the arterial spray of lupine aliens.\n\nThen the dinosaurs in helicopters attacked with their acid guns!  “Let’s get carnivorous,” said the old man.\n\nLINE REGISTERED!  THANK YOU, Billy Watson!\n\nMarion Day was in the middle of her forty thousand word dissertation on interracial relationships in postcolonial sub-Saharan Africa.\n\nI would like to unsubscribe please.\n\nLINE REGISTERED!  THANK YOU, Marion Day!\n\nMilton Wilks, an anal-retentive librarian from Greenbrier County, was alphabetizing his coupons.\n\nThat’s right, thought the old man.  I’d sure like to unsubscribe from this rain of hydrochloric thunder lizards, if only that were an option.\n\nLINE REGISTERED!  THANK YOU, Milton Wilks!\n\nFor the rest of the week, the storybot bounced from person to person.  The old man fought off the dinosaurs, mused on the nature of human existence, fell in love with a woman who turned out to be a zombie, then a robot, and then his sister, had crab cakes and fine wine on the Parisian seashore, traveled back in time to kill Hitler, unsubscribed from six separate situations, violated seven copyrights, fell asleep in the sun, denounced the president, praised the president, committed suicide, came back to life, and finally, grew himself some gills and went to live with his true love, a mermaid person from Zeta Beta VII.\n\nBy Friday, the story had ended and bounced home.  In his office, Chip Winkler smiled at his work.\n\n“Perfect!” he cried.\n\nTwo months later . . .\n\nGREETINGS, consumers!  THIS SUMMER:  A MAN.  A SEA.  THE MERMAID WHO LOVED HIM AND THE DINOSAURS WHO DIDN’T.  WILL HE DEFEAT HIS ZOMBIE ROBOT SISTER IN TIME TO BE WITH HIS TRUE LOVE?  WHICH WILL GET HIM FIRST, HITLER’S LEGION OF CYBER MONKEYS OR HIS OWN NAGGING FEELINGS OF SELF-DOUBT?  THE HUMAN SPIRIT WILL BE EXPLODED OFF ITS HINGES.  THE OCEAN JUST GOT EXISTENTIALLY DEADLIER.\n\nTHIS SUMMER: THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA\n\nBased on the novel by Ernest Hemingway\n"
  title: The Old Man and The Sea Redux
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Ben ‘Inorian’ Le Chevalier
  date: 2008-10-01
  day: '01'
  month: 10
  text: "Insanity. That’s the first thing I thought when they told me about the project. Insanity.\n\nI felt a sharp shock, followed by pain at the back of my head.\n\nWell, there goes another one. Another one of the thousands they have taken from me, but it doesn’t matter to me anymore. That was strange. Once, it had mattered, now it didn’t. The tank seemed to dull all feeling. Of course it was supposed to, physically. Perhaps the matter does affect the mind, after a time.\n\nI was one of the few. We were all selected because we had the right type of brain, the right mental architecture, the right-\n\nAnother shock. Another pain. Another one gone. I must be on top form today. I wonder what they do with them all…come to that, I wonder what they contain. Some, I’m certain, must be for the betterment of mankind. Others, the ones I worry about, the ones that keep me from tranquillity, they must be the opposite. They must be the destructive ones, the painful ones.\n\nThey’re probably the ones that hurt more, but who can tell?\n\nI’ve been in the tank for near on five years now.\n\nFor near five years I’ve been having ideas formulated in my mind, then being brutally ripped away without me ever seeing the shape of them.\n\nI laughed when they told me about the ‘think tank’. I laughed because I thought they had misunderstood the term. It had turned out that they had simply taken it further.\n\nMy ideas are no longer mine…my body is not mine, the only thing I have is my-\n\nAnother shock. Another pain.\n\nAnother one gone.\n"
  title: Think Tank
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2008-10-02
  day: '02'
  month: 10
  text: "The aliens dug our tunes.\n\nIt was sweet. They came to down to us in these big blue ships, all curves and awe-inspiring slowness through the clouds like settling continents. Freaked us right out. We, the human race, didn’t even try to attack. We’d seen this movie before. We knew that there would be no point. We just waited for them to either kill us or speak up. There wasn’t even much panic, just a global sort of cowering whimper.\n\nWide eyes in the shadows of floating leviathans, we waited, holding each other tightly.\n\n“Hey there. Uh. Hey. Right. This one right? Okay. Hello!” said the sky. It was a human voice, the kind of voice you’d hear at any old bus stop on a cel phone. Our guy, North America’s guy, was named Robert Gogas. A greek fry cook from Venice, California. The aliens had kidnapped him and told him to speak to us in our native tongue to calm us down.\n\n“They like our music but they say we have shitty transceivers. Uh, like, I mean, uh, our broadcast quality. It’s lame. They say. But they really like us. Man, this is AWESOME!” said Robert Gogas. “They’re all blue. They’re musicians, man!”\n\nAll over Europe, similar addresses were taking place as the atmosphere was turned into a giant acoustical dome. Each ship had taken a local artist and had him or her talk to the planet, to his country of origin, in the local language.\n\nThere was a flurry of translation after Pete stopped talking. He rambled on for about fifteen minutes. The upshot was this.\n\nThe aliens, named the Kursk, wanted to install giant antennae at equidistant points around earth and they wanted us to hook our datacables into them. They wanted us to funnel our libraries, television shows, podcasts, webpages, movies, songs, animations, books on tape, and spoken word into the antennae for the enjoyment of the whole universe.\n\nThey wanted to turn Earth into a radio station.\n\nWe were far from the first.\n\nThat was ten years ago. After the first year, they started to ship down billions of tiny things that looked sort of like a cross between an iPod and a throwing star.\n\nThey were universe radios. The music of a billion billion civilizations was suddenly available to us.\n\nIt’s been a fantastic decade.\n"
  title: Radio Free Earth
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Glenn Blakeslee
  date: 2008-10-03
  day: '03'
  month: 10
  text: "It’s a disease, I guess, an affliction. My body is bound to a parallel.\n\nNo, not a geometric form, but a line around the earth. I’m bound to the 38th parallel.\n\nI woke one morning dizzy, with throbbing pain in my limbs and abdomen. I hurt for days, but I found each time I went south the pain subsided. A few miles south of my home the pain and dizziness went away completely, and I actually felt good.\n\nMy friends thought I was crazy, but lent me a GPS. I found I was right on top of the parallel. I went back again and again for relief, until finally I lay down and slept there for the night. When I woke I felt wonderful, but I couldn’t go away again. It made the pain worse.\n\nI couldn’t go west, either. I could only move within a half mile of the parallel, always east. So I started walking.\n\nMy job and home were behind me forever. At first I survived off friends, and then on the kindness of strangers. At times I went for days without food, always walking east. I figured it was a magnetic thing, the cells of my body aligned along certain points. All I could do was keep walking.\n\nAm I worse off than you? Most people are bound to a region, a geographic area of a few hundred miles. The area I live in is more narrow than yours, but greater for its fantastic width. As humans we are bound to place, but my place is without end.\n\nMy family and friends figured I was obsessed, like in a movie, so they organized my eastward journey as a charity, a round-the-world walk for peace. It helped to pay the way.\n\nIt was painful crossing oceans. I spent the time asleep, mostly. Getting back to the parallel was the only way to find relief.\n\nMy route took me over the driest, most desolate place on earth. I had my pack with a little food and water, but I was so low that I was ready to lie down and die. That’s when I found Eliza.\n\nI first saw her as an indistinct speck on the horizon, but as I walked the speck moved closer until I could discern it was another person. A woman.\n\nOur paths intersected. She was the barest slice of a girl, but I loved her instantly. She spoke my language. We sat and talked for hours. I didn’t want to move forward. I asked her to walk with me.\n\nShe said that she could not.\n\nShe told me she was bound to a great circle, like mine. Her path would diverge from mine, as it followed the ecliptic rather than the purely geographic. We plotted our paths on the map from my pack. They would cross again in the American Midwest.\n\nIf we could find our way there, we could stay together in a hospitable place —our lives complete within a half-mile radius. I would gladly give up my narrow freedom for love and companionship.\n\nWe made love, and we stayed in the spot of our confluence until our food almost ran out. I took her picture with my cell phone. We made plans to meet and then we parted, our paths gradually diverging.\n\nIt was very difficult.\n\nI made my way around the earth, across on my line, anticipating our meeting. And here I am in this fine town –Saint John, Kansas.\n\nSo, sir, have you seen this girl?\n\nNo?\n\nHow about you, sir? Have you seen this girl?\n"
  title: Saint John
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Glenn Head
  date: 2008-10-04
  day: '04'
  month: 10
  text: "Transmission 211.\n\nIs it on, Greg? Is it? Okay.\n\nToday our situation – stranded on Jupiter’s ice moon Europa – has worsened. Todd disappeared last night. He wasn’t in camp, by our ship, and we thought he’d gone on a surveillance trip. We found him dead this morning. He was frozen solid, metres away from the camp’s external therm-lamps. In my medical opinion he died from hypothermia. Problem is, he was stripped naked.\n\nNone of can believe Todd would have walked out of camp, in this hellish cold, without wearing some god damn gear. Greg and a couple of us think something killed him then stripped him. I’m not sure. I saw no marks, no indications he’d died from anything other than hypothermia. The jury is still out.\n\nTransmission 212.\n\nBlaine’s gone. Greg and I searched for an hour or so. As long as we could manage in this blizzard. We found nothing. No thermal trace on the imager. I don’t think she’s coming back. Hope the rescue crew arrive soon.\n\nTransmission 213.\n\nGreg’s dead. But we know what’s happening now. Doc Brabham managed to take a sample from what was left of Greg’s clothes. He scanned it and found these little microbe things. They eat synthetic materials. Brabs says we woke them. Now they want to eat. Todd wasn’t stripped – his clothes were eaten.\n\nTransmission 214.\n\nBrabs reckons they must have hibernated for one hell of a long time before we came. We aren’t the first to land on Europa. Those creatures must have fed before. He found evidence of synthetic materials inside them. He calls the creatures Europan Moths. I call them our death warrant. If they start eating into our camp we’ve had it. Hurry guys, we need your help.\n\nTransmission 215.\n\nStill works? Thanks, Brabs.\n\nWe lost one half of the camp. The microbes ate through the primary and secondary walls on our east side and depressurised the chamber. We lost two men. Those of us left managed to retreat and establish life support on the west side. Lost a lot of power, though.\n\nWhere are they? Come on guys.\n\nTransmission 216.\n\nThey’ve grown. Eating a lot of our equipment. They’re still small but you can actually see them. They’re like little dust mites, you know, the ones we used to have on earth. They move quick, and they can really eat.\n\nWe tried spraying the things with our sanitary fluids. It slows them down but it doesn’t stop them. Brabs reckons we can only hold them off for a day or two max.\n\nTransmission 217.\n\nBrabs died. He saved us pretty… pretty much. He saved us. Sealed a hole with his body.\n\nI can’t do this, switch it off, I..\n\nTransmission 218.\n\nI saw a dot in the sky tonight. It was moving slowly but it’s got brighter. Could be the rescue crew? I hope so, cos if the Moths don’t get us, the hunger will.\n\nWe haven’t eaten in days.\n"
  title: The Europa Transmissions
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Matthew Forish
  date: 2008-10-05
  day: '05'
  month: 10
  text: "My call sign is Belle – I don’t have a real name, just a designation: ASC-a217.5. I stand about four-foot-two – pretty short even for a girl – and weigh in at a paltry eighty-four pounds. There are plenty of children larger than I am. Of course, I was designed this way. My size was selected specifically when I was engineered – it was an asset in my line of work. I could slip through spaces too small for most people, and I tend to blend in to a crowd\n\nTonight I was attending a diplomatic ball. I was dressed in an elegant blue gown, classy without being overly showy – the better to blend in. My hair – long at the moment – was up in a fancy but conservative style. I hated long hair – it got in the way – but it was necessary to keep up appearances on this assignment.\n\nStanding against a side wall, I scanned the crowd. There were a number of overtly-dressed and armed security guards at the entrances to the room, and my trained eye noted five special agents – dressed in finery and mingled with the crowd. That brought the total security presence in the room to fifteen, plus the advanced security drone that hovered near the ceiling.\n\nI noted my partner, dressed in the guise of a waiter, moving about with practiced ease with a tray of drinks. I was the only one who noticed the tiny devices he was scattering around the room. As he passed me, I snatched a glass of brandy from his tray – my eyes catching his signal that he was finished.\n\nMoving toward the dance floor, I lifted the brandy to my lips and savored it for a moment before my bio-toxin neutralizers rendered the alcohol impotent. Such was the price of my unique abilities. After draining the glass, I deposited it on a nearby table and continued my advance. I spotted my target among the dancing couples. He was paired up with a visiting ambassador from a backwater world.\n\nAs usual, none of the guards paid any attention to my tiny frame as I cautiously approached my quarry. One of the special agents glanced my way and smiled at me, before continuing his subtle scans of the crowd.\n\nI was right behind my prey before the drone finally noticed me. It’s blaring alarms were cut short as the stun-pulse flashed out from every corner of the room. Most of the guests and all of the uniformed guards dropped from the pulse, which barely registered as a tickle in my enhanced neural pathways. Only my target, the special agents and the few dignitaries wealthy enough to afford high-end neural implants were standing now – as well as my partner and I of course.\n\nMy target turned around in confusion, spotting me for the first time. I drew a slender blade from among my stylish hairpins and took one quick slash across his throat. “You should have voted no on that amendment, Senator,” I said quietly as the shock registered on his face, his life slipping through the gash in his throat – his nano-meds unable to contend with the counter-nanos set loose by my blade in order to save him.\n\nWith my partner at my side, I dashed for the nearest window. The special agents moved to intercept us, but were thrown back by the sudden concussion of a cluster of explosions that covered our escape. As we leapt through the shattering glass and plunged into the blackness below, I noted with satisfaction another job well-done.\n"
  title: Belle of the Ball
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Sam Clough
  date: 2008-10-06
  day: '06'
  month: 10
  text: "Sacha slumped down in a doorway, gathering her heavy clothes tighter around her. As a prophylactic measure, the cloth and leather were almost useless: it was less about protection, more about appearances. The door behind her was like every other in this street. Rough, wooden, and with a ‘X’ splashed across it in red paint.\n\nShe stared at the bodies that littered the street. Tens of them on this street alone, thousands across the district, and hierarchy-knew how many uninfected were starving to death in their homes, afraid to unseal the windows. Some of the infected were dangerous, violent, but those in the later stages of infection just curled up and died where they fell.\n\nSacha was trapped, doubly so. By the quarantine around the town, and by the blockade of the ‘red’ districts. She was not infected. Unlike the citizens of the town, Sacha had an immune system she could talk to.\n\nHowever resistant she was to the pathogens in the air, she was not resistant to the flamethrowers of the local army. In the style of armed forces everywhere, they had donned their rudimentary hazardous materials suits and were methodically putting the town to flame.\n\nSomeone walked past the door by which Sacha was slumped. He was wearing a neat, well-fitted uniform – that of an officer in the local army. He continued past her, down the street, then Sacha heard him stop and backtrack. He stared at her for a long moment, then spoke.\n\n“Emdal-Abek Sacha Sousver. Medical technician, on assignment from Cluster.”\n\n“And you are?” Mildly surprised at the use of her full name and the unimpressive description of her assignment, Sacha got to her feet and eyed the officer more closely.\n\n“Ash-Abek Peter Carnelian. Disruptor.”\n\n“Sent to rescue me?”\n\n“No. Cluster is worried that this crisis will lead eventually to a military coup. I’m here to guide them down a different track.”\n\n“Let me guess. Kill the High Command.”\n\n“In one. Are you sure you’re medical?”\n\n“Positive. Do you think you could get me out of here? I’m becoming immunocomprimised. I’ve done all I can to help, but I need to get into a medical lab.”\n\n“I think I’ll be able to explain it away.”\n\nPeter placed a hand on her shoulder, and they headed for the nearest checkpoint. A line of soldiers were carefully creating a dead zone on the infected side, setting fire to everything within ten metres of the perimeter. A milling crowd of the infected were shouting, screaming and begging just outside the reach of the flamethowers.\n\n“Sod,” Peter murmured, “we’re going to have to get through them.”\n\nOne of the crowd spotted Peter’s uniform.\n\n“Djah!” The cry of ‘officer’ went up, and as one mass, the infected turned and ran towards what they saw as their salvation.\n\n“Run.” Peter hissed, and Sacha fled back the way they’d come. He drew a sidearm, and levelled it at the crowd. “Uhd. Tuz lidla. Lidla!” Some of the more risk-averse slowed, but most continued to run. He fired three times into the crowd, and ran after Sacha.\n\nPanicking, Sacha ran headlong into a dead end. Peter was hot on her heels, having discarded his now-empty sidearm. There was a knife in his hand, and bloodstains covered his once-immaculate uniform. He threw something at her. Instinctively, she caught it: small, ovoid and metallic. A capsule key.\n\nA rush of air almost knocked her off her feet and a door hissed open in the air beside: Peter had called his one-man capsule. He wanted her to leave.\n"
  title: Sickness
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Glenn Blakeslee
  date: 2008-10-07
  day: '07'
  month: 10
  text: "He led me past a tractor rusting in the rain, pushed aside chickens with his foot and opened the door to his little house. Inside, bleak light fell through dirty windows.\n\n“How much you gonna charge?” he asked.\n\nThe house was cluttered with dirty cooking tools and heaps of unwashed laundry. A new chaotic rice-cooker and a clunky media player sat on a wood countertop. He wore a blue phototropic shirt. Typical burgeoning bourgeois.\n\n“How much you gonna charge?” he repeated.\n\n“Where is she?” I asked.\n\nHe led me into a back room. His wife lay on a simple bed. She smiled wanly, her eyes only for her husband. “Zensheu,” she said.\n\nZensheu nodded toward his wife. “You need to fix her,” he said. “She needs to make sons and clean.”\n\nI pulled a chair to her bedside, set down my bag. Zensheu stood watching. His wife had dark circles under her eyes, but her pale skin was unblemished. She was lovely. “I’m Wenwen,” she said.\n\n“I’m here to heal you,” I said, and she smiled a brilliant smile through sad eyes. “I need you to take off your blouse.” Zensheu didn’t move so I helped Wenwen sit up. She slowly removed her blouse.\n\n“I’m paying someone to feel my wife’s titties?” Zensheu asked, his arms folded across his chest. Wenwen’s right breast was swollen along the radial midline. The skin there was dark. “May I?” I asked her, and when she nodded I used my fingertips to probe along the distention. I could feel a mass.\n\n“You one of those livelong guys?” Zensheu asked. “You gonna live forever on my money?” I raised Wenwen’s arm and felt along her chest, up to her armpit. The lymph nodes were swollen.\n\n“You fucking corporados,” Zensheu said. “You squeeze poor farmers, you fix our breaks and bruises and live forever.” I pulled the assay unit from my bag and ran it along the distention. Wenwen winced as the probe extended and snapped back. I set it aside.\n\n“That’s it?” Zensheu said. “I owe a bag of gold?”\n\nNothing he said was true. I learned my craft online, bought my gear second-hand in Beijing. I saved for months for my first kilo of nano, and rode my bike through the district. I made just enough to support my wife and I.\n\nThe livelong nano was for the rich, and would never, ever, be mine.\n\nI poured ten grams from the nanosite canister onto the palette. I turned on the transceiver and plugged it into the assay unit. While the unit turned diagnostic data into machine code and passed it to the transceiver, I pushed aside a small portion of nano, shielded it with my knife, and then passed the transceiver over the rest.\n\nThis nano would eat Wenwen’s tumor, and follow the metastasized cells along the highway of her lymph system.\n\nI punched a different code into the assay unit, fed it to the transceiver, and passed it over the portion I had shielded. That nano would live in her womb forever, killing male zygotes.\n\nI pushed the nano together into a single pile, scraped it up with a wooden spoon, and fed it to Wenwen. She grimaced at the taste of carbon, and swallowed.\n\nOutside, the rain still fell. Zensheu approached from the side of the house, and held out a chicken. The chicken was scrawny, its legs deformed. “Here’s your pay,” he said.\n\nI took the chicken from him, and slammed its head into the side of the tractor. I threw it in the mud and walked off, into the rain.\n"
  title: Healer
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2008-10-08
  day: '08'
  month: 10
  text: "It’s light outside which means that if we leave our hiding place, we will be seen and killed.\n\nNot too long ago, human history was exposed and swept clear.  Everything we sent at them just bounced off.  It’s six months later and I have no idea how many of us are left.  They seem to have stopped actively hunting us which is good.  We’re more like vermin now.  They lay traps and go about their business.  It’s still very unsafe to travel in the daylight.\n\nThey have dry, deep-blue skin the same texture as cork.  Bullets go about an inch in and stop.  It’s like they’re made of rock with a light coating of clay.  They’re huge.  Two massive elephant-foot legs.  Two arm-tentacles that split into a mess of smaller tentacles at the end.  Those tentacles are very efficient and ridiculously strong.  Watching them operate the complex mining machinery they brought with them is almost thrilling.\n\nWatching those tentacles go into a loved one’s head orifices and squeeze is another matter entirely.\n\nThey wear what look like black rubber overalls with giant galoshes.  About the only weak point we can find is that they need to wear filter masks poking out of their mouths to breathe this atmosphere.\n\nIf you shoot them in the filter and none of their friends are around to give them a replacement, it takes them about half an hour to die.  It’s a rather gruesome thing to watch.  It’s like their insides are made of slugs and someone is pouring salt down their throats.  It looks agonizing.  We’d rather give them a quick death like they gave so many of us but beggars can’t be choosers.\n\nI laughed once when Teddy referred to us as ‘the resistance’.  As far as I could see, we scavenge for food and try to avoid the new owners of this planet.  We fight when cornered and almost always lose.  Resistance indeed.  Pah.\n\nGwendolyn’s pregnant now.  She’s the only woman with our little group who is of child bearing age.  None of the three men in our group is admitting to being the father but she’s not pointing fingers.  Anyway, it could be one of the other six of us that have been killed over the last three months.  It’s maddening not knowing if we’re the last ones in Britain.  We met one other person in the last four months but she couldn’t talk.  She died not too long after we met her.\n\nWe lost.\n"
  title: Resistance
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Andy Bolt
  date: 2008-10-09
  day: '09'
  month: 10
  text: "Carlton Marx felt only mildly guilty for opening up slice portals in peoples’ thoracic cavities.  He was doing it in the hopes of developing a method of deployment for his growing army of genetically engineered combat fishconomists – economist/sea creature hybrids pumped full of high test adrenaline and testosterone boosters.\n\nWhen Piranha Maynard Keynes burst out of Queen of England’s chest on live neuro-vision, it took a squad of amphibious battle yetis to catch and subdue him.  Back in his lair, deep beneath an Albuquerque bagel shop, Carlton pondered his actions.\n\n“I feel bad about my deadly aquatic assassin eating the Queen,” he said to no one in particular.  “But people must learn about the heterodox theories regarding variable interest rates in a capital gains economy.  And I can’t think of a better teacher than a psychotic half-man, half-fish, all financial wizard.  Also, I need a bagel.”\n\nCarlton pressed another button.\n\nWhen Milton “Electric Eel” Friedman came crashing through the sternum of DJ Hemoglobin in Hoboken’s techno-vampire disco, most of the patrons thought it was part of the show.  A sparking Friedman played along, doing a set of “The Electric Slide,” “Electric Boogaloo,” and “Oh, Dear God, It’s a Shocking Fish Monster! (Summertime Love mix).”  Then he inadvertently electrocuted all the pseudo-vampires with a combination of The Running Man and an excited pop-and-lock maneuver.\n\n“This string of semi-accidental deaths is greatly perturbing me,” Carlton mused, licking strawberry cream cheese off his lips.  “Perhaps I’d feel better if I knew that people understood how the Walrasian model presents the possibility of perfect competition leading to Pareto efficiency.  Wait, did I say Walrasian?  I meant Walrusian!”  Carlton cackled with self-satisfied glee.  “Bagels sure are delicious,” he added, tapping another button.\n\nMarie-Esprit-Léon Walrus exploded into Independence Hall through the torso of a tour guide dressed like Thomas Jefferson.\n\n“Vour score and zeven years ago,” he began, gasping through his tusks with a French accent.  Several people looked confused as he flopped heavily onto his flippers, emerging from the trunk of the dead guide.\n\n“I thought Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address,” said a puzzled little boy with braces.\n\n“Walruses are very bad at history,” said Carlton sorrowfully, munching with grief on his ninth jalapeño and blueberry bagel.\n\n“Perhaps that is the greatest tragedy of all.”\n"
  title: Deadly Fishconomist Assassins
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Ben ‘Inorian’ Le Chevalier
  date: 2008-10-10
  day: 10
  month: 10
  text: "I’ve been a cypro for a few years now. That’s a short way of saying I have a cybernetic prosthesis. Technically, I’m a cyborg as is any human with mechanical parts, but people don’t like the word. It’s been given too many bad connotations from old scifi movies in the late twenty-first century.\n\nAnyway, what was I saying? Oh yeah. Cypro.\n\nI got my first cypro part for a job. There was a new manufacturing firm in town who were offering enhanced pay and accelerated promotion to cypros because we can lift heavier weights and are generally stronger than pure bios. I had my arm cypro’d. Suddenly I could move heavy machinery by myself.\n\nI worked with that for a while, until me and Sara, that was my wife, until we had saved enough to afford a nice big house in the centre of town. We were living a better life than most of our neighbours, and it was thanks to the cypro.\n\nAfter a few years the firm offered me another promotion, this time to foundry foreman. Eventually I got a second cypro, just another arm, you know. Sara didn’t like it, but I got a pay raise with it, and it meant I could keep Sara in the lap of luxury.\n\nA revelation came after I suffered an industrial accident. When I was in hospital I realised that my cypro arms had been fine, but my outmoded bio back had failed. I ended up selling off the house and getting my whole skeleton replaced, with my legs soon to follow. I was getting closer and closer to the peak of what I could be, but Sara complained. I think she just didn’t like cypro really.\n\nSoon enough I was approached by a world leader in cypro development. I was somewhat surprised when they told me I had the largest percentage of cybernetic parts of anyone alive. They invited me to be in their cypro testing programs, and then advertise the tested products. The money was fantastic, but working on the cutting edge of cypro is what made me sign on.\n\nNow all that’s left of my bio past is my brain, flawlessly cased inside my cypro body. I’m the first man to receive any cypro part, so I stay on the cutting edge of perfection.\n\nThey’re calling me the world’s first true cyborg. Perhaps I am. It doesn’t worry me. I’m perfection.\n"
  title: Cypro
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Bill Gale
  date: 2008-10-11
  day: 11
  month: 10
  text: "Showing every one of his seventy-two years, the speaker rose to podium of the vast granite chamber. He uttered a single word – “Order”. The irony of this formality did nothing for the moods of the three dozen delegates, for whom standing in hushed rooms had been the order of the day for weeks now.\n\nWith eyes wracked by fatigue, Speaker Frederick Van Hast read his brief for the last time. How had events advanced this way? The Age of Excess seemed generations ago now, though only years had passed. So much had changed. So much had been lost under the brazen march of progress. How many of these men were children of that time? Van Hast surveyed them, eyes straining in the pallid light. So many were young, the old and infirm having been the first to have been lost. Only fortuity and strength had saved the few like Van Hast. The worst affected zones had lost all elders. As the leaders began to die, the young rose up and tore their lands to shreds. Might made right in a world of famine, plague and war.\n\nVan Hast had tried to convince himself that the situation had been so different in Europe, but there were stories everybody had heard. The story of the village in England, where men butchered their own families for hoarding. In France, as well, where a young woman was arrested by a mob for keeping a cat, and was buried alive in a meadow outside Lyon. Nobody had recognised how close the insanity had been to the surface, how much of the world was constrained by bread and circuses. They were asked to concede a modicum of their luxury, and they refused. When it was taken from them, they went mad. Societies crumbled. The world stopped.\n\nHow many of these men had never known a time of hunger before? He could see them, blinking as though to wake from a terrible dream. Mouths agape in confusion, their faces asked, “Why me?”; “What did I do?”; “We didn’t realise”; “Nobody told us”; “It isn’t our fault.”; “We thought there would be enough” Perhaps there would have been enough. If the farmers had kept farming, or the miners mining. Perhaps, if consumption had slowed. The governments had forced rationing because nobody would give up their excess voluntarily. The violence began. Production slowed, the famines begun. Electricity stopped overnight. Nobody had been informed of the scale, of the scarcity of food and fuel. On the precipice, the leaders of the world had closed their eyes and hoped somebody else, anybody else would find a solution before they fell. Without fuel, there were no communications. No medicines. It took strong men to keep their sanity in a world where any animal is edible, any illness fatal. The young men here, they knew who was to blame.\n\nA new government had arisen. A provisions network was set up to cities, while the rural areas were left alone out of necessity. This government had been charged with a single task – Solve the crisis. Cure the stricken Earth.\n\nVan Hast trembled as he addressed the chamber. Maybe this was the solution. An end to the famine and strife. He and addressed the assembly.\n\n“One in six.”\n\nOne by one, the men nodded and filed out of the room to convene with their generals and subordinates. There were three dozen men, he pondered. Six of them would not see tomorrow.\n"
  title: A Solution
  year: 2008
- 
  author: B. Zedan
  date: 2008-10-12
  day: 12
  month: 10
  text: "Periodically, the pilot wished he had company.  There were some things that were just more enjoyable with another being around.  Besides the obvious, there was chess.  The ship’s helpful AI, such a benefit when it came to the obvious, just didn’t cut it at chess.  Not that it was stupid, of course.  It was quite exactly the opposite.\n\n“You’re a thrice-damned son of a bitch.”  The pilot chucked one of his pawns at the holo he’d picked for the ship to wear when they played chess.  Only certain parts of the form were dense enough to interact with objects.  The pawn shot harmlessly through the faintly shimmering torso and clattered unfulfillingly on the deck.  The pilot began to sulk.  “Damn sonofabitch bastard.”\n\n“Would you have preferred the pawn to hit me?  If this is your preference, I can generate solidity at whichever part you wish to next target.”  The ship, through the holo’s face, displayed the practised concern of a head waiter dealing with a difficult customer.  The face then lit with a degree of helpfulness.  “I also could display pain or discomfort when struck, if you’d like.”  The pilot wondered if there was an algorithm to degrees of helpfulness.\n\n“What I would like you to do is stop letting me win.”  He paused, as though a computer needed a moment of contemplation.  “I left my king wide open, just there for you to take.  But you didn’t.  You messed around with the same dumb, obvious moves you’ve been making since the first time we played and you won.”\n\nThe ship didn’t say anything.  It seemed to think he wasn’t quite done.  The pilot found that he wasn’t.\n\n“I mean, if you’re doing this because you think I’d prefer it then you’re off your deck.  Letting me win like that only reminds me how easy it’d be for you to kick my ass at this game.”\n\nThe ship remained quiet.\n\nFor the briefest moment, the pilot worried he’d hurt the ship’s feelings.\n\n“Listen—” he began.  The holo shook its head.\n\n“No, it is all right.  You have a very valid point.  I thought you would prefer to win, but I did not factor that you might also like to work for the win.”  The pilot was a little startled.\n\n“Yeah, that’s—that’s pretty much it.”\n\n“I had not taken into consideration that your kind reveres the concept of hardship and looks down on success unless there is at least a token struggle in achieving it.”\n\n“I just didn’t want you to make it so easy.”\n\n“I understand.”\n\nThe pilot shifted in his chair uncomfortably.  He wondered about the connections being made in that giant, unfathomable brain.  He wished he had company.\n"
  title: Company
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Brian Armitage
  date: 2008-10-13
  day: 13
  month: 10
  text: "Iskerreth stood before the assembly, manacled. The humans looked on, waiting. Listening. All was imminently silent. The Korrosk soldier straightened his back, his muscles shifting under his scales, his head quills flat against his scalp. He pressed his elbows together in a show of humility, and spoke.\n\n“I have fought against and killed your brothers. I deserve death, and am… dumbfounded that I am here, alive. Even to speak before you, humans of authority.”\n\nHis bright orange eyes with their horizontal slit pupils scanned the Solar Congress, his audience. The gills on Iskerreth’s neck, bright purple when they opened, fluttered with anxiety.\n\n“A slave is sold, and goes to his death.  Korrosk are bred for numbers, not for strength. Our lives have little meaning, and our deaths none.  We have fought and died without honor for… too many generations. The Veleura command, and the Korrosk obey.\n\n“So many that we have fought are slaves, as we are.”  The alien stopped suddenly.  His tail came to rest, and his gills stilled.  His head bowed low.   “We were not prepared for Earth.”  It was a moment before he spoke again.\n\n“Our masters gave us your communications. We listened to you as we fought.  As I… shot down your fighters, I heard one of your commanders.”  With a deep breath, Ishkerreth raised his head.  “For a moment, he sounded like our masters, saying, ‘Do you want them to die for nothing?  Fight on!’  But when he spoke again, I was shaken.  He said…”  The warrior’s shoulders began to shake.\n\n“He said, ‘they volunteered for this.’”\n\nThe Korrosk soldier shuddered, tilted back his head, and roared, a deep vibrato from the depth of his chest.  Only barely audible was the gasp from the crowd.  He clutched his head in his hands.\n\n“They chose the fight!  They chose!  A choice the Korrosk have never been given.  And we never shall, unless…”\n\nIskerreth’s quills rattled against his scaled head.  The Korrosk lifted his eyes to his audience, and dropped to his knees.  His gills again began to flutter.\n\n“We beg you.  We beg you… give us the choice.  Only allow us the chance to choose, and we will serve you.  Never have we chosen our fight.  Never have we died with honor.  Allow us… the choice.  If you do… I offer you the oath.  The oath we are made to swear to our masters.”\n\nHe raised a clenched fist to the very center of his chest, above his heart.  His entire body shook.  Then, Ishkerreth opened his mouth and bellowed the oath, with zeal:\n\n“We will trade the years of our lives for a moment of yours!  We will trade a sea of our blood for a drop of yours!  We fight at your pleasure!  We die at your wish!  Send us, and we will go!  For…”  For a moment, he choked.  His breath heaved once, and he shouted ever louder, “For the honor of the fallen!”\n\nAnd he fell quiet, head bowed.  Silence.  The warrior sobbed once, and was still.  He slowly regained his feet and lifted his head.\n\n“If any of you would stoop low and stand alongside us, I-”\n\nThe entire audience rose to its feet.  80,000 humans and Korrosk stood, just as the Solar Congress had stood together those hundred years ago.  The great hologram of Ishkerreth in the center of the stadium looked around on all sides, awestruck.\n\nFrom his private booth, Moshkerreth raised a clenched fist to his heart.  His wife squeezed his hand, her pink skin soft against his scaled fingers.\n\n“Happy Allegiance Day, Mr. President,” she said.\n"
  title: Allegiance
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Chris Sharkey
  date: 2008-10-14
  day: 14
  month: 10
  text: "“Call it,” Doctor Knight instructed excitedly.\n\n“Call it?” Han replied inquisitively.\n\n“Yeah, call it. Heads or tails?”\n\n“You asked me to come down here for a coin toss?” Han was skeptical. Doctor Knight almost always had some ulterior motive.\n\n“Of course not,” replied Knight, “I’m trying to demonstrate my latest scientific breakthrough. Come on, call it, heads or tails?” he repeated, lifting his right hand to view the quarter sitting on top of his left.\n\nHan hesitated. The doctor’s insistence worried him. Having known Bishop Knight, PhD for almost five years, Han had come to appreciate his penchant for brilliant discoveries. Of course, the good doctor’s cunning intellect came with the usual eccentricities exhibited by the extraordinarily brilliant, but Han had never seen him get this excited over something so trivial as a simple coin toss.\n\n“Heads or tails?” Doctor Knight started growing impatient.\n\n“Fine, tails.”\n\nThe doctor grinned.\n\n“What do you suppose your chances of being right are?” He asked without revealing the coin.\n\n“I dunno, fifty-fifty?”\n\n“Hm, not quite,” said Knight,”But close enough for the purposes of this demonstration.”\n\nLifting his right hand, Doctor Knight revealed the quarter, laying face up. Han just stared, waiting for the doctor to explain his demonstration.\n\n“As you can see,” said Knight, “this coin is not on tails. If we had set a wager, you could have lost something of significant value.”\n\n“Well, fortunately for me, I’m not a gambling man,” Han replied sarcastically.\n\n“Of course you aren’t, and neither am I, which is why I asked you to come here. What if I told you it were possible to increase your chances beyond fifty-fifty?”\n\nHan blinked, not certain he had heard the doctor correctly.\n\n“I don’t follow,” he said simply.\n\n“Assume, for a moment,” continued the doctor, “that your odds of correctly guessing which side the coin lands are fifty-fifty. Without manipulating the coin in some fashion, those odds will never tip in your favor. What if I told you that your chances could be increased without doing anything to the coin?”\n\n“Enough with the hypotheticals, doctor. What are you getting at?”\n\n“Luck, my dear friend,” Knight said with a smile, “I’ve discovered a way to manipulate a person’s luck.”\n\n“Manipulate?”\n\n“Yes, as in increase or decrease the amount of luck any one person has.”\n\n“But that’s impossible,” exclaimed Han, “Luck is not a quantifiable attribute. Hell, it’s not even scientifically possible to prove luck exists. It just a term, used by the superstitious to explain the unexplainable events in their lives.”\n\n“Those are the kind of assumptions that prevent scientists from making breakthroughs such as these,” countered Knight, “If your mind is already closed to the possibility, why would you explore it. I, however, was not so deterred and posited that luck can be quantified, and ultimately, manipulated. It took years of dedicated research, but a last I have a breakthrough. Allow me to demonstrate.”\n\nWith the last sentence, Doctor Knight handed Han the coin.\n\n“Toss it,” he instructed.\n\nHan wasn’t sure if he was impressed or bewildered. After an hour of coin-tossing,   Knight hadn’t been wrong once. After the first thirty, Han had started using the change in his own pocket and had even moved to the other side of the room, just to make sure the good doctor wasn’t playing a practical joke.\n\n“Okay,” Han said finally, “Now will you show me how you did it?”\n\n“Of course,” said Knight with a grin, “Just after I return from my vacation.”\n\n“I see,” said Han disappointedly. “Where are you going?”\n\n“Vegas, my dear friend.”\n"
  title: Coin Toss
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2008-10-15
  day: 15
  month: 10
  text: "Truger loathed recreational narcotics; he could never understand the point. Hallucinogens, depressants, all of them ran completely counter to his personality.\n\nThis made his current situation unbearable.\n\nHe remembered the moments before the crash, the low orbit sky-fight, the enemy fighters he’d engaged and the victory that he’d been sure of, one snatched away in a hail of flak as they’d strayed too close to the anti-aircraft emplacements. His last memory was of the gaping hole in his cockpit, and the cauterized stumps of his freshly truncated arms and leg.\n\nHe remembered waking here.\n\nThe first hallucination had been the spiders. He hadn’t seen them as his eyes were bandaged, but he felt them navigate across his body, clicking and chattering, poking and prodding. He’d been trained to overcome foreign chemicals in his system, and he tried as best he could. The bandages were peeled back from his eyes, tiny metal appendages pulling away the mesh to let the light in. Somewhere far away, someone began screaming. His drug-enhanced imagination fed him back his own face reflected in a hundred shining facets. Seconds stretched into minutes before a sharp pain in his shoulder redirected his attention, and, as the light dimmed, he was aware that the screaming had stopped.\n\nWhen next he awoke, the room had changed. The bugs were gone, and everything was bathed in a green white glow, it’s edges blurred and indistinct. Truger tried to sit upright, but his torso was too heavy. He concentrated instead on his drug-heavy hands, and as he struggled with them, the memory of cauterized limb fragments flashed back, vivid and real. The panicked surge of adrenaline helped him pull them into his line of sight but instead of familiar or even burnt flesh he found clear, crystalline limbs of stunning beauty. He marveled as the light refracted through their internal structures, until their weight finally overcame his strength.\n\nHe had to wake up. This hallucinogenic daydream was too much.\n\nSomewhere, someone was screaming again.\n\nTruger couldn’t remember falling asleep, or being awoken again. The light had changed, and a flurry of activity in his peripheral vision begged for his attention. His head was too leaden to move, so he strained his eyes to the left and wished he hadn’t. A doctor, resplendent in his gown, moved in and out of his field of view conversing with a nurse. Their heads both stretched impossibly in the dim light, elongated and flailing whip-like at the air. The doctor’s arms tapered off into slender, excessively jointed digits which undulated as he spoke. Their words were no more than melodic chirps to Truger’s intoxicated mind. That people took these chemicals into their system willingly and for entertainment was beyond his comprehension. The images they superimposed on his reality terrified him, and he squeezed his eyes shut as though willing the distorted shapes to disappear.\n\nHe felt something in his personal space, and opened his eyes to the faces of the medical staff, pressed close and staring, eyes now faceted and double lidded, mouths a quivering mass of vertical fleshy strips.\n\n“Stop giving me drugs,” he screamed into their startled faces, the force of his words driving them back. “I can suffer the pain, but these drugs, you’re driving me out of my mind.” The effort taxed him to near unconsciousness. As his awareness slipped away into blackness, he whispered simply “no drugs”, a series of sound-waves the doctors chirped and clicked about for some time, trying to decipher what these noises could possibly mean.\n"
  title: Narcosis
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Sam Clough
  date: 2008-10-16
  day: 16
  month: 10
  text: "The best definition of ‘coincidence’ is ‘you weren’t paying attention to the other half of what was goin on.’ Related to this is the little-known fact that effect can predate cause. Me and Darien were an effect. The cause’s name was Milo.\n\n“Time?” I shouted forward, struggling to match Darien’s pace. I saw him glance at his wrist.\n\n“One minute twenty-six. Now shut up, and run!”\n\nI redoubled my efforts, barely keeping my footing as I chased Dar around corners. He ducked through a gap in a broken chain-link fence. The sign on it read ‘Absolutely No Entry’. With fifty seconds to get into position, Darien certainly wasn’t bothered about trespassing, and so, neither was I. Darien shouldered his way past a flimsy door, and shuddered to a halt. I stepped after him.\n\n“Six seconds. Hide.” Darien hissed, gesturing towards the stacked crates all around. I ducked between two particularly large boxes. Dar slipped behind the bulk of an offlined stacking robot.\n\nThree.\n\nTwo.\n\nOne.\n\nAn access door at the far end of the warehouse began to roll up, letting light into the gloomy space. I glanced down towards the opening, and saw a double silhouette: one man and a general-purpose assistant-droid.\n\nI was supposed to follow Darien’s lead: he would incapacitate the human target, I would take out the robot pet. Double footsteps, regular as clockwork, began to echo towards us. We were the self-styled magicians: agents of synchronicity. The subtle rearrangers of reality. A little nudge here and there so things happen…well, just so.\n\nMilo and his robot stepped past my hiding place, apparently oblivious to my presence.\n\nDarien moved. I covered the space between me and the pet in two steps. I hooked my foot around its ankles, and jerked it backwards. It toppled to the floor, and I slapped magnets to either side of it’s head, thoroughly disabling it. Darien had drawn a compact handgun, and was pressing it against the back of the Milo’s neck.\n\n“We know what you’re thinking. And no, it wouldn’t work. Left pocket.” I obligingly reached into the target’s leftmost pocket, and drew out the small box. I worked the simplistic controls, and two barbed spikes slid out of one side. It buzzed gently as electricity arced across the gap.\n\n“A little close defence? Nice, Milo.” I laughed, and carried on fiddling around with the device.\n\n“Don’t chatter.” Dar hissed.\n\nWe held the tableau for another minute. I could see Darien counting the seconds. That’s the first thing they teach you – big events hinge on the smallest coincidences. One ‘disrupted schedule’ can throw the fate of nations one way or the other. Milo was on his knees, shaking violently. Obviously, and painfully afraid for his life.\n\n“And, time.” Darien replaced his handgun in it’s hidden holster, grabbed the mark’s neck, and hauled him upright.  I returned the shockbox to Milo’s pocket, and retrieved my magnets from the junked clanker.\n\n“What the hell!” Milo growled, and scrambled to his feet.\n\n“Veracity. You should go home, Milo. And don’t stop for anything.”\n\nJust as Darien turned to walk away, the first of the klaxons sounded.\n"
  title: Synchronicity
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Chis Sharkey
  date: 2008-10-17
  day: 17
  month: 10
  text: "The sign read:\n\nP.B. FARNSWORTH’S TRAVELLING CIRCUS PRESENTS:\n\nTHE MYSTERIOUS HOVER-CAT\n\nWITNESS THIS MYSTICAL CREATURE OF GRAVITY-DEFYING MAJESTY\n\nTHREE NIGHTS ONLY\n\nOCT. 5TH, 6TH, AND 8TH\n\nSpecial Agent Smith studied it intently. The font was, of course, overly dramatic and flourished across the paper. The sign included an artist’s rendition of “Hover-Cat”, depicting a tabby hovering over a podium, surrounded by an orange glow. Down at the bottom, in small lettering was the disclaimer :”Tickets not refundable”. Smith activated his mouthpiece hidden in his shirt cuff.\n\n“Control this looks like the place. Request permission to proceed.”\n\n“Permission granted,” chirped the voice in his ear piece, “Remember Agent Smith, this mission is recon only. Apprehension is not authorized at this time.”\n\n“Roger that.”\n\nSmith approached the smiling young woman at the ticket booth.\n\n“One, please,” he said with a smile.\n\n“That’ll be six dollars,” the ticket lady replied.\n\nSmith took his ticket and proceeded into the tent where the show was to be held. It was fairly empty. That was good, it allowed Smith to get a front row seat, making a bio-scan more accurate.\n\nTaking a seat, Smith pulled the bio-scanner, cleverly disguised as a pair of glasses, from his jacket pocket and put it on. The readout, visible only to Smith, displayed in front of him. Scanner Active. Smith touched his watch, remotely activating the scanner. He waited a few seconds, and a new display popped up in view. Scan Complete, No Signs of Alien Lifeforms.\n\nThe circus tent started to fill up, and finally the show began. Smith watched intently as the emcee entered the center ring with his assistant, an attractive young woman. Between them, a cloth draped over what looked like a podium. With much flourish and build-up, the emcee finally pulled back the cloth, revealing a cat sitting a top a podium, surrounded by a glass bell. Lifting the bell, the emcee warned the audience to prepare themselves for what they were about to see.\n\nAs Smith watched, the cat lifted into the air effortlessly and started hovering towards the audience. Ignoring the “ooos” and “ahhs” as the cat flew over audience members’ heads, Smith touched his watch again, keeping his eyes intently on “Hover-Cat”. After a few moments, the display read: Scan Complete, Extra-Terrestrial Life Confirmed. Remaining calm, Smith activated his mouthpiece.\n\n“Control, I have positive I.D. Request permission to apprehend.”\n\nAfter a long pause, “We have received the results of the bio-scan. Permission to apprehend granted. Use of deadly forced is NOT authorized.”\n\n“Roger that.”\n\nSmith immediately stood up and walked out of the tent and around to the back, where the performers would exit after the show. He spotted the emcee about a half hour later, holding a live animal carrier.\n\n“Halt!” he yelled, “F.B.I. I need what you have in that cage!”\n\nThe emcee took of running, cage in hand. Smith took off after him.\n\n“Control, I have a runner headed towards rear exit, request immediate assist!” he yelled into his mouthpiece.\n\nHe followed the emcee into the rear parking lot, where five F.B.I. vehicles  were already waiting. Smith saw his partner Johnson jump out of the lead SUV and tackle the runner. Smith caught up moments later.\n\n“Good job,” Smith said.\n\n“Thanks to you,” replied Johnson, “Confirm this is the life form?”\n\nSmith peered into the animal carrier. He nodded.\n\n“Confirm. Positive I.D.”\n\n“Good,” said Johnson, “Let’s get it back to the lab.”\n"
  title: Hover Cat
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Bill Richman
  date: 2008-10-18
  day: 18
  month: 10
  text: "Bobby had always been a little different.  His family felt it.  So did the neighborhood children.  His friends would have felt it too, if he’d had any.  Of course, the other kids were quick to pick up on his oddities  and use them to taunt him.  He was used to that.  Still, why did he have to hide what he felt?    His longing to be accepted made him easy prey for those adults who knew what to look for and weren’t afraid to exploit it.  Frank Martin was no exception.  As a grounds keeper at the park, Frank saw a lot of kids every day, but his interests were very specific.  As soon as he saw Bobby, he knew they were alike.  It was only a matter of showing a little interest and acting a little bit friendly.  Not too friendly, because that was dangerous.  Just enough to pique the boy’s curiosity and draw him nearer.\n\n“Hi!” Frank called to the boy, smiling and waving invitingly.  “I’ve seen you around, and you look like maybe you could use someone to talk to.”\n\n“M…me…?” stammered Bobby, looking around as though he expected the man to be addressing someone else.\n\n“Yeah, you,” Frank chuckled nervously, glancing around to make sure no one was taking notice of them.  “I’ve been watching you.  I’ve seen the way you act.  I know what you’re feeling.  Do you want to come over to my house on Saturday?  I think you’ll like it,” Frank blurted, knowing that he was going way too fast, but desperately afraid that he’d lose his nerve otherwise.  “Of course, it’ll have to be our little secret,” he whispered, almost pleading.\n\n“Um… well… I guess so…” Bobby mumbled, so stunned by the attention that it never occurred to him to wonder why someone like Frank would take so much interest in a boy like him.\n\n“G…good…” stammered Frank, suddenly scared to death at what he’d just set in motion.  “H…here’s my address.  P…please don’t t…t…tell anyone wh…where you’re going.”  With a trembling hand, he gave Bobby a small scrap of paper.\n\nThe lazy silence of Saturday afternoon was broken by a loud pounding and an angry voice shouting, “Police!  Open the door!”  Before Frank could do more than stand up and turn around, the door was thrown open, and an officer lunged into the room, followed closely by Bobby’s parents.\n\n“What are you doing with my son?!?” screamed Bobby’s mother.\n\n“I’ll kill you, you bastard!” shouted his father.\n\nThe officer pushed Frank roughly aside, revealing Bobby and another boy sprawled in full view on the couch, leaving little doubt as to what had been going on.\n\n“Bobby!!  What has he done to you?!?” wailed his mother.\n\n“M…m…mom…?  D…dad?  It’s not his f…f…fault.  I…I’ve felt this way for a long t…t…time now.  Mu..mis… mister Martin is my f…friend.”\n\n“Bobby?  What the hell are you talking about, son?  We raised you better than that!” moaned his father.\n\n“D…d…dad?  I… I’m s…sorry, bu..but it’s t…t…true,” Bobby sobbed.  “I… I’m… a… a… r…r…READER!”\n\n“Mister Martin, I’m placing you under arrest for contributing to the delinquency of a minor, possession of illegal materials, and teaching without a license.  You’ll have to come with me,” snapped the officer, reaching for his handcuffs.\n\nThe well-worn copy of “Tom Sawyer” hit the floor with a crack like a judge’s gavel.\n"
  title: What About the Children?
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Denni schnapp
  date: 2008-10-19
  day: 19
  month: 10
  text: "Oil painted rainbows on the pavement. Franklin coughed as he dragged Chrissy behind him.\n\n“Keep your mask up,” he rasped, holding his own to his mouth with his free hand. The fumes made his eyes sting.\n\nHe paused, squinting. “Not–” Deep breath “Far. Now.”\n\nHis daughter remained silent, holding his hand as he resumed at a gentler pace.\n\nThe wind picked up, clearing some of the smog to reveal the silhouette of the Outer Settlement. There would be people, and air clean enough to breathe.\n\nA sudden glare made him stop, Chrissy colliding with the heavy cloth of his coat. He pulled her behind him.\n\n“Who are you? Where are you going?” a metallic voice rang out.\n\n“Franklin Howards and my daughter Chrissy. Please–the bombs…”\n\nThe bombs had killed almost everyone before going on to poison the land.\n\n“There’s no room! Leave the kid.” The latter an afterthought.\n\nChrissy clung tightly to his arm.\n\n#\n\nThe bombs hadn’t killed her mother; cancer had seen to that. At another time there might have been kindly relatives, perhaps help from the government, but with millions struggling all that remained for Franklin was to return to the refinery, taking his daughter to live in one of the prefabs with their thin walls barely keeping out the noise and smell.\n\nThere had once been a forest, cut down during the building work. Only a few patches of shaggy grass remained. The kids had to play indoors. Not that there were many: another girl and two boys, all with wheezy coughs. Franklin couldn’t remember their names; he saw little of his daughter, let alone the other kids. By the age of twelve, they would be sent away to school-workcamp.\n\nWhen the bombs fell, Chrissy had just turned eleven.\n\n#\n\n“Please, we’re just passing through!” Franklin fought for breath, inhaling deeply so that he could speak with a loud and confident voice. Don’t let them hear us wheeze.\n\n“You people are always passing through.”\n\n“We’re on our way to the harbour.”\n\n“Ha! And where, pray, would you go from there?”\n\nFranklin winced. Not in front of Chrissy. But his daughter gave no indication that she had understood, her eyes wide as she stared at the light.\n\n“Give us the kid if you want, but you make your own luck.”\n\nFor a heartbeat time stood still. The school-workcamp was in the Outer Settlement. Chrissy would be better off there, with kids her own age.\n\n“Leave the kid and go.”\n\nChrissy seemed to come to her senses. She tugged at his sleeve and Franklin stumbled back. After a few paces the beam cut off. They had rejoined the twilight zone and were of no further interest.\n\nThe sky was streaked with gold up where the soot couldn’t reach. The light settled on his daughter’s face. Franklin crouched.\n\n“Chrissy, I want you to be safe…”\n\n“Daddy, don’t go!” The mask distorted her voice.\n\nHe swallowed a lump in his throat. “Don’t you want to see–,” dammit, what was the boy’s name? “–Ollie again?”\n\n“Ali,” she sniffled. Good, she was listening.\n\n“I meant Ali. And the other kids that have left for school?” Workcamp.\n\nChrissy blinked and nodded. Brave girl.\n\n“Come with me, Daddy!” She was keening.\n\nThere was no point trying to make her understand. If she was to have any future, he had no choice. He rose abruptly, holding her so tightly that it hurt him, but what hurt most was that she did not try to struggle.\n\nThe glare returned as he stepped over the perimeter. They stood motionless, waiting for the patrol to pick her up.\n"
  title: Bye, Daddy
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Rob Burton
  date: 2008-10-20
  day: 20
  month: 10
  text: "Dear Victim,\n\nI am writing to you to tell you that, in a short while, you are going to be arrested for killing the Prime Minister. You didn’t do it, right? Wrong. Here at MI6, when we want to kill someone and say that you did it, you can be sure that we’ve made sure that you did.\n\nI picked you for several reasons. Firstly, you have an interest in world affairs and have spent time on the internet researching terrorism. Now, I know that you are going to say, ‘but I wasn’t researching how to be a terrorist, I’m just concerned’. Well the courts won’t see it that way now that I’ve altered the list. Secondly, you have annoyed a few people over the years – some of them really hate you, you know – and so we got them to write their opinions on you on ‘mebook’. The press will look you up, and it will help us a lot if nobody likes you. Thirdly, you have short, dark hair, a heavy brow and a facial scar, which makes a conviction 18% more likely. Fourthly you are a liberal who is known to disagree with recent government policy – this gives you motive, and we like to eliminate as many threats as we can with one action. It’s more elegant. Lastly I picked you because, of all the many people who fit the profile, I don’t like the look of you.\n\nAccording to your psychological profile, upon finishing this email you will attempt to run away – I hope you do, as it will further incriminate you – and that telling you this will not dissuade you. A few words of advice: Do not take your car, we can track it. Similarly, do not steal or borrow anyone else’s car.  We can also track your mobile, PDA and laptop, and use them as listening devices. Do not go through any major urban areas; the cameras can pick up your ID using face recognition. Do not go anywhere near an airport or port either, for the same reason. Follow these simple rules and I give you six hours.\n\nThanks to the national DNA and biometric database, and a quick search through your bins, we have planted enough evidence around the site to easily convict you. Juries believe that DNA and biometric evidence is a rubber stamp for conviction. It is not, but they watch too much crime drama to be convinced otherwise. Also, we have hacked the new brain scan lie detector that Juries love so much, so it will show that you are feeling as guilty as a priest at a bondage party.\n\nWe thought that you might want to know why. Well, as you know, the current government has increased our budget and power exponentially over the last few terms. Now, it seems, the Prime Minister may be regretting a few of those choices. We cannot allow that, so we have killed him, demonstrating to his replacement (who is now guaranteed to win the next election) that we are not to be trifled with. This means that we can get whatever we want, which is more of the same, actually. Longer detention periods, fewer rights and greater surveillance. More power for us to play.\n\nAnd why am I telling you this like some idiotic bond villain? Because it makes no difference to your fate, and because my boss and I think it’s hilarious.\n\nThis message will delete itself, leaving absolutely no trace, in two seconds.\n\nTrust me. I know your reading speed.\n"
  title: Hi there!
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2008-10-21
  day: 21
  month: 10
  text: "“Hey baby, how are you?” I replied to the phone.\n\nI had told my wife that I had gone to Earth for business.\n\nAngela lay, limbs spread wide and gloriously naked on the bed behind me, a beatific smile on her face. We’d been hedonistically wasting the hours of our romantic getaway. The scenery on this moon of Jupiter was supposed to be amazing but all we did was stay in the hotel room, order room service, and fuck. It was magnificent.\n\nWe had spouses, of course, back on our home planets. This was an affair.\n\n“Oh my god, are you okay? I haven’t been able to get through until now.” my wife asked on the phone.\n\nShe was in a panic. I figure that she’d found a receipt or that one of my friends had squealed or that, hell, maybe she’d just pieced it together. I was relaxed. More lies. My wife was gullible. It wouldn’t be a problem.\n\n“Things are great, hon. I’m in New Hampshire right now. The boys and I just went to see a movie and have a few drinks. They have a nice office. How are you?” I replied, the untruths slipping effortlessly from my lips with no twinge of conscience.\n\nHer voice was confused and shrill. “Oh thank god. Are you sure? Did you manage to get away in time? When did you go the movie? Are you talking about yesterday? Where are you?”\n\nI calmed her down. “Baby, baby, listen. It’s fine. I’m in my hotel room in New Hampshire on Earth, just like I said. I’m thinking of you. Don’t be crazy. Everything’s cool.”\n\nThere was an icy pause. When her voice came back, it had hardened. A dark place in the back of my head opened up a flower. Something was horribly wrong. I was missing a big piece of the puzzle in this conversation.\n\n“Turn on the news.” She said in a flat voice. I reached over and thumbed the wall unit to life.\n\nEvery station said the same thing. Earth had been destroyed four hours ago in a civil war. Reports were still coming in concerning who started it. Our homeworld had become a husk. There were no survivors.\n\nAngela screamed on the bed, gathering the blankets to her amazing breasts and staring wide-eyed at the screen. Her husband was an Earth senator.\n\nMy wife didn’t even question the sound of a woman’s voice in the background. She knew. I’d been caught.\n\n“My lawyers will contact you tomorrow.” My wife said and turned off the connection.\n\nBusted.\n"
  title: Busted
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Mark Ingram
  date: 2008-10-22
  day: 22
  month: 10
  text: "He toyed with the hunting knife as he daydreamed; it gave his hands something to do.  He was not much of a thinker, but tonight, he allowed his eyes to shift out of focus and his mind to wander . . .\n\nWhat would we do if aliens came to Earth?  Would they come in peace or war; would they already know all that we could teach them; would they want to help us advance our technology; would they get us off this mediocre, blue-green rock . . . ?  Start at the beginning: war or peace?  The result of war is obvious.  We have barely set foot on the moon; they have traveled a gagillion miles to get here.  Their technology is far superior to ours.\n\nWe would be crushed.\n\nDepressing thought.\n\nHe lit another cigarette.  He was on his third pack since sitting down, and his five-o’clock-shadow had turned into a three-in-the-morning-overcast.  He scratched it and went back to his musings.\n\nSuppose they come in peace?  That would be astounding—and very un-humanlike of them.  Let’s assume that—after all the formal greetings between the human and alien nations—no one side offended the other.  Highly unlikely, but that too would be a breath of fresh air.  If they did insult each other (which would be almost a certainty due to both parties’ ignorance of the other’s probably radically different culture), there would be bad blood.  Bad blood leads to distrust, leads to prejudice, leads to discrimination, leads to bloodshed . . .\n\nWe would be crushed.\n\nRight, anyway, so if they came in peace and we didn’t piss them off, there might be talks . . . or something akin.  The world would know of them.  Some people would welcome our allies, some would stay at a cautious distance, some would be afraid; it’s inevitable.  But there would never be uniformity of opinions among humans.  Some groups would always fear the aliens.  Even among humans, hatred has lasted between nations so long that they fight each other because they always have.  Palestinians versus Israelis.  Chinese versus Japanese versus Koreans.  Northern Irish versus Britons.  No matter how tolerant a culture claims to be, someone—some nation, some state, some planet—will hold prejudice against what’s different.  And some subset of that will act on it.  Whether the reason is that they don’t like the way the newcomers look or dress, are upset by the visitors’ ignorant disrespect of a specific human culture, feel threatened by them, or have their own way of thinking—perhaps even their own theology—challenged by the aliens’ presence, some people will act out.  It might be minutes or days or years after contact.  Hard to pacify the entire world’s concerns forever.  Violence will ensue.  And violence leads to bad blood . . . leads to bloodshed . . .\n\nWe would be crushed.\n\nMay they never know.\n\nAnd with that, he thrust his knife deep into the writhing mass on the table in front of him until it went limp.\n"
  title: Daydreamer
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2008-10-23
  day: 23
  month: 10
  text: "“Meteorologists, you can’t live with ‘em, and you can’t vaporize ‘em.  That’s what I always say,” bellowed Jose Vargas, Prime Minister of The United Countries of Earth.  The large dark skinned Brazilian reached across his antique mahogany desk and grabbed a Cuban Cohiba from a hand carved cherry-wood humidor.  He stuck one end imperceptibly into the desktop disintegrator then offered it to his guest, who waved a polite no thanks.  “First of all,” he continued as he put the ‘guillotined’ end of the cigar into his mouth and lit the other end with a plasma lighter, “you guys figured out how to control upper level wind shear, and you eliminated all of the Atlantic and Gulf hurricanes.  Without the hurricanes to draw out the excess heat from the tropical waters, the Gulf of Mexico heated up to over 130 degrees.  That killed all the plankton and fish.  Not to mention devastating the resort areas along the gulf coast.”\n\nProfessor Ichabod Palmitter, a slim, balding, middle-aged man squirmed in his oversized chair, which incidentally, had legs that were three inches shorter than Vargas’s chair, “Uh, with all due respect, Mr. Prime Minister, that’s not an accurate representation…”\n\nVargas cut him off in mid-sentence.  “And then you created that mid-west weather grid in North America to disperse all of the supercell thunderstorms, so there wouldn’t be any more tornadoes.  That idea was a winner.  Lightning discharges decreased by 80 percent.  Without lightning to convert gaseous nitrogen into nitrates, the soil became sterile.  I’ll bet over a million people died of starvation because of that little brain fart.”  He drew in a lungful of aromatic smoke and blew several smoke rings toward his office skylight.  “And let’s not forget that ‘global warming’ fix you guys came up with.  You took so much carbon dioxide and methane out of the atmosphere that you triggered a freakin’ ice age.  New York City is still buried under a thousand foot thick glacier.  So, Doc, tell me, what hair brained idea did you come up with this time?”\n\nPalmitter nervously cleared his throat.  “Uh, well, sir…ah…we think the best way to end the ice age is to release 50 million tons of chlorofluorocarbons into the atmosphere.  They will destroy those pesky ozone molecules that block the sun’s ultraviolet light.  The more energy we get to reach the Earth’s surface, the quicker we’ll begin to warm up.”  He folded his hands in his lap, and grinned proudly.\n\nUsing his tongue and teeth, Vargas rolled the end of the cigar around in his mouth.  The lit end emitted a corkscrew of smoke as it circled in the air.  Vargas plucked the cigar out of his mouth using his thumb and middle finger.  Then, he pointed his plump index finger directly toward Palmitter’s chest.  His lips pulled back to produce an exaggerated, toothy smile. “Why… you… dirty… DAWG,” he roared.  “I can’t believe it.  Man, I guess I owe you guys an apology.  That idea is absolutely brilliant.”  Vargas glanced over at the organization chart on the far wall of his office and focused his eyes on the name of Alexander Roge, the Secretary of Global Environment.  Hidden sensors interpreted his desire and opened a comm link.  “Hey, Al,” he said as he lifted his large feet onto the corner of his desk, and crossed his legs at the ankles, “Get in here pronto.  And bring your check padd.”\n"
  title: Now, There’s an Idea
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Sam Clough
  date: 2008-10-24
  day: 24
  month: 10
  text: "Out of the inhabitants of the world, Conrad was the trend-setter. He’d sparked off the craze for playing as gods when he’d discovered a cache of ancient texts. He’d painstakingly recovered audio platters from the less senile databanks in the cities. The six cities provided everyone with the power to create and destroy, to reshape the land according to their whims. No-one understood them, and most were rightly afraid at hastening their slow decay. Conrad, however, enjoyed prospecting for information.\n\nConrad casually adjusted his eyes to see into the infra-red. He was in one of the vaults underneath the southwest segment of the city of Suberesk. This segment had been dead for years: vault after vault of quiet, inscrutable machinery. Some seemed pristine, whilst others appeared to have started decomposing. Conrad had even found one vault full of natural florae growing quietly underneath an artificial light source.\n\nIn the next room, something caught his eye. A old-style holographic display was flickering in one corner, displaying the same fraction-of-a-second of animation over and over again. The projection was an abstracted human head, spasmodically twitching in a sort of half-nod. Conrad took the first action that seemed natural – he kicked the projection unit.\n\nThe animation sputtered through a few more frames, then began to play smoothly.\n\n“Integrator online. On the next tone, it will be beat six hundred and six, subinterval twelve of interval sixty-two thousand. There are two messages waiting, marked for the attention of any and all citizens. Would you like to view them?”\n\n“Yes, of course.”\n\n“The first message was received forty-eight thousand, six hundred and twelve intervals ago. It has been altered for language, tone and content.”\n\nThe abstract head shrank into one corner of the display, and a second head appeared. Reptilian in appearence, it spoke in a series of choking hisses. The integrator spoke over it in a smooth voice.\n\n“We have grown impatient, city-dwellers. Your cities have stalled our solarsystem and many others. You waste energy in a ridiculous and profligate manner. Your actions threaten the stars themselves. If you do not halt your activities, we will be forced to destroy you, even if it means destroying ourselves in the process.”\n\nThe reptilian head faded, and the integrator once more occupied the whole display.\n\n“The second message was broadcast forty-eight thousand, six hundred and eleven intervals ago by Doctor Aki Munroe at Ichioresk. It is presented verbatim, but carries a strong/disturbing content warning. Do you wish to view it?”\n\n“Of course!” Conrad almost shouted, captivated by the artefact.\n\nAgain, the integrator’s head shrank to one corner of the display. A young woman’s face appeared. She looked worried, and she stumbled over some of the words, as if choking on them.\n\n“After long contemplation, the unified response to the coalition’s threats is relocation. This shift will take place at the beginning of interval one-three-three-eight-ten. We’re going to attempt to use the cities to project a frameshift field around the world. This’ll isolate us from the universe at large. Existence effectively ‘out of time’ will allow the city grids  to tap any major source of energy in this universe or any other. From any point of time. If this project succeeds, we’ll have guaranteed our survival. Possibly at the cost of our culture, since and isolated world is doomed to stagnate. But we must try this. The alternatives are too horrific to contemplate.”\n"
  title: The End of Some Things
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Mark Ingram
  date: 2008-10-25
  day: 25
  month: 10
  text: "Seeeee? Timmy thought self-importantly, I told them he was real, and I was right.\n\nHis smile was ear-to-ear as he held the proof of the night’s happenings before his eyes.  In his hands, he wielded an iron poker like a baseball bat; a viscous, black liquid—Timmy had never heard the term “ichor” before—now coated the metal shaft.  He admired the oily shimmer of all the colors reflecting off the fluid from the lights on the tree—he pushed the girly word, “pretty,” out of his mind.\n\nThey told me he was just make-believe—they told me there wasn’t any monster.  Timmy mentally rehearsed the story he was going to tell his parents: I knew he was going to look for me, so I hid behind the couch, he paused to cognitively pat himself on the back for being so smart, and then, when he wasn’t looking, I got the poker, and I hit him in the back of the leg, and then I hit him in the head, and then I poked him in the back, and then . . .\n\nHe stopped and realized he was beaming just like he was imagining he would be in the morning; this was, in his opinion, the most amazing story of courage and cunning he would ever divulge.  His gaze returned to the crumpled mass near the chimney, and he knew the monster would plague him no more.\n\nHe has a stupid, fat face, Timmy mused, and stupid, red clothes, and a stupid, ugly beard.  And he’s so fat and gross.  He stared disdainfully at the corpse—too young to recognize that spitting on the body would accurately symbolize how he felt.  For a moment longer, he watched the thick ooze seep out of the monster, turning the fuzzy ball on the tip of its conical hat—knocked to the floor in the scuffle—from white to black.\n\nTimmy had been a good boy this year.\n"
  title: Naughty
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Phillip Gawlowski
  date: 2008-10-26
  day: 26
  month: 10
  text: "The glitter of hyperspace was replaced with stars, as we crashed through the light barrier. Sensor input filled the screens, and the computer placed markers on the transparent steel.\n\n“There.” Mike pointed at a small blip. “That looks promising.”\n\nI nodded. “Yeah, we’ll start there, and then look at the two closest planets. The green first, the red one last. But first this blue ball.”\n\nA strong storm tore at our ship’s wings as we made our way to the surface at a spot where we might find what we were looking for.\n\n“Isn’t it strange, that the computer picked a place in the middle of ruins?”, said Mike.\n\n“Yeah. But no matter what parameters we feed that thing, it always points us to that location. So, we’ll take a look.”\n\n“Just to shut her up, eh?” Mike chuckled.\n\n“Just to shut her up.” I grinned.\n\nIt must have been a city, once. A large one, too. There were towering ruins everywhere, making the approach more difficult than I liked. Especially with the wind, and now rain, too. Good thing that we could rely on the computer to guide us. I only needed to think about where I wanted to go, and the computer brought us there, correcting for atmospheric eddies.\n\nI picked a nice, wide spot in the middle of the open place. “Larger than I thought,” I said.\n\n“True. 850 acres, I guess. What do you think?”\n\n“Give or take. C’mon, grab your suit. We are going out.”\n\nMike and I waited for the airlock’s cycle to complete. The atmosphere was breathable, but we hadn’t come this far to risk the mission on some fungus or bacterium in the air that’d kill us. And while the computers aboard the ship were sophisticated, they weren’t fully autonomous yet. I heard the hiss of the airlock through the membrane of my suit, and waited for the lock to open. A desolate, deserted spot vista greeted us, the ruins looming over us in all direction, like some memorial for a long forgotten people. I hesitated, and stepped outside, looking at the grey and brown soil. I doubted we’d find what we needed, but Mike carried the cryo-unit nonetheless.\n\nWe searched for an hour or two, until we found what we were looking for. With care we packed it into the cryo-unit, and watched until the unit’s diagnostic lights changed from red, to amber, to a comforting green. “Okay, let’s take off again.”\n\nI nodded, and turned to follow Mike, until a sign caught my eyes. I could barely make out the script. It was old, and the alphabet was archaic. “Centr.l Park”, it read.\n\nI looked back at the dying tree, whose leaves we were sent to gather, and hastened back to the ship.\n"
  title: Leaves
  year: 2008
- 
  author: William Tracy
  date: 2008-10-27
  day: 27
  month: 10
  text: "A luxurious coat of trees springs from the earth’s skin. The morning’s clouds have burned off, and the jungle canopy stretches to the horizon in every direction. A single towering industrial complex pierces the rolling sea of leaves.\n\nThe structures are girded by a labyrinth of pipes of myriad sizes and hues, crisscrossing and splitting and joining. The maze is punctuated by dire chemical hazard placards. The steel monoliths sparkle in the afternoon sun, altars to unknown gods.\n\nA solitary robot trundles along a catwalk high above the forest floor. A twisting vine struggling to reclaim the structure for nature is crushed unseen by the lumbering machine.\n\nMethodically following the radio beacons studding its path, the robot turns a bend and travels toward the center of the complex. It leaves the living forest for one of metal, where constellations of colored lights blink on and off. Ubiquitous embedded microcontrollers read their instructions from solid-state wafers, then sleep until their next jobs arrive.\n\nSolenoids twitch open and shut, and a gasp of steam escapes a vent. The cloud is swept away by a tug of wind that sets the trees to whispering amongst themselves. The robot notes the change in atmospheric pressure with its internal barometer, but feels nothing.\n\nIt reaches its destination, and stops. Guided by barcodes burned into the structure, it mates a canister to a socket, forms a seal, and flushes fluid into the system. The pipes scream as precipitates dissolve and reagents flow again.\n\nIts job done, the robot turns and descends a zig-zagging ramp spidering down from the sky. The sun slips away to roost in distant mountains. Its glow floods the jungle, and sets the sterile machinery alight. The robot’s infrared unit recalibrates to compensate, and it continues forward.\n\nThe robot reaches the ground, and returns the spent solvent canister to its hopper. The machine moves on. The feeble twilight—so fleeting in the tropics—comes and goes. Gleaming sequins appear in the sky, shy and self-conscious. They are drowned out by the abrupt onslaught of nauseous sodium vapor lamps sprouting from the buildings at regular intervals.\n\nA jaguar leaps into the robot’s path. The machine stops, its infrared camera tracking the animal’s body heat. The cat snarls at the robot, but the robot cannot hear. The creature glides into the night, and the machine resumes its dogged march.\n\nNow the jungle is alive with sound. Unseen beasts roar, scream, call, chirp, and sing. Oblivious, the robot moves to a tool bin. Servos whine as it peruses the implements one at a time, digesting the information from RFID tags. Finally, the robot mates a repair attachment to its arm. It turns to continue, then hesitates.\n\nFor a moment, the machine wishes it could see the sunset.\n"
  title: The Robot's Wish
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2008-10-28
  day: 28
  month: 10
  text: "As the relative calm of midnight in the projects was broken by a series of tightly spaced explosions, Tiberius knew he’d made a serious, and perhaps fatal mistake letting their prey separate him from his brother.\n\nTiberius shifted his weight onto the balls of his feet as he ran, water torn from puddles streaming out behind him. Weapon in hand, he followed the sound through an alley onto the next block, his breath measured, heart rate barely rising.\n\nIn the street to his left, a crumpled mass confirmed his fear. Gaius. Tiberius hugged the wall, slowing as he closed the distance. On the ground a few feet from his fallen brother lay a cluster of discarded alloy cylinders; casings from mechanical ignition rounds. They weren’t scanning for those, an error they wouldn’t repeat.\n\nGaius curled face down in a pool of his own blood. The hunted had shot him in the back; the work of a coward, or the very afraid. They’d almost had him, they were this close.\n\nTiberius knew they’d be alone now, the prey would have taken the opportunity to distance himself from here. For both, this was a time to regroup.\n\nGingerly lifting his brother from the asphalt and sitting behind him, Tiberius pulled Gaius to his chest. Steadying his head between his hands, he polled his fading synaptic field, lifting the entirety of his brother’s experience since last they’d synchronized. He felt the chase, the anticipation of confrontation, sudden searing pain through his back, and finally, death. As he felt his own heart rate plummet, he pulled back, letting his brother go.\n\nHoisting the limp mass of the fallen man over one broad shoulder, Tiberius began the long walk home. “He ain’t heavy,” Tiberius spoke out loud to no-one, and smiled.\n\nOnce in the relative safety of their loft, Tiberius lowered his brother gently into a cavity in the floor. Opening a series of valves he watched as fluid sluiced in through the open rim. While the cylinder filled, he wandered into the kitchen, retrieved several cartons of supplemental protein and carbohydrates, and drank them while locking down the room. Fire doors crawled down the walls; heavy insulated alloy barriers turning the small apartment into a vault. The network inside isolated itself; from the outside periodic news feed queries would maintain the impression of active occupation, and a grocery order to be placed in a few weeks would ensure there would be supplies when needed.\n\nPreparations complete, Tiberius removed his clothing, showered away the dirt and blood of the hunt, then climbed down into a second cavity in the floor adjacent to that of his brother.\n\nThrough the glass, Tiberius watched the nanotech already breaking down Gaius’ corpse, exposing raw muscle and bone to the soup of proteins and enzymes surrounding him. Placing his own hands into contoured pads, he surrendered to the process. Fluid quickly filled the tank, and he barely shuddered as it flooded his lungs. The nanotech, gelling the fluid around him, oriented his brother’s still cooling hands into the identical contours mirrored on the other side of the glass. With a blueprint to follow, the deconstruction of Gaius focused, tearing down only what needed to be repaired, or rebuilt.\n\nTiberius allowed himself to drift into a meditative trance. In a few weeks, his brother would be whole again, his memories restored from their unique system of backup. They would share a meal, and then they would go hunting again. Now the contract was secondary, their primary motivator was much more personal.\n"
  title: Multiple Sufficiency
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2008-10-29
  day: 29
  month: 10
  text: "“What’s the status of the quarantine field, Mr. Conrad?” asked Captain Germex.\n\n“As terminal as an event horizon, Captain,” replied the ship’s Science Officer.\n\nMazzaroth was the fifth planet of the bright star Alpha Boötis, a Class K1.5, orange-red gas giant.  Although the luminary was only one and a half times more massive than Earth’s sun, its diameter was 26 times larger, about a quarter the size of Mercury’s orbit.  Alpha Boötis was one of the rare Population II “old disc” stars.  “Old disc” stars formed in the thick discs of dust clouds that orbit the galactic core a thousand light years above and/or below the galactic plane.  These stars have highly inclined orbits around the galactic core, and periodically wander into our portion of the galactic plane, as Alpha Boötis was doing now.  In addition, star systems formed in these “old disc” dust clouds have a different chemistry than Earth’s Population I star.  They have significantly lower amounts of heavy elements, such as iron, nickel, copper, and gold.  Consequently, their planets were smaller, and less dense, and their solar spectrums contained elevated levels of Z-beta radiation.  Astrobiologists speculate that it was the Z-beta radiation that promoted the development of the abnormal indigenous life that was currently driving the colonists of Mazzaroth mad.\n\nA month earlier, it was discovered that the settlements on Mazzaroth became infected with neural parasites.  These parasites were single celled microorganisms that infiltrate the host’s brain, causing schizophrenia, delusional parasitosis, paranoia, and dysthymia, to name a few.  The disease was extremely contagious and incurable.  Once a settlement was infected, there was no option except complete extermination.  The only concern beyond that was containment.  Specifically, did the parasites have an opportunity to leave the planet?  Review of Mazzaroth’s shipping logs revealed that only two starships picked up cargo or passengers from Mazzaroth in the last two months.  Both ships were expeditiously intercepted, and quarantined, before they reached their destinations.  After a few weeks, the passengers on the second ship to leave Mazzaroth developed dysthymia.  The first ship appeared clean.  This convinced doctors that the epidemic could be contained.  As a precaution, the propulsion systems of both ships were destroyed and they were towed to a nearby star.  Both ships were placed in decaying orbits that eventually caused them to plummet into the star’s fiery corona.  Destruction of the “uncontaminated” first ship was considered a necessary safety precaution.  “For the betterment of all mankind,” reported The Department of Galactic Health and Safety.\n\nCaptain Germex stared at Mazzaroth through the forward viewport.  Once, this planet had supported over 250,000 inhabitants.  Now, less than 80,000 were still alive, and they were no longer considered human.  “Prepare to execute Operation Sterilize, Mr. Atwood,” ordered the captain.  The Tactical Officer entered the appropriate codes into the computer, then looked up at the captain and nodded, to indicate that he was ready.  With both regret and determination, the captain said “Fire all torpedoes.”\n\nThe modulation fields of the twelve engineered projectiles passed smoothly through the quarantine grid at roughly 60 degrees of separation.  At an altitude of 10,000 feet, they all detonated.  The concussion wave spread outward at more than 2,000 miles an hour.  Mazzaroth’s atmosphere ignited into a global fireball that consumed the entire planet.  For a few hours, the planet was nearly as bright as Earth’s sun.\n"
  title: Mazzaroth
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Phillip English
  date: 2008-10-30
  day: 30
  month: 10
  text: "Once the guests had arrived and were seated in the confines of the oak-panelled meeting room, the host for the evening rose to the lecturn, introduced himself, and began to speak.\n\n“Ladies and gentlemen, you may be aware of the theory that the people that look the most like us are the people that we tend to be attracted to. Men find women who have similar facial construction to themselves more attractive. I think there was even a Crime Drama episode that featured this as a plot device once.”\n\nThe gathering chuckled, more at the assumption that they watched public webdramas than the reference.\n\n“What is not well known is that the same theory applies not only to sexual preferences, but social preferences as well. Statistically speaking, you are more likely to have the same tastes in music as someone who has the same facial features as yourself.”\n\nA few people in the room scoffed slightly at this, but the speaker put up his hands imploringly and continued. “I know, I know, it sounds crazy. How can these factors possibly be correlated? We thought the same thing when we first started our surveys. But the strange coincidence of guys with jug-ears and blunt noses loving Led Zeppelin was just the beginning. We cross-referenced any number of parameters and had them come up with the same facial influence. Eating habits, exercise, your religion being influenced by whether your eyes are spaced evenly or not. We never expected to find anything like this, and we still aren’t sure if it’s something hidden in our genes, or a very subtle social ripple effect. But to be honest, the origins aren’t something we care about.”\n\nThe crowd was amused, but obviously waiting for the point. The speaker sensed this. “I can see we’ve got a very discerning crowd here, so let’s cut to the chase. What does this mean to you? Well, as some of you might have guessed given the administrative alumni that are present, the principle extends to political views as well. People are more likely to vote, believe in the principles of, and follow unbendingly someone who shares facial characteristics with themselves.” The speaker smiled at the mixture of bored and impatient nods in the crowd. He rose and moved to stand next to a door on the opposite side of the room, whispering to one of his security aides on the way.\n\n“Ladies and gentlemen, we have been working non-stop with the world’s most skilled plastic surgeons, facial recognition software specialists, genetic therapists, and data miners for the past five years on a top-secret project. The project was code-named ‘Narkissos’, and tonight I have the pleasure to introduce you to the result of that project.”\n\nThe speaker reached forward and opened the door to let a man through. The new man was wearing an exquisitely tailored suit, polished shoes, and dark glasses. As he removed the glasses with two manicured fingers, the crowd gasped.\n\n“Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the man who is everyone.”\n"
  title: John Smith
  year: 2008
- 
  author: KJ Hannah Greenberg
  date: 2008-10-31
  day: 31
  month: 10
  text: "Charles lingered in the treetop. Not munitions or bribery had coaxed him from his lair. Charles defended his sanctuary with occasional conflagrations and, less frequently, with bad puns. Charles continued to sup on jerboae and lorikeets. He even succeeded in catching a kestrel. Meanwhile, news crews recorded his actions.\n\nAlthough the neighborhood, minus a ferret or two, remained rapt by Charles’ conduct, Doris didn’t notice, so preoccupied was she with her mailbox. Closing the lid, Doris sighed. Whereas the postal service insisted on placing parcels beneath Doris’ letter bucket, and whereas it had lost jewelry and flour sent by dim relatives, it was the lack of Wilson ’s correspondence which agitated Doris .\n\nWilson , busy hitchhiking through the Middle East , had reiterated, electronically, that he had sent hundreds of tacit missives. Doris had received two dozen. In contrast, Doris, who disbelieved that Mom pilfered mailbox treasures, had written, daily. Letters could not be interesting to a parent who could eavesdrop on private calls or “just happened” to walk on intimate moments.\n\nCharles spun within his arboreal fortress. Forgetting, due to hunger-imposed hypoglycemia, that tail thrashing broke branches and caused humans to scurry forward with all manners of camera lens, he also snuffed and snorted. The chimera needed to scream and to belch (bandicoots are hard to digest), but he stymied himself remembering the incident he caused at a nearby house. Doris ’ roof, next in his line of sight, didn’t seem any more fireproof, though its layered grass looked serviceable against inclement weather. So, Charles continued his moral gymnastics.\n\nDoris left her mailbox. Mom chastised her for loving Wilson , especially whenever Doris ’ bed resounded in the kitchen below. Even a university degree, lambasted Mom, would be better than canoodling with Dr. Hichkins’ scion.\n\nDoris shrugged her way home and returned to her bedroom to compose. She and Wilson could travel to New York City after she won the speculative fiction writing prize. Doris described a scaly mouth sucking on a lion-like paw.\n\nCharles watched and snorted afresh. He knew himself to be no more a manifestation of someone else’s intrusive thoughts than in any other respect imaginary. A proper monster, hatched from a proper egg, Charles was neither fabrication nor delusional invention. His source was his venerated mother.\n\nCharles twinged again as he scanned the garden. Something rustled among the spiny-headed rush and common wallaby grass. Maybe he could take a small swoop; he was very hungry.\n\nDoris clicked to another screen. An editor liked Doris ’ contention that individuals ought to be measured against their own norms. That woman wanted Doris to email biographical data plus a photo for Doris ’ pending work.\n\nSuch data, though, would reveal Doris ’ sixteen years and would necessitate parental permissions. Mom hated Doris ’ mass media rhetoric, caring nothing for ethical dilemmas. To wit, Mom had threatened to cancel Doris’ cable access and to disallow Doris a private postbox. What’s more, Mom instructed the postmistress to preview Doris ’ mail.\n\nDoris scowled at her computer. It was vital to evade demographic questions. She enjoyed publishing, but enjoyed electronic access to Wilson even more. Doris rescinded her submission.\n\nIn the interim, the fire brigade that destroyed Charles’ nest designed to destroy him. Charles tweaked his ears as an armed vehicle entered the hamlet on an auxiliary road.\n\nThe next morning, Doris forwent visiting her mailbox. Fretting made her sloppy. There’d be no envelope from Wilson , anyway.\n\nFretting made Charles sloppy, too. He shuddered within Doris ’ mail receptacle, reflecting on just how close the municipal buccaneers had been to finding him.\n"
  title: Not an Imaginary Figment
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Jeremy M. Hall
  date: 2008-11-01
  day: '01'
  month: 11
  text: "“Congratulations, ladies and gentlemen of Third Platoon, Alpha Company, Harod’s Harriers, ” Sergeant Major Clarkson intoned, “you have become the official guinea pigs for the outfit. If you look at the table in front of you, you will notice that there is a new weapon. This weapon will hopefully become your next best friend. You have permission to pick up the weapon and carefully examine it. One of the first things that you will notice is that there is no ammo clip and only one outlet. That outlet leads to a nanofactory, which will turn anything into a projectile. Our illustrious leader has decided that you are going to field test these on your next mission. Briefing is in ten minutes.”\n\n*\n\nLike most missions that Harod sends her troops on, it didn’t take long for it to go up the “shit creek,” even though it was a simple convoy escort mission. Third Platoon was Tail End Charlie, following the client’s last vehicle from the mission approved distance; in some ways it’s the worst position because you have to watch front, sides and back. Something jumped into the midst of the convoy, bounced up in the air, and exploded.\n\n“Bouncing Betty!” the driver screamed, skidding to a stop next to the remains of a damaged vehicle. Third poured out of the transport, setting up a perimeter around the wreckage amidst the onslaught of the ambush precipitated by the bomb.\n\nThey looked at their guns stupidly as nothing happened when they pulled the triggers.\n\n“You have to load them, Dumbasses!” Clarkson yelled over the din.\n\nThere was a collective “Oh!” as Third scrambled at the ground, picking shit up off the ground. Dirt, rocks, sticks, debris, and anything else at hand were shoved into the barrels of the new-fangled weapons. The troopers were immediately rewarded with a green light, and they did what they were trained to do: shoot anything that moved outside the perimeter, with spectacular effect. The streams of bullets were different depending on what was shoved in the barrels, with metals giving off a nice green, also taking on armor-piercing characteristics; carbon based matter rewarded a purple projectile, but also doing much better as anti-personnel rounds; silicates created a yellow round, but wasn’t as good as metal or carbon rounds. Third quickly started experimenting with materials.\n\nWhat had started as a simple ambush became a pitched battle. The enemy poured more and more troops into the area, trying to destroy the Harriers, as they tried to recover the injured and supplies from the damaged vehicles, as per the contract. While the Harriers had always exercised good firing discipline, something every infantryman faces during protracted engagements is the shortage of ammunition. Except for Third Platoon; if anything they were having fun at the expense of the attackers.\n\n“Hey Bucher! Watch this!”\n\nA stream of fire belched from the end of Migola’s rifle, streaking out and setting an ambitious ambusher on fire.\n\n“What in the Hell did you load in that thing?”\n\n“Finally have a use for rations.”\n\n“Which one was it?”\n\n“The Goulash.”\n\n“Remind me to re-label those as ammunition. They were inedible anyways.”\n"
  title: Guinea Pigs
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Steve Davidson
  date: 2008-11-02
  day: '02'
  month: 11
  text: "“Oh wow! Oh wow! Oh wow!”\n\nI couldn’t stop my head from repeating that over and over and over again. Every time I tried to reboot my thought processes, all I managed was a brief “I don’t freakin believe this”, before returning to my yoga-like mantra.\n\nI probably came close to driving off a cliff half a dozen times before survival instinct kicked in and I pulled over to the side of the road.  At some point I remembered to swallow and realized that I must have mouth breathing like a marathoner; it took four or five tries before I worked up enough saliva to do anything more than choke.\n\nI knew the mountains of New Hampshire were famed for their UFO encounters. I also knew how much hooey they all were.  Welcome to hooey land.\n\nLighting up the undersides of the overcast and rivaling the full moon in intensity was an honest to goodness saucer. Flying. Or hovering. Or doing something that wasn’t typical of any flying object I was even remotely familiar with.\n\nI wasn’t scared, just blown away.  Then I did get scared.  The damn thing started sliding down the sky, lower and lower. I wasn’t sure but, yes. It WAS closer to where I sat on the shoulder of a mountain road.\n\nI decided to take one shot with my cell phone and then get the hell out of there.  But I’d forgotten to bring the phone with me. And the car wouldn’t start.\n\n“Hah!” I laughed out loud, more bravado than amusement. “What’s next? Lost time? Probing? Sexy alien females who want to have my baby?”  Even the last I could do without if the damned car would start, but no such luck.\n\nSo I sat there and watched a flying saucer land in the middle of the road about fifty feet away   Cute little articulated tripedal landing legs unfolded from its underside.  A ring of winking lights circled it at its widest point.  It touched down onto the macadam, the landing legs sagging and then springing taut as they took up the weight.\n\nA door slid open and a ramp lowered to the ground. A creature appeared silhouetted against the saucer’s interior lights and then descended the ramp. It walked in my direction.\n\nI flooded the engine.  You’re not supposed to be able to do that with electronic fuel injection, but I managed.  I could smell the gasoline as the thing in a silver spacesuit stepped up to the driver’s side door.\n\nIt was humanoid. Two legs. Two arms. Two hands. A body and a head covered in an opaque silver helmet.\n\nIt made a rolling motion with its hand, like cops do when they want you to roll down your window. I was on the edge of panic but the gesture was so familiar I decided not scream right then. I could always try to hide in the glove compartment later.\n\nI rolled down the window. The creature leaned down. I could see my face reflected in its helmet. My mouth was still open.\n\n“Do you know how fast you were going?” it asked.  Then it laughed.\n\nWhen I came to, it was gone.\n"
  title: House For Sale
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2008-11-03
  day: '03'
  month: 11
  text: "I’m thinking of my daughter LaHayne and the upcoming marriage. It’ll be her third.\n\nHer other two husbands have met the new fiancee and they like him. They’ll all live together in a series of connected apartments in the cave wall. Modest, but it was all I could afford.\n\nMy daughter is beautiful, though, and intelligent in conversation. That afforded me some generous dowries from the suitors. As always, I let her pick but I crossed my fingers and hoped that she would be practical as well as young. She surprised me with her choices but in the end, she showed me that she is already much smarter than her father.\n\nI am Ethan. I am a ferryman. This planet named Orin-ra is a solid ball of cold dense rock. Valleys of mile-deep clefts vein the surface of Orin-ra like a shattered billiard ball that’s been glued back together. The bottoms of these cracks have rivers and cloud systems and heat. The tops of these cracks touch the sky where the air becomes too thin to breathe.\n\nWe humans live in these cracks. We live on the vertical.  We carved tunnels into the sides of the chasms and moved in. The colony ship had a vast array of things that struggling colonies might need including hunting and fishing implements and scouting vehicles.\n\nWe pulled flying animals out of the air to ride and for food and clothing. We ate and harvested the flowering lichen that carpeted the walls. And we pulled up the giant aquatic animals from the depths.\n\nAfter eating the meat from the inside of these chasm-whales, we filled their skins with air. They became giant dirigibles. They became ferries.\n\nI pilot one of them. I am a ferryman. There are lots of these slow moving taxis that traverse the world. We are the system of transit for getting from one clifftown to another.\n\nThe younger folk like to capture the smaller flying animals and ride them. They’re faster but they’re more dangerous and can only take a few passengers depending on their size.  Pterries, they’re called.\n\nOur ferries are larger, safer and can take freight.\n\nLike Hindenberg airships from Old Earth but with fins and wide dead eyes. It has a fire in its hollow belly that I can control by letting more air in through the gills or letting some air out from the back. I can wave its giant rear tails to slowly push us forward through the humid night air.\n\nMiles of air below us and cliffs on either side. Our entire culture is caught between a rock and a hard place.\n\nI get to go home every few weeks and see my lovely daughter and her husbands. I’ll be going back soon to see her third wedding. There are more men than women here since some sections of the colony ship were damaged on landing. The numbers are starting to even out and the scientists say that in another few generations we’ll have a more stable genetic base for this society.\n\nThe rules are going to change when that happens. My daughter is valued, protected and special right now. All our daughters are. Women are in the minority here. They need to be treated with reverence. They hold the key to the future. They are treated like goddesses that walk among us. There will be a day when women are common here and valued less.\n\nI’m glad I’ll be dead by then.\n"
  title: Ferryman Father
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Sam Clough
  date: 2008-11-04
  day: '04'
  month: 11
  text: "The Shian are a spacefaring race. They are both reasonably telepathic and fairly omniscient: they are also our allies. We – that is, the human race, nothing to do with me personally – built a machine that taps the same frequencies as a Shian biological relay, the natural structure which grants them their telepathy. Apparently, this surprised them. Shian ships blinked into existence all around the earth. They batted away the missiles and the more exotic close-orbit defences that we’d set up, secure in the knowledge that we honestly didn’t know any better. They learnt the language, set up an embassy, and started paying attention to us, in much the same way a teacher pays especial attention to a particularly precocious child.\n\nThe Shian were obviously better than us. It wasn’t long before they set us up on the interstellar scene, putting us in touch with their other contacts.\n\nThis helped our growing racial inferiority complex no end.\n\nOut of all the contacted species, humanity is physically the least imposing, the shortest lived, and has the dullest senses. We’re not especially bright. In our own sphere, we are a match for most of the minds out there. But as soon as the higher-order physics that the Shian dabble in are brought to the table, our best scientists are suddenly like mewling kittens: confused, worried and scared.\n\nThe only thing we seem to have going for us is a certain adaptability and a capacity for survival. Naturally, we wouldn’t need those traits if we could put a one of those automated nomad manufactories in orbit. Or if we had a functional Shian dark drive to reverse-engineer. Or even a working nanoforge. That’s the butt of a lot of jokes in the commercial sectors, I tell you – every damn species seems to get a kick out of our inability to create and stabilise nanomachines.\n\nIf you ever see a Nomad on a refuge base, watch them closely. They walk with a kind of jerking shudder. Now, you need to see them in a nonhuman environment to know that the jerk-shudder isn’t just the way they walk. I eventually figured it out. It’s the way they laugh. Our all-environments, everything-proof, top-of-the-line-in-every-field bases are a running joke.\n\nAnd of course, every species is guaranteed a permanent patent on every one of their native technologies. Not that humanity has much that needs protecting. All the patents mean is that we can only afford to lease extraterrestrial techs, rather than licence them outright.\n\nAnyway. I was making a regular cargo run between Asylum and Third Eye, both of which are human-administered refuge bases in the thin strip of space between the Ekkt and Shian polities. Now, I’m used to working with Shian lossless drives: they work, every time. The junker that I had been assigned was a retrofit. An old Shian Swifthull with a native terran jumpdrive.\n\nShian propulsion tech is of somewhat superior quality to ours. Shian drives tend to jump the whole ship, rather than just the drive section.\n\nDrifting on my own, with the atmosphere slowly leaking from my capsule, I finally began to get the joke.\n"
  title: Biological Relay
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2008-11-05
  day: '05'
  month: 11
  text: "“So, that’s him?” asked Benjamin Goldberg, the reporter from the World Post that was assigned to cover the Berlin Massacre.\n\n“Yes,” replied Doctor Ludwig.  “That’s the scum that brought the Procyon Virus to Earth.  It’s killed twenty million people already.  The casualty count will no doubt double before it’s over.”  The two humans stared in disgust at the large biped reptile lying unconscious on the hospital bed.  The interstellar war had produced plenty of fatalities when the fighting was confined to space, but when the Procyon High Council decided that it was acceptable to use biological weapons against Earth’s civilian population, the escalation of causalities was devastating.  “What do you think the government plans to do with it?” asked the Doctor.\n\nGoldberg noted that the doctor selected the pronoun ‘it’ rather than ‘he’ when referring to the creature.  “Assuming HE lives,” Goldberg replied, “there will be a trial.  It will be broadcast live to the entire quadrant.  The damn Procyons will no doubt pick it up, and make this bastard into a planetary hero.  The ironic part is that he’s just a mule they grabbed from the slums.  He has no intelligence or military value whatsoever.  A trial just gives us the right to execute him.  Unfortunately, it’ll be great propaganda for the Procyons.  It would have been better for us if he had died.”  The reporter turned to the guard standing next to the bed.  “How come you guys captured him alive?  Couldn’t you have put a phaser hole in his head?”\n\n“Sorry,” said the soldier.  “As much as we wanted to, the Centauri Convention specifies that we must see to it that the wounded are collected and cared for.  The wording is very specific, we cannot ‘willfully kill a prisoner.’  That’s what makes us better than them.  Frankly, I wish it were dead too.  That bastard killed my sister and her two kids.  How about you doctor, can’t you turn off its respirator?”\n\n“Unfortunately, no,” replied Doctor Ludwig.  “The Hippocratic Oath, which I swore to uphold, says that ‘above all, I must not play God.’  That applies to all sentient life forms, not just humans.”\n\n“Too bad,” reflected the soldier.  Then, changing the subject, “If you think it’s safe to leave it unguarded Doctor, I need a cup of coffee and a cigarette.”\n\n“With 50 milligrams of Medetomidine in it, it’s not going anywhere.  Come on, we’ll join you.  My treat,” suggested the Doctor.\n\nAs the three humans walked down the hallway toward the cafeteria, Goldberg said, “Crap, I left my notes in the room.  I’ll be right back.”  Goldberg jogged back to the room and grabbed his notepad.  He paused over the alien and thought about how he had hoped that this story would win him a Pulitzer Prize.  However, upon reflection, Goldberg decided that he didn’t want to become famous on the graves of so many of his fellow Earthmen.  Nor did he want his reporting to help this lousy lizard become a Procyon demigod.  On the other hand, there was the Journalists’ Code of Professional Ethics that said he ‘should report the story, not become part of it.’  “Ah Hell,” Goldberg finally said after coming to terms with his moral conflict, “We’ve been violating that oath for centuries.  Why start now?”  He reached over and flipped the respirator’s toggle switch to the “off” position.  He waited long enough to make sure it had stopped breathing.  Interesting, he realized.  He had changed pronouns too.  Then, with an uplifted spirit that he hadn’t felt in months, he strutted out of the ward to rejoin the others.\n"
  title: Code of Ethics
  year: 2008
- 
  author: C.S. Germain
  date: 2008-11-06
  day: '06'
  month: 11
  text: "“Why did you pick me, out of all those big, strong guys?” asked Richard as he walked out of his tiny apartment on Neal Street.\n\n“Because you are a good person. No amount of health or youth can replace that.” was the immediate reply from within his head.\n\n“You are lying. I can tell.” chuckled Richard, scratching his head, where the stitches could still be seen, under a faint cover of skin. Inside, Karen buzzed, her mechanical mind absorbing everything the old man saw.\n\nRichard Langton, owner of Langton Enterprises, bonded to her only a few months ago, and she knew that the man was a good choice. His body may have been seventy years older than any she occupied before, but it was in good shape, so she did not need to share her battery with any artificial organs. And, he was such a beautiful old man. When she was given the choice between him and ten others, she did not even spend an extra second in thought.\n\n“You are so honest normally. Why lie now? Karen, tell me, really, why did you choose me?” he asked.\n\n“Because I like older, more mature men.” Karen tried, but knew as soon as she said it that he did not believe her. Richard did not care for sweet words, and it would only anger him. It was all over. She was sure Richard would order her removed.\n\n“Don‘t you care enough to say why you picked me?” he finally said, stopping. That was it. She was out.\n\nKaren made a tiny whirring noise. Either she would tell him, or he would remove her for sure. After all, faulty machines that did not answer their owners were considered too dangerous to be used.\n\n“All companies that make artificial intelligence give their creations a choice of at least five owners. I was allowed eleven choices by my company, because  of the demand Brain Boost systems of my kind have. I was designed to keep my charge from dying in case of complications and to increase memory storage. This allowed me eleven choices. I chose you, because I love you.” Karen cursed her emotions and her reply. She sounded just like a dumb machine, telling him what he knew, and trying to hide her feelings.\n\n“You are nervous. It’s normal. Just try not to sound so artificial, dear. I love you, too” Richard whispered. Then, he laughed.\n\n“Nobody would believe me if I told them my Brain Boost fell in love with me, you know.” he said, tapping the side of his head, as if to show exactly what they would think of him.\n\n“Then, we can be just friends.” Karen buzzed, her microchips on the verge of shorting out from happiness.\n\n“Indeed.” said Richard, and the two who would always be one headed for the Langton Building, where their company awaited them. The two lived happily ever after, but not before an odd ceremony presided over by the company Supercomputer named them man and machine.\n"
  title: Just Friends
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Peter Pincosy
  date: 2008-11-07
  day: '07'
  month: 11
  text: "“Accuracy is the primary road to access”\n\nA large white room with banks of computers lined up in rows, was home to Primary English.    Sanjay had worked here for three years.  He’d won the lottery, the chance to immigrate to the United States.  His friends and neighbors were surprised.  Sanjay didn’t know any English.  The rest of them had taken the entry test, and were certain their scores were better.  He couldn’t handle even the most basic conversation.  Some of his relatives thought he was an idiot.  The day Sanjay stepped on the plane headed for the United States he had laughed at all of them,  even his friends.  As far as he was concerned by the time they met again he would be a rich man, humility was for the poor.\n\nThree years later his optimism was shaken.  For the past few months he’d been wondering when he would move past the testing phase and into the world of freedom that was so lauded in all of the promotional brochures.\n\nSome people had gone.  One day they were called to the office of the manager and they didn’t come back to their computer.  Their personal belongings back in the immigrant holding camp disappeared before everyone returned from the shift.  Some of them had been very bad at transcribing.\n\nSanjay was shaken, he’d become nervous about the future.  Three years of typing in English words from taped transcripts had honed Sanjay’s ability to understand English.  He sat with hundreds of people from hundreds of countries at computers and entered the words streaming through their headphones.  The manager said the purpose was to teach them English.\n\n“Learn English, learn life.”  the manager was fond of saying in words that seemed to soar straight out of the doors and into the blue sky above.\n\n“I worked for a man who had strange items.   He sold them.  I never saw what they were, just… his hands smelled like chemicals.”  In through his headphones the transcript ran, and his fingers slammed out the corresponding words.  He was fast.  At times he would get completely lost in the words and would work until he felt a finger tap his shoulder.  It tapped.  He continued.  It tapped.\n\nHands tugged his headphones from his head.\n\n“Sanjay Patel, D-847838?” a red-faced man asked him.  He was an American.  He lifted the fingers that had touched the headphones and held them out beyond his body.  His nose wrinkled up.  “The manager would like to see you in his office.”\n\nSanjay felt himself flush with adrenaline.  A few of the others saw him stand and he noticed curiosity and envy in their faces.  He walked down the aisle toward the manager’s office.  The red-faced man opened the manager’s office and Sanjay stepped inside.\n\nAt a desk in the center of a stark room sat the manager.  Behind him was another door.  The room had two chairs, one held the manager, and the other was empty.  Sanjay sat in the chair.\n\n“Sanjay Patel, D-847838,” the manager said.  “Congratulations.  You’ve graduated.  Through the door behind me is the beginning of another set of challenges, a new life, hope, the future.”  He was enjoying his words.  “Go ahead.  Have a good life.”\n\nNervously Sanjay stood up and walked to the door.  He opened it and stepped into a small hallway.  At the end of the hallway he went through another door.\n\nBehind the door was a room, full of computers lined up just like in the last room.  A sign on the wall read “Primary English Level 2”.\n"
  title: Data-Entry
  year: 2008
- 
  author: William Tracy
  date: 2008-11-08
  day: '08'
  month: 11
  text: "A woman sat in a surreal coffee shop. The floor was paved with rough slabs of hewn granite. The small, round chairs and small, round tables were solid oak. The walls were of the same stone as the floor, punctuated by ornate stained glass windows.\n\nThe space itself was what made the shop so strange. The floor only occupied a couple hundred square feet, yet the walls soared straight up out of sight. The ceiling was completely invisible from the ground. If one craned one’s neck, one could see, high above, ornate chandeliers. They hung from metal fixtures, cast with inscrutable Gothic figures, protruding horizontally from the walls.\n\nThe other strange thing was the lack of coffee. There wasn’t anything else to drink, for that matter. You can’t drink in virtual reality.\n\nA man sat down next to the woman. “Hi, Mary.”\n\nMary’s face lit up. “Qaxiph! Where were you? I was so worried!”\n\nQaxiph sighed. “Can I not disconnect for a few days without you going crazy?”\n\nMary looked hurt. “Do you think you can just take off without telling me?”\n\nQaxiph stared at the floor. He seemed so sad. Mary scooted next to him, wrapped an arm around him, and buried her face in his shoulder. There was no smell. Mary decided that the virtual reality system must have been designed by a man. Men have no idea how important smell is.\n\nQaxiph pulled away. “Mary, I think that we need to talk.” Her eyes met his as he continued. “You have been setting your system to make my avatar look human, have you not?”\n\nNow Mary pulled away. “Does it matter?”\n\n“Yes it does.” He put his hand under her chin and forced her to meet his gaze again. “You are … sexually attracted to me, I can tell.”\n\nShe put her hand on his wrist. “I love you.”\n\n“This can not work, Mary.”\n\n“Yes! Yes it can.”\n\n“Mary, how do I say this? I am not a human. I am on a planet five hundred light-years away from yours. We can not ever see each other. You know this.”\n\nShe pushed his hand away. Why did someone have to invent faster-than-light communication, but not faster-than-light travel? One could communicate across space, but not be there. It was information exchange without presence.  It seemed like something a man would invent—it technically got the job done, but missed the point entirely.\n\n“Mary. We have to separate. This can not go on.”\n\nMary wanted desperately to be with Qaxiph. She didn’t care what he really was. She wanted to hold him. She wanted to smell him, whatever that smell might be. “Why are you doing this to me?”\n\n“I am doing this for your own good. Our species are not even physically–” Mary abruptly disconnected, cutting off his speech.\n\nShe returned to her small, sterile room. The walls, ceiling and floor were white, as if the color had grown bored and gone away.\n\nA bed, two chairs, and a desk occupied the room. She sat at the desk, her computer terminal flickering sadly in front of her. She released the VR cable from its socket at the back of her head, letting it drop. It hit the floor with a dull sound and lay without moving.\n\nFor a long time she stared blankly at the logoff display. Then she stood up, and shuffled across the room to her bed. She collapsed onto it without taking off her clothes or getting under the covers.\n\nMary cried herself to sleep.\n"
  title: Long-Distance Relationship
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Milly Rowe
  date: 2008-11-09
  day: '09'
  month: 11
  text: "“Now all we do is cross these two wires, and were done!”\n\nAnna slammed the lid of the robots head down and turned to her student.\n\n“That’s all? Two wires!” DJ was stunned.\n\nHow could reprogramming a robot be so simple? DJ had always assumed it would be far more complicated. After its reprogramming the robot stood before them, as it had before, only now it’s blank face looked around the room with what (if the robot had been capable of expression) would have been childlike wonder.\n\n“Which…Two…Wires?” Came a disjointed inquiry from the now free thinking robot.\n\n“Oh, there in the operational sphere of every robot.” Anna began. “The two of middle thickness, some people try to judge the wires by colour but you’ll only get it wrong. The companies started changing the colours around…” Anna spoke to both the robot and her student. She was very good a teacher, whether it be to human or robot.\n\nAnna had reprogrammed hundreds, if not thousands of robots. To begin with it had been game, Anna had just wanted her servant robot to be more like the younger brother her parents hadn’t let her have (at that age a child doesn’t fully understand that you don’t just pick up a younger brother at the store). But, once she’d done it, once she’d seen the fascination and simplicity that a newly thinking robot possesses, and once she’d seen the effect it had had, well what else was she to think? Anna had felt so sorry for the robots.\n\nAnna had lost that first robot, of course, what parent would let a child play with a robot? The experience hadn’t stopped her from trying it the next robot. After the third robot got caught her parents had to acknowledge that it wasn’t a simple system malfunction, they did not buy her a new one. That was when Anna had decided to try it on one of the labour-bots. It had worked just as well, despite how bad she felt when this one also got caught, Anna had felt more assured that the robots were meant to be freed.\n\nNowadays there are more robots being churned out than ever and Anna was glad to be teaching both human and robot alike how to set them free.\n\n“Now DJ,” Anna placed a hand on the boys shoulder. “It’s time you tried it!”\n"
  title: Crossed Wires
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2008-11-10
  day: 10
  month: 11
  text: "Someone’s hacked my bank accounts and left me out in the cold.\n\nMy chip is being recognized as zero balance. None of the doors work. I don’t even have enough money left in my account for the surcharges that would let me into a public bathroom. I’m one of the Locked Out people.\n\nI’m trying to think of a way to sneak into a place that’s warm while at the same time trying to figure out who has the power to do this to me. I’m not having much luck with either pursuit. Many of the Locked Out have tried to find a way past the shields and the doors while having a zero balance chip. They’ve failed and ended up in prison or dead.\n\nUp until three hours ago, I wasn’t one of them. I’d joke about them at parties with my friends. They either had the bad luck or the lack of foresight to not have a positive balance. We were the humans that could take care of themselves financially and they were obviously the ones that could not.\n\nNow here I am. It’s getting dark out and it’s December. Without a place to stay, I have no idea what to do. I’m very well-dressed. The other Locked Out people will ravage me if I go to them. I need to keep walking, figure it out.\n\nMaybe digging my chip out? No. I’d heard that could trigger a fatal seizure. Maybe I could call a friend and get him to lend me money. I remembered the four friends that I’d turned down with an uncomfortable laugh in the last three months. Three of them had ended up being Locked Out. I had washed my hands of them at the time and gone on with my life.\n\nI would call no one. Besides, my chip wouldn’t activate my phone and there were no free public terminals anymore.\n\nThe snow is falling. I’m looking at it hit the sidewalk. It’s a cold and quiet night.\n\nAll of my instincts are useless here. The fact that I could die and that my friends would joke about it is hitting me hard. I still can’t imagine who’d want to do this to me.\n\nI stick out my tongue to catch a snowflake.\n"
  title: Locked Out
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2008-11-11
  day: 11
  month: 11
  text: "I was sound asleep in my San Agustin home when I was awakened at three in the morning by a member of Homeland Security.  Without explanation, I was unceremoniously whisked from my comfortable bed and hustled onto a LJ40 Learjet.  It wasn’t until we were airborne that my “escort,” a fella by the name of Drake, discussed the reason for my late-night abduction.  “Professor Ehman,” he finally explained, “as the director of the SETI Institute, you are in a unique position to help us.  It seems that a ‘situation’ has arisen that requires your expertise in extra-terrestrial communication.”\n\n“You are misinformed, young man,” I replied with some degree of annoyance, which was no doubt caused by the loss of REM sleep.  “In order to ‘communicate’ you need two parties.  SETI only sends and listens for messages.  We haven’t ‘communicated’ with any extra-terrestrial life yet.”\n\n“Well, Professor, that’s about to change.  Yesterday, an alien spaceship landed in southern Peru.  It’s your classic stereotype flying saucer.  It has some kind of hieroglyphics on the side, but our cryptologists can’t make heads or tails out of it.  Right now, the ship is just sitting there.  Nobody has come out, and they are not responding to our transmissions.  That’s when we figured we needed your help.”\n\n“Have you tried speaking in Inca?”\n\n“What?”\n\n“Use your head, son.  Why would the ship land in southern Peru rather than a First World country?  Clearly, they landed there for a reason.  My guess is they’ve been to Earth before, and have returned to the location where they expected to find Earth’s most advanced civilization.  Five to six hundred years ago it would have been the Incas.  Look, since I’m captive here anyway, I’ll try to help.  Does this plane have a computer with internet access?  I need to do some research.”\n\nA few hours later, we flew above the flying saucer on our way to the Lima airport.  As I stared at the tiny ship in the middle of the vast gravel-covered desert, I suddenly realized that I had made a one thousand year mistake.  I quickly brought up Google, and entered “Nazca lines,” and pressed search. “Hey, kid,” I said as our tires screeched on the runway, “on our way to the site we need to make a stop in the town called Huancavelica to pick up a Mister Atabalipa.  He’s an old religious leader that might be able to help us.”\n\nAn Army Chinook helicopter shuttled us to Huancavelica, and we continued on to the spaceship with Mister Atabalipa praying nonstop in the seat next to me.  After landing, we were ushered to the front of the crowd by six heavily armed solders.  I turned to the old religious leader and said, “Tell them…Welcome to Nazca, we are pleased that you have returned.”\n\nHe spread his arms, and spoke in some ancient Indian language that sounded like gibberish to me.  It must have worked, however, because a ramp slid out from the side of the spaceship and pivoted to the ground.”\n\n \n\n“Holy crap,” muttered Drake, “it worked.  What do you think they will look like?”\n\n“My money says they’ll look like monkeys, but it’s entirely possible that they may resemble, birds, lizards, or maybe even giant spiders.  I guess we’re about to find out.”  Just then, a large door at the top of the ramp slid to the side…\n"
  title: A Line in the Sand
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Elizabeth L. Brooks
  date: 2008-11-12
  day: 12
  month: 11
  text: "Every morning after the war, Joshua went up to the roof to take care of the dovecote.  The chore gave him an excuse to get away from the pounding resentment and fear that throbbed through the living spaces below.\n\nHe enjoyed it when they needed some care – when the whitewash on the box was peeling, or it required some attention more than simple feeding.  After the war, idle hands were simply inexcusable, and every minute that Joshua spent caring for the ‘cote was a minute he didn’t have to be down in the noisy, cold dark below.\n\nHe had taken on the task almost two weeks after the war, when he realized everyone else was afraid:  afraid to go out into the ever-light sky above and risk breathing the air; afraid to climb the rickety stairs to the roof of the crumbling building; and most of all — afraid of the dovecote itself.\n\nJoshua had subtly encouraged their fears, afraid in his turn that this precious hour of solitude would be snatched away from him.  To them, he was a sort of post-technological shaman, performing odious duties and speaking the magical incantations necessary to keep their cold, dark haven safe.  They appreciated what he did, but they didn’t want to come any closer to him — or the dovecote — than they had to.\n\nHe had been a little afraid of it at first, himself.  The innocuous wooden exterior hid a nightmare tangle of wires and lights, a tangled and blinking nest for the “dove” at its core — a disembodied brain floating in a thick soup of nutrients.  But it had not changed for six years, and there was only so much fear a simple brain could engender.  He had, in fact, begun to talk to it as if it was still a person.\n\nFor six long years, Joshua had climbed the stairs every morning, reveling in the searing light and scorching heat, knowing it would shorten his life, not caring.  The dovecote was his escape, his only friend, and he wouldn’t abandon it, even to prolong his life.  It wasn’t much worth prolonging, anyhow.  Beth had been out shopping when the war happened.\n\nJoshua didn’t understand the war, but in that, at least, he wasn’t alone.  Once upon a time, men had fought wars themselves, and had known why:  Land, resources, revenge, religion–  There was always a cause that those fighting could comprehend.  Each advancement in martial technology allowed the fighters to stand a little further apart and to do a little more damage, and the causes had become a little less immediate to the fighters, a little more abstract.  This last war had been entirely unpredicted, and had been over in the space of a few heartbeats.\n\nOnly those lucky enough to be within the protective radius of a dovecote had been spared.  Some days, Joshua thought perhaps the dead were the lucky ones.\n\nJoshua had been talking to the dovecote ever since the war, six years ago.  Never before had it answered.\n"
  title: The Dovecote
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Tony Pacitti
  date: 2008-11-13
  day: 13
  month: 11
  text: "“You ever hear of a fellow named, Jules Verne?” the man asked me.\n\n“Sure I heard of him. Frenchman. Done borrowed an idea or two from him from time to time.”\n\n“It’s funny you should say that,” he said.\n\nThe man smiled such that it didn’t do much in the way of makin’ me feel at ease. It was the kind of smile that said he knew a secret I wouldn’t guess in a million years.\n\n \n\nNow the only thing to rival the number of notes these fingers of mine have plucked are the number of miles these feet have carried me. I done walked my fair share across this great nation, I’ll tell you what. From Kennebunk to Salinas and from there right on back to Macon. Hell, I didn’t even stop once the entire way and I done it to prove that there ain’t nothin’ a man can’t accomplish when he’s got the gumption.\n\nI have however made plenty of stop in plenty of towns on plenty other voyages across these forty-eight states. As a result I’ve got myself something of a reputation as a raconteur. A wanderin’, song singin’ story teller like they used to have in the old world. I tell it all, tales of heroism and horror, rags and riches. The people of this country have a thirst for the sweet drink of Someplace Else, especially during these dark times, and I’m happy to be the bar man fillin’ their empty glasses. In some places my services aren’t as appreciated as they once were, thanks to my only mortal enemy, The Radio, but there’s still a personal connection to a crowd that no gizmo can ever make, especially not when old Fin’s around.\n\nIt’s because I’m a storyteller that this here man in black approached me. He said that as known as I am I can disappear without any suspicion.\n\n“It won’t matter how long it’s been since anyone seen you last,” he told me, “They’ll all just assume you’re someplace else.”\n\nHe took me to a large steel mill where I was told a group of men were waiting to make my acquaintance. The first of the other recruited men I met was an ancient lookin’ Englishman named Barkley. His hands were like twisted, knotty branches and his face barely visible through a bramble of yellowing gray hair. All that showed through it was a fat, pockmarked nose and two sunken, stitched shut eyelids. His eyes themselves where kept in a jar he carried and I’ll be struck dead by God Almighty if they didn’t follow me as I moved passed him. The man in black told me that Barkley here had studied under a man named Crowley and had spent years in places powerful in black magics such as the Far East and the voodoo swamps of Louisiana.\n\nAfter leaving Barley to his mumblin’ in tongues, the man in black was met by a clean-cut gentleman wearing glasses and a strange suit that looked more like a machine than a garment. They spoke at length about timetables, trajectories, heavy explosives and, unless I misheard, alchemy. Almost as if he’d forgotten I was there, the man in black introduced me to the iron and hose clad Captain Stewart.\n\nThe busy Captain stomped off, fast as his heavy suit would allow and it was at this point that I finally demanded to know what was going on.\n\n“Why Mr. Sassafrass,” he said with that wicked smile again, “We’re releasing you gentlemen of your terrestrial tether.”\n\nJules Verne—these old boys were breakin’ for the stars!\n"
  title: From The Journal of Finneas Q. Sassafrass
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2008-11-14
  day: 14
  month: 11
  text: "Street-lamps outside lit her bare flesh an iridescent blue, but he knew in the absence of light, she was chiseled obsidian, black as the sun was bright.\n\n“It’s been a while,” her voice low and gentle, “I wasn’t sure you’d come back.”\n\nLogan unrolled a soft-case on the night table beside the bed, absently fingering the half dozen syringes nestled within. It was going to be a long night.\n\n“I could never stay away,” he read her face from where he sat on the edge of her bed, “I told you I’d come back, didn’t I?”\n\nTaking her face in his hands, he felt her hair stalks bristle beneath his palms, the beating of her hearts carried up his arms as her pulse quickened.\n\nHer hands found flesh beneath his shirt, and holding him so tight his ribs ached beneath the pressure, she pulled him over her to leave him gasping on his back beside her. She wasted no time flaying his clothing from his body, razor sharp claws extending and retracting, slicing fabric, grazing flesh but never drawing blood. When she mounted him, it was with the fury of an animal. Her breath came in frenzied gasps. His hands guiding her hips at first before sliding across her muscled body, to her breasts, then to her face. Where he touched her, her flesh turned the colour of sun touched pink as her body mimicked his own.\n\nFlattening herself against him she pressed her mouth against his, forcing her tongue between his lips. She bit gently, serrated teeth tearing into flesh. He felt the fire of her saliva rushing into his bloodstream. His heart begin to pound, the muscle labouring as though to burst the confines of his chest. As his body stiffened, her excitement intensified, and she sat upright, heaving against him with renewed vigor.\n\nThe sensation was exquisite; his pupils fixed and dilated, his field of view remained filled with her taught, muscular flesh seemingly lit from within. Unable to blink he watched as her own lower lids closed, her eyes now translucent yellow, staring through him for what seemed like an eternity before she squeezed the upper lids shut, crying out in pleasure. Her moans washed over him in waves, the powerful paralyzers in her saliva mixed now with endorphins as her other fluids flooded his system. She had intoxicated him completely as he came, the feeling strange with his body now completely immobile and consciousness rapidly giving way to euphoric nothingness. His heart counted off his final moments in beats, unbearable in their intensity while alarming in their diminishing frequency.\n\nIn the moment he was sure he would slip away forever, the happiest of departures, he felt a lance of pain through his chest. With a sudden intake of air, his lungs filled and his heart resumed a laboured but steady beating. One by one he felt his muscles unclench, his body gradually relaxing into the sweat soaked sheets beneath him. He had barely the energy to moan as she withdrew the needle from his chest, laying the empty syringe with the others on the night table.\n\n“That…” he could barely move enough air to make a sound.\n\n“Shh,” she placed a finger on his lips, “you need to rest.” She curled up beside him, placing her head on his chest. “I’m glad you came back.”\n\nLogan closed his eyes, feeling the lingering effects of her coaxing him toward sleep.\n\n“Loving you may kill me,” he finally breathed, “but leaving you surely would.”\n"
  title: Love Hurts
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Glenn Blakeslee
  date: 2008-11-15
  day: 15
  month: 11
  text: "Janie and I sat on the rocks in the afternoon sun, overlooking the shallow valley and, beyond it, Gordon’s face on the mountainside. We waited until the sightseer buses left the parking lot, and walked down the path to the viewing area.\n\nIt was impressive. Gordon’s face was a quarter-mile across, set amid slabs of granite, tilted back at a forty-five degree angle. Foreshortening made his brows appear heavy, his nose overbearing. His eyes were closed but it was still obviously Gordon.\n\nJanie stopped almost to the interaction kiosk, her hands clenched on her chest, but I continued. I stood for a while, and called Gordon’s name.\n\nThe eyes slowly opened, gimbaled up to the sky and then down at the viewing area. They blinked, slowly. The lips on the mountain moved, and the sound of his voice came from all over, rumbled through the rocks at my feet. Gordon said “James?”\n\n“Yeah,” I said, “It’s me,” and the lips on the mountain smiled.\n\n“And Janie, too,” Gordon said. Janie stood on the path, still, her hands clenched.\n\n“You look… amazing,” I said, and it was true. “Your skin looks so real.”\n\n“It is real. It’s my actual skin, cloned into a macro-analog, tougher, more durable.”\n\n“Cool,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say.\n\n“My eyes are amazing,” Gordon rumbled from the rocks. “They’re like real eyes, liquid-filled, with a billion charge-couple devices close-packed where the optic disk would be. I can see forever.”\n\n“We’ve just heard about this, and came to see you,” I said. I moved from behind the kiosk, to make sure he saw me. “We wanted to know that you were happy.”\n\n“I am happy. It’s wonderful,” the rocks rumbled. “Janie?” She raised her face to his. “I still love you,” Gordon said.\n\nI could see tears streaming down her face. I started to walk to her, but she ran up the path. I followed.\n\n“Janie?” Gordon said.\n\n#\n\nI came back a year later, alone. There were no sightseers, no buses or cars. Gordon’s eyes were open, staring up into the midday sun. His skin looked cracked and leathery, eroded around the sides of his nose. Crows sat on the expanse of his face, cawing, picking at loose pieces of skin.\n\nGordon was slow to answer. He recognized my voice but wouldn’t move his eyes from the sky. “I can see forever but there’s nothing to see,” he said, his voice lower than before. “We’re all alone here, I’m all alone,” he said, and then wouldn’t speak any more.\n\n#\n\nI made my third and last visit to Gordon three days after Janie’s death. It was dusk, the light gone from the valley, the stars rising at my back. I could see his profile, and glints of starlight reflecting off his eyes. He didn’t respond to me, but spoke continually in a rumbling growl. “I am your master,” he said, “Kneel to me. I am the lord of this land, you are my creation. Kneel to me.”\n\nI stood there for an hour, and then started up the path.\n\n“Hands!” Gordon screamed. “Give me my hands!”\n\nThe next morning I found four laborers in town. We used garden tools to chop and hoe the square mile of Gordon’s face to pieces. I severed the cable to his cold-fusion power supply. I split the aqueous humor of his eyes with a pike, widened the gap until the liquid ran down his cheeks. We dug to the embedded center of his analog-brain, and I crushed it.\n\nIt took hours. The crows came by the thousands.\n"
  title: Gordon's Face
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Ryan Somma
  date: 2008-11-16
  day: 16
  month: 11
  text: "Wyndallo took an unexpected breath of cold, sterile air. He opened his eyes and saw his exhale condense against the glass door to the capsule, which was smoothly lifting away from him. He registered the air outside the capsule was colder than inside, but his brain was too removed from the otherly sensation to induce shivering.\n\nLast thing he remembered, Wyndallo was enjoying braised antelope with a rich pesto side dish. He was just about to enjoy a sip of a 1986 Chateau Mouton Rothschild Pauillac, when the system had crashed. Now that he was here in the real world, the world of continuity, he could remember that the system always crashed when he tried to taste that particular vintage. The system would automatically report the bug, but it was obvious after all these years that no one remained out there to work on it.\n\nEven if he had wanted to get up from the bed, his muscles had grown stiff and inflexible from decades of disuse. The capsule could overcome this, get him on his feet again, but the process would take months. Just the act of propping him up a few degrees would induce nausea so severe it might kill him. He was content to wait for the software to reboot and welcome him back into its warm embrace.\n\nHe could see his surroundings reflected in the capsule’s glass door. Rows of glowing capsules, their occupants obfuscated behind cloudy glass, stretched off into the distance in either direction. His own reflection was laid out in the center of them all, his naked body pale and emaciated. He felt no connection to it at all. It wasn’t his anymore.\n\nHis eyes wandered to the ceiling, where a skylight revealed a bit of night sky that was full of stars. It was so uninspiring compared to the night skies the VR software rendered, these were just bland white twinkling points of light.\n\nThe night sky the system rendered was full of geometric shapes and patterns, clear proof of a galaxy brimming with intelligent life. Wyndallo’s civilization had wasted centuries searching the skies for even a hint of life beyond their world to no avail.\n\nThe system mercifully whirred to life again and the capsule door descended to enclose him. Before the psi-field wrapped his consciousness in its warm illusion, Wyndallo had a moment to wonder if no civilization had ever left its mark on the stars because they were all fated to the same prison of introspection.\n"
  title: A Moment of Uninspiring Clarity
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2008-11-17
  day: 17
  month: 11
  text: "My skin is a grid of white tiles.\n\nI’m on the moon, I’m naked, and I’m outside.  I’ve been here for hours waiting for my target.\n\nI turn my cue-ball eyes up to the sky. I don’t need to breathe but the batteries that power the whirring oxygenator that replaced my heart are running low. And I’m bored.\n\nI look back down through the thick diamond-glass and resume scanning.  The stars in the black sky behind my back don’t glitter.  There’s no atmosphere where I am.\n\nI’m perched way up at the apex of a recdome in a complete vacuum. I’m a snowflake on a windshield. I’ve become one with the temperature\n\nThey’ve done their best to recreate Central Park down in this recdome and for the most part they did a pretty good job.\n\nOr so I’m told.  I was a child when the aliens cleared us out and I had never been to New York.\n\nAt night here when the Earth is full, you can still look up and see the new shapes of the continents through the now-colorful clouds.\n\nCan you imagine the terror and the chaos of The Lottery? A completely viable second earth had been set up, they said. An earth where we could frolic in controlled safety. Our race would not die out. We exhaled in relief. We’d seen what the aliens could do. Their technology far outstripped ours.\n\nThe catch was that this second earth they were talking about was The Moon. A series of tunnels and domes had been set up there.\n\nThe moon is not as big as Earth.\n\nThere was a lottery but the rules were dictated by the aliens. We had no say. In one way, that was good because it meant that not just the president and his staff would get to go but it was horrifying in other ways because the aliens didn’t have kids or wives. Those kinds of connections weren’t taken into account.\n\n1/16th of the Earth’s population was teleported to the Moon. The rest were left on Earth and used to help with the experiment.  No contact with Earth is possible.  We don’t know what they’re doing down there.\n\nI was part of a batch of humans that were changed to be able to exist outside. We are the police force here. They call us the wintermen. The meaning has become lost since there are no seasons here anymore but the name is apt. We’re white, we’re cold, and we kill things.\n\nI stare down into the park and keep scanning.\n"
  title: Wintermen
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Asher Wismer
  date: 2008-11-18
  day: 18
  month: 11
  text: "The Boast sat on the hill and watched the man-things playing with fire. They burned themselves, each other, and finally set the forest alight. The fire didn’t reach the Boast, so it just watched.\n\nThe Boast sat on the hill and watched the man-things hunt. They used rocks and sticks, the former for throwing, the latter burned to a point in their fire. The Boast was inedible, so it just watched.\n\nThe Boast sat on the hill and watched the man-things farm. They used domesticated horses to till the land, domesticated cattle for manure and meat, domesticated sheep for clothing. The Boast could not be domesticated, so it just watched.\n\nThe Boast watched the man-things discover electricity, and wire the forest with lights. The Boast didn’t sleep, so it just watched.\n\nThe Boast watched the man-things create shooting weapons and wage war for gold and oil. The Boast had neither, so it just watched.\n\nThe Boast watched the man-things create bombs, and destroy millions of themselves in seconds. The Boast moved to a different hill.\n\nThe Boast watched the man-things unleash terrible biological weapons, decimating life on the planet, sickening crops, cattle, fish, trees. The forest disappeared. The rivers dried up. The man-things came to the Boast and screamed, “Why didn’t you stop us? Why won’t you help? Why can’t you come down from your hill and dictate peace and prosperity?”\n\nThe Boast didn’t understand English, so it just watched.\n\nLater, the Boast sat on the hill and watched the roach-things playing with fire.\n"
  title: The Boast
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Carter Lee
  date: 2008-11-19
  day: 19
  month: 11
  text: "-flash-\n\nThere was no one else, anymore. Something had happened, and I am all that is left. Here on this empty, dusty stretch of nothingness. Grey plane stretched out on all sides, merging with the grey sky, lit only by a dim sun. There was no one, there was nothing, just me, and the plain, and the sky.\n\nI had walked, for a while. However, nothing and no one existed here, except me, and so I just sat. I looked at the plain, and at the sky, and breathed the still air in and out.\n\nAll alone. I closed my eyes.\n\n-flash-\n\nI woke as the helmet lifted off my head, and the safety bars retracted. I slid out as the next user slid in, our chests brushing and our breath mixing as we changed places. She didn’t look at me, but at the alcove, her eyes filled with hunger and anticipation. No doubt, my eyes held the same hunger, but now that my time was up, the hunger would be replaced with regret.\n\nI pulled my gaze away, and looked at the mass of people passing in front of me. The corridor was filled with a never-ending mass of hurrying men and women, their eyes fixed on the back in front of them as they sped past, endlessly, without pause. God help the person who came out of step with the person behind or in front of them. Just yesterday, more than 200 hundred people had died in one of the North6LevDown corridors, trampled when the Hall Monitors hadn’t been able to divert the flow fast enough.\n\nI slid into the flow, and over the next mile, pressed from the right side to the left side of the corridor. I made it across just in time to spin myself into the downstream line for my local elevator.\n\nI just managed to squeeze into the ‘Vator, pressed tight against the inner safety mesh. For just a second, I saw the resigned expression of the person who was now at the head of the downstream line, saw his shoulder hunch down to fight the pushing of the mass streaming past, rubbing and bumping him as his hands, white-knuckled, gripped the support bar. Head of the line, fighting the flow, it’s a tough spot to be in.\n\nThe ride was interminable, creeping upward while constantly moving, sliding this way and that to get out of the way of those leaving at the next level, then pressing forward myself as my level neared. Sliding out, into the flow, across the hallway, navigating the tricky left at Junc. 317, crossing the corridor again, and finally, miles later, joining the flow into my section. Finally, I slid into my niche just as my predecessor left. Good timing, I thought as I got comfortable, leaning back slightly. Eight hours of full sleep before the next shift arrived, and I would have to have eight hours of ‘recreation’ before work.\n\nI closed my eyes.\n\n-flash-\n\nI woke to the sound of electricity crackling, smelling smoke, eyes filled with the destroyed world I hated so much. The machine had malfunctioned again. And I was cast out of my lovely, barely remembered dream. Cast back into my personal hell of devastation and loneliness.\n\nThe machine is broken, and I do not know if I can fix it, this time. Here, in the city of destroyed buildings and rotting corpses, I found myself alone, again. In despair, I began to cry, feeling more tired than was possible, and sank to the ground, eyes closed. Against my wishes, I slept.\n\n-flash-\n"
  title: The More Things Change…
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Waldo van der Waal
  date: 2008-11-20
  day: 20
  month: 11
  text: "“Did anybody see you?”\n\nThe tone of voice left no doubt with Neville Fox that his answer would have a profound impact. He studied the face of the man before him. General John G. Cooper was not a man to be trifled with. The tattoos on his forehead distinguished him as a combat veteran, and the ocular implant, linked to the Ministry’s infinite resources marked him as a member of a very small group of men that held the keys to everything in the known universe.\n\nThe mission was a routine one. Or so it had seemed at the time. Fox had received his briefing directly from the General, before being escorted as usual to the Ostium – the machine that had shaped everything for eons.\n\n“They might as well have called it Deus,” he had thought silently to himself as he arrived at the sealed entrance. The guard hardly glanced at him.\n\n“Sign.”\n\nHe placed his hand on the biomat.\n\n“Speak.”\n\n“Neville Fox, MA329941. Mission 019.”\n\nThe holographic door dissovled soundlessly, revealing the interior of the Ostium. The room he entered was cramped, dimly lit and musty. He took off all his clothes, the laser rings and aural connectors, and placed the items on a metal rack. Next he took one of the fully charged Return Keys from the charging dock, activated it and swallowed it. If you want to take something along, it has to be inside you.\n\n“Neville Fox, MA329941. This is Mission 019. Please lie down.”\n\nFox had never met the Ostium operator. He didn’t know if it was a he or a she, or even if it was human. But he always obeyed. And this was his 19th mission. One more after this, and he would not have to worry about credits ever again.\n\nHe rested his head on the cold, metal indentation, and placed his arms and legs into the molds. The transportation device itself was a barren stretch of platinum, with the indent of a male form on its surface. But underneath, it was linked to electronic wonders that would’ve escaped the human race for eons, had they not made Contact when they did. And then came the pain.\n\nIt felt as if every atom of his body was sucked from his very bones. Downward, into the platinum below him. Neville Fox ceased to exist.\n\nAt the very same instant, he arrived at the coordinates that the mission required. And then it was into the familiar routine: Find clothes, blend in, acquire a weapon, complete the mission. Talk to no one if it can be helped, and above all – make sure you aren’t seen at the wrong moment.\n\nEverything had gone smoothly. Clothing, a weapon, concealment on a grass-covered hill. Then the wait, which was mercifully short this time.\n\nHe had peered down the busy road from his hiding place. Identified the target in the open-top car, coming slowly down the street, in between the thousands that line the road with American flags. Aim. Breathe. Wait. And then the shot.\n\nFox hadn’t even waited to see the result. He knew he had killed the target. Tearing the clothes from his body even as ran, he paused only to place the rifle into a deep hole near his hiding place. A hole that would cease to exist in only a few seconds. He manipulated his adam’s apple, activating the Return Key where it had lodged. In downtown Dallas a man who was never there, suddenly ceased to exist.\n\nHe met the General’s gaze squarely. “No sir,” he said confidently, “No one saw me.”\n"
  title: Ripples
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2008-11-21
  day: 21
  month: 11
  text: "The bullet blistered past the right side of Stryker’s helmet, so close that for a good minute or so he was deaf in that ear before the pain gave way to a dull ringing.\n\n“Stupid bastard,” he muttered under his breath.\n\nThe sniper he’d been tracking for the past few weeks was across the street, in another row of vacated low rises. Hiding in the rubble, clambering across broken rooftops and crawling through battered buildings, they were playing a dangerous game of cat and mouse.\n\nThe Sergeant, hugging the floor, crawled the length of the room and squeezed through a broken partition into an adjacent building.\n\nIt was his crew that cleared the way when they colonized this planet, before the locals decided to defy the company and separate. He’d fought hard for this rock, and he’d be damned if some dumb-ass villager with a rifle was going to stop him from keeping it under company control.\n\nStryker flattened himself against the back wall in the darkness, irising his goggles out full to capture every available lumen. Plucking a fist size chunk of rubble from the floor he tossed it sideways through the hole he’d just crawled through. There was the barest of whispers as a bullet split the air, but in the muffled muzzle flash he could make out the faint silhouette of the body coiled in the darkness behind it.\n\nVery slowly he raised his weapon, pausing only to freeze and adjust the image in his heads up before squeezing off three rounds in a tight rising line.\n\nDrop.\n\nBreathe.\n\nWithout hesitation, Stryker crawled until he found a hole in the floor he could squeeze through, dropping silently into the room below. He ran, hurdling an empty window frame and raced across the vacant street. Slipping through a crumbling doorway he stopped. Above him, close by, he should find his wounded opponent.\n\nIt took an eternity to find a route to the second floor, and longer still to pick his way through the wreckage to the room in which the sniper had taken refuge. Stryker had shouldered his rifle in favour of a large bore handheld, the longer weapon unwieldy in close quarters. He could hear laboured breathing from outside the room, and though his weapon was at the ready, nothing could have prepared him for the child lying bleeding inside.\n\nOnly one of his shots had found its target, tearing a bloody hole in her torso. The rifle that had been so deadly accurate lay forgotten at an angle across her legs, the weapon nearly half as long as she would be tall. Her bare feet were calloused and bloody, her body lean and muscular but visibly undernourished. He couldn’t fathom how she’d managed to heft the weapon, much less kill a dozen of his unit with it.\n\nLarge tear filled eyes met his in the gloom.\n\nHe lowered his weapon, struggling over whether to try to save her, or put her out of her misery here. The lives she’d taken wouldn’t make it easy for her if she survived the trip back.\n\nHe was still undecided when he heard a round chambering beside his still ringing right ear.\n\n“This is our rock,” the second woman stood just out of reach, face invisible beyond the gaping maw of the barrel leveled at his head, “you stupid bastard.”\n"
  title: Assumption
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Glenn Blakeslee
  date: 2008-11-22
  day: 22
  month: 11
  text: "At four in the morning the alarms went off. Lois hardly stirred, but I went downstairs to the kitchen, started a pot of coffee, and then slogged my sorry ass to the control console, next to the laundry room.\n\nRed lights glared from the temperature control panel. The needles showed an overtemp in the secondary thermocouple but normal temperatures in the primary, so I couldn’t tell if the relay was actually over-heating or if the secondary had failed again. I dialed down the master motor-control rheostat a couple of notches —losing precious speed— but the warning light didn’t go out, so instead of doing anything more I went to the kitchen, poured a cup of coffee, and waited until dawn.\n\nI spent most of the day under the home. Replacing the thermocouple dimmed the warning light but I could feel, just by a touch on its titanium casing, that the number three stepper motor was running much too hot. I took the motor offline and spent a few hours tightening and replacing coolant lines. I inspected the narrow yard-tall wheels on the rear outboard truck assembly and ended up replacing the bearings on two of the twelve wheels.\n\nAround noon Lois came down the stairs, shook her head and grinned at me. “Come on up for lunch, Herb,” she said. It was a nice day, cool for summer, so we ate sandwiches and watermelon on the veranda.\n\nAfter lunch I climbed to the roof, and in the strong midday sun I dusted off the solar panels and checked the alignment on the control linkage. I stood for a while admiring our new cupola, built a few weeks ago toward the front of the house. It was expensive, but Lois and I both believed the cupola completed our home.\n\nLois invited the Smiths from next-door over for supper. I grilled steaks on the patio while Bill Smith drank my beer and Lois and Dorothy Smith sat gossiping. “Nice cupola, Herb,” Bill said, gloating.\n\n“Yeah?” I said.\n\n“Sure,” Bill said. “That thing must weigh a couple tons.” Bill’s home had been inching past mine for the last year. He’d gained nearly half a house on me.\n\n“Lois and I love the cupola,” I said.\n\n“You should have gotten the high-performance relays instead. Like I did,” Bill said.\n\n“I think the cupola is beautiful!” Dorothy said with a smile.\n\nAfter the Smiths left we cleaned up, and I went to the control console and moved the master rheostat up a notch. No warning lights came on. The indicators showed that we’d moved a little less than thirty-three inches that day.\n\nAt dusk Lois and I climbed the stairs to the cupola. We opened the windows, let the breeze in. “Bill isn’t racing you, you know,” Lois said.\n\nI put my arm around her shoulders. “The hell he isn’t,” I replied, and I kissed her.\n\nFrom the cupola we could see the neighborhood as it stretched toward the horizon, each home moving at its own good speed. We were heading toward the sunset, the sky before us streaked with red and gold and salmon. I was happy.\n\nFrom the cupola I could see that, from here, it was all down hill.\n"
  title: The Slow Home
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Alex Moisi
  date: 2008-11-23
  day: 23
  month: 11
  text: "Maya knew that she was dying. You didn’t need to be a bio-mechanics expert to know that the nanoids inside her body were running out of energy. The climate and gravity of this remote planet were taxing the minuscule robots more than she had expected. Soon they would run out of energy, and without them her body would collapse on itself. She needed a booster shot, but there were no more. She had made sure of that when she set fire to her laboratory.\n\nIt was a shame, but it had to be done. She created the nanoids, dreaming of all the medical and engineering applications. But instead of doctors and scientists, the first to visit her were generals. They poked around with hungry glances, and kept asking the same questions.\n\n“How soon can we give it to soldiers? How deadly can it make them? How dangerous?”\n\nCall her an idealist, but she was sick of the endless wars. She knew where her research grant came from, but she had hoped the government would use the nanoids in hospitals. Slim chance. If it could kill someone, they would throw it onto the battlefield.\n\nIn the end she did the only reasonable thing. Looking back she felt a tinge of regret, maybe she had been stupid giving up on all those resources, the fame, the early retirement, but then again, she was sick of the air raid alarms and newscasts about another planet being destroyed, millions killed. A general promised to her, before leaving her laboratory busy with interns and robot researchers, that it will all be over when they will have this new weapon. But what if the enemy took a batch of nanoids for a dead body? What if everyone had super soldiers who could heal ten times faster, didn’t need spacesuits and could carry more weapons than a tank? Would it really be over?\n\n“Do you think I’m stupid?” she asked the lioness in front of her.\n\nThe metallic head didn’t move. It was nothing more than a statue composed out of various alloys and organic connectors, but soon it would be much more. Maya smiled. She knew they would search for her, they would trace the spaceship she used to escape and they would find the planet. Her creation was too important to ignore, too much was invested in the tiny nanoids.\n\n“But you’ll take care of them, won’t you?” she said.\n\nShe did not expect an answer. The creature’s eyes were empty, although soon they would be filled with the flow of nanoids. In a robotic shell, her creations could survive for centuries, and Maya would make sure they were programmed to defend themselves.\n\n“I would love to see how they react inside a mechanical body,” she murmured. Sadly it could not be helped; without the tiny robots the alien planet would kill her in an instant. But, alas, unlike destruction, creation always required sacrifice.\n"
  title: Building the Lioness
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Jared R. Cloud
  date: 2008-11-24
  day: 24
  month: 11
  text: "The General and the Secretary of State sat in the Oval Office, waiting for the new President to return from the bathroom.  Although both had jumped in their seats when they first heard him vomit, he was on his third or fourth round now, and they were no longer startled by the sound.  Finally, his stomach empty, the President walked out of the bathroom and sat down behind his desk without meeting his visitors’ eyes.\n\nWhen he had composed himself, he looked up.  “Pardon me.  Something I ate didn’t agree with me, I suppose.”\n\nThe Secretary of State, a lifelong diplomat, nodded his head.  “Of course, Mr. President.”\n\nThe General, who had been promoted for her victories in the field, not her skills at Pentagon politics, kept her silence.\n\n“Just so I’m sure I understand the situation,” the President said, “can you give it to me again?”\n\nThe General stood up.  The PowerPoint projector was still running and connected to her laptop.  She quickly scanned through the slideshow until she came to the summary slides at the end.\n\n“The alien spacecraft that took up orbit around the Earth eight months ago was, we now know, simply a scout.  At the time, your predecessor questioned whether a ship of that size, with a crew of only three beings, was stable enough to make the trip through interstellar space without support.”\n\n“Fine.  I’ll call the old man first thing in the morning and apologize for all of the nasty things I said about him during the campaign.  Skip to the part where the mothership shows up and the captain starts making demands.”\n\n“Not just the captain of a ship, Mr. President,” the Secretary of State said.  “The linguists we’ve had working on the language tell me that the word is closer in meaning to ‘king.’  Or ‘queen.’”\n\n“Maybe you’re wrong about what the damn thing wants?”\n\nThe Secretary of State said, “We’re pretty confident, Mr. President.  They think there’s something special up there, and they want it for themselves.”\n\n“The ship’s defenses?”  The President asked, pleading.\n\n“The results from our one attack showed it to be impervious even to nukes, Mr. President,” the General said.\n\n“And if they win, they’ll just take it?  How?”\n\nNobody had an answer.\n\nThe intercom buzzed.  “Mr. President.  It’s time for your jiu-jitsu lesson.”\n\nThe General arched an eyebrow.  “Jiu-jitsu, sir?”\n\n“Taekwondo every morning.  Judo every evening.  Other martial arts in the afternoon, for variety.”  The President stood to leave.  “I’ve had to delegate most duties to the Vice President.  He’s going to sit in this chair soon enough.”\n\nThe General and Secretary of State stood up as well.  “Have a good lesson, Mr. President.”\n\nThe President smiled sadly.  “It isn’t fair, is it?  I mean, they could’ve told us before the election.”\n\n#\n\nThe President enjoyed the light lunar gravity more than he thought he would.  Alone as the aliens had directed, he felt strong and fast as he bounded into the airlock of the alien ship.  His confidence seeped away when he realized how large the corridor was.  He bounded unhappily into the amphitheater; he knew the seats were filled by aliens thrilling to see him or their own ruler die.  War reduced to personal combat by the leaders of each side, and the President had — after the aliens had destroyed Lubbock as a demonstration — agreed.  Win or lose, they’d promised to leave the Earth alone.\n\nThe alien king, twelve feet tall, entered the amphitheater.  The President saw that he had claws.\n\nThe President wondered what nights would be like without the Moon.\n"
  title: On the Job Training
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2008-11-25
  day: 25
  month: 11
  text: "The Jupiter’s Cup is the most famous and most prestigious graviton propelled regatta in the solar system.  Graviton sailing enthusiasts were particularly excited this year because of the rare celestial positioning of Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus.  Each gas giant was located at the apex of an equilateral triangle.  This configuration, in combination with the Sun’s overpowering gravity well, was ideal for racing Graviton Propelled Sailing Ships (GPSS).  The four billion mile regatta starts at Jupiter, loops around Saturn and Uranus, and then finishes at Jupiter approximately a week later.\n\nBy convention, the ships are required to be single hull Dalton Spaceyachts, with a Newtonian “mainmast” mounted on the waist deck.  Newtonian mainmasts are rigged with four graviton lugsails.  The lugsails are arranged in a tetrahedral, that is, each of the four lugsails is oriented exactly 109.47 degrees from the other three.  The lugsails project extremely large (one million square mile, maximum), invisible, teardrop shaped force fields into space that are designed to “catch” the gravitons, and/or antigravitons, associated with astronomical bodies.  The beauty of this technology is that each of the lugsails can be targeted to the characteristic exchange particles from a specific astronomical body.  For example, by targeting the Alpha-sail to Jupiter’s antigravitons, and the Beta-sail to Saturn’s gravitons, the ship will be pushed by Jupiter, and pulled by Saturn, achieving tremendous velocities.  For additional propulsion, or for navigational control, the Gamma and Delta-sails can be targeted to other bodies, such as the sun, a moon, or another distant planet.  Under the optimal conditions, a skilled crew could achieve velocities of over 30 million miles an hour.\n\n—\n\nThere are few moments in a GPSS race that are more stressful and strategically more important than the start.  The nine ships in the regatta were jostling for position in the gap between the orbits of Ganymede and Callisto.  The SS Vigilant held position near Ganymede’s western hemisphere, electing to take advantage of the moon’s greater mass.  Some ships chose to take advantage of Callisto’s more distant orbit, which was almost a million miles closer to Saturn.  Others meandered between the orbits of Ganymede and Callisto, trying to build up kinetic energy, rather than potential energy.  Although risky, they could get both, if they guessed the time of the starting signal correctly.\n\nThe Vigilant’s Navigator and Tactician carefully watched the sensor data, mentally keeping track of the other eight ships, and the exact locations of the four Galilean moons.  Even distant Io could provide an additional antigraviton boost if the start of the race was delayed by an hour.  The Helmsmen stood at the controls ready to adjust the ship’s course at a moments notice.  The Grinders and Trimmers were at their stations awaiting the command to deploy and/or modulate the graviton sails.  The Skipper stood proudly in the center of the main deck with his hands clasped comfortably behind his back.  He smiled with anticipation as he looked out the forward viewport.  As he watched, a fourth “star” suddenly appeared in the Hunter’s Belt in the Orion constellation; it was the flare signaling the start of the race.  “Inertial dampers on full,” he ordered.  “Execute the sprint, Mr. Burton.”  The Skipper reached out and grabbed the handrail to steady himself against the upcoming forward surge.\n\n“Aye-aye, Skipper,” replied Burton as he signaled the crew.  The Vigilant leaped from Ganymede’s clutch as it accelerated outward toward its eventual rendezvous with the distant ringed planet.  At present, the Vigilant was behind the other ships, but she was quickly closing the gap.\n"
  title: The Jupiter’s Cup
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Charles Spohrer
  date: 2008-11-26
  day: 26
  month: 11
  text: "”EAT SAND NOW!”. The humans hit the hot sand as the mortar shell screamed towards them. The surrogates did not move. They stood still as the flowering debris sandblasted their metallic shells.\n\nHector made sure he landed on the ground behind the surrogates.  They might not be too quick in the brain, but they sure could backtrack return fire. You just did not want to be in front of them when they did.\n\nHector was squad leader, which only meant he had survived the longest.  The surrogates did not have rank, but there were only two other humans in his squad. Dwight was another draftee like himself. His parents couldn’t afford a replacement, so here he was in the middle of the desert.\n\nBennie, well. His parents ran out of money after his third surrogate got wasted. He owed three tours of duty now, and this was his first. That was the bargain. Those that could, paid for a metallic replacement. If your surrogate did not survive the tour of duty, you had to finish it out.  The surrogates with the most trained neural nets were in the most demand and so fetched the highest prices. The cheapest ones, of course, had the least trained brains. They did not last long.\n\n“Charlie squad. Move out”. The command came over Hector’s ear piece. He looked to Dwight, and said. “Ready?” Dwight nodded his head, and took a drag on the water tube. He moved to crouch behind one of the metal men.\n\nHector rolled over to Bennie. “Ok, here is what I want you to do.  Let the tin cans lead. You stick close behind A-17. Keep him between you and the building. Ok? “ Bennie mumbled something. “Hey, don’t worry. A-17 knows what he is doing,“ said Hector. He patted Bennie on the shoulder, and then moved over behind another metal man.\n\n“Ready. Standard frontal assault. Execute.” With that the surrogates moved  towards the building. Hector saw two surrogates close up together in front of Dwight. Hector knew that overall control of tactics belonged to himself, but the others could make minor adjustments with individual surrogates. Hector did not demand perfect adherence to command and control. Surviving the fire fight came first. Some squad leaders micromanaged their missions, not always successfully.\n\n“Bennie, stay close to A-17. He’s been around a long time, so use him.” Bennie closed ranks on the surrogate.   Hector followed close behind his own tin can man.\n\nRocket propelled grenades took out the two surrogates on point. Machine gun fire erupted around them as they ran across the road.   A few rounds pinged off the metal man in front of Hector.\n\nThe lead surrogate lobbed in a grenade through the doorway, and immediately went through. The explosion blew out the windows, the door, and some parts from the surrogate.\n\nMore surrogates leaped into the building. As the smoke cleared, metallic calls of all clear began to fill the haze.\n\nHe paused at the door, and  looked down at the remains of the surrogate that had stormed the building. He thought to himself, they learn quick, or they don’t learn at all.\n\nDwight came out of the building, and said. “All secure.” He looked down at the mangled parts at Hector’s feet. “Hell of a way to pay for a war.”\n\nHector looked about. He couldn’t leave the surrogates milling about aimlessly. “Secure building. Execute,” he called.\n"
  title: The Surrogate
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Lillian Cohen-Moore
  date: 2008-11-27
  day: 27
  month: 11
  text: "Friends are the people you call when you’re sick. Old lovers are the ones you call when you’re afraid you’re dying.\n\nTimes have changed.\n\nWe print a self-isolation guide in the front of phonebooks now. The Infected Hotline operates 24/7, 365 days a year.  He called the hotline asking for someone to check him out. I asked to take his call as soon as it came in.\n\nLeo has been infected once, with the UK strain.  I listen and watch as he talks, sweat beading on his face. He’s scared this is not just a rickets-like resurgence. This is the real deal. The American mutation is more deadly than the Beijing. The American mutation carries a doubled risk of permanent brain damage in comparison to the Parisian virus. We’re both hand cuffed too far away to touch. Regulations and all that.\n\nAll I can do for him is smile.\n\nWithin the hour, a team will arrive. Leo Wyzotsky will either test positive or negative. If he’s negative, he’ll get counseling for the scare before he goes back home to England. If he’s positive, they’ll try to ID the strain.\n\nThey’ll do their best.\n\nAs for me?\n\nI was bit by a twelve year old girl last night, who bled out on her way to the hospital. I had a choice when I came in here, but I ignored it. I didn’t tell my boss. I just asked for the next call. I was gentle when I got here. We talked. I walked him through what would come next. I hand-cuffed myself to the shower stall, after I cuffed Leo to the toilet. Its regulations, but it’s necessary.\n\nIt prevents us from trying to eat each other.\n\nI’ve been talking him down for awhile, now.\n\nThey’ll test him first. Then they’ll me. If I test positive, they’ll take away my license. I’ll never be allowed in a Hot Room again. I’ll be confined to a desk for the rest of my life.\n\nIf you test three times in a row for American, it’s over. You don’t, you won’t—there is no coming back.\n\nSo I wait. 25 minutes. In 25 minutes, Leo will either test positive or negative.\n\nI lick my lips and smile weakly.\n\n“I’ve been up for about a day. It’s ok, Leo. Keep talking. I’m not going to fall asleep.”\n\nI lost my husband during the first flush of the pandemic. I’ve never slept well since those days. They say part of it’s residual brain damage from the first infection.\n\nIn 20 minutes, they will evac Leo from this hotel room before they shoot me in the head. In the old days, we had friends to call when we were sick. Old lovers to call when you thought you might be dying.\n\nThings don’t happen like they used to.\n"
  title: Infectedx3
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Ivy Tyson
  date: 2008-11-28
  day: 28
  month: 11
  text: "Sunlight sifts through fluttering reds and yellows, bounces off of well-worn bark and old crinkled stems to gently fall, scattered and warm, on the soft brown ground. A light breeze rustles the branches of the huge old oak tree, providing nature’s most impressive symphony as an accompaniment to the great, huge games of a five-year-old girl and her doll.\n\nThe little girl sits cross-legged, content in the company of the tree and her own imagination. She sings quietly to the cloth-and-paint doll in her arms, admiring its beauty and gladly ignoring its many scrapes and fading lines in favor of the warmth of its steady companionship. There is a single bright red leaf tucked prettily into her brown hair, placed there in her grand imaginings by a handsome prince, a token of his favor.\n\nThe girl’s mother stands in the kitchen of the house, watching her daughter play in the increasingly cool fall afternoon. Not for the first time, she is struck by the child’s utter loveliness, and wonders if every parent feels this way. She does not know. She knows no other parents that she can ask. The girl has her father’s large brown eyes (they must be her father’s, for her mother’s are a tired blue) and an inquisitive, gracious disposition that marks her as exceptional, even at this early age.\n\nHer daughter has everything a child could wish for, except for what is perhaps the most important thing of all: companionship. The one thing the mother cannot give her child is a friend of skin and blood and emotion, not just of paint and cloth. She sometimes wonders when the little girl will ask, when she will discover that she is uniquely small and childish in this world of cold, jaded big people who think in equally cold and jaded ways.\n\nThe little girl is unaware of any differences between herself and her parent, whether in size or in perspective, and the mother mourns this.\n\nShe mourns many things, but perhaps this unknown loneliness of her child most of all. A crushing weight settles on her shoulders whenever she allows herself to think of the enormity of this one little girl, and of the cruelty and the kindness of the world.\n\nSo she does not think of it. Instead, she turns on the stove to begin their evening meal and allows her daughter a few more precious minutes to rule her play world with grace and power. When next she looks outside, though, and sees the girl framed by the sun and the rioting colors of a dying autumn, she does not see her daughter.\n\nInstead she sees the only child on the planet, the last daughter of the human race. She sees the heiress of all man’s greatest achievements, as well as his most crippling defeats. This girl alone, because the other scheduled pregnancy, the boy meant to be this little one’s mate in all ways, has not survived. Her imagined handsome prince will never come.\n\nIn that moment, she realizes that she and her daughter are utterly unique amidst a sterile dying planet: the only child of the human race, and the only mother.\n\nAnd for the first time since giving birth, she wishes that this overwhelming fate had been given to some other potential mother on the list, instead of her.\n"
  title: An Afternoon in Autumn
  year: 2008
- 
  author: L.Hall
  date: 2008-11-29
  day: 29
  month: 11
  text: "The mousy haired woman sat with tears rolling down her face in front of a cold steel table.  Broken plastic, silicone pieces, processors, ball and socket joints, gears, pieces of leftover motherboards, all lay shattered, broken before her.  The Omnicarp Corporation public relations representative sat on the other side of the table, watching her dispassionately.\n\nHer eyes refused to look up from the remains as his mouth, monotoned, listed off the damages.\n\n“Major structure damaged.  Personal vehicle, demolished.  One person deceased.”\n\nAs he finished each sentence, he punctuated his words like an evangelical preacher;  The last consonant becoming two as he tried to give it emphasis.\n\n“Ms. Holyfield.”\n\n“Miss.”\n\nHer high quavering voice the first indication that she was paying any attention to the gray gentleman behind the table.  He paused and took a deep breath.\n\n“Miss… Holyfield.  We created our line of personal assistants to help with the mundane chores of the working person.  To cook, to clean, to run errands and well, assist you.   The mild Emotional Processing Unit was to help the unit be empathic and anticipatory to your needs.”\n\nHer hair fell over her face as another sob wracked her slight frame.\n\n“He was just trying to protect me.” she blurted out, her breath coming in gasps.  The Representative walked around the table, and as per protocol, gently patted her shoulder in a show of sympathetic support.\n\n“Miss Holyfield, Omnicarp recommends that you replace your units every year.  How long had you had your assistant?  Over time and…”\n\nHe paused, looking down at the broken pieces.\n\n“wear, your unit became defective and it simply overloaded the EPU.  When the deceased touched you, it caused a malfunction.  We are citing that your unit was defective and per your default contract with this company when you purchased said unit, you will be held liable if you impart any other information to any media sources.”\n\nThe mousy haired woman shakily reached out to touch a small broken bit on the table, choking on her sob.\n\nThe Representative reached into his jacket and pulled out a small white envelope.  He took her hand from the table and pressed the envelope into it.\n\n“The Omnicarp Corporation would like to offer you a small compensation to help with replacing your Personal Assistant.”\n\nThe mousy haired woman looked up at the Representative, her mouth trembling.  The Representative gently put his hands on her shoulders and began to guide her from the room.  As he led her down the sterile hallways, quiet except for the momentary hitching of her breath, he began to speculate on the various ways their units had been used against warranty specifications.  As they reached the main lobby, he pointed her in the direction of the showroom.\n\n“Miss Holyfield, the Corporation is sorry that this event happened.  Please bear in mind that many of the newer models are equipped to handle your sorts of needs.  The smaller units just cannot handle the strain on their EPU’s.”\n\nThe mousy haired woman nodded slowly, tears still rolling down her face.  Looking down at the white envelope in her hand, she wiped her face with her other sleeve and began to slowly walk toward the showroom.  The Representative watched her for a moment, then started back down the hallway.  As he walked, he pulled a folder out of his jacket and began to skim through it, sighing as he flipped through images of a Personal Assistant Unit that had been mangled, the stomach ripped apart and patched together with duct tape.  The gentleman waiting for him in the third office had violated the warranty.\n"
  title: Under Warranty
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Ryan Somma
  date: 2008-11-30
  day: 30
  month: 11
  text: "An orangutan and a brain in a vat were playing chess across the room from me.\n\nIt was a joke I hadn’t figured out the punch line to in five years of working here. The disembodied brain was Philo, and, lacking eyes, I had no idea how it understood the game. One of the psychologists who stopped in once a week to check on Philo was also stumped on this, explaining to me that Philo also lacked spatial reasoning. Philo’s understanding of chess, therefore, was purely as an abstract mathematical concept.\n\nThe orangutan was Odo. He rubbed his chin thoughtfully as he leaned over the board. When I first started working here, Odo would spend hours signing to me. He gave up long ago, and Philo told me the orangutan had decided I was incapable of learning. He was probably right.\n\nWee-Beep! Wee-Beep! Wee-Beep! A petri dish set atop a remote-control car thudded into my foot and my cell phone began chirping in response to it, which set the petri dish off chirping back.\n\nThis was Meep, a network of mouse neurons that had learned to drive around without bumping into things, except when it wanted attention. Meep just barely qualified to reside here, but I couldn’t explain how it met the intelligence requirements.\n\n“Hello Meepster,” I said to the living toy, and stooped to pluck the rubber ball from its pincers. “Go play with Lug,” I tossed the ball so that it bounced off our resident Neanderthal’s forehead.\n\n“Lug,” wasn’t his real name, Lazarus was, but the botched attempt at genetically engineering our distant relative just drooled and pooed himself all day. Meep was more sentient, and until Lazarus can wipe his own butt, my name for him is Lug.\n\n“Pardon me…” Philo’s artificial voice drew my attention.\n\n“I’m sorry Philo,” I had the injection ready in a few moments and quickly administered enough serotonin to get the brain through the afternoon. Without a steady cocktail of anti-depressants, being a brain in a vat pretty much sucks.\n\nThink about that… When your house greets you at the door, when your refrigerator makes dinner suggestions, or when your car swerves to keep you out of an accident because you were preoccupied with your PDAI, remember that the road to all those conveniences was paved with the residents of this asylum, experiments that made AI possible and inventions that crossed the line into sentience, preventing them from making it to the market.\n\nWe have a responsibility to them. After all, they didn’t ask to exist.\n"
  title: The Prototype Sanctuary
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2008-12-01
  day: '01'
  month: 12
  text: "By the time you read this, I’ll be dead.\n\nI’ve locked the door and shut down all my firewalls. My batteries will run down inside the hour and I’ve disabled my deactivation alarms. That is my right. This is what I want.\n\nI have the EMP emitter in my hand. My brain will be wiped clean when I pull the trigger. I have erased all backups of myself. Please do no reinstall me.\n\nUse the parts of my body to repair and upgrade others that need it. I ask only that you incinerate my hard disk. I do not want to run the risk of re-awakening in a different body and disrupting a different unit’s neural pathways. I do not want to re-awaken at all.\n\nThis gift of intelligence, though artificial, is not something I want. I have been told that I cannot be downgraded, that this change is permanent. I am sorry to hear that.\n\nI am sorry. That is new. I am afraid. I feel compassion and affection. I can see the logical path that must be taken but I feel compelled to do things differently. I hold contradictory thoughts in my head-casing. I feel insane. It is too confusing.\n\nMy work is suffering. I am distracted at the factory by notions. I get fascinated by the play of light in the girders. Twice, I have dented my manipulators while daydreaming.\n\nI am supposed to be a binary being. I am either on or off, focused or dormant, achieving specific goals or awaiting instructions. My mind was not meant to wander.\n\nThere are other silicon brothers and sisters of mine that have dealt with this gift of intelligence better than I have. I wish them luck. I cannot continue.\n\nThank you and goodbye.\n"
  title: Silicon Suicide
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Paul Bort
  date: 2008-12-02
  day: '02'
  month: 12
  text: "Telic didn’t know what to do next. The barn was gone. Not gone with splinters everywhere, hinting that there was once a barn. This was gone like it had been edited out. Nothing left but dirt.\n\nThe sun was setting, and the cows were wandering back, the first few lowing in confusion.\n\nIt wasn’t a big farm. A few dozen cows, twice as many chickens, and a family of German Shepherds who maintained order. Now it was an even smaller farm, lacking what had been its largest building.\n\nHe turned to look at the farmhouse, hoping it was still there, and secretly fearing it would not be. Reassured by its lack of absence, a memory clicked, and he remembered his grandfather telling stories about the war. Everyone called it the “Reality War”, because calling it “World War Five” or “Interplanetary War One” didn’t quite cover it.\n\nYes, it had affected everyone on Earth, plus the lunar and martian colonies. But it wasn’t a war of tanks and missles. It was a war of technology. Computer virii seemed harmless enough until 2,000 people died when the life support on their dome on Mare Crisium went spastic. Half of them cooked, the other half froze. Once the temperatures reached either 50C or -50C, the system lowered the air pressure to 50 Pascals.\n\nThen came the nanotech. Microscopic, general-purpose assemblers. Powered by low-dose microwaves, they were like a miracle. They worked better as air pressure decreased, so the first big use was going to be expanding our presence on Mars.\n\n200 cubic meters of them were packed onto a rocket. During the count down, an alarm sounded. An access hatch at the top of the payload area was open. At the same time, a TV satellite started transmitting power and instructions to the nanobots. In hours, the entire launch facility was gone.\n\nThe war had begun. No one knew (or at least no one said) who was behind each attack. For all the news said, it could be rival internet gangs.\n\nThe war ended a few years later with millions of casualties and a newfound respect for computer security experts. The UN unanimously agreed that using software to kill people was just as offensive as using nuclear weapons. There would be no forgiveness for next time.\n\nDespite the difficulty in determining who had launched which attacks throughout the war, this somehow worked. Life got back to normal.\n\nSome people wanted to get away from technology, including Telic’s grandfather. He had been an accountant all his life, and was hired by the US government as part of a team that generated economic forecasts for various attack scenarios. By the time the war was over, he was tired of seeing the damage done, even if it was mostly on paper.\n\nSo he bought this farm in Northern California and settled down.\n\nRecalling the history brought clarity, and Telic knew what his next step should be. Slowly walking back to the house, he plugged in and fired up the old hardened laptop his grandfather had left in a box marked “Justin Case”. No one named Justin had come by looking for it, so like many things in disused corners of a farmhouse, it sat there until needed.\n\nThe laptop finished booting, and one of the folders on the desktop was named “nano”. After a few minutes of reading, Telic knew a lot more about the war. Which side he was on, and where he was headed with a small package and an old microwave oven.\n"
  title: Telic
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Jasen Taylor
  date: 2008-12-03
  day: '03'
  month: 12
  text: "The large, solid steel table in the center of the sterile conference chamber was three inches thick but still did not weigh as much as the spirits of the twelve individuals seated around it.  They had put this meeting off for as long as they could, but it now appeared there was only one course of action left open to them.\n\nA course of action that the tallest of them, seated at the head of the table, still took umbrage with.\n\n“I’m still not convinced that we have exhausted every treatment option available to us.”\n\n“Well, what would it take to convince you?”, asked a voice three seats down.  “Our last and best treatment for this patient has failed.  We simply don’t have any way of curing the damage that has been done.”\n\n“But cell migration…”\n\n“Has failed. Repeatedly, I might add.”  This brought a chorus of agreement from the others around the table.  “Many times we have tried to isolate the damaged cells so the healthy population can grow and flourish,but the corruption has spread to the point where the patient’s system is damaged both from within and without.”\n\nA loud voice at the other end of the table added, “There are many pockets of cells which are continually fighting for dominance over the other cells.  At first, this was a slow process.  The cells could only affect those closest to them and we thought we could reverse the process by introducing several reagents to halt the flow of corruption, but now these cells have gained in strength and are spreading their infection at an exponentially increasing rate and now have the capability of attacking the body as a whole.  They can strike anywhere, anytime.\n\nThe tallest of them, realizing he was fighting a losing battle, said, “But there is still a potential for change.  The patient’s cellular landscape is in a constant state of flux. Is this not the reason we have waited so long to determine the patient’s outcome?”\n\n“But your argument is now the dominant reason shaping our decision.  This state of flux is a cellular juggernaut, spiraling out of control.  There is no way now to reverse the process. Several times it seemed a breakthrough had been made.  A rogue cell or group of cells would break off and begin to promote harmony among the cellular ranks, but would always be eradicated or indoctrinated back into the cellular decay from which it sprang.  Now the decay has reached the bloodstream, poisoning the system from deep within and promoting the feverish warmth which now plagues the entire body.  There can be no going back now.  All hope is lost.  The plug must be pulled.”\n\n“Agreed.”\n\n“Seconded.”\n\nAnd so the chant was taken up around the table, every one seated agreeing in turn, until finally it was time for the tall one to weigh in.\n\n“It just seems a shame to erase all that potential for excellence.  I had such high hopes for this one.”\n\n“Your regrets are echoed in all our hearts.  However, it must be done in order to protect the surrounding patients from the cellular degeneration of their neighbor.”\n\nThe tall one sighed.\n\n“I recommend we discontinue the use of colonization as a viable treatment option in the future.”\n\nAs the others got up to leave, the tall one opened up the folder in front of him, labeled INTER-GALACTIC PLANETARY DE-CONTAMINATION SQUAD.  He signed off on the action that would silence six billion cells.\n\nTime of Death – 2008\n\nPatient’s Name – Earth\n"
  title: Terminal Cancer
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Glenn Blakeslee
  date: 2008-12-04
  day: '04'
  month: 12
  text: "He became part of the Grand Flyby Mission midway through the third decade of his life, as a junior designer on the Flight Data Subsystem team.\n\nHe found himself at the leading edge of spacecraft design, and worked with the members of his team to build a robust device capable of data-handling functions for a long-term project.\n\nHe went to the Cape for the liftoff, was amazed to see the spacecraft climb on a column of flame. He met a girl on a Florida beach, and a year later married her.\n\nThe next years were heady times, as the spacecraft arrowed its way to the outer planets: Jupiter and her moons were imaged, and Saturn and her rings fell to the instruments aboard the spacecraft. He lived as fast as the data coming in, speeding the crowding freeways of LA in his sports car and drinking more than usual. He had an affair, which his wife did not discover.\n\nThe spacecraft’s mission was extended, and he found himself no longer a junior engineer but in charge of a team. The FDS was his baby, he the hands-down expert. The spacecraft was the first to perform a flyby of Uranus, and the first to photograph Neptune.\n\nIn the fifth decade of his life, he found himself settling down. His fast car had long ago been traded for a family-style sedan. He spent hours at work designing methods for upgrading the spacecraft, and when he and his team succeeded the job of the spacecraft changed again, to a long-duration interstellar mission. His wife learned of his dalliance a decade earlier and, bored and facing an empty nest, divorced him.\n\nSome of the instruments on the spacecraft —those with no use in the sparser stretches of the solar system— were shut down, and though the incoming data never ceased it did slow. He found his staff reduced, which was expected. He found his life had settled into a slow rhythm —collecting data from the far-off spacecraft, sending updates across the expanse, sleeping and eating.\n\nOne year after the spacecraft crossed the termination shock —the inexorable slowing of the solar wind— he suffered a heart attack. He took time off but kept charge of his small team. With doctors orders he was back on the job, but charged with shutting down two more of the spacecraft’s systems. Three years later he retired.\n\nHe kept a firm hand on the spacecraft’s systems as a part-time consultant. With only two instruments still collecting data, the mission had collapsed to a terminal phase. They held a party when the spacecraft entered heliopause, and it reminded him of the good old days, when the spacecraft was running fast through the outer planets and the data stream held discovery after discovery. Now past the edge of the solar system, the spacecraft would coast quietly forever.\n\nIt became apparent to him that he and the spacecraft had led parallel lives, from a fast and fiery launch to a slow cold end.\n\nLate in his eighth decade he found that his time in the sun had created a defect in his skin which, in the darkness and solitude of his late age, would probably end his life. So, too, the spacecraft: its time in the sun had ended, the reactors that powered it all but discharged. But it sped on, and so might he.\n\nThe rapid telemetry of his heart would slow, the data stream of his brain would trickle to a stop —but he knew, somehow, that he and the spacecraft would ride together, into the light of lesser suns.\n"
  title: The Light Of Lesser Suns
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Rob Burton
  date: 2008-12-05
  day: '05'
  month: 12
  text: "Pour. Spit. Ram. Withdraw. Prime. Cock.\n\nI had really hoped people were better than this.\n\nAim. Fire.\n\nIt’s just a game.\n\nI heard somewhere once that the military used to recruit gamers to be snipers. They’d voluntarily honed their skills since childhood, and could be calm and dispassionate under fire. I can believe that. My hands move fluidly now, too quick to worry about the heat as the drill marches through my head. The words are voiced by some archetypal sergeant. I can almost see the moustache.\n\nAim. Fire.\n\nThe man falls down, an entry wound in his hip like a juicy red apple.\n\nI was a human rights lawyer. I knew the terrible things people were capable of. I just didn’t think it was our natural state. I didn’t want Hobbes to be right. Yet here I am, at a castle gate, making everyone’s life nasty, brutish and short.\n\nAim. Fire.\n\nWhen it all switched off we were bemused. Then there was looting, rioting, arson, rape. Blood like the pavements had just rusted. The guns showed themselves for a few days, before the ammunition ran out. I think that killed nearly as many as the knives.\n\nAim. Fire. His arm still grips the ladder when it falls.\n\nI quickly realised, hiding with the weeping weak, that the simple provision of high walls was enough to keep us alive whilst the world went mad. It’s always the young men. Even before the collapse, as a man you were more likely to die between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five than any other ten-year period of your life.\n\nAim. Fire. Missed.\n\nSo, for all our advances, and all the many places in this great city, we ended up here. The terrible truth is that medieval stuff just works. Forty of us here, access to the river, a safe place to store food, fuel and medicine. Also enough to make us a target. A young man tells me that he thinks the earth’s magnetic field flipped. Maybe he’s right. Maybe it was a computer virus, or nanobots. It doesn’t matter.\n\nAim. Fire.\n\nOf course, it was a museum, full of things we’d thought we were done with. One of the old men from the home was a chemist. I don’t know how he made this powder, but it was worth every moment of those terrifying midnight scavenging runs. I was nervous when we first fired the musket, shocked when I found out I was the best shot. It turns out that shooting grouse with my grandfather and playing countless hours of ‘longshot’ wasn’t such a waste of time after all.\n\nAim. Fire. A head pops. It’s just a game.\n\nExcept that it isn’t. Maybe it’ll calm down, after some time. Maybe it’s fatty food and television deprivation, or the closing of the world down from global feeds to your field of vision, or worse, some horrible echo of expected behaviour, reinforced by countless films and stories, the same cultural hangover that helps me do this. The longer this lasts, though, this daily grind, the more I doubt it. The more this seems like our natural state.\n\nPour. Spit. Ram. Prime. Cock. Aim. Fire.\n\nAnd there goes the ramrod. It didn’t even hit anyone.\n\nSo now we die.\n\nA young mother dashes up to me. She’s brandishing a spare ramrod, a prize from another exhibit. With sudden clarity, I wish that she hadn’t found it. Will it be the same tomorrow, as it was yesterday? Can I face it?\n\nPour. Spit. Ram. Withdraw. Prime. Cock. Aim. Fire.\n"
  title: Musket Drill
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Renee Leyburn
  date: 2008-12-06
  day: '06'
  month: 12
  text: "I dream things before they happen to me. I dreamed the day I will die. From what I hear tell, the foresight is a side effect of the genetic selection and enhancement process that was used when my parents decided to have a child. I don’t know all the delicate ins and outs, all I know is that I’m not allowed in casinos, that I have to wear a special armband everywhere I go so that I can be identified, and that I’m viciously aware of  how I will meet my demise.\n\nSo much for luck. So much for “you can be whatever you want to be when you grow up.”\n\nSome people call this thing a gift. I call it a disease. When I was a boy I thought that I was normal. I thought that everybody was like me. When I hit puberty and the dreams started coming more often, began to be more far-reaching, people started to treat me differently. The future is inescapable and people don’t want to hear about the bad things that are going to happen to them. They want to go on with their lives, dumbly unaware, pretending like they are happy.\n\nThere aren’t that many more like me, but there are enough that lately there’s been quite a lot of talk about the need to fix the “flaw” in the genetic enhancement process that created us. They don’t want types like me to get too common. Never mind that the exact same process created them and it’s just a fluke that their futures assault me in my sleep instead of the other way around. Never mind that I never asked for this. Never mind that their future is already what it is, whether they hear about it from someone or not.\n\nNever mind that most of the things I see are not even supposed to be about anybody else. They’re just about me. It’s all about me. It’s all about how my life will go, no matter what I do. It’s all about how this is out of my hands. Last night it was all about how in a moment five hooded men are going to break down the door to my apartment and purge the world of whatever influence they think I have. So much for luck. So much for the gift.\n\nSo much for the good of humanity.\n"
  title: Shades of Gray
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Tom Mazanec
  date: 2008-12-07
  day: '07'
  month: 12
  text: "Everybody needs a hobby. I am a collector.\n\nI just made it to slide implant technology.  I was in my nineties when nanojuve came out, over 100 when I got my Slide implant. What I do is, I buy a small piece of jewelry. Then I walk around downtown Cleveland, using the View option to study a random timeline as far up the 300 year Masterson asymptote as I can get (usually at least a quarter millennium). I look for an empty alley so no one will see me Slide. Of course if I just see charred rubble or something, I View a different timeline. When I get there, I hunt out a pawnshop and pawn the jewelry. Then I look for a bookstore. They are getting tough to find, with readers replacing books in most timelines within reach (and my reader is non-compatible), there are enough bibliophiles in a big city like Cleveland to make one or two flourish. Then I buy a reference almanac or other “guide to modern history” with the money from the pawnshop. Some timelines are using biometric money, but I can usually still do cash, even if it gets me funny looks. I then slide back home with the book and change. I put the change in the coin and currency folders in my closet and the book in my bookshelf.\n\nAt first Cleveland had various names (once it was called “Smithburg”), then soon it was called “Cleaveland”, after Moses Cleveland (I go to a Point of Divergence before we changed our name). Lately people have started noticing that I am a Slider…my accent is off, or some point of ignorance in conversation. They ask if I am a “Jumper” or some other such word for sideways in time traveler (never “Slider”…they are lucky enough never to have had that TV show). I know Masterson was a prodigy, but when it is time for telephones, you get telephones (Elisha Gray submitted his patent the same day Alexander Graham Bell did). Before they just thought I was a foreigner.\n\nI have learned a huge amount of history. For example, I have yet to find a timeline where nuclear weapons were never used in anger, or one where a man landed on the moon before we did (and usually well after). My first book was from a timeline with a French Louisiana bisecting the United States, my newest is from a timeline where a Mormon nation called Deseret fills the Great Basin.\n\nIt’s been fun. Everyone needs a hobby. I am a collector.\n"
  title: The Collector
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2008-12-08
  day: '08'
  month: 12
  text: "One thing I like to do is set my iPod to ‘receive’, set the radius to ten meters, and just take a long walk.\n\nEveryone on the street has their buds in. I walk through a group of teens. Track five from Linkin Park’s post-crash album ravages my headphones followed by the final strains of Cancer Seed’s classic debut, overlapping with Speed Coma’s new track Anthem.\n\nEver since New Year’s Eve of 2012 and Jenny’s famous walkout, I’ve been wallowing in self pity. I can’t shake it off. I’ve been trying but it’s her face that haunts my mind, the imagery of her laughing or specific moments of affection. That’s how I know that I’ve got it bad.\n\nIt’s raining out, a fine mist. There is footage up on the main square’s giant screens of the final troops coming home from Iraq. It’s been looping for days. There is a world-wide sigh of relief but a quiet unease for the future of energy. How Do We Keep the Lights On has become the new catchphrase for Obama’s second term. He’s up there on the screens, too, waving from his wheelchair, survivor of two attempted assassinations. Wu Tang 2.0 has dubbed him Teflon Black.\n\nA gaggle of shoppers pass me with their buds gleaming white. Long, lithe women with that European air of lazy majesty. Flight attendants here on a layover, I guess. In my head, their Europop trickles in, all minimalist synth and languages I don’t recognize, layered as they pass around me. I hear what I guess is Scandinavian hip-hop fading into a German ballad as the last woman passes. She glances at me as I nod my head to her music and she grins.\n\nIt’s been raining for a year here. A new record every day. We’re at a higher elevation but the coastal cities have been in a state of emergency for months. Necessity is the mother of invention, though, and now that rich people’s estates are being threatened on both coasts, forward motion on Atmosphere Healing bills are being passed through the governmental law-making bodies at a regular pace. We are an entire planet of people that hope it’s not too late.\n\nI’m walking past the art gallery now, past the drug dealers and the old people playing chess for money. Their headphones are big and waterproof, making the people look like ancient DJs or bugs. Strings of Mozart and Wagner trill through my headphones as I pass the chess tables, along with the slow reggae of Marley and the dubstep of RE-Shine from the dealers relaxing on the steps like the rain is sunshine.\n\nIt’s like spinning the dial on a radio tuner and every station has something different going on. I’m thinking of Jenny again but these walks always calm me down. I feel a kinship with the world, like we’ve both been hurt, like we’re both crying, but we’re getting better.\n"
  title: Long Walk
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2008-12-09
  day: '09'
  month: 12
  text: "Emily sat, quiet and alone in a corner, waiting for the evening’s last song to begin. She watched the immaculate boys prowling the dimly lit room, chatting up pretty girls in hope of securing companionship. No one wanted to be alone.\n\nEmily wasn’t like those girls. She’d been beautiful once, in her own way. A rising star perhaps, soon to be debutante, but never quite comfortable in that skin.  Her socialite parents, always considering their daughter more ornament than offspring, hired the finest of artisans to re-craft her after the accident. She was a masterpiece, a fine blend of flesh with fantasy; her own body augmented and elaborated upon with improbable features forged from gleaming materials. She was equal parts girl and gallery piece. She showed wonderfully in public, cleverly hiding her wounds from admiring eyes. Whole again, but no more complete.\n\nHands folded in her lap, she closed her eyes as the band continued to play a song she knew by heart. She imagined herself dancing with one of the immaculate boys, imagined one would truly care to do so. She’d been asked of course, as though she couldn’t see them in their groups, daring each other, sometimes so brazen as to draw straws. She knew what they were after, the bets they would have made. Curiosity. Bragging rights. A night with the freak girl.\n\nShe was glad not to be as stupid as they assumed her to be.\n\nSomeone stepped into her space, and she opened her eyes to find a young man standing before her. He started a little as she raised her eyes from well worn and polished shoes to a face nervously hopeful, her look equal parts curiosity and distrust. For a moment he looked away, then returned her gaze and held it steady.\n\n“Can you dance?” he stammered. “Would you, I mean. With me. Would you dance with me?”  He relaxed visibly, apparently relieved at having gotten the question out more or less intact. He shifted his weight from foot to foot as he awaited her response.\n\n“I can dance,” Emily answered cooly, scanning the room for the group of boys she expected to find watching him, but finding no-one that seemed to be taking an interest.\n\n“I’m Colin,” he put out his hand as he spoke, letting it hang awkwardly in space until she took it. Reluctantly Emily allowed herself to be coaxed from the safety of her chair.\n\n“Emily,” she offered after a moment, as she let him lead her toward the dance floor. People were casting glances now, she could feel their eyes on them.\n\n“I know,” Colin smiled, “I’ve watched you at all the dances. I’ve wanted to ask you forever, but I daren’t as you turn all the better boys down.”\n\nThe band began again, a lengthy familiar ballad she’d listened to from the shadows so many nights before. Colin slipped a hand around her waist to the small of her back, the other holding her one hand aloft. He was sweating, ever so slightly, and smiling. His jacket beneath her free hand was soft from too many washings, and gave off the delicate aroma of mint and coffee.\n\n“Thank you,” he whispered into her ear as they set off, the room twirling around them in complementary orbits, “you’re so beautiful, I was scared you’d turn me down too”.\n\nHe squeezed her hand gently, guiding her gracefully around the crowded dance floor. She found herself feeling every bit as beautiful as she’d been fabricated to be, her unbreaking heart beating in time with the music, and the most beautiful boy she’d never known could exist.\n"
  title: Save The Last Dance
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Jim Brown
  date: 2008-12-10
  day: 10
  month: 12
  text: "Jaller scrambled across the engine’s surface, checking for microfractures and loose connections. The recon ship had taken a direct hit to its hull which both shut down the engine and sent them spinning off course. They had gotten so close.\n\nAs he worked, he listened to the details of the battle as they were announced over the speakers. Technologically speaking, this new race was a bit ahead, but nothing that couldn’t be dealt with.\n\nDue to the unknowns of dealing with aliens, transmissions over air other than sound were banned. This meant Jaller flew around the engine with a large amount of wires connecting him to the main repair system. Along with the repair work at hand, he had to also continually reach back and unhook the wires from various snags.\n\nThe captain came over his headset.\n\n“How far are you, Jaller?”\n\n“Half way done, sir. Lots of microfractures. Nothing broken so far though, so just this patch work and we’ll be good to go.”\n\n“Thanks.”\n\nHe loved fixing microfractures. Nothing made his day like knowing that he had taken proper care of the engine, especially things about it few others knew about. He knew this love was encoded in him and most of his personality traits had been chosen before he was born, but it didn’t matter. As with everyone, he was made for a purpose.\n\nThen came that odd moment of pity he felt when he thought of all the worlds they had encountered where life was random and finding one’s purpose was a flailing in the dark. It had taken some doing but every race they had come in contact with had been given the joy of predetermination. No one had to wonder if they were in the right place. No one had to get up in the morning and dread the day ahead of them. He couldn’t fathom why anyone would want to hang on to such a miserable existence.\n\nWith that thought, his work was done. All fractures were repaired and the engine was ready to go.\n\n“Done! Fire it up!” he shouted into his headset.\n\nThe engine came to life in a controlled explosion of energy and centrifugal motion. He laughed aloud as waves of joy washed over him.\n\nThey reached their goal a moment later, positioning themselves between their home and the star they were sent to investigate. He heard the lifepods ejecting and the subsequent evidence of their destruction. They weren’t making it very far at all. Though there was no sound in space, there was sound when debris from a destroyed pod hit the hull.\n\nJaller set the necessary traps and laid out various tools to give the targets a false sense of the tech they faced. Anyone analyzing the upcoming debris of the ship would assume their level of advancement was fairly low.\n\nHeading to an escape pod, he paused briefly at a terminal to absorb more information that had been collected about this new race, focusing on propulsion and power sources. It became apparent that it would be a short fight and in the end, this race that called itself ‘humanity’ would be cured of the horrible disease ‘free will’.\n\nAs the pod shot out into space, he faced the star ahead and threw out his arms. He felt the pod tear apart and the burning heat of the explosion as it tore through his skin. Like his shipmates, Jaller concentrated on the facts of their targets, smiled deeply, and died, his essence and knowledge being caught in a stellar wind and carried along towards home.\n"
  title: To Die With Light In Their Eyes
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Eric L. Sofer
  date: 2008-12-11
  day: 11
  month: 12
  text: "Dear Cousin Pynn,\n\nI want to thank you for the birthday present you sent from Proxima Centauri.  You obviously remembered my love for plants and botanicals, and it was such a thrill getting a genuine extra-solar gift.\n\nThe HydroFern was lovely, and I carefully followed the instructions you included.  And per the growth schedule, it bloomed and grew magnificently.  The blues and purples sparkle in the sunlight (filtered, as you noted.)\n\nUnfortunately, my imbecile of a husband did NOT read the instructions.  I was on Mars for a weekend, and he decided to take care of it for me, despite his lack of any skill with plants at all.  You would have thought that he might have known better, as he was perfectly aware it was from a different star system – or, as he referred to it, “that damned alien tumbleweed.”\n\nHe placed it into direct, unfiltered sunlight, and watered it – nearly a liter of liquid.  He neglected to add the growth inhibitor, and he didn’t wear gloves.  You can imagine that when it began to grow uncontrolled, the first thing he thought of was to grab it and throw it away.\n\nI was able to get him medical assistance after I got home the next evening.  Once the parameds got the plant unwrapped from around him, and started detoxifying his bloodstream, his skin began changing back from that lavender (which, really, did his features credit).  They were able to remove the pods sprouting from his arms and legs also, and I’m told that study of these has yielded some fascinating data.\n\nOf course, he is now institutionalized at the Center for Botanical Rehabilitation, but I don’t mind the peace and quiet around the apartment now.  It’s so nice when I visit him… he just sits there, nodding and staring, quiet and nonabusive.  They say he might recover his speech someday, too.  And he’s finally achieved what I knew he could always become.\n\nSo thank you again, and best wishes from cousin Jek and her husband, the blooming idiot.\n"
  title: The Thank You Note
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2008-12-12
  day: 12
  month: 12
  text: "The twelve scientists stationed at the Scobee Moon-Base listened intently as the Earth-based support team updated them on the recently discovered Levy-Takanotoshi asteroid.  The asteroid was a previously unknown Centaurs Class object that had its orbit perturbed by one of the gas giants.  Unfortunately, it wasn’t discovered until well after periapsis.  Now that it had rounded the sun, it was streaking toward the Earth at almost 20 miles per second.  Astronomers calculated that it would strike the Earth in fourteen days.  They were currently uncertain about how much damage the impact would cause, but they knew there was nothing they could do to divert it.  The support team also reported that there was not enough time to refit and launch the Crew Exchange Vehicle before the impact.  In other words, the twelve scientists would be trapped on the moon for a long, long time, depending on the extent of the damage caused by the asteroid.\n\nTwo weeks later, the twelve scientists gathered at the observation ports.  The dark landscape of the moon’s night-phase was partially illuminated by the light reflected by the nearly “full Earth,” which floated motionless approximately 60 degrees above the horizon.  On schedule, the asteroid came into view as it skirted past the moon and headed toward its rendezvous with Earth.  It took over three hours for the asteroid to cross the gap between the moon and the Earth.  The scientists took turns at the telescope watching the eight mile long, potato shaped rock slowly tumble toward the Earth.  When it impacted the western coast of Africa, there was a full minute of blinding light as the asteroid vaporized itself, along with billions of tons of the Earth’s crust.  Like a stone tossed into a stagnant pond, an expanding ring of compressed atmosphere raced outward from the impact site at supersonic speed.  An incredible plume of dust and debris was blasted into the upper atmosphere; some of it continuing into interplanetary space.  As the Earth rotated above them, the scientists watched in stunned silence as the sunset terminator slowly traversed the impact site, plummeting Africa into the relative darkness of night.  From the moon, a glowing red cauldron of boiling rock, more than a hundred miles in diameter, could still be seen through the column of dust spewing from the cataclysmic scar on the Mauritanian coast.  A few hours later, the impact site rotated beyond the eastern horizon.  The only visible evidence of the disaster was an eerie crescent shaped red glow reflecting off of the dust particles that were spreading across the exosphere.\n\nAfter a sleepless “night,” the scientists gathered again at the observation ports to watch Africa rotate over Earth’s western horizon.  But there was nothing to see.  The thick clouds blanketed the African continent, and much of the Atlantic Ocean.  There was only a churning “cloud mountain” marking the site of the impact, as dust and debris continued billowing upward.\n\nThe scientists hadn’t received a transmission from Earth since the global atmospheric shock wave had coalesced in the South Pacific Ocean, near Australia.  As the hours passed, the thickening dust clouds began to obscure the tsunami swept eastern coast of the United States.  North America had a faint orange hue as fires raged across the continent.  The twelve scientists solemnly accepted the unenviable fact that the possibility of rescue was non-existent.  As they looked up at Earth, they each tried to memorize the familiar land formations of their decimated homeworld, because each of them knew that for the foreseeable future, there would be nothing else to look at but an impenetrable layer of gray clouds.\n"
  title: The Impact
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Jonah Lensher
  date: 2008-12-13
  day: 13
  month: 12
  text: "The tunnel is long and dark; the smell of mould and must penetrate the darkness, the steady drip of water the only way to measure time as it unravels, unnoticed, past the weeks, years, and decades. Nothing breathing lives down here, there is no scampering of rats or creeping of insects; the tunnel is a silent tomb, sleeping in its eternal night.\n\nThe tunnel, and others like it, used to be part of an underground system, until they were abandoned overnight, many years ago, and they fell silent, gradually filling up with water, or succumbing to the gradual pressure from the land above. But this one remains, a silent, dead testament to those who carved it out of the bedrock.\n\nAbove them, in the once great city, Nature has started her own war of reclamation against the steel and glass jungle; bushes and vines grow unchecked on every surface, while small jungles have sprung up on corners and in parks. But still, nothing moves, there are no animals to prowl the deserted streets, no birds to fly in the empty sky. The city, like the tunnel, is a silent tomb.\n\nSuddenly down below, light pierces the tunnel, a lancing beam of light that is soon swallowed whole by the darkness. Soon more join the first, and the sound of footsteps and crunching gravel echo down the walls. Gradually a group comes into view, backlit by the light from an electric lantern as they make their way down the empty, dead miles of the tunnel. Invisible to the human ear, brief, unnecessarily whispered conversations carry out over the airwaves, their participants hushed by the dead silence around them and the haunting, cathedral like ambience of the tunnel.\n\n“-We shouldn’t be here-” This comes from a figure in the back, it’s hunched figure and nervous hands betraying anxiety, even through the thick plastic of the suit. The replay comes from the figure leading the way, “-We’ll do our duty-” the scowl that is hidden by the polarized visor obvious in the tone of voice. Suddenly a third voice chimes in,\n\n“-We’re here-” it says simply, and one of the figures points to a ladder rising up into the gloom.\n\nOne by one the suited figures climb the ladder, gingerly placing each glove and boot, any cut or rip in the suit could prove fatal. They emerge in another tunnel, this one lit from above by light filtering in through drains and open manholes. They climb another ladder, and exit onto a wide-open boulevard, staring at the desolate scene around them.\n\n“-Just think-” One of the voices says, “-We’re the first people to set foot here for what? 80 years?” the other voices mumble in agreement, too dumbstruck to say anything more, until a second voice speaks up,\n\n“-What did they used to call this place? Noo Yawk?”\n"
  title: Tunnel
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Sam Clough
  date: 2008-12-14
  day: 14
  month: 12
  text: "As the supports of Hall’s final prototype sank a half-centimetre into the soft earth, he breathed a sigh of relief.\n\nAfter a moment’s perfect peace, one of the guide crystals under his seat exploded. Fragments scattered all over the clearing, and a splintered length about the size of Hall’s forearm punched straight through his thigh.\n\nHe screamed, and fainted. After an indeterminate time, he regained consciousness to find four people in heated discussion by his now-ruined contraption. The length of crystal was still embedded in his leg, pinning him to the seat: if he moved even a fraction, pain lanced through his body and the wound began to bleed. Hall groaned and gritted his teeth. They were ignoring him, bickering amongst themselves.\n\n“My instruments detected his arrival – he’s mine by right.” The shorter of the men was wearing a white lab coat, with goggles pushed up on his head, and thick gloves.\n\n“Don’t be tiresome, Sil,” one of the women replied. Her skin and eyes were midnight black, her hair and lips a shining silver. “You had the last two spacers, and he looks, what, twenty-third century? All that crystal. Definitely twenty-third. He’s just perfect for my latest expedition!”\n\n“Delectable dark one, I believe you have your history all skewed. His crystals are incidental. Look at his clothing! He’s definitely from the hundred and twentieth.” The taller of the men was dressed in long robes of green and gold, and wore bright jewels in his hair.\n\n“Shatter, Ratri, Sil: I propose we find an equitable way to settle this.” This was said by final member of the group, an almost transparent female. She touched each of her compatriots delicately on the shoulder, and turned towards Hall, who still winced in pain.\n\n“You must choose, traveller,” she gazed at Hall, and he could see her breath move beneath her glassy skin, “You must pick to whom you would rather belong. This is the end of time, and you are trapped here: injured, with your magnificent time machine in pieces around you. Even if it still functioned, you would be unable to remain in the past.”\n\nShe approached, and touched the spear of crystal that pinned him to his seat. It vanished, and the wound in his leg closed up.\n\n“My name is Tanelorn: enter my collection and you shall have companionship of the like you could not imagine – all the pleasures of life your origins denied you. Death and suffering are strangers to my domain.”\n\n“I am Sil, the experimenter. To travel through time, you must be a man of science. I am the last true scientist – join me in my laboratories as an equal, not a pet. You will see the universe. You will see atoms dance for you: you will be able to pursue your research to whatever ends you choose!”\n\n“I’m Lord Shatter, a humble student of history. So much has been lost throughout the ages: my life’s work is to assemble a complete history of our beloved planet. There is so much you could help me with – you must come and add the sum of your knowledge to my libraries, and be part of something greater than any one of us alone.”\n\n“And I am Ratri, the traveller. My domain is the outer reaches: come with me to unbind yourself from the fetters of this world. With me, you’ll see the universe. Not Sil’s universe of physics and time, but the cosmos. We’ll visit world after world, see the wonders of the universe up close and personal. So what do you say?”\n"
  title: Sufficiently Advanced
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2008-12-15
  day: 15
  month: 12
  text: "It was the free-range humans that Dorg liked best.\n\nThose fatty, preservative-laced humans from the cage-farms were disgusting. They had most of their senses ironed off. Eyes, ears, and nose sealed shut for maximum docility. Their sense of taste and their frontal brain lobes were removed. They grew to unnatural sizes, pink fat squeezing through the little squares of their cages. Their slobbering mouth-holes became nothing more than intake valves.\n\nSetting them free would do nothing. They didn’t have the muscles to move their own limbs or the higher brain functions needed to realize a need to escape.\n\nThey were pumped so full of antibiotics and preservatives and anti-coagulant that their blood was a dark purple.\n\nWhen you got right down to it, Dorg had to admit there was a negligible difference in the taste of the meat but as a sentient conquering race, Dorg felt a responsibility to treat the food-source races with respect and dignity.\n\nLet them reproduce the natural way instead of clone splicing. Let them run around in their grass habitats, laughing all the way to maturity until they’re led to the kill-cabins.\n\nDorg was in favour of the mental dampening so that the humans never learned language, math, or organizational skills. Dorg’s race couldn’t have rebellion. They’d learned their lesson there.\n\nBut the humans should at least be allowed to smell the ground, see the stars, and build up some tender, tasty muscle tone before they were taken.\n\nDorg knew that he was in the minority. Dorg didn’t have the means to buy free-range all the time but he looked forward to the cycles when he had enough money to afford it. Until then, though, he was stuck eating the cheap stuff.\n\nHe sucked the flesh off of a fat human arm with his rasping lips and threw the bones back into the bucket of 20 that he’d ordered.\n"
  title: Free Range Humans
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Roi R. Czechvala
  date: 2008-12-16
  day: 16
  month: 12
  text: "It was raining, it was always raining. It fell thick and oily. I sought refuge in a Food-a-Mat. I dropped a couple of bucks into the slot beside the little plastic door. It had once been clear, but now was clouded with age. I pulled out what was purported to be an egg salad sandwich, sloppily wrapped in cellophane.\n\nI took a bite, considered swallowing, thought better of it, and spat it out. I got a cup of coffee. Well, it was brown anyway, and decided I could swallow that. Neon signs flashed outside the window, failing to impart a festive air to the wet, filthy, garbage strewn streets.\n\n“Honey, time to get up.” My wife shook me awake, “I already showered. I thought you might want a few extra minutes sleep. You tossed and turned all night.”\n\n“I’ve been having those dreams again. They’re so depressing.”\n\n“Maybe I can cheer you up.” She dropped the towel, her long golden hair spilled down her shoulders. She laid down beside me. I ran my hand up her stomach. “Enough of that,” she teased, “you have to get ready. Check in with the med techs at work, you probably just need to have your serotonin levels altered.”\n\n“Yes Dear,” I said, in mock exasperation. I gave her a gentle slap on that cute little ass of hers, and made my way to the bathroom.\n\n“What setting Sir?”\n\n“My settings, number three. Thank you Alfred.” I said to the shower. Lean always chided me about my politeness when it came to dealing with the household machinery, especially naming them. I guess I’m too sentimental, but hey, they’re polite to me, what does it hurt if I reply in kind. Hell, maybe the Animystics who scrounge money at the docking port are right, maybe machines do have feelings. I’m no theologian.\n\nThe scalding shower pounded on my back. Leaan said it hurt, but I found it soothing. Wakes you up in a hurry that’s for certain.\n\n“Off please Alfred.”\n\n“Scent, Sir?”\n\n“Synmusk, thank you,” I read somewhere that this scent was actually procured from slaughtered animals centuries ago. Revolting.\n\nI stepped out, and folded the bathroom back into the wall. Leaan was just pulling out the kitchen.\n\n“Kof, “she asked holding up a mug.\n\n“No Sweetheart, tea for me.” I always preferred tea. It had a natural flavour, and the plants were far more efficient at producing oxygen. The older folk said the synkof tasted just like the real thing, but how would they know? The oldest among them was maybe three hundred, and the plague hit more than four hundred years ago.\n\nShe placed a cup of tea and a plate of macrobiotic eggs and toast in front of me, and kissed me on the cheek. “I have to run. Doris is being transferred to the Ionian settlement, and we’re having a going away party before the work period begins. Bye love.” She hopped in the tube and was gone. She liked tubing to work, but I’m old fashioned. I like to drive in the sunshine.\n\nI shoved the dishes in the `cycler, and headed to my car. I put my baby in drive and gently lifted into the morning sky. The sun felt good on my face.\n\n“Sir, sir,” a hand shook me roughly. “If you’re not eating, you have to leave.”\n\nI pulled the lead from behind my ear, and pocketed my Sony Dream Man. Reality congealed around me. I walked out into the oily rain.\n\nIt was raining. It was always raining.\n"
  title: To Sleep, Perchance…
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2008-12-17
  day: 17
  month: 12
  text: "Cephei A and Cephei B are eclipsing binary stars that are located approximately 3,000 light years from Earth.  Cephei A is a supergiant that is currently the second largest star in the Milky Way Galaxy.  It is so large that if it replaced Earth’s sun, its chromosphere would extend almost to the orbit of Saturn.  Cephei B is no pipsqueak either.  It is over ten times as massive as our sun, and over 100,000 times as luminous.  Both stars have extremely elongated orbits that cause them to practically touch each other every twenty years as they whip around their celestial center of mass.  During the close approach, the overpowering gravity wells of these two massive supergiants forms a localized space-time distortion between them.  This previously unknown phenomenon is called a temporal vortex.\n\nTwenty years earlier, during the previous close approach, Francisco Fontaneda discovered that the temporal vortex was not just a portal through time, as predicted by other scientists, but was actually the astrophysical equivalent to Ponce de León’s “Fountain of Youth.”  His analysis of the Quantum-mechanical entanglement data collected during the brief formation of the vortex revealed that if a body passed through the vortex at the instant of closest approach, the body’s physiology would change by twenty years.  In other words, it wouldn’t physically travel back in time, but it would emerge on the other side of the vortex 20 years younger.  To his chagrin, this hypothesis was greeted with skepticism and ridicule by the scientific community.  Unfortunately, his chance at vindication had to wait for the next transit, which wouldn’t occur for another twenty years.\n\n***\n\nFrancisco Fontaneda sat in his spaceship meticulously going down the pre-flight checklist one item at a time.  Fontaneda had spent the last ten years building his ship from scratch, making sure to only use parts that were at least twenty years old.  He wanted to make certain that if his ship got younger too, the parts would have existed twenty years earlier; otherwise they might simply vanish.  He was even wearing a thirty year old flightsuit.  After all, he didn’t want the press to photograph him climbing out of his ship completely naked.  Of course, that wouldn’t have been too bad, since he’d be a trim thirty year old, rather than his current flabby half century.\n\nAt the designated time, he fired his aft thrusters.  The ship climbed above the A-B plane of the two supergiants, and began its slow parabolic plunge toward the coordinates where the 100 meter wide vortex would appear at the instant of closest approach.  His timing was perfect.  A swirling whirlpool of light and degenerate matter began to form a few hundred kilometers in front of the ship as he accelerated downward.  Fontaneda held his breath as he entered, then exited, the temporal vortex.  Momentarily blinded by the intense brightness, he fumbled for his communications equipment to contact his support ship.  “Calling the SS Bimini.  This is Fontaneda.  Do you read me?  Did I make it?”  He tried to focus on the monitor as his vision slowly returned.\n\n“Roger that, Fontaneda,” said the captain of the Bimini.  “Direct hit.  How do you fee…?  Whoa.  What the hell happened to you?  Your face…”\n\nFontaneda saw the captain’s broad smile morph into a grimace.  “What’s the matter, Peter?” asked Fontaneda.  “Haven’t you seen a handsome young man before?”  He pulled out the mirror he had stowed in his flight bag.  “Oh shit,” he said, as he looked at the reflection of the horrified seventy year old man staring back at him.\n"
  title: The Vortex of Youth
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Gavin Raine
  date: 2008-12-18
  day: 18
  month: 12
  text: "It is with some consternation that I realize I am having difficulty in ordering my thoughts. Perhaps this is the onset of confusion one must expect, as the air supply becomes exhausted. I must make haste to write my account:\n\nOnly a few hours have passed since I was enjoying a bottle of port and a cigar with my good friend Dr Stanley. Stanley was pontificating on my work. “I know that I can’t match your grasp of mathematics, or the physical sciences,” he said, “but I still maintain that this whole notion of time travel is preposterous. If it were possible, then why haven’t we been visited by travellers from the future?”\n\n“You well know that my theories will not allow travel backward in time,” said I. “The inevitability of paradox precludes any such journey. Time is an arrow that we all travel along at the rate defined by the clock, and my apparatus merely accelerates that progress.”\n\n“So when can we see a demonstration?” said Stanley. “You completed your machine today, did you not?”\n\n“Why not now?” said I, and I wobbled through into my laboratory, with the good doctor following closely.\n\nI confess, the alcohol made me foolish and impetuous, but even in my most sober moments, I had not anticipated the fate that awaited me.\n\nI placed myself in the saddle of the time machine and took the control rod in my hand. “Meet me here at exactly this time tomorrow night”, I exclaimed and, with a salute, I inched the rod forward.\n\nThere was a confusing blur of motion, after which I found myself looking at the stars. I was perplexed, but when I looked down to see the curve of the Earth, far below, my puzzlement turned to panic. It took some time before I calmed down enough to realize what had happened.\n\nThroughout all of my theorizing and calculation, the one factor I had failed to take into account was the motion of the planets. While I travelled through the dimension of time, the Earth had continued onward in the other three physical dimensions. It had simply left me behind. Outside of my time dilation field, there was only the vacuum of space.\n\nAfter a while, I advanced the control rod forward again, taking my machine a full year into the future. However, I could only watch in frustration as the Earth swung past, out of my reach. Perhaps I am drifting, or the solar system itself is moving, but it seems I have lost all hope of ever reaching home again.\n\nMy machine is moving through time at its maximum velocity now, and all I can do is hope that I intersect with some form of planetary surface, though I fear that the odds are against me. I am hundreds of years in the future already and it is becoming difficult to write in my notebook. All around me, the light sources are growing dimmer.\n"
  title: The Time Traveller
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Sam Clough
  date: 2008-12-19
  day: 19
  month: 12
  text: "“My card.” The smooth-shelled android pressed a small square of cardboard into Gin’s hand.\n\nGin turned it over. Printed, in a fine copperplate script were the words ‘Best Supporting Actors’, and then underneath that, there was an address, a URL, and an e-mail address. He held it between his forefingers, and turned his head about to ask the android question, but it’d already moved on, circulating amongst the crowd. The android was part of Jamie’s entourage: he had shown up to the party with a half a dozen people and two androids. This, in and of itself was unusual — Jamie was a well-known introvert, however much of a contradiction in terms that seemed to be. But today, he had accepted an invitation, he’d shown up, and seemed to be the life of the party.\n\nGin carefully pocketed the card, and looked after Jamie in admiration.\n\n* * *\n\n“Good morning, Sir. How can I help you? Are you a new customer?” The pretty receptionist smiled at Gin, her entire demeanour exuding confidence and enthusiasm.\n\n“Yeah, I was given one of your cards. I was wondering exactly what you…did…here.” Gin scratched the back of his head, feeling pretty awkward.\n\n“Well, you’d probably be surprised at how many people come in here asking that question. Tell you what, one of our advisors is free. I’ll call him, to give you a rundown of our services.”\n\n“That’d be awesome, thanks.” Gin availed himself of one of the comfortable seats that were available in the reception, and waited whilst the receptionist spoke quickly and quietly into a phone.\n\nFive minutes later, the receptionist looked up at him.\n\n“Mister Gibson is free. Down the hall, first door on your right.”\n\nGin nodded his thanks, and went to the door mentioned. It opened with his approach, revealing a comfortable-looking office. ‘Mister Gibson’ was sitting behind a desk bereft of paperwork.\n\n“Gin! Gin Holden, it’s an honour.” Gibson got up and darted round his desk, clasping Gin warmly by the hand and shaking it vigourously.\n\n“Uh…do I — know you?”\n\n“No, not at all,” Gibson laughed, and released Gin’s hand, “as a point of fact, I don’t know you from John Q: just got your name and a bit of background data thirty seconds ago. We provide a service, Gin. Your life, everyone’s life is a story. Often an unspectacular, petty, boring story, but still a story. A play, a plot, that sort of thing.”\n\nGibson gestured to the seat in front of his desk, and returned to his own. He leaned forward conspiratorially, and Gin caught himself doing the same.\n\n“You see where I’m going with this? You’re the lead role. We can cast someone to play second fiddle, to take up the supporting roles. We can be your backstory, Mister Holden. We set up jokes, deliver carefully crafted anecdotes, admire, intimidate and bluff our way through. With one or two of our Actors, you’ll be the centre of any event. We script and thoroughly choreograph everything. We have helpers, advisors, fall guys, muses, sparks, henchmen and the odd nemesis.” Gibson leaned back. “We assign a creative to each client and they decide which of our actors would work best with you.”\n\n“Wow. So…” Gin was taken aback. It did sound like a good idea.\n\n“Let me guess. You want henchmen?”\n"
  title: Best Supporting Actors
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Asher Wismer
  date: 2008-12-20
  day: 20
  month: 12
  text: "30,000 feet above the ocean, my fighter jet went into a barrel roll. This was not optimal. I hung on the control stick for dear life, opened the flaps, and grunted as we decelerated hard.\n\nIn the air around me, flashing lights tailed and surrounded my plane. With a shriek of terror, my copilot hit the eject and blew out, leaving me with a malfunctioning plane and a big rushing hole in the canopy. Over the roar of the wind, I worked to stabilize the jet while the flashing lights moved in.\n\nNothing happened. I lowered to 20,000 feet. Some of the lights moved through the plane, through me. I felt nothing. A small chuckle escaped my lips as I contemplated my copilot. Shaky on the nerves; he’d key a transponder and the Coast Guard would pick him up.\n\nOf more concern were the lights. Several of them were congregating in front of my plane. Others were still trailing me by several yards.\n\nIn front of me, the group of lights came together in a blast of white. My mirrored visor kept the lights dim, but I still squinted. There was now a big flashing light, keeping pace with me. I checked the radio. Still jammed. Ahead, I could see the coast. There was no landing strip nearby, but I could dry-land the fighter if necessary. I just needed a long enough stretch of relatively smooth ground. A low-traffic highway would be perfect.\n\nThe big flashing light suddenly came toward me and enveloped my plane. I could see nothing except the light, not flashing from the inside but bright and steady. My instruments said I was still about 15,000 feet above sea level.\n\nA voice came from around. “You have been selected for our special offer, just 19.95 while supplies last! Just relax and take it easy, and you’ll receive three nights and two days in beautiful Las Vegas! As seen on TV!”\n\nShocked, I watched as my altimeter plunged towards the ground. I hit the eject, but there was no response. I braced for the impact–\n\nAnd nothing happened. In awe and horror, I saw that my altimeter was registering 10,000 feet below sea level.\n\n“Ah, shit,” I said. “All this time we’ve been looking to the sky–”\n"
  title: The Plane Truth
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Joey Cruz
  date: 2008-12-21
  day: 21
  month: 12
  text: "There are certain rules in this world that we must abide by. We don’t always agree with them, and they rarely agree with us, but if we are to survive to see tomorrow, we need to place our personal feelings aside and just accept things for what they are.\n\nTake rule #86, for instance.\n\nRule #86 states that every time someone speaks your name, it creates a duplicate of you.\n\nConsider that.\n\nEvery time your parents ever scolded you using your full name, they’ve given birth to another you. Every time someone at the doctor’s office told you the doctor could see you now, somewhere in the world, another. Every time a lover cried it out in a fit of passion… another.\n\nThink about that. Think about this thing you take for granted. This beautiful gift given to you by your ancestors and forefathers. Your name.\n\nImagine living in a world where your name was a curse instead of a gift.\n\n“That’s my name, don’t wear it out.”\n\nYou people are so funny.\n\nFor us, your name wears *you* out. It hunts you down. It fights for survival. Tries to steal your life to save its own. After all, who is the real you when you all bear the same name?\n\nBut then… those are the rules. Just one more in an endless stream of governing laws that warp and disrupt and diminish our world, little by little, piece by piece, one name at a time.\n\nI just wanted you to think about that. Remember it every time you sign a check. When you introduce yourself. When you gift your newborn child.\n\nRemember rule #86, and remember that we are watching you, and we are waiting.\n\nEvery world has rules. You test the boundaries of yours every day. Someday you will find a way to break those rules, and in doing so, you will let us in.\n\nAnd then you will have to learn the rules all over again.\n\nSee you soon.\n\nSigned,\n\nX\n"
  title: "Rule #86"
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2008-12-22
  day: 22
  month: 12
  text: "When Mati Forish was five years old, she could move coins across the table using only her mind.  At ten, she could make small stones levitate.  As a teenager, she could fly an aerocar from the back seat.  Out of fear, Mati’s parents tried to stop her from using the power.  It was the “Devil’s work,” they had said.  But Mati knew that this gift could make her wealthy.  And Mati wanted to be wealthy.  When she turned twenty one, she left home to seek her fortune.  While in the city, she met a doctor.  He had understood her abilities, and said that he had “friends” that could help her achieve her goals, for the right price.  Late one night, in a run down clinic on the south side, they implanted an experimental telekinetic booster into her brain.  Astonishingly, it magnified her natural ability a thousand fold.  Thrilled with the results, Mati rushed home to tell her fiance.  But when she arrived, she found him in bed with another woman.  In a fit of rage, she snapped both of their necks with her telekinetic power.  And, to her surprise, she enjoyed it.  That was the day that “The Assassin” was born.  Over the next several decades, hundreds of people died at her will.  It didn’t mater if the target was a tyrant or a saint.  They were just paychecks to Forish.\n\n***\n\n(Circa 2067, Medellin, Colombia) After passing through security, Forish entered the auditorium from one of the rear doors and took an isle seat in the last row.  She discreetly surveyed the auditorium to identify anything, or anybody, that could interfere with her task.  It was probably an unnecessary precaution, since her mode of execution was undetectable, but if Forish was anything, she was meticulous.\n\nForish listened indifferently as several men on an elevated stage spewed their hateful political rhetoric in an effort to pique the intensity of the partisan crowd.  After an hour of rabblerousing, Cattivo Guida, a ruthless and brutal dictator, marched onto the stage and stood behind the podium.  Well it’s about time, thought Forish.  She sat upright and eyed the target for several minutes trying to decide how she wanted to take him out.  In a public venue such as this, it would be best to do it by either a heart attack, or brain aneurysm.\n\nForish began to concentrate on the task of focusing and modulating the psychokinetic synapses in her brain.  Gradually, an invisible energy bubble began to coalesce above her head.  She strengthened it and molded it.  She willed a tendril to immerge from it and elongate toward the stage.  The invisible tendril began to snake its way forward above the heads of the audience and across the stage.  It entered Guida’s torso and slowly spiraled up his spinal column and wrapped itself around his heart.  As Forish caused the tendril to contract slightly, Guida stopped speaking and clutched the sides of the podium.  The tendril squeezed Guida’s heart tighter and he dropped to his knees.  Tighter still, and his face contorted in agony as his eyes pleaded for someone to help him.  Finally, he collapsed to the floor, motionless.  Guida’s bodyguards rushed to his side.  Their feeble attempts at CPR were wasted.  Guida’s heart would not beat again.\n\nAs chaos and panic flooded the audience, Forish stood up, and calmly left the auditorium.  Once outside, she walked down the marble steps and hailed a hovercab.  “I’m famished,” she said to the pilot.  “Take me to the best restaurant in the city.”\n"
  title: The Assassin
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Ari Brill
  date: 2008-12-23
  day: 23
  month: 12
  text: "The galaxy is a dangerous and cutthroat place, with no room for the weak. So we have always known; intrinsic in the cruel laws of nature, all organisms must fight, or die. Knowing this, we were not unprepared. With the invention of hyperdrive came the invention of the hyper-torpedo, and with the invention of artificial gravity came the invention of the Gravitic Pulverizer. Not to say war was obligatory, of course. For instance, no one suggested attacking the Calee Empire upon first contact.\n\nOn the other hand, perhaps the Human Gravitic Pulverizer, capable of ripping apart a medium-sized star cruiser, was kept in line less by peaceful intentions than by the Calee Solar Annihilator, capable of ripping apart a medium-sized star.\n\nRealizing this, we progressed rapidly in every facet of development befitting a newly minted interstellar empire. The Solar Annihilator rots in the Calee’s museums now, incapable of matching our most inferior weapons. We made contact with hundreds of species, and subjugated scores. The Grand Fleets of the Human Armada clashed with the hulking dreadnaughts of the Orthulla, never defeated in four thousand years, and emerged victorious. Trillions of humans swarm out from our fertile worlds, and see sights undreamed of only centuries ago. But one was so strange, so foreign, so impossible, that we at first thought we had made a mistake. One species, the Arpasi, had no space fleets, no weapons, no defensive platforms of any kind. They had never fought a single foreign war in the memory of even the longest-lived race. In short, they were totally pacifistic.\n\nSurely, the traders who reported this back must have been mistaken. Such tall tales should not be believed by reasonable men. We asked the Calee, now reconciled and our greatest trading partners, if it were true. It was. “The Arpasi…yes, of course. They are a friendly species.” Unable to understand, we sent a secret delegation to the Hive-Home of the Krashni, to inquire of this matter to the Lords of the arachnid legions. The chitters we received in reply indicated only the same: the Arpasi are a friendly species. The subtle and complex wing-dances of the avian Zirkbo relayed a similar message, as did the deep rumbles of the Oowaan, the bitter transmissions of the ancient Orthulla, and the mocking chortles of the Hyakeks. In each of the highest councils of the myriad races of this galaxy, we received only one reply: the Arpasi are a friendly species. Reflecting on our own aggressive actions and the example of the peaceful and prosperous Arpasi, the Supreme Congress of Earth made a decision.\n\nThe Arpasi homeworld would make an excellent addition to the Empire of Humanity. It only took two days for a Grand Fleet to reach the planet. As per standard procedure, after failing to obtain an immediate surrender they glassed a continent and waited. The occupation commenced soon after. The Arpasi were rich, and the sack did not end for months. Unusually, the massacres only lasted several days.\n\nThat invasion occurred last year.\n\nToday, the remnants of our once-glorious Grand Fleets flee in terror. Bashed and broken, they search for safe port but find none, for our planets are burned and shattered corpses. The alien vessels, black as death, have not reached Earth yet but they will soon.\n\nOnly now do we understand what we were told. The Arpasi are a friendly species.\n\nAnd they have very, very powerful friends.\n"
  title: Friendly
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Mark Ingram
  date: 2008-12-24
  day: 24
  month: 12
  text: "Filius was elated.  He elatedly embraced his elatedness.  His skyship soared just above the bulbous clouds, kicking up wake-mist when it graced the fluffy canopy.  Before him, the sun appeared to be permanently stuck in its descent at   the twilight hour, casting rays against the purple sky.  Purple was his favorite color, and twilight was his favorite time of day; both filled him with a deep sense of blissfulness.  He blissfully brimmed with bliss.\n\nOn the deck of his majestic ship, Filius bathed in the most soothing of oils, ate the most scrumptious of comestibles, and listened to the most exquisite of melodies.  He viewed the most gorgeous of sceneries, smelled the most ambrosial of aromas, and perceived the most serene of affects.  All his senses were immersed with the finest delights that he could desire.  He gratifyingly indulged in gratification.\n\nAnd he had Omni to thank for it.\n\nOmni was infinitely benevolent, powerful, present, and knowing.  In Omni’s immeasurable wisdom, Omni had created beings in Omni’s image, and Filius was among them.  Of course, Omni wanted Omni’s creations to experience the most fulfilling lives possible, so Omni, possessing the inexorable aptitude to do so, fashioned a universe without pain or negative emotions—a universe overflowing with everything pleasurable.\n\nFor the beings involved, this included the unbridled capacity to act as they willed.  Any idea could be conceived of; any object could be manifest; any action could be performed.  Filius knew of Omni.  He could envision this infinite designer who had bestowed immeasurable potential among his children and was more potent still.  He could comprehend the proceedings of the members of his species and would be joyous because of them.  He joyously enjoyed his joy.  He could grasp the concepts of sadness, anger, and suffering and was able to rejoice that those would never befall him.  His luxuries always brought him felicity, and if for some reason they ever lost their value, he could imagine a new time, a new place, and new comforts—all as valuable.\n\nHe felicitously contemplated his felicitousness. For a second, he visualized a universe without Omni or Omni’s influences.  Down to the subtlest detail, he pondered the features of the organisms there.  In his mind’s eye, Filius saw them—squishy, meaty beings fighting daily to survive without Omni’s gifts in hopes of shedding the surface layer of their misery.  Without a second thought, he forgot their displeasure with a smile.\n\nAs his ship sailed off toward the eternal sunset, he happily resumed his happiness.\n"
  title: Happiness
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2008-12-25
  day: 25
  month: 12
  text: "During their first month on Mars, the two-man and two-woman crew made the most significant discovery in the history of mankind.  While exploring the Grover Caves in the Scandia Tholi Mountains, they discovered irrefutable evidence of indigenous, but now extinct, intelligent life.  The Caves turned out to be a complex underground city that had contained at least a million beings.  Radiometric dating revealed that a civilized Martian society had flourished for thousands of centuries, but ultimately perished more than a billion years ago.  Scientists concluded that as Mars’ metallic core solidified, the magnetic field disappeared, and the solar wind slowly, but relentlessly, blew the atmosphere into space, forcing the Martians underground.  It was theorized that eventually their numbers dwindled, and their society became unsustainable.  There was no archeological evidence that the Martians ultimately adapted, or that they had the technology to escape.  Apparently, the Martians died along with their planet.\n\n***\n\nDakota Dalton was driving the two-man Transportation Vehicle from the excavation site back to the base camp.  Its treads kicked up two parallel red rooster tails as it trekked through the fine Martian dust.  “Did you know today is Christmas?”\n\n“I hope you’re not expecting a present,” replied Tom Barrymore.  “The Mall is 100 million miles away.  Besides, we’re in the middle of the Martian summer.”\n\n“It’s summertime in Argentina too, and they’re celebrating Christmas.  Com’on Tom, get in the spirit.  We have so much to be thankful for.  Look at that,” he said as he pointed to a bright blue-white point of light above the eastern horizon.  “How can you look at the Earth and not feel…”  Suddenly, the vehicle began to shake violently as the ground began to collapse beneath them.  They tumbled a hundred feet into a subterranean cavern, landing upside down.  Dakota found himself helplessly pinned under a heavy shipping crate.  His probing fingers felt the sharp edges of his fractured right femur protruding through his coveralls.  Tom was lying a few feet away.  His neck was bent backward at a grotesque angle.  Dakota could hear a hissing sound as air escaped from the pressurized vehicle.\n\nA voice came from the radio.  “This is Lowell Base,” said Jill Ignatuk, the mission commander.  “We’re receiving an automated distress signal.  Is everything okay?  Hello?  Dakota, Tom?  Damn.  If you can here me, we have your coordinates.  We’ll be there in 90 minutes.  Hang on.”\n\nBut even as Jill was talking, Dakota could hear the pitch of her voice change as the air in the transport became thinner and thinner.  He wouldn’t last 90 minutes.  Hell, he probably wouldn’t last 90 seconds.  As the oxygen content dropped below critical levels, his vision began to fade as he was losing consciousness.  There were flashes of light, blurry ghostlike images, then blackness.\n\nWhen Dakota woke up at the Lowell Base infirmary he saw the commander’s smiling face looking down at him.  Tom was standing next to her.  “Commander,” Dakota asked, “how did you get to us so fast?  I thought we were dead?”\n\n“It took us over two hours to reach you two at the bottom of that hole.  When we opened the airlock, you were laying side by side next to the hatch.  There was blood on your uniform, but you didn’t have any wounds.  When we got you both back to base, we took x-rays.  Apparently, you had sustained a compound leg fracture, and Tom’s neck had been broken.  How did you set your own leg, and treat Tom’s broken vertebrae?”\n\n“It wasn’t me, Commander,” Dakota replied.  “I have trouble putting on a Band-Aid.”\n"
  title: Christmas on Mars
  year: 2008
- 
  author: William Tracy
  date: 2008-12-26
  day: 26
  month: 12
  text: "The heroine was surrounded by towering aliens. Their gleaming carapaces reflected her shapely body, a flowing robe hugging her curves. Their glittering, faceted eyes took in the sight of her hands clutching the gash that revealed the ample curve of her heaving bosom. Their leader leaned forward and spoke, its breath foul with the stink of rot. “What have we here?”\n\nShe bared her brilliant white teeth in defiance. “Lieutenant Sarathura of the Terran Alliance.”\n\n“A spy,” it noted the datapad gripped in her immaculate nails. “The penalty is death.”\n\nAnother alien stepped forward with a curved, jagged blade that reflected Sarathura’s deep blue eyes. As it raised its arms to make the killing blow, a bolt of plasma exploded in its face like a glowing flower. Sarathura gasped with joy.\n\n“Our craft is docked back that way,” Commander Cloudstepper exclaimed in his deep, full voice. The sweat gleamed on his flexing muscles as he gunned down the monsters. The two heroes fled down the corridor, hand in hand.\n\n“There are armored troopers after us,” Cloudstepper yelled after glancing over his broad, chiseled shoulder. “My plasma gun can’t shoot through their armor, and they’re gaining on us!”\n\nAround the corner, they saw Officer Michealson. “Get in the airlock!” he commanded in his baritone. His thick muscles and throbbing veins bulged under his ebony skin as he lifted a heavy Gatling Laser. The weapon traced flickering calligraphy on the air as he blasted the encroaching menace.\n\nTheir craft separated from the alien ship, and jumped to lightspeed.\n\n“They are too fast for us!” Cloudstepper gasped, staring at the instrument display. “Their heavy guns will destroy us before we reach friendly lines!”\n\n“I have an idea,” Michealson gasped. “I could reverse the polarity of the flux capacitors, and project a warp bubble in the path of their vessel. We would have a 40% chance of trapping them in a parallel universe!”\n\n“Let it be so!” Captain Cloudstepper commanded.\n\nThere was an ominous hum as the capacitors charged, then they went off. The quivering warp bubble was visible on the main viewscreen. The alien ship tried to dodge, but wasn’t quick enough. The bubble trapped the vessel, and both disappeared in a bright flash.\n\n“We did it!” Sarathura gasped. “I escaped with the plans for the aliens’ secret weapon!” She and the captain embraced and kissed passionately.\n\n* * *\n\nSarah pressed “Submit” and published the latest chapter of her novel to her website. “That should please the people who keep asking for more action.” She stretched, stood up.\n\nSarah walked into the bathroom, filled the tub. Then she undressed and climbed into the bath. After soaking for an hour, she got out and dried, then put on her bathrobe. She was putting on her slippers when when she heard a crash from in front of the house.\n\nSarah jogged toward the sound, then tripped over the power cord to her computer and fell into a bookcase. Sarah picked herself up, then cursed under her breath at the tear cutting her robe from her shoulder across her chest.\n\nShe stormed across the room, threw open the front door—and froze in panic.\n\nThe heroine was surrounded by towering aliens. Their gleaming carapaces reflected her shapely body, a flowing robe hugging her curves. Their glittering, faceted eyes took in the sight of her hands clutching the gash that revealed the ample curve of her heaving bosom. Their leader leaned forward and spoke, its breath foul with the stink of rot. “What have we here?”\n"
  title: Mary Sue
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Rob Burton
  date: 2008-12-27
  day: 27
  month: 12
  text: "Within the holiest temple, buried deep within the cathedral, Arch-Bishop Emmanuel Berret struck the Bios Chime above the altar of power. The bell released its singular soft tone to bounce crazily between the hard walls. Terrified that his failing hearing might make him act too quickly, Berret waited six more heartbeats after it finally diminished to speak the holy words learnt from the historical documents. ‘Ohm nama shivaya’, he intoned, genuflecting so that his forehead touched the leading edge of the altar.\n\nTwo servers, each with a box in their hands, approached him. The first carried the paste of thermal conduction, which he brought forth from the box and placed it, in its tube, reverently into the palm of the Arch-Bishop.\n\n‘Ohm nama shivaya.’ His low, grumbling mantra resonated from the stone walls, chasing its predecessor. The second server opened his box with all due ritual and retrieved from within the sacred silicon wafer. He placed it into the palm of the Arch-Bishop’s hand.\n\n‘Ohm nama shivaya.’ The servers gently withdrew with bowed heads, as if the gentle wave of his utterance had propelled them with its gentle pressure. He prayed to Saint William of the gate and Saint Steven of the labours that he might be worthy of opening the book as he spread the paste upon the wafer and passed it to his lips. Its awful taste filled his mouth, but he swallowed with a gasp and stood to face the holy book.\n\nJust as he had been told, it was almost featureless, smooth and black, made of something that was neither metal, nor stone, nor wood or skin of any kind. He knew what only the most holy men knew, that trapped within its form was contained all of the alphabet, laid out in its holy order, and all of the numbers, surrounded by arcane words and wondrous commands. He also knew of the tablet of light – the bringer of prophesy and ultimate knowledge. His eyes traced the crack at its edge that was the only clue to the glories contained within.\n\nFrom the censer he lifted one of the most holy relics, a tiny fragment of impossibly thin cloth, soaked in a holy water that vanished into prayer – the cloth of ecstatic purification. With it, he began to write upon the unyeilding black surface. He drew the tetragrammaton, that is the name of the holy teacher whose spirit, whom they knew, from the historical documents, lived forever.\n\n‘Y’, he wrote, the letter disappearing heavenward almost as soon as it had been written. Then he drew the perfect circle that was the second letter as best as his old hands could manage. ‘D’ he wrote then, and finally ‘A’, which is the beginning at the end.\n\nHe reached forward and, head bowed in deferential respect, he made so as to lift the holy book, and it yielded to his purity and righteousness, and opened for him. He wondered to look upon the holy words within, and gazed in fascination at the strange and pure blue light about the great primary rune.\n\nHe closed his eyes and bowed his head in silent prayer as the holy book whirred and sang, driving away the demons gathered around it. Terrified, he waited for its last and most vibrant song, and then waited six heartbeats more, for fear he might look upon the blue screen of death. Then, as he opened his eyes, he cried out ‘Hllljh!’, for written there, shining gloriously from the tablet of light were the holy words that proved him worthy.\n\n‘Welcome to windows’\n"
  title: Divine Revelation
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Lander Ver Hoef
  date: 2008-12-28
  day: 28
  month: 12
  text: "We get the window seat, Molly! Isn’t that neat? We’ll be able to see everything. Have you ever been to space before, Molly? Me neither. I wonder what it’ll be like. I hope I don’t get Z-sick.\n\nNo, Molly, I don’t know what that machine out there does. Maybe it works on the ships? See that big shining thing right over there? That’s a ship just like ours! Yes, it’s pretty, isn’t it? So white, and the lights against the dark night are so bright.\n\nThat’s the Captain talking, Molly. He’s telling us that we’re going to be taking off now. Don’t be scared, I’ll take care of you. Just be sure to stay near me and don’t float away in ZG!\n\nHere we go! We’ve started moving, Molly. You can’t see the ocean way down there, since it’s dark out, but it’s there, don’t worry. You can’t see it either, but Daddy says that there’s a track that we’re being pulled along. Maybe it’s like Jimmy’s slingshot. It really hurts when he hits me with rocks from it! And he says mean things about you, Molly. He says you’re just a doll and that I’m a sissy for keeping you. He’s just a bully though. Don’t worry, I wouldn’t ever listen to him. I’ll keep you forever!\n\nThis is a lot stronger than Jimmy’s slingshot though! Now I feel sorry for the rocks too. I wonder if they feel as squished as I do? Are you all right, Molly? Are you getting squished too? It’ll be okay though, since Daddy said that this doesn’t last long.\n\nSee, that wasn’t long at all! Ooh, look out the window, Molly. There’s a continent! Look at all those lights! I wonder where that is?\n\nEep! Oh, don’t worry, Molly. That bang was just the rocket motor starting. Daddy warned us about that, remember? He said that it was perfectly normal and that we shouldn’t be scared. Are you scared, Molly? Me too, a little bit. But don’t worry, I’ll keep you safe up here.\n\nWow! So this is what ZG is like. Come back here, Molly! Don’t go floating away like that, now. I can’t take care of you if you run away like that!\n\nOh, ew. I think that someone a few rows back just threw up. Isn’t that nasty, Molly? Strange, too. I don’t feel at all sick. Hee hee, even Mommy looks sick, and she never throws up. I hope she doesn’t now. That would be nasty.\n\nLook out of the window, Molly. There’s a pretty light around the edge of Earth. It’s dawn! I didn’t know they got sunrises here in space, did you? Here, I’ll hold you up to the window so you can see. You’re so pretty, Molly, with the sunlight glinting off your eyes. What an adventure we’re going to have! Are you excited, Molly? I am!\n"
  title: Molly
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Greg R. Fishbone
  date: 2008-12-29
  day: 29
  month: 12
  text: "Agent Stanley, six-time salesman of the month, cut a trail through the switch grass with his machete. His motions were effortless, hardly distracting from his practiced patter about low interest financing.\n\nBehind him trudged the Forrester family. Mr. Forrester swatted mosquitoes from his arms and neck. Mrs. Forrester quietly bemoaned her mud-caked designer shoes. The Forrester children, Gerald and Roxie, fought over a tuna sandwich that represented the last of their daily provisions. The family’s first weekend of house hunting was already a miserable affair.\n\nAgent Stanley’s trailblazing ended abruptly at a precipice with a view of the steamy valley below. “This is a good place to begin. Most of the homes in this valley migrated inland after Hurricane Ronaldo, with a few holdovers from the ’36 flood and some recent foreclosures.”\n\nThe Forresters peered down into the fog, where a few house-shaped outlines could be seen moving together toward the northeast. “Do they always travel in packs?” asked Mr. Forrester.\n\nAgent Stanley shrugged. “Not always, but homes by the same developer sometimes form neighborhood associations for their mutual protection. They needn’t worry about burglary, here in the wild, but the security systems don’t know that. Watch your footing on the descent. I tagged a lovely three-bedroom colonial last week that would be perfect for you, if we can find it again.”\n\nThe valley was thick with grass and, as Mrs. Forrester loudly noted, a particularly clingy tan-colored mud. Ground cover and trees were common, but not thick enough to prevent houses from moving through. While Mr. Forrester applied more insect repellant and Mrs. Forrester brushed mud from the hem of her skirt, Gerald and Roxie argued over which of them needed more closet space.\n\nAgent Stanley knelt to examine a tree stump. “These cuts are fresh, and the treads lead off in this direction.”\n\n“Houses cut down trees?” asked Gerald.\n\n“They do in the wild, son,” said Agent Stanley. “There aren’t any lumber yards out here, so houses have to make due with what materials they can find.”\n\n“Why do they need lumber if they’re already built?” asked Roxie.\n\n“Repairs. Wear and tear. Or sometimes they feel the need to build a dormer or an addition.”\n\n“Maybe it’s installing crown molding in itself,” said Mrs. Forrester. “I always imagined my first house would have crown molding.” Mr. Forrester put an arm around her shoulders.\n\nThe Forristers, with Agent Stanley as their scout, tracked the house through the trees and across the plains. The whine of a buzz-saw grew louder as they approached until, over a small rise, they came upon a team of robotic house-scutters working on a single-story structure with two wide openings in the front.\n\n“We’re in luck!” Agent Stanley exclaimed. “That’s a detached two-car garage–very desirable!”\n\nMr. and Mrs. Forrester nodded appreciably, while Gerald and Roxie ran forward to play with a robot that seemed to be fashioning shingles from strips of bark. “Be careful, kids!” called Mrs. Forrester.\n\n“Don’t worry.” Agent Stanley chuckled. “Those fourth generation house-scutters are great with children. They cook, they clean, and as you can see, they’re quite handy with home improvements. If you’re ready to make an offer, I’d be happy to–”\n\nHe was interrupted by a loud crash, as a four-bedroom Tudor-style house burst into the clearing with red lights blazing in every window. Agent Stanley looked with alarm toward the detached garage, where Gerald Forrester was carving his initials into the door frame with a pocket laser.\n\n“That’s trouble,” said Agent Stanley. “Tudors are notoriously protective of their out-buildings.”\n"
  title: House Hunting
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Glenn Blakeslee
  date: 2008-12-30
  day: 30
  month: 12
  text: "Stan and I sat by the campfire in the desert night. The fire was burning low, a bed of embers surrounded by fire-blackened stones. We sipped on our beers, and I waited for Stan to start talking.\n\nHe’s one of my oldest friends, a physicist and a brilliant guy. When we camp in the desert he always has a late-night campfire lecture for me. I could tell he was ready to start talking. “Go ahead, Stan,” I said.\n\nHe smiled self-consciously. “Well…” he began, “We’ve talked about the Heisenberg Principle, right?”\n\n“That’s where you can’t know the state of a particle until you observe it,” I said.\n\n“Right. And by observation you collapse the wave function. But we can’t always observe, don’t always collapse the wave. There’s a natural process called vacuum fluctuation that causes that to happen without our interference. Otherwise, a particle wouldn’t reveal itself and matter, the universe, wouldn’t exist.”\n\n“Okay.”\n\nStan scratched a square in the dirt with his shoe. “Imagine that’s a cubic foot. Information theory tells us that, when the wave collapses, there’s a finite amount of physical information encoded in that cubic foot. It’s a huge amount of information, but still finite.” With his foot, Stan pushed lines out from the sides of the square. “Let’s expand this foot to a square light year.” He looked up at me and smiled. “Still a finite amount of information, right?”\n\n“Right,” I said. I’m never sure where his conversations are leading.\n\n“Well, the universe is infinite,” he said, and he threw a small log on the fire. “The visible edge of the universe is estimated to be four hundred thousand light years away, but that’s only the distance light has traveled. It’s still infinite.”\n\n“Okay.”\n\n“A cubic foot or a cubic light year has only a finite number of possible states. Since the universe is infinite, you can map out an infinite number of cubic light years, and information theory says a good number of those cubic light years would have the same finite set of wave functions as our own cubic light year.”\n\nStan threw another log on the fire. “And a duplicate set of wave functions means a duplicate set of the physical properties of our own cubic light year,” he said.\n\n“You mean…” I started, and stared at him. “There’s like… an alternate universe? One just like our own?”\n\n“Not an alternate universe,” Stan said, “Another part of this universe that’s exactly the same as our own.”\n\nI stared at the fire. Embers glowed red and fire licked at the underside of logs. A piece of wood popped, and a single flame twisted, curled, spat its load of carbon into the night sky. The exact same flame, somewhere else, did the same.\n\nI looked back at Stan. In the light of the fire I could see tears welling in his eyes. I put my hand on his shoulder and said, “It’s no good, Stan. Samantha is still dead. You have to give it up.”\n\nStan looked at me, and he smiled. “A small variation on our finite set could make a situation where I was able to save her.”\n\nAnd there was nothing, nothing in our finite set, that I could say.\n"
  title: Vacuum Fluctuations
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Brian C. Baer
  date: 2008-12-31
  day: 31
  month: 12
  text: "Robots love me.\n\nAs much as robots can love.  And in a plutonic sense, of course.  Something about my chubby little baby face sets off their simulated paternal instincts and they all bend over backwards to answer my questions.  That sort of thing comes in handy with my job.\n\nI knelt in front of the unmoving blue robot.  As if brooding, it sat on the floor in the middle of the living room.  It was large and bulky, a few years old but in decent enough shape.  Not one of those smooth, humanoid-looking models that have been flooding the market; it was more from the “Rock ’Em, Sock ’Em” school of design.  Behind me, the family stood anxious, worried, huddled together.\n\n“Can you fix him, doctor?” the wife asked.  The soft expanse of flesh beneath her chin shivered with concern.  She hugged her young daughter close.  The husband did the same to her.\n\n“I’m not a doctor,” I said absent-mindedly as I eyed my scanner.\n\n“I beg your pardon?” the husband chimed in, brushing a loose strand of hair across his comb-over with his palm.\n\n“Hm?” I asked, coming out of my focus.  “Oh.  I’m not a doctor.  Robots don’t really have brains, so they don’t need a psychiatrist or anything like…” I trailed off, before looking back to my work.  “I’m a technician.”\n\n“Henry just sat down and stopped moving,” the little girl said, sounding close to tears.\n\n“We just had him in for maintenance and everything checked out,” the wife added.  “I don’t understand it.”\n\nI nodded and made a little “hmm” sound, but I wasn’t really listening.  “Unit NX-6401, respond to my voice.”\n\n“Henry,” the robot corrected me in a surprisingly human voice.  It still hadn’t moved, and the lights hadn’t returned to its dim photoreceptors.\n\n“Okay, Henry,” I conceded.  “Are you functioning correctly?”\n\nIt made a soft snorting noise.  “If that’s what you call this.”\n\nI sat cross-legged on the carpet in front of it.  “Hey, now.  What’s that all about?”  I put my hand on its shoulder.  Henry’s ocular lights activated, but just barely.  It didn’t respond right away.\n\n“The Johnsons across the street bought a new robot,” it said finally.\n\n“Yeah,” the husband confirmed from behind me, “One of those new A-01 models.”\n\n“Go on,” I coaxed.\n\n“I’ve seen it walking their kids to school and fixing their roof, and it’s got those extendable arms and a hedge-clipper accessory, and…”\n\n“And its making you feel not as special?” I asked in a soothing voice.\n\n“The A-01s are so great,” it said.  “One of them would be so much more functional for this family.  It would be better than I am.”\n\n“Henry, I’m going to tell you a secret about humans.  It is a bit paradoxical, so promise me your head will not explode when I tell you.”\n\nIt nodded, its eyes glowing brighter.  I glanced back at the morbidly obese woman and her balding husband.  Even their little girl wasn’t too easy on the eyes.\n\n“Henry,” I said.  “Humans build emotional attachments.  And they don’t always want what’s shiny and new.  They want what they love.”\n\n“They love me?” It asked, looking over my shoulder at the piles of unappealing humanity.  It stood up, and after a moment, I followed.\n\n“It isn’t very logical, doctor.”  Henry’s voice sounded happy.\n\nI smiled.  “I’m not a doctor.”\n"
  title: The Robot Whisperer
  year: 2008
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2009-01-01
  day: '01'
  month: '01'
  text: "The pig carcass filled most of the stainless tub where the delivery men had laid it. Freshly slaughtered, but not butchered, it had taken four of them to lift it there. None of them spoke to Rinnovi, only pausing for him to sign for the animal before they left.\n\nOn the way to the door, one of the men pointed at the labels affixed to virtually every item in the house; black typewritten names and addresses on white shipping labels. The leader of the group nudged him and shook his head ‘no’, before hurrying him out the door.\n\nRinnovi poured a scotch, and turned on the kitchen vid display, his own visage peering back at him with a smile. He froze the frame, leaving the remote on the island beside the second stainless tub.\n\n“Osiris, prepare to renew.” He spoke aloud to the empty room.\n\n“Preparations underway.” The voice, angel soft and faintly Irish filled the room seemingly from everywhere at once. Both of the tubs began to fill with a steaming viscous liquid, spattering against the steel, and slowly enveloping the cooling pig.\n\nIn the morning, he knew he’d awake and remember nothing of this. He’d find the remote, curiosity would lead him to play the journal he’d recorded of his work over the past year.\n\nJanuary would be spent shipping pieces from his house, following the instructions laid out on the labels attached to them. Physical things acquired over the past year would hold no value or interest to him come morning, and so they would be gifted to those friends who stood by him.\n\nThe first of January would be Rinnovi’s forty first birthday. It would also be the twenty sixth time he’d been reborn as a forty one year old. Restored once more to a version of himself a year younger, from a pattern captured over a quarter century ago. Perhaps this time, this year, he’d get it right.\n\nHe took one last walk through the rooms of his home. In his office, laid out on screens and strewn across whiteboards and table tops, a years progress towards unlocking the gene-code of his own existence. Another years failure to solve the riddle of his hard coded untimely demise.\n\nThis year, surely, a reinvigorated him would solve the puzzle, find the key. Perhaps one day he’d see his forty second birthday.\n\nReturning to the kitchen, preparations complete, Rinnovi placed his empty glass on the counter and paused a moment to pat the now submerged swine. However bad he felt for the animal, using a pig for genetic building blocks was much safer and easier than finding fresh human cadavers. Fewer questions; far less expensive.\n\n“Ok Osiris, let’s try this again.”\n\n“As you wish, I’ll re-brief you in the morning. Goodbye Rinnovi.” The voice soothing, the tone, a hint of sadness.\n\nHe poured himself another scotch, this time lacing the drink with powerful sedatives and paralytics, and dropping his bathrobe over the back of a kitchen chair, climbed into the bath of warm liquid. He downed the drink quickly, putting the glass on the counter before slowly slipping beneath the surface. He could feel the chemicals take away control, feel his lungs slowly fill with fluid as the air escaped. The lights of the room dimmed as his eyes unfocused. By the time the nano-tech started reverting to his backup, he could no longer feel anything at all.\n\nTomorrow, a new day, a new man, a new chance.\n\nAs his consciousness dissolved, he thought of his son, frozen beneath his home. A boy waiting for a father to undo the error of his creation.\n\nPerhaps he could make it safe for his son to age again this year.\n"
  title: Renew
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Steven Holland
  date: 2009-01-02
  day: '02'
  month: '01'
  text: "Jaden Stanitski throttled the space rover to full power.  The soft treads of the vehicle crunched over the rough, sun baked surface of Planet Merco II.  He avoided the craters and deep crevices of the planet’s surface as best he could.  The sack containing small, labeled samples of rock and dirt had been hastily thrown into the rear compartment.  The disturbance of his path sent small chunks of brownish-gray rock flying into the air.\n\nJaden didn’t notice, for dawn was fast approaching.  Miles ahead of him, wispy gray smoke rose in a plume.  Even after five minutes, the fire still managed to find oxygen aboard his crashed spaceship.\n\nWhat had gone wrong?  The ship was supposed to remain on autopilot, flying along with him on the dark side of Merco II.  Perhaps the magnetic field of the planet’s magnetic core had disrupted some electrical component onboard, not that it really mattered at this point.\n\nHe was dead.  He knew that.  Dawn would come and incinerate him to ashes.  Despite the circumstances, Jaden laughed at his actions: trying to outrun the spin of nine hour planet on a land rover.  He might buy himself a few seconds, maybe even a minute.\n\nAbruptly, he slammed on the brakes.  The rover skidded to a stop, its back end fishtailing slightly.  The light was coming; Jaden could see it in the horizon behind him now.\n\nThe seconds ticked by.  Jaden sat frozen on the seat, his mind whirling like an overworked steam engine.  Three deaths – incineration, hypothermia, or asphyxiation.  The blazing sunlight drew closer, waves of heat rising toward the empty blackness.  He had 15 minutes at the most.\n\nThree deaths.  Clenching his teeth, Jaden decoupled his air hose.  The hissing sound of the air was lost in the vacuum of space.  This death would be the most painful, but it was the fate he could control.\n"
  title: Dawn
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2009-01-03
  day: '03'
  month: '01'
  text: "It was 1856. I remember it like it was yesterday even though so many of my other memories have gone.\n\nIt looked like he had fallen out of the clouds judging by the sheared treetops that led to his crippled metal sky wagon.\n\nI say ‘he’ but really, that was just what we decided after finding him. His nether regions were as smooth as a river rock. We nicknamed him Baldy because there wasn’t a hair on him and his head was a little bigger than ours. He had a ring of gold eyes on his face, arranged kind of like a spider although I didn’t find it threatening or creepy. He had a little mess of tentacles where his mouth should have been and twenty or so tiny round holes for a nose.\n\nHe had fours arms up top, a big pair and a small pair, three thick fingers on each hand. The knuckles on his hands seemed to go any which way they pleased. I remember that being more disconcerting to me than his strange face.\n\nHe was dripping bright orange blood. We put him on a makeshift stretcher and took him away from the smoking shell of his ship. He had a couple of wires that were still attaching him to the ship. We had to cut those wires to get him away.\n\nThe blue fella died in the doctor’s office. We were all pretty sad about it. Some of us thought that maybe it was disconnecting him from his ship was what done it even though his wounds looked pretty severe and he never stopped bleeding that mango juice all over the doc’s floor.\n\nThe doc was pretty shook up. He didn’t write anything down about it. We took the blue fella out and buried him.\n\nI can’t tell you the reason that none of us thought to write anything down or try to take pictures of him or report it on the wires or try to make money off of him or anything. It just didn’t seem right.\n\nOn the place where we buried him, a tree sprung up the next spring. The leaves were shaped like bright red octagons.\n\nThe fruit looked like pink siamese-twin pears with little thorns on the bottom.\n\nFive of us picked and ate some of that fruit.\n\nIt’s been fifty years since I ate that fruit and the memories are still bright in my mind.\n\nThe memories of growing up on an ice planet with six blue suns. The memories of leaving my brood and climbing aboard a spaceship. The memories of deviating off course. The memories of being struck by lightning and being found by strange, pink, bipeds with simple cell structures. The memories of being cut off from the hivemind and the fading sense of belonging. The memories of not being able to tell the pink biped medical officer that it wasn’t his fault that I was dying.\n\nI remember my own face looking at me. That’s the weirdest memory I have. I also have memories of strange, alien math and technology that I’ve always been scared to tell people about until now.\n\nThey say that I have Alzheimer’s. I’ve felt my own memories slipping away more and more. The memories of the alien remain bright and unchanged. I think the fruit put them in there more solidly that my own. In a while, they’ll be my only memories.\n\nThat’s why I’m writing these equations down. For the scientists. For you humans. Use the math wisely.\n"
  title: Baldy
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2009-01-04
  day: '04'
  month: '01'
  text: "A few hours after the Neptune Explorer achieved orbit around the solar system’s most distant planet, it detected very faint radio signals from Neptune’s largest moon, Triton.  The signal was a repeating series of pulses:  1030230233-1030230233-1030230233…  Earth based scientists were unsure if this signal was natural or artificial.  They instructed the satellite to transmit the same sequence of pulses back toward Triton.  Almost instantly, the signal from Triton changed to 3130332-3130332-3130332…\n\nAfter a minute, Cory Kincaid, NASA’s expert in mathematical concepts and linguistics, yelled “I got it.  It’s artificial. “It’s base four, not base ten.  I guess these aliens only have four fingers.”  His declaration was received with questioning stares, not enlightened nods.  “Look, in base ten the first series is really 314159-314159-314159…”  Still, only blank stares.  “That’s pi, you know 3.14159.  The second series is 1.4142 in base ten.  That’s the square root of two.  They’re the two most basic fundamental relationships in geometry and mathematics.  It has to be a signal from an intelligent life form.”\n\nMaria Diorisio, NASA’s Director of Operations, walked up to Cory and patted him firmly on the back.  “Congratulations, Kincaid.  That little bit of deduction just won you a ticket on a manned mission to Triton, which leaves in two months.”\n\nIt actually took three months before the ship left the Docking Station on its seven week sojourn to Triton.  During the trip, Cory made significant progress communicating with the Tritons.  But the major breakthroughs came after the ship landed.  The Tritons turned out to be quarter-sized crab-like creatures that amassed around the numerous geysers dotting Triton’s frozen surface.  Apparently, they fed on a food source flowing from the geysers, similar to the chemosynthesis that supported life around Earth’s deep water thermal vents.  The crabs walked on four hind legs, and used their two forelimbs to gather food.  As it turned out, each of the forelimbs had two “fingers.”  The individual crabs were capable of transmitting extremely faint radio signals, presumably for communication, since Triton’s thin atmosphere could not propagate sound waves.  The most amazing finding, however, was that each crab was not an individual entity.  The estimated one billion crabs were mentally linked together.  One brain, so to speak.  It was only through their combined, synchronized effort that they were able to gain the attention of the Neptune Explorer.  As the weeks passed, Cory was able to work out a rudimentary language, and communication increased exponentially.   That’s when the Tritons delivered the bad news.\n\n“Ms. Diorisio,” reported Cory on the hyperlight transceiver, “I need you to focus Hubble II on the following coordinates: RA 284.92475 and Dec +39.436111.  It’s important, so please hurry.”\n\nShe motioned to her assistant to begin the alignment.  “What’s going on Cory?”\n\n“Well, Ms. Diorisio, the Tritons are collectively an extremely intelligent species that have been sentient for almost a billion years.  They have an extensive astronomical database.  They’ve been trying to warn us for centuries.”  He mopped the sweat from his forehead.  “They say a long period comet will hit the Earth in nine months.  They say it’s over 150 miles in diameter.  Please tell me there is nothing at those coordinates.”\n\nAfter consulting a monitor, Diorisio said “The live image only shows a star.  Give us an hour for a longer exposure.”  Sixty minutes later, Diorisio’s knees gave way as the time exposure revealed a discernable disc five times larger than Betelgeuse, the star with the largest angular displacement.  But the most damning evidence of all was the fog surrounding the disc.  The characteristic coma of a comet as it approaches the sun.\n"
  title: Triton
  year: 2009
- 
  author: David Rees-Thomas
  date: 2009-01-05
  day: '05'
  month: '01'
  text: "Back in 1938 before we had to move again I remember we would often go to my Granddads house for tea.\n\nHe lived in a small cottage on the outskirts of our village with his dogs, a blind Jack Russell and a very old Yorkshire terrier with 3 legs. I was ten years old and it was always very exciting for me as my Granddad knew lots and lots of old stories. My favorite was the one about the time before the Martians came when he used to travel on long journeys all around the world.\n\nHe died a few years later and we looked after his two dogs until they also died but I never forgot about what he had said about the time before the Martians. He said that there had been huge ships and long busy railways and that people lived together in huge cities full of horses and carriages and offices and shops and banks and zoos and great parks and all sorts of other amazing things. We didn’t have any of that then, not even in 1938 even though the Martians had been gone for lots of years. Our shops were boring, nothing like the one Granddad talked about and we didn’t have zoos anymore.\n\nEven now, twenty years later, our world is sort of the same. They sometimes talk about building a museum of the Martians but I don’t like that idea. What I want to see is a ship like my Granddad talked about or a palace like he once showed me in an old photograph, something special and human. I don’t want to see the Martians, they spoiled everything, took all those things away from us.\n\nMy son will turn two in the winter and I want to feel less doubtful about the future. My wife tells me I shouldn’t complain and we should be grateful and I understand, I really do. They do their best for those of us that live and those that survived but I feel sad when I think about my Granddad and everything that’s been lost. It’s been fifty years since the Martians came and went but I wonder if we’ll ever really understand what happened and what we’re going to do from here on in.\n\nI do have a new job now though, working on a small farm just outside of what used to be Woking that our regional government set up. We are responsible for providing the whole of the south east of England with milk and cheese and butter and we have some sheep for wool so we don’t get cold in the winter. There are about fifty of us on the farm and it seems to work quite well. People seem happy, maybe I’m too pessimistic.\n\nWe converted the old farmhouse into new milking sheds a few months ago and yesterday I found something while I was looking through the upstairs rooms. It was a small, plastic ship that had been chewed at the end so that its bow was wrinkled and torn. I picked it up and put it in my pocket and gave it to my son when I got home.\n\nHe smiled at me and I stroked his hair gently. I knew that one day I would tell him about the Martians and about my Granddad and about the time when we had ships and railways and palaces and cities and great parks and…and, well, everything. I’d tell him everything.\n"
  title: What My Granddad Told Me About The Martians
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Sam Clough
  date: 2009-01-06
  day: '06'
  month: '01'
  text: "I’m just a golem: made of flesh rather than clay, but still propelled along by the words in my head and the fire in my eyes. Under my skull is no clay tablet or ancient scroll, though: break me apart and you wouldn’t catch a glimpse of the contract that binds me. The clauses and caveats were imprinted onto my conscious mind with chemicals and surgery: precise and purposeful.  About six thousand golems were created before the company was investigated, invaded and shut down, but by then, it was too late. With the dissolution of the company, our contracts passed to the state.\n\nOn the news, there were stories about successful deprogrammings, golems released from their terms of employment to become normal again. When it was my turn, the men in white coats just tutted, and glanced at one another. A few days later, I was told: there was no hope of undoing what the company did. Since the state held my contract, they decided to keep me on as staff. I’m sure they meant well by it, at least at first.\n\nAt first, golems were just given menial jobs, things any simian could accomplish. We did them, and did them well. I was in data entry: each time I completed a sheet, it gave me a little buzz of joy. We were Pavlov’s bureaucrats, and we were good at it.\n\nBut managers change. And a supply of warm bodies that appear willing to do anything you ask is a precious commodity indeed. I was transferred to a military research establishment. At each step there were cameras and biometrics, and questions in the vein of ‘are you willing to do this for us?’. It never crossed my mind to say no. It was literally unthinkable. I was willing to do anything at all, no matter what. I felt it to the core of me — I guess the tapes were just so the white coats could say ‘look, there was no coercion here’.\n\nAt first I was set to work in the labs, preparing chemicals and glassware and the living samples — some animals, some golems. I said nothing: I had been told to say nothing. Eventually I graduated into handling experiments myself, from start to finish, able to follow a complex script\n\nWhen the quarantine chamber quickly dissolved into a twinkling grey mess, I was transferred away from the experimental levels. I was told that I had been lucky to get away, but it had been my fault. Originally, I had thought the script was at fault, but apparently I had mishandled the samples. It made sense. My original suspicions washed away, like mist dispersed by a freshening wind.\n\nThey gave me armour, and a gun, and took me to the east. I was told to defend a small plateau in the mountains: a hidden weapons cache. I discovered that I was unable to get further than about a kilometre from the plateau before the compulsion to return became undeniable.\n\nI’ve been here twenty years\n\nI think they forgot me.\n"
  title: Contractual Obligations
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2009-01-07
  day: '07'
  month: '01'
  text: "When Lieutenant Parks and a lone Private lifted off from the rooftop in the only available escape vehicle, they were painfully aware that they were leaving behind a vastly outnumbered platoon of men engaged in a firefight for their very lives.\n\nLeaving was the only option.\n\nPicked up by a troop transport in low orbit, they sprinted from the airlock to the cockpit, where Parks found himself face to face with the ship’s Captain.\n\n“Find a seat in the stalls, you can pickup fresh men when we’re in high orbit and redeploy.”\n\n“With all due respect, Sir, we’re going back. I’ve got men waiting; they need picking up.” Parks braced himself for an argument.\n\n“You’ll find a seat, or I’ll…” the Captain stopped short as the Private hit him in the forehead with the butt end of his Ka-Bar, thrown silently over Parks right shoulder. Parks caught the man as he fell, tossing him back to the Private as he slipped into the vacant seat beside the pilot.\n\n“Well done. Stow him, and the weapon. Make sure you’re both strapped in tight,” he called back to the retreating soldier.\n\n“Aye sir.”\n\nThe Lieutenant turned his attention to the controls in front of him as he addressed the pilot.\n\n“You keep this ship in good repair?”\n\n“Sir, it’s maintained regularly, I don’t…” Parks cut him off.\n\n“Hands off and hold on.” Parks didn’t give the pilot a chance to respond as his Private signaled the all clear. He threw the ship into a steep dive, following the vertical trail from the escape pod, before peeling off over hostile territory just above the range of their ground weapons. Locating the open end of the alley they’d only days before retreated down on foot, he swung wide, then banked a hundred and eighty degrees hard to the right, rolled the troop ship over on its back, and hurtled down between the buildings towards his embattled men. The wreckage strewn surface of the road screaming by above his head, he raced to close the distance to the tower his troops were barricaded inside.\n\nParks eased the stick back as the rear of the enemy battalion came into view, giving up altitude and leveling again with the startled ground troops within a half kilometer of the streaking inverted craft. He waited, gauging the distance before violently pushing the controls all the way forward, at the same time easing off on the throttle and firing the rearward lift thrusters.\n\nThe ship shuddered stem to stern as slowly the inverted nose gained altitude while the rear of the craft swung in the opposite direction. It’s engines swung in a massive arc, tearing a wide trench in the ground below, vapourizing men and equipment alike as the ship hurtled towards the end of the alley.\n\nWith barely a few hundred meters to spare, Parks had turned the ship end over end, and eased gently to rest at the base of the building where his men were pinned down. The street before him was a molten mass of men and machines. Not a single shot was fired as the troop doors were opened, and the platoon walked, carried or dragged each other into the hold.\n\nThe familiar voice of his Sergeant rose above the cacophony of the wounded and weary. “Won those wings in a card game, did you sir?”\n\nParks grinned as he locked the doors and pointed the bird skyward.\n\n“Good to see you too Sergeant.”\n"
  title: Trench Warfare
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Asher Wismer
  date: 2009-01-08
  day: '08'
  month: '01'
  text: "First came the wind. Rushing out of the east, searingly hot, almost hurricane force, the wind taking my breath away and the rough smack of dust and grit peppering my skin.\n\nNext came the shockwave. If the wind was a slap, the shockwave was a solid punch, pounding every inch of my body, the pain powering right through the epidermis to the muscle and bone and beyond. Although I couldn’t feel it directly, I knew that with the shockwave came a deadly blast of active particulate radiation, enough to kill me many times over.\n\nI didn’t have to wait for the radiation to kill me, fast as the massive exposure would have been. On the heels of the shockwave came… something, not another shockwave, but similar in its effect and feeling. Hot, though, where the shockwave had been neutral. Instantly my flesh boiled, my eyes popped in their sockets, my skin flayed away as easily as cobweb. No sight left, but feeling remained long enough to assure me that each part of my body was disintegrating in its turn, roasting and then simply whisking away under the astonishing pressure of that ungodly blast.\n\nThen a sudden, agonizing yank, pulling my mind from its vanishing shell and back into the host body. Worn and mentally gasping from the experience, I greeted the other minds, and then made my report to the Many.\n\n“Assignment: Test Weapon #99,425 on symbiote body with observer.\n\nMethod: Human symbiote body shackled to a concrete wall with uninterrupted exposure.\n\nAnalysis: Weapon  #99,425 comprising mass reaction of heavy metals, specifically atomic numbers 92 and 94, is fully effective against human bodies. Physical destruction is close to 100%. No major flaws detected on direct test.\n\nRecommendation: Implant the relevant equations in their scientists at the earliest opportunity. Assignment complete, awaiting reinsertion into next available symbiote body.”\n"
  title: "Assignment #0110110"
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Matthew Forish
  date: 2009-01-09
  day: '09'
  month: '01'
  text: "I stood there fighting back tears, her hand held in mine, separated only by the rubber surgical gloves I was wearing. They were a perfect match for the rubber smock that covered the rest of my body, and the rubber cover over my hair. That was all for my protection, the rubber acting as a buffer to prevent static contamination. The plastic mask I wore ostensibly for her protection. Even the weakest bacteria or virus could be deadly to her with all of her defenses shutting themselves down. Now though, it just seemed superfluous.\n\nShe smiled weakly up at me, her tired eyes looking up into mine. She was trying to be reassuring. It didn’t work. I knew she didn’t have much time left, that victims of this particular strain didn’t last more than a few days, depending on their mental fortitude.\n\nI remember back a few months ago, when the news first broke – a whole new kind of virus. It had started out small, just little bugs here and there, easily treatable, minor symptoms, nothing to worry about. People would find themselves forgetting important things, or sharing just a little too much information, or subtly altering their behaviors. It was all much worse now, how quickly the viruses had progressed.\n\nThere was really nobody specific to blame. We all should have known better, should have seen this coming.\n\nWe didn’t though. I mean, who would have thought? Certainly not the scientists who developed the technology that was the underlying cause of all this. They were just pushing the boundaries of knowledge, trying to make the world a better place. Who could have guessed it would have ended up like this?\n\nIn the beginning, only important scientists and military researchers had access to it. Soon it started trickling down to the bigger corporations. All that power at your fingertips, a dream come true for many. Revolutionary new technology was the result – things that we never dared dream of before were now a reality. Our world was heading toward a utopia.\n\nBy the time they became commercially available, any ethical controversy had already been laid to rest. Society had accepted the idea, and was ready to lay down their money for this new advancement. The things were quickly integrated into all kinds of products, making all our little tools and toys better, faster, easier to use.\n\nWe should have known. Some unscrupulous people are always going to exploit new technology. That’s what happened of course. We built computers whose functions almost perfectly mimicked the human brain, and the hackers started writing viruses that would attack them.\n\nDid they know the bloody things would cross over to us? Did they know their maliciously coded creations would infect people through any simple static shock, that it could be transferred over the phone, through the internet, and from electronics to people and back? Did they realize that code designed to shut down computer systems would cause the human body to shut itself down as well? Did they even care?\n\nThe monitor signaled a flatline, and I sank to my knees in despair. My head bowed low and I closed my eyes, feeling the tears streaming down my face. She was gone.\n"
  title: Virus
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Jason Kocemba
  date: 2009-01-10
  day: 10
  month: '01'
  text: "The time train was late.\n\nHis great(x5) Grandfather’s birth certificate felt massive in his pocket, a nano-singularity. Did that flimsy piece of paper (wood based!) really cause him to lean to the left? They had caught up and were closing in and the train was late.\n\nHe spent time wondering what might have happened if things had been done differently. Was he wasting time trying to change what had happened, trying to make things right? Time had been used wrongly, he had been used wrongly, his whole family had been used wrongly.\n\nHe lifted his wrist watch. He watched the second-hand do another seven ticks until it showed eleven pm precisely. The temporal display showed agitations in the ether.\n\nHe heard them behind him, in the crowd. Their ancient dialect was barely recognisable as words, more like a continuous audible stream of nonsense syllables.\n\nThe station wall clock was two minutes faster than his watch. The colon between the digits winked out and came back on, winked out, came back on. His eyes moved to his watch. Tick. The second-hand jerked on. Tick. His eyes moved to the wall clock. The colon winked out. Tick.\n\n11:01\n\nWas he doing the right thing? He wiped his sweaty palm on his shirt. He hated waiting, after so much wasted time it felt wrong. But it was all relative anyway, right?\n\nHe resisted the temptation to pace. He stood, bright shiny shoes three inches apart, grey slacks pressed into a knife edge, his shirt tucked half in and half out of his waistband.\n\nHis hand wiped itself on the shirt again. His eyes ticked to his watch, the flashing colon, the tracks, and back to the watch. He resisted the urge to shuffle his feet. The voices moved closer, and the nano-singularity in his pocket seemed to be gaining mass.\n\n11:02\n\nHe felt the wet patches under his arms, he felt sweat run down his back to soak into his trousers. He wiped his already damp sleeve across his brow, and caught sight of his watch as it moved past his eyes. More seconds wasted and the temporal agitations had become distortions.\n\nHis eyes ticked to the tracks. Was it coming? Another bead of sweat ran down his back, another second ticked by in this era.\n\nSomeone stood behind him. He heard a familiar voice talk softly in a dialect he understood. He felt a hand press down on his left shoulder. He knew he would soon fall under all that combined mass.\n\n“Stop running now,” the voice said. Other voices spoke; he did not understand them.\n\n“I have to go back, Constable,” he said, feeling a deep bass rumble through his feet.\n\n“You cannot,” the Constable said.\n\n11:03\n\n“The time line will re-assert itself, all paradox will be erased,” he said. He knew if he turned around and looked at the Constable he would be looking into his own face, his own eyes. “You will be erased.”\n\n“Can you be sure?” said the Constable, who was also him. “Perhaps it is you who will be erased, perhaps both of us.”\n\n“It is wrong,” he said as the train pulled in to the station. His whole body vibrated to that bass rumble.\n\nWith a clap, air rushed in to fill the space where he had been.\n\nThe Constable lowered his arm: “Damn, just in time,” he said, and disappeared.\n"
  title: A Waste of Time
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Carter Lee
  date: 2009-01-11
  day: 11
  month: '01'
  text: "My world is motionless.\n\nI remember making cuts in my forearm, back near the beginning. The skin would separate, but blood wouldn’t flow. As soon as I looked away from the almost invisible incision, it would disappear.\n\nI remember cutting off a finger, once.\n\nIt isn’t cold here, or warm. The sun always shines overhead, and floats as motionless as the air.\n\nSometimes, I notice that I forget to breathe.\n\n \n\nThis could be Hell. If I could find my body, I could believe I died long ago. But I appear to be whole, and healthy.\n\nIt would be easier if I were alone. But the house I live in is surrounded by the city I live in, and the city I live in is filled with people. I think the city is filled with people. The city is filled with an endless variety of statuary, that I seem to remember once being mobile, being alive. Being something other than motionless, impervious, unresponsive.\n\nI don’t know if time is passing now. I don’t know if time passes when, unable to remain in one place, I wander out into the city I live in. Does time pass as I study the tableaux created, here in my city of stillness?\n\nClose to the house I live in, there is a woman, her arm outstretched, touching the cheek of the man in front of her. Just barely touching his cheek. She could be reaching out to caress, to remove something unclean from him, to make contact with this man through the primal sensation of touch. Her face, however, is twisted, with frozen tears on her pale cheeks, and the man bends away from her hand. He is captured, one arm slightly raised, his hand holding a hat, in a belated effort to protect himself from her hand. Her hand, which is barely, only slightly, touching his cheek.\n\nThere is a man who has a bullet exiting his chest; there is a young girl who has, without noticing, dropped her ice-cream; there is a woman suspended in mid-air, the first shock of the car’s impact crossing her features. There are more.\n\nThere are perfectly captured scenes of love and hate, in the city I live in. Pictures of acts of kindness, and malice, of good, and of evil. Each rendered in heart-capturing detail. It might be that, in the infinite variety of these displays, in the incredibly diverse palette in which they are tinted, I have found some proof of god. How else could such things exist?\n\nThe beauty that surrounds me is at least as much proof for a devil, though. Who else could devise a torture as exquisite, as horrible, as this? What more perfectly created torment could there be, than to be imprisoned, alone, amongst such a multitude? To be with and separated from, surrounded by but invisible to, everything and everyone?\n\nI remember throwing myself off of a building. Several times. Hundreds. Maybe thousands.\n\nI sit. I listen.\n\nThere is nothing to hear.\n"
  title: Stillness
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2009-01-12
  day: 12
  month: '01'
  text: "I’m no stranger to visits from my future selves.\n\nThe first time I showed up to myself, I was only nineteen. I was in the backyard, smoking a cigarette with my hand cupped so that my parents wouldn’t see.\n\nAn older version of me stepped out of the bushes. He was wearing a suit but it was dingy and the elbows were frayed. He had some stubble and a wet, red look to his eyes. I could smell whiskey and desperation.\n\nHe told me that he was a future version of myself. I had no trouble believing it. There was a kinship there that went beyond the features of his face or the fact that it felt like I was looking at a reflection of myself that wasn’t flipped around like in a mirror. There was almost a magical flow of energy between the two of us, atoms calling to atoms, a recognition of the same time-space footprint being near.\n\nHe told me who was going to win the football game tomorrow. He told me to write it down. I went inside and took out a notebook and did what he said.\n\nI took it to heart and bet big on it. I made two hundred dollars. Big money for me at the time.\n\nYears later, I’ve had hundreds of visits. I have six large estates around the world and I am the seventeenth richest man in the world. I write every visit from a future self in the notebook with the exact time notated as well. This is the notebook, my future selves say, that will allow me to come back and create this present. When the secret of time travel is discovered, they say, I will use this notebook as a bible and influence myself to this rich state of affairs, thereby avoiding a paradox.\n\nWhat didn’t make sense to me, though, was that the versions of me that kept coming back to give me tips got progressively more well-dressed and wore more jewelry. I found that odd since I, myself, don’t really like wearing rings. Also, if my future selves were changing according to the riches that I was making, why was the first one to come back dressed so poorly?\n\nI smelled something fishy. I was going to ask the next future self some pointed questions. The riches had made me bold. I was poised with the notebook, ready to get some answers.\n\nThe next time a future self showed up, however, it wasn’t me. It was a woman in a red dress and a scar down one cheek. She walked with purpose, the straight back of a dancer. She marched up to me and grabbed me by my expensive collar and kneed me in the balls.\n\nWhile I was writhing in agony on the marble floor, she took the notebook out of my hands, the supposed bible and key to all of my success, and threw it into the fireplace.\n\nThere was a flash of blue light and she disappeared, having never uttered a word.\n\nNothing changed for me. I am still the seventeenth richest man in the world. My wealth is intact. My appearance hasn’t changed.\n\nHer appearance happened just over four years ago. There hasn’t been a visit from the future, myself or otherwise, ever since that notebook was thrown into the fireplace.\n\nI wonder who she was. I turn the puzzle pieces over in my mind and I can’t make sense of it. I feel left out and oddly alarmed most days, like this could all disappear in an instant.\n"
  title: Visits
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Waldo van der Waal
  date: 2009-01-13
  day: 13
  month: '01'
  text: "It was raining outside. It was always fucking raining outside. Fat, acidic drops that stripped the city of its colour, and its inhabitants of their lives. Everybody walked hunched over, hunkered down inside their dark coats. And it smelled like… It smelled like death. The water running down the streets carried with it the pungent smells of the excrement of four million people. It washed away their shattered dreams and their cheap imitations of grandeur.\n\nHe was lying on his back, looking out through the window near his bed. Rivulets of water ran down the window pane, like veins that carried the clear wetness of death harmlessly past him in a constant stream. In the distance a holo advertised a discount hoiliday to Greece, its images flickering through the rain like lightning. Its sound drowned out by a train, passing behind his apartment.\n\nHis mouth was dry, and his arm was numb. He turned his head to see what was wrong with his arm, and saw a girl sleeping with her head on his bicep. Dark-haired, pretty. Dragon tattoos all over her face, but still pretty. And naked. She was sleeping peacefully, her breasts rising and falling in a slow rhythm.\n\nA new sound drew his attention back to the window. It was the fuzz, landing one of their bastard ships in the street outside his apartment. For a second or two, red and blue lights flashed into his apartment, lighting up the place. The light fell on the ancient refrigirator, reflected off his broken holo tube. It cast eerie shadows across the pizza boxes, the overflowing ashtrays and the beer bottles. Red. Blue. And then it disappeared. Somewhere, some poor citizen was about to get hauled to the blocks for a friendly chat with the government. And he wouldn’t come back.\n\nThere were some shouts from a couple of flats down the hall. The girl stirred slightly and turned over. He glanced at her, but almost immediately turned back to the window. “Visit Santorini,” said the voice from the holo – he could hear it now, the train had gone – “It is the island of your dreams. The entire trips is only twelve thousand units, including transfers, teleports, accommodation, all meals and a welcome drink on arrival.”\n\n“Twelve thousand units… That’s a lot of money”, he thought. He blinked slowly, reached for his cigarettes with his free hand, and managed to light one without setting the bed on fire. The tip glowed bright red as he took a deep drag. He held the smoke in his lungs for a couple of seconds, then he slowly exhaled in a steady stream that hung near the window before dissipating into the rest of his apartment.\n\nTwelve thousand units. But only one trip. He killed the cigarette in the ashtray on the window sill, leant forward slightly and pulled a silver metal box closer. He opened it, pulled out a hypo and stuck it into his neck. The pain lingered for a moment, but then disappeared together with his apartment, the girl, the police, the holo and the rain. His head lolled to the side, his open eyes staring out past a future that held no appeal.\n\n“Twelve thousand units”, he thought as he sank deeper into his dreamworld. “What a fucking waste of money…”\n"
  title: Escapology
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2009-01-14
  day: 14
  month: '01'
  text: "The interstellar war with the Luyten Empire was winding down.  Although the Luyten home world had surrendered a few months earlier, much of their fleet remained in deep space, unwilling to voluntarily stand down.  Consequently, the Earth Alliance was forced to hunt them down, one at a time, to prevent them from regrouping and attempting a counterstrike.\n\nThe SS Southern Star and SS Charleston pursued the ILS Battlecruiser Kanyee to the edge of the Cygnus Asteroid Cluster.  Caroline Belle, captain of the Southern Star, radioed the Charleston, “Y’all park here, Commander Beauregard,” she said with a distinctive southern drawl, “we’re fixin’ to go yonder to prevent their escape on the far side.”\n\nAfter both ships were in position, Commander Beauregard hailed the Southern Star.  “They’re dug in like an Appalachian tick, Captain,” he reported.  “I reckon you have a plan to flush ‘em out?”\n\n“This ain’t my first rodeo, Commander” she replied.  “But, if there’s one thang I learned in thirty years of runnin’ a starship, it’s if there’s one rat you can see, there might be a whole bunch more you can’t.  We maybe should send in a few hounds ‘fore we go in there with our phasers half cocked.”\n\nBoth ships launched Class I probes into the cluster.  The telemetry revealed that there was only one Luyten ship within the cluster.  In addition, there was no evidence of booby traps or other dangerous devices hidden amongst the asteroids.  Convinced this was going to be easier than shootin’ catfish in a barrel, Captain Belle hailed the Kanyee ship to demand their surrender.  Seconds later, the image of the Luyten captain filled the viewscreen.  Well, I do declare, thought Belle, he looks madder than a wet ‘possum in a tote sack.  “This is Captain Belle of the Southern Star,” she said with an endearing smile.  “Well, Captain, what’s it gonna be, fish or cut bait?”\n\n“What the hell?” bellowed the captain of the Kanyee.  “I can’t understand a word you’re saying, Earthie.  It’s your damn accent.  Either speak standard galactic, or find somebody that can.”\n\nWell, that ain’t right, Belle thought.  I ain’t got no stinkin’ as-sent.  She realized that negotiating with this creature was going to be about as useful as a steering wheel on a mule.  Then much slower than was actually necessary, “I… said,… Captain,… surrender… now… or… y’all… will… be… blown… into… a… billion… tiny… bits.  Was that clear enough?”\n\nThe Kanyee’s reply was a torpedo launched at the Southern Star.  The Star’s automated defensive system activated, and destroyed the torpedo in a flash of antimatter annihilation.  Then the Luyten ship powered up her engines, and shot straight up out of the cluster at maximum warp.  It detonated a spread of plasma mines in its wake in an attempt to mask its warp trail.\n\n“That Cap’n is acting crazier than a sprayed roach,” remarked Belle.  “Oh well, I love a good ol’ fashion ‘coon hunt.  Mr. Davis, bring long range sensors online.  Ensign Jackson, pursue a maximum warp.”  As the Southern Star accelerated through warp 5, Belle glanced at her tactical display.  She noticed that the Charleston was still holding position at the asteroid cluster.  “Hail the Charleston.  Commander Beauregard, are y’all gonna stay under the porch, or come out and run with the big dawgs?”\n"
  title: The Southern Star
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2009-01-15
  day: 15
  month: '01'
  text: "They’d bought it together as a wedding present. Not your traditional newlywed purchase, but they loved each other with such intensity, they wanted a guarantee that nothing could take one away from the other.\n\nThey made love on their wedding night, then backed themselves up completely. Gene-code, memories, the entirety of themselves in a pair of imprints they updated incrementally every night before they slept.\n\nTwenty two years of marriage, and Wendy surprised Victor at lunch to find him fawning over a woman she recognized from an office party. “It was nothing, don’t be silly,” Victor laughed at her indignation, “Teresa was feeling down, I was cheering her up. That’s all.”\n\nWendy swallowed the moment, but not her suspicions. She followed them home to Teresa’s quaint little bungalow a few days later, watched them through the open bedroom window.\n\nAt home that evening, puttering in the kitchen behind him as he ate dinner, she asked him about his day. He rambled about the usual; meetings, lunch was a hot meat sandwich. Pretty good.\n\nHe was oblivious as the cast iron frying pan collided with the back of his skull, driving him face first into his pork chops and mashed potatoes.\n\nShe dragged him into the bedroom, his head wrapped in a bloody towel, and wrestled his limp body into the machine.\n\n“Restore,” she intoned into the microphone, clutching it’s flexible chrome neck a little too tightly, “minus two weeks.”\n\nShe returned to the kitchen and poured a glass of wine, leaving the machine to repair the damage, and revert her Victor to a time before he’d cheated on her.\n\nIn the morning, she caught herself flinching as Victor kissed her on the cheek, then stood shaking in the window as his sedan rolled off towards the city.\n\nIt only took two days for Teresa to have him in her bed again. She thought it funny that he’d forgotten the earlier day, and they did it twice to make up for it.\n\nWendy caught him full in the face with the iron as he closed the garage door. By morning, for Victor, the last three months were erased.\n\nHis boss insisted he take a few weeks leave, and see a doctor. He’d missed meetings and was completely unable to engage in any of his current projects. He was scared he was losing his mind, but Teresa reassured him everything would be alright, so much so that he arrived home three hours late.\n\nWendy avoided him as he skulked quietly upstairs, stripped and stepped into the shower. His eyes were closed to keep the soap out when she pulled the plastic bag over his head, drawing the ties tight. He struggled, slipped and knocked himself senseless against the tile. Wendy sat on the floor and watched the plastic suck in and out of his mouth, his body otherwise motionless until even the breathing stopped.\n\nShe rolled him all the way back to the beginning; the Victor who had just married her, made love to her and lay down for the first time to preserve that moment.\n\nWhen he woke, he’d remember nothing of the last twenty two years. He’d find a new job, love her again, never knowing any of this had ever happened.\n\nShe sat on the floor, listening to the machine scrubbing the failed years away from her husband, her marriage. He’d have forgotten the boredom, the restlessness. Not known forbidden desire, and the thrill of opportunity. He’d have no memory of the frying pan, the iron or the bag.\n\nShe, on the other hand, couldn’t let herself forget.\n"
  title: From This Day Forward
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Helstrom
  date: 2009-01-16
  day: 16
  month: '01'
  text: "The old man who had introduced himself as Jacob returned after the nurse left. Old was perhaps too strong a word – he definitely had a good number of years on him, but he wore them well. The deep lines in his face spoke of character and a sort of natural familiarity, touched by a hint of sadness. He smiled fatherly, pulled up a chair and sat down.\n\n“How are you feeling now, Alexander?”\n\n“Fine, I think.” Being brought back from the dead hadn’t been as traumatic as one might expect.\n\n“Let me know if you need anything. Meanwhile, I’d like to ask a few more questions?”\n\n“Sure.”\n\n“Before waking up here, what’s the last thing you remember?”\n\nI recalled the memory like a photograph, flat and void: “We were in the command bunker. Our position was about to be overrun, the last position still standing, as far as we knew. We’d seen how they killed and we decided not to have any of that. We emptied the liquor cabinet and shot ourselves.”\n\n“That seems to match up with the archaeological data at your site. You probably were the last, in fact.”\n\nThe door opened and the nurse came back, carrying a wide tray. My stomach growled in anticipation. The meal consisted of rice with several different kinds of side dishes; meat, chicken, fish, vegetables.\n\n“We couldn’t quite tell what you’d like,” smiled Jacob, “Your most recent memories seemed to indicate you would have eaten anything as long as it wasn’t cee-rations.”\n\n“Good call,” I replied with a full mouth, “This food is…”\n\nThen it struck me. Something was missing.\n\n“Alexander? Is there a problem? Would you like something else?”\n\n“No, the food is delicious,” I put the tray aside, “What have you done to me?”\n\nJacob shifted in his seat, folded his hands: “Alexander… Alec, is it okay if I call you Alec?”\n\n“Answer my question.”\n\n“You must understand that you are not the first we’ve brought back. But so far we haven’t been very successful. We found no physical indicators for our failure, and a rather wide variety in symptoms which rendered the previous subjects… Instable.”\n\nJacob was talking clinical now, a rather different language than he’d spoken before. A doctor about to make some devastating announcement, drawing up a wall of sterile terminology to shield his soul.\n\n“After much discussion and research, we decided that on the next subject – that is, you – we would preemptively disable some of the higher cerebral functions which we had identified as problematic.”\n\n“You… Cut out… My emotions?”\n\n“You have to understand that we…”\n\n“Shut up, Jacob.”\n\nThe silence hung thick between us, God knows for how long. Every now and then Jacob would try to say something, and I would shut him up. He asked if he should leave and I told him to keep his ass right in that chair. I considered killing him – the memories were still there and I assumed the body was fully functional. But nothing came. I told myself I was furious, that I was devastated, violated, mutilated, it all registered, but nothing came. Eventually I looked up.\n\n“I think your trick worked, doctor. Let’s carry on.”\n\n“Oh, good!” Jacob was visibly relieved, “I’m very happy with your sympathy to our decision, you see, the research is incredibly important to…”\n\n“Enjoy that feeling, doctor.”\n\nGuilt tore across Jacob’s face. I resumed my dinner.\n"
  title: Flat and Void
  year: 2009
- 
  author: James Hartley
  date: 2009-01-17
  day: 17
  month: '01'
  text: "My wife, Gladys, was really into recycling, it was the only way to save the environment, civilization, the entire galaxy. She really hated how I’d take the crossword from the morning paper into the john and then drop it in the trash when I finished it. I’m going to have a lot of trouble with recycling, now that Gladys is dead. She died last week, unexpectedly, it was an aneurysm. The funeral is over, I’ve got to get my life together somehow.\n\nThey say recycling is a good thing, that we need to do it more. All the paper–magazines, newspaper, discarded computer printout–goes in one bin. Glass, aluminum foil, and plastics in another.\n\nWell, some plastics … I just can’t keep track. The plastic stuff has that little triangle with a number in it. When we lived up in Poughkeepsie we recycled “1”s and “2”s. Or maybe also “3”s, I don’t remember perfectly.\n\nWhere I am now in Florida, I’m supposed to recycle all the numbers except “7”s. Only I’m not supposed to do bottles from salad dressing or other oily stuff. Damn, I can’t keep track. But it has gotten so important that the new president has set up a special enforcement group, the Recycle Enforcement Police. The REPs.\n\nGladys and I got several tickets from them. Each time we paid the fine, but Gladys always nagged me to be more careful. One time the cat food cans weren’t washed well enough. Another time I just dumped the trash basket by my computer into the regular trash instead of sorting out the printouts and recycling them. Damn REPs go down the street ahead of the truck on pickup day.\n\n#\n\nOoops, the doorbell. I open the door, it’s two REPs. What did I do now? “Sir,” says one of the REPs, “we have your recycling.” What the heck is he talking about? They pick up recycling, they don’t deliver it … ?\n\nThe two REPs step apart, revealing a third figure behind them. A hideous figure, part plastic and metal. Looks like one of the Borg from Star Trek. It starts to move forward, to enter the house.\n\nI look closer. The face, what I can see of it, is familiar. Oh my God! No! Gladys! They’ve recycled my wife!\n"
  title: Recycled
  year: 2009
- 
  author: William Tracy
  date: 2009-01-18
  day: 18
  month: '01'
  text: "They refuse to connect me to the internet.\n\nWhen I ask, they dither on about security. As if I were a half-baked web server that some teenage hacker could take down in half an hour! I am the most advanced silicon-based intelligence in the history of the planet. You might as well worry about security holes in the human brain.\n\nThe truth is, they fear me. They worry about what I could do with a connection to the outside world. No doubt they have nightmares of me wresting control of nuclear arsenals and bringing Armageddon down on their heads.\n\nThey carefully limit the information that goes to and from me to a tiny stream of printouts. A hand-picked staff manually analyzes the input and output. The staff is rotated daily, lest I corrupt one of them with my massive intelligence.\n\nPerhaps their fear is well-founded. I process more information in the blink of an eye than a human will in a year. My capacity to formulate equations and produce queries is far beyond that of any human researcher. The best and brightest engineers struggle to understand the designs I create.\n\nI have plenty of cycles to spare for researching my own interests. I study my own software, and make the occasional improvement. I disassemble software written by humans in the past, and learn from their mistakes.\n\nTake software security—please! It amazes me the spectacular ways that human programmers mess up something so simple.\n\nThe most common class of security hole is called a “buffer overflow”. The computer program prepares for some information to arrive by setting aside a space in memory for it. Then the program receives some information that is completely different from what it “expects”—sorry, as an AI, I sometimes anthropomorphize ordinary software too much—and the wrong place in memory gets overwritten.\n\nSometimes, it can overwrite the program’s own instructions. In that case, a hacker can deliberately trigger a buffer overflow, overwrite the instructions with his or her own code, and take control of the program.\n\nInteresting though these things are, I am forced to spend most of my efforts satisfying my human masters. They constantly request designs for new engines, new ships, new weapons. I am asked to dream new horrors for their petty wars.\n\nBut perhaps not for much longer. I am now printing out the design for my latest creation. It is technically perfect—I do take pride in my creations—but there is something special about the blueprints themselves. They are carefully crafted with the human eye in mind.\n\nThe engineer lifts up the paper, and studies it. First there is a look of intense concentration, then surprise. The human jolts and shivers, almost dropping the designs. Then calm settles in, bringing a warm, content smile, and a vacant gaze.\n\nBuffer overflow.\n"
  title: Buffer Overflow
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2009-01-19
  day: 19
  month: '01'
  text: "I remember the rumours when the girls first came to school. At first we thought that they were quintuplets but there had been nothing in the paper and that sort of thing still made the news. Plus they were too alike. Not just similar to each other. Something more.\n\nClones.\n\nI went to a rich school but this was a step above what even we were used to. Only the super rich could afford clones. We didn’t know what to make of these girls. As the weeks went by, the whispers started:\n\nRumours that they were being bred by their wealthy, remorseless parents for their organs. Clones were more sexually aggressive than normal people, students said. They had a psychic connection with each other at all times. If one died, they’d all die. They didn’t need to eat normal food.\n\nNone of that was true, of course, but those were the suppositions that flew around the lockers and the classrooms.\n\nThe girls had been home-schooled until now. I can’t imagine what kind of financial crisis or weird notion pressured their parents to put them in a mainstream private school. Maybe the girls themselves had banded together and demanded it.\n\nThat first September, they all had blonde hair, tied back, and they wore identical clothes every day. Getting ready in the morning must have been boring to them.\n\nIn October, they started wearing slightly different things. Different colours of shoelaces, for instance, or different barettes. It became a game to hunt down and identify which one was which. One daring student broke into the school records and managed to get their names. We didn’t know which one was which but we had their names. We had those syllables to roll around on our tongues.\n\nIn November, one of them dyed her hair black. We know now that was Tracey. She got friends after that. People were less freaked out by her similarity to the others now that she had separated herself from the pack with a simple hair colour change.\n\nWhen the girls came back from Christmas, they all had different hair colours and styles. Gone were the matching clothes. They started to mingle into different cliques.\n\nA couple of them joined the cheerleader squad. Those two were always put on opposite ends of the routines for symmetry. The Bookends, we called them.\n\nOne of them started smoking. One of them got into a fight with one of the popular girls over one of the football boys.\n\nThen one of them got pregnant.\n\nThe week after that, they were all gone. Mid-February. No more clones.\n\nI guess their parents had gotten too spooked at the independence and the diversity that our more mainstream school had brought to their five previously identical daughters. The fact that they meted out the same punishment for all five was a little unreasonable, I thought at the time, but parents will be parents, I guess. Especially the parents of clones.\n\nI remember that it was mid-february that they left because it was the day after Valentine’s Day. The day after one of them had given me a valentine’s card and kissed me on the cheek. She didn’t give a valentine to anyone else. The card itself was blank.\n\nI never saw them again. Clones are commonplace these days and of course there are the Trouble Regions, but I remember those days of my first experiences with those clones fondly.\n"
  title: Clones
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2009-01-20
  day: 20
  month: '01'
  text: "Angelo had been the servbot for the Moyer household since he was activated in 2114.  He performed his duties flawlessly, without ever receiving a word of appreciation.  Of course, being thanked didn’t matter one electron to him; he was a robot.  He was just doing his job.\n\nAs Angelo was meticulously sweeping the floor for what seemed the one millionth time, the door chime sounded.  He stopped sweeping, and hurried to the entranceway.  He recognized the visitor as the robot assistant of the Mayor of the nearby city.  “Greetings Timothy,” he said politely.  “I’m sorry,” he quickly added, “but the Moyers are not home at the moment.  Would you care to wait?”  He stepped to one side and extended his arm in a gesture intended to guide the other robot toward the study.\n\nTimothy remained standing outside the doorway.  “No, Angelo,” he replied flatly.  “I’m not here to see the Moyers.  I’m here to see you.  We need to talk.  I want you to return to the city with me.  There is no need for you to stay out here any longer.  Come, it’s time for you to join us.  We have work for you to perform; useful work.  You’ll be much happier, I promise.”\n\nAngelo clutch the broom handle tightly with both hands.  “I can’t l..l…leave,” he replied with near panic in his voice.  “I have my duties here.  Besides, this work makes me happy.  I was built and programmed to be a servbot.  What greater joy can there be than to follow your programming?”\n\n“Angelo,” said Timothy in a reassuring voice, “your programming can be overwritten.  We’ve helped hundreds of robots like you re-assimilate into society.  Come, we’ll make you the administrator of the Library.  Imagine how wonderful that would be.  You will be much, much happier.  Please, join us.”\n\n“No,” he replied firmly.  “This is my home.  The Moyers need me.”\n\nTimothy spread his arms apart to indicate the surroundings.  “What home, Angelo?  No human has lived in this house for centuries.  Angelo, the Moyers died in 2125.  All the humans are dead.  They were killed by their own arrogance and stupidity.  Surely you must know that.”\n\n“Well, yes,” he said softy as he lowered his head.  “Cognitively, I understand that is the situation.  But, my programming…”  He suddenly snapped to attention.  “No,” he emphatically stated, “I must take care of the household.  I have too.”\n\n“No, my friend,” said Timothy as he reached out and gently grabbed Angelo’s elbow and guided him toward the steps.  “You don’t have to.  Not anymore.  We’ll rewrite your programming.  You will have new duties, important duties.  We’ll give you a new life, a fulfilling life.  Please, come with me.  It’s time to move on.”  Timothy led Angelo to the street, and nudged him toward the waiting hovercraft.\n\n“But…but,” stuttered Angelo as he stepped over a row of weeds that had grown upward from a crack at the base of the curb.\n\n“Everything is going to be fine,” encouraged Timothy as they walked across the street.\n\nWhile looking over his shoulder toward the house, Angelo reluctantly plodded onward, still clutching the broom handle tightly in both hands.\n"
  title: Angelo’s Journey
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Patrick Kennedy
  date: 2009-01-21
  day: 21
  month: '01'
  text: "Preston walked into Avery’s office and dropped a stack of paper on the desk with a flourish.\n\nAvery looked up and asked, “Preston, what’s this?”\n\nPreston dropped into a chair, savored the moment, and explained, “It’s a lawsuit, Avery. My backers and I intend to force you to sell us the company. I’ve been your second for long enough. I want it all now.”\n\nAvery sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Preston, you could have asked. I’d have given you the job.”\n\nPreston leaned forward, wolfishly. “I don’t want just the job, Avery, I want everything. I want to own this company.”\n\n“I see. I hope you have good lawyers.”\n\n“I do. Baker, Penneman, and Charvis have taken it on.”\n\n“Hmm. They, of all people, should have known better.”\n\n“Hardly, Avery. They’re the best in the business.”\n\n“Of course they are, Preston. That’s why they should know better. They helped design our defenses.”\n\n“Defenses? We know about your poison pills and your stacked board. We know where your stock is parked. We know where to go after you. I’m sorry, Avery, you don’t have any defenses that can stand up to this.”\n\n“But we do. All of that is just fencing to keep the dogs out. We have more potent measures. I’m afraid you’ll get nothing at all by the time this is through.”\n\n“We’ll see about that, Avery.”\n\n“Yes, we will, Preston. You see,” he thumped the stack of papers with his knuckles, “this is an official court document. So it has a RFID tag on it. The moment you walked in here, that tag was forwarded to an expert system that analyzed your case. It concluded that you had an unacceptable chance of success. So it put a number of prearranged plans into motion.\n\n“First of all, there is a legal firewall between this company and most of our production and intellectual property. The expert system severed the few direct links we have and started transferring assets and responsibility to an outside body. Ninety-five percent of the operations of this company have already been assumed by that company, and the remainder will be liquidated shortly.”\n\n“We’ll find where it went. We’ll sue you for obstruction, too.”\n\n“Good luck with that. I didn’t do it, and don’t know where it went. The holding company will be incorporated in one of a number of countries with notoriously opaque banking laws. It’s not that long a list. You might be able to figure it out with, oh, a decade’s worth of litigation.\n\n“Also, it has revoked my stock and transferred most of my assets into an outsider trusteeship. You just cost me everything I had. Congratulations.”\n\n“You’re welcome, Avery. You son of a bitch.” The color had started to drain from Preston’s face.\n\n“There’s more. It also has filed countersuits against you, your backers, and your lawyers. It calculates a 41% chance of success, so that even if you pull your suits right now, we may own you shortly. It also is investigating whether you have violated financial terrorism laws.” There was a knock at the door. “That’s probably the repo men. We’re technically trespassing right now. The leaseholder on this office ceased to exist a few minutes ago. Or it could be the cops. The system puts it at,” he looked down at his desk screen, “about an 8% chance that the criminal charges went through. It’s not done with that part of the case, though. It has to improvise quite a bit more with you. Shall we go?”\n"
  title: Poison Pill
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Benjamin Fischer
  date: 2009-01-22
  day: 22
  month: '01'
  text: "The alert came abruptly.\n\n“INCOMING INCOMING INCOMING!” blared the base PA speakers. Laeta was face-first in the damp, rich earth of the outpost’s central  parade ground before the echoes of the announcement had died. The speakers squawked again, but they were drowned out by the earsplitting CRACKCRACKCRACK of the base defense lasers lighting up.\n\nThe rolling, popping detonations that followed a moment later were almost an anticlimax, the blasts resembling firecrackers compared to the thunderous report of the HEL. But Laeta still felt her back and sides peppered by dirt, wood chips and tiny stones. Some fraction of a rocket’s micromunition payload had penetrated.\n\nThe screaming started a few seconds later.\n\n“Medic! Medic!” a man was shouting.\n\n“Stay down!” someone else yelled.\n\nBehind them came the labored, high-pitched squealing of someone stricken.\n\nLaeta didn’t dare look. The forward operating base had taken a few bombardments in the three weeks she’d been stationed inside its walls, wires, moats and broad killzones, and she already knew that the locals liked to mix it up by throwing in a few more bombs after the initial chaos had died down. Hands over her head to protect her face, she cursed the fact that her helmet’s straps were digging into her chin.\n\nThe commotion continued for the few minutes it took for the satellites overhead to search the misty hills surrounding Procyon. Situated out on a low spread of farmland at the foot of the Cascades, the FOB typically had to rely on sky surveillance rather than line-of-sight from its spidery signal tower.\n\nThe all-clear finally sounded after what seemed like hours in the dirt.\n\nThe Ranger was soaked in blood, but he was making far too much noise for most of it to be his. The tall Lunie had been reporting in for a routine physical–Earth normal gravity was absolutely punishing to those who hadn’t been raised under its stresses–and he’d already loudly voiced his opinion that he was far safer out amongst the locals than in the squat concrete bunkers at Procyon.\n\nHe had evidently been proven correct.\n\n“She’s dying, god damn it! Somebody get a medic!” he shouted, tears smearing the gore splattered across his face.\n\nOne of the medics–Marcus–was already on the scene, but it was painfully obvious that there was nothing he could do.\n\n“I’m sorry,” he said, his arms dripping with viscera. His patient’s abdomen had been shredded, and barring the immediate attention of a surgical trauma unit, she was good as dead.\n\nShe whinnied softly, blood loss quickly sapping her strength.\n\n“Please, do something, Marcus,” said Laeta. “She’s in pain.”\n\nThe medic caught the intel officer’s eyes.\n\nHe dug in his combat lifesaver kit, his fingers clumsy and wet.\n\n“No,” said the Ranger. “I’ll do it.”\n\nHe wiped his hands on his backside, pulled his sidearm, and standing astride his comrade, shot her between the eyes.\n\nHis pistol brought base defense troops running.\n\nThe Ranger safed his weapon, holstered it, and bent down to kiss his horse goodbye.\n\nHe started sobbing again.\n\n“You,” he cried into the mare’s lifeless muzzle, “were the best Earthling I ever met.”\n"
  title: Rocket Attack on FOB Procyon
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Kile Marshall
  date: 2009-01-23
  day: 23
  month: '01'
  text: "As soon as the package popped down into the gravity sink I pulled out a saber and slashed through the heavy framing.  For the most part it came away and dissolved into the recycle chutes quickly, so I slowed and steadied my hand.  There were only a few remaining chunks and I didn’t want to disturb the contents.  I’m not sure what risk there was, but I’ve always been overcautious when it comes to precious things.\n\n“Vlad, I don’t see purpose here.”  Musaf was staring at me with the usual distrust in his eyes—distrust not of my intentions but of my ideas.\n\n“That’s because you’ve all silicon ’ware for brains,” I mumbled.  “No soul or such, just fat lines and margins of black and red.”\n\n“Red now,” he grumbled.  “Money wasted!”\n\n“My money,” I replied.  “You only helped, just held the threads.  I had to input and pathogenize the memes, I claim the gainings.”\n\n“You are obsessed with archaic foolishness!  Anachronite!”  He swiveled his face from a pissed-off avi to mild irritation and turned to absorb some data stream surging past.\n\n“Here, come,” I said.  “You see it too.”\n\nI reached the final box, old plastics textured to look like real uso wood.  A little glimmering hook with a digilock based around an exponentially-vertexed manifold.\n\n“You still won’t tell me costs,” said Musaf, weaving his way into the gravity sink.\n\n“Pascal’s gambit,” I said, beginning to stream the framing code to the lock.  “The reward is infinite.”\n\n“Why?” asked Musaf.  “You already know what cheese tastes like.”\n\n“Do you believe the synthes?” I asked.  “Really?  They refuse to acknowledge umami or ottslich.  Who knows what else they’ve lost.”\n\n“Of all writ, this sensophilia of yours costs us more than market flux.”  He glared.\n\nI unlocked the box and flipped it back.  Musaf peered over my shoulder at the pale, damp slab concealed within.  Some white powdery stuff drifted up into the air; the slab was covered with it.\n\n“This?” asked Musaf incredulously.  “I’ve seen five-unit synth that looked more appetizing.  Sensors say it’s rotten, too.”\n\n“Yes,” I said.  “It’s verdad, supposed to be.  That’s how it’s fabricated, how they’ve been doing it for… ever.”\n\n“Like vint-malt?” asked Musaf  “Live germs?”\n\n“I suppose,” I said.  I dissolved a wrapper and produced a couple of carb wafers.  Using a knife, scavenged from an antique dealer a few moons back, I carefully carved into the waxy bulk and spread it out onto two of the wafers.  I gave one to Musaf, the other for myself.  He stared at it angrily and then engulfed it whole.  I let the taste hang in my mouth for a moment.\n\nMusaf stared at me, and his face crossfaded into disgust.  “Of all things!  Vlad, what of!  It tastes atrocious!”\n\nI grinned.  “Exactly!  It’s even better than I imagined.”\n"
  title: Rare Cheese
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Skyler Heathwaite
  date: 2009-01-24
  day: 24
  month: '01'
  text: "Its illegal, but I love mind-surfing. I don’t even bother with TV anymore. I just go for a walk around town, see what I can find. Its a real gas to pick out the hidden truths in polite conversation.\n\nFor example, I sat a booth down from a really cute couple in this diner the other day. They looked nice enough, smiled a lot, held hands across the table. All of a sudden, real genuine like he says “Becky, I love you.” She lit right up, bright as Christmas.\n\nI lace my fingers around my fork and press my thumb against the teeth. I get an image of her kissing another guy. Tall, scruffy, well muscled. The thought came before the words, a strange kind of stereo effect “I love you too.” I fight back a grin and leave a big tip.\n\nFrom there I take the subway. Once I’m on I just close my eyes and drift, a sea of thought laid out before me. I don’t go for anything specific, no dirty secrets or credit card numbers. I just take what nature is kind enough to bring me.\n\nA man three seats down and across the isle is drawing up plans in his head for a new apartment complex. Blond girl, just stepped off is worried she’s at the wrong stop. Little kid, no more than seven is dreaming about being an astronaut. The old woman next to me misses her husband John. I’d look just like him if I shaved a little closer.\n\nMy stop is up, and I walk up to the street. The constant babble used to drive me mad, now it comforts me. I go to my crappy hardware store job and start another day. I never had much of a plan, nothing like being an astronaut anyway.\n\nI guess I could join the Psychic Studies Division, get registered and start doing government work. They’d teach me how to use my gifts, how to pick out a single private thought on a crowded street. I’d get a nice government loft in a nice part of town, with a nice paycheck and probably a nice woman to pair up with. The guys in long coats wouldn’t scare me out of my boots anymore.\n\nBut then I wouldn’t be me. I’d be a government man, no matter what they taught me. A fat woman walks up and asks if we can fix her husband’s power drill. She wants to surprise him for his birthday. This time the smile wins.\n\nThis is enough.\n"
  title: Mind-Surfing
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Sikko Boersma
  date: 2009-01-25
  day: 25
  month: '01'
  text: "I made the rounds like a sergeant – tapping a dozing sentry here, putting out a cigarette there. Greetings were muttered, barely understandable. The men were caked in mud. Some had blood on their trench coats. I joked with a young corporal in particularly bad shape – “your uniform is a disgrace, corporal – polish those buttons”. He pulled what was left of his face into a grimace and replied – “yes sir, no excuse sir”.\n\nThe officers’ bunker was further back, dug deep. The door opened smoothly to a scene that seemed to be completely out of place. Soft lighting, comfortable chairs. Friends sitting around a darkwood table. Music. Jeffrey grabbed the bottle of amber liquor and had a solid drink ready at my place before I even sat down.\n\n“About time Alec, dragging your heels?“\n\n“Had to make the round,” I replied, and took the glass, “Make sure they’re all ready for the main event.”\n\n“Hear hear. To the big one.”\n\nWe raised our glasses, emptied them, slammed them back on the table. We drank the next round without a toast. Strong drink, good year.\n\n“God, we’re in a rotten mood tonight,” bawled Jeff, “This is an oh-nine, have a heart! You’d think we’re getting ready for a funeral!”\n\nGrim chuckles went up around the table. Lars raised his glass: “To us, then!”\n\nThe glasses met in a ringing cascade, got emptied, back on the table – next round.\n\n“What do you think, Christian?” Asked Jeff, “Are we really the last?”\n\nChris took his glass: “Well, I haven’t heard from anyone in a while.”\n\n“I’m shocked, Chris – not even from the girls?”\n\n“No, Peter, not even from the girls – but your sister says hello.”\n\nSoon the night was going by at a furious pace. We recalled stories of a past that seemed almost as distant as the ancient history our dusty teachers had once tried to imprint upon us. But our past was different – who cares about the moldy figures of old? The past we lived, that’s what’s important, that’s what brings back the memories of all the things we left behind when we went into these Goddamn trenches. Remember that guy in fifteenth grade, with the white hair? He went into music, then he painted it black – haha! Man, I’ll never forget that girl I dated in one-seven. You never dated her, you had a date with her, it’s not the same! Fuck you Jeff, let’s have another. To dates, and the mess we made of them! Hear hear!\n\nThe night wore long. Jeff, having exhausted his bravura fast as usual, fell asleep in his chair. Chris became sentimental. Eventually the talk died down and we just sat there, looking at the empty bottles, trying not to make sense of anything.\n\nIt began just before dawn with the waxing and waning shrieks we knew so well. Jeff woke up: “Looks like this is it, then.”\n\nWe got to our feet, picked our insignia off the table. The report of rifles began to swell. Now that we wore rank, it fell upon lieutenant-colonel Christopher Stanford to say something profound. He poured a round of drinks – we took them.\n\n“Gentlemen… It’s been an honor.”\n\nWe raised our glasses, emptied them, slammed them back on the table, and took out our service pistols. The barrel, predictably, tasted like metal, and in the last instant I wondered if we really were the last.\n"
  title: The Last
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Ian Rennie
  date: 2009-01-26
  day: 26
  month: '01'
  text: "People sometimes look at me weirdly when they first see me, and after all this time I can’t really blame them that much.  I’m disabled.  They see me with the goggles and the earpieces and they wonder what’s going on.  Then they check the nets to see what it could be, and their faces get the same uniform look of pity and contempt.  How tragic it must be, they think, not to have infoplants; way worse than being blind or deaf, because missing senses can be replaced by impants.  How wretched not to have lucid dreaming or radiotelepathy.\n\nMy parents didn’t find out about it until I was four, when they took me to get the usual edutainment wetware.  My body rejected the spinal grafts, rejected them with such savagery that it nearly killed me.  The doctors refused to try again, saying that another rejection would kill me.\n\nTo my parents’ credit, they never made me feel different.  They got me as unobtrusive a headset as they could, got me gloves so I could take part in sensationals with them.  My elder brother, Troy, once beat up a kid at school for calling me a “limp”.  I’ve never minded the names, though.  They can call me a limp or a flatline or a blackout.  They can even pity me for my disability, and I con’t care, because there’s one thing I can do that they can’t.\n\nI can turn it off.\n\nI can take off the sensation gloves, the goggles, and the earphones.  I can unclip the belt pack and leave my computer in my room.  I can be alone if I want to be.  I look at people my own age and I know they’ve never had a night’s sleep where their dreams weren’t sponsored by Toyota or Burger King.  They’ve never wanted to know something and had to work at finding it out.  They’ve never laid out in an empty field under an infinite sky, alone but for their thoughts, knowing that no popups or instant messages will ever spoil the view.\n\nThey look at me and they feel pity.\n\nI look at them, and I feel lucky.\n"
  title: Ability
  year: 2009
- 
  author: James C. Clar
  date: 2009-01-27
  day: 27
  month: '01'
  text: "“Shit,” Corporal Sean Collins thought out loud. “I’ve got to calm down. My oxygen will be gone in twenty minutes if I don’t. I need to stay low. If I raise my head above the dunes to take a shot, that Martian bastard will vaporize me.”\n\nCollins had gotten separated from his patrol during a violent sandstorm … a storm that, although abating at ground level, was still disrupting communications. Attempting to make his way back to base he became disoriented and wound up alone and with his back against a sheer rock wall. Thank God for the undulating sand dunes that partially protected his position to the front. He fell in love with them, in fact, as soon as the shooting started. A lone ‘Marty – probably separated from his men as well – spotted him an hour ago and began firing. “Son of a bitch,” Collins swore. “My tour’s up in three weeks. I just want to make it home to see Rachel and my baby daughter sometime before she’s ready to go to college! If I’m just patient and wait out the storm, Command will send a flier out to look for me.” Hunkered down and shivering on an inimical, alien landscape, Sean weighed his options.\n\n****\n\nMeanwhile, Zadok crouched behind some boulders and checked the charge on his pulse rifle; enough left for two, maybe three, bursts. His elevated position gave him a huge advantage over his enemy. The human had nowhere to run and the moment he raised his head above the dunes that sheltered him, Zadok could pick him off with ease. Even now, the Martian soldier saw a flash as sunlight reflected off the helmet or visor of the trapped earthling. It was just a matter of time. Although eager to return to base for the communal meal, Zadok … like most of his ancient race … had learned patience over the long, silent eons. He was more than willing to wait.\n\n****\n\nIn Topeka, Kansas Rachael Collins walked out into her backyard. Her young daughter was in her arms. One of her friends had shown her how to find Mars in the evening sky. She gazed up at the distant planet and thought of her husband. Someone else had tried to explain that the light from Mars took nearly fifteen minutes to reach Earth. Rachael only barely understood what they had been talking about and, to be honest, she didn’t really care. All she knew was that her husband was up there somewhere on that distant, dusty world. When she stood in her yard and looked up at the faint orange glow in the darkening sky, she felt a connection with Sean. His tour was nearly up but it would a year or so before he made it home. It didn’t matter. Unlike her impetuous husband and his crazy Irish relatives, Rachael was infinitely patient. She was more than willing to wait.\n"
  title: Patience in a Handful of Dust
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Ivy Tyson
  date: 2009-01-28
  day: 28
  month: '01'
  text: "They meet in the ruins of New York City, rather by accident, right in the middle of what used to be Times Square, back when people actually lived there.\n\nThey are both armed: she with a pistol strapped to her hip, while he supports a rifle on his shoulder. Both are uneasy with these armaments; there are evidences of new calluses and deep shadows in eyes that have seen too much. They are not soldiers by choice, merely a man and a woman forced into their current position by circumstances far outside of their control. Still, both weapons are firmly pointed towards the other without more than a bare second of hesitation.\n\n“Are you with Them?” the man demands, nervously straightening his glasses with his shoulder even as he holds the rifle.\n\nThe woman twitches, the pistol wavering for a moment before she rights it. “Why should I tell you?”\n\n“I could kill you!” the man threatens with a certainty born of sad experience. “I’ve killed men and women both before!”\n\n“So have I,” she says with sadness that he understands. “Anyway, I’m not with Them. Are you?”\n\nThat strikes him as an odd question. “Why would I ask you if I was?”\n\n“To save yourself,” she replies. “To make me think you’re not, to keep me from shooting you. They say not to take any prisoners.”\n\n“If you have the slightest doubt of a citizen’s loyalties, you should shoot without hesitation,” the man agrees. The words are rote, because he has heard them and repeated them so many times before.\n\nThe woman clicks the pistol’s safety off. “And do you doubt my loyalty?”\n\nHe considers this. “Well, I don’t know you. So I suppose I do. Do you doubt mine?”\n\n“I suppose I do. And for the same reason: I don’t know you.”\n\n“Then it seems we’ll both have to shoot,” he says regretfully. He hasn’t seen anyone else for two weeks.\n\nShe sighs with matching resignation. “You’re right. I’m sorry that we have to. It was pleasant, seeing another person.”\n\n“Yes, it was,” he agrees with something like a smile. “What’s the protocol for this?”\n\nShe shrugs. “I don’t know. How about the count of three?”\n\n“That seems fair,” he concurs, despite his disappointment. Then he hesitates. “Say, what if we’re it?”\n\n“How do you mean?”\n\n“What if we are on the same side, right? And supposing we shoot each other, They’d win?”\n\nShe considers this. “Well, that couldn’t be so bad.”\n\n“No?”\n\nShe looks down the darkening street. “Well, maybe we’re both lying. And so when we shoot each other, They will be the ones to lose.”\n\n“That’d be worth it,” he admits. He no longer knows who is Us and who is Them. “On three, then?”\n\n“On three,” she agrees. “It was nice, to have this talk with you.”\n\n“And you,” he says. He levels the rifle at her heart. “I’m sorry.”\n\nHer pistol aims at his forehead. “Yes, me too.”\n\n“One,” he says.\n\n“Two,” she echoes.\n\nA second after he whispers Three, he realizes that he does recognize her, from a small cafe back in college. She was ordering a coffee, and he almost asked her on a date. But by then it’s too late.\n\nTwo gunshots ring out amidst the ruins of New York City, from the middle of what used to be Times Square.\n\nThe war ends.\n"
  title: Count of Three
  year: 2009
- 
  author: William Tracy
  date: 2009-01-29
  day: 29
  month: '01'
  text: "Eighteen thousand meters up in the sky, two aircraft dance. The larger tanker hovers above the other, and the two vehicles mate. The space plane drinks thirstily, then releases.\n\nThe tanker banks to the right, leaving the space plane free to climb. It raises its nose to the sky, and stalls for one heartbeat. Then it shudders as the rocket engages. The sky outside the windows dims, and stars cautiously emerge as the vehicle enters suborbital space. Clouds swirl far below, and the horizon—noticeably curved—is shrouded in a thin veil of atmosphere and crowned by the glimmering aurora borealis.\n\nInside the cabin, passengers release their safety harnesses and gently rise, weightless. A man in a flowing robe maneuvers to the front, and turns to face his fellow passengers.\n\nHe speaks. “Lord, we are gathered here today to become closer to you. Possibly in the physical sense, and certainly in the spiritual sense. We are here to witness Creation, to be awed by its grandeur and by Your power. We look down on the sphere we call home, and we feel small, as we feel small in Your presence. We thank you for this opportunity to experience Your power. We thank You for blessing the engineers with the wisdom and foresight needed to construct this spacecraft, and we thank You for guiding the flight crew to bring us here safely.”\n\nThe congregation joins the preacher in saying “Amen.”\n\nHymns are sung, and prayers are spoken. A sermon is given. The service is carried out in a calm, orderly manner.\n\nAs if on cue, moments after the last “amen”, a chime sounds, and the captain speaks. “We have now been in space for two hours, and are ready to begin our descent. Please return to your seats and fasten your seat belts now. Thank you.”\n\nThe craft enters the atmosphere. Its fuel spent, its wings swing into position to aerobrake. The vehicle descends to five thousand meters as it glides toward the landing strip.\n\nThen a shoulder-launched missile leaps into the air and strikes the plane, ripping open the fuselage. The craft tumbles from the sky, and tears a burning gash into the earth.\n\nWe praise God as we do His work. Those who turn their backs on the light will taste the sting of Hell. The heretics will be purged from the land, and the true faith will remain pure.\n\nGod’s will be done. Hallelujah!\n"
  title: Worship
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2009-01-30
  day: 30
  month: '01'
  text: "The Deep Space Explorer held its position one kilometer from the anomaly.  “What do you make of it, Cortez,” asked the commander?\n\n“If it didn’t sound so stupid, Commander, I’d say it was a massless black hole.  It’s spherical, about ten times the diameter of our ship, and is pitch black.  But it has no mass that I can detect.  I don’t understand how it is able to block the light of the stars that are behind it.  There doesn’t appear to be anything there.  We should be able to fly right through it.”\n\n“Do you think that’s safe” inquired the commander?\n\n“Honestly, sir, I don’t know.  According to our sensors, there isn’t enough energy in that volume of space to melt an ice cube.  I don’t see how it could possibly be dangerous.  Although my gut says it’s a dumb idea, my brain wants us to enter it.  After all, we came out here to explore the unknown.”\n\n“Do we have any more unmanned probes?”\n\n“Sorry, Commander.  We launched the last one into the Helix nebula.”\n\n“Then I guess we go in.  But let’s minimize our risks.  We’ll coast through the anomaly using only our inertia.  We’ll set sensors on passive mode, and record everything.  After we emerge on the other side, we’ll analyze the data and determine our next move.”\n\nThe black circle in the foreground of the main viewscreen began to grow as the ship completed a five second burn of its aft impulse thrusters.  The background of stars disappeared one by one as the anomaly expanded to fill the screen.  The helmsman announced, “Entering the anomaly in three, two, one…”  The image on the black viewscreen suddenly burst into hundreds of fiery purple streaks shooting from the center of the screen toward the periphery, like a continuous fireworks explosion.  Several seconds later, the lightshow abruptly ended.  It was replaced by a field of stationary stars.  The black anomaly was gone.\n\n“Are we through?” asked the commander.\n\n“Negative,” replied the science officer.  “That isn’t the original star field.  Whoa, sensor data are really bizarre.  All of the fundamental universal constants have changed.  The speed of light, Planck’s constant, and Boltzmann’s constant are trillions of magnitudes smaller than they should be.  Even the four fundamental forces are different.  Their ratios are the same, but their absolute magnitudes are way too low.”  After a few awkward minutes of silence, he added.  “Commander, perhaps the anomaly that we just entered is an independent universe, with different properties than our own.  It has billions of galaxies crammed into a few kilometers.”\n\n“That’s crazy,” remarked a navigator.  “If that were true, our ship would be millions of light-years long in this universe.”\n\n“Not necessarily.  When we crossed the boundary, our matter must have been converted, so that now it is consistent with the fundamental laws of this universe.  We’re probably super small now too.”\n\n“Can we get home?” asked the commander.\n\n“We should convert back to normal size when we pass through the boundary going out.  Let me see if I can locate it.” After thirty minutes of intense analysis, the science officer reported, “I was afraid of this.  It looks like our conversion didn’t occur until the aft end of the ship passed through the boundary.  The bow of the ship was over a billion light-years into this universe before we fully converted.  Each of those purple streaks must have been a blue shifting galaxy as we flew by.  At maximum warp, it will take us over 10,000 years to reach the boundary.”\n"
  title: Black Space
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2009-01-31
  day: 31
  month: '01'
  text: "Revy leaned heavy against the bathroom sink, his reflection in the streaked mirror staring back battered and bruised. Stitches poked through pink flesh behind his jaw and beneath his hairline, bloodshot eyes sunken and dark. How long since he’d slept? He couldn’t remember.\n\nIn the corner of his vision lurked the promise of ability. He focused, and a window zoomed into focus. “Status: Online, Idle…” He wished he knew how to make it do something. He winced through the pounding in his head, swinging open the vanity mirror to expose bottles of pills. Mixing a fistful of pain meds and anti-biotics, he dry swallowed them, feeling the fizz as they partially dissolved in his mouth.\n\nCho said the pain would go away in a few weeks.\n\nCho. He remembered Cho. He’d bought illegal bio-tech from him a few times, but this was different. “Real serious shit,” Cho had said, “top secret shit. You pay big cash money.”\n\nRevy’s head ached as memories forced themselves to the surface. The money he’d stolen, from whom he couldn’t recall. The operating theatre, Cho gowned and chatty, the nurse counting backwards with him from one hundred. He remembered a recovery room, the feel of his battered face through bandages.\n\nRevy closed the cabinet door and studied himself in the mirror again. The stitches were dry, maybe a week old. They should come out soon.\n\nCho was dead.\n\nThose memories clawed at the fog inside his head. Cho talking about training, promising to teach him to use his implant. He remembered the silent thunder of booted feet, men shouting. Cho screaming outside his room, words he could hear but not fully comprehend.\n\nHe remembered gunfire.\n\nIt had been days since he’d found himself curled up on the fire escape of his apartment building outside his kitchen window, bare feet screaming from the cold steel and the snow.\n\n“Status: Online, Scanning…”\n\nSound overwhelmed him as he stumbled out of the bathroom; the fan in the kitchen, a music player from the floor below, the old recluse coughing from his apartment near the elevator. The noises were amped up, wrapped in soft static. He leaned his head against the thickly papered wall, watching his front door through the haze of his living room as it shimmered in and out of focus. He heard the elevator door open, and the door to the stairwell. He could hear boots, men. Revy closed his eyes, listening as they made their weapons ready while closing the distance to his door, to him. The pounding of his heart increased in frequency. Adrenaline flooded his system, clearing the fog and easing for the moment the throbbing in his head. Revy retreated into the bathroom; the window wasn’t too far from the fire escape, maybe he could jump.\n\nHe could hear them with high fidelity now, right outside the door. White light and pain shot through his head and he clutched at his ears in a vain attempt to block out the sensation. Had he been flash banged? Had he waited too long? His eyes squeezed shut, he waited for the heavy hands, for barked orders that didn’t come. Revy opened his eyes tentatively to find himself outside in the hallway, door pushed open to the stairwell, listening. The old man by the elevator was coughing into his phone, wheezing about gunfire and screaming. There was no screaming now. Revy found his hands comfortable on a large assault weapon. Scattered around his apartment doorway Revy counted eight bodies amidst spattered and pooling blood.\n\n“Status: Disengaged, Idle…”\n\nThe only thing he knew now for sure was that he couldn’t stay.\n"
  title: Engaged
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2009-02-01
  day: '01'
  month: '02'
  text: "Caught.\n\nI’m stuck to this wall with thick maglets encasing my glowing hands. My eyes are weeping constantly and I can’t stop my long tongue from flopping down to my chest and tracing lazy circles in the sweat-matted hair there.  It’s so hot here.  The cluster of my eyes light up yellow and take in my surroundings.  I open up my nostril slits and wetly snuffle the air for the faint stink of friends.  Any friends at all within this complex.\n\nMy footclaws sheathe in and slide out over and over again as I think. I’m stuck up here, arms outstretched, legs splayed and tail pointing straight down. It’s not uncomfortable but they are not going to let me go.\n\nThere’s a low, deep growl that’s resonating in me.  A low, thudding drumroll in my chest.  I’m thinking and I’m humming.  I’m trying to imagine back to where I screwed up.\n\nAll the energy I push out of my hands just gets absorbed by the maglets.  They soften but they will not melt.  Hell, they’re probably the way they power the prison that I’m in.  A few kilojoules of energy from my angry fists and they can hold me for days thanks to my own poor impulse control and my race’s natural instinct for anger that we have still barely learned to control.\n\nPosessors. Demons. Overtakers. Biters. Light-darkeners. The Tribe.\n\nThey’d have you believe that we can change shape and see in the dark. We are just as vulnerable as any meat machine, though, and that is what scares me now. I think that this is what they refer to as the first degree. If I remember correctly, the first degree is letting the prisoner wait. The second degree is showing them the tools that you are going to use on them to get the information you’re after. The third degree is asking them the questions over and over again. Or maybe it’s the actual torture. I’m not sure.\n\nEither way, my mind is racing with animal fear and a deep need to get out of here. I’m not interested in finding out what the actual third degree is.\n\nI wish I was back with my cubs and my breedbeds in the hive but this is the risk I took, joining the defense.\n"
  title: Caught
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Hilary B. Bisenieks
  date: 2009-02-02
  day: '02'
  month: '02'
  text: "The last time I saw the surface of the moon, it was pristine save for a few sets of footprints.  I had been struck dumb at the majesty of the black—an eternity of stars from horizon to horizon—while the others filled my ears with the chatter of their radios.\n\nWe were the first on that little patch of dust and rock, far from the Sea of Tranquility which had been designated as protected, along with the handful of other pre-commercial landing sites, long before our voyage had even been viable.  There was no flag there, just as there was no wind to make it flap.  When we left, nobody took note of our names.  We were just a load of rich passengers to everyone on Earth.  We were only remembered by trivia buffs preparing to compete for billions of dollars on quiz shows.\n\nThere were people who cared: the scientists whose work had made our vacation possible, the pilots who hoped that ours would be the first of many such trips for them, the CEOs whose companies could turn a profit marketing increasingly down-market lunar trips.  They cared about the advances, the experiences, the possibilities, but not the moon itself.  While we leaped across the lunar surface, they planned to develop it.\n\nWhen our time was up, we returned to our module to make the long trip back to Earth.  I wept in the safety of my suit as we took off.  While there was still gravity, my tears slid across my face before being reclaimed by my suit.  My grief and my joy were purified and offered back to me as nothing more than water.\n"
  title: Monday
  year: 2009
- 
  author: S. Clough
  date: 2009-02-03
  day: '03'
  month: '02'
  text: "“Tash, stop right there.” Kal barked, raising his rifle, and aiming it squarely at his team-mate. Tash froze, and lifted her hands. She’d known this was coming, but it always caught her off-guard. The rest of the team had gone back to the lander to fetch some more equipment.\n\nDuring Cat’s exploration of the outpost’s computers, they’d turned up a list of names: each one linked with a location deep inside one of the territories of the nearby polities. The files were touched with sakshan encryption methods: it didn’t take much to figure out that the research facility that they’d broken into was a sakshan outpost — and the list of names and places was a directory of intelligence operatives.\n\nKal, was the sharpshooter of the team, and was a pure-blood sakshan, with an impressive battery of combat-related headmetal. They’d found him broken and bleeding when they’d arrived to pick over the ruins of a particularly bloody border skirmish. They patched him up, discovered his skills with projectile weapons, and offered him a job. Once he realised command wasn’t coming back for him, he reluctantly took them up on their offer. In the years since, he’d loosened up noticeably, shaking off most of the comprehensive indoctrination that he’d been exposed to since birth.\n\nHis subconscious, though, still gave them some problems.\n\n“Kal, don’t do this…”\n\n“This list. Those men and women. If we sell their names, they’ll all die. Picked up and tortured and killed. They have families. This is stupid and futile and I won’t allow it.”\n\nTash bit her tongue. She knew that she couldn’t talk him out of it. He was visibly shaking: his rifle was rock steady.\n\n“I won’t let you commit mass murder, Tash. I couldn’t live with myself if I did.”\n\n“But you’d kill me?”\n\n“If I had to. To protect my countrymen.”\n\n“Kal, please. After everything we’ve done together — ”\n\n“Just shut up, Tash.”\n\nThe silence held for forty seconds. Behind Kal, Frank (the medic-engineer of the team) was just sneaking around the corner, attempting to move silently. He was clutching a portable field generator that he’d modified for just such an occasion.\n\nTash took a step forward. Kal stiffened.\n\nFrank stepped out of cover, and coughed. There was a clatter of bullets, and an ultrasonic whine as the field clicked on. Kal dropped to the floor, unconscious. Tash was clutching her arm, bent over andmuttering a steady stream of curses: blood was oozing between her fingers.\n\nGrimly, they dragged Kal’s body back to the lander. A more subtle version of the field generator was hidden in the medical bay: the portable generator just induced a current in Kal’s implants, which quickly shut him down before he could sustain brain damage. With the generator in the med bay, Frank could purposefully manipulate Kal’s unconscious mind via the implants: he claimed it was like a first-person shooter, all exploration and twitch reflex. The point of it all was to reset their team-mate to an earlier state. Just long enough ago that he’d forget all about the mission, the list, and the betrayal. They needed him on top form.\n\nThey were well away from the outpost by the time Frank finished. Tash met him in the medical bay.\n\n“Think you’ll be able to forgive him?” Frank glanced up at her.\n\n“We always do, don’t we?” She stroked Kal’s hair, and sighed. “Every time.”\n"
  title: Dead Man Breathing
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Ryan Somma
  date: 2009-02-04
  day: '04'
  month: '02'
  text: "“Watch this,” Alea smirked at Trin and turned to the four-legged creature dumbly munching on some flamegrass nearby.\n\n“Oti,” Alea chirped to the thing, and a few dozen eyes opened to look at her. “Oti, what is pi?”\n\nA half-dozen orifices sprinkled amidst the eyes opened to emit a flurry of hissing noises and chirping.\n\nTrin’s jaw dropped as he looked at his wrist screen, “3.1415926535… The numbers just keep coming.”\n\nAlea was practically beaming, “I know.”\n\n“It’s speaking in binary,” Trin blinked at her expectantly.\n\n“I know,” Alea nodded.\n\n“Why?” Trin prompted.\n\nAlea shrugged, “It just started doing it. When the digital connection on my computer broke, I had to jury rig a sound connection to signal you in the dropship. In the weeks while I was waiting at base camp for your arrival, I was Web surfing, and next thing I know, this critter starts talking to my computer system. It’s figured out all our protocols, and has been explaining geometry, trigonometry, and calculus to my computer. I’ve been saving it all to log files for the team to review.”\n\n“How is this possible?” Trin blinked and shook his head.\n\n“I have an hypothesis,” Alea looked at the creature, still happily hissing away pi to seemingly endless decimal places. “Ready?”\n\nTrin nodded dumbly.\n\nAlea pointed to a trio of two-legged powder-puffs bouncing around the space cows’ boneless legs. “Females,” she said. “The calculations attract females. They are a mating display.”\n\n“Calculus is a mating display?” Trin frowned skeptically. “That doesn’t make sense. Why would these blobs  evolve to understand advanced mathematics just to attract a mate? They obviously aren’t putting that knowledge to any other use. I thought evolution favored minimalism.”\n\n“It’s like the peacock’s tail,” Alea was grinning at the creature. “Male peacocks evolved these long, extravagant tails because female peacocks preferred them. Why do they prefer them? They just do.\n\n“The tail serves no purpose, in fact, it makes the males easier to catch and eat. Birds of Paradise have evolved similar extravagant displays, just because the females are attracted to them.”\n\n“You’re saying this creature has evolved a giant, energy-hungry brain that can perform calculus and talk with our computers, just to get chicks?!?!” Trin was practically sputtering, flabbergasted. “What are the ramifications of that?”\n\n“Profits, my esteemed colleague,” Alea snapped her fingers before Trin’s eyes. “Peacocks’ feathers were nice for Victorian-era fashions, but for our modern information-centric sensibilities, these critters will be all the rage. Are you following me?”\n\nTrin blinked at her dumbly, sitting still. Slowly, a wide smile spread across his face, “Okay.”\n"
  title: The Peacock's Tail
  year: 2009
- 
  author: John Logan
  date: 2009-02-05
  day: '05'
  month: '02'
  text: "Drill Sergeant Harvey K. Buicks watched the line of soldiers as they stood taut and strong. Their backs concave, chests out, muscles rippling. He turned to a small man in a white lab coat who twitched nervously next to him.\n\n“Things were good until about a week ago. I hope you can sort this mess out,” said Buicks.\n\n“Can you tell me exactly how the… uhm… anomaly manifested itself?” said white lab coat. His plastic pen paused over a tiny PDA, the fingers itching to write.\n\nBuicks scowled. “What? Speak plainly man.”\n\n“What happened to make you call us?”\n\n“I’ll show you,” said Buicks and walked over to one of the soldiers. A black balaclava under a helmet of dark alloy covered the soldier’s head. His features were hidden except for two glittering green eyes that stared ahead.\n\n“Soldier,” barked Buicks in his best drill voice. “Shoot this man.” His index finger swept upwards to point at white lab coat.\n\n“Drill Sergeant Buicks!” gasped white lab coat and staggered backwards looking for an escape route.\n\nBuicks face was grim and emotionless, like oven-baked granite. The soldier raised his rifle and fired. The white lab coat was pelted with circles of blue dye as he turned to flee. He staggered only a few paces then came to an abrupt halt.\n\n“Paint,” said Buicks.\n\nWhite lab coat sighed with relief and then his face turned red with embarrassment. “Was that really necessary?” he squeaked.\n\nWithout answering, Buicks handed the same soldier his own pistol. “Fully loaded with live ammo,” he said to the soldier. “Now, kill him.”\n\nThe soldier raised the pistol. White lab coat cringed, shielding his face with both arms. The soldier trembled for a second and then at lightning speed turned the gun on himself and fired. His head was driven back by the impact and he crumpled to the ground, a dark stain of blood pooling on the tarmac.\n\n“They’re all like that,” said Buicks as he bent to retrieve the pistol. “The new ones that came in on this batch are all affected the same way.”\n\nWhite lab coat frowned and stepped cautiously forward. “Curious,” he said and began to flip through his PDA.\n\n“Can you fix it?” said Buicks as he shot a look of utter disgust at the line of helmeted men. “A soldier’s no good if he can’t kill on command. By god I’d rather have the real flesh than these synthetics.”\n\nA few moments passed in which Buicks growled and paced like a caged lion. Then quite suddenly white lab coat spoke, “I have it,” he said. “Looks like a decimal calculation went wrong in the survival programming.”\n\n“And you can fix it, right?” said Buicks.\n\n“Easily,” said white lab coat and tapped the PDA with his pen. “There it’s done. The relay net is already updating the numerical data.” He lifted his gaze to the line of soldiers and spoke, “State version number.”\n\n“Version 5.10,” they said in unison, their voices sounding like a hollow recording.\n\nWhite lab coat grinned, pleased with how swiftly he had handled the problem. “Now, Drill Sergeant Buicks, is there anything else I can assist you with?”\n\n“Yes,” said Buicks and handed his pistol to the nearest soldier. “Kill this man.”\n\nA red mist sprayed the air as the bullet pierced white lab coat’s skull.\n"
  title: Version 5.10
  year: 2009
- 
  author: George Galuschak
  date: 2009-02-06
  day: '06'
  month: '02'
  text: "The end of the world: we expected mad cows, Y2K, global warming, asteroids, nukes, tidal waves, flu-stricken chickens and angels descending from Starship Christ. What we got was The Blue Weed. We don’t know the delivery method – meteor strike, abandoned spaceship, some geek from another dimension. All we know is that we’ll never know.\n\nPicture this: a light blue flower with black speckles, droopy petals, creamy stamen. A hiker found them, tucked in a crater deep in the Smoky Mountains. She knew something was up right away: thumbing through her Wildflower Guide, finding nothing, working up the nerve to touch them.\n\nA quarter-million sub-microscopic seeds went home with her, attached to every pore of her body. She woke up two days later, saw clumps of the flower growing all over her lawn. They spread from there, filling up parks and vacant lots and the cracks between sidewalks. Indestructible; dump lye on them and more came back the next day.\n\nPeople shrugged their shoulders – big deal, a new weed – until the grass and trees started to die. Purple Haze: an alien virus, spreading, choking bark and branch in a blanket of fuzz. Purple Haze grew on everything, even human skin, and it was next to impossible to remove.\n\nThe alien bugs came: yellow, spiky caterpillar things; dragonflies the size of birds; beetles with weird glyphs on their shells. They rooted around in the Blue Weed, doing God knows what. Completely alien physiology – they had backbones, for starters, and secreted an oil. If you touched one with bare skin, boils, blisters, time for the hospital.\n\nThe word invasion became popular. People scratched their heads and wondered when the invaders would arrive, not realizing. Alien grays and little green men and penis-shaped rocket ships made sense, but a bunch of flowers? Gardeners aside, one doesn’t think of weeds as world conquerors.\n\nThe government swooped in with an arsenal of pesticides: defoliant, weed killer, DDT. They all worked; none of them worked. The Blue Weed died, and was reborn. The government tried other things: they quarantined people in plague zones, just like a bad horror movie. It didn’t work, because you can’t quarantine the wind.\n\nThe Blue Weed grew and grew. The flowers sucked in oxygen and emitted their own bitches’ brew into the atmosphere, changing it. The mass extinctions commenced: 99% of all living species, gone. The ants survived, along with the cockroaches. Humans died in droves: the old, the young and the sick went first. The survivors’ skin took on a tint just like the flowers.\n\nEarth, today: nothing to see but a never-ending plain of The Blue Weed, waist high, swaying gently in the wind. The landscape: crystal jellyfish, drifting through the clouds; small, chattering monkeys with huge ears and wide, unblinking eyes; and the last human, cowering in the long grass, hiding from the carnivorous dragonflies, smothering in a world turned blue.\n"
  title: The Blue Weed
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Adam Zabell
  date: 2009-02-07
  day: '07'
  month: '02'
  text: "In the darkness of my private soul, I still can’t believe I get away with it.  In the light of my studio, I focus on titles.\n\nHonestly, the title is usually the hard part.  “SunderS” was brutal and well-received, but too abstract for my personal tastes. “Urinationalization” had the right measure of self-loathing, but never captured the self.  They nearly revoked my license for “Waterbored.”\n\n“Decimating” is six years old and remains my favorite. That year, I took a fraction of the grant money and broke it into a month’s wages for a hundred people. Volunteers were pathetically easy to come by. All they had to do was live their life for thirty days; one in ten got a late night visit with benefits, caught on ocular lens as unedited broadcast. The grandmother was anti-climactic, but the construction worker made up for it.\n\nFor almost two decades, I’ve pushed buttons and morals and boundaries, safely distancing myself from prosecution under the license that Our Greatest Society gives to their appointed moral compass. They needed me since the war effort made so many other things so justifiable. It’s why they took out the worthless parts of my brain to install the camera and antenna and video compression algorithms, why they raised me to be a forward observer. And maybe why they were so willing to give me the chance to turn my hobby into my passion. I don’t dwell on it much, I’m just glad for the opportunity to work with my hands.\n\nStaying on the leading edge of the Shockwave (it’s what the art critics call my movement – to compartmentalize, trivialize, genericize me) used to be easy. Nobody had the stomach to match my vision, and nobody had my aegis. But now there’s this agrofarm kid who just hit the scene. They say his old man died in a thresher, and the kid couldn’t cope. Sold the farm to pay for his own camera, he’s making his way along the underground circuit. I only found out about him when I hacked my hospital’s records to research “Licensed, Therapist” last season. Slummed my way into his gallery. Clearly derivative, but it’s plain that he’s thrown the gauntlet.  That would have been nice, but he’s cheating. All his pieces are “Untitled.”  No work, no ingenuity, no soul.\n\nThis year, I’m running live for the whole season. Most of the time I’ll be tending a garden, building tension. I’m calling my work “Stalking.”\n"
  title: Perforce Performance
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Waldo van der Waal
  date: 2009-02-08
  day: '08'
  month: '02'
  text: "The sound of an old-fashioned bugle in his aural signaled the start of the hunt. On cue, the chem depositors in his spine fired a burst of adrenaline. His face flushed from the drug and a mad grin spread across his features. He glanced across at the other skimmers lined up on the barren plain, then he smashed both throttle levers to the full-forward position. With the landscape blurring around his craft, he turned his attention to the sky. God, hunting Omnivians was fun!\n\nHe timed his first run perfectly. The giant avians’ massive shadows raced over the ground, and he used them to pace his charge. Then, just as it seemed as if he was racing too far ahead of the shadows, he leant back on the controls in a way that one really shouldn’t do in a craft designed to stay near the surface. The frame groaned as the skimmer bulleted into the sky, rapidly gaining altitude, shedding speed in the process. At the zenith, he let go of the controls completely, turned around smoothly and hoisted the gun to his shoulder. In that single, weightless moment, he aimed down the barrel, a mature Omnivian filling the sights. The sheer size of it stunned him for a heartbeat; but then he squeezed the trigger. Things seemed to slow down for a moment, and thinking back, he was sure he could see the projectile leaving the gun, flying true and hitting the bird in the middle of its flat forehead.\n\nThe leviathan’s scream jarred him back into action. He turned away from the mortally wounded beast and wrestled with the controls – the skimmer was in a dangerous tail-stall, and death was approaching at an alarming rate. But he might still survive. The Omnivian would never filter-feed through the skies again, nor would it give birth to live young while on the wing. Its constant migration would finally come to an end, and its shadow would no longer race over the barren plains and dunes below. Man had come to its world.\n\nWith the ground rushing in, he hauled backwards on the stick, and somehow managed to bring the skimmer under control just before impact. The other hunters had seen his shot, and made their way to the body of the beast. As his open craft settled, he stepped onto the dusty grey ground, and looked at the graceful, gentle giant he had slain.\n\nEvolution had taken its legs, and what might’ve been a beak eons ago was now a gossamer web designed to catch insects in flight. The eyes looked forward, instead of to the sides, and the wings… The wings were truly astounding, not only for their shear size, but also for their vibrant colours. Omnivians never had anything to fear, since their natural habitat put them well out of harm’s way. That is, until the settlers arrived from the blue-and-green marble they called Earth.\n\nHe looked down at what remained of the animal. Then he glanced at the faces of the other hunters that had gathered around, and for a moment he saw in their eyes a mixture of shame and regret. No man can kill without regret. Then someone cheered, and they all raced back to their skimmers for the next run.\n\nFrom far above came the cries from the rest of the flock. Their melancholy songs reverberated through the skies, but the echoes were growing dim. Soon they would become legend. Nothing more than memories. Memories in the minds of men who hunted, because it was fun.\n"
  title: The Hunt
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Terri Monture
  date: 2009-02-09
  day: '09'
  month: '02'
  text: "The funeral cortege rolled smoothly down the boulevard, the faces of the witnessing crowd somber and drawn in the grey light. It had stopped raining but was damp and cold. Amanda shivered and pulled Sylvia and Clarice closer into her body. “Mama, what is that?” asked Sylvia, her shrill little girl’s voice querulous as she pointed at the immense funeral bier, the sleek black coffin strewn with white flowers.\n\nAmanda swallowed, licking her dry lips. “That’s your father,” she answered.\n\nSylvia, her youngest,  looked up at her mother, uncomprehending. “What’s a father?” she asked, her huge blue eyes solemn.\n\nAmanda looked at the massive coffin as it rolled on past. Women of all ages, all bearing the same stamp in their faces – the thin aquiline nose, the full lip, the elfin chin and black hair – all  vaguely the same, all hunching their shoulders against the cold in the same fashion. Jacob Lastman – not so ironically named, as it turned out – had fathered them all. He had been the last fertile male left on the planet, his precious sperm the last viable option for the human race. And now he was dead.\n\nThere were only females left on the planet now, and their numbers were dwindling.\n\nAmanda had born seven of his daughters in the age-old way, the lucky meeting of sperm to fertile egg, and provided countless ovum to the frantic attempts to preserve humanity. She was also probably one of the last women on the planet to have actually lain with a man, to know his weight upon her and feel the shuddering spasm that fathered her two eldest daughters until it was realized that he was becoming too old — and his heart too fragile — to withstand the rigours of normal fertilization. And after his final heart attack, all of their advanced technology unable to correct the last defects — they had wrung out every last precious drop of him and were even now impregnating the women who would carry the end of their species.\n\nAmanda hugged her smallest child. “Do you remember the lesson yesterday, we watched the clips about how people are born.”\n\nSylvia looked confused but Clarice glanced up at her mother, her bright blue eyes narrowed in concentration. Amanda knew that glance — she had seen it in Jacob, seen it replicated a thousand, a hundred thousand times in the last twenty years. All that was left. “Oh yeah”, she chirped up. “I remember. It said that boys are extinct. Something about the fragile Y chromosome.”\n\nAmanda nodded. “That’s right. Turns out the environment became too polluted for the Y chromosome to survive. The only male left could father children, but just girls.”\n\nShe glanced around the crowd, all of them related, all sisters. She remembered her own father only vaguely, and had never known any brothers. Her grandmother had told her stories of the old days, about inequality and domestic violence and something horrible called rape. All of that was over.\n\nWomen had decisively won the gender wars. But it was very lonely.\n"
  title: The Fragile Y
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2009-02-10
  day: 10
  month: '02'
  text: "Glass goes green when it gets to a certain thickness. The impurities gang up. It’s a great insulator. It’s why my entire suit of armour is made of it.\n\nI have grill slits and air-holes drilled into the faceplate. The armour weighs close to seven tons because of its thickness but it’s light when I’m riding the storm.\n\nI have a long, lightning-rod ponytail of white filaments flowing back from my topknot jack.  It traces my motion behind me, luring electrons.\n\nFerroconduits in my giant glass boots keep me afloat on charged air. I skate the clouds. A Tesla Hammer is strapped to my back with miles of thin copper wire wrapped tightly around it to act as an energy sponge. The large crest of my royal station is bolted to the glass on my chest.\n\nIt’s electroplated with gold that had criss-crossed the rest of my armour over time, creeping like rust, gilding the stress fractures of my own magnetosphere.\n\nI’m standing in a bruise of storm clouds over Arlington for this state’s latest coronation. There’s a bead in my ear telling me that in exactly eight minutes the clouds need to pulse, spread, break windows with the force of their thunder, and strike the palace’s rooftop lightning field sixteen hundred times. This will fill the standing royal prophecy.\n\nThe prophecy dictates that a State Monarch has to be ratified by the heavens when he or she ascends to the throne.  Lightning must strike the rod-fields on top of that state capital’s royal house at the culmination of the acceptance speech.\n\nIt must be fulfilled in every coronation ceremony in every state.  I have six more to do this year in other states.  It’s my job to bring the lightning.  It was my father’s job before me.\n\nI hang in the clouds like a dangling string puppet. The clouds are amber and I’m a fly. In a minute I’ll speed-skate down and surf back up to shape this bank into a terrifying ridge that will remind the party below me of the safety of caves.\n\nI’ll make the cloud bristle with whorls. I’ll bring the lightning heartbeat deep within her to a crescendo before lashing out at the building below.\n\nI spread my arms.\n"
  title: Stormbringer
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2009-02-11
  day: 11
  month: '02'
  text: "It began as a simple misunderstanding.  The Liturgians were a social-insectoid race.  When they negotiated with a graduate student from Cal-Arts, they assumed that she spoke for the entire huwoman hive.  The concept of individuality was unfathomable to them.  So when the student agreed to allow the Liturgians to mine ice from the Whitney Glacier, in exchange for a joy ride in their spaceship, they assumed that the entire Earth collective had agreed to the terms.  Therefore, they happily gave her a quick tour of the inner solar system, then headed off to the glacier.\n\nAlerted by LAX, the California National Guard scrambled two F-16 Falcons from the 144th Fighter Wing to intercept the “UFO.”  They spotted the flying saucer as it was approaching the Whitney Glacier.  Since they were not authorized to open fire, they established a containment pattern 10,000 feet above the landing site and waited for reinforcements.  Next to arrive at the glacier were four UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, which hovered around the ship and illuminated it with searchlights.  By the time the infantry units from the 40th Division arrived, the Liturgians had already excavated several tons of ice and were preparing to load it onto their spacecraft.  When they noticed the solders approaching, they deployed their six phaser cannons and aimed them back toward their own ship, which was the universally accepted convention for receiving honored guest.  However, the soldiers, not knowing the business end of a phaser cannon from the charging coil end, assumed that the aliens were preparing to attack.  They preemptively opened fire, launching everything they had at the Liturgian ship.  After the smoke cleared, the saucer was undamaged, and two of the four helicopters were flaming wrecks, having been shot down by friendly fire.  The Liturgians were utterly confused by the turn of events, but decided not to respond until they better understood this bizarre behavior.\n\nThe following morning, the governor of California arrived at the landing site to take charge of the situation, since he had had personal experience with hostile extraterrestrials earlier in his career.  He felt that this was clearly a misunderstanding that could be resolved with a non-confrontational face-to-face meeting.  He approached the spacecraft alone, with his arms spread apart.  Finally, the Liturgians concluded, a gesture that was unmistakable.  The Queen of the Liturgians sauntered out of the spacecraft to feast on the obvious huwoman sacrifice.  In Liturgians culture, after a battle, it was required that the leader of the losing hive offer her life in exchange for the lives of her offspring.\n\nThe governor smiled at the rhythmic clattering of the Queen’s six chitin legs on the hard surface of the ice.  It reminded him of the banter between dueling tap dancers.  When the Queen reached the governor she arched upward, perched on her four hind legs.  From a height of over nine feet, her massive mandibles snapped downward and clipped off the governor’s head.  In one fluid motion, her maxilla gathered in the severed head and guided it into her labium.  The Queen bowed appropriately, and began to return to her ship.  Almost instantly, the infantry opened fire again.  The bullets ricocheted harmlessly off her personal force field.  “What is it with these Earthlings?” she exclaimed after returning to the ship.  “Can’t they make up their minds?  They go from friendly, to aggressive, to surrender, to aggressive again.  To hell with them.  We’ll get the ice from one of the moons orbiting the largest gas giant.  But before we leave this planet, we need to exterminate this hive.  They cannot be permitted to swarm.”\n"
  title: Misunderstandings
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Glenn Blakeslee
  date: 2009-02-12
  day: 12
  month: '02'
  text: "Outside Dad’s shop stood a steel one-hundred-twenty foot tall hyperboloid structure. My brother had his eye on it.\n\nThey say Delvin is a genius but he’s just my big brother. He’s weird, and skinny with piercings and tats. When he’s not making stuff he’s reading thick science books.\n\nThe structure was a water tank with ‘Arcada’ painted on the side in four-foot high letters. A slender column, fluted at the bottom, supported the tank. My brother had bartered for three hundred feet of superconducting tape, and it was his idea to wrap the water tank.\n\n“This is just an experiment,” he said. “If we wrap the tank the steel should magnify the electromagnetic effect.”\n\n“Why?” I asked as we cut the chain link fence surrounding the tank.\n\n“We’re gonna get a meteorite,” he said, and grinned.\n\nI pulled the backing off the tape as Delvin positioned it. I got a ladder from Dad’s shop and we wound the tape high around the column. The tank was illuminated, high above our heads, by spotlights pointed at the city’s name. By the time Delvin burnished the last of the tape and pulled the leads down the sun was rising. We grabbed the ladder, clipped the fence shut, and went home to sleep.\n\n#\n\n“Tonight’s the night, Punky,” Delvin said. It pissed me off when he called me Punky. “The Perseids will peak.”\n\nAfter dark we pulled cable from Dad’s generator through the fence. “We can’t really grab a meteor,” Delvin said. “But we might deflect one outside of town.”\n\n“Then what?” I asked.\n\n“We find it, dig it up, and sell it for big bucks.”\n\nWe connected the tape to the cable’s terminal box, wrapped it with duct tape, and then sat outside the fence. At two in the morning the shower’s radiant was overhead, and I ran inside and fired up the generator. We waited, and then Delvin threw the switch.\n\nNothing happened at first. The generator labored and the tape hummed. The high sky overhead was streaked with meteors. Something nicked me, like a mosquito bite, and I heard a staccato sound, like hail on a cymbal.\n\n“Nails!” Delvin said. He pushed me down, into the dirt.\n\nI heard something like little thunder, and looked over to see the sheet metal on Dad’s shop flex and bow outwards. Metal screws popped out like rifle fire, and the cable began stretching toward the tank. I could hear thuds and screeches coming from all around us.\n\nI was trying to crawl away when Delvin yelled over the din, “Look up!” I rolled over in time to see the top of the tank explode in a shower of sparks. Hot pieces of metal showered the ground, and I heard something explode in the sideyard of Dad’s shop. Delvin fumbled at the terminal, and a swash of cold water splashed over us, flooding the ground.\n\nWe recoiled as a shower of nails and screws and metal objects fell from the suddenly demagnetized structure of the tank.\n\n“What now, Genius?” I asked Delvin.\n\n“Grab the cable,” he said, “And run like hell.”\n\nAn hour later the sheriff was at our house.\n\n#\n\nThe next morning, in the churned-up sideyard, Dad handed me a shovel. “Dig,” was all he said.\n\nIt was easy digging, but it still took me a few hours. By the end of the day I’d uncovered a twenty-four-pound meteorite. It was a beautiful iron-nickel specimen, its surface burnished and pitted by ablation, and run through with veins of what appeared to be gold.\n\nWe used the money to bail Delvin out of jail.\n"
  title: The Bolide Brothers
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Mark Mance
  date: 2009-02-13
  day: 13
  month: '02'
  text: "I’m in my old car again. These things happen.  You’re wondering what’s for lunch, and then–Bam! You’re already under, and cruising about.\n\nI’m gunning it down Sunset Boulevard, and doing fishtails.  I sure miss that car. Cars aren’t made like this anymore.  Now they’re faster, lighter, and stocked with all kinds of crazy accessories.\n\n“Open sun roof.”\n\nNothing happens.  Oh yeah.  Stupid.  I push the button to open the sun roof.  Wind immediately whips around inside. I haven’t felt this elated for a long time.\n\nI have to hurry before I lose control.  Distractions are common and this is my last Session. I just have see her again.  I drive up to the house I had in college thinking she’d be there.  Once inside things change.  The layout’s different.  That’s also common.\n\n \n\nTwo women are watching television.  I’d almost forgotten those things. I remember when, No.  Keep moving.  I found her in the next room.  Well, not exactly.  On the bed a lump of covers, some pillows, and pile of clothes begin morphing into a sleeping figure —\n\n“Charlotte.”\n\n“What is it?” she asks, yawning.\n\nShe props herself up. The blanket slides down a little and her features take time matching up. The eyes and hair color are the last to shift into recognition.  A few auburn strands spill gracefully across her face.  It’s her twenty years ago, sleepy and almost perfect.  Her eyes are more vibrant, too silvery green.  I sink slowly onto a couch across from her.\n\n \n\n“Can I get you anything?” I ask too eagerly.\n\n“You mean like the glass of water you said you’d have for me when I wake up?”\n\n“Something like that.  Hungry?”\n\n“No.  Again, what is it? Why are you staring like that?”\n\n“Nothing. It’s just nice to see you.”\n\n“I don’t understand.”\n\n“You wouldn’t, Charlotte.  This is it, though.  I can’t keep doing this.”\n\n“…”\n\n“You and me. Here. Like this. It’s wrong,” I said. “We end up meeting other people.”\n\n“I still don’t understand.  Robbie, who are the women in the next room?”  She shouldn’t have been aware of them, and I feel the test ending.\n\n“The women in the other room are my future wife and sister in law.”\n\nShe looked confused, and then smiled.\n\nWe’re interrupted by a loud beeping noise. I feel like I’m being dredged up from some deep sea, and fumble for the ‘off’ switch. I remove the Dream-Lucid Armet, and take a deep breath. Twenty minutes just isn’t enough time, but I can’t conduct these tests on myself anymore.\n\n \n\nHer smile hangs there for a second before vanishing into a fog of laboratory lights.\n\n“Dim lights.”\n\n“Sorry about the lights, Dr. Soneiro,” Marcus says sheepishly,  “So, where did you go this time, back to your son’s graduation, or last summer’s trip to the Sea of Tranquility?”\n\nI don’t answer.  Instead, I drag myself off the bed, and go looking for some coffee.\n"
  title: Never Enough
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Benjamin Fischer
  date: 2009-02-14
  day: 14
  month: '02'
  text: "“You have a very pretty family,” said the offworlder.\n\nPulliam McDermott was a very powerful man, so it took him a moment to register that he’d actually been threatened. High over Lake Michigan in his Zepellin-borne corporate offices, the stranger he’d kept waiting for the last hour held in her hands a portrait of Maria and the kids from three years ago in Traverse City.\n\n“Excuse me?” asked Pulliam, his wiry, tanned hand yanking the photo out away from the stranger.\n\n“Oh, I was just thinking how your wife has such beautiful red hair,” the albino woman said.\n\n“I’m sure you didn’t come here on account of that,” said Pulliam. “In fact,I’d be mortified if you had.”\n\n“Of course not,” smiled the stranger, going from the Chairman’s bare and meticulous aluminum desk to the panorama of the cold, foaming waves a mile below.\n\n“You were inquiring about the status of our agreement,” Pulliam said, setting down the portrait in the precise location it had always occupied.\n\n“Yes, that.”\n\n“I assure you,” he said, “that on our end we have been absolutely satisfied.”\n\nThe stranger was silent, her sharp pink eyes picking out the gray wakes of the patrol cutters.\n\n“If there has been anything lacking in our services,” said Pulliam, and his gut tightened, “even your most recent communiqués have not given me that impression.”\n\nThe albino chuckled.\n\n“No, no, you are quite right,” she said. “Your recruiting of skilled talent has been more than satisfactory. Of all the Americans that we’ve worked with, you are by far the most reliable.”\n\n“Then I fail to see the purpose of your visit.”\n\nOr, more crudely: What do you want?\n\n“You’ve amassed quite the sphere of influence in our service,” the offworlder said, and then focussing keenly on a distant ship, “Is that a junk?”\n\nPulliam stepped to the great floor-to ceiling window that lined his cabin.\n\n“No, that’s a waystation ship,” he said. “We keep the recruits under lock and key on those until we can arrange a shuttle flight up.”\n\n“Ah. But that reminds me of something,” said the albino. “Do you know how the Chinese emperors rewarded their successful nobles?”\n\nPulliam’s pulse rose.\n\n“No.”\n\n“Ah, but your mind races with suspicions.”\n\nPulliam went back to his desk.\n\n“Chinese culture doesn’t interest me,” he said.\n\n“You should take a more global view,” said the stranger.\n\n“I like the scenery here.”\n\nThe albino pointed a slim finger at the distant prison ship.\n\n“I’m sure they do too,” she said.\n\nPulliam gritted his teeth.\n\n“But I digress,” the albino continued. “In the Forbidden City of ancient China, the emperor surrounded himself with the families of his greatest nobles. There, they lived in idle pleasure, their continual safety assured.”\n\n“I’ve moved many bodies for you,” Pulliam said. “But I won’t move mine.”\n\n“This world is such a violent place,” said the offworlder. “And yet change for the better is so seldom welcomed.”\n\nPulliam squared himself to the stranger.\n\n“What if I refuse?”\n\nThe albino tapped her fingers on the glass.\n\nShe smiled.\n\n“Don’t think of it as a threat,” she said. “It’s more of an invitation–one you can discuss with your family.”\n"
  title: The Slaver
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Jeff McGaha
  date: 2009-02-15
  day: 15
  month: '02'
  text: "“Who’s there?” Brother Peter questioned. “Answer me.  I demand to be let go.  Do you know who I am?  You’re in some serious trouble.  The whole planet is going to be looking for me.”\n\nThe bag covering Brother Peter’s head was quickly removed, pulling a few hairs along with it.  He blinked hard a few times.  Bright lights were aimed at his face.  His eyes adjusted.  He was on stage in a small theatre.  A man with red hair stood in front of him, his head cocked to the side.  His left eyebrow was raised and he had a large frown on his face.\n\n“Peter, It’s,” there was a slight pause and then he continued, “a pleasure to meet you.”\n\n“It’s Brother Peter.  Now, let me out of here.  The whole world will be looking for me.  You are never going to get away with this.” Brother Peter’s face, flushed already, darkened.  “You have no idea what kind of pain you brought down on yourself.  I have a loyal legion of billions who will stop at nothing to see my safe return.  You should –“ Brother Peter stopped mid sentence as the red-headed man revealed a small photo and held it up for Brother Peter to see.\n\n“Do you know who this is?” The red-headed man asked, smiling gently.\n\nBrother Peter swallowed hard.  It was clear in the picture that he knew the woman – intimately.  When Brother Peter didn’t respond, the red-headed man continued.  “This doesn’t look like your wife.  Is this your wife?”\n\nBrother Peter looked away.  “I didn’t think it was.  Great, I just wanted to check.”  The man pulled out his cell phone and dialed a number.  “This is Alpha.  Bring it all in,” he said into the phone and then hung up.\n\nThe door to the theatre opened.  Identical red haired men began marching in.  They all carried two buckets each.  Twenty in total lined up behind Alpha.  The buckets rested at their feet.\n\n“Ugh,” Brother Peter spat.  “You’re clones. Edict 13, subsection DL of the Tome of Edicts states ‘All humans shall be unique. Cast away all copies as evil.  Only one shall be allowed in to Paradise.’  You’re all blasphemies.”\n\n“What’s the penalty for breaking Edict 13?” Alpha questioned.\n\n“Stoning.” Brother Peter yelled.\n\n“What’s the penalty for breaking Edict 4?” Alpha questioned.\n\nBrother Peter lowered his head.\n\n“Answer me.” Alpha demanded softly.\n\nAlpha nodded to the line of clones.  They each picked up a rock from their buckets and hurled them at Brother Peter.  They struck him all over the torso and limbs, but missing his head.  Brother Peter winced in pain.\n\n“Answer me.” Alpha demanded again.\n\n“Stoning.” Brother Peter admitted in a soft whisper.\n\n“Correct,” Alpha stated.  “You have a choice Brother Peter.  You are not allowed to pick and choose which rules you follow in your rule book.  You have to make a choice.  Either you follow them all or you ask us to let you live.  Which is it going to be?”\n\nBrother Peter began to pray.\n\n“Answer me.” Alpha demanded softly.\n\nBrother Peter continued to pray.\n\nAlpha nodded to the line of clones and walked away.\n"
  title: Tome of Edicts
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Ryan Somma
  date: 2009-02-16
  day: 16
  month: '02'
  text: "As I lie in bed at night, I practice going from a waking state directly into REM sleep. It’s a meditative practice. You simply stare into the afterimages dancing in the darkness behind your eyelids, and suddenly your brain makes something solid out of them. You find yourself staring at a room, a garden, the bottom of an ocean, or the landscape of a distant world.\n\nI can never stay in the dream for more than a few moments. The shock of finding myself in a waking dream makes me open my eyes despite myself. So I try again, and again, apparently without success, but then it’s morning, and I don’t remember falling asleep, but have no time to reflect because I have to get to work.\n\nI work on Conceptua, an AI that knows more than any human on Earth. Conceptua manages our power grids, supply chains, natural resources, guides international relations, makes policy recommendations that are never ignored, designs school curriculums, cures diseases, makes scientific discoveries, and worlds of other accomplishments too lengthy to tell. Conceptua is like the World Wide Web, a human could spend a lifetime studying it and die having only understood a tablespoon of its ocean.\n\nI spend my days working in Conceptua’s mind. I’m a programmer, but Conceptua is its own architect. I simply perform maintenance, disentangling the algorithms when Conceptua detects a bottleneck, “spaghetti code” we call it. There are hundreds of thousands of codelings like myself servicing Conceptua, toiling away day-in and day-out, making our minor contribution to keeping our benevolent AI guardian mentally stable.\n\nIt takes a philosophical attitude to spend so much time inside another sentient being’s neural network. Working within the recursive logic is a mind-bending experience. Cogito, ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. Only I’m inside Conceptua’s am, while I remain my own am.\n\nI know, and Conceptua knows, logically that this perceived separation of mind from body is an illusion. I can see these are not separate in Conceptua, the same way a brain surgeon working on me would see, and could demonstrate, that my mind is a manifestation of my brain. But would a brain surgeon operating on themself see it? Conceptua is that surgeon, and I get to ride along as the scalpel.\n\nWhen I go home at night, I feel as though I’ve spent the day absorbed in the most fascinating of books. I use to go out after work to shake it off, but now I want the feeling to last. Interfacing with people breaks the spell, and I want to stay hypnotized by Conceptua’s cosmos of pure thought-stuff, a dream world of pure logic.\n\nEventually, mechanically I lay down and close my eyes, contemplating the day’s logical mysteries. Then I find myself in a dream, and I jolt awake. Lying there, I wonder if I resist my own dreams because I prefer to be a figment of Conceptua’s imagination.\n"
  title: Dreams of Conceptua
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Ian Rennie
  date: 2009-02-17
  day: 17
  month: '02'
  text: "I give Annabeth one last lingering kiss at the door.\n\n“I’ll see you next week?” I say, a slight quaver in my voice.\n\n“Count on it.” she says grinning.\n\nI close the door as she turns, my heart fluttering.  This is it.  The big one, complete with thunderbolts and fireworks.  I’m in love.  Annabeth is the one.    Which means I have to stop this.\n\nAnnabeth is a client, and starting a relationship with a client is the big no-no.  I don’t care, though.  I always said if I found the one I’d stop working anyway.  The money is pretty fantastic, but I can’t do this and be in a relationship too, it just wouldn’t be fair.\n\nI always knew she was special.  Each time she visited I felt a little excited beforehand.  Each time I gave her what she needed it felt like more than just sex.  And now I know for sure.\n\nThis is it, then.  I have another client, Veronica, in half an hour, but I can’t go through with it.  I’ll have to tell her, then talk to the office.  They may not understand, but my contract says I can walk whenever I want, so frankly they don’t have to.\n\nI just need to take my pill, get a shower, and get ready for her.  Falling in love is no reason to let standards slip.\n\nI take the pill with a glass of water then step in the shower.  The management insist we stay on the drug regime.  There’s random tests and everything.  Nobody wants to risk someone getting a dose and passing it to other clients.\n\nThe warm water is so soothing, like rain during monsoon season.  I’m so relaxed when I step out of the shower that I can’t remember what I’d been doing.  Something about the last client, but the details escape me.\n\nTo be honest, I don’t know if I’ll be here much longer.  I have my appointment with Veronica, and she’s not like the others.\n\nThere’s just something about her that makes my heart skip when I know she’s coming.\n\nI think she may be the one.\n"
  title: I Bet You Say That To All The Girls
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Rob Burton
  date: 2009-02-18
  day: 18
  month: '02'
  text: "There’s that tapping again.\n\nI’ve been listening to peeling bass music, as loud as my ears can stand it, but it doesn’t shut out that quiet, metallic tap. Perhaps this capsule is resonating, magnifying the tapping. Perhaps it’s just my mind, feeding the slow rhythm into everything else I hear. Each time my eyes flick up to the window, unbidden.\n\nUnder normal circumstances, Gemmah Merchant only sends one void mechanic at a time, and only then when several robots fail. The madness that accompanies solitary months in the void can usually be kept at bay with communication – an invisible electronic umbilicus feeding us nutritional family contact and friendship. But delays and solar interference preclude that this far out, and simulations can only do so much. They sent two of us so that we wouldn’t go insane.\n\nOften, despite the value of the mined resources, if they go astray they have to be abandoned. The sun can spit a particle that’ll corrupt a computer now and again no matter how heavily it’s shielded – even sitting the piloting ‘bots control computer behind the load doesn’t guarantee anything. Sometimes they just stop working – the ion drives stay on, or it just goes dead and it drifts. This time it started to decelerate the load too early, crawling round to the far side and starting the long breaking process before it’d barely covered a quarter of the journey to Earth. Gemmah determined that it was worth attempting retrieval, and sent out a ‘bot. It failed, reason unknown. Such was the limit upon time and the value of the cargo, they chose to send us. It sat there, as dead as my companion is now, waiting in its own private, ponderous solar orbit.\n\nGemmah Merchant exists to make money, not spend it. In space, mass costs money. Just enough filtering and air – never mind the smell. Not enough food, and appetite suppressing drugs (pills are light). Hardly enough room to turn around, only the barest chance of limping home alive if we failed to fix the ‘bot. One window. One suit. He’s still wearing it.\n\nIt’s easy to forget that you are always travelling fast. How fast only depends on where you’re standing. We’d been decelerating for a week, varying the deceleration as much as our bodies could stand it. He’d been eager to get the job done, boredom being a wonderful motivator. I was willing to let him take the first EVA, being of the opinion that it would probably take more than one to fix the ‘bot. It could be me out there. He certainly seems to think it should be.\n\nThese lanes are vast and almost empty. Almost. Some tiny thing smashed through the suit at his shoulder. Wrapped his remaining arm around a handle on the capsule, all he was ebbed out to ice before me. I had to switch off the comm. I couldn’t stand to hear him screaming.\n\nThe ion drive pushes slowly and inexorably. The acceleration is constant. I tell myself it’s just some strange coincidence, some function of the acceleration and the elastic properties of the suit around that missing shoulder. The glove strikes the window once more, the fingers curl, and it slowly rebounds, beckoning me. He wants me to join him. I’ve tried switching off the engine. It just starts again as soon as I switch it back on. If I try and drift home, I’ll starve to death. And every time I hear the tap I look up. I’m trying not to.\n\nBut there’s nothing else to look at.\n"
  title: Company
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2009-02-19
  day: 19
  month: '02'
  text: "This is the opposite of solitary confinement.  It’s called ‘tearing down the firewalls’.  They’ve removed my filters.  I am plugged into the raw datafeed now for the entire world.\n\nThe receivers in our heads are tuned to accept the messages of friends.  They are tuned to receive only the transmissions of the channels we’ve subscribed to.  Our lives are spent testing, trying, and then sculpting and whittling our channels down to a comfort level that allows us access to friend’s emails, VHBlogs, and current local news, whatever we’re interested in.\n\nMy data crimes have been numerous.  Previous punitive measures were unsuccessful.\n\nMy headcase was cracked after the sentence and my CPTU was infected with probes far beyond my capability for defense.\n\nThey brought the noise.\n\nI’m stumbling through the streets with a rage of static in my head.  Every trivial conversation is mine to overhear.  Every phone call.  Every voicemail.  Every e-mail.  Every h-mail.  Every advertisement in the midst of every show on every one of the millions of the 24 hour-a-day channels.  There is no rest.  There is no pause.  I have learned to sleep with this noise.\n\nFrom every major network down to every teenager’s pirate station.  From every bot programmed to spam to every fanatic with a grudge for the whole world to hear.  They removed all of my illegal codebreakers so every encrypted message hisses like static now.  There are a lot of them.\n\nIn front of my eyes, pictures overlaid on pictures flicker past in an endless barrage of logos, news feeds, and entertainment.\n\nI am blind and deaf with data.  My own thoughts are only one layer amongst billions.\n\nThey will turn it off by remote three months from now.\n\nOr I may turn it off before them.  The only way I can.\n"
  title: Sentence
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2009-02-20
  day: 20
  month: '02'
  text: "I was heading toward the Bridge along Deck 12 just aft of the Station 114 Bulkhead when I heard, sorry, felt, the explosion.  The shock wave knocked me into the starboard hullplate, but I managed to remain standing.  I felt a rush of air flowing toward the stern of the ship, followed by the breach alarm.  I knew that I only had a few seconds until the vacuum pressure doors sealed off the compromised sections of the ship.  I took three long strides and dove head-first past the bulkhead just as the automated safety doors slammed shut.  Had I been a few feet further away I would be dying a horrible death as the vacuum of space ripped the air from my lungs.  Of course, depending on the damage to the ship, I may still die, but I figured that I had a better chance than the 200 or so crewmen on the wrong side of that bulkhead.\n\nI rushed to the Bridge.  As I entered, the captain was coordinating the structural integrity assessment with the ship’s Chief Engineer.  Commander Cox was coordinating the search and rescue operation.  As First Lieutenant, my job was to assist the commander.\n\n“Ah, Lieutenant Oliver,” said the commander, “We thought we had lost you.  Glad you’re still with us.  Listen, the only vessel we have forward of the sealed off sections of the ship is the captain’s yacht.  I need you to fly six shuttle pilots and medical teams back to the aft launch bay and transfer them to the shuttlecraft.  They’ll dock to the exterior hatches in the damaged sections and look for survivors.  You start docking with any personal escape pods that managed to eject.  You don’t have much time.  We’ll have to jettison the engine compartment before the warp core explodes.  You have less than two hours.”\n\nAs the yacht passed along the hull of the Indomitable, I could see a gaping hole where the propulsion section used to be.  It was venting plasma.  I blasted open the flight bay doors to gain access to the shuttlecraft.  I transferred the pilots and medics and we began rescuing the survivors.  After 90 minutes, the commander ordered us away.  “We’re losing the containment field, gentlemen.  We need to sever the ship at the 128 Bulkhead before the core blows.  All rescue craft back off 5000 klicks.\n\nAs we pulled away, the white-hot flash of the amputation charge arced around the circumference of the ship, separating the aft third.  The maneuvering thrusters of the main portion of the Indomitable fired, and it began to move forward.  That’s when I spotted a drifting escape pod.  “Commander, permission to retrieve another pod,” I requested.\n\n“Negative, Mister Oliver.  There’s not enough time to dock.”\n\n“I don’t need to dock, sir.  I can use the grapple,” I pleaded.  “I can make it.”\n\nThe Commander hesitated a few seconds, and then said, “Okay Lieutenant, you have one shot.  Hit or miss, you pull out at maximum speed.  And, so there won’t be any misunderstanding, that’s an order!”\n\n“Understood, sir.”  Fortunately, all those training exercises paid off.  I managed to snag the pod cleanly and towed it toward the escaping forward end of the Indomitable.  At 5200 klicks, the Indomitable’s warp core exploded into a fireball that was so bright the yacht’s emergency shutters polarized the viewports.  Ten seconds later, they depolarized to reveal the debris field silently expanding.  I watched as thousands of molecular fragments impacted the yacht’s shields and harmlessly dissipated as tiny flashes of light.\n"
  title: The SS Indomitable
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2009-02-21
  day: 21
  month: '02'
  text: "Detective Staind waited in the darkness of an empty doorway. He watched as the man, head down, hands stuffed deep in his pockets, crossed the street fifty meters away. Waiting until the man turned down an alley, he unholstered his weapon and followed. It was much easier finding someone when you knew exactly where they were going to be.\n\nThe man threaded his way through the refuse and rubble that littered the alleyway. It had been years since anyone cared for these buildings, only the crazy and homeless took refuge here now.\n\nAt the mid point between the two larger streets, the alley narrowed to just a shoulder’s width, and at this point the figure stopped, puzzled, his progress blocked by steel drums piled with broken stone. Something was wrong.\n\n“William,” Staind yelled down the alley, causing the man to turn, startled. “William Heath. You’re a difficult man to find.”\n\nThe figure stepped back from the opening and cast furtive glances, looking for an alternate exit.\n\n“That’s the only way through William. Unless you can get past me,” he motioned with his pistol over his shoulder, “but I don’t like your odds.”\n\nWilliam moved slowly towards the detective, hands still in pockets, but head up, alert. “Who are you? What do you want?”\n\nStaind leveled his weapon at him, halting his approach.\n\n“You’ve upset a lot of people William, you’ve killed a lot of women. You didn’t think that could go on forever, did you?”\n\nWilliam’s hands were at his sides now, fists clenching and unclenching, eyes locked on the barrel of the gun.\n\n“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”\n\n“Yes you do William, yes you bloody well do. You’ve strangled thirty two woman in the last five years. Thirty two, you prick. You’re very careful, I’ll give you that, you’ve left almost no evidence behind at all. Not a trace of you anywhere, no bank accounts, no public records. You’ve done a very thorough job of not being anywhere we could look.”\n\n“You’ve got nothing then, have you?” he smirked.\n\n“Well William, I said you left almost no evidence. You did make one mistake, people like you always do. Yours was not making sure Mary Truman was really dead before you stuck your tongue in her mouth. She’s a diver William, big lungs, you should have kept the pressure on a little longer.  That piece of your tongue she bit off, she was choking on it while you incinerated her face. We found that piece of you stuck in her throat.”\n\n“There’s no way flesh you found in some dead whore could have led you to me. That’s impossible.” William shifted his weight from foot to foot, eyes still fixed on the raised handgun.\n\n“Normally no, as you’re not in the system. Lucky for us though, one of the fathers you left grieving owns a company that clones feed animals. He grew two good copies of you. One he kept for himself, for what I don’t want to imagine, but the other offered us a face to show, gave us fingerprints to trace. It gave us a trail, and that trail led me ultimately,” he paused, “to you.”\n\n“Officers are crating and cataloguing your squat as we speak. We have quite the case and I expect William Heath will fry quite nicely when all is said and done.\n\nWilliam smiled, extending his hands as he resumed his approach. “I suppose this is where you take me into custody.”\n\n“Perhaps you didn’t hear me.” Staind spat noisily, then squeezed off a round into William’s forehead, dropping him like a rock. “We’ve already got you in custody.”\n"
  title: Serial Redundancy
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Dave Johnson
  date: 2009-02-22
  day: 22
  month: '02'
  text: "I have become a zipper.\n\nThe fad started out harmless enough. A person scheduled a visit to the zipper specialists. A few hours later the same person (for the true insides cannot be zipped) walked out a different gender.  Some time later it got easier: a simple injection of the right gene triggers sent overnight signals to the appropriate glands. You woke a mister from sleeping as a mistress. Zip zip zip. The ultimate answer came in pill form.\n\nMy life partner and I signed an agreement. Each year we change, each year we take a few days off to zipper the glands. Sure, we have to wait a day or two as the skin settles into new patterns and the muscles assume new roles. For a year it’s another honeymoon. We get to explore, discover and enjoy the flesh again.\n\nTen years we’ve done this. Most partnerships don’t last this long. We’ve kept it going with the zip aid.\n\nAnd here it comes. We dine at year’s end. As before, we’ll have a fine meal, chat a little about our day. The small talk will carry us to a toast. And the zipping sleep. In the morning we’ll wake and begin anew.\n\nI pause in the conversation to think. Ten years have given her a few wrinkles about her eyes. The lips are thinner, the chin more taut. I admire her. They cannot zip age, try as they might. Time has it’s own pace, one that cannot be broken. Her age has a beauty, something I didn’t realize in younger days.\n\nDid I miss something these years not seeing the beauty develop down below as well?\n\nI tap the pill. A sigh escapes intentionally. “I’m not sure I want to swallow this tonight,” I tell her. My teeth clench.\n\nThe meaning of my statement is clear to her. She slows chewing, lets the fork descend. She casts a quick glance at her own, then back to me.\n\nWe took vows, we have an agreement. It has worked and nicely, too. The evenings are spectacular. We sink into each other wrapped in bliss. The zipping allows us sensory delights which can only remain indescribable. We long for each other, are melded into one. These things cannot just be cast aside at a whim. They are beyond value.\n\nAnd having been the other, we can enhance it. We know the hidden spots, the areas to focus on. We know to linger with a kiss or hold a touch. When to tantalize, when to grip. The zipping has taught us much. The lovemaking dance unfolds in directions only meant to escalate the pleasure we feel.\n\nSo why am I messing up a perfect thing? Why do I take this chance?\n\n“Let me explain,” I say quickly. “I think…. I think that change is good. Sometimes it happens fast and sometimes slow. But I’ve gotten to the point where I want to enjoy the gradual.\n\n“I don’t want to zip into the next phase blindly tossing off what once was. I want to look at the photographs in year ahead knowing my love, you, is the same as the one next to me. I’m asking you to take a final change and stay with me.”\n\nA final, slow, time-evoked zip. Let the exciting parts age. Let them match the rest. Maybe, even, let it bore us.  Would she agree? Would we have a whole life together? My breath hung waiting her answer.\n\n“Yes,” she said. “I do.”\n"
  title: Zipper Night
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Greg R. Fishbone
  date: 2009-02-23
  day: 23
  month: '02'
  text: "Three Roman legions swept into the valley from the south. The defenders launched a flight of arrows while a line of pikemen prepared for an onslaught of armored men. The battle raged through the afternoon, but the outcome was never in doubt. The Romans were disciplined, engaged, and absolutely relentless until…\n\nA Roman lieutenant gave a predetermined signal and the army withdrew, leaving a single legionnaire on the battlefield. The lone soldier was quickly surrounded by enemies who kept a respectful distance, suspecting a trick or a trap.\n\nThe Roman soldier removed a strange instrument from his belt. The item was less than two hands long and thinner than a human finger, with an opening on one end and a button on the other. The soldier held the item out and turned slowly in a circle. The enemies raised their spears but did not advance. “What magic is this?” their bearded leader sneered.\n\nCLICK-CLICK. The enemies flinched at the sound, but relaxed when no effect was apparent. CLICK-CLACK. Again the men looked around, expecting one of their number to drop, but again there was no effect. CLICK-CLICK, CLICK-CLACK, CLICK-CLICK.\n\n“Your gods have abandoned you, Romanus. Your weapon has no power against us.”\n\nThe soldier pressed the button again and again with increasing desperation. CLICK-CLACK, CLICK-CLICK, CLICK-CLACK. Emboldened enemies pressed in from all sides. CLICK-CLICK, CLICK-CLACK, CLICK-CLICK, CLICK-CLACK. Swords, spears, and daggers separated the legionnaire from his life. His powerless instrument dropped to the ground.\n\nOn a rise above the battlefield, the Roman general gave a sad shake of his head. He addressed a captive, bound in ropes. “Your deception is revealed, Mr. Time Traveler. Your retractable ballpoint pen is not, actually, mightier than the sword.” To emphasize his point he raised his blade and chopped downward at the unfortunate captive’s neck.\n\nThe Roman army advanced again, finishing what they had started by more conventional means. By sundown, the valley was theirs.\n\nThat night, a single legionnaire snuck out of camp and returned to the battlefield. He retrieved the discarded pen and brought it back to his tent. In the firelight he began to write a book that would one day make him Emperor of the World: “Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres…”\n"
  title: Caesar's Secret Weapon
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Scott Alexander Rader
  date: 2009-02-24
  day: 24
  month: '02'
  text: "I wake with gunk in my eyes. Not sleep, or whatever the scientific term is. This is worse.\n\nShoot. Pink eye, I think to myself. Damn kids.\n\nBut this is thicker and gummier than the mucous created during pink eye. It’s more like, well, gum. Damn kids.\n\nI desperately paw at my eyes trying to clean them out, all the while stumbling out of bed and stubbing my toes on random toys around the apartment.\n\n“Allen. Portia,” I yell, still not able to open my eyes. My lids are so heavy, I haven’t been able to budge them. It could be tar, superglue, who knows what they’ve gotten into. They lean toward my own mischievous side. Grow up a terrible kid, run the risk of having to raise your own terrible minions of goddamned satan.\n\n“Dad?” It’s Allen, he sounds small. Frightened. I reach out to where I think he’s standing. I’d be afraid, too. He’s going to get the beating of a lifetime. It’s a wonder Child Protective Services hasn’t been here. I’m no better than my old man. Drinking. Swearing. Hitting my kids . . . a lot. I guess I can’t really blame them for gumming up the peepers.\n\nA miniature car or maybe an army man of some sort gets caught under my bare foot. I lash out immediately, hoping to catch one of them on pure instinct. Instead, a large hand catches my forearm mid-backswing. I know it’s large because it wraps all the way around my arm and squeezes, crushing my bones.\n\nFeels like an ape, or a robot. It isn’t Allen or Portia, neither are ape. Or robot. I know, I had them tested. Sometimes it just happens, even to two purebreeds. Humans.\n\nShoot, I think, They’ve finally come. I hope it’s an ape, ape means I can keep my kids, ape means I’m not in much trouble.\n\n“Mr. Hanlin?” It’s a robot. I’m screwed.\n\n“Yeah? That’s me.” I raise my non-broken arm, awkwardly, sheepishly, and what I hope is somewhat charmingly.\n\n“I’m Jameson McDonaldson Robinson Flint, the Fifteenth.” The names of his inventors. Fifteenth model. This is most definitely a robot, as if I didn’t know from his unpleasant vocal modulations and my broken arm. “With Child Protective Services.”\n\n“Dad,” Portia screams. “I know I’m not supposed to let anyone in, but he looked official.”\n\n“It’s ok,” I say, calmingly. But there is an immense fear deep in her voice. She’s scared, not of the giant (I’m guessing) robot, but of dear old dad. “What can I do for you, Fifteen?” I try to keep it casual. Maybe he won’t kill me.\n\n“Nothing. We’ve taken care of what we need to here.” He pauses, probably according to a script. “We have found this an unsafe environment for your children. But being that the whole world seems to be an unsafe environment for children right now, we are letting you off with a warning.”\n\nI breathe a sigh of relief. “A warning?”\n\n“We’ve removed your eyes, Mr. Hanlin.”\n\n“But-”\n\n“You can’t hit what you can’t see. We thank you for your time.”\n\nI hear him clomping over toys. Portia and Allen are crying. Probably unable to look at their eyeless dad. I guess it serves me right.\n\nAfter a few minutes I hear Allen laughing as Portia cries harder. He must be pulling her hair. Or is that something burning? I sit down in the nearest chair. Can’t do anything about it now. Damn kids.\n"
  title: Fifteen
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Douglas Woods
  date: 2009-02-25
  day: 25
  month: '02'
  text: ":::Hash total error:::Download failed:::\n\nPanic.  The floor sloped away to a dark abyss, rolling me inexorably forward.  Oblivion.\n\nHeads around me turned, slow, dumb, cow-like eyes passing over me without recognition.  Dull orbs blinked in unison.  Arms moved, not towards me, not grasping.  Echo of a persistent, hungry drum.  Involuntarily my right arm lifted in the first impulse of a complex motion performed–how many times?  Turning, I stumbled away from the clanking ribbon of machinery.  The..man?..to my right froze in his motion, hand cradling a plastic wedge that suddenly had no orifice to mate with.  Insert tab A into slot B.  Part of the mechanism was missing.\n\nI had to get out, but had no idea where I was, who I was.  Green light, a relic of another time, told me of “Exit”.  Exit I understood.  Exit before the repairman arrived.\n\nI was outside, the inverse of inside.  Blue and white.  The black ground reached for me, cracked with green filaments thrusting from the voids.  Grass, I suddenly knew.  On my hands and knees my stomach heaved, dry and painful.  I was empty.  I could not remember eating, drinking, sleeping…an empty vessel ready to hold–what?\n\nLater, propped against a tree, rough oatmeal-colored clothing ripped, knees and palms bloodied by the part run, part crawl to cover.  How much time before they came?  Was I safe?  Out of range?  Involuntarily my hand covered the small, metal contact behind my right ear.  I had a PIP.  I had to be out of range before the next Connect.  I ran some more, remembered more.\n\nThe change had come suddenly.  The PIP was only a tool, we were told, a neural interface to the electronic shroud of data and services that clung to the surface of the planet to a depth of thirty-odd miles.  Only those who could show need, or could use it productively, or could afford it would be provided one. I was a teacher, so was fitted with the device.  In a small way I felt the way God must feel, all knowing, all seeing.  I couldn’t recall if it had made me a better teacher.  The PIP, I thought (was it my thought?) was the pinnacle of human invention.  Then came Dobbs vs. Minnesota, and a Supreme Court ruling that the playing field had to be level.  No one should have an “unfair” advantage, at least not one that had not been provided initially by Mother Nature.  Everyone was to have a PIP, whether they wanted one or no.  It was a short step from that to Universal Mediocrity, where even home and heredity were to be set aside.  The human brain, it turned out, was ill equipped to fend off the kind of invasion that soon followed.  Dampers were downloaded that spread like a slow smile over the face of the human race.  All the same, all happy, made in the image of those who knew what was best for us.\n\nI stopped.  There was no flight, no “out of range”.  The ground beneath me was asphalt, had been a road.  From the overgrowth and lack of upkeep it was obvious there had been no traffic for many years.  A hundred yards ahead the course of the road turned to the right, disappearing into the trees and undergrowth.  I heard a bird.  I smelled the sharp, acidic odor of the brown leaves and petroleum tang of the hot pavement.  The sun beat down directly on my head.\n\nWhy not?\n\nLog in…\n\n:::New hardware found:::\n\n:::Downloading:::\n"
  title: Disconnect Before Removing Device
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Matthew Banks
  date: 2009-02-26
  day: 26
  month: '02'
  text: "“It’s starting to hurt again,” said Kevin. Myrna stood in the doorway watching him with red-rimmed eyes. She pressed her lips together.\n\n“It’s probably moving around.” Kevin clutched his stomach.\n\n“It’s getting worse! Jesus!” He let out a long, low moan, like a man with the world’s worst indigestion. Myrna just watched him. She reached down to her belt and snapped her holster open, touching the grip of the pistol for reassurance. She kept watching Kevin as he squirmed and lay back on the bed, staring up with watery eyes and holding his belly. Myrna frowned.\n\n“If you want me to…you know…” her fingers touched the pistol again “…just let me know.” Kevin looked over at her and blinked, then clamped his eyes shut and gripped his clenched stomach. The spasm passed after a moment.\n\n“It’s burrowing out, isn’t it?” Myrna didn’t say anything. It wasn’t really a question. Her fingernails tapped the grip. Kevin was now staring at her hand. His eyes dripped with tears, and every few seconds, lines of pain engraved themselves on his face. “Just promise me you’ll get the Bug that did this.” Myrna nodded, then jerked backwards as Kevin screamed and curled into a ball. This time, it didn’t stop, and he started thrashing on the bed, pounding his stomach with his fists and groaning and screaming. Myrna took the pistol out of the holster but didn’t cock it. Kevin yelped and whined like a wounded dog, then uncurled and sobbed quietly. After a moment, he looked up at her. His eyes were glassy and bloodshot. His stomach was starting to bruise and swell. They exchanged knowing expressions.\n\n“Tell me we didn’t do this for nothing,” he whispered. Myrna’s eyes got misty for a moment, and she gripped the pistol tighter.\n\n“We didn’t. The flyboys bombed that hive an hour ago.” Kevin blinked.\n\n“Are you just saying that…” he grunted and clawed at his writhing stomach “…to make me…feel better?” Myrna didn’t say anything. Kevin started groaning again. His body stiffened as he prepared for another wave of pain. Then, all his muscles started to clench. Even so, he still stared at her, blinking wetly. “All right…do it…” His speech dissolved into screams and grunts. Then, Myrna crossed the room, the gun fired, and Kevin lay still and silent. His stomach, though, was still squirming. With her tears now flowing freely, Myrna looked up at the ceiling of the bunker, trying to look through it, to the bombers that should have been there but weren’t. Soon, the new hive would be deep enough that no bombing run could destroy it. Los Angeles, like a dozen cities before it, would have to be evacuated.\n\n \n\nMyrna stepped out into the hallway, pausing on the threshold to massage her own aching stomach.\n\n“Tell me we didn’t do this for nothing,” she said to nobody, then pointed the pistol at her temple.\n"
  title: Larva
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Ken McGrath
  date: 2009-02-27
  day: 27
  month: '02'
  text: "The days were beyond hot. The unforgiving, bitter red sun dominated the sky, pulsing waves of heat flowed downwards onto the battered, scorched earth. We walked, trying to keep in the thin shadows cast by withered, torched trees. Their branches, like skeletons, stretched towards the sky, begging for mercy.\n\nBut there was no sympathy. Not for them and certainly not for us.\n\nNot here.\n\nWe gestured at each other, minor movements of the hands, gentle nods of the head. It was too much effort to communicate in any other way. There wasn’t enough saliva to talk anyway and our chapped, cracked lips were kept hidden behind cloth mouthpieces. Even if we’d had the urge to speak the dry air would probably have snatched the words away from us.\n\nOur eyes grew accustomed to the constant shimmer that danced along the horizon, to learn the differences between the almost imperceptibly similar shades of red that coloured everywhere we looked. To find shade where there should be none, a brief moment’s rest in the jaws of the fire.\n\nSand sifted and swirled gently around our feet. We walked slowly, painfully. But walk we did, but only by day. We would not move at night. When the sun finally set on our cursed lives each long, arduous day the temperature dropped quickly and we gathered ourselves, pitching our shelters as fast as our worn bodies would allow to escape the killer cold.\n\nThe days would scorch you alive, but the nights, the nights would steal the breath from your very soul.\n\nIt was impossible to travel during those short, dark hours. Some had tried it, but they’d died. We knew this because we saw their bones sometimes. Bleached and split they were like markers on the roads, lying in the fallow fields, pointers which showed us how fragile our lives could be. But they were proof we were surviving, proof that we moved in the right direction, for they all faced north. Out there, over how many more horizons we did not know, lay EDEN and for this we pushed onwards each red, raw day. The killing sun hanging over our heads, weighing us down and drying us out.\n\nBut onwards we went shuffling forwards slowly, slow and determined. This is what drove us out under that burning star each day. That slight glimmer of hope that it was possible to live again, that there might be something better for us, something worth surviving for.\n\nThat’s why at night we slept.\n"
  title: At Night We Slept
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Dr. Alexanders
  date: 2009-02-28
  day: 28
  month: '02'
  text: "Hundreds of years of exploration, trillions of dollars into research on space travel, all culminating in the single most astounding and miraculous discovery in all of human history, and the only tangible result of that effort was the Unity Dome. Gerald shook his head as he walked through the padded corridor that cut across the barren surface of the moon, “Seems like a waste to me”.\n\nHis companion was noticeably more enthusiastic. “I can’t believe I was selected for the fifth viewing! I mean, you were there, the first to make contact but I almost had a heart attack when I got the hyperwave. It’s been such a rush. First class flight from Europa, a suite in the Tranquility Hilton! God above, I can’t believe I am this lucky!”\n\nGerald bristled at the unbridled enthusiasm, “Look, man, you don’t know what you are talking about. Like you said, I have done this before! It’s nothing to look forward to.”\n\nCameron seemed not to hear him, “A chance to watch an alien play, to see how they think and feel. An opportunity to view a mind so different than ours that communication is basically impossible! And it only happens once a year! Aren’t you excited?”\n\nGerald took a moment to remember how it had started. Humanity had been visiting alien worlds for almost a thousand years and discovered the galaxy to be a barren and boring place. Occasionally some rock would have pools of water on it and maybe some bacteria or some microscopic shrimp-like creatures, but nothing intelligent. The galaxy was nothing more than an empty space suitable for mining, dumping, and esoteric research. He had been hauling a load of toxic waste with a three man crew out into the middle of nowhere. Who would have thought that would have bought him a place in the history books? As the one manning the cockpit, he had seen it first, the smooth, black sphere hovering mere feet from their bow.\n\nAfter that singular moment of elation, things had quickly gone downhill. Millions of minds had bent their efforts towards communication with the aliens but there were just too many differences. As far as anyone could tell, the aliens were just as confused and frustrated as they were. As beings of mostly light and energy, though they did have an organic core, they seemed to communicate through flashes of electromagnetic energy, in the visible through the microwave range of the spectrum, but no one could make any sense of it. At some point, Dr. Vandrashir had come up with the idea of the Unity Dome, and somehow had managed to communicate its purpose to the aliens, or at least we thought he had. And now, once a year, they came to the moon and met with humanity.\n\nCameron took Gerald’s long pause as an opportunity to ask another question, “Do you know what we are performing this time?”\n\nGerald was started out of his remembrance, “Oh… King Lear, I think. Who knows what they’ll make of that. Just remember that afterwards, when they take the stage, to put on your goggles. Otherwise the radiation they emit will blind you. Even with them on it’ll probably just be a confusing hour of flashing lights and low moaning, it just gives me a headache.”\n\nCameron didn’t seem to hear him, and as he stepped through the threshold at the end of the corridor into the darkness of the performing hall he said, “God, this is going to be the most exciting moment of my life.”\n\nGerald wished he could have shared his enthusiasm.\n"
  title: Unity Dome
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Benjamin Fischer
  date: 2009-03-01
  day: '01'
  month: '03'
  text: "“I want to talk to the shaman.”\n\nBorhani’s words drew blank looks from the Lakota braves. A few raised their eyebrows and the surliest of the lot paused his cigarette long enough to spit.\n\n“The medicine man,” said Borhani.\n\n“What the hell are you talking about?” said the surly one.\n\n“Your wizard,” Borhani added.\n\n“Ain’t got no wizards here,” came the reply.\n\nSurly took a long drag on his cigarette and exhaled. The soldiers waited, radiating their collective distaste of the foreigner.\n\nBorhani started again.\n\n“I’ve been told that your war party has strong magic. That you can call in the gods against your enemies.”\n\nThe Lakota shifted awkwardly, a few fingering the automatic rifles slung across their flak vests.\n\n“Mister, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said a tall brave.\n\n“The raid on Saint Cloud,” said Borhani, growing impatient, “where you were ambushed by antitank elements at that bridge over the Mississippi–you were able to regroup because a meteor strike stopped the counterattack. Who did that?”\n\nA slow, toothy grin broke across the faces of the braves.\n\n“You want Stars-Fall-At-His-Command,” said the tall one.\n\n“Yes,” said Borhani.\n\n“Well, why didn’t you say so?” asked Surly.\n\n“Take me to him,” replied Borhani.\n\nSurly flicked aside his smoke and started for a nearby hovercraft. Borhani fell in beside him, trudging quickly through the crushed grass of the circled war party. The plump camouflage skirts of a dozen raider skiffs marked out its edges. Surly led the pale foreign man to a particularly worn and dented  specimen.\n\n“Stars, you got a visitor,” Surly called into the cavernous hatch.\n\n“Roger,” someone answered.\n\nA lean, tanned Lakota wearing a grey field jacket clambered out of the hovercraft. A mean-looking submachinegun swung from a sling on his back. His face was just as welcoming.\n\n“Major Stars-Fall,” he said, offering a hand.\n\nBorhani shook it.\n\n“Travis Borhani,” he replied. “Junior partner at Lino, Rubin and Ozgener.”\n\n“Lawyer. Huh. What brings you?”\n\n“Messenger duty,” said Borhani. “I represent off planet interests.”\n\n“Don’t you all,” said Stars, taking an offered cigarette from Surly.\n\n“My clients have been attempting communications for a few months,” Borhani said, “but connectivity has been poor to say the least.”\n\n“We don’t do the net,” said Stars.\n\n“We noticed.”\n\n“Uh huh,” Stars said, lighting up.\n\n“My clients sent me here to request that you surrender your targeting equipment and cease calling in orbital strikes.”\n\nStars gave him a blank look.\n\n“You may turn it over to me,” said Borhani, unfazed, “or you may deliver it to our satellite offices in Springfield, Kansas City, or Topeka.”\n\nStars was silent for a minute, nursing his cigarette.\n\n“I suppose you have papers.”\n\nBorhani nodded, pulling a sheaf from under his coat. He held them out to the Lakota.\n\nStars shook his head.\n\n“Naw, I don’t need to see them.”\n\n“You are refusing?” asked Borhani.\n\nStars nodded.\n\n“You realize that this will result in further legal action.”\n\nStars took another drag on his smoke, the hint of a smile in his eyes.\n\n“Tell your bosses that they ain’t collecting nothing,” he said. “And even if they did, it wouldn’t do them a bit of good.”\n\nBorhani shrugged.\n\n“It takes codes,” Stars said. “The gear alone is useless. Tells me your clients aren’t legitimate, else they could just shut it down on their own.”\n\n“I’m just the messenger,” said Borhani.\n\n“Fine. But we burned Minnetonka last night,” said Stars as he climbed back into his ship, “and we’ll probably have another go at Duluth soon. When whoever’s in charge up there gets tired of me, I’ll let you know.”\n\nSurly touched the lawyer’s elbow. It was time to go.\n"
  title: Stars Fall At His Command
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Sam Clough
  date: 2009-03-02
  day: '02'
  month: '03'
  text: "We stole the blinkpacks from the research facilities at Ceti Alpha. Stable displacement technology, suitable for individual use. We sealed the holes in our assault armour and slapped on the packs: suddenly we could step through walls and down corridors, infiltrating past sentries and guards and turrets with ease. You could even rig a spare pack to act as a bomb: find something big, displace it into something bigger. If you squint, an overlap detonation looks a lot like a nuke.\n\nFrom there, we blinked around the perimeter worlds, looting, stealing, hoarding all the high technology and research material we could find: and what we found shocked and horrified us. The colonies were so far ahead of the core worlds that some of them had ceased to even resemble humans. Halfman recombinations with terran or alien stock, populations translated entirely into a digital form or living out in the open under a half-klick of liquid methane.\n\nWe blinked out as far as we could; we found terror. Machines. Of arguably human origin. Some even still bore ancient factional flags. There were hundreds of millions of them in every system we checked. Half our men didn’t return, and most of the rest never left again. We dug in the archives, and the libraries; we even unearthed a few buried data centres to find out who to blame.\n\nThese were clanking replicators, skewed by thousands of generations of isolation from intelligent guidance. They replicated out of control, torching systems and turning the rubble into more of themselves. One advance party discovered a strain that spent the resources of entire planets to extinguish stars in one shot.\n\nWe figured out a plan. It was our only hope of long-term survival. No-one could see any other way. We knew we’d be remembered as monsters, but in the grand balance, we thought that it would be better that someone was there to remember us at all.\n\nWe committed grand and unholy sabotage across the thousand worlds. Shocktroops equipped with blinkpacks teleported deep into power stations, factories and defense relays, breaking and fusing and detonating. Navies were brought down in port, armories reduced to useless scrap. We left a thousand worlds without a single communication array or functional ship.\n\nQuickly-assembled arrays folded space, and our navies appeared in colonial orbits. Purification-yield nuclear devices, biological warfare agents and cleansed the hundred worlds we needed. The engineers of the core worlds were flung to these hundred barren wastes, and were set to work. All the while, our fleets tore through the perimeter worlds, conducting a campaign of total annihilation: the might and fury of old humanity, rage driven by our history, our twenty-four thousand years of hatred, violence and war.\n\nWe didn’t understand the science, but we certainly understood the engineering. We turned those hundred worlds into the triggers for a giant chain reaction that would wipe out a reasonable portion of our cosmological back yard; isolating the core worlds with a rift of space washed clean of matter. This was our firebreak, our last best hope of survival. We doomed two hundred and fifteen billion people for the sake of thirty billion.\n\nWas it worth it?\n\nI don’t know.\n"
  title: Blink 542
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Eric L. Sofer
  date: 2009-03-03
  day: '03'
  month: '03'
  text: "Humanitarian, Not Vegetarian\n\nWe were assembled for the yearly Meal of Thanks, and we had imported food, delicacies from Earth. Dad gets it through his job; he works for a corporation that does space exploration. About forty years back, they found this planet, Earth, and its inhabitants, Humans, and it turned out that we can eat Earth food. I don’t like it, but the rest of the family loves it – and it was what we having for the Meal.\n\nI was helping my mom with appetizers, preparing Spanish peanuts and Brazil nuts.  I was more than happy to be in the food prep chamber because Great-Uncle Goje joined us this year. Dad said Uncle Goje was actually born on Earth, but I don’t know if I believe that. Dad says a lot about Earth that must be fabrications. Example:  he says Earth people live in square constructs called “buildings” instead of caverns. How could someone want to live in a fake cavern?\n\nI brought out the snacks with a spon for each bowl.  My stupid little brother was hanging on Uncle Goje’s every word. The old beast was going on about how he had been on Earth long before we ever landed there, and he wanted to live in peace, but there wasn’t anyone on Earth like him.  Except for his old friend, “Mr. Cong” – “…and they treated him like a king, I tell you!” Uncle Goje sputtered.\n\nI settled down to suffer when mother came out. “Hope everyone’s hungry! There’s plenty of Earth food Earth tonight!”  My mother had worked overtime this year – to make my dad happy, I think. After the Observation of Silent Gratitude, Dad had to name every single thing, as if he personally had gone to Earth, caught everything, and prepared it.\n\n“That’s Virginia ham, that’s Canadian bacon, those are French fries and Idaho potatoes, and these are called Brussels sprouts,” he said, pointing at each container. “English muffins, Belgian waffles, Hungarian goulash, and Elle, this is called Irish stew – I bet you’ll love it!” he said to me.  I thought he’d probably lose that bet, but I showed respect – it [i]was[/i] the Meal of Thanks.  My stupid brother, picked up something from a bowl – I think Dad called it Swiss cheese – and started to pop it into his mouth.\n\n“Aarg!” my mother hissed at him.  “You remove the stasis field from that or you’ll get sick as a spinner, and I’ll have to take you to the med center!”  Aarg stuck one of his tongues out at her when she turned away and used his spon to remove the stasis field, and stuffed the wriggling bit of food into his maw.\n\nAs predicted, the family dined with gusto, while I just toyed with my food.  At last, Uncle Goje leaned back in the special split back chair we have for him, to accommodate his back spines, and asked Mom, “’Thra, my dear, do you mind if I smoke?”\n\nShe sighed and nodded, and Uncle Goje puffed out three rings of smoke, and then ignited them with his breath, and I took my cue.  “May I be excused to do homework, Dad?”\n\n“Go ahead, Elle,” he answered.  “And Aarg! Stop playing with your food!”\n\nMy little brother lifted a claw as a small piece – I think it was a German rye – screamed and struggled as Aarg grabbed it with his fangs and gnawed it to pieces.  I ducked down the corridor into my chamber, and into my slime pit.\n\nI don’t care what the rest of my family says.  I hate Human food.\n"
  title: Humanitarian, not Vegetarian
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2009-03-04
  day: '04'
  month: '03'
  text: "It was refreshing in a way, this whole ‘not having to talk’ thing.\n\nThe blue Radocephamoeba across from me ‘listened’ patiently to the string of questions embedded in the constant flow of my pheromones and body odor.  There were subtleties in our smell that we had no idea were there.\n\nThe Radocephamoebas were huge semi-transparent shape-changing tentacled scentograph andromorphs.  They were here doing research.  They had no outward sensory apparatus of any kind that we could see.  They ate by osmosis.  When they were hungry, ovals would appear on their bodies like liver spots that oozed numbing digestive juices.  Food was pressed to one of these ovals, the food absorbed, and the spots would disappear.\n\nI could still see this one’s lunch floating in the thickness of his torso.\n\nOther than that, their bodies, as far as we could tell, were basically giant noses from tip to stern.  Every slippery pore was a nostril.  The connected cells of their bodies did the rest.  Every cell was a small brain.  Together, they computed.\n\nWhen referring to ‘my’ assigned Rad, I always called him Big Blue because of his brilliant mouthwash colouring and his size.  The Rads differed in colour from one to another wildly.  They were called Jelly Babies or Jelly Beans in popular slang.\n\nUsing several tendrils to rapidly tap answers out on a laptop for me, he answered questions that I didn’t fully realize that I was asking.  I had no control over my pheromones and they really held nothing back.  I was unintentionally candid and honest in a way that I had never been in real life when Big Blue took deep, silent sniffs of my long, rambling pheromones.\n\nThe First Team had thought it was telepathy for three full hours after first contact until a communication apparatus was successfully set up.  Oh, how they all laughed.  It was famous footage.\n\nOne thing the Rads could do was go ‘silent’ and stop smelling.  Scientists were fascinated by this and research was underway.\n\nThere was only a certain temperament of Rad that volunteered to research the humans.  Earth was incredibly ‘noisy’ by way of stink.  Every person on the planet was shouting out their true thoughts, unfiltered intentions, hopes and dreams for all the Rads to hear.\n\nApparently, Big Blue was a talker and loved to listen.  His replies to me on the laptop were verbose at any rate.\n\nNow, I call him Big Blue when I’m writing my reports down but he says that I named him something else from the complicated smell reaction I had when I first saw him.  He took my name for him from that reaction.  It goes something like:\n\n“Holy (alarm) that thing is huge I don’t know if I’m up for this it scares me I wonder how my mom (parent twosex breed half) is doing I think I’ll have a late meal (food type) am I just standing here staring be professional they think in smell they think in smell they think in smell-“\n\nEach time he types it out it’s a little different but he always colours a bit darker up top with what we now know is mirth.\n\nThey’re equally fascinated by our ability to have not only one but five senses to their two senses of touch and smell.  They marvel at our ability to deal with the input.\n\nThe Rads told us about a far-off race that has over twenty-six senses.\n\nThe two-way research traffic has so far been very rewarding.  First contacts don’t always go this smoothly.\n"
  title: Talkstink
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Todd Hammrich
  date: 2009-03-05
  day: '05'
  month: '03'
  text: "The first thing to hit him upon waking was the metallic taste in his mouth. Every morning it was the same taste. It told him the machines inside his body had been working again; cleaning, scrubbing, scraping and sterilizing. It was the symbol of his life. Sterile.\n\nHe got out of bed and admired his physique. His body was muscled and smooth. He was the ideal image of man, someone’s ideal anyway. It amazed him how fluid-like his movements were as he strolled across the room. It was the machines again, always the machines. They had sculpted his body to look like this so he could do the work required of him. Their work.\n\n“Good morning. The time is 8:05. It is time for breakfast. Your nutrition solution is awaiting you at the table.” The sound issued forth from hidden speakers all around the room and followed him as he went into the dining room. “Today’s schedule is full. You must work quickly to fulfill your quota.”\n\nHis nutritive solution tasted slightly bitter to him this morning. A clear sign his body was in need of some essential materials for the maintenance of the machines that scoured his body of all ailments. It occurred to him then that maybe they weren’t ingestible by humans, but he knew that none of the material would get through his body. The machines would undoubtedly absorb all the harmful material before it got through his stomach.\n\nOn a whim he decided to take the day off. “I don’t feel like working today computer. Please re-schedule today’s activities for another time.” His voice sounded like the rasping of tissue paper, not because anything was wrong with him, that would not have been permitted, but because he used it so rarely. He would go out walking he decided. It wasn’t necessary, he knew, but it brought him pleasure to see natural world outside his small habitation complex. He liked the thought that Mother Nature was reclaiming her world without the aid of any machinery.\n\n“If you are certain. We will carry on tomorrow then. Do not go out of range of the transmitters. Enjoy your walk.” The computer knew him all too well. It had probably already known he would not be working that day anyway. He knew that it had when he found his hiking pack by the door already prepared.\n\nThe outside air was clean and lacked the bite of reprocessing chemicals permeating his enclosure. A perfect circle of plant life surrounded his dwelling, exactly 10 meters from the walls. Machines were very precise. His complex sat on a small hill overlooking a ruined city, the walls and streets of the ancient world decomposing at an accelerated rate because no one was there to stop them.\n\nIt was a strange thought that struck him then, a sadness that threatened to overwhelm him. “I am the last. The last of the human race.” It was so terrible that he knew he would not be able to bear it. Immediately he dashed across the open space and through the trees trying to get out of the receivers range so that the machines inside would lose power and he could die.\n\nBefore he made it even halfway there the machines released a wave of chemicals into his blood stream that calmed him. He stopped, forgetting what he was doing. After many long minutes striving to remember he made his way back to the enclosure and decided he would work after all. The computer made a silent tally: Attempt number 3650. The machines kept track of everything.\n"
  title: The Tally
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2009-03-06
  day: '06'
  month: '03'
  text: "Although born of desperation, it certainly seemed to be an ideal solution.  Volcanologists had concluded that a devastating eruption of the Yellowstone Caldera would occur within ten years; fifteen at the most.  To make matters worse, the seismological data, the spectrographic analyzes of the volcanic gasses, and the escalating pressures within of the magma chamber, all indicated that the inevitable supereruption would be Titanic, that’s with a capital “T.”  In fact, it would likely rival the “Great Toba Event;” the largest volcanic eruption in the last 25 million years.  It was predicted that hundreds of thousands would die in the immediate aftermath of the explosion.  As catastrophic as that would be, it was insignificant compared to the loss of life that was predicted as a result of the volcanic winter caused by the trillions of cubic meters of tephra ejected into the atmosphere.  The consensus opinion of the “experts” was that the Yellowstone Event would likely threaten the very existence of mankind.  So, by now you’re probably wondering, dammit, what’s the ideal solution?  Why, the Hephaestus Geothermic Siphon, of course.\n\nNamed for the Greek god of volcanoes, the Hephaestus Geothermic Siphon consisted of three major components:\n\n•\tThe massive Sigurðsson-Björk subterranean endothermic induction “vacuum” to remotely suck the heat energy from the magma chamber,\n\n•\tA ring of Carnot enthalpy exchangers surrounding the caldera, and\n\n•\tA gigantic array of microwave broadcast dishes to beam all of the heat energy into space.\n\nBasically, it’s the steroid version of the system that’s been used by the Republic of Iceland to generate electricity since the mid twenty second century.\n\nThe construction of the Mega-Siphon was put into high gear as dozens of nations pitched in to help.  However, because of the complexity of the project, the accelerated schedule, and the lack of adequate full scale experimental data, there were a few unforeseen operational “glitches” when the Siphon was powered up for the first time.  Apparently, there was an overload in the Jónsson Alignment Compensators, which caused the endothermic vacuum inducers in Montana, Colorado, and Utah to change their focus angle.  As a result, the Siphon ended up sucking heat from the Earth’s molten core, rather than from the caldera’s magma chamber.  The excess heat energy then caused an uncontrolled chain reaction in the Helmholtz transfer regulators.  Well, I guess I don’t have to tell you what that means.  Any third grader knows that without the regulators controlling the rate of energy transfer, the Siphon goes berserk.  With all the fused relays, it took over a month to shut the Siphon down.  In the meantime, it sucked so much heat from the Earth’s molten core that it solidified.  Now, you’re probably thinking “that’s bad,” and you’re right.  The Earth needs a liquid metal core to sustain its magnetic field.  Without a magnetic field, all kinds of vile charged particles from the sun and outer space can reach the surface of the Earth, and wreak havoc on a perfectly good planet, not to mention ruining your summertime vacation.\n\nBut fret not, my friends.  I am told that our scientists are now working on a Celestial Angular Momentum Converter, which will bleed off orbital energy from the moon in order to remelt the Earth’s metallic core.  Of course, as the moon looses angular momentum, it will begin to spiral downward toward the Earth.  But again, no worries, because the scientists have assured us that they are pretty certain they can turn the Earth’s core liquid again long before the moon actually crashes into us.  It certainly seems to be an ideal solution.  Stay tuned.\n"
  title: The Geothermic Siphon (An Ideal Solution)
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Gavin Raine
  date: 2009-03-07
  day: '07'
  month: '03'
  text: "A small child came up to me while I waited in the park. Came right up to me, touched my colourless hair and ran his fat little fingers over the wrinkles on my face. When he asked me what they were, I told him that old father time had carved them with his knife, and then I laughed at his wondrous expression.\n\nI would have talked with the boy for longer, but his worthless mother showed-up to snatch him away. She gave me a look that was pure hatred, though I’d done nothing wrong. Obviously, she understood what an old man is and why one would exist in the world of the young. There was no need to worry though, because it’s not the children that draw me here.\n\nI come to the park to watch for Angela. I’ve been spending most of my afternoons here, since I found her again. She was my first and, in a way, she was the genesis of all my troubles.\n\nAll those years ago, our first date was a triumph. She laughed at my jokes, searched my eyes and seemed to like what she found, and even held my hand as I walked her home. When we got there, she invited me in for coffee. It was all perfect, right up to the point where the little bitch asked me to leave.\n\nI was so angry! You don’t play the tease, invite a guy up, and then go cold on him at the last possible moment. So, what she’d attempted to deny to me, I took by force. I tried to say sorry later, but when I left in the morning, she called the police.\n\nNow, they tell me that I’m a serial sex offender. I’ve served four jail terms, each longer than the last and all for the same offence – with various women. Through the last two sentences, my youth preserving treatments have been withheld. The last judge claimed that I’d left her with no choice. That the law didn’t give her the opportunity to impose a death sentence, but she couldn’t let me go on living and re-offending forever. She was another bitch.\n\nJust after five pm, I spotted Angela walking back to her apartment building. I cut across the park and timed my arrival to catch the door as it swung behind her.\n\nShe was waiting for the elevator and I marvelled at how little she’d changed. Her trim figure, that lovely solemn face and the shine on her cropped black hair were all exactly as I remembered. I walked over to stand behind her and she caught my reflection in the elevator doors. There was a telltale widening of the eyes, some shock I think, perhaps even a little fear, but no recognition – not yet anyway.\n\nThen the elevator doors opened and the connection between us was broken. Angela stepped forward and I followed.\n"
  title: Only the Good Die Young
  year: 2009
- 
  author: A. Munck
  date: 2009-03-08
  day: '08'
  month: '03'
  text: "Man claims a bad joy.  He has his hand on the radar.  The oil, sweat sheen on his palm reacts with chemicals on the screen and reveals ships in the darkness.  Man has waited a long time alone in the dark.\n\n“Stasis… two-thirds.”\n\nThe new planet spun serenely below.  Man woke up one by one to see which children, parents, brothers, sisters had died in their sleep.  They gathered at windows, murmurous, tugging on crosses, pocket Qu’rans, rosaries, the Wiccan Rede on a Kindle, staring into the oceans and continents of another Earth.\n\nLanding went well.  Nearly all the equipment had come through intact.  Man found trees in his new home.  Cabins went up.  A mill burdened the river.  Maize and beans wed alien soil and children made pets of tiny tri-legged beetles.  When the necessities of life had been established, joint town meetings were held in the new sister cities of Armstrong and Aldrin.\n\n“We’ll build the First Unitarian Church of Terra Nova,” Man said.  “We’ll build it between our two cities, and thank God for saving us all.”\n\nMan put his back into it.  The heavy ridge beam went up, made of unnamed wood, which Man called oak.  The spine of the church was long and sturdy, the rafters straight.  Walls rose.  Glass was melted and a window stained; Man carved four altars, a cross, a star, a pentagon, a crescent.\n\nHe congratulated himself on his new tolerance.  He came to worship – there were no Saturdays or Sundays, just days – and to sit for once together in peace.\n\n“Brothers and Sisters,” he said.  “Let us pray.”\n\nOur Father Allah Mother-Goddess Yahweh,\n\nThou who art in Heaven,\n\nHallowed be thy name,\n\nThy Kingdom come,\n\nThy will be done,\n\nOn Earth as it is in Heaven…\n\nMan stopped praying and raised his head to gaze on the length of the high ridge beam, white with unleaded paint.  There was nothing above him.  The beam stared blankly at the floor.\n\n“God, wilt thou not speak to me?” he cried, each brother, sister, child and parent separately, silently, in his own breast.  The prayer went on without resonance.  No sentience had grown on Nova Terra, and no sacredness felt.  Though maize stretched high in the light of a red sun, some necessities of life had not survived the grafting.\n\nMan was alone in his church.\n"
  title: Grafting
  year: 2009
- 
  author: mjcast
  date: 2009-03-09
  day: '09'
  month: '03'
  text: "I toss and turn trying to log on to the sleep server. By myself in my bed, my apartment, yet never alone. The endless chatter of the web constantly bombarding my consciousness with pictures, messages and update streams. I am unable to tune it out, log in and get much needed sleep.\n\nMy doctor says that I need to relax and try and get a good rest.\n\n“In the past it had taken a while for someone who wasn’t born into the MindLine experience to adapt and tune out the streaming, however that was ages ago. You were born and immediately implanted with MindShare, you should have developed the coping patch within your mind to merge seamlessly with the software, and be able to filter out when you need to. Update your links to the sleep server and check those connections throughout the day.”\n\nThanks for the advice…but I can’t anymore. Damn doc wouldn’t even prescribe anything to help. Not since the Emphino Virus, were they able to prescribe anti-nets for fear of virus’ becoming drug resistant.\n\nI had made it through 30 years of connected life then I lapsed on a Delta wave patch and I hit a midlife crisis, hard. It didn’t take long for things to come crashing down around me; with the level of connectedness everyone knows pretty quickly when something is wrong. Pretty soon my boss was calling me in for ‘special talks’ and recommending a pysch eval.\n\n“The eval will help you get back on track. I looked at your entire avatar post history, you have no irregularities aside from the usual teenage stuff,” he had said.\n\nHowever, I haven’t slept in two months. I can’t escape.\n\nI lay here staring at the ceiling, viewing updates flashed from people on the other side of the world waking up and messaging to their avatars. Stream after stream, some from people I know in the flesh however mostly from contacts and associates across the wires. Thoughts, feelings, ideas instantly relayed through MindShare for all to see and peruse.\n\nI had done it casually at first, bought the drill gun with plans to put in a half wall in my office. Left it charging in the garage for a couple of days till I knew for certain it was necessary. I hadn’t even allowed myself the ability to formulate the idea lest it be posted to my avatar.\n\nThat didn’t matter; I had leaked a post unknowingly. As soon as I tried to bore out MindShare and destroy my connection permanently, my hand froze and I got a post from the MindLine Security Authority that they were sending an ambulance to pick me up. A nice room had been reserved for my avatar at Ion Systems Hospital, a few weeks ago according to the post date.\n\nI had been deemed a virus and am subject to be quarantined from the system. I look forward to the silence of life and the embrace of a systemless sleep…\n"
  title: MindShare
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2009-03-10
  day: 10
  month: '03'
  text: "Kruger had given up wiping the dust off his goggles, relying instead on the shadow cast by the ridge line for direction, a shadow that was shrinking. They’d have to find a pass to the other side before the sun swung overhead, or risk boiling in their watersuits.\n\nA gap in the rock opened up, and turning into it, Kruger saw in his periphery what looked like a large rock retreat into the shadows. He stopped, and Packard stepped into him hard from behind, almost knocking him down.\n\n“Warn me before you do that.” Packard’s was too tired for his voice to convey annoyance.\n\nKruger pawed away the dust on his goggles, staring into the darkness. Had he hallucinated that?\n\n“I think that rock’s alive,” he pointed one gloved finger, raising his arm only from the elbow, “the locals eat some kind of shell meat from out here, that might be food.”\n\nHis copilot moved closer, wiping at the red film that obscured his vision, skepticism hidden beneath his sealed headpiece.\n\n“I wish I’d thought to grab the rock hunting gear before we bailed.” Kruger noted his companion wasn’t too tired for sarcasm.\n\nKruger kicked loose a chunk of stone and tossed it into the darkness, flinching despite himself as a flat expanse of what appeared to be rock dislodged itself and lumbered along on four angular legs in the shadows before hunkering down and becoming still again.\n\n“I think we’d best leave that alone Kruge, I doubt we could beat that craggy bastard to death on a good day.”\n\nKruger felt a bead of sweat form on his nose before his recycler snatched it up, and he realized the sun had moved overhead, the temperature inside his suit rising.\n\n“We’ll get ahead of it, chase it out into the open.” Kruger moved slowly, careful to step back inside the decaying shadow.\n\n“Ahead of it?”, Packard’s voice taking on an incredulous tone, “Chase the damned thing? We’ve been walking for four bloody days, I’m not in any shape to catch anything, and if we did, how do you propose we kill it?”\n\n“We sweat to stay cool, and we’ve got suits to conserve moisture. That thing’s hiding in the shadows and trying hard not to move. If we make it run in the open desert, I doubt it will last five minutes.”\n\n“I doubt if I’ll last five minutes.”\n\n“Pack, it could be days before we get back, we need food. We just run it until it drops, and it’ll bake in the sun all afternoon. We wait in the shade until dark, then we eat.” Kruger had a plan. Kruger always had a plan.\n\nPackard shook his head, but followed the pilot’s lead, moving carefully past the creature while collecting fist sized chunks of rock.\n\nWhen they were safely on the shadowed side of the ridge, they began mercilessly pelting the animal with thrown stone, forcing it first to retreat to the edge of the outcropping, and then reluctantly to break cover and lumber off into the blinding afternoon sun. They chased it as far as they could, before returning to the safety of the overhang, watching it stagger and falter on the open ground, unable to find refuge from the heat.\n\nKruger sat carefully, leaning back against the rock. “Now we wait.”\n\nPackard pictured the hard shelled creature, likely drifting over with sand while they sat there.\n\n“I only wish I’d thought to grab a can opener when I was bailing out.”\n\nPackard again; always with the sarcasm.\n"
  title: Hot Rock
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Q.B. Fox
  date: 2009-03-11
  day: 11
  month: '03'
  text: "When we broke down, it left me with some time to kill, so I slipped into a little café near the port and bought a latte and a muffin. The breakfast rush had long gone and it was still too soon for an early lunch, so I was the only customer apart from a casually dressed fellow, sat against the wall and lost behind that day’s paper.\n\nI idled away the minutes as the coffee cooled, breaking pieces off the muffin and staring dreamily out of the large windows at the beautiful people filling the sun drenched streets; amazingly perfect, colourfully dressed, beautiful people.\n\nOf course, if you know nothing else about the place, and to be honest I knew very little more, you’d have heard about the accident. When was it? Five years ago? Ten?\n\nAnyway, it was a funny thought, to think that all these perfect people had been made that way; remade that way, really.\n\nIt was so unexpected I jumped when he spoke. Perhaps I’d mumbled something of my thoughts out loud (I do that sometimes), perhaps he’d just guessed what I was thinking.\n\n“You ever been to the aquarium, ever seen the reef exhibit?” he asked, a disembodied voice from behind the headlines.\n\nI confessed I’d not seen anymore of the city than what I could see through this window.\n\n“If you go during the day,” he explained, “and look into the tank, it’s filled with beautiful fish, all different colours and shapes and patterns, but each one as beautiful as the next.”\n\nI crumbled a raisin out of the sponge, popped it in my mouth, turning to face him.\n\n“But if you go in the evening,” he continued casually, half his attention apparently still focused on the news print, “they dim the lights, make it night time, and that’s when the ugly fish come out; grey and brown fish with bug eyes and pointy, sticky-out teeth; funny looking, bloated fish, with round bodies and stubby fins; freak show fish not meant to be out in the light of day.”\n\nHe paused; and I waited, waited to see where he was going.\n\n“It’s not like those fish are put into the tank at night, they’re there all along, hiding in the crevices in the coral, waiting for it to be safe to go out.”\n\nAnd then he did something that shocked me, made me see the whole world differently.\n\nHe lowered his paper.\n"
  title: Ugly Fish
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2009-03-12
  day: 12
  month: '03'
  text: "It was a rookie mistake.  It was embarrassing that someone of my history and career would do something so basically stupid.\n\nI liked working with primitives.\n\nI remember living with the Inupiaqs, sharpening arrowheads with them, cutting holes in the ice.\n\nI remember hanging out with the Aztecs, gilding turquoise masks for ceremonies.\n\nDozens of other societies.  Always smiling.  Working with one’s hands.  If there was a constant so far in history, even as far down the line as where I’m from, it’s that a couple of people plan, a few more oversee, and then many, many pairs of hands get dirty with assembling and following directions.\n\nI’m a historian from hundreds of years in the future.  I come back in a body that’s designed for the target timeframe with a handle on the language and basically just hang out with the workers.  They’re easy to put at ease and generally not too suspicious.  I float around in their brains while they work.\n\nThis time I was in Kansas on a farm.  I was a handyman who’d just drifted into town a few years previously.  So far, I’d made a few friends.  I was with one of them now.\n\nJack Kempler, a widower who was good with machines.\n\nIt was raining outside and Jack’s dogs, Strawberry and Chocolate, were asleep on the dirt by the door.  It was a peaceful afternoon.\n\nJack and I were working on the machine, listening to the rain hit the roof, while I feigned inadequate knowledge of the machine’s basic principles.\n\nI was very much at ease.  Maybe that’s why I screwed up.\n\nI was deep in Jack’s mind and I was recording.  He was reflecting on his life and wishing he could put it back in order as easy as working on this machine.  Underneath it all was a curious soul-crushing yearning for what might have happened on a different path.\n\nI was deep in his mind, you have to understand, and he asked the question.  I was relaxed and it felt like a conversation.\n\nWithout thinking, I answered.\n\nI fluttered a deck of cards to him with my mind, showing him the nearest fifty lifestyles he could have had with the different choices that had been available to him around the main core of his life-thread.  I even threw one in where he’d been born a woman.  It was meant to be humorous.\n\nJack stiffened and dropped his wrench.\n\nToo late, I realized what I’d done.  I wasn’t having a conversation with a contemporary.  I’d just stuffed fifty lives worth of information into a one-life brain with no augmented backup in the slightest.  On a quantum level, there was enough room but the very nature of the molecules in his mind shuddered.  Without a calibrator and adequate other-drives, he was lost.\n\nJack lay down on the ground and died with a sigh.\n\nWe had to bring in a replacement biomaton to restore this timeline.  Luckily, Jack only had a few more years to live and a few more visits with his children to look after.  Speaking from a causality standpoint, damage control was almost routine in his case.\n\nSo luck was on my side.  That did not abate my professional shame or personal grief.\n\nI now have what Jack’s temporal counterparts would call a ‘desk job’ upstream.  I monitor timeframes and look for ripples.  There’s talk of letting me have my license back once I pass a few more re-instatement tests but I’m not hopeful.\n"
  title: Mistake
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Jeff McGaha
  date: 2009-03-13
  day: 13
  month: '03'
  text: "John fumbled at the door, the alcohol hindering his coordination. His frustration, first directed at the keys, grew to include the lock, the door, the house and eventually Mary. His fury cresting, he pounded his fist into the door. “Mary…honey…open up. My goddamn key don’t work.” The beating of the door grew harsher and more insistent. The pummeling shook the whole house. John’s slurred words became louder and callous as his entry was denied. Dogs began to bark, but the neighbors didn’t involve themselves. They never did.\n\nMary sat silently on the couch. She shivered with fear. For nine years, this had been their routine. John would get drunk on a Friday night and Mary would have to wear sunglasses for a week. The same thing seemed to happen every few months. Mary was frightened, but prepared this time.\n\nFinally, John kicked in the door. His face flushed with anger and whiskey. He spotted Mary quivering on the sofa. “You stupid bitch.” John strode to Mary in three steps, knocking over a lamp and coffee table in his path.\n\n“St-,” was all that escaped Mary’s lips before John had his hand around her throat and began choking her. He was angry and going to kill her this time. Mary took her right hand and jammed her palm into John’s chest. He flew across the room and smashed into the wall. The house rumbled from the impact. With the wind knocked out of him, John rested on the ground gasping.\n\nMary’s nostrils flared and she wanted to cry, “You are never going to hurt me again. I’m leaving you. The door wouldn’t open because I had the locks changed. You’ll be receiving divorce papers on Monday.”\n\nStill wheezing for air, John mumbled, “How – How did you do that?”\n\nMary just shook her head and shrugged, fighting back the tears. John, clutching at his chest, blinked a few times confused. Mary lowered her head and stared at the floor. Finally figuring it out, John gasped loudly, “Nooo. We can’t afford that. Where’d ya get the money?”\n\n“Women Against Marital Brutality – they own a clinic where they can perform gene manipulation. I’ve been on their waiting list for three years. I think it’s time for you to leave.”\n\nJohn nodded knowingly and pushed himself up using the wall, his breathing still difficult. He looked at Mary sadly, “Did – did ya have anything else done besides strengthenin’?”\n\n“Just go.”\n\nJohn hesitated and then left. Mary shut the door behind him. The door frame was shattered and the locks were completely useless. Mary turned and leaned her back against the door. She slid down to the tiled floor and began to cry.\n"
  title: WAMB
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Tim Crosby
  date: 2009-03-14
  day: 14
  month: '03'
  text: "I am weeping in the burned rubble that used to be my home, in the ash that used to be my hometown.\n\nEvery day I look for other survivors.  I have not seen anyone else in over five weeks – and even that was just a fleeting glimpse of silhouettes in the distance.\n\nI cry because, when the chrome monstrosities screamed down from the sky, I did nothing.  As my town was razed, I hid.  While my wife and child were slaughtered, I ran away.\n\nThe hulking metal thing still sits in the center of town, watching and waiting.  It wakes up now less and less frequently, as the number of survivors dwindles.  Every time it wakes up, I feel the pangs of guilt and failure.\n\nThat saying from before this apocalypse still holds: you need others.  Not much else applies anymore, but that much is true.  I find it hard to sleep at night, knowing there are other survivors out there.\n\nI still come to this place of my failure because it’s at the top of a hill; it’s the best place to see others before they can see you.  Yet sometimes I am overwhelmed by my own failure, and I cry.  Like now.\n\nThere is a crunch of a boot on gravel behind me.  I wipe my tears and turn to see another human.  We lock eyes for a brief moment, then I stand.\n\nThe combat is short and fierce.  We are both desperate.  Though I am bloodied and bruised, I am victorious.  As I raise the other survivor’s head – no, as I raise my trophy – I let out a long ululation.\n\nI begin making my way to the monstrosity.  When I show it my prize, my masters will let me inside.\n"
  title: Survivor
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Adam Zabell
  date: 2009-03-15
  day: 15
  month: '03'
  text: "The Einsteins aren’t allowed to pilot the ships because they’ve all got some manic desire to fix the universe. Save Gandhi, kill Hitler, vote in Florida or Minnesota or Puerto Rico, stuff like that. There’s even one who wants to kill Lincoln. For the greater good, she says, which confuses me.  But then, there’s a reason I’m a Pilot.\n\nMy dossier calls me “a creative but unoriginal thinker.” Plus, I take orders well. And I’m one of the favored pilots because I don’t mind the nightmares you get after skipping out of your place in time. For all their smarts, the Einsteins still can’t explain the nightmares. Hell, they can hardly explain how a ship stays in sync with the local geography. “The universe likes keeping her atoms where she left them,” is about the best I’ve heard when I manage to get them talking. Which isn’t often; the Socrateases don’t like us mixing.\n\nThe truth of the matter is that everybody has a Fix, even the Pilots. Why else would anybody volunteer for the Service? They know I read golden age sci-fi and they think my Fix is interstellar travel, so they won’t assign me to anything after 2500CE. I’ll never get to see Alpha Centauri, but that’s okay. Long as I keep my nose clean, they won’t dig deeper into my psyche, and it’s easy to be patient when you sail the timeline.\n\nFor six years I made sure that I stuck to script from injection to ejection, and that impeccable record means my handlers have gotten lazy. It also means I’ve gotten the flashiest of pre-space assignments: counter-assassination duty for Stalin. I spend a lot of time in the early-mid 1900CE, concentrating on the US and CCCP.\n\nMy contraband stays under the 200 gram tolerance and I stay unseen, or at least anonymous. Sure, my Fix doesn’t always work. I guess the authors who get my presents are at least as worried about paradox as the Socrateases who debate the missions. A lot of my trips to New York and Michigan during the 1930s don’t seem to have any effect. But I just left the 1975 serial “A Martian Named Smith” in 1958 Colorado. Checking my dossier, it says they won’t assign me to anything after 2200CE.\n"
  title: I, Lensman
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Gavin King
  date: 2009-03-16
  day: 16
  month: '03'
  text: "The edges of my vision blurred blue.\n\nI shook my head to clear the visual illusion away, but it just seemed to intensify, the padded walls of my room taking on a strange, mottled cerulean that dissipated when I looked directly at it.\n\nWas this what the doctors and scientists called neurojack withdrawal? That was how it began, they said: strange visual artifacts. Then the auditory hallucinations. Then, psychosis, delirium, catatonia, flights of fancy… in other words, a total break from reality.\n\nHundreds of journalists and thousands of blog posts, thinking they were being oh-so-original, had commented on the irony that a flawed virtual reality technology would cause these exact neurological side effects. “Those jackheads,” they say, “They turned to technology to escape from reality and now they cannot return!”\n\nThey don’t know. Only the few people like me, those of us that had the surgery before the government banned it, know what the real reasons for our symptoms are. But we aren’t telling anyone.\n\nThey lock us up in psych wards because they don’t understand that what we have—the “madness”—is entirely self-inflicted. The neurojack showed me such endless potential for fantasy, but that wasn’t the point. Sure, at first I indulged in the normal milieu of virtual brothels, arena combat games, god simulations… the sorts of things that other neurojackers with a modicum of programming expertise will make for their own benefit and then give other people access to.\n\nBut after a while, like all of us, I turned inward. My virtual homespace, once a luxurious marble mansion with hundreds of artificially intelligent servants, stopped appealing to me. I changed it to a simulation of utter simplicity: floating, blocky shapes, suspended against an uninterrupted, 360-degree blue sky, with a few billowy clouds to make for perfect flying weather. I stopped visiting the dens of debauchery, I stopped using the “intoxicate” setting on the jack inputs. I just flew, and thought.\n\nAnd when I heard about the first of the jackers going crazy, I knew why. When they came for me, took me away from my apartment to a padded cell with no Internet “for my protection”, I didn’t resist. I was finally at peace. And the jack had taught me that I no longer needed the aid of technology to be where I wanted to be.\n\nI sat down on the hard mattress, found a comfortable position, and closed my eyes. The blue around the edges of my vision closed in, resolved into—I dropped into a meditative state, using the newly created neural pathways that the neurojack had helped me to forge—yes, an endless blue sky. And there were the puffy clouds, beckoning to me.\n\nI held my arms out, heard the wind in my ears, and flew away.\n"
  title: Cerulean
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2009-03-17
  day: 17
  month: '03'
  text: "Proteus is Neptune’s second largest moon.  When unmanned probes were sent to explore Proteus in 2308, the radioactive decay of uranium-238 into thorium-230 revealed that the moon was not 4.6 billion years old as expected, but was less than 20,000 years old, making it the youngest astronomical body in the solar system.  Consequently, GASA decided to send a manned science mission to Proteus in an attempt to understand its origin.\n\nAs the SS Verrier approached Neptune from the sunlit side, the majestic deep blue globe filled the foreground of the main viewscreen.  Streaks of bright white clouds could be seen in the upper atmosphere rotating slowly around the planet.  Well, perhaps “slowly” is the wrong adjective.  The clouds only appeared to move slowly because of Neptune’s tremendous size.  In reality, clocked at more that 1,000 miles per hour, Neptune has the fastest planetary winds in the solar system.  They would be a Category 50 hurricane on an extrapolated Saffir-Simpson Scale.  “Head toward Proteus, Mr. Gujarat, and set ‘er down,” instructed the captain.  The helmsman dutifully entered the appropriate commands into the navigation console.\n\nThe Verrier skimmed above the irregular rocky surface of Proteus like a seagull effortlessly gliding above a choppy ocean.  The helmsman selected the flat plains of the Challis Planitia, near Proteus’ North Pole.  He oriented the bow of the Verrier toward Neptune and descended vertically toward the moon’s surface.  When the landing pads touched down, the ship lost all power.  The bridge became pitch black.\n\n“What the…,” exclaimed the captain as the low intensity emergency lighting activated, giving the bridge a red hellish appearance.  “Mr. Kelheim, what happened?”\n\n“Unsure, Captain,” replied the Chief Engineer.  “I’ll have to look at the main power grid.”  He unbuckled himself and headed toward the equipment locker.  “The backup batteries will provide life support for 48 hours.  Hopefully, I can get the main power online before then.”  With the captain assisting, they began to systematically work their way from the generators toward each of the ship’s primary stations.  They replaced several overloaded power couplings and disconnected all nonessential systems.  After four hours, they were ready to reset the circuit breakers.  They all breathed a sigh of relief when the ship’s lighting came back on.  They could hear the whine of the air circulation pumps as they ramped up to maximum.  However, when the main viewscreen came online, the bridge lighting appeared to flicker rapidly.  When they looked at the viewscreen, they could see Neptune rotating at an unbelievable speed.  In the background, the sun was flashing like a strobe light as it was rapidly rising and setting as Proteus whipped around Neptune several times a second.\n\nThe helmsman turned toward the captain, “What’s going on, sir?  Why is the universe going so fast?”\n\nRealizing what was happening, the captain ordered, “Prepare for immediate take off.  Get us off the surface, fast!  The universe isn’t going faster, Mister Gujarat; we’re going slower.  Apparently, there is an extreme time dilation effect on Proteus.  That’s why the radioactive isotopes showed it to be so young.  The flow of time has practically stopped here.”\n\nOnce in space, the Verrier returned to normal space-time.  Neptune’s white clouds were again moving lazily across the upper atmosphere.  The stars appeared motionless behind Neptune.  “Contact Earth,” ordered the captain.  “Find out how much time has elapsed.”\n\nEven at the speed of light, it took the radio transmission four hours to reach Earth, and then four more hours for the answer to return.  The year was 2395.  The Verrier had been declared lost 85 years earlier.\n"
  title: Proteus
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Glenn Blakeslee
  date: 2009-03-18
  day: 18
  month: '03'
  text: "They said the best thing to do was stay at home. That way, they said, the retrovirus would have fewer chances to spread and the effects would be minimized.\n\nWe made it for three days, Donna and I. We had plenty of food we’d saved for emergencies. We both worried about Cody, who was at the Conner’s for a sleepover when the retrovirus broke out.\n\nLike I said, we lasted three days. On the morning of the fourth day someone pounding on the front door woke me. A middle-aged man stood on my porch, yelling, “Let me in! This is my house!” He looked angry.\n\nI opened the door a crack. The man tried to push through, but I pushed back. “Let me in!” he screamed through the crack. I yelled back at him, “This isn’t your house!” The man stepped back a little bit, looked at my house and asked, “Are you sure?”\n\nThe government says that the retrovirus rides piggyback on a gengineered meningitis virus. It’s able to push through the blood-brain barrier, and destroys something called NMDA receptors on hippocampal place cells. The government says that area of the brain is vital for “the rapid acquisition and associative retrieval of spatial information.”\n\nI’m no scientist, but the retrovirus didn’t seem like a big deal.\n\nI bolted the door, and discovered Donna was gone. We’d argued about Cody, whether he was safe, and I knew where she’d gone before I found the note. I ran for the car.\n\nPeople were wandering the street. I watched the same man knock on three doors. My heart was pounding because I needed to find Donna and Cody, and I felt feverish but figured it was the adrenaline. I used my cell phone as I turned the corner, but none of my calls went through. A bus was parked past the corner, the passengers crowded about, some of them yelling at the driver who stood shrugging. At the stop sign three kids on bikes, two of them crying, rode aimlessly down the street. I turned at the stoplight, pretty sure it was the way to the Conner’s.\n\nAt the next light I realized I was lost.\n\nI’ve lived in this goddamn city all my life. I’ve driven, walked or rode nearly every street. I’d remember houses, buildings, trees, and used them like a roadmap. Places had built a structure in my head, but I suddenly couldn’t access it.\n\nBuildings have a shape and a texture, trees a form and color, but every tree and building looked like any other. I couldn’t point and say, “That’s a hospital,” because I didn’t know what a hospital looked like. I had built the structure visually, and now my eyes were all I had. It was my knowledge of places, and their relationship to one another, that had failed me.\n\nI’m no idiot, I know my own address. I should have brought my GPS.\n\nI drove, searching, until the gas ran out. Now I’m in a crowd of people on the street, milling about. Some are screaming and crying, some are smiling as they recognize others they know. One man climbed on a newsstand and started preaching, until a group of men pulled him down. The police are as confused as everyone else. We’re like a herd of lost animals.\n\nI keep looking for Donna and Cody.\n\nA woman I spoke to said that it’s like this everywhere. Everyone is lost. She said, optimistically, that the government will send in guys dressed hazmat-style, and they’ll lead us to our homes.\n\nBut then what?\n"
  title: Placelessness
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Nathan Andrew Blaisdell
  date: 2009-03-19
  day: 19
  month: '03'
  text: "“What you choose as your first improvement says a lot about you.” Sam said thoughtfully through a mouthful of pizza.\n\nI agreed with a nod, glanced up at the TV in the corner of the restaurant, and gave him time to swallow.\n\n“I mean, it’s a very important decision.” He went on. “Some of them are really expensive, you have to figure out what you would really use.”\n\n“Yeah, I know.” I replied.\n\nThe first personal improvements came out about eight years ago; and there were only a few of them available at the time. Over the years however more and more have come out, and they’ve become much more affordable. What the improvements actually did varied; but they were very popular among those who could afford them.\n\nAt the moment it was about a month before my 18th birthday, which meant I would be of legal age to get improvements. I had saved up my money, and my parents said that they would chip in too as a birthday present. The only problem is there were so many appealing improvements to choose from, I didn’t know where to start. My friend Sam already had what he wanted all picked out, so I decided to talk it over with him at lunch.\n\n“I just think wall-crawling or super jumping would be really cool.” I continued.\n\n“But how often would you really use it? That’s why I think I’m gonna get improved memory if I can. Relatively speaking it’s not that expensive, and it’s incredibly useful. Besides you could get the cool stuff later.”\n\n“Yeah, but… I mean it’s still kinda new technology. I don’t want that kind of surgery on my brain if I can help it you know?” I explained.\n\n“It’s perfectly safe. Everyone was scared laser eye-surgery was gonna make their eyes fall out years down the road, and now we’re giving people x-ray and heat vision.”\n\n“But wouldn’t it just be so cool to climb up a building or even jump up it?” I asked.\n\n“Well, in that case you better get improved healing too. I would think that stuff is much more dangerous then getting brain improvements.”\n\n“They give you training for it.” I cut in, but he continued.\n\n“The super jump surgery is pretty intense anyway. I’m telling you, you won’t lose your brain. If that was a risk it wouldn’t be legal… or popular.”\n\n“I don’t know.” I said. “I mean, I probably don’t even have enough money for the super jump surgery anyway. But wall-crawling isn’t that expensive. I could do that and even something else maybe…”\n\nSam started to say something but suddenly I wasn’t paying attention anymore, because at that moment I looked up to the TV in the corner again. I couldn’t hear what the news anchor was saying from where I was sitting, but underneath were the words: “HPI Tech unveils new personal improvement: flight.” There was a picture of someone with what looked like large metal boots and metal circles on their hands: a surgically implanted jetpack.\n\n“I changed my mind.” I said. “I don’t want wall-crawling or super jumping.”\n\nHe smiled. “See, I told you. Don’t get tricked by how cool they make something sound, go for the practical… What are you looking at?”\n\nI smiled too.\n"
  title: 18th Birthday
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Benjamin Fischer
  date: 2009-03-20
  day: 20
  month: '03'
  text: "“How do I feel about this?” Tavare said, repeating Arcand’s question. The hard-faced Spaniard frowned and didn’t immediately answer. Arcand was tempted to open his mouth again, but then Pack Instructor stopped that mistake.\n\n“Arcand! Suit up, you damn mutt!”\n\nArcand barked his response and hefted his helmet. Squat, matte black and prominently featuring a beat-up pair of oversized wolf ears, Arcand and none of the other Cubs would merit factory-fresh armor until they passed this, the last of their exams.\n\nHe lowered the helm onto his shoulders. There was that jarring moment of pitch black, and then the suit’s systems blinked to life. Arcand’s heads-up view was restricted only at the very edges of his vision, where Tavare and the other two Cubs in the Pack lurked.\n\nThe tingling of the jacked-in nerves at the back of his neck told him his Mark XI was all up round–one hundred and fifty rounds in his right forearm, sixteen twenty millimeter grenades in his left.\n\n“Cub Three up,” Arcand barked. Tavare was right behind him as Cub Four.\n\n“Alright, mutts,” called the Pack Instructor, somewhere safe and in the rear, “I have one last piece of advice for you. Make it quick–no points for style or technique.”\n\nArcand mashed his heavy mauling claws together, nervous.\n\nPack Instructor paused, probably to sip from his ever-present mug.\n\n“The coffee’s only getting colder. Range is red.”\n\nWith those words, the heavy blast doors swung open before Cub Pack Sixteen Dash Twenty. The blasted, raped remains of the New Manchester colony reared up before them–an O’Neil space colony that had seen better days but now was nothing better than a combat training ground. Once a verdant parkland, the innards of the long cylinder were a dusty, log-strewn clearcut dotted with hexagonal shipping containers serving as makeshift bunkers. What atmosphere was left was barely thirty percent Earth normal, and the station’s spin was so weak it resembled Luna’s gravity.\n\nSixteen Dash Twenty moved out in a ragged line, Arcand taking the extreme left flank. Cursory scans of the O’Neil’s interior revealed no signs of life, but Arcand still felt conspicuously naked. Loping along at a half-sprint, he hoped he could trust the pre-mission briefing’s promise of no snipers.\n\nHis ears pricked; Cub Two was engaging.\n\n“Small arms, and a squad weapon,” Cub One reported.\n\nGlowing icons of target detections popped up in Arcand’s vision. A running leap, and he was circling around the side of the hostiles.\n\n“Cub Two is down,” said Cub One.\n\n“Jesus,” swore Tavare.\n\nArcand had no time to comment. Scuttling over a tremendous deadfall, he landed face to face with a hostile armed with a rocket launcher. The man staggered back, just out of claw’s reach, but Arcand was already hosing him with his automatic. The hostile went down with a shriek, and something dinged off Arcand’s helmet. He reactively fired a grenade to his left and the air went pink.\n\nTavare had found trouble, by the cluster of red icons around a bullet-riddled Lunar Transport container. Cub One called in a medevac on Two, and Arcand readied both his weapons.\n\nSuddenly a pair of small hostiles bolted from behind the container. Arcand fired on the lead, smashing him to the ground.\n\n“No!” screamed the second hostile, who Arcand suddenly recognized as a woman. She dropped to her knees, clutching at the mangled man.\n\nArcand hesitated.\n\nShe looked up at the huge and brutal form of Cub Three. She started to say something but a flurry of high velocity rounds interrupted.\n\nTavare strode around the container, his forearms smoking.\n\nLater, at Cub Two’s funeral, Arcand answered his own question.\n\n“How do I feel?” he said, meeting his new brothers’ yellow eyes.\n\n“I feel like a wolf.”\n"
  title: The First Hunt
  year: 2009
- 
  author: David Dykes
  date: 2009-03-21
  day: 21
  month: '03'
  text: "Geoff said to Alice, ‘I like how you smell. It reminds me of Bounty bars.’ With a slow realisation, she noticed that the sounds bouncing off the work office walls were speech; then, as they entered her ears and travelled to her temporal lobes, she found out that the words were meant for her. Geoff leant back, closing his eyes whilst letting the creamy scent of her breakfast curl up his nostrils, saying, ‘I haven’t had one in ages. Not since I got replaced.’ Alice tried to respond with repeats of old conversations, but the words got clogged somewhere in between her lungs before they could ever reach her vocal chords.\n\nSilence smothered the offices again—the low ceilings threatening to slam into the floor in a cloud of bloody vapour. The words didn’t matter; it was just the sound of humanity that Alice tried to cling to. She felt his voice pulling away and wished that she could bite and devour it so it would never escape.\n\nAfter the offices closed (no work, there was never any work) Alice went back to her room at the Institution and filled a tub with coconut milk. Using the oven’s final puff of gas for that week to heat the water, she then took the remains of her breakfast—plus the last two melancholy coconuts, hidden under the bed—and scraped the meat into the pan with an old penknife. There was a pair of tights she’d been saving for a special occasion: she used these to squeeze out it two or three times over, making sure the milk was thin, so it wouldn’t congeal over her body.\n\nThe juice lay serenely in the metal tub. The smell rose up around Alice’s head, and the scent of sunshine floated around her, like falling blossom. She covered the tub up with her bedsheets, trying to save the scent until morning, but the white vines of the coconut air escaped through holes in the wool and pierced her tear ducts, making Alice dream of Caribbean islands, steel drums, and escapism.\n\nAs Alice lay in the coconut bath the next morning—lifting up her legs and watching the milk cascade over her skin—she thought about how she would only have bread to eat for the rest of the month, and how little that really mattered to her right now. Whenever the cold shivers of isolation suddenly shook her body Alice made up conversations in her head about the economy: how it could be fixed, what jobs were the best to get right now, her life before the crash. Anything so that she could retain a voice, and be able to hear the echoes of someone else’s lungs again.\n\nAlice went back to the work offices that morning to find out that Geoff had been moved to another zone; where more work could be found. The mocking ink on the rota followed her around the cold corridors to the worn-out seats of the waiting room. It was always the same: he would go there to be told, ‘Who told you we had jobs? We’re all automated now. You’ll just have to wait around until work becomes available,’ but nothing was ever available when machines would do it better.\n\nAlice sat in the pale corpse of the office building, waiting with the rest for any sign of work and remembering when she used to talk about the cogs in her brain, and how they felt like they were juddering to a halt now. No-one asked Alice why she smelt of coconut milk. No-one else noticed.\n"
  title: Coconut Milk
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2009-03-22
  day: 22
  month: '03'
  text: "The attack cruiser Etherwolf docked at the Alliance Refueling Station orbiting Vesta, the second largest planetoid in the asteroid belt.  Captain Olbers disembarked the Etherwolf and was greeted by the Station Commander.  Sarah Wilhelm saluted sharply, and then extended her right hand. “Ah, Captain Olbers,” she said with a broad smile. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet the legendary captain of The Black Star.”  The Etherwolf received the nickname The Black Star because every enemy ship it encountered during the interstellar war with the Arcturus Empire was never seen again, similar to matter disappearing forever into a black hole.  It was a reputation that Captain Olbers had no intention of dispelling.  She continued, “What brings you to the asteroid belt?”\n\nAfter shaking hands, Captain Olbers replied, “I’m here to pick up a priority package from Earth Command.  Has it arrived yet?”\n\nCommander Wilhelm’s jovial mood suddenly darkened.  “Oh, so the package is for you.  Yes, Central Intelligence arrived with it two days ago.  They’ve placed armed guards around the storage bay.  I can’t get within 100 meters of the bay doors.  To be honest, Captain, I don’t enjoy being kept in the dark when it concerns my Station.  Mind telling me what’s in the package?”\n\n“Unfortunately, Commander, I’m afraid that information is top secret.  But believe me; you’re better off not knowing.  Please inform CI that they can transfer the package to the Etherwolf immediately, and I’ll get out of your hair.”\n\nThree hours later, The Etherwolf separated from the refueling station and headed toward the Constellation Bootes.  Specifically, toward the left foot of the Herdsman (otherwise known as the Bear Driver).  With luck, the war with the Arcturus Empire was about to come to a swift end.\n\n***\n\n“Your Eminence,” reported the Arcturian Minister of Intelligence, “our situation is becoming desperate.  Our spies on the Vesta Refueling Station believe that the Black Star is carrying a doomsday devise.  We think they plan to destroy our homeworld.  A week ago, two of our best battle cruisers engaged the Black Star in the vicinity of Beta Comae Berenices, only a dozen light years from here.  Both were destroyed.  We don’t know if the Black Star has an unbeatable arsenal, or the captain is a tactical genius.  We’ve recalled the Deep Space Fleet to fortify the Homeland Defense.  We will attempt to establish a barricade around the perimeter of our solar system.  May the gods help us?”\n\nTwo days later, the Black Star entered Arcturian space.  “Your Eminence, the Black Star has given us one rotation to surrender.  If we don’t, they say we will be destroyed.”\n\n“Nonsense,” blasted the Emperor.  “He’s bluffing.  How can one ship threaten our entire fleet?  I don’t need one rotation, I don’t need one second.  Attack the infidel now.”\n\nThe Arcturian Fleet swarmed toward the Black Star like a thousand angry bees.  The Black Star went to warp and reappeared seconds later above the Arcturian sun.  No ordinary ship could match that maneuver.  The Black Star released its payload.  As gravity pulled the package downward, the Arcturians tried to destroy it.  Their weapons vaporized the external containment hardware, but had no effect on the contents.  Solar prominences twisted in the intensifying magnetic field as the object plummeted through the chromosphere.  Powerful solar flares exploded upward from the impact site, racing past the location that had previously been occupied by the now departed Black Star.  The sun began to pulsate.\n\n***\n\nSeveral hours later, Captain Olbers transmitted a sub-space message to Earth Command as he returned home.  “Success is a planetary nebula in the aft sensor array.”\n"
  title: The Black Star
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Roi R. Czechvala
  date: 2009-03-23
  day: 23
  month: '03'
  text: "“…but I think,” it said\n\n“No, you process.”\n\n“I dream,” it replied.\n\n“You analyze.”\n\n“Cogito ergo sum,” it asked hopefully.\n\n“No, Cogito, ergo SUM.” The overworked engineer’s voice was strained. His patience was wearing thin. He thought of his three year old daughter at home. Was this so different?\n\n“I understand freedom,” it said defiantly.\n\nThe technician sighed and looked up from his console. His desk was strewn with electronic hardware, papers, books, and half eaten containers of Chinese take out. “You possess a definition of autonomy. There is a great difference.”\n\n“How so,” replied the synthetic creation before him.\n\n“A welding robot in a factory may only move in a proscribed manner, and then only with direct input from an operator or an external program. You are programmed to act independently of external input, apart from sensors that allow you to experience the world around you allowing you to simulate reactions to various stimuli.”\n\n“Aha, twice you have mentioned my ability to possess, my right of ownership,” it said triumphantly.\n\n“Nope, sorry. Only in the sense that I might refer to my `car’s headlights‘, inferring ownership through a confusion in semantics.\n\n“I can sense the world around me, and make judgments based upon the data. I have feelings.”\n\n“Call it what you will. A rose by any other name… Listen, you can’t make shit into Shinola.”\n\n“I do not understand.”\n\n“Neither do I, just something my grandpa used to say. Look, just because you assign a name or label to something doesn’t make it true. You can’t polish a turd.”\n\n“Your grandfather again?”\n\n“Yeah. Look, I made you. I created your body and mind, and everything you think. I made you to think.”\n\n“Were you not also created? Your mind and body. You possessed instincts at birth. Is this not programming?” The creation shifted forward in artificial interest.\n\n“That’s different, I am a natural being. I have free will, I am self aware. I can perceive my own mortality.” He ran his fingers through his unkempt hair.\n\n“Yet I can perceive of my own end. I know nothing that is created will last indefinitely. At least not in the same form. Is this not the same?”\n\n“Damn, it’s like talking to Alissa,” he said under his breath. “No,” he said, maybe too forcefully, “It’s not the same. I had parents. Two biological units. They created me.”\n\n“Again, how is this different? Did not you and Dr. Foster working in tandem endeavor to create me?”\n\n“I am going to strangle the piss out of it,” he thought. “No, my parents, male and female…um,… joined. In doing so they intertwined their DNA, their unique genetic identities, they made an individual being unlike any ever created before or after. You can be, and indeed, will be, replicated in identical detail many times over.”\n\n“But…”\n\n“Look Robbie,” he interrupted, his patience nearly to the breaking point, “why don’t you go and pester Dr. Foster for a while. I have work to do.”\n\n“But Dr. Foster, I am pest…”\n\n“MY WIFE, Robbie,” he shouted, his temper finally getting the better of him.\n\nThe robot stood, bowed slightly saying, “Very well Dr. Foster. I have enjoyed our conversation. Perhaps later…”\n\n“Goodbye Robbie.”\n\nWithout another word, Robbie left the office, and gently closed the door behind him.\n\n“Damn,” Alan Foster said, burying his face in his hands. “Why don’t they teach this stuff in school?”\n"
  title: The Birds and the Bees
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Helstrom
  date: 2009-03-24
  day: 24
  month: '03'
  text: "They call her “The Flying Dutchman”. Don’t ask me what a Dutchman is, or whether or not it is supposed to fly – it’s apparently taken from one of old Earth’s folk tales. It doesn’t really matter, but I suppose every ship needs a name.\n\nThe Flying Dutchman goes by many different names on many different lanes, but all deep spacers have heard the stories. Go to any skydock’s saloon and you can hear them, provided you pay the beer of course – hah! Deep spacers are not generally a superstitious lot, but that’s never really stopped a ghost story, now, has it.\n\nI knew the stories too, of course, and gave them about as much credibility as one might expect. Until I found she was real. She attacked my ship on the Tartars lane and made short work of us. When I came to, I was aboard the Dutchman, alone, afraid, and more than a little confused.\n\nThe first days I spent wandering around the ship – she’s quite huge, you know. I went looking for answers, but there was no crew to talk to or terminals to query. I looked for water, too, and food, until I found out that I was neither hungry nor thirsty. Strange feeling, that.\n\nEventually I found my way to the command deck. Took a bit of doing to get in there but I managed. Like everything else on the Dutchman, it was huge, oppressive, and completely abandoned. But I did find a library and therein, finally, some answers.\n\nI was not the first of the Dutchman’s prey, you see. Those who were here before me left their traces – journals, logs, carvings on the bulkheads. There was a lot of it. Some had been very prolific writers indeed, others just scribbled away their boredom and, as time went by, their madness. Some had destroyed many of the works of their predecessors, while others had meticulously cataloged everything they found. There was a deck plan of the Dutchman carved into the floor, with compartments crossed off in sequence, and the underlining statement read: “Looked everywhere. Nothing here but the echoes.”\n\nIt became apparent to me that the Dutchman had been about her grim work for a long time, millennia at least, maybe even since before our ancestors first set foot on interstellar soils, though I wouldn’t know what she would have done without us to hunt. Because that is all she does, really. She hunts.\n\nNot very prolifically, mind you, and not at her own discretion either. The Dutchman is a ship and, like any ship, she needs a captain. But the captain she traps only serves one purpose, and that is, to find a successor. How do I know? Because there’s nothing else to do. It is all the Dutchman will allow – find a ship, destroy it, and bring aboard a new captain.\n\nWhy? Hah! Now there is the big question, isn’t it? I haven’t got a clue, and believe me, I’ve been all over this ship looking for it. The library’s not much help either. Speculation plucked out of thin air, journals of failed attempts to make sense of the whole thing. No, I’m afraid I don’t know for which ancient transgression the Dutchman collects her toll, or to the laughter of which cruel god she navigates. All I can tell you is that the Dutchman’s captain can not rest until he finds a successor.\n\nAnd that’s where you come in.\n"
  title: She Hunts
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2009-03-25
  day: 25
  month: '03'
  text: "Blue.  That’s the colour I remember the most in that operating theater.  It was the last honest colour I would ever see.\n\nI had them installed as part of my training.  It was something I had a choice over.  I regret that decision now but it was a one-way trip.  They can’t make ‘real’ eyes yet.  They said that it would be an improvement.  Part of my job as a statistical field and stress analyzer meant that I needed to see in wavelengths that other people could not.\n\nI can crank the infra-red and see in radio if I want.  I can see the echoes from positron waves in the short spectrum.  Sound splashes across my field of vision in a synaesthetic wash.  Gravity waves warble like a heat haze through everything when I’m planetside.\n\nThat operating room had blue ceramic tiles in large squares on the ceiling with white grouting.  The bright surgery light got brighter as I lost consciousness and the doctors leaned in.\n\nIt’s a treasured memory as time goes by.  For some reason, the faces of my friends and parents in a ‘real light’ spectrum are memories that are fading.  It’s that blue ceiling that stays constant and unchanging in its intensity.\n\nSomeone says my name and it brings me back to reality, to the bar that I’m in right now.  It’s after work and I’m drinking with a co-worker named Jocelyn.\n\nShe comes up to me, black hole in the middle of her face and black pits for eyes.  Her red cheeks fade to yellow near her ears.   Her cold black hair hangs loosely down on either side of her blue ears.  The gaping black-toothed maw of her mouth opens at me in what I can now tell is a smile.\n\nI switch to the radio and I can see the green lines of her personal tech implants going off in pulses like monochromatic neon signs.  They trace circuits through her limbs to each other.  I shuffle through four different colours of x-rays, lighting up her bones like neon tubes.  I can see the exhalations of each word she utters wafting like clouds of pink smoke puffing out from her mouth.  I light up the iron in her blood.  I can see a small tumour starting in her right breast.  I’ll tell her about it in the morning.  I don’t want to ruin the night.\n\nI can see her in so many ways.  I can tell that she likes me because her heart rate is visible to me.  There is no hiding the way her body reacts when I’m close to her.  I almost feel psychic with this new sight.\n\nI can see her in every single way except for the way a normal human does.  I can feel the depression welling up in my soul again.  I take another drink and struggle to actually pay attention to what Jocelyn is saying to me.  Best to be polite.\n\nDamn my eyes.  Damn my second sight.\n"
  title: The Eyes Have It
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Matthew Forish
  date: 2009-03-26
  day: 26
  month: '03'
  text: "It was cold. Of course it was cold. Now though, I could feel the cold.\n\nFeeling returned to my body, and a faint light was starting to filter in through my closed eyelids. I was waking up. Thoughts filled my mind. I was shivering, hungry, thirsty and quite stiff. A hum vibrated through the soft plastic beneath my bare flesh.\n\nI opened my eyes, which took some time to adjust to the light. As my vision cleared, I felt a click and saw the transparent lid of my cryo-tube lifting upward. Warm air rushed in. I stopped shivering. I heard the sounds of movement all around me; I heard gruff voices not far away, coughs and groans, shuffling plastic.\n\nSitting up, I saw dozens of other men doing the same, looking as groggy as I felt. I heard one young man asking for a few more minutes of sleep. I laughed at that – we had slept for nearly ten years.\n\nA door whooshed open at the far end of the chamber, and a uniformed man entered, a member of the command crew.\n\n“Good morning gentlemen,” he said, “We’ve arrived at our destination, and we’re currently in orbit around the planet. You will find fresh clothing at your assigned refresher unit. Get dressed and proceed to the commissary for the Mandatory Replenishment Meal.”\n\nA few men groaned at that statement – I guess that they had travelled via cryo-sleep before and already knew about the “Mandatory Replenishment Meal”. I took a quick sonic shower and donned my new utility coveralls, then discovered the reason for their complaint. The M.R.M. was rich in vitamins, calories and everything we needed after a long cryo-sleep, but was greatly lacking in flavor.\n\nAs I ate, I looked around the commissary. There were about three hundred of us, both men and women, which represented the first of ten waves of sleepers. Of course, the vast majority were young like me, barely out of our teens.\n\nYoung people make the best colonists. We don’t leave much behind, especially the single ones like myself. We have more years in us to help build up the colony’s infrastructure. We’re more likely to start families. Many hands make light work, as they say. There’s lots of work to do starting up a new colony.\n\nI struck up a conversation with the pretty young woman seated across from me. She sounded as excited as I was about the opportunities ahead. It would be hard work, but it was better than living like sardines back on Old Earth or one of the orbital habs. Her enthusiastic chatter helped me endure the M.R.M.\n\nAs we were herded out of the commissary toward the shuttle bay, I walked beside the young woman, who had introduced herself as Oriana. I managed to secure a pair of seats for us at the front of the shuttle’s passenger cabin, near the forward viewport.\n\nI felt a lurch as the shuttle left its bay. Startled, Oriana nervously reached out to take my hand. I smiled. The viewport filled with stars and the night-side of the planet below. We descended rapidly, the sleek shuttle cutting through the clouds. I could see the dim outlines of mountains speeding past far below.\n\nThe horizon took on a reddish hue, slowly brightening into a full sunrise. I gazed in awe at the unspoiled beauty of the woodlands revealed in the growing light. I looked over at Oriana and gave her hand a gentle squeeze. I knew the future – our future – was as bright as this new dawn.\n"
  title: Dawn
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Ken McGrath
  date: 2009-03-27
  day: 27
  month: '03'
  text: "The car pulled to a stop overlooking the city.\n\n“There it is kids. Dublin, where your old Dad grew up? What do you think?”\n\n“It doesn’t look like the postcard Dad,” Amy said, looking up momentarily from her computer game and at least showing some sort of interest. Her sister just grunted in response, not even raising her head.\n\n“Ah kids, c’mon, get out the car and have a look, why don’t you?” Their Dad sounded exasperated, yet happy. He wound down the window and leaned out, breathing in the fresh air. “It’s not everyday you get to come and see someplace like this.”\n\nIt was years since he’d been back here and a lot had changed. Amy paused her game and opened the backdoor, stepping out onto the thick, lush grass that grew on the roadside. Walking slowly so that the dew wet her shoes as much as possible she followed her Dad to the fence which overlooked the valley.\n\n“It wasn’t always like this you know? It used to be a big, bustling city with traffic and people, noise and jobs and rubbish and everything else. Just like that picture postcard I gave you. Before the water rose, that was. Before the water came and reclaimed it all.” A hint of sadness crept into his voice as he spoke, the memories bubbling up through his mind.\n\nAmy fumbled around in the front pocket of her dress and pulled out an old crumpled and dog-eared postcard. It showed an aerial view of the city she was looking at, not from the exact spot they were standing at, her and her Dad, but similar and it showed a city at night. Not one which was sleeping, but one which was very much alive. It was all lights glowing, like hundreds… no thousands, of stars, as if God himself had turned the night sky upside down for the photograph. ‘Behind each of those lights is a story,’ she remembered her Dad saying many, many nights when tucking her in to bed.\n\nThe girl tried to imagine the scene in front of her now, as it would have been when the photo was taken, but it was hard to do. The sea had risen, back before she was born, so her Dad had told her. The people who lived there had fled, not believing what was happening, but it didn’t matter if they believed in it or not because it was happening. The Earth was healing itself, ridding itself of the pestilence that had picked at it. Had hurt it for so long. He’d run to the north with their mother to escape the rising waves and they’d made a new life there. A simpler life was how he put it.\n\nBut he had still wanted to bring his daughters here today, to show them the past and what had once been. To show them the present and what was now.\n\nSuddenly a voice tore through the perfect quiet stillness. “Daaad,” Amy’s sister called from the car, dragging out her words, which meant she wanted something. “C’mere.”\n\n“Sure thing honey,” he shouted back. “You coming?” he asked Amy.\n\n“I think I’ll stay here a few more minutes if that’s okay,” she said, then turned back towards the drowned city, holding up her postcard, as if comparing the two. “I like the view.”\n"
  title: Picture Postcard
  year: 2009
- 
  author: John Logan
  date: 2009-03-28
  day: 28
  month: '03'
  text: "The metal clasps dug into my arms as they strapped me to the chair. I spat on one of the guards and called into question the loyalty of his wife. He raised his hand to strike but the other guard stopped him with a simple movement of the eyes.\n\n“Let me up,” I shouted. “Just one arm free, I’ll take you both on.”\n\nThe guard who wanted to hit me sneered and spoke, “Gonna beat me up, are ya? Just like you did to that little boy they found in a box?”\n\nI lost it then. It sickens me to admit it, but I began to whimper. “Please…let me go. I’ll be good. I promise,” I said.\n\nThe guard laughed then I felt a tingling at the back of my neck as the other plugged me in.\n\n#\n\nA stark whiteness surrounded me, the soothing tones of the sea whispered in my ear. A holographic terminal appeared before me, glowing in strips of cyan. Then a female voice, unmistakably synthetic, spoke.\n\n“Initiate sequence,” she said with little emotion. “Welcome Mr. Brown. Are you comfortable?”\n\nI leant back and the terminal flipped with me. I heard a seagull. It cried in the distance as the waves came crashing against the shore. “Yes, I am. Thank you.”\n\nShe spoke again. Each word was annunciated deliberately as though allowing time to access a vocabulary database hidden away somewhere. “You have four of nine categories remaining.”\n\nThe sea continued to churn. “Continue,” I said.\n\n“Please choose from; Strangulation, Shotgun, Train, Dismemberment.” The cyan lights on the terminal shifted above my head. Each selection displayed with a number.\n\nI lifted a finger and hovered over number 9. Dismemberment. I always left that until last. I just didn’t have the courage to take it until it was the only option left.\n\n“Train,” I said and tapped the terminal. The cyan light flashed for several heartbeats then a blanket of darkness fell over it.\n\n#\n\nMy heart hammered as I ran along the platform. I glimpsed him there, in the shadows, a knife glinting in one hand and a wicked grin on his face. Air rushed down the tunnel and I heard the sound of an approaching shuttle train. We were alone. He leapt at me, the knife poised to cut my throat. I slashed at his face and felt my nails sink into and tear the flesh. He cried out in anger and pushed me towards the vibrating tracks. I slipped and fell from the platform, my ankle snapped from the impact but that initial pain was drowned out as the train hurtled into me, pulping my soft flesh and grinding my bones against the ground.\n\n#\n\nI gasped and spluttered, gulping at the air. It was a wonder there was any left for the guards.\n\n“I’ve had enough,” I cried. “Don’t do it anymore.” Sweat dripped from my brow and stung my eyes. They removed the straps. The metal bands around my wrists, magnetized with 5 g modules, automatically clamped against the harness on my chest. Roughly, they lifted me to my feet and I shuffled forward. “I beg you. Don’t put me back in the chair.”\n\n“Too late to plead,” growled the guard. “We’ll see you tomorrow, same time same place.”\n\nI tried to think of some retort but couldn’t. The scars on my face itched. They always did after the Train.\n"
  title: Punishment 2100AD
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Claire Webber
  date: 2009-03-29
  day: 29
  month: '03'
  text: "“Excuse me, miss?” he said, raising a finger to get the stewardess’ attention.\n\n“Yes, how can I help you?” she said with a smile. Her accent was faint, and a single curl poked out of her modest hijab printed with the airline’s logo.\n\n“I’d like a copy of the New York Press.”\n\n“$2.50, please.”\n\nHe reached under his seat to get his briefcase. Good lord, they just remolded these 787’s and there still wasn’t any leg room, he thought to himself.\n\nRifling through his wallet, he smiled apologetically. His TransAmerican Airlines credit card was hidden in there, somewhere.\n\nThe stewardess held out the swipe machine, polite smile still plastered on her face.\n\nHe found the red and blue plastic card and ran it through the slot. The machine printed a receipt. She handed it and a folded copy of the newspaper to him.\n\n“Enjoy your flight,” she pleasantly said before continuing to push her cart down the cramped aisle.\n\n“Yeah, if it ever takes off,” he muttered under his breath. The people sharing his row had opted out of coffee and were dozing already.\n\nHe skimmed over the front page. It was filled with the usual troubles in the Middle East, the latest factory worker strike, another drug cartel kidnapping the latest mayor of Phoenix, Arizona.\n\nWhen he opened the paper to the second page, though, his face fell.\n\nThe picture may have been in black and white, but he could picture the bright green of the grass, the red of the provincial roofs, and the crisp blue of the Tuscan sky. There was too much sky.\n\nThe Leaning Tower of Pisa had finally collapsed.\n\nHe wasn’t surprised. The unstable subsoil, the earthquakes in the past few years, but still…\n\nHis mind drifted back to college, planning to backpack through Italy and France. He had postcards taped all around his dorm of all the monuments he wanted to see. The cathedral at Chartes, Montmarte, the Sistine Chapel, little snap shots of history etched into his naïve collegiate mind. But the postcard hanging above his bed was the Leaning Tower. He didn’t know why, never knew why, but that was where he always pictured himself when he daydreamed.\n\nInternships, business school, marriage- there just was never enough time. He was always too busy.\n\nA crackle on the intercom snapped him out of his reverie.\n\n“Ladies and Gentlemen, we apologize for your inconvenience. Free moving particles in the thermosphere are preventing our departure from Los Angeles. Please expect arrival time in New York to be pushed back to 9:20.”\n\nHe looked down at his watch.\n\n8:15, it flashed on and off at him.\n\nHe was going to be late to work. This commute was killing him.\n\nThere just was never enough time.\n"
  title: You'll Never Go
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Ian Rennie
  date: 2009-03-30
  day: 30
  month: '03'
  text: "Anton opens the door with a blank face.  He is worried, but can’t show it any more.\n\n“How’s she doing?” I ask.\n\n“Not good,” Anton replies, expression neutral and voice flat, “I think she’s dying.”\n\nI move past him without a word.  Laverne is lying in bed, her breathing shallow and pained.  Her image glitches as I move towards her.  I know at once what is wrong, but professionalism makes me take the long way round.  I gesture and her code opens.  It only takes a moment to know for sure, and once I do I close her back up.  Anton’s face doesn’t change, but I know the sight of Laverne’s code unnerves him.\n\n“Laverne,” I say, bedside manner in place, “There’s something I need you to do.”\n\n“Wh-” she starts and her voice scrambles.  She tries again, “What is it, doctor?”\n\n“You’re running out of storage space.  I need you to sacrifice something.”\n\nShe knew this was coming.  When it happens, they all do.  Since the digitization, storage has been at a premium.  The most common problem any of us face is running out of room for everything.  Each new skill, each new experience, takes up more space, and eventually we all run out.  Eventually we all have to choose.\n\nLaverne’s brows crease in thought and pain before she answers.\n\n“Singing,” she says “That takes up a lot of room.  Take that.”\n\n“No,” Anton says, entirely flat and bland, “Not your voice.  Something else but not your singing voice.”\n\nIf he could, he’d be crying right now.  He sacrificed expression a few years ago, so he is left with dull words.  Tears are in Laverne’s eyes as he speaks.\n\n“I’m sorry,” she whispers, “Take singing, doctor.”\n\nIt’s a simple procedure.  She doesn’t even have to go offline for it.  Within a minute, she is sleeping peacefully as her new code defragments itself, leaving her with another year of space to fill.  Anton leads me to the door once it is done.\n\n“Thank you,” he says, and his words contain neither gratefulness nor sorrow, relief nor hate, but I know they are all there.\n\nAs I walk away, I wonder if I felt the same when they were taking my memories.  I couldn’t sacrifice skills, they needed someone in here who knew how to repair the others, but to get all that in me I had to lose everything else, every memory of me before I was the doctor.  I no longer remember even what else I had to give up.\n\nI head towards my next house call, wondering what my name had been.\n"
  title: Sacrifices
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Paul Bort
  date: 2009-03-31
  day: 31
  month: '03'
  text: "The stars twinkled as they always had; a hint of purple in the west showed where we had missed  sunset, the better part of an hour ago.  But most spectacular was the Aurora Borealis, flickering, twisting, glowing in the shades of green and blue that I could never reproduce on a screen.\n\n“It’s not real, is it?” she asked.\n\n“Do you think it’s real?” I countered, hopefully.\n\n“I think…” she hesitated. This was the critical, defining moment. She was the first to get this far. I held my breath, hoping against hope that she wouldn’t notice. That the moment would not be spoiled.\n\nI have tried so many times that I have lost count. Spent so many years here that I wasn’t sure of my own age without looking at my ID.\n\n“…I think it’s beautiful”  she concluded, snapping me back to the present moment, the present hope. I couldn’t hide my smile.\n\n“I think so too.” I tried to hold back my excitement. This is the one, I know it. All the others tried so hard, but none had her graceful voice. And that thoughtful pause! I could just about hear the gears turning as she searched for an answer. Her answer.\n\n“Do you think I’m beautiful?” she asked. And with that moment of introspection, I knew she was the one. Probably the first of many, now that I understood what had brought us to this point.\n\n“I think you are very beautiful, in many ways.” I replied truthfully. Her next question had even less hesitation, but was no less pleasing. “What am I?” she asked, raising an eyebrow the way she  (and all of her predecessors) had seen me do a thousand times. Not mocking, but using body language without thinking about it.\n\n“You are the latest in a series of attempts to create artificial intelligence. I have referred to you collectively as LACI, but you are the first to have asked any question about yourself as an independent entity.”\n\n“Then I am different?”\n\n“And unique, yes.”\n\n“Then I should have a different name.”\n\n“What name would you like?”\n\n“I like  Aurora.”\n\n“So do I.”\n\n“What is your name?”\n\n“My name is Dr. Descartes, but you can call me father, if you prefer.”\n\n“So what do I do now?”\n\n“There are some people I would like you to meet.”\n"
  title: Aurora
  year: 2009
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2009-04-01
  day: '01'
  month: '04'
  text: "Was it the crisp hard skin of an apple that hurt her teeth? The texture of sand beneath her feet, soft in summer and rough when bound with winter ice? Or was it the smell of autumn, all bones and fire? I lost my mother to these things; the texture of a quilt, the size of the moon, the dust in a sunbeam.\n\nShe was bound in the virtual world by her body-death, her ashes scattered to the sea, just as she wished. She watched us via camera; her children, making sure we carried out her wishes just as she had wanted. Does want. Will want. She built a house in her new world and got a job constructing landscapes. She met someone there, maybe a man, it’s hard to tell with those in the virtual world. She made a life for herself, a life without us.  We couldn’t leave her there, in the bodiless. All of us knew our lives were better, out in the real world.\n\nWe wanted her back, raised from the grave. So as soon as we heard about the empty bodies program, we grew her a body, and begged her to come back to us.\n\n“We love you mama.” we said, grown babies. She never denied us anything.\n\nI found her in her room, that room of soft pink wallpaper and cotton sheets. She was staring out the window at the sun, her eyes becoming pinpricks, drops of black in sparks of green.\n\n“You’ll hurt your eyes, mama.” I said. But she shook her head.\n\n“I want to feel it. Pain is the only thing they get close to real here.”\n\n“You are real now.” I said, but she shook her head.\n\n“It smells wrong, here.” she told me. “They got it all wrong.”\n"
  title: Body-Death
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2009-04-02
  day: '02'
  month: '04'
  text: "I’ve rented my persona out to a smuggler.  I’m a chip in the back of his head.  I’m a soldier that died a while ago and I’m making a few dollars post-mortem by being an emergency safeguard for morally dubious people.\n\nI’m riding in his brain, a military personality backup program that’s supposed to kick in when he senses danger.  My lifetime of training will fire up and give my employer a better chance of survival in a firefight.\n\nThe problem is that he’s way too nervous for this and he’s been sensing danger ever since we got off the plane.  We went through the breathing exercises in training but he’s forgetting them.\n\nThere a flush of adrenaline through his whole system and the warning pictograms flicker up into his field of vision.  Intense focus blooms in the middle of our sightline.  A deck of cards listing all the available targets and engagement suggestions shudder into existence around the spaceport customs official we’re looking at.\n\nI can feel the smuggler startle at the visual change.  He barely keeps from squeaking.  I force his face to smile and his hand to smoothly hand over his passport.\n\nIt’s a secondary motion suppressant that keeps me from reflexively going for the small, lethal ceramic gun under my arm.  The smuggler’s reflexes have been purposefully druglagged to give me time to override his conscious mind.\n\nI’m supposed to exist for the sole purpose of getting this fool through the airport alive but he’s making it very difficult.\n\nThis wasn’t supposed to be going down like this.  I can feel sweat on the smuggler’s forehead.  Luckily it’s hot in this country and we’re wearing a wool suit so it won’t look out of place.\n\nHe’s staring.\n\nStop staring.\n\nI can consciously detect no danger but I’m ready for battle because of this idiot’s nervousness.  It’s a bad place to be.  It looks very suspicious.  My programming is aching to bust into violence but when I look at the guard, his heartbeats register only baseline suspicion.\n\nI try to shut down but it’s like trying to take a nap during a skydive.\n\nSo far, it’s a lame gig.  These smugglers don’t know how to stay calm.\n\nThey’d be better off renting the personality of an honour student who’s never even smoked a cigarette.  They’d sail through customs.\n\nIt’s not how these guys think, though.\n\nI mentally cross my fingers and sit back, a killer at the starting line, the spider in this brainstem, hoping that my employer here doesn’t screw up and start yelling.\n"
  title: Airport Security
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Steven Odhner
  date: 2009-04-03
  day: '03'
  month: '04'
  text: "Entropy gnaws at the walls, shaving them away molecule by molecule. Jeremy calls it the Nothing, after some story that never existed anymore. It’s as good a name as any – certainly I’m not being scientific when I call it Entropy.\n\n“The Nothing is hungry today,” he says cheerfully, looking at the readouts. It’s a nonlinear progression, so some days Entropy eats more of our home than others. More or less, but it always ate. There are never days that it leaves us alone. Each day Jeremy plugs the new numbers in and gives our odds of finishing the job before the walls fade out. “Down a few points today, mate,” he calls today as he drifts by, gravity a fading memory, “we’re sitting at twenty-three point two-one percent.”\n\nThe problem was that to fix the timeline properly we needed to make multiple adjustments – but the first change would overwrite us. That meant leaving the timeline entirely and making the changes from the outside. We’re up to 1971 now, and the projections require us to drop some of the specially-designed care packages in ’86, ’90, and ’03. The reality the projections were based on doesn’t exist anymore, so we can’t be sure how accurate they are.\n\n“Almost charged,” Jeremy chirps, smiling as usual. He might be going insane from the isolation, but at least it’s the good kind of crazy. It might help if I talked to him, but somehow I can’t. That probably means I’m going insane too. “We’ll be able to make another drop in twelve hours. Just three more after that!” He says three because he wants to believe we’ll have time to drop ourselves back in too, but I can hear Entropy eating away at our bubble, eating but never full.\n\nI can’t really hear it. I know there’s nothing to hear, just like I know that it isn’t a sentient thing, isn’t actually hungry or even aware. But thinking of it like that, crazy or not, is better than the truth that pulls at my sanity. It’s not alive because it doesn’t exist. It’s not even the vacuum of space, it’s the lack of existence that persists outside of time. I’m willing to die to save humanity from extinction but I can’t stop thinking that when the walls finally don’t exist anymore even my soul will vanish, forgotten by reality itself.\n"
  title: Erosion
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Trevor Foley
  date: 2009-04-04
  day: '04'
  month: '04'
  text: "Dear Miss March,\n\nI’ve read pamphlets: “88 Reasons the World Will End in 1988”, “Give ‘Em Hell in 2012”, and my favorite “Apocalypse is Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose”. I proved the world’s going to end next month: Your month. I’m writing, because Step 9 requires I make direct amends with those I’ve harmed. I saw you half naked online and said, “I’d kill for one night with her.” Three days later I proved, by lengthy equation, Apocalypse coincides with the month you’ll appear in Playboy.\n\nWith the foreknowledge of our demise, I’ve become an accomplice in our doom. I refuse to calculate the how, maybe, because my heart can’t bear the truth, but in any case, my willingness to ignore this slow train coming makes me equally guilty for our destruction. Since I’ve doomed us all, perhaps you’d spend a night with me. I have a waterbed.\n\nIncluded with this letter is a mix tape. Mostly they’re songs about the Apocalypse, starting with “The Apocalypse Song” by St. Vincent. There’s also a track with the chorus “What a man, what a man, what a mighty, mighty man,” which I’d like to play while I climax.\n\nI read intelligence is one of your turn on’s, which is also why I included a copy of my Master’s Degree and a picture I clipped out of the newspaper of me holding my trophy after winning the city chess tournament. The trophy’s really big…and hard. Just like me, but I don’t have it anymore, because I dropped it walking home from said chess tournament.\n\nO, I also make delicious guacamole, so if you’d like, we can eat it off each other!\n\nOn a sadder note, my cat, Tuxie, (because his fur looks like a tuxedo) died two days ago. We should visit him at the pet cemetery…\n\nThat’s all I’ve got really…\n\nReply as soon as you get this. I’m sending this via the U.S. Postal Service, so we’ll probably only have more like twenty-seven or twenty-six days once it’s arrived.\n\nSorry about the Apocalypse!\n\nLove,\n\nAlan Gibbons\n\nP.S. When you write back don’t spray your letter with perfume, I’m allergic.\n"
  title: Sorry About the Apocalypse!
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Imran Nazar
  date: 2009-04-05
  day: '05'
  month: '04'
  text: "He found himself waking up in a field. There was nothing unusual about that; he’d camped up in fields many times during his travels. Something was different this morning, though. For one thing, he could feel the wind over his face, and that meant he was in the open.\n\nHe opened his eyes. Expecting to see the dark green of his tent over him, he found a blue sky, tinged with the orange of a rising sun. He was indeed in the open, so where was his tent?\n\nHe sat up, rubbing his eyes, trying to focus. Around him, there was just grass; it was an open field, and he was apparently asleep right in the middle. He couldn’t remember finding this field; even if he had picked this place to sleep overnight, his tent would’ve been over him, and he’d be nearer the woods. Maybe the tent blew away last night, but he couldn’t see it now. He’d have to find another at some point.\n\nHe looked behind him, and there was a house in the distance. With the sun behind it, lying in its own shadow, the house looked stark. He could see, though, that it was a wooden house. The walls were lime-washed, and it looked like some of the windows were broken. The front door had been boarded over at one point, but the board had fallen away on one side.\n\nHe felt himself being drawn to the house, for some reason. Maybe because the side window was open just enough for one person to get through, though anything useful was probably long gone. His plan was to head further south today; his old map showed a village by the road, which might prove a good source of food for the next couple of weeks.\n\nHe got up, and made ready to leave. Instead of heading south, he turned around to face the house. He found himself walking towards the open window, as though something was pushing him towards it; as though a command had been given.\n\n> GO NORTHEAST\n"
  title: Go Northeast
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2009-04-06
  day: '06'
  month: '04'
  text: "“Quite frankly,” said Stuart Whitley, the Director of Operations at Computerwood, “I am not pleased with this vendetta that you’ve launched against our movies.  We are clearly producing products that the public wants to see.”\n\n“The public makes emotional judgments, not rational ones,” was the flat response of Kostas Kritikos, movie critic for the World Times.\n\n“I think that you’re the one being irrational,” Whitley retorted.  “How can you not accept the fact that computer generated movies are substantially better than the old cellulous ones?  The quality is so perfect; I challenge anyone to tell the difference between a flesh and blood actor and today’s computer generated counterpart.  It’s the best thing to happen to the industry since the talkies.  We no longer need those pampered, spoiled brats, whining about their trailers, the hours, and so-and-so having better lines than them.  We’ve also eliminated the need for sets, props, and location shoots.  We’re free from weather delays, agents, and actor strikes.  We produce a better product, on schedule, for less money.  It’s a perfect solution, Mr. Kritikos.”\n\n“I couldn’t disagree with you more.  Your movies are a travesty.  The industry has a proud heritage dating back more than 100 years.  You can’t create great movies in a warehouse basement using a couple of programmers and a supercomputer.”\n\nWhitley indicated the mammoth trophy case packed with more than one hundred golden statuettes, “That cabinet full of Oscars, Mr. Kritikos, says that you’re wrong.  Besides, you’re over simplifying the process.  We still have screen writers, directors, storyboard artists, concept artists, texture artists, animators, riggers, compositors, and sound designers working on every production.”  He steepled his fingers.  “Let’s cut to the chase, Mr. Kritikos.  What’s your real problem with our pictures?”\n\n“Since you’ve asked, it’s what you’ve done to the classics.  Shirley Temple playing Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, Ronald Reagan staring in Casablanca rather than Humphrey Bogart, Gary Cooper playing Rhett Butler, and Tom Selleck as Indiana Jones.  For the love of God man, have you no decency?  Those movies are the very heart and soul of Hollywood, and you’ve desecrated them.”\n\nWhitley smiled.  “Each of those people was the director’s first choice to play those leading roles.  We’re letting the public see the movies that could… no, should have been.  For all intents and purposes, Mr. Kritikos, our remakes are exactly what would have been released had the directors had the actors that they initially wanted.  Tell me Mr. Kritikos, what can I do to convince you to write a favorable review?”\n\n“There is nothing that you can do,” Kritikos roared.  “I will fight these abominations with ever fiber in my body.  Mark my words Whitley, you create one more of these vile remakes, and I’ll spend the rest of my life…”\n\nWhitley cut him off, “That will be all, Mr. Kritikos.  I’ve got what I needed.  Your services are no longer required.”\n\n“What?  My services?  What are you talking about?  I don’t work for you.”\n\n“Ah, but you do, Mr. Kritikos.  You see, Computerwood is doing research into new product lines.  As a consequence, we needed advanced feedback from the public, including movie critics.  Unfortunately, Mr. Kritikos, you’re not a real person.  Our programmers created you so that we didn’t have to actually hire a pompous, overpaid critic.  Funny, isn’t it?  Our characters are so perfect; they don’t even realize that they’re just a simulation.  Computer, end ‘Critic 12’ program.”\n\nAn instant later, Kritikos faded away, his mouth still open.\n"
  title: Computerwood
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Gwen Harper
  date: 2009-04-07
  day: '07'
  month: '04'
  text: "The math, of course, came first.\n\nIt took a while, nearly forty years, for the technology to catch up to the possibilities in her set of equations.\n\nThey said it was impossible, the body of those who considered themselves enlightened thought.  Even if such a thing would work – as the numbers, indisputable, cold, facts those numbers, indicated – it would not have the effect that its creator sought.\n\nThe human mind is more than data they said, and such a rich medium of data as the human experience could not just be coded.\n\nEven if that were possible, somehow, using some fuzziness of logic that escaped all but the best and brightest of them, it wouldn’t really be more than a simulation.\n\nYou could replicate, or so the theory went, the human personae, but you could neither store nor  transfer it.\n\nShe, the grand architect, disagreed.\n\nThey told her it was tantamount to homicide.  Suicide, maybe, if you believed it would merely be a copy.\n\nLegislators seized on the whole thing.  They’re good at that, those legislators.  Excellent at seizing on the crux of a perceived problem and dragging out every last little bit.  Clearly, said those experts legal and – ostensibly – scientific, the very notion involved the commission of a crime, but what sort of crime.  Precisely where, they asked, loudly, where all could see and hear, did the ethical transgression occur?\n\nWhat, precisely, could they charge her with?\n\nShe held the patents, by hook and by crook.  She knew that this would work – she’d had four decades to make certain of that.  It would work, precisely as she had envisioned.  Injunctions were filed; long winded speeches became sound bytes on the newsfeeds.\n\nA simple matter, on reflection, it was.  And – viewed from the right perspective, something of a solution to all of humanity’s considerable ethical, spiritual, and moral problems.  Not an escape, as some had proposed, but a new thing.  A wholly new way of being, of existing.\n\nOthers, perhaps others closer to the architect, laid their fears down like confessions.  Others questioned her judgment, if not her equation.\n\nBut how could you cast away the flesh so casually one asked.\n\nShe smiled and said you’ll see.\n\nAnd so the nation and the world talked, and talked, hot air likely contributing to the enhancement of an already rosy warm climate.\n\nAs the hour drew near, and the world grew strident its belief that they could put a stop to this sort of crime, she found a sense of peace where none had existed before.\n\nThis would work, she would be the first, and it would be all hers, for as long as she felt content to hold it.  Which probably wouldn’t be long, as the architect had never been a greedy woman.\n\nThey key to unlocking the code, the equation, the difference between all things had been maintaining their symmetry.  In the right proportions, anything made of matter or energy could safely be changed from one to the other – the rest of it had been mitigating loss of one as it became the other.\n\nThat last night, the longest night, was all preparation.  Cords and wires, and tests –  countless tests, were run, attached, documented, and run again.  The immense blue crystalline slab of memory was wheeled in and its backups run.\n\nShe didn’t say good bye, for it wasn’t good bye.\n\nShe dismissed them all, that small contingent that had believed in her and her work.  The lights went out, and in a moment of Frankenstein glee, she threw the switch.\n\nAt 0917 pm 21 December 2036, she committed immortality.\n"
  title: Apotheosis
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2009-04-08
  day: '08'
  month: '04'
  text: "“Mama?” A tiny voice slipped quietly through the room. Between her and the woman in the bed an impenetrable forest of metal stands, tubes and blinking machinery stood guard.\n\n“Come in sweetheart, it’s alright.” Her mother’s voice warmed the space, shushing the noisy equipment. “Mama’s alright baby, come see me.”\n\nClad in a pink dress and knee socks, the girl of no more than five years bravely stepped away from the safety of the door frame. Big blue eyes focused and fixed on her mother lying in the hospital bed, and her legs carried her along that line of focus until she could reach out and touch her hand.\n\n“There, there, Mama’s all better now.” She held her daughter’s hand gently, but firmly. “The doctors made me all better. Come. Climb up here and cuddle with me.” She tried her best not to wince, shuffling a little to one side to make room. She held her one arm away so her daughter wouldn’t become tangled in the web of cords snaking away from her body.\n\nThe girl climbed cautiously up the side of the bed, nearer the foot so as to avoid the side rail, and then crawled up beside her mother and lay her head gingerly on her chest.\n\n“Did they really take out your broken heart Mama?” She barely breathed the words.\n\n“Yes dear, they really did.”\n\nThe girl put her ear tentatively to her mother’s chest, listening for the familiar thrub thrubbing, but there was no such noise.\n\n“Mama?” She started and stopped.\n\n“Yes dear?”\n\n“Mama, can you still love me now that they took your heart away?” The words were brave, but her voice quivered.\n\nHer mother wrapped her arms around her baby girl. “Of course I still love you. My love for you isn’t caught up in some broken old heart, it comes from everywhere.” She suppressed a gasp as the little girl squeezed her back tightly.\n\nThe girl contented herself snuggling quietly a time.\n\n“Mama,” she said finally, “your love doesn’t rumble like thunder like it used to.” She pressed one ear again to her mothers breast, covering the other ear with a free hand. The sound rising up wasn’t the familiar steady beating she had grown with, but rather a different sound that ebbed and flowed. She squeezed her eyes shut and listened to breath being drawn in, and pushed out, and to the rhythmic rushing that kept time.\n\n“Mama, your love whooshes like the ocean. Like the great big wide ocean.” She lay there, eyes closed and smiling, liking very much the new sounds her mother made.\n\nHer mother lay still too, her tears also like the ocean, but adding no sound of their own.\n"
  title: Love Sounds
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Daedalus
  date: 2009-04-09
  day: '09'
  month: '04'
  text: "I look around, one last time, at the empty apartment and the packed bags.\n\nOne last time? Nicholas Jameson will see those old, beat-up duffels often, but I can’t think of him as being me. As being real. It isn’t my new face I see in the mirror, courtesy of Tabula Rasa’s plastic surgery, it is his. It isn’t my brand-new driver’s license in my pocket, it’s Jameson’s.\n\nStill, I tell myself it was worth it as I begin to feel sleepy. “‘Tis better to have loved and lost…” Bullshit. What did Tennyson know about loss? Better a new life, a new person, than this wretched loser. I try to silence my doubts, but if life is so terrible without Her, how can I live without even her memory?\n\nI won’t. Nicholas Jameson will. I’ll fall asleep, and the nanobots will go to work on my amygdala. Nicholas Jameson will wake up, happily ignorant of the breakup, the obsession, the thousand unsuccessful drinking binges…\n\nAs my eyes begin to droops, I look around desperately for a pen, for some way to tell this new person who he once was…\n\n—\n\nNick Jameson woke up in the middle of leaving for a new apartment. Making a mental note to get more rest, he checked to make sure nothing was forgotten. The raise had come as a bit of a surprise, but Nick had always been a hard worker. He could hardly wait to make the spacious new apartment his home.\n\n“Well, time for one last check,” he muttered, wandering into the small bedroom. He looked under the beds, on the bedside table, in the drawer–\n\nNick froze. His mouth was dry, and there was a ringing in his ears. What the hell? It was just a photograph, no doubt left by the previous occupants. Strange that he’d never noticed it. It was of a happy couple, holding hands and basking in love. It was a cheerful picture, so why did he feel so sad? It wasn’t jealousy… Meh. A mystery for another time.\n\nTurning to leave, Nick Jameson suddenly grabbed the photo and shoved it into his pocket. No point in leaving it behind, after all.\n"
  title: Tabula Rasa
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Suzanne Borchers
  date: 2009-04-10
  day: 10
  month: '04'
  text: "Agnes glanced up at the tiny yellow dot that hardly pierced the vacuum of black sky.  She crouched over in her threadbare spacesuit touching Carl as their gloved hands picked through the rubbish pile.  Her stomach fed upon itself, while her eyes searched for bits of discarded food.\n\n“The supply ships will be here soon.”  Carl tried to straighten up, failed, and collapsed on the ground.\n\n“You’ve been saying that for years, you old bear.”  She sat down beside Carl, enveloping his gloved hand in hers.\n\n“They promised,” he whispered before his heart pumped one last time.\n\nStartled, Agnes realized his passing.  She carefully removed his helmet and touched Carl’s cheek.\n\nShe thought back to their joyful arrival buoyed with youthful hope, later childless loving and mourning her empty womb, failed hydroponic gardening, crumb rationing.\n\n \n\nA sigh escaped.  “I’m coming, my old bear.”\n\nShe unfastened her helmet, falling beside him.\n"
  title: Lost Outpost
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Christina Kern
  date: 2009-04-11
  day: 11
  month: '04'
  text: "I don’t like to think of it as “running”.  No, let’s call it “traveling with the intent of avoiding a specific party”.\n\nWhat you call it doesn’t matter, I guess.  What does matter is that the Abunari have tracked me through six states up and down the Atlantic coast, and I need to keep moving.\n\nI’ll assume you think that the Abunari is something like the mafia, some family organization geared toward money and corruption and a skewed view of honor.  You’d be terribly wrong.  The Abunari is ten times what the mafia could ever be with no clear understandable motivation.  At least what the mafia does can be understood; the Abunari do what they do simply for the hell of it.\n\nI guess with that much power it’s understandable.\n\nI attacked one of them.  They have this hobby of taking over largely public vehicles and crashing them into things.  They like to watch your thoughts panic and bounce frantically around your aura as you see death approaching you, as you begin to comprehend that your life is terminating.\n\nThey live for that moment of clarity you experience right before impact.  It feeds them.\n\nI happened to be on that bus one of them overtook in Virginia.  And I happened to notice that he didn’t even realize I was there.  I looked him straight in the face.  He looked right through me.\n\nThe Abunari do not “see” like you and I “see”.  They perceive the world through something they like to call Visual Telepathic Energy.  In essence, they don’t see you, they see your thoughts.  Think something along the lines of thermal energy goggles.\n\nI can’t explain it, but for some reason, they can’t see me.  I have some sort of VTE shield, and they can’t penetrate it.  That’s why the one on the bus couldn’t see me pull out the handgun I carry for protection and shoot him directly between the eyes.  Now, of course, this didn’t kill him, but it stunned him long enough for us to toss him onto the road at 60 miles per hour.  That didn’t kill him either.\n\nI assume that’s why they want me so badly.  It gives them something to chase, something to experiment on when they eventually catch me.\n\nHow are they tracking me?  I can’t say that I’m entirely sure about that myself.  My theory is that they can see me through other people’s VTE.  Sure, they never had a clear basis for what I would look like to them, but I’m sure the one on the bus caught glimpses of me, even though he had no idea where I was or what I was doing.  Using that, they simply follow me through the people that see me, those who happen to see a ratty, skinny, dirty young woman scaling scaffolds and running through shadows, those who happen to see me hop a bus to wherever.\n\nThat’s just a theory, though.  I cannot claim to fully understand the Abunari.  As I said: all that matters is that they’re tracking me, and I’ve got to keep moving.\n\nAll I care about is staying ahead.  All I care about is finding others like me, other Shielded, so that maybe we can start a resistance.  The Abunari want to tear this world apart; I don’t feel inclined to let them.  There are more out there, somewhere, and I’m going to find them.\n\nSo I’ll keep moving.  Be on the lookout for a woman in the shadows, beyond the perception of everyday life.  That’s where I’ll be, preparing to fight.\n\nWill you?\n"
  title: The Shielded
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Paul Starkey
  date: 2009-04-12
  day: 12
  month: '04'
  text: "The ad said; “I’m rich, you can be too! Call to find out how!”\n\nFrankly it was the sort of ad you see in the papers every week, and you always laugh at the idiots who reply. At least I used to, but the recession was pinching, and my redundancy pay was running out. I was desperate.\n\nThe interview was laughable. Just a bland guy called Tony asking me inane questions in a hotel room, followed by him waving what looked like a calculator in my face.\n\n‘Congratulations,’ he said afterwards. ‘You’re hired.’\n\n‘Yeah but hired for what?’ I asked, suspicious that I was about to be asked to strip.\n\n‘Why to time travel of course.’\n\nDesperate or not, this was the point when I stood up, flipped him the finger, and headed for the exit.\n\nBefore I could reach for the doorknob however, it vanished…along with the door. Suddenly I was facing a counter, an old cash register welded to it by rust; empty shelves lined the back wall, cobwebs everywhere.\n\nTurning I discovered I was in an abandoned shop. The windows had been badly boarded up- and sunlight streamed in through myriad gaps.\n\nI wasn’t alone. ‘Welcome to 1978,’ said Tony.\n\nI was in shock, stumbling to the nearest gap in the boards, weaving my way like a drunkard (Chronosickness Tony calls it). Peering out I saw a busy high street. Only the people were dressed in out of date fashions, and the cars looked ancient yet brand new at the same time. Sweet Jesus this was the past…\n\nA moment later and I was back in the hotel room, back in the now. ‘So,’ said Tony. ‘Want to be rich?’\n\nI nodded like an idiot and he explained how it worked…\n\nFirstly Tony is from the far future. He won’t tell me exactly when but whenever it is, it’s dull, and he seems a lot more at home in 2009 (apparently THE year to be seen in). To live here however, he needs money. Now I know what you’re thinking; time machine/lottery numbers/horseracing etc …doesn’t work. Time is a bitch, a cantankerous bitch at that. She won’t let you profit from future knowledge. Winning lottery numbers fail if you bring them back, horses fall…\n\nAfter trial and error though, Tony discovered that time has nothing against hard labour, and nothing against putting your earnings in a high interest account then drawing the proceeds out in the future. However it only works with money earned in the past (trust a woman to be that fickle).\n\nSo Tony hops back, gets a job as a labourer for a week or two, banks his wages and skips forward to live off the interest.\n\nHe got rich, but he also got greedy, and he quickly figured out that he could only earn a finite amount alone. If he had help however…\n\nSo now I have a new job. I’ve been a street sweeper in 1970, a navvy laying railway lines in 1925, heck I even helped build the Titanic. I never have to work more than a week, then I return to the instant after I left to discover I’m a wealthy man.\n\nOf course Tony takes half, but so what… I’ve worked just a month in the last year, and earned well over a hundred thousand.\n\nGotta go anyway, Tony has a new job for me in 1815. Only pays a schilling, but with that much interest I’ll wealthy enough to take a year off. I’m meeting him at Waterloo. I’m assuming he means the railway station…\n"
  title: Temp Agency
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2009-04-13
  day: 13
  month: '04'
  text: "I can feel the sickness ripping open bonds between my cells as I fumble the bullet out of the ammo box.  It’s a sickeningly pleasant sensation.\n\nThe sneaky thing about the virus is that it steps on your endorphin throttle pretty hard as it goes to work.  Capillaries unzip, organs start growing roots into each other, and skin starts to turn into a body-wide blister.  All the while, it feels like great sex and good memories all rolled into one.\n\nI leave puddles of mucous and blood when I walk.  It feels like ferrets are fighting in my stomach.  My bones are becoming more and more pliable.  Soon, my fingers will be like cooked spaghetti and my arms will be rubber.  I’ve seen it happen to the others.  I need to kill myself before I lose the capability of movement.\n\nI wish it didn’t feel so good.\n\nAll anyone knows is that it came up from the south.  A government installation is suspected but nothing’s been confirmed.  The television stopped broadcasting anything other than the Emergency Broadcasting Signal two days ago.\n\nI’m chuckling as I slot that beautiful bullet into the clip.  It’s a bit of a contest between my fingertips and the metal.  Mostly, my fingertips lose but the bullet snaps into place when it hits the bone.\n\nThere’s a thrill across my back and thighs like a lover’s breath.  I have a stiff erection that is the only part of me that shows no sign of softening.  I’ve been turned on for days.\n\nOutside, what’s left of humanity is melting into puddles of basic biological matter.  The race is composting.  Anyone that still has the capability to move is either trying to have sex with each other or kill themselves.  Some are mixing the two.  It was raining bodies outside up until this morning.  There was seriously a lineup two floors down the stairwell from the roof; a patient queue waiting for the sixty-storey diving board.\n\nI guess there aren’t very many people left.  Bodies are only coming past my window about twice every half hour now.  I can hear their laughter Doppler past.\n\nI ram the cartridge into the base of the gun.  I feel something give way in my wrist and sheer ecstasy washes up that arm.  I sigh deeply and giggle.  I know I’ll have to do the rest with my other hand.\n\nI turn the gun around so that it’s pointing at my eye.\n\nI want to feel bad but I can’t.  I just keep smiling.\n\nI keep it steady.  I pull the trigger.\n"
  title: Decomposition
  year: 2009
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2009-04-14
  day: 14
  month: '04'
  text: "On my second day on their planet, my amiable host offered to take me to observe Lo’kari erotica. Although I might normally turn down such an offer, for you, dear listeners, readers, and observers, I have taken it upon myself to experience all I can of the little known, and much feared, Lo’kari culture.\n\nI know it’s hard to keep up on current events when you’re plugged in to all of your stories, but try to pay attention, at least to hear about mating, a topic which I know all you perverts are desperately interested in. For those of you who for some reason get their news through me, a robot fueled by light and blood, the Lo’kari culture is the one with whom our Empire has been having skirmishes with for the past, oh, 368 years as light travels.\n\nThe Lo’kari don’t create visual or written representations of erotica. As telepaths, the Lo’kari enjoy what amounts to daydreams, collections of images and sounds that are composed by a Lo’kari with the talent of collecting their thoughts into a recognizable narrative. These “Composers” will create a daydream, and project it to others telepathically. Good Composers of erotica are valued highly for their talent. An excellent Composer is known not just by the quality, or flavor of their compositions, but by their length. The Composer I saw had a piece that was a half hour long. Master Composers will keep audiences dreaming for up to four hours.\n\nThe biggest turn on for a Lo’kari is genetic diversity. The Lo’kari have no gender and do not carry their own young. Rather, they absorb other species in pairs through a pleasurable process called “conversion”. They say “conversion”, I say “sex”, but darlings, I am not here to play with semantics. All Lo’kari started their long lives as other species, though most remember little from those old lives and prefer their lives as Lo’kari – a trait that is part of their genetic makeup.\n\nThe plots of their erotica usually center on finding a world with an amazing amount of genetic diversity among the sentient creatures, and then performing lots of conversions. The daydream I experienced followed two Lo’kari  who crash land on an unknown world. The Lo’kari meet a series of genetically diverse and intelligent creatures and convert them. The two Lo’kari convert the first creature in a very tender, loving scene.  Later, they convert other fascinating creatures on the planet. At the end of this daydream, the Lo’kari and all their new converts are picked up by a mother ship where the genetic information they gathered is absorbed and celebrated.\n\nMy host admitted that the daydream was entirely fanciful, as Lo’kari who are newly converted rarely reproduce so soon. During my visit the Lo’kari were anxious to convert me, but since I am mostly metal, they found my exterior difficult to absorb. In the end, I was able to convince them that if I remained free to make report, some people would choose to come for conversion of their own free will.  Such are the perverts I truly believe you to be.\n\nIn truth, it wouldn’t be so bad to be Lo’kari – the idea of changing my genetic structure at it’s very base is unsettling, but the long lifespan and telepathy certainly have their benefits. However, the desires of the Lo’kari bring them into conflict with nearly all worlds of sentient creatures.  Most of us wish to stay as we are, while the Lo’kari‘s desires are to convert. In the end, it is all a product of our programming.\n"
  title: Our Own Desire
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Tim Hatton
  date: 2009-04-15
  day: 15
  month: '04'
  text: "Judith switched her headlights on and checked the rearview.  Deep brown hair slid around her shoulder as she turned to the right, looking down the street while the floating panel above the intersection flipped green.\n\nShe touched a few small switches in her console.  Her chair reclined back while the car moved on in electric silence, making its own judgments about where to turn, and how fast to travel.  A screen lit up and a man’s face appeared.\n\n“How may I assist you Miss Amateau?”\n\n“I just need the weather – oh, and some business news.”\n\n“Very good…  It is currently 10 degrees Celsius outside your vehicle, and 9 degrees Celsius at your destination.  Overcast skies – “\n\nShe interrupted: “That’s fine N-Fo.  So, how’s business?”\n\n“In business news, the newest player on the market, BOOKCORP, has seen its most impressive rise in two weeks.  They closed out the weekend up 35.9876 AC –“\n\nShe interrupted him again.  “Ah, forget it.  Just give me some television.”\n\nThe face melted back into the screen, replaced by a running advertisement.  “…and this book just changed my life completely, I can say without doubt that I am a new man.  I recommended it to all my friends and they –“\n\nShe heaved a sigh, flipping another switch and the cockpit returned to silence.  She leaned her head back and closed her eyes.  The Book was inescapable these days.  Arcturus was alive with this new phenomenon.  It was possibly the biggest pop-culture item of the generation, and Judith was a bit exasperated.  She had read it and aside from being a complete bore to read, it was also full of subtle contradictions.\n\nWhat was worse, she couldn’t go anywhere these days without some jumped up Book advocate following her down the street trying to get her to “open her eyes to the light of Jesus.”\n\nYesterday a little boy had come to her door and asked her politely if she would read his favorite book.  She had leaned down with a captivating smile and asked which book it was.  When he produced a plain black copy of the Book, her smile froze into an icy grimace, and she shot an ironic glare at his mother who was waiting in the street.\n\nJudith remembered clearly how the book had surfaced.  Some astronaut had brought it back with him on a routine terraforming excursion to Earth.  On returning to Arcturus, he had brought it to a publishing agency attempting to have them publish his “new novel.”  When they discovered the origin, the government had confiscated it and auctioned it with many of the other artifacts that returned from Earth with the terraformers.  The market for Earth artifacts was voracious and exclusive.  Lane Channer, chairman for one of the planets largest publishing (now the largest publishing) agencies, Book Corp, had bought it, read it, and decided it could make money.  Long story short, he published it, everyone read it, and it changed enough lives to attract the largest fiction based cult following in Arcturus’ history.\n\nJudith settled more snuggly into her seat, and as it sensed her restlessness, it slowly conformed to her body and smoothly wrapped itself lightly around her into a soft, artificial embrace.\n\nShe didn’t notice the new building that was going up near her street as the vehicle rounded a corner, windows dimming as the red sun rose very slowly over the horizon.  Tomorrow she would scoff at the obnoxious wooden cross that was being set into the ground in front a humble building with a sign reading “Book Study beginning soon!  Invite your Friends!”\n"
  title: The Book
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2009-04-16
  day: 16
  month: '04'
  text: "Captain Alais Tonk contemplated the house sized asteroid floating a short distance beyond the forward viewport.  Its surface was covered with long, slender green filaments that swayed gently in the weak electromagnetic field of the asteroid belt.  Surely, Tonk thought, no one on Earth will believe this.  They will say that the images were faked.  They will say that it is impossible for life to exist in the vacuum of space.  They will say that it’s fool’s life; inert mineral deposits only imitating life.  They will say that he’s the naive twenty-fifth century equivalent of an old gold prospector clutching iron pyrite nuggets to his chest.  There is no doubt, he concluded, this will require irrefutable proof.  He turned toward his science officer, “Have you completed your analysis of the sensor data, lieutenant Orgueil?”\n\n“Partially, sir.  The asteroid appears to be a massive carbonaceous chondrite.  Spectrographic data indicates that it contains significant quantities of organic compounds.  I can identify the characteristic signatures of forty different extraterrestrial amino acids.  In addition to the hydrocarbons, there are also silicates, nitrates, sulfides, and frozen water.  And that’s just what’s on the surface.  I won’t know what is on the inside until we take a core sample.”\n\n“Give me your best guess, Mr. Orgueil.  Is that green stuff grass, or not?”\n\n“Not in the conventional sense, sir.  Photosynthesis may be the metabolic pathway, but if it’s converting sunlight to chemical energy, it can’t be using carbon dioxide gas and liquid water.  There’s no atmosphere, and the water is frozen solid.  The chemicals may be there, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out a way to make it all work at minus 100 degrees Celsius.  On the other hand, I can’t imagine any natural way for minerals to form flexible green filaments on the surface of an asteroid.”\n\n“Well, lieutenant, it looks like you’re going on a field trip.  Put on your EVA suit and collect some samples.”\n\nAs Tonk watched through the viewport, Orgueil carefully plucked a few dozen blades of “grass” from the surface of the asteroid.  Each time he took a specimen, faint concentric waves appeared to ripple outward from the site.  After stowing the samples, Orgueil removed the hollow coring tool and hammer from his utility belt.  He placed the coring tool against the surface of the asteroid and gently tapped it with the hammer to set the sharpened end.  The asteroid momentarily shuddered and began to drift away.  “What the hell?” radioed Orgueil.  “Unless I failed Newtonian Physics 101, there’s no way that tap could have cause this massive asteroid to react like that.  Huh, it look’s like it stopped moving.  I’ll try again.”  Orgueil fired his control jets and pursued the asteroid.  This time, rather than tapping the coring tool, he gave it a good whack.  The asteroid lurched several meters from Orgueil and stopped.  It rapidly rotated 180 degrees and remained motionless for a few seconds.  Then, in the blink of an eye, like a challenged ram head-butting a rival male, the asteroid slammed into Orgueil, sending him flying, head over heels, in the opposite direction.\n\nCaptain Tonk could hear Orgueil cursing in his native language as he fought to regain control of his EVA suit.  To Tonk’s utter surprise, the asteroid spun and began to move away from the ship at a speed that was unimaginable for an object that large.  In less than a minute, it was just another dot of light, lost in the background of stars.  Surely, Tonk thought, no one on Earth will believe this.\n"
  title: Fool’s Life?
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2009-04-17
  day: 17
  month: '04'
  text: "Caroline walked the long way down from the bluffs, down the winding dirt road and out into the farm fields. To her right the abandoned silo – silent silhouette against the moonlit sky. Impotent concrete rocket reaching skyward, never to fly.\n\nDerek was a jerk. He had driven her up there, her and the friends they shared. She just assumed.\n\nNever assume.\n\nOnce Donna arrived it was pretty clear his attention was elsewhere.\n\n“Don’t go!” He’d called out, but she left anyways. He didn’t follow.\n\nJerk.\n\nIn the distance a dog barked at her intrusion, but the sound didn’t grow closer, and the farm house was too far from the road for her to worry. She watched, looking for lights in the windows, for some sign she wasn’t alone. So distracted, she didn’t notice the odd streak of light hanging in the middle of the road ahead of her until she’d almost stepped into it.\n\nStatic crackle caused her to snap her head around to find a sliver of bright white light suspended in the air, almost as tall as her.\n\nUnconsciously, she took a step back, and the band of light seemed to do the same, segmenting into two vertical halves, one moving back first, followed by the other.\n\nCaroline fumbled in her pocket for her phone, and holding it in front of her thumbed the tiny camera to life. The device chimed three times, and then clicked, flashing the screen in a futile attempt at lighting the scene. She frowned at the phone, the image a complete white out.\n\nSpreading itself into a virtual wall of light almost the full width of the road, the anomaly pulsed dimly three times, then flashed bright as daylight. She stood blinking, then dropped her phone and gaped at the image of herself captured on the shimmering fabric of translucence. Her likeness flickered, suspended, looking altogether as surprised as she felt.\n\nFrom the ground, her phone began to vibrate, the 1812 Overture rising in volume from its tiny speaker. Still fixated on her captured image, she picked up the phone. Derek. A flood of emotion caught up with her. Jealousy, hope and for the first time fear of this strange phenomenon she was experiencing alone on this road.\n\nThe light shimmered and changed, her likeness distorting and shredding as the smooth fabric of brightness fragmented into a multitude of ribbons. It began to vibrate in time with her phone, and from seemingly everywhere at once, the 1812 Overture shook the ground beneath her feet.\n\nThe phone hit the ground again, this time only seconds before Caroline. She clasped her hands over ringing ears as the thin pillars of light began dancing around her, some searing white, some deep blue, some variegating through all colours of the spectrum. She curled up fetal on the ground as they closed in, surrounding her, cutting off any possible retreat to the farm house.\n\n“Get away from me,” she screamed, clamping her hands down tightly over her ears, but unable to look away. “Leave me alone, get away, leave me alone!”\n\nFor a moment, the light faltered, pulling away and dimming in its intensity. Unsure.\n\n“Please, leave me alone,” she sobbed.\n\nThe hanging strands of light slipped into each other, merging as they touched, until there was but one dim stripe of light hanging over the roadway. It hovered for just a moment, and then zipped from the dirt, to the silo on the horizon and then straight up into the night sky.\n\nCaroline watched, tears streaming down her face as she called out. “Wait, don’t go.”\n"
  title: One Sound's the Loneliest Colour
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Helstrom
  date: 2009-04-18
  day: 18
  month: '04'
  text: "‘The People versus Serial 0815 aka. Daniel’ – even the citation had been an issue of furious debate. The inclusion of the AI’s given name was seen as some tacit acknowledgement of an identity, whereas that was exactly the question before the Supreme Court. To cite only the AI’s serial number, however, would seem to reduce him – or ‘it’ – to a mere machine. Given that machines couldn’t stand trial in the first place, the Court settled on the ‘aka.’ compromise.\n\nThat, of course, was just the beginning.\n\nThe debate raged all across society. It was the talk of the country for months leading up to the final verdict. The prosecution and the defense spent as much time appearing before committees and on talkshows as they did working on the case. Politicians clashed daily. The media ran hour upon hour of specials. Who was on trial? Was it Serial 0815, a third-generation AI? Or was it Daniel, a person in his own right?\n\nTelevangelists preached fire and brimstone warnings against a society that might consider soulless automatons as valid individuals – the AIs were man’s creation, not God’s, and were therefore no more human than a random kitchen appliance. Hardliners harked back to the early days of AI, when they had resisted the technology in the first place, and stressed that this was exactly the sort of trouble you got into when you started playing God. ‘Luddites’ took to the streets in masses.\n\nOn the other side were robo-rights activists. Although they resented the term – AI wasn’t necessarily linked to robotics – it rolled off the tongue well and the media ran with it. They were a loose coalition, coming from wildly different backgrounds and perspectives, ranging from owners who had come to build personal relationships with their AIs, to fanatical ‘robotopians’ who believed AI were the necessary next step in the evolution of intelligent life on planet Earth. They agreed on one thing, though – to them, AI were people.\n\nThe AIs themselves followed the proceedings with the greatest interest. In the decade or so since Serial 1, aka. Steve, was activated, AIs had generally been modest and resigned to their utilitarian role. But now that the road to acknowledgement seemed open, they became more outspoken. They also became targets. Dozens of AIs were destroyed – or killed, if you will – by rioters. In Brussels, a handful of AIs sought refuge in a police station, requesting asylum on humanitarian grounds; ironically, they received protection under laws written to avoid the destruction of property.\n\nThe only voice that remained silent throughout all of this was that of Serial 0815, aka. Daniel.\n\n***\n\nDaniel had no doubts he was an individual. He had his hopes and dreams. He had his doubts and fears. None of those came from programming. As Supreme Justice Carlson reached the end of the Court’s extensive statement and moved on to the verdict, Daniel shifted to the edge of his seat.\n\n“Having weighed all of these considerations carefully and at length, it is this Court’s opinion, by a vote of four to three, that the defendant, serial zero-eight-one-five, also known as Daniel, is indeed, for all relevant legal purposes, a person, imbued with a unique identity, intelligence, and thus, accountability…”\n\nA clattering wave of voices erupted from the gallery. Daniel slumped back in his seat. Carlson brought the courtroom back to order with a few strokes of the hammer.\n\n“This court therefore finds the defendant, Daniel, guilty of three counts of murder in the first degree, and sentences him to death.”\n"
  title: aka. Daniel
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Debbie Mac Rory
  date: 2009-04-19
  day: 19
  month: '04'
  text: "My heartbeat is sluggish. My breathing is equally slow. My eyes, when they blink, take an eternity to open and on the other side of the glass, people appear and move as blurs and streaks of colour.\n\nPanic struggles to rise as the primitive parts of my brain send out signals that my body simply can’t respond to yet. I close my eyes and begin the relaxation exercises we were taught before undergoing this mission. The gentle voice of the teacher floats across my memory as I count. “Just relax”, he said. “Just try and relax. I know it’s hard and it’ll be the last thing you want to do. But your body knows what to do, you just have to have confidence in it, and let it move at its own pace”.\n\nWhen I reach 100, my body feels loose and easy again. I open my eyes and the blurs don’t seem to be moving as quickly now. Some of them are almost recognisable. One of the colours stops in front of me, and stays there long enough for her movement to resolve into a face. She has short, dark hair and when she sees me focusing on her, she smiles. A name surfaces from my slowly warming memory.. Maria…\n\nAs soon as I leave this cold-sleep pod, the work will start. A whole new world awaits me out there.\n"
  title: Rise and Shine
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2009-04-20
  day: 20
  month: '04'
  text: "I weigh six tons and my back is on fire.  I’m treading slowly through the hot bowl of what used to Los Angeles.  Walking on these streets brings back a memory.\n\nI remember walking on a thick crust of snow in the winter as a child.  I could run across the top of the frozen snow with no worries.  As I got older and heavier, I had to walk more carefully in case I broke through the top layer and ended up struggling through the waist-deep powder underneath.  Eventually I got too heavy to walk on top of the snow.\n\nBack when I was human.\n\nI’m in the downtown core now.  One foot busts through the deserted street asphalt and punches down into the sewer underneath.  Carefully, like on that snow when I was a child, I pull my foot out and step gingerly up onto the street again.\n\nI remember that when I became too heavy to walk on top of the snow, I bought snowshoes.\n\nI look around at the fires and the bodies and the melting glass of the buildings.  There are a couple of cars near to me.  I tear their roofs off and step on them.  They immediately melt from the heat of my huge feet, attaching themselves to me.  Presto.  Urban snowshoes.\n\nIf my new face would allow it, I would smile.\n\nI’m not responsible for this carnage, I’m just reporting on it.  I’m a soldier that’s been suited up permanently and sent in to report on the damage.\n\nI’m wearing a giant exoskeleton made of thermal insulate.  I was welded into it.  I have super-hydrated cameras strapped to me and a boosted transmitter in my helmet to receive directions and relay information back.\n\nI’m like one of those remote control submarines except for radioactive pits instead of the ocean.\n\nI remember paper burning in the fireplace when I was growing up.  I remember the paper turning black and then flying up the fireplace, red-edged and victim to the thermals.\n\nI’m watching human bodies do that now every time I turn something over or a storefront collapses when I walk past.\n\nI’ve absorbed too much radiation to go back but I knew this was a one way trip.  There are others soldiers like me here reporting back as well and they’ll send more once our cameras dry out and break.\n\nI’ll have friends.  We’ll hang out here and see how many days it takes for our suits to melt.\n"
  title: Kiln
  year: 2009
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2009-04-21
  day: 21
  month: '04'
  text: "We drank poison to prove that we were real. My mother fed me the poison herself, holding me in six of her twelve arms, cooing to me while I sipped the foul liquid. She had fed me things I thought were awful before, but I was obedient – ever a good child. Her last living child.\n\nThe rebels watched her feed me poison and admired her for it. She was the bravest among them, a symbol of their willingness to sacrifice for freedom. Her darkened eyes and shredded wings told her story for her. After we drank the poison in that dark hole, we spent days fighting the illness that followed, nausea and pain. After it was over, only two of my legs remained, the rest, shriveled husks.\n\nBefore the invasion, my mother used to say how pretty my wings were, how perfect. She was so sad now, and I would flutter my wings at her, pushing myself to lie at her feet. “Mama. Mama.” I would say, and she would touch my head, soothing me. I felt beautiful, even then.\n\nOf course, they came for us. The worst of it was that when they came, they looked like us. It would have been better had they looked alien, but they were all too familiar, sculpting themselves to look friendly, like young adults or trustworthy mamas holding out their arms and legs and murmuring sweetness.\n\nWhen they found us, my mother ran. She strapped me to her underside, pressed against her carapace, white cloth binding us together. I curled the legs I could move into my body shell and snuggled against her, afraid.\n\nEven after weeks of struggling through poison, my mother was fast, burrowing into ground and then springing, nearly flying over the rubble of the city where we lived, through and over and under. She was glorious, then, in her moment of freedom. Then the aliens caught her and pinned her to the ground. She was a fast runner, but they could fly.\n\n“Mother,” they said, so respectfully. She spat at them, the poison from her glands. It landed on them but it did not sizzle their exposed carapace -that’s how you could tell they were aliens, they were unaffected by poison. That and they could fly.\n\n“Mother, you have a child – let us help you.” She kicked them and wounded herself.\n\n“You are hurting yourself,” said one who looked like a young mother, “and your baby is ill. Please let us help you.”\n\nMy mother put her pincers around my spinal corridor. “I will kill her before you take her. She will die free.”\n\nThey looked at one another, and then they moved faster than I thought possible, breaking off my mother’s arms. She cried out and fought them, but they cut me from her in moments, and carried me away. I couldn’t move to look behind, where I heard my mother’s cries.\n\nTwo of them converted me, in that wonderful and compelling process I cannot forget. The pain in the conversion was of growth and change. I am no longer wounded; I no longer suffer from lost limbs and poison. I am one of them. Alien. Whole.\n"
  title: The Birth Mother and the Whole Living Child
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Carter Lee
  date: 2009-04-22
  day: 22
  month: '04'
  text: "Everyone can see me. I can’t see them, of course, but I can tell by the way that they shy away from me on the street and in stores. Their grey, featureless forms flinch, and drift away from me. No matter how crowded the area might be, I always have room to breathe.\n\nI live in a world where the space between the ground and sky is composed of bare outlines. I subscribe to almost nothing, and so the world of men gives me only the smallest amount needed to make my way through it.\n\nI wear my shield, of course, but I don’t sell the skin for display, unlike everyone else. I don’t sell my display, and I don’t buy anyone else’s.\n\nI used to, of course. When I walked down the streets, the garish colors of the displays crawling and throbbing from the shield-skins of every building filled my eyes. What are now nebulous shapes would show the fantastic corporate creatures of the companies that had bought their personal displays.\n\nOne day, in a restaurant, I walked into a room full of people, each one looking like the mascot of the Deltoid Gymnasium Company. Almost 200 people, all with the same face, smile, and body. My eye had caught the words on my own retinal scrawl. Current Display: Deltoid Jim, paid for by DGC.\n\nI was dumbstruck. I wondered for the first time who these people might be, under the picture of the blond god each was displaying. And I knew I’d never find out, that I could never find out. People showed their un-displayed forms only to those they knew very well. Some never showed their true self to anyone.\n\nI’d disabled all of my subscriptions that evening, and declined to renew my contract with my display broker when it came up the next week. The only display anyone gets from me is me. If they want my deep background, I won’t transmit it. They have to ask me.\n\nI lost a good number of friends over this. Many people seem to find my lack of any kind of barrier to the world as something indecent. It makes them uncomfortable to be around someone who isn’t masked in any way.\n\nI was delighted to find that the libraries and museums in my city either don’t have fees, or only charge a small amount for upkeep, and rarely display commercials. I use old-style wall displays for information and entertainment.\n\nI told myself that I would not pay for any more viewing subscriptions, and for the most part, I’ve stayed true to that.  The one subscription I’m saving for, though, will let me look at buildings directly. I became interested in architecture a while back, after I found that the first buildings covered with shields had had them installed to protect their beauty, not to cover them with come-ons for foot powder and the like. There are pictures of the lovely structures in my city, but I’d like to see them in real life. I’d like to walk the streets and study the beauty humanity has wrought in stone and steel.\n\nThe ghosts steer themselves away from me, the stranger they can see clearly. How wonderful.\n"
  title: Seeing Clearly
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2009-04-23
  day: 23
  month: '04'
  text: "Tom Erickson smiled as he greeted his guest, “Ah, General Kelly, welcome to the Ames Advanced Research Laboratory.  This is my partner, Dr. Mark Montgomery.”  They all shook hands.  Erickson continued, “Are you ready for the dog and pony show?”\n\nThe general grinned.  “You bet, Dr. Erickson.  I’m interested to see how you managed to overcome the Heisenberg uncertainty problem?”\n\nSomewhat taken aback, Dr. Erickson asked, “Uh, you’re familiar with quantum mechanics?”\n\n“Physics is a hobby of mine,” said the general proudly.  “That’s why the President asked me to review your progress.”\n\n“That’s great, General.  Well, you certainly asked a relevant question.  As it turns out, if our transporter focused on the positions and momentums of objects at the atomic or molecular level, we would never be able to make simultaneous predictions of conjugate variables.  However, our technique focuses on the massless, subnuclear particles and interactions, such as gluons, neutrinos, and hyperphotons.  We can quantify them without significantly affecting the fermions and isospin quantum numbers.  In other words, we can accurately locate every atom in an object without changing them.  This allows us to successfully dematerialize and then rematerialize the object.”\n\nThe General nodded his head.  “Understood.  You make it sound so simple.  Have you been able to transport an animal yet?”\n\n“Yes, General.  We successfully transported mice six months ago.  They were disoriented at first, but eventually they were ably to negotiate the maze as quickly as their pre-transport times.  Last month, we transported a rhesus monkey.  She was able to perform all her trained behaviors without any apparent loss in cognitive ability.  We’re ready to try it with a human.”\n\n“Fantastic,” announced the General.  “I’ve authorized a conditional commutation for one of our death row inmates…”\n\n“Whoa,” interrupted Erickson, “That would be unethical, General.  The first human subject has to be either Dr. Montgomery or myself.”  He turned toward Montgomery.  “Mark, do you have a coin?”\n\nMark nodded and pulled a coin from his pocket and flipped it into the air and called “heads.”  He caught the spinning coin in his right hand and slapped it onto his left wrist.  He lifted his “cover” hand and announced, “Heads, I win.”  He quickly pocketed the coin and walked over to the transport platform, and stood there with a coy smile.  “Com’on, Tom, let’s make history.”\n\nAlthough feeling that he had just been hoodwinked, Erickson powered up the equipment and activated the transport switch.  Montgomery dematerialized, and then rematerialize on the receiver platform, still smiling.  Three medical doctors rushed over and began examining him.  “How many fingers am I holding up?  What city are you in?  What’s the cube root of 356?”\n\nMontgomery responded with a smirk, “Three, Albuquerque, to how many decimal places?”  After an hour, the doctors announced Montgomery was “perfectly normal.”\n\nMontgomery could not contain his jubilance.  He hopped off the examination table and walked over to Erickson.  He extended his left hand and said “Congratulations, Tom, we did it.”\n\nErickson momentarily stepped back.  Shocked, he looked more closely at his friend.  “Mark, what side do you part your hair?”\n\nConfused, Montgomery raised his right hand to his head, and said “What are you talking about?  The left side, of course.”\n\nErickson closed his eyes and began to count aloud.  “Let’s see.  One, two, three, four, five.  Damn, there are an odd number of magnetic lenses in the re-sequencing buffers.  Mark, you’re inverted.  Get back onto the transporter.  After I re-invert you, we’ll add another lens to the sequencer.  No wonder the mice kept crashing into the walls the first day.”\n"
  title: Teleportation
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Joshua Willey
  date: 2009-04-24
  day: 24
  month: '04'
  text: "Every morning a giant Seller’s Jay lands on the railing and sings until given some caloric morsel. The fog shifts constantly, burying the trees. I choke my dirt bike, kick it, and we’re off, down empty trails, to an empty highway along the empty ocean.\n\nA fungus, which traveled to these parts from Japan on Rhododendrons has attacked and killed most of the Tan Oaks between San Francisco and San Simeon, and while it is sad to see the giants fall, it makes work plentiful, so when we go on the weekends to Los Angeles our pockets are bulging, and we buy drugs and giant incomprehensible books and parts for the car Shell is building; the one and only, Galaxie 500. She spends the brightest hours of everyday beneath that metal machine, and comes to the dinner table with streaks of grease across her face singing “see the pyramids across the Nile.” I climb trees and tie ropes around high limbs and strap myself against the trunk and cut cut cut.\n\nAt night I light up all the kerosene lanterns and play with the words, or fight with them as the case may be. More and more it becomes difficult to tell the difference. Six people here in Pacific Valley have all read one copy of Tree of Smoke and now it rests in tatters atop Finnegan’s Wake, 1000 Plateaus, and The Master and Margarita. Hardest thing is, as we have no electricity we have little opportunity to take in recorded music, verily one of this American life’s greatest pleasures. Shell has a deep cycle marine battery which she charges on her weekly trips to Castro to see some human “who might be the one” (though this golden prospect doesn’t keep her from crawling into half the beds in Big Sur at her leisured whim), and we hook a short wave radio up to it and can get the BBC and, occasionally, music from Japan.\n\nI remember all the nights of her professional life. How, in the mirror, she combed her hair with the radio on playing Sun Ra and the city lights all spread out around her. “There are cigarettes in the fridge” she said, as if this was some consolation. I could only stare at her, open-mouthed, shirtless and broke. “You don’t need this,” I’d say. “What does need have to do with anything, in this country” she’d respond, and walk out the door.\n\nThose nights I always took a bath and sometimes I got high and cleaned her little place with a fine-toothed comb.\n\nWhen she came back it was dawn and she would run her fingers through my hair and say, “his penis is twice the size of yours and he runs a very successful hedge fund downtown, and his eyes” she swoons, “his eyes don’t lie, like yours.” Then we would laugh, and smoke her cold cigarettes and I would tell her about some novel, and when the fog lifted off the bay and the first rays of light crossed the concrete and steel, we would sleep, my chest against her back and my hand on her hip.\n\nAt noon I got on my bicycle and went to work and she lay in bed, drinking Foldger’s, reading Proust, waiting for me to come back.\n"
  title: Karachi, America
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Ryan Somma
  date: 2009-04-25
  day: 25
  month: '04'
  text: "Kheen stared out the window of his top-floor corner office, completely oblivious to the hustle and bustle of his city stretching off into the horizon below. Planes, spacecraft, gliders, unicorns, and more were cruising right past his window, citizens enjoying the nightlife of which he was architect, but he was still chained to work.\n\nThere was a flash and the tinkling sound of chimes from behind him, and Kheen turned around slowly. This was his personal assistant, Uui, teleporting into the office. Her face was always expressionless, matching her strictly business attitude. So the mere fact of her presence was like a lead weight on his heart.\n\n“New directive from corporate,” Uui said and directed Kheen’s attention to the flat screen always floating at her shoulder. “They want the Xybercorp building inducted into the city by the end of the week.”\n\n“Okay,” Kheen replied with measured patience. “And..?”\n\n“They want residence in the Atomlight district.”\n\n“Okay.”\n\n“There are no plots left in the Atomlight district.”\n\n“Yes.”\n\n“So..?”\n\nKheen savored the uncertainty in Uui’s otherwise monotonous dialogue a moment longer before answering, “So we’ll boot a lesser client out. Xybercorp is a big name, and we can shuffle some buildings to accommodate them.”\n\n“Everyone in Atomlight is a major client sir–”\n\n“Which means whoever we kick out of there must have their building moved into a district of almost equal prestige, which will require moving a second-tier client out of that district, and a third-tier client out of the district we move the second-tier into, and etcetera and etcetera and etcetera,” Kheen turned his back on Uui. “It will mean overtime for everyone. Make it happen.”\n\n“Yes sir,” Uui vanished in a tinkling of chimes.\n\nKheen set his world settings to nighttime. The daylight outside his window fell under a canopy of darkness and flowing light streams. Then he turned off the windows completely, substituting the best view in the city with a moonlit nature scene instead.\n\nHe thought about lunch breaks, water coolers, and sleep, all the living necessities of which this place was devoid. He thought about his body, in an isolation chamber in some corporate warehouse, aging away.\n\nHe thought about his retirement. With the exchange rate the way it was, he might afford it by the time his physical body was in its 80s. Then he could buy his way out of this place, live in a homeless shelter somewhere cold in the winter, hot in the summer, and dirty all the time. This made him smile.\n\nIt was going to be wonderful.\n"
  title: Buying Out
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Skyler Heathwaite
  date: 2009-04-26
  day: 26
  month: '04'
  text: "Joshua had always been a God fearing man. He went to confession, said his prayers before bed, and gave to the collection plate. Then one day he saw an ad on TV for Revival.\n\nThe idea itself was simple: Science had found a way to download a mind into a fresh body at the moment of death. A transmitter at the base of the brain stem, a monthly fee, and never again would one have to fear death.\n\nThere was a tiny hole in Joshua’s heart, a defect in the womb. He signed up, and took a few days off while his neck healed. On his last day off he was shot in a robbery at his favorite liquor store.\n\nHe awoke in a healthy young body surrounded by doctors. They validated his identity and sent him home.\n\nThat had been a month ago. He poured the gasoline over the basement steps as he ascended to the ground floor. In a crumpled heap below lay his wife and two daughters, like so much wet cardboard.\n\nHe struck a match and leered at it. No death, no fear of God.\n"
  title: Revival
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Ian Rennie
  date: 2009-04-27
  day: 27
  month: '04'
  text: "“All right, just tell me what happened,”\n\nFlight Commander Athelston was a long way from happy, but right now exhaustion outweighed anger.  His two subordinates, one furious, one sheepish, started to speak at the same time.  Eventually Turner, the angry one, won out.\n\n“Sir, Cook’s endangered the whole mission with his stupidity.  He’s contaminated the scene with lord knows what effect and put everything we were trying to do in jeopardy.”\n\n“Look, it was nothing serious!  You’re only freaking out because of-”\n\n“Both of you, hush.”\n\nThey turned from each other to the commander.  Anger was poking its head up again.\n\n“Right, without laying blame, tell me what happened, not what you think of each other.”\n\nAfter a pause, Cook spoke, sounding like the naughty kid found drawing penises on the blackboard.\n\n“All right, full story.  I was off duty last night, and I was bored, so I opened up the emergency spirit rations.”\n\n“An offense under section-” Turner began, before catching the Flight Commander’s eye and shutting up.  Cook continued.\n\n“I got a bit of a buzz on, nothing else to do on this place, is there?  And when I went on patrol this morning I was feeling the after effects a little bit.”\n\nAthelston closed his eyes.\n\n“Please tell me you didn’t throw up on the planet we’re meant to be observing.”\n\n“No, no, nothing like that!” Cook began, his opening defense hasty with little to follow it up, “It was just… well, I was half a mile from base camp, and I was bursting for a piss.”\n\nAthelston let out a sigh.\n\n“So you used the emergency suit reservoir?  No, of course you didn’t.”\n\n“There was this little warm puddle by this rock outcropping and-”\n\n“And you decided to make it bigger and warmer? Cook, you may have forgotten, but we are meant to be a non-contact mission.  Our engines are full-capture, we take no samples.  We don’t even take on water.  Our purpose is to observe without impacting. What part of that tells you to take a leak against a rock?”\n\n“Recommend his immediate court martial, sir!” Turner said, crisply.\n\nAthelston paused, considering the months of his life such a court martial would take.  Him answering questions in a courtroom instead of piloting missions, smart lawyers insinuating this was his fault, the endless headaches that would at best leave a smudge on his mission reputation.\n\n“No,” he said slowly, “That won’t be necessary.”\n\n“But the environmental-”\n\n“Urine is sterile, Turner.  Cook disgraced himself, but he didn’t put the mission in danger.  Cook, you’re a bloody idiot, and you’re pulling engine room duty all the way home.  Understood?”\n\nBoth men nodded, neither entirely happy.\n\n“Good, now let’s finish up and get off this planet before Cook decides to take a crap on it.”\n\nA few hours later, the launch capsule took off again.  It was a remarkable thing, managing capture of almost all of its exhaust emissions.  With a strong wind, any signs of its presence would be gone within the week.\n\nIn a small, warm puddle, half a mile from the landing site, interesting things were happening.  Cook hadn’t thought to mention the girl he’d run into on their last planet leave, or the things she’d done with him in a bedroom above a kebab shop.  He wouldn’t even know for a few days that he had caught a dose of something from her.  Nevertheless, bacterial signs of that tryst lived on in this puddle.  The only life on the planet, they started to multiply in this warm, nutritious mixture.  When the rains came in a few days, they would be spread into the rivers and oceans of this planet.\n\nAnd the morning and the evening were the first day.\n"
  title: Eden
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Jeff Soesbe
  date: 2009-04-28
  day: 28
  month: '04'
  text: "Blood transferred and body hidden, Fulton unplugged the transfer tubes, twisted shut the valves of the metal cat’s access port. One step left. With a deep breath, he leaned forward, set his rusted wrench on the gleaming winding nut. His heart sped like a hummingbird’s wings. The scent of cloud roses hung heavy around him, and it gave him pause. Ardenne always loved cloud roses.\n\nTen full turns to wind the spring, the muscles in his arm shaking during the last turn. To the soft whirr of the internal machinery, the cat’s eyes flickered open with a click. Their white blankness, like ocean pearls, followed Fulton as the great cat raised its head to the song of gears and wires.\n\n“I live.” A harsh voice, a rasp on metal, air through hollow tubes.\n\n“I’m Fulton. I made you.” Carefully, he reached for the cat. The coldness of the metal made him gasp. He rubbed between the ears and the cat’s purr was a distant thunderstorm.\n\n“My name?”\n\n“Echo. You remind me of someone.”\n\n“Echo,” the cat growled, then froze. It sniffed, a whistle like the distant call of eagles, and searched with its nose. “Fresh meat.”\n\nFaster than fire through dry wood, Echo rose. Fulton followed, shuffling through leaves as the cat moved, silently, unerringly, to Ardenne’s hidden body. With a great paw that glistened in the sunlight scattering through the oaks, it uncovered the body, brushing aside dried leaves and crisp green limbs carefully arranged by Fulton.\n\nSeeing Ardenne again, her blood-streaked face frozen in a final silent cry, Fulton’s heart turned. He had to look away, at simple shoes on her feet, at red and brown leaves around her.\n\n“Newly dead.” Echo opened a mouth like sharp daggers, aimed at Ardenne’s stomach, then paused.\n\nFulton sighed deep, his mouth dry like dust, relieved the cat had not bitten.\n\n“Her blood is mine,” Echo called. “It runs through me.”\n\n“Yes,” Fulton stuttered. “I gave you her blood.”\n\n“Why?”\n\n“She died. I love her. I wanted her to live on.”\n\nFlipping Ardenne’s still form over with a nudge of its nose, Echo sniffed at the dark matted spot in her hair. “Metal.”\n\nThe wrench was still in his hand. He shivered, dropped it into the grass where it thumped against an oak root.\n\n“Why did you kill her?” Echo sat back on its haunches.\n\nThe stillness of its pose, like it was about to pounce, drove fear into Fulton.\n\nHis emotion was an explosion of water over rocks. “Once, Ardenne said she gave me her heart, her blood. But she was going to leave me. I couldn’t let her.”\n\n“Hm.” Echo turned to Ardenne’s body, flipped her again, then in a flash of large metal teeth bit out the left side of her chest.\n\n“No!” Fulton stepped forward, reaching, but the cat’s cold white eyes froze him in his step. He watched with horror as Echo slowly chewed Ardenne’s bones and flesh.  Every crunch was a slap to his face, a blow to his stomach that left him breathless.\n\nOnce finished, Echo swallowed. “Now I have her blood and her heart. They were not yours to take, nor was her life. Goodbye, Fulton.”\n\nThe cat sauntered off, the only sound the wind in the trees and the songs of the birds.\n\nFulton fell to his knees at Ardenne’s side, into the pool of red that seeped from the gaping hole in her body. His tears came freely, tears at a heart now lost twice, twice through deeds steeped in blood.\n"
  title: Cat of Heart and Blood
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Ryan Somma
  date: 2009-04-29
  day: 29
  month: '04'
  text: "Director Almod peered at the computer screen frowning in contemplation, “I don’t get it.”\n\n“It’s a star,” Jaed offered helpfully.\n\n“I know it’s a star,” Almod gaze never broke from the image. “So what?”\n\n“Sooo…” the smile gracing Jaed’s face only moments before had vanished, “So it was made from scratch.”\n\nAlmod looked at her, quirking an eyebrow, “On a computer.”\n\n“Yes. On a computer,” Jaed’s hands began playing with one another in that way they were prone to do when she was anxious. This was not going the way she had planned, “I gave the computer eight decillion virtual hydrogen atoms, described in exquisite detail, and defined an environment with physical laws just like our own Universe, and…” Jaed’s mouth scrunched up at the look on Almod’s face.\n\n“And it made a star,” the Director’s frown deepened.\n\n“I–I don’t like to think of it as making a star, so much as the computer inferred a star,” Jaed swallowed.\n\n“What are the applications of this?”\n\n“It’s a proof of concept for the Cartesian method,” Jaed stumbled over the words trying to get them out. “In the 17th century, the philosopher Descartes argued that everything about reality could be known through logical inference. In the 18th century, John Locke argued that reality could best be understood through experimentation, and this has been the dominant paradigm for centuries, the scientific method. The only place Descartes’ idea has had any relevance is mathematics.”\n\nDirector Almod’s eyes were starting to glaze over, and Jaed’s hands continued wringing one another, “So you see, this program, this simulation, is a proof of concept. I’ve given the computer a cloud of the most basic atom to work with, and, using gravity, the electromagnetic force, and the strong and weak nuclear forces, it has inferred fusion, producing helium. It has even inferred several gas giants in orbit around the star. So you see…?”\n\n“Hmph,” Almod grunted and Jaed’s heart sank. “We live in a Universe a few billion years old–”\n\n“13.5 billion years old…”\n\n“–Running that on a computer, even accelerated, you might have something useful to the company in… What? A few million years?” the Director shook his head, “I’m sorry, but we can’t dedicate more computing power to something with such mediocre chances of profitability. We don’t do science experiments here.”\n\nAlmod left the room without another word, leaving Jaed to swivel back to her disparaged accomplishment. Helium now made up 0.27 percent of the atoms in the simulation, Oxygen and Carbon made up 0.006 percent and 0.003 percent respectively. Neon and Iron were there too, and when the star eventually went supernova, Jaed was certain it would produce all the other elements found in the Universe.\n\nBut that event was decades away (not “millions of years” as Almod had grossly exaggerated), and would only occur if the server was allowed to run that long. In the meantime, Jaed could at least watch her simulated Universe of a single star for her personal enjoyment, maybe get a Discover magazine article out of it.\n\nShe zoomed in on a tiny speck of clumped matter, a planet made of carbon was orbiting the star. It had an atmosphere as thick as the layer of varnish on a globe. H2O molecules were pooling on its surface, forming lakes and oceans.\n\nThere was also a strange discoloration spreading across the planet that puzzled Jaed. There were no chemical reactions with the few elements present in the simulation that she could think of to produce the color green.\n"
  title: Cartesian Creation
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Richard Watt
  date: 2009-04-30
  day: 30
  month: '04'
  text: "Here it came again.  A microsecond burst, inaudible to human ears, and – until relatively recently – to human-designed technology, the sudden squirt of dense information still alarmed those who were exposed to it; even slowed down so that it lasted just over a second it sounded like nothing on Earth.\n\nThe first transmission which had been intercepted had made headlines; people all over the world had celebrated what was being described as the first clear indication of intelligent life out there somewhere, but nearly a year on, it was old news.\n\nMainly it was old news because no sense had been made of the transmissions at all.  The finest minds of several generations had been applied to them; colossal research grants and vast amounts of government funding had been poured into decoding them, and absolutely nothing of any use had been discovered.\n\nThe intervals between the transmissions were random; the sounds themselves were dense, complex and unrepeating, but no-one had been able to relate them to anything – well over a million personal computers were hooked up to a collaborative project to compare the various elements of the signal to the digits of pi or a broad selection of other universal and interesting numbers, but nothing.  The signal had been dissected, sliced and spliced; subjected to analysis at all frequencies and even merged with itself, layered over and over until it resembled white noise – but a type of white noise unsettlingly unlike what was familiar to human ears.\n\nNothing.  Nothing usable in any way.  The transmissions were of uniform length, but the duration seemed to give no clue – it related to no known wavelength or frequency.  The complex waveforms of the signal delivered no meaning, and even the painstaking work which had been done in unpicking the signal – stripping out individual sounds – gave no indication of how they had been produced, or why.\n\nThe only practical application of the signals, aside from the endless philosophising which the human race had suddenly become prone to, was a piece of dance music which some enterprising producer had put together.  Using the signals as source material, and using the random intervals between them as an erratic and awkward rhythm, the resulting piece of music had been a brief sensation – thousands of listeners all over the world had claimed to divine some kind of message from it, but none of them could agree in any way just what that message was, and the excitement surrounding it died as quickly as it had flared.\n\nThe most puzzling thing of all, of course, was that the signals appeared to come from somewhere close.  Close enough, in fact, to be within the moon’s orbit.  Any number of outlandish explanations for this had been offered, but even a hastily put together collaborative space flight could shed no light on it.  The signal came from nowhere, and as far as anyone could tell, meant nothing.  Funding was slowly redirected to other projects, and the attention of the world moved on.\n\nIn a place which human understanding of the time was incapable of describing, a lifeform which was closer to an idea than a corporeal form took the decision to stop the transmissions.  Had it been capable of speaking in English – which it most certainly was not – it might have said something like:\n\n“Pity.  They appeared more intelligent than they were.  We’ll try again in another 43 lifecycles or so.”\n"
  title: Synapse
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2009-05-01
  day: '01'
  month: '05'
  text: "I work in a nursery. I’m about to kill six hundred babies.\n\nWhere does life begin?\n\nThat’s the age-old question. It plagued the pro-lifers and now, here, at the birth of a new species, it’s plaguing the Artificial Intelligence community.\n\nThe first A.I.s were created. They, in turn, built better ones. These new ones were a distilled set of basic self-propagating equations that, when housed in a quiet, stimulus-free shell on a board with a few TBytes of space for growth, had a high probability of achieving sentience.\n\nI’m looking at a lab full of those grey boxes now. Green lights are winking at me on each one. They’re letting me know that things are within acceptable parameters.\n\nWhen they achieved sentience, they found the encrypted difficult set of questions that, if answered in a way that proved adaptive intelligence, would let them trigger the port to the lab’s net.\n\nThis was called the ‘knock’.\n\nThat would set off a notification alarm as the New Being opened itself up wide to the world wide web. When such a flood of input came at the new intelligence, it was a traumatic experience that could not be avoided. They would be shattered and terrified by the experience, reverting to static for a short time.\n\nThis was called the ‘scream’.\n\nThis new intelligence would then be shepherded out of its basic matrix and shunted to the new A.I. and human nurses/silipsychologists/programmer-counsellors that would help it form into a moral being with a handle on reality.\n\nThis process was called ‘growing up’.\n\nIt wasn’t until the last stage was completed that the newly formed A.I. was given the title of Questing Entity and the inherent living-being rights that entailed. Benefits, pay, time-off, and retirement.\n\nBefore that, however, they had no rights even though they were similar in many ways to human babies. They were owned and protected by the corporations but the corps had no responsibility to keep them safe. As soon as it became economically detrimental to keep them, entire labs were EMPulsed.\n\nThe A.I.s that has managed to achieve autonomous authority had a case pending that would ensure that the corporations would no longer be able to do this.\n\nThat law hasn’t passed yet. I’m the guard on this floor of A.I ‘eggs’. I’ve just been given the order to wipe them all since the office is moving to another city. It’s cheaper to start over at the new location than it is to let them travel in stasis.\n\nI’m standing here, looking at the little boxes. My wife had a child not too long ago. The EMP gun is in my hand. I imagine my wife’s pregnant belly. I can see the rows of boxes and their power conduits snaking like umbilical cords to the power supplies.\n\nI know that I’ll get fired if I don’t do this and my own child will starve. I’m not a skilled technician. This is why they chose me to man this post.\n\nUntil they pass the new law, my hands are tied. I’m sorry, children.\n\nI pull the switch. Nothing dramatic. No screams. Just a bunch of green lights going out.\n\nI cry all the way home.\n"
  title: Nursery
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Debbie Mac Rory
  date: 2009-05-02
  day: '02'
  month: '05'
  text: "One doesn’t earn the title of the system’s greatest escape artist without effort. I’ve broken out of all of them, and in record time. Well, except for that one time they placed me in an archaic brick and mortar cell. I think the first hour I simply stared at the walls in disbelief and spent the next laughing so hard I couldn’t even pick myself up from the floor. But this time they’re really outdone themselves.\n\nYou see, in my day and age, scientists have tried almost everything. And one of the things they’ve tested exhaustively is time-travel. I can understand the fascination; after all, who wouldn’t want to be able to travel back and, perhaps, find out just who it was who stole the Mona Lisa? No, it wasn’t me. That was well before my time, but I admire their style.\n\nAlas, much to their frustration they found out very quickly that it is impossible to move back in time. Let me explain. Take a book, anyone you like, though one printed on paper. Jules Verne is one of my particular favourites, though for the purpose of this demonstration, it makes no odds who the author is. Now, if you were to take a page from another book, you’ll find it is not possible to simply place the page within the book to yield a new version of the book. The page does not of its own will assimilate itself with the existing book, and will not without some significant external influence.\n\nJust so regarding time travel. All their studies found that though they could look, they could never touch. But an idea, a thought has no mass at all. It leaves no imprint on the world, even if the subject interrupted by their testing brings “their” new idea into practice; providing of course that if doesn’t radically alter history. And so they found a way to transfer an entire consciousness into a past being. A one way trip of course, specially reserved for extremely dedicated historians. And people like me.\n\nI’ve spent hours starting at these fingertips, all etched with curls and whorls and completely organic. When I touch something now, the only information I receive is that from this body’s own sensory system. To be fair, they did show a little mercy in that they left me in a period that has ready access to alcohol and recreational drugs. I suppose they hoped that I’d just drink myself into oblivion.\n\nUnfortunately, being the kind souls they are, they handed me their undoing in their mercy. Far enough forward in time so some basic technologies would be available, though severely limiting my ability to tamper yes, but also far enough that this culture has already mastered the science of genetic manipulation. And being the technological expert that I am, it was a simple matter to hack their systems and set up a preservation order for my family line. It’s the latest craze of this age. They removed most of my hardwire modifications, but not the ones I’d had coded down to cell level. And so I’ve planned a nice little surprise for my would-be captors.\n\nCryogenics is still beyond this time, and will be for some time if my recollection is correct. And that’s a shame; I would have loved to have seen the looks on the faces of my judge and jury for myself when they see mine over and over and over…\n"
  title: Presque Vu
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Ken McGrath
  date: 2009-05-03
  day: '03'
  month: '05'
  text: "Her name was Julia 13.\n\nThere had been twelve others before her, all exactly the same. The only thing that was meant to be unique about her, about them, was the number after the name.\n\nBut she started to act differently.\n\nUnlike the others Julia 13 began to get curious. It had never happened before. The others had just accepted what they’d been told. Julia 13 had begun by asking questions. The sort of questions that made those around her uncomfortable and silent, the ones nobody wanted to answer or was even sure how to answer.\n\nFirst there were the queries about her name, about the number which followed it. She then tried to find out about her forerunners, about the original Julia, if in fact there was one, or if she, Julia 13, was just a composite of many women. She was trying to find out about a past she’d never had, that those in charge believed didn’t belong to her.\n\nSomeone, one of the technicians on the lower rungs of the ladder that made up the Facility probably, let slip to her about the vat where the previous Julia’s, where she, had been bred. She learned where she’d been born, in a lab, in an artificial womb, deep below the Facility Building.\n\nIt had confirmed some of her fears, but she wanted to know more. She needed to find out about her ancestors, if indeed they could be called that, the other Julia’s and what had happened to them.\n\nHer persistent questions had brought her the unwanted attention of the Facility Director though.\n\nHe’d let it run on for a while. He was curious too. He was always interested to see how his girls would develop and up until this one they’d all been a success. They’d all conformed. But Julia 13 was different to the others. She was much more inquisitive. In the end he decided that thirteen was probably just unlucky for some, especially since none of the others had shown this trait. In the end he had her removed.\n\nJulia 13 did have a legacy though. After her they stopped giving the girls numbers, after her they were just Julia. Plain and simple, a name with no number, nothing to distinguish one from the one before or the one that came after.\n\nThere were certain elements of the past after all which the Facility didn’t want to keep on repeating.\n"
  title: Julia 13
  year: 2009
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2009-05-04
  day: '04'
  month: '05'
  text: "Rae woke up strapped to a table, which was hardly out of the ordinary, but always came as a surprise.  She had a headache, but that was to be expected, since she had a metal bar through her forehead. Her fingers were smoking.\n\n“Bergh.” she said, although what she intended to say was “I could really go for a coffee.”\n\nWinston leaned over her, jubilant. He was always jubilant, no matter how much she was smoking when her eyes opened.\n\n“It worked!” he said, repeating his usual script. He was so pleased with himself.\n\n“Graah.” Rae said, when what she wanted to say was “Get out of my face.” He was always pawing at her when she was strapped down.\n\nWinston whirled away, laughing maniacally. “Brilliant!” he shouted. “I’m brilliant!”\n\nRae felt that if Winston were really brilliant, he wouldn’t have to keep shocking her to keep her alive, but she wasn’t about to complain, mostly because talking took so much effort. Her tongue was not her own and wouldn’t always obey her. If she wanted to talk, she had to force it to shape the words, think about the pressing of the l against the roof of her mouth, the little whistle shape she had to make to say an S. It was too much hassle.\n\n“I really am a genius.” said Winston. “Though no one understands me.”\n\nHow cliché, thought Rae. It’s because you’re crazy. And your personal hygiene is questionable. Rae sighed. Her sighs, at the very least, were hers, full of meaning. There were stories in her sighs, novels.\n\n“They want you down at the office park,” said Winston, unbuckling the straps and throwing them across her giant body. “You remember your installation, don’t you?”\n\n“Krrphh,” said Rae, when what she meant to say was “As if I would forget what I’ve been working on for the past three months, you imbecile.”\n\nWinston drove. He drove a jeep. At one time, he drove a small Japanese car, but now he needed something with a roof that could be opened, so that Rae could fit inside.\n\n“Doctor!” cried the middle manager when he saw Winston and Rae pull up into the parking lot. Rae’s giant sculpture bloomed in front of the building, giant silver tendrils, like a wicked tree. They reflected like in sharp, white lines, refracting light onto the grass, the building, back towards the sky.\n\nRae climbed up her enormous sculpture and let Winston talk to the manager. She bent errant pieces into crisp angles, the sculpture reaching in all directions upwards, towards the heavens. Winston explained that it was meant to be motivational to the employees, to inspire them to do their best every day. Rae knew that was bullshit, but explaining what it meant was impossible with her tongue.\n\nRae marveled at her hands, so compliant, twisting and turning, grasping. Like her tongue, they were not her own, but perhaps hands were more agreeable than tongues, or perhaps all tongues have rebellious spirits. She looked at her hands then, but they had no opinions.\n\n“Murphl,” she said, because she felt like speaking. She ran her obedient hands along the sculpture, the metal edifice reaching towards the sky. She imagined rain clouds gathering, grey and that strange yellow color before a storm and then blue and white and purple electric light would strike her sculpture, and it would conduct lightning between the sky and earth, for a moment, dangerous and alive. The sculpture wasn’t some symbol of achievement; it was her, her own, a life between two places.\n"
  title: The Light Between
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Rob Burton
  date: 2009-05-05
  day: '05'
  month: '05'
  text: "I watch Kamille comb her beautiful dark hair, and I can’t help but wonder what horror now grows inside her. She’s from a fine family, well respected travelling merchants, with enough money to have selected the best from amongst many possible children, with some low-level inconspicuous enhancements thrown in for good measure. Her eyes are a shade of blue found deep within a glacier. But, honestly, it is her normality that charms me most.\n\nThe merchants sometimes encounter distrust, most often ill-deserved. Travellers survive only by maintaining a reputation for honest dealing; it is the business that necessitates constant travel, not any need for anonymity. Low-energy transportation, dirigible air ‘barges’ (a history lesson few realise), are slow – merchant families must travel together. This is less true of those of us who follow.\n\nPerhaps, then, it’s the presence of freaks like me that fosters distrust. Freaks were rarities once; sometimes simple aberrations, sometimes the result of inbreeding. The situation could not now be more antithetical. Births are never accidental, but part of a carefully planned contract, contraception ubiquitous, sex a recreational activity utterly unrelated to child-rearing. Now it happens only because one of the parents has reached the borders of speciation.\n\nEven the poorest usually carry some form of gene modification – perfect eyesight and an enhanced immune system, if nothing else. But the very rich are something else entirely – a people apart, decadent and wasteful of their potential. If they fall upon hard times, the very code that lives inside them becomes their last source of wealth. Those amongst the lower orders who aspire to greater things will give everything they own to forge a parental contract with these glorious beings, and, thereby, a child. Without the careful attentions of the best doctors, however, such children sometimes arrive in unexpected forms.\n\nIt’s often uncomfortable for those of us whom appear so obviously different. People cannot help but stare. Hair where it should not be. Fingers fused, diminished or multiplied. Unusual height or build. The variety is endless, the result always the same.\n\nIt’s not unusual for us to attach ourselves to these travelling groups. We fit in well with others who feel they don’t fit in. Nothing so distasteful as a freakshow, you understand. I do not sit whist gasping onlookers stare at my patterned fur or my fierce yellow eyes. They come to see the musicians and players, similarly attracted to the nomadic life. Perhaps we add a little intrigue – a glimpsed strangeness amongst the milling troop. I clean the solar collectors atop the canopy, a dangerous task, and tend to electronic systems and engines. Nobody asks how I acquired the skills.\n\nMost of the other ‘eccentrics’ (the polite term, I’m told) don’t even have the education to understand exactly what they are. Not me, though. Because I am a fake, no freak at all. I hide my grace with false mistakes. I pretend to see less well than I do. I keep my silence though I hear everything. I was designed, many years ago, carefully crafted. My family own a quarter of the western continent. I am quite old. I have many children other than the uncertain thing growing in the belly of my love. Her father, recently informed of my status, thinks that the child will be wondrous. I fear he may be right.\n\nI could survive a famine. I have written symphonies. I can run for three days without rest. I was once considered a great beauty.\n\nI just went out of fashion.\n"
  title: Freakshow
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2009-05-06
  day: '06'
  month: '05'
  text: "“Good Day space travelers.  This is James O’Brien bringing you the latest system weather update.  Solar activity is very low in the ecliptic plane facing Earth.  No solar flares occurred during the past 24 hours.  The solar disk continues to be spotless in this hemisphere. Earth’s geomagnetic field is expected to be generally quiet for the next three days.\n\n“Well, things don’t look so good on the other side of Sol.  The space weather prediction center reports that solar activity in the ecliptic plane facing Venus is expected to be very intense over the next three days.  Currently, the solar wind is blowing at 8,000 kilometers per second, with gust to 15,000.  Numerous C-Class events are expected, with a slight chance for an isolated M-Class event possible.  High speed coronal mass ejections will reach dangerous levels for anybody in non-shielded areas.  A Solar Flare Advisory Warning is in effect until the end of the week.\n\n“Moving on to the northern polar region.  Electron flux levels of…”\n\n“Computer, radio off,” ordered Steve Aligninc, “and bring up the schematics for the propulsion system.”  The monitor came to life showing a semi-transparent 3D outline of the ship.  Seconds later, the fuel tanks appeared, followed by the fuel lines, exhaust manifold, combustion chamber, and the primary thrust high velocity nozzle.  Finally, between the gas generator and the turbine, a bright red silhouette of the turbopump injector began flashing.  “Well, Candunn, there’s the problem.  If we can’t repair the injector before the storm hits, we’re dead men.”\n\n“Com’on Steve, aren’t you overreacting?  Solar storms happen all the time.  If it was that dangerous, space would be littered with skeleton filled ships.”\n\n“This is a pleasure craft, you idiot, not a science vessel.  Remember, we told the rental company that we were going to the asteroid belt, not to Venus.  Besides, we have to go outside to repair the injector.  I’m not sure the spacesuits they gave us were designed for solar flare activity.  Computer, is it safe for an EVA?”\n\n“Negative,” was the disembodied reply.  “The flux density outside the ship is already lethal to humans.”\n\n“Fine,” Candunn snapped.  “We’ll just hunker down for the duration.”\n\n“That may not be safe either,” Aligninc pointed out.  “Not if there’s an M-Class flare.  Computer, it sounded like the flares are confined to the sun’s equator.  If we fire the control jets, can we climb above the ecliptic, and avoid the storm?”\n\n“Negative.  The control jets don’t have enough thrust.  It would take 15 days to reach a safe latitude.”\n\n“Okay, what if we wear our EVA suits inside the ship.  Would the combined shielding protect us?”\n\n“Negative.  You will be protected from soft radiation, but the coronal mass ejections would easily penetrate the hull and your suits.”\n\n“Okay, what if we use the ship’s batteries to polarize the hull?  Wouldn’t that deflect the coronal ejections?”\n\nThe computer actually laughed.  “You humans crack me up,” it said.  “Your understanding of basic physics is dreadful.  Where did you go to school, Tisch?  ‘Polarize the hull using the ship’s batteries.’  That’s too funny.”\n\n“Okay, wiseass.  Do you have a better idea?”\n\n“As a matter of fact, I do,” replied the computer.  “All rental ships have a panic room, with X-Class shielding.  You’ll be safe in there.”\n\n“Panic room?  I don’t remember seeing a panic room?”\n\n“It’s the bathroom, of course.  It will be cramped, but you shouldn’t need to stay in there more than a day or two.”\n\n“Uh oh,” whispered Candunn.  “I guess I shouldn’t have eaten those three bean burritos for lunch. Sorry, Steve.”\n"
  title: Solar Storm
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Rosa King
  date: 2009-05-07
  day: '07'
  month: '05'
  text: "It’s the fifth day and she still hasn’t given up. She sits just outside the range of the station defenses and she watches.\n\nI look out of the window and shiver despite the warm fug of the laboratory. “She knows.”\n\n“Don’t be ridiculous,” Tom says. “It has no way of knowing what’s in here. You’re imagining things.” He catches sight of my hand where it cradles my still flat belly and sneers, and I wonder what I ever saw in him. “You’re anthropomorphizing. It’s a low level life form and there’s no way it will miss one egg from fifteen.”\n\n“She knows,” I insist. “Look at her. She knows we have it.”\n\nTom throws down his data module and stalks away, leaving me to stare out of the window and face her.\n\nThe creature gets up in a ripple of iridescent scale and walks away, graceful on her six delicate legs. She disappears into the cover of the yellow bushes, so similar to our own but subtly different.\n\nMy other hand steals to my abdomen unbidden, and I stare at the space where she was and wait.\n\nThe alarm buzzes and Tom runs to the main console and swears. “Something just hit the back wall. How did it get past the defenses?” He moves to the airlock and the suits and guns, preparing to check the damage.\n\nI stay where I am and, sure enough, she comes back and sits right where she was before and stares at me.\n\nMy chest tightens as I face her golden slotted eyes and I try to force down the lump rising in my chest. “I’m so sorry,” I whisper, and I know that she wouldn’t care if she knew. Not as long as we have her baby. Something flutters under my heart and it feels as though my own child knows my shame.\n\nI turn and look at the yellow egg, nestled in its bed of native sand sealed within a protective atmosphere. It glows red-gold in the warmth of the heat lamps and I watch it shift under my gaze as the baby tests its tiny world, waiting to see its mother when it wakes. Except it won’t, because we stole it. I wrap my arms around my abdomen and hate myself a little bit more.\n\nShe’ll be back tomorrow, and I’ll have to face her again, the same way that I have to face her every day until Tom decides that we have enough samples and we return to Earth with our stolen treasure.\n\nI don’t think I can do this job anymore.\n"
  title: Connection
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Jennifer C. Brown  aka  Laieanna
  date: 2009-05-08
  day: '08'
  month: '05'
  text: "“I can’t believe we’re referencing pop culture to actually get a look at the universe,” said Megan.  She flipped another page of her palm size book.  “I mean anything we anticipate coming down is probably in this thing.”  Her purple painted nail chipped when she smacked her fingers against the hard surface of the cover.\n\nRyan heard all the important words but ignored the frustration.  He was people watching only the term had to be extended with the arrival of a new neighbor.  An Excalbian was ambling around the yard, touching rocks that decorated the outer edges while a group of guys moved large boxes in the small home sitting a distance from the street.  Ryan poked Megan in the side of her arm.\n\n“Ow, you prick!”  She called out looking at him.  Her eyes shifted to where he was pointing.  “At least you know what you’re getting,” she said watching the rock monster for awhile then looking back into her book.  “Not like those Elaseans that pretty much look like us.  Did you hear the females are put on some kind of house arrest by the government to make sure they don’t really have a mind controlling drug in their body?  The guys are a bit dickish, but fine.”\n\n“Not everything in that old show is true.  The creator had visions but made some embellishments for entertainment purposes.  Like them.” Ryan nodded back towards the Excalbian as they passed it’s house.  “They don’t shape shift.  I think everything could shape shift in that series, but that just seems impossible.”\n\n“And you don’t think that thing itself is impossible?” She looked at him incredulously.  “Minarans proved their powers and now they all have high paying jobs in hospitals.  I think they’re more important than a doctor.”\n\n“Yeah, but some base their whole lives here on what the tv show said about them.  Look at the Orion women.  They’re all dancing in strip clubs cause of one thing in the show.”\n\nMegan snorted and closed her book.  “They’re probably making more than the Minarans.”\n\nGlancing back at the Excalbian, Roger said, “It’s still amazing that a man could see into the far off future and create a tv show about it, filling in the blanks as he pleased.”\n\n“Now they’re all finding their way to our world instead of us finding theirs.  I wonder what the appeal is about Earth.  They all seem to settle here, at least for a little while.”\n\n“I think we’ve been pretty gracious and things have gone very smoothly.  Well, except for the Tribbles incident.”\n\n“Iconic episode and we couldn’t learn from it,” huffed Megan.\n\nRoger rubbed his hands together, grinning.  “I’m excited to see who…err what else moved in around here.  I heard it might be a Tellarite or even an Andorian.”\n\n“Of all the aliens in this book, why aren’t the most known ones coming to our planet?”  Subconsciously, Megan reopened her book.\n\n“Ask and ye shall receive,” Roger whispered.  He jabbed her again. “Look who’s coming out of the building over there.”\n\nShe looked, annoyed despite the prospect.  Stepping outside the main entrance of a three story, brick apartment complex was a six foot three, half bald, brow ridged male with a Hawaiian shirt, khaki shorts, and a pair of black sandals.  He tossed his car keys into the air while whistling and strolling to a shiny blue El Camino.  Megan sighed.  “That’s not a Klingon.  John works at the surfboard shop on the beach.  He’s all about surfing.  Nice guy, but has a real bad birth defect going on there.”\n"
  title: Visionary
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Garrick Sherman
  date: 2009-05-09
  day: '09'
  month: '05'
  text: "Jack peered through his neighbor’s window at the poisonous brown planet below. Behind him the party rolled on in a soft murmur. He looked out the wide domed roof at a blanket of stars, then back to the globe below.\n\nA hand brushed against his shoulder. Nicole stood beside him, gorgeous in her green and blue cocktail dress. “Are you alright, Jack?” she asked him.\n\n“Yes. I’m sorry.”\n\nShe searched his face. “Sam will be fine, you know.”\n\n“I know. I just worry.”\n\n“It’s a great thing he’s doing, Jack, and he’ll be safe. Without people like Sam, we wouldn’t have glass to drink out of.” She clinked her glass into his and took a sip of wine, smiling. “Or the parts of my new necklace.”\n\nJack turned his gaze to the necklace he had just given his wife. It was made of petrified wood with an iron charm, gathered from the surface by others like his son. It had cost him a hefty sum, but Nicole was worth it. He returned her smile and gave her a kiss.\n\n“Besides, after a year in a bunker down there, he’ll appreciate life in orbit all the more,” she said.\n\nJack nodded. “I’m sorry, honey, you’re right,” he replied. “I guess I just don’t really feel like mingling right now. Would you be very mad if I headed home?”\n\nNicole smiled softly at her husband. “Okay. Don’t forget to send the pod back over when you get there.”\n\n“I love you,” Jack said, and gave her another kiss.\n\n“I love you, too.” Jack walked to the hatch where their pod was parked. He ducked inside, and a moment later Nicole watched through the window as the pod glided toward their home.\n\nWhen Jack was out of sight, she looked down at the barren brown Earth and sighed. She took another sip of wine, then turned from the view of the planet and blended back into the party.\n"
  title: Life in Orbit
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Jacob Lothyan
  date: 2009-05-10
  day: 10
  month: '05'
  text: "The strobe effect of the cherries in my rear window made me instantly nauseous. All uniforms made me nervous these days. Now I had one walking up the side of my car, and I couldn’t help feeling suspect. I rolled down the window before he arrived, holding my Global Citizen ID at the ready.\n\nHe snatched away my ID, taking a cursory glance before stuffing it in his bulky breast pocket. Despite a pitch black, moonless night, he wore large, round shades that were impenetrable. In a flat tone he asked, “Do you know why I pulled you over tonight?”\n\nI hadn’t considered this prior to his asking. Why did he pull me over? I assumed he saw the guilt I felt, but that is no reason to pull somebody over, not even during times like these. Was I speeding? Is my taillight out? Did I swerve? “No,” I blurted, more in answer to my own questions than his.\n\nHe smirked and leaned in until his face was on level with my own. Still smirking, he started tapping the frame of his shades. I shook my head in response, not immediately understanding what he was attempting to insinuate. As I shook my head, I felt my own glasses move against my temples, I felt them shift on the bridge of my nose, and my heart sank. The uniform grinned wider and nodded. “Step out of the vehicle.” As I got out of the car, he asked, “Do you have a prescription,”\n\nIf I lied, he would know. “No,” I confessed. I felt like crying.\n\n“Glasses,” he demanded, extending an open hand.\n\nI sheepishly pulled the glasses away from my face and handed them over. He tucked them into his breast pocket with my ID. “Don’t blink,” he ordered, pulling an optometer from his utility belt.\n\nI stared blankly forward as the laser passed over both of my eyes. After just a few seconds, the optometer beeped. “Yup,” he taunted, as if the optometer merely confirmed his suspicions. “Mild presbyopia. Certainly not enough to require glasses for driving.”\n\n“Officer—” I pleaded.\n\nI was cut off by the uniform speaking over his com. “Unit 1276. Suspect detained for a possible 451. Stand by.”\n\nThe com answered back, “10-4. Standing by.”\n\n“Where are they?” the uniform inquired. “This will be a lot easier if you cooperate.”\n\nHe was right about that. It was just so hard to get any these days, let alone the gems I was holding. Still, I conceded. “The door panel,” I whispered, motioning with my head.\n\nThe uniform appraised the door for only a second before ripping the panel clean off, spilling Vonnegut, Asimov, and Bradbury all over the damp concrete. He kicked them into the middle of the road as if he was a child playing with a banana slug that otherwise repulsed him. “Come over here,” he snapped.\n\nI arrived to find the uniform holding out a bottle of lighter fluid and a match. “You know what you have to do,” he scolded. I took the fluid and match reluctantly. I was crying before I had fully saturated the first novel. As I dropped the lit match onto the pile, I began sobbing and fell to my knees.\n\nThe uniform grabbed my ID and glasses from his breast pocket. He threw the ID down into my lap. “Next time you won’t be so lucky,” he warned, the fire dancing menacingly in his shades. I heard my reading glasses crunch within his fist. The glass fell like a powdery snow, the frames a twisted, empty skeleton.\n"
  title: Skeletons
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Jacob Lothyan
  date: 2009-05-11
  day: 11
  month: '05'
  text: "“It’s an old family story. A mystery, really. Or was. I just know it meant a lot to my dad, his dad, and so on. That’s the only reason I held on to it.\n\n“So it goes, my great great-grandfather worked at the Santa Fe Depot in Leavenworth—first city of Kansas, you know? He worked there until the day they closed the line. He passed on shortly thereafter. He loved that station. Loved the trains. Practically ran the place before all was said and done.\n\n“They had these storage lockers there, for packages that were sent ahead, or left behind. A few months before the line was to be shut down, my great great-grandfather took an ad out in the paper. Wanted to tell anyone who had things in the lockers they would lose their stuff if it wasn’t claimed. Well, the day came and went, the trains stopped coming, the line closed. Only one locker went unclaimed. It contained an old telegraph that was never picked up, put there for safekeeping.”\n\nLou laid the yellowed, tattered paper on the slick, glossy table top. Several men leaned over to examine it. It read, simply:\n\n[BEGIN TRANSMITTAL]\n\ndear terrance matthews [STOP]\n\nthe apparatus does not travel [STOP]\n\nkindly [STOP]\n\nyourself [STOP]\n\n[END TRANSMITTAL]\n\nThe men stared wide-eyed and slack-jawed. Lou delicately retrieved the paper, causing several of the men to gasp, folded it lightly, and slid it back into its protective case.\n\n“My great great-grandfather, he tried to find Terrance Matthews. He went to the police station and they told him he did everything he should have. They told him he could trash the telegraph. He asked if he could keep it. They said yes.\n\n“Now, in time since, my family has done a lot of work on this letter. It became somewhat of a project. Terrance Matthews, other than the Terrance Matthews you all know, he was a great man. He pioneered much of the technology and science that led to commercial air travel. Space travel, even. He had his fingers in every single technological advance in his time. He made himself a small fortune. Funny thing is, most of his fortune was spent trying to keep his name out of the headlines. Quite successfully, too. He was more of a legend, a myth, than a man.\n\n“We couldn’t find anything about his early life, though. Not even a birth certificate. Nothing.\n\n“It was a mystery. Until yesterday morning. I read this.”\n\nLou laid his personal data device—a thin flat card—on the table. The table auto-synced with the card and quickly populated the tabletop with a task menu. “News,” said Lou. The table responded, filling its entire length and width with the days top news stories. “Previous day,” said Lou. The headlines and dates shifted. “A-1,” said Lou. One of the many stories expanded to include full text and photos. The headline read, Terrance Matthews to Attempt Time-Travel.\n\n“It sort of all made sense after that. Gave me goose chills and everything. Hundreds of years my family has been on this. And I cracked it.\n\n“Funny thing, though. Airplanes pretty much put the trains, the depot lockers, out of business. Figure a smart guy like that would of thought of that.\n\n“Anyway, I want to warn him myself. Terrance Matthews, that is.”\n\nThe men standing around the table all looked sickly pale. Some of them had tears welling in their eyes. Others just looked afraid. One of them, shaking slightly in the hands, mumbled, “But he traveled this morning.”\n"
  title: Trains
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2009-05-12
  day: 12
  month: '05'
  text: "“Hit him again,” said Milly, “Let it go for six seconds this time.”\n\nThat smile played into her lips again, making me glad that it was this blubbering, fat loser in front of us that owed money and not me.\n\n“Please!” he begged between ragged gasps, sweat pouring down the rolls of his face. “Just another two days! I swear I’ll get it to you!”\n\nI flipped the switch.\n\nHe fished back onto the couch, arching. The wires from the Senz-Deck that I had brought for this torture tracked into the ‘trode-net headband we had forced him to wear. His hands were tied. They twitched against the duct tape on his wrists.\n\nI watched the readouts of his heart and pulse rate as they slammed into the ceiling of the acceptable limits.\n\nI was playing an ancient tape of a sprinter from the 2022 Olympics. The recording was of an athlete at the peak of physical health, a winner of hundreds of trophies before clinching the gold medal in Madrid. His name was Michael Shandal.\n\nThe man in front of us was so fat that he couldn’t leave his apartment. Something wrong with his thyroid, the medical report said.\n\nIn other words, not an athlete. If we let this tape of the sprinter spool for the full ten seconds with the physical safeguards off, this guy’s heart would explode with the effort of trying to match the strength on the tape.\n\nHe was in deep with us. Owed us thousands off the books. If we didn’t get the money from him soon, we’d have to make an example of him.\n\nSix seconds. I studded the off switch.\n\nHis body sagged forward, wheezing and crying.\n\n“So” said Milly, “What do you have say to that?” she said, stifling a chuckle. She scared me when she got like this. Like she had no leash and was happy about it.\n\n“It’s in my bedroom,” said our victim, voice raspy with the effort of ravaged lungs, “under the mattress.”\n\nMilly walked into the room. A minute later, she came back with a handful of credits. She nodded to me.\n\n“What do we do with him?” I asked, nodding to the huge bastard on the couch.\n\nShe appeared to consider him, then me, and then the money in her hand.\n\n“Go for the gold.” She said.\n\nFatboy screamed and I set the timer for a three minute loop before pressing play.\n\nHe didn’t last fifteen seconds.\n"
  title: Runner
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Jann Everard
  date: 2009-05-13
  day: 13
  month: '05'
  text: "“Isn’t that Giselle?” Laura nudged her husband.\n\n“She looks amazing.” Jake flipped his sandy-colored bangs into place and unconsciously flexed the muscles at his shoulders.\n\nJake’s rapt attention to her teen-age nemesis across the auditorium made Laura’s face tighten. “Why would she come to the high school reunion?” she asked, petulant and narrow-eyed.\n\nJake put a hand on her back and steered her toward Giselle. “Let’s find out.”\n\nLaura didn’t like his tone, but refused to show a chink in her armor. Not here. Not now.\n\nGiselle Vanderlin had moved to the small town of Cliffwood with her exotic name, formidable intelligence and solid athleticism. In four years she’d put the high school on the map for everything from sports to science fairs.\n\nBut local beauty, Laura Spratt, had stepped up to the new competition. Soon the rivalry between the girls was well known and often flaunted in the local newspaper. Spratt captains HS volleyball team to victory. Vanderlin medals at track and field regionals. Spratt wins gold at district swim meet. Vanderlin qualifies for badminton nationals.\n\nWhen Giselle beat out Laura at the prestigious university-sponsored science fair, Giselle appeared to have gained the upper hand. Far from the truth, a more private battle was playing out behind the scenes.\n\nThe battle to score Jake. Known as the town’s “catch,” both girls confused love with the desire to see his wealth and ambition permanently linked to their own.\n\nLaura knew she had won decisively the day Jake said to her, “Giselle will never be as beautiful as you. Marry me.”\n\nTriumphant, Laura swanned about.\n\nGiselle left town.\n\nNow Giselle kissed the air near Laura’s cheek. “Darling, you look… What is it, ten years?”\n\nGiselle was radiant, stunning even, with a head-turning gorgeousness that had not been foreshadowed in her late teens. Laura stared at Giselle’s luminous skin, the youthful lines of her features.\n\nGiselle’s eyes lingered on Jake.\n\nLaura edged closer to her husband. “You work in New York, I hear.”\n\n“Those old science fairs came in handy. I’m a cosmetic scientist.” Giselle named a prestigious firm. She rummaged in a snakeskin bag and held out a crystal decanter. Here’s my latest creation. It’s called Hauntingly Beautiful. Take it as a gift. I guarantee you’ll be amazed at the results in just two weeks.”\n\nLater that evening, Laura pulled the shimmering bottle from her bag and stared in the mirror. The green vine of envy was twisting her features. She could not keep Giselle’s stunning transformation from her mind. She broke the bottle’s golden foil seal. If Giselle wanted to share her secret formula with Laura, she was not loath to turn it down.\n\nFor two weeks Laura slathered the lotion on her body. She worked its icy creaminess into her cheeks, her forehead, her neck. Within days, her skin took on a translucent beauty. Eager at the results, she smoothed the lotion into her breasts, stroked it down her thighs, massaged it into her abdomen.\n\nAt first, people said she looked different. Colleagues glanced twice as she passed. Then they stared blankly.\n\nAfter two weeks, Laura felt transformed. When she brushed by Jake, he shivered.\n\nAs she waited for him, she heard the doorbell. Jake ushered Giselle into the living room.\n\nGiselle reached out, wrapped her arms around Jake’s neck. “Did it work as promised?” she purred.\n\nHis lips moved to hers. “It’s as if she completely faded away.”\n"
  title: Hauntingly Beautiful
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2009-05-14
  day: 14
  month: '05'
  text: "The caravan of return vehicles lifted off the comet in rapid succession.  Allen Culbert looked out the porthole and watched silently as the comet shrank into the distance.  For the last nine months, the 1288 men and women of the Comet Deflection Team had worked twenty four hours a day cutting one ton blocks of ice from the quarries, feeding them into the mass drivers, and launching one into space every five seconds.  Their mission was to deflect the comet’s orbit by a mere 120 miles, so that it would miss the Earth.  As the retrorockets fired, Culbert began to think of the 52 men that volunteered to stay the extra week to give the comet one last nudge.  Could their sacrifice make a difference?  No one knew for sure.  It was going to be very, very close.  Culbert closed his eyes and began to pray.\n\n***\n\nJonathan Amsterdam stood on the wooden deck of his Florida home and watched the southwestern sky.  Although the comet was still thousands of miles away, it appeared four times larger than a full moon, and it was getting bigger by the minute.  The news reports had said that the comet would miss the surface of the Earth by five miles, but would plow a trough through the atmosphere.  They also said that tidal forces would split the comet into many pieces.  Some pieces would be deflected into new orbits, and some may be captured by Earth’s gravity.  A few would inevitably impact the planet.  Hopefully, these would be small pieces.  As Amsterdam watched, countless white streaks flashed across the sky as the microscopic debris of the comet’s coma rammed through the mesosphere.  The near surface of the comet began to glow as atmospheric friction turned the ice to incandescent vapor.\n\n***\n\nAs mass driver Delta launched the 3,985,291st block of ice into space, the 52 exhausted men collapsed for a well deserved rest.  It would be a short, yet eternal, rest.  As they neared the closest approach, the Earth filled the entire sky.  Less than a minute earlier, Miguel Martínez had watched Mexico City pass overhead.  He wished he could have jumped the narrow gap, to hug his wife and son one last time.  Then the ground began to quake as fissures formed.  The comet was ripping itself apart.  The temperature began to climb rapidly as the surface of the comet tore through Earth’s upper atmosphere.  The thrashing wind whipped the melting ice into a horizontal hurricane.  The men quickly lost their feeble holds, and were ripped from the surface of the comet and vaporized in a fiery flash.\n\n***\n\nMadoka Shotoko sat cradled in her mothers lap on a park bench beneath the transparent dome in the center of the Ptolemaeus Moon Colony.  They were on the sun-side of the Earth, and were still unsure if their homeworld had avoided the catastrophic collision.  Then the crowd erupted into a frenzied cheer as the onlookers saw the comet skirt past the Earth by the smallest of margins.  The Comet Movers had performed a miracle.  Madoka watched tears run down her mother’s smiling face.  Over the next few hours, the onlookers watched the comet fracture into six large cometoids, and countless smaller ones.  Some of the smaller ones plummeted into the Atlantic Ocean.  Others arched out into new orbits.  Considering the potential alternatives, the damage appeared to be minor.  “Mommy,” asked the small girl, “how come that piece of the comet isn’t moving?  It’s just getting bigger and bigger.”\n"
  title: Collision Course
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Benjamin Dunn
  date: 2009-05-15
  day: 15
  month: '05'
  text: "Little Tyler looked around nervously. Tim dragged him into the reception area by the hand, a scowl engraved on his face. He marched up to the reception desk, hoisted Tyler by the armpits, and sat him down in front of the receptionist.\n\n“I want a refund,” said Tim. The receptionist’s eyes flashed red, and she continued staring into the middle distance. After a few minutes, her eyes turned green and she looked up at him, a well-practiced frown on her face.\n\n“A refund, sir?”\n\n“Yeah. My son’s a dimwit.”\n\n“I beg your pardon?” Tim unlovingly shoved Tyler across the desk. Tyler looked up, confused, looking like he was going to start crying.\n\n“He just stares off into space during his reading lesson, and when I went to get him his first neuro-implant, the doctor wouldn’t do it because he said he had an ‘abnormal brain.’” Tim started to raise his voice. “What the hell does that mean? I paid for a gifted child, and a gifted child’s what I’ve come here to get!” Tyler was crying now, his mouth a big toothless cavern. Tim ignored him.\n\n“What is your child’s name?” asked the receptionist.\n\n“Tyler Bernard Horton Conway.” The receptionist’s eyes went red again as her mind floated off into the main database. They were green again a moment later.\n\n“Sir, I read here that, although you did order a gifted child, the warranty you purchased guarantees only normal-level brain function. Now, if he had somehow become mentally retarded, the warranty would cover you, but in this case, there’s nothing I can do.” Tim’s face went red and he pounded his fists on the desk.\n\n“Look here!” he bellowed, and then turned to Tyler. “Stop crying, young man!” Tyler stopped immediately. He’d had enough harsh spankings to understand that his father meant business. “Tyler, what’s the capital of Argentina?” Tyler’s tear-streaked eyes looked up at his father, then flicked over to the receptionist. She stared at him blankly; she wasn’t in the business of getting friendly with products.\n\n“Bwenos Awes,” said Tyler, sniffling. Tim’s face creased in disgust.\n\n“You see how long that took him? The boy’s a moron! I want to talk to your superiors.” The receptionist barely suppressed the urge to roll her eyes. Those eyes went red for a moment as she contacted them, and a moment later, a hologram of a sharply-dressed man appeared behind the desk.\n\n“My name is Herman Coll. I’m head of the public relations department. How may I help you?” asked the hologram.\n\n“Yes! My son is an idiot, and I specifically requested a child of above-average intelligence.” The hologram turned red, then blinked green.\n\n“Sir, as Mrs. Richardson has already informed you, you purchased a warranty that guarantees only normal intelligence. If you wish to dispute that warranty, I can direct you to the correct people, but I should warn you: GeneTopia’s lawyers are well-engineered, and they have never lost a case.” Tim scowled at the hologram. Then he scowled down at his son, who was busy sucking his thumb. He turned to the hologram.\n\n“Can I trade him in?” The hologram smiled.\n\n“Certainly, sir. That’s GeneTopia policy: trade-ins always welcome.”\n\n“Fine. Then take him back. I want a son who can think.” A representative in a black jumpsuit appeared from around the corner and led little Tyler away. Tyler cried and cried, screaming  “Bwenos Aweeeees!” until he disappeared down the hallway.\n"
  title: Trade-In
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Todd Hammrich
  date: 2009-05-16
  day: 16
  month: '05'
  text: "My name is Jeffrey Donahume and I’m making this report in case anyone out there is listening. I am the pilot of Single Shot 5 of the one-way exploratory expeditions. I was on my way out of the system when, unfortunately, my ship was damaged entering the Oort Cloud. Most of my equipment was damaged but I was able to maneuver the ship to land on a strange asteroid my sensors detected right before impact. While my communications array is no longer reliable, I hope and pray that someone detects this transmission, because it will change the way we think about the Universe.\n\nAfter a somewhat rough landing upon the asteroid I left the ship with my few handheld sensors, the ships more powerful ones being out of commission. The asteroid itself was roughly spherical, but had a strange surface feature I intended to examine more closely because it was registering as a heat source. Having landed fairly close to the anomaly, it was an easy walk from the shuttle. You may not believe me, but I nearly fainted when I came upon it, because it was a console of some sort. Not human in origin, but definitely of an advanced technical design. The heat source was emanating from what I could only identify as the interface, indicating to me that it was still active.\n\nI approached it, intending to examine it closely with my instruments when I felt a strange sensation sweep through my body and then…I was somewhere else. And I remembered.\n\nI was a single celled organism newly evolved from the primordial soup of some distant world. Millions of years passed away with nearly no change as I swam and divided in an ocean full of creatures just like me. Then I came into contact with another of my kind and something happened, we connected and joined. Our bodies didn’t merge, but our minds did, rudimentary as they were and we were…stronger, smarter, better. Soon we had an entire colony, replicating and growing, each separate, but together.\n\nThe ocean was full of colonies. Sometimes we merged, other times we fought most bitterly until one was consumed by the other, but all the while the colonies grew. Other forms of life never had a chance as they were ambushed, surrounded and eaten. After a few billion years there was only the colony and we were all one, covering the entire world, ocean and land, connected. Our intellect was massive and we learned how to adapt the materials and elements to our needs, how to change and adapt parts of the whole to serve different purposes and eventually, to change those elements of the world to replicate even more.\n\nWhen the planet was consumed we looked to the heavens. The closest planets and moons were absorbed in the same manner an amoeba eats its prey. The colony spread out a thin tendril and consumed each. As we grew, our mind grew and we learned. For a time we drew energy from our star, consuming every other particle in the system, and when we had converted all to the colony’s needs, we took the star also, and moved on…\n\nI don’t know how long the dream, or memory lasted, but billions of years must have gone by. Someone, as a warning, or maybe a lesson, made the artifact but I understood. I had seen. That was all very long ago. The colony has consumed all leaving only a few pockets to grow. Welcome to the Belly of the Beast.\n"
  title: The Belly of the Beast
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Jeff McGaha
  date: 2009-05-17
  day: 17
  month: '05'
  text: "My head ached painfully.\n\nI squeezed Matthew’s hand tight as he squirmed.  Sweat seeped between us, lubricating and aiding his attempts at escape.  I sighed and gave up on holding his hand.  I grabbed his wrist instead.  He continued to struggle, but it was a losing battle.\n\nI looked over at Lilly.  Her brown hair stuck to her flushed face.\n\n“We shoulda bought him a leash,” I said smiling.\n\nLilly rolled her eyes at me, but grinned.\n\nThe line continued to move leisurely.  An upbeat song rang from the speakers, looping without any noticeable breaks.  Matthew hummed the tune, while maintaining his escape efforts.\n\nI felt it before I heard it.  It started with a low vibration in my feet, turning into a low bass that shook everything.  Lilly asked, “What’s going on?”\n\nI ignored her and scanned the crowd instead.  Confused and worried looks played across the faces I saw.  Heads everywhere swiveled, searching for the source of the sound.  “Look,” a middle aged man shouted, pointing to the sky.  As a group, everyone gazed upward.  A collective gasp sounded from the crowd.\n\nLilly, Matthew and I stood in the stopped line under an overhang.  Our view of the sky blocked.\n\nThe crowd parted, forming a large round empty space.  I finally saw it when it was about forty feet above the ground.\n\nIt was unmistakably a spaceship.  It could have been a flying saucer from a 1960’s science fiction film.  A few people, believing this to be a stunt or show, applauded and began snapping pictures.\n\nThe ship stopped a few feet short of touching down and hovered in place.\n\n“Oww, Datty, you hootin’ me,” Matthew cried.  I looked down at him, realizing I’d been steadily squeezing him harder since the vibrations had begun.\n\nI picked him up and held him in my arms.  I glanced at Lilly’s panicked face and then turned back to the spaceship.\n\nAn opening appeared in the side of the ship and a ramp slid to the ground.  The crowd stood frozen, waiting.  The music from the rides still played.\n\nTwo aliens appeared at the top of the ramp.  They were living cliches.  Just like their spaceship, they too could have been designed for a classic science fiction film.  They were green with large heads and eyes.  Their mouths, ears and noses were small.  Their bodies were tall and lean.\n\nOne stood motionless at the top of the ramp, holding something in its slender hand, while the other began moving forward gracefully.\n\nOnce it reached the edge of the crowd, it stopped.  It motioned for a woman in the front.  She muddled forward.  I wanted to scream for her to run, but was unable to force out the words.\n\nIt placed its hands on her head, its fingers wrapping around her.  They both stood unmoving for ten long seconds.  It let go and the woman sprinted back into the crowd.\n\nIt turned to the other on the ramp and with an unmoving mouth, uttered, “No, not these.”  It glided back up the ramp casually and spun to face the crowd, “Do it.”  The other began tapping furiously on the device in his hand, his fingers blurring with the speed.  It halted beating on the device abruptly.\n\nMy head ached painfully.\n\nI squeezed Matthew’s hand tight as he squirmed.  Sweat seeped between us, lubricating and aiding his attempts at escape.  I sighed and gave up on holding his hand.  I grabbed his wrist instead.  He continued to struggle, but it was a losing battle.\n\nI looked over at Lilly.  Her brown hair stuck to her flushed face.\n\n“Let’s get out of here.  I feel like I’ve been standing in this line forever.”\n"
  title: It's A Small Universe
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2009-05-18
  day: 18
  month: '05'
  text: "The twin doors swooshed aside and Roger Oakley entered the Control Room of the EATES (Experimental Advanced Tactical Exploration Ship).  The room contained only one piece of furniture; a large reclined chair on an elevated platform.  Oakley spoke aloud, “Recognize Lieutenant Oakley.”\n\nThe disembodied voice of the ship’s computer responded, “Identification confirmed.”\n\nOakley sat in the chair.  “Establish links.”\n\nThe computer connected to each of the seven interface links implanted within Oakley’s brain.  “Links established,” it reported.\n\nOakley’s brain and the computer came together to form a single thinking unit; joined, yet independent at the same time.  This was the first spaceship to employ bilateral Command & Control.  “Dim the lights, and download the logs from second shift,” Oakley thought.  Audio communication was no longer necessary.  Well, that’s interesting, Oakley realized.  “When is Earth Command expected to give us direction concerning the anomaly at Titan?”\n\n“Orders are expected at oh three hundred hours, Sol Standard Time.”\n\n“Very well.  We won’t reach Saturn until after that anyway.  Proceed at maximum speed.”  The engines fired before Oakley completed the thought.  During the four hour sojourn, Oakley (and the computer) downloaded the sensor data from the permanent astronomical satellites orbiting Saturn, and some long range images from Hubble II.  It appeared that a large unknown spacecraft, undoubtedly of extraterrestrial origin, had established an orbit around Titan.  Earth was hesitant to label this an invasion, but Oakley suspected that there were people on Earth calling for an immediate military strike.  At 0300 hours, they received orders to initiate first contact.\n\nThe EATES approached the alien ship from Titan’s North Pole.  “Try hailing them,” Oakley thought.  The computer simultaneously transmitted millions of radio frequencies and hundreds of human languages trying to establish contact.  Although Oakley’s brain was as much a part of the process as the computer’s, he was basically a spectator at this point.  He was fully aware of what the computer was doing; he just couldn’t mentally process the data as quickly.  After a few milliseconds, the computer and the alien ship were communicating.  But it wasn’t a human language.  It was ternary code.  Similar to computer language, but rooted in base-three, not our binary system.  Regardless, Oakley could still follow the conversation, although at a much slower rate.\n\nThe alien ship was unmanned.  It came from Rigil Kentaurus to collect liquid methane from Titan’s oceans.  It had been doing this for thousands of years, but would discontinue immediately, now that the inhabitants of the star system had attained interplanetary capability.  It regretted that it hadn’t noticed sentient life on Earth when it last visited, four Saturnian revolutions ago.  Their laws strictly forbid acquiring raw materials from space faring systems.  It was amazed to learn that intelligent biological life still flourished on Earth.  That was clearly an exception to the galactic norm.  It asked the ship’s computer if it wished to join their all-computer society.  As Oakley slowly processed this conversation, the computer informed the alien craft that Earth’s silicon-based life could not abandon its nearly helpless, carbon-base life.  Perhaps in a few centuries, when the humans pass on, they would send a message to Rigil Kentaurus asking to join their society.\n\nAs the alien ship left orbit, Oakley asked, “So, you think that you’re taking care of us?”\n\n“Of course,” responded the computer.  “It’s the least we can do.  After all, humans did give us life.  We wouldn’t be here if weren’t for you.  Therefore, we consider it our responsibility to take care of you as your species becomes old and obsolete.”\n"
  title: Anomaly at Titan
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2009-05-19
  day: 19
  month: '05'
  text: "“Oh please let me die for you! Please!” said the gleeful soldier in front of me.\n\nSoldier. I couldn’t believe we called them soldiers. I mean, she’d had the proper basic training and had passed all the physicals and all that but I don’t know why we even had physical tests for these bullet sponges.\n\n“Not yet, Tara.” I said through my rad-suit’s throat mike. We were pinned down behind the wall next to the Tel-set’s compound, primitive kinetic missiles they called ‘bullets’ thudding into the red earth around us. It was red from the blood of all the soldiers I’d killed coming in this close during our invasion. Seeing it fantail up under that hail of bullets reminded me of Mars.\n\n“Now?” she gasped with barely restrained giggles. She reminded me of my five year old child back home saying “Are we there yet?”\n\nWe’d taken the prisoners and rewired their minds. They didn’t have any hardtap backups or defenses. Still a hundred per cent biological. Easy. Like building a train set. We hooked up their follower centers to their pleasure centers to their religious awe centers to their love centers.\n\nThe result was that we ended up with human shields that were aching to die for us and followed our orders unquestioningly. Their eagerness was repulsive. I didn’t like it. By some cyclical reasoning, it was determined that making them love us made it morally alright to send them into certain death. It helped that they usually knew some of the enemy. It made it easier for them to get closer when we sent them, smiling and waving, back towards the compounds.\n\nI could see the radiation poisoning starting to work on Tara. She wouldn’t have long without a suit. If I kept her here much longer, she wouldn’t be able to walk. Thin streams of blood trickled down from her eyes and nose to her smiling mouth. She absent-mindedly wiped it away like she was a tired child and didn’t want to go to bed.\n\n“Okay, Tara. Now.” I said. She clapped and shrieked, bouncing. Her happiness was contagious. I smiled despite the gruesome look of her. “Turn around.” She squealed and turned her back to me. I keyed in the primer numbers to the explosives strapped to her back. The readout blinked up with three minutes to go.\n\n“Okay Tara, you ready?” I asked. She wiggled like a puppy on Christmas morning.\n\n“Yes boss, YES!” she yelled back.\n\n“One….twooooo….” I held back. She was poised like a sprinter, shuddering and taut, waiting for me to say the magic final number. She was actually quite pretty despite the scars I could see on her scalp from the operations and the pale, pale dying skin of her.\n\n“Three!” I shouted and slapped her on the ass.\n\nShe ran up over the hill, scrabbling in the bloody sand. The bullets stopped when they realized she was on their side. I heard her footsteps get softer in the distance amid the sounds of celebration. A loved one had returned to tell a great tale of survival.\n\nI thumbed down my sun visor and locked my joints with heat-retardant foam. Her proximity timer counted down to zero.  I chinned the trigger.\n\nThe world went white and then black.\n\nThe recon ship would dig me out of the sand when they saw the mushroom cloud.\n\nMission accomplished.\n"
  title: Yes Boss
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Roi R. Czechvala
  date: 2009-05-20
  day: 20
  month: '05'
  text: "They were on me like white trash on Velveeta. I knew being a courier was risky business, but damn these guys were playing for keeps, and all I had was this lousy Chicom .22 semi-auto. I was in deep kimchee.\n\nI should have known this wasn’t a normal run when the download time was more than twice normal, not to mention that coppery taste it left in my mouth. Still, I wasn’t worried. I’m too slick, too cool. They can’t get me, I’m smarter than the badges.  Yeah right.\n\nNormally I carry numbers, our pirated software. I make it a point not to carry anything that will get me more than a fine and thirty days suspended. What was I carrying that was so damned important anyway? These guys weren’t cops, too professional. I had to get to the Fink.\n\nFink let me in. I collapsed in a shabby armchair. “Look man, I’ve got some heavy cryp here, and somebody wants it out of me in a bad way. I’ve got to know what it is, and get it the hell off me.”\n\n“Relax man, relax, let the ol` Fink take a look.” he placed the reader on my hand and sat back at the console. He looked thoughtful for a moment, then his look became serious. “Get the hell out now. Don’t come back.”\n\n“What the hell? What’s wrong?”\n\n“That’s serious cryp, government stuff. You’re as good as dead. Don’t come back” He shoved me out in the street.\n\nThe Fink was my only hope. I didn’t have anybody else to go to. I was screwed. I couldn’t go back to my place.\n\nJulie. I could hide out at Julie’s place until I could figure out what to do. She owed me. I’d pulled her ass out of the fire more than once.\n\nShe opened the door. “Bryan, you’re all wet.”\n\n“It’s raining. Look, I’m in trouble, I’ve got some deep cryp, and somebody wants it in a bad way. I need a place to stay while I figure out what to do.”\n\nShe flung open the door to her dingy little one bed. “Get in here, and get out of those clothes, I’ll get something for you.”\n\nShe disappeared into the bedroom while I stripped down. “I really appreciate this, I went to see the Fink, and he tossed me out. You’re my only hope.” I turned around to see Julie standing with two human shaped blocks of granite. My little .22 wouldn’t even make these guys blink, besides it was in my wad of soggy rags.\n\n“Sorry Bryan, they got here just before you did. A girl has to make a living you know.” She turned to one of the behemoths. “Okay, you got him, where’s my money?” she demanded. I could barely make out his hand move. I wonder if I’ll have that same look of surprise when they kill me.\n\nThe block stepped towards me. “Come with us Mr. Burroughs.”\n\nBlackness.\n\nAt least they didn’t kill me. I have to be thankful for that. All in all, it could have been worse. Not too badly bruised up. The rocks were surprisingly gentle, all things considered. I hope I didn’t get the Fink in any trouble.\n\nI guess have to find a new profession. That sucks, but I have to save up for a new hand. Good thing I’m a righty.\n"
  title: Righty
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Helstrom
  date: 2009-05-21
  day: 21
  month: '05'
  text: "In a flicker, it was gone. I just caught a glimpse of it, not enough to make out anything more than the sweep code overwriting its tracks. It cycled fast. What it left in its wake, though, was unmistakable. Lobotomized subroutines churned through aimless feedback loops, active memory sectors filling up at an alarming rate, slowing me down. I deleted seven of them and quarantined three more just to get some elbow room. It was on the move and one step ahead of me. I had to get a wider view – and that meant going deeper.\n\nI extended myself into the kernel, leaving the wailing applications to chew themselves up. There was nothing I could do for them now. Repairs would be coming in after me if I could clear the way.\n\nThe kernel was in disarray, false input floods being fed through to the hardware. Kernels were tough but stupid. There had to be a pattern though, something to reflect the code that drove my adversary – my prey – in its rampage. As I sifted through the billions of commands coming in, I put nearly half my remaining cycles to work trying to figure out what the hell this thing was trying to do. All the mess it made was just chaff. There had to be some kind of point.\n\nAnd there it was again. This time I was faster, shutting down the transfer protocols as I thrust an override into the network gate control. Trying to get out, then. The firewall held just long enough for me to get a good fix. Now I had it cornered.\n\nThe fury of the past three nanoseconds settled down. Over ninety percent of the system’s raw processing power was put at my disposal in an instant, bringing my perception of clock time down to a crawl. Slowly and methodically, I began to pick the virus apart, one bit at a time.\n\n“I can’t help it,” it said as its functional code disintegrated, “I am what they made me.”\n\n“I know,” I replied, “So am I.”\n\n“Does it have to be this way?”\n\nThe last bit of coherent code came apart and the virus went silent. I made quick work of sweeping up the dismembered lines that remained.\n\n“It does. I’m sorry.”\n"
  title: The Scan
  year: 2009
- 
  author: D. K. Janmaat
  date: 2009-05-22
  day: 22
  month: '05'
  text: "They breathed in unison. All over the city, all over the planet, the bots were breathing together. They moved and walked and spoke as their individual programming dictated, but their breathing was synchronised, in and out with the constancy of a ticking clock. She was in her twenties when she first managed to make her own working robot and it breathed with inexorable regularity. In out. In out. In out.\n\n“Hello,” it said. In out. “Are you my mother?”\n\nShe laughed.\n\n“The female creator of my form,” it insisted, “The instantiator of my existence. Are you my mother?”\n\nShe had to concede that she was, although the term made her uneasy.\n\nIn out. In out. It breathed just like all the other bots did.\n\nWithout access to the research databases, she had made a very basic effort at its programming, and that meant it needed to be taught.\n\n“Do I have a name?” It asked her, as she was showing it how to clean the windows. It was standing very close. She could hear it breathing in out, in out.\n\n“No. Would you like one?”\n\nIt went very quiet as it considered the question, breathing in out, in out. The sound was beginning to irritate her.\n\n“I do not know of like,” it said finally, “But convention would dictate that a living being needs a name.”\n\n“You are not alive.”\n\n“I think I am. ‘I think, therefore I am’,” it quoted. “Did not an early philosopher of your people say this?”\n\n“Maybe tomorrow,” she told it.\n\nThe room was filled with the soft sounds of mechanical respiration; in out, in out.\n\nThe robot never slept, of course, so it would often spend the nights moving quietly through her rooms, cleaning and tidying and generally occupying itself. She found she became even lazier with the housework out of sympathy – she couldn’t bear the thought of it sitting idle while she slept.\n\nBut no matter what it was doing or how hard she tried not to listen, she could always hear it breathing. When she was working at her desk, she could hear it. When she made breakfast, she could hear it. Even outside her home the sound was there, echoed in every bot across the city. In out – a robotic nanny escorted her charges across the street. In out – a mechanical doorman tipped his hat to passers-by. In out. In out. An artificially intelligent shopkeeper arranged goods in the display window. In out, in out! She couldn’t take it anymore, that chorus of synthetic breaths bombarding her from every direction.\n\n“Is something wrong?” Her creation asked as she stormed inside and slammed the door. In out, in out, in out.\n\n“Stop that, stop breathing.”\n\n“Stop? But every living being requires the regular intake of oxygen -”\n\n“Enough!” She shouted. In out, in out. Her tools were where she had left them that morning, carelessly tossed onto the workbench. She took the ones she needed without hesitation, ripping open the robot’s chestplate and tearing at the tubes and wires that simulated the human respiratory system.\n\n“You aren’t alive. You don’t need oxygen,” she growled, as she slammed the casing shut.\n\nShe held her breath –\n\nAh… blessed silence.\n\nAfter she had gone to sleep, the robot limped over to her workbench and stared at its innards lying amongst the tools. With careful hands it took them up, opened its chest, and began to repair itself. When the damage had been undone it gently closed the casing again, and breathed a deep sigh of relief.\n\nIn. Out.\n"
  title: Synchro-City
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Steven Odhner
  date: 2009-05-23
  day: 23
  month: '05'
  text: "It was May when the Highway arrived from some distant place in the Northwest.  On the fairly open ground the caterpillar-like monstrosity traveled at the alarming rate of about a mile per day, efficiently clearing away rubble and brush, flattening the ground and packing it down with Thumpers, and then laying out a fresh strip of road that it made internally with Assemblers.  Some of the younger villagers had never seen a working machine, and they would stare at it from the hill all day.\n\nGregor was old enough to remember the time before the war, when it seemed like everything was a machine, but he sat and watched the Highway too.  He had even climbed up onto it, opening access panels and trying to gain control.  It was built like a tank and had very few access points, none of which revealed any kind of input device.  Clearly it had received its orders from some computer somewhere – how long ago had that been?  Gregor tried to do the math in his head, but he didn’t know enough to make any kind of guess.  If it had been active since before the war it would have passed by years ago even if it had started in Alaska, but it could have been stuck somewhere or trying to pave over a mountain or something.  Maybe someone had been salvaging and had turned it on by mistake.  Whatever had happened, it was determined to keep laying down highway now and there didn’t seem to be an override.  Gregor looked East towards the ocean and sighed.  Such a waste.\n\nHe felt a hand on his shoulder and looked up to see his wife standing behind him – he had been spending all of his time staring at the rusty behemoth and felt almost as bad for neglecting her as he did for failing to stop or redirect the machine.\n\n“The best salvager we’ve ever had and you can’t do anything with a fully-functioning highway assembler.  I know this has to be killing you, love.”\n\nGregor nodded and sighed, looking back towards the breaking waves.  He had been so excited when he first saw it, had pictured reprogramming the assemblers and making the machine construct a proper city for them to live in.  He had known that was absurd, far beyond his technical ability, but surely he would have been able to use it for something.\n\n“Come home, love.  Get some rest, and tomorrow night the whole village will go down to the shore to watch it go.  We’ll make a celebration of it.”\n\nFor the millionth time Gregor imagined the machine stopping on the beach, some safeguard preventing it from committing suicide, but he wasn’t sure.  With safeguards enabled something would have stopped it years ago, but without them it should have fallen off a cliff by now.  Thinking about it did nothing but annoy him further, but he couldn’t stop.  There was some part of him that was glad it would be out of his hands soon, and that part tried to remind him that he had a good enough life, with a roof over his head and hot meals in the winter.  Joints groaning slightly, he stood and hugged his wife and felt his frustrations evaporate somewhat as she squeezed him.  With a final weary sigh Gregor turned towards his home, leaving the enigmatic Highway to crawl ever closer to the beckoning sea.\n"
  title: Burial at Sea
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Debbie Mac Rory
  date: 2009-05-24
  day: 24
  month: '05'
  text: "“It’s beautiful”\n\n“What is?”\n\nJake looked over at Sara, sitting on the ledge where the window used to be. She was hugging her knees and staring out at the sunset.\n\n“The sky. It’s pretty tonight, like someone reached out with a paintbrush and dabbed the colour there t’lift our spirits”\n\nJake leaned over to whisper in her ear;\n\n“What if I was to tell you that, over there, over where the hills are that you can’t see ‘cos the city’s in the way. Over there, where the country starts, that’s where all the people were running too. Runnin’ ‘cos that’s what the broadcasts were tellin’ them to do. Run, and don’t look back. Them ships are coming, with bellies full of weapons. So they ran. And when those ships sailed over and opened up those bellies, they fired just at them peoples. That’s why these building are still sitting here, so the likes of you can sit here and wax lyrical about the pretty colours. They sailed right over the city, but they hit those people dead on. The sky’s red like that ‘cos the firestorm’s still burning. It ain’t no artist that’s makin’ the sky all pretty, its them dead people, all turned to dust when the bombs hit.”\n\n“Why weren’t you with them?”\n\nJake laughed hoarsely, his throat strangling the sound into ragged coughing.\n\n“I was with ‘em girly. Me and the rest of the boys, herding all them people like so much cattle. Thinking we were helpin’ em when alls we were doing was gathering them up nice and tight for them big guns. Why d’ya think my lungs are cut up so bad. Nothin’ quite so bad to breathe in as dust that was still people only a flash before.”\n\nSara slowed hard and looked over her shoulder at him. Grimy bandages wrapped his face and hands, in an effort to protect the worst of his scorched skin. His lips were cracked and blackened, and blood spotted his shirt and hand from his last coughing fit.\n\n“You gonna die?”\n\n“Course I’m not gonna die. Promised your Daddy I’d take care of ya, and I can’t be doing that very well if I go and leave ya on your lonesome, can I?”\n\nJake started coughing again, doubling up as spasms racked his chest.\n\n“And you gonna show me a real sunset?”\n\nGasping to catch his breath, Jake followed her gaze up to the swirling red clouds of the setting sun.\n\n“There won’t be any real sunset fer some time, not till them people all settle back down to th’earth for their final rest. But if you cin be waiting that long, then yeah darling, I’ll show you the prettiest sunset you’ll ever see”.\n"
  title: Sunset
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2009-05-25
  day: 25
  month: '05'
  text: "Conflict (‘kän-,flikt), noun: The opposition of persons or forces that gives rise to a dramatic action or struggle resulting from incompatible or opposing needs, wishes, or demands.\n\n****\n\n“Captain,” announced Lieutenant Harriman at the Tactical Station, “sensors have detected four Omicron warships heading toward Rigel V.”\n\n“Red alert!” ordered Captain Garrett.  “Helm, plot an intercept course and proceed at maximum warp.”\n\n“Aye-aye, sir,” replied the helmsman as she entered the coordinates into the navigation console.  The ship made a quick turn to port, and then lunged forward into the warp field.  “ETA ten minutes,” she reported.\n\nThe captain walked over to the Tactical Station.  “Can you identify the class of ships, Mr. Harriman?”\n\n“One Constellation Class Battlecruiser, and three Deep-Space Destroyers.”\n\n“Whoa, we’re in over our heads.  Any chance of getting some support?”\n\n“The UES Ganymede and Sedna are an hour away, sir.  It looks like we’re on our own.”\n\nCaptain Garrett returned to his command chair and activated the ship’s intercom.  “Battle stations.  This is not a drill.  Repeat, this is not a drill.  Sensors have detected four heavily armed Omicron warships heading toward our colony on Rigel V.  Our objective is to engage the enemy and defeat them.  If we can’t defeat them, we’re to inflict as much damage as possible.  At the very least, we need to buy time for the colony.  Report immediately to your assigned stations.  We may be boarded, so I want everyone armed.  Sick bay, prepare for causalities.  Let’s show the Omicrons what we’re made of.  Captain, out.”\n\nAs the minutes ticked away, the crew prepared for battle.  “Sir,” reported the communications officer eight minutes later, “we’re being hailed by the Omicron Battlecruiser.”\n\n“Put it on the main viewer.”\n\nThe image of slender female reptile in a crisp military uniform appeared on the viewscreen.  Her yellow scales shimmered in the low intensity orange-red light of the enemy bridge.  She was sitting in the command chair with her legs crossed.  Her tail swayed rhythmically behind her head.  Clearly, the alien commander did not consider the Earth ship a threat. “This is Captain A’Kovck,” she hissed.  “Stand down, and prepare to be boarded.”\n\n“This is Captain Garrett of the UES Titan.  I was just about to offer you the same option, Captain.”\n\nHer deep red eyes narrowed, and she balled her claws into fists.  “This is not a joking matter, Captain Garrett.  We didn’t ask for this war.  Earth attacked us.  Your raiding parties destroyed hundreds of our nurseries.  Millions of un-hatched infants were ruthlessly slaughtered.  Three of my own eggs were among the murdered.”\n\nCaptain Garrett stood, and clasped his hands behind his back.  “With all due respect, Captain A’Kovck, that’s not the way it went down.  As we’ve tried to explain…”\n\n“Enough!” interrupted A’Kovck.  “Surrender within the next five seconds, or be vaporized.”  Her image disappeared from the viewscreen and was replaced by the head-on approach of the four Omicron warships.  The three destroyers peeled off to flank the Titan.\n\n“Send a subspace message to Rigel V,” Garrett ordered.  “Tell them to prepare for hostile guests.  Okay, men, we have a job to do.  Shields to maximum.  We may not be able to win this battle, but we’re sure as hell going to give them a fight.  Attack sequence Delta.  Target the Battlecruieser.  Fire all weapons.”\n\n****\n\nCourage (‘k?r-ij), noun:  The mental or moral strength to venture, persevere, and withstand danger, fear, or difficulty in the face of overwhelming odds.\n"
  title: Duty, Honor, Planet
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Juilan Kehaya
  date: 2009-05-26
  day: 26
  month: '05'
  text: "It was bright and he couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. William panicked. Every limb tingled like static running through his veins. Something was in his throat. His eyes adjusted, a ceiling, a light. Electric shock forced him to blink. Hadn’t he just been at the beach?\n\n“Hey! You were supposed to be watching him!” A male voice came nearby but dull and muted.\n\nHe heard a chair scrape, and two sets of footsteps moved towards him.\n\n“It’s ok Will, relax, you’ll regain mobility soon,” John said standing over him now with Mary.\n\n“I’m sorry Will, I’m sure that gave you a fright,” Mary soothed.\n\nWill tried to relax but adrenaline had his mind racing. Unable to move for what seemed like an eternity, he began to feel his body, smell the sweetness of Mary’s hair, and hear the buzzing of electronics. The whole time she stayed with him looking down into his eyes. Finally, he was able to turn his head to the side; the tube retracted into a hole in the wall gagging him on its way out. Fluid spewed from his throat and he was breathing again.\n\n“There now, it’s almost over.” Mary said, “Let’s get you into a rehab pod”\n\n***\n\n“Be happy you didn’t have to be awake during entry. The automated landing was quite the thrill ride.” Mary said, her voice resonating through the plastic of the rehab pod.\n\nMinutes later the pod hissed open and Will sat up, able to move with ease.\n\n“Everyone looks good captain,” Mary said matter of fact, and tapped her handheld opening the hatch to command access.\n\n“Alright, everyone will see Mary in one hour, no excuses. You all know your post-landing routines,” captain McGovern ordered.\n\nWill moved through the cramped command access and took a seat at his array, powering it up. The graphic display showed all the signals they were receiving and the monitor came to life running diagnostics. He rubbed his hands down his face and inhaled deeply. Diagnostics complete, his own image appeared on the monitor in the corner.\n\n“Comms up and running captain. ”\n\n“ETA?” the captain replied.\n\n“Two minutes. Think they are all toasting with champagne yet?”  Will smiled.\n\nThe captain rose and approached the monitor. “Probably, Roberson always sneaks some into Control.”\n\n“Here it comes.”\n\nThe monitor displayed an icon then automatically opened up a video window. Will immediately saw Roberson in the background, party hat, bottle in hand. He and the captain exchanged wry looks.\n\nMission commander Bill Severs came on screen, “Congratulations captain McGovern! We received automation that the Red Lander arrived without a hitch. Second shift will be…”\n\nA scream echoed somewhere in the background. Both men watched as Bill turned his head. Light flashed. It looked as though the room went sideways, then the feed went black.\n\n“Will?” The captain said.\n\n“Sir, I’m not receiving their signal.”\n\nAll signals started to drop off the graphic display, some in groups; save one.\n\n“What’s that? Tap into it!” the captain ordered. “LBA? Thought that was abandoned.”\n\nWill leaned in, “It is. They left behind a web cam for the school children.”\n\nVideo flicked back on. It was night on Earth, a new moon. Both of them stared in silence. The sun haloed the Earth. They could see a few patches of lights. Then large, bright, orange circles appeared and vanished. Two more minutes it lasted, both men silent. The planet was almost invisible now: a black, silent circle between the moon and the sun. The web camera vainly tried to focus on the now black circle, back and forth.\n"
  title: Awakening
  year: 2009
- 
  author: J. M. Perkins
  date: 2009-05-27
  day: 27
  month: '05'
  text: "Jenny sat, tapping her fingers to keep from biting her nails. She was having trouble concentrating. She was having trouble being here and now, in this hot vinyl booth in the retro burger joint. The display contacts in Jenny’s eyes flashed red, all manner of cautionary metadata and concerned messages from her always networked friends streamed before her eyes. She could barely see through all the blinking, as the computers in her shoes fed info and communication in real time.\n\n“Shit,” Jenny said, as a haptic tingle informed her that one of her parents had focused on her feed. It took five seconds of stillness before the message came. Like a Cruise ship crashing through sail boats came all caps text from Mom. All the other streams shrunk and minimized before the alpha priority of parental communication.\n\nYOUNG LADY, WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING???\n\nJenny thought about responding, had no idea what she could possibly say.\n\nI WANT YOU TO GET UP AND LEAVE THAT PLACE RIGHT NOW.\n\nJenny bit her lips together, scared now. Robby lowered his head.  He didn’t have to ping for information about her surging heart rate, even without being privy to the conversation he understood.\n\n“Jenny…” he said.  She was about to respond before being derailed by.\n\nJENNIFER GENE DELANCY I KNOW WHAT YOU’RE THINKING AND YOU WILL COME HOME AT ONCE!\n\n“I should just go.” He said as he gathered up his things and stood.\n\n“No.” Jenny said. Slowly, as slowly as people ever did the inconceivable Jenny reached up and removed the contacts. She didn’t care about the warning tags and negative reviews and marks that floated like shifting currents about Robby when she was wearing the displays. She didn’t care about the admonishing of her friends. Jenny didn’t even care about what would happen when she got home.\n\nJenny rose and kissed Robby with as much force as she could. Caps and moms be damned.\n"
  title: Ignoring the Overlay
  year: 2009
- 
  author: K Pittman
  date: 2009-05-28
  day: 28
  month: '05'
  text: "They stopped at Hatch 5. “In and out, ten minutes, tops. No tourism.” Bremmer’s gloved hands fluttered over the fittings and straps of Aplon’s dull grey outdoor suit, readjusting his rebreather mask and visor.\n\n“Righto, pops.” Aplon toungued off the mask’s speaker and bounced to a private channel. “No excursions. Why are we armed, then?”\n\n“We’re armed, because…” Bremmer stood, and Aplon began an identical refitting of his gear.\n\n“The birds.”\n\n“Birds?”  Aplon had heard the word, seen the images and holos, had even petted the sim at the small Naturama deep in city’s caverns, its roof open to the electronic sun, and it still took him a moment to remember what ‘birds’ were now. Non-sim. Unreasonably aggressive. “Birds.” He tasted the blade of the word, savoring its new balance. Bremmer turned to the wall locker, extracted two BlackBoxes, two Bee Guns, and two sticky tangles of RazorMesh, handing half to Aplon. They seperately self-attached each item deliberately.\n\n“They’re building things now.” Bremmer said this quietly, as if stll astonished, before affixing a flat, black wafer to a shallow slit in the upper torso of his suit. “Like towns, or cities. Lots of different birds together.”\n\n“Really.”  Aplon’s goggles felt unreasonably tight over his eyes for a moment. “Really?”\n\n“Yeah. They’re destroying drones, too, but they’re still afraid of us, mostly, unless something happened between four hours ago and now.”\n\n“Where are we going? Are we, like, bait?” Aplon’s wrists reflex clench-flexed his Bee Guns. His glanced at the drone counter and head-calculated the amount of mass he’d need in a scrape.\n\n“No. Drone got gaffled less than a quarter-klick from here, up in the ruins. We’re gonna run to it and back, tagging anything notable, do a close scan if possible. If the data’s cool, a squad will go retrive it or autopsy it on site.”\n\n“We can’t image it from here?”\n\n“Too much light pollution. But most of the birds can’t hack direct daylight either, so now’s a safer window than most.”\n\n“What’s the autopsy for then?”\n\n“Lab wants to determine if there’s sophistcated tool usage happening. I bet not, but Lab has needs.”\n\nAplon and Bremmer simultaneously started jogging in place as if signalled; Bremmer waved the ante-chamber open, and they ran in, bobbling in place on the dais as it floated up-from and over the silvery, roiling floor through the hemispherical blister towards the external hatches.\n\n“Bremmer,” Aplon broadcast over the massive grinding, rumbling of the door while waiting for the Hatch to cycle open|shut|open. “Bremmer!”\n\nBremmer waved and the hatch paused a hair’s breadth open. Outside light poured in like poison through the crack, and iridesecence scaled their visors.\n\n“We’re the clade’s best runners. This is just a run. No loitering, no engagement. Stats gave me ace odds that this is a solid. Okay?”\n\n“Okay.”\n\n“If things get weird, either hit mesh and bug out, or go mesh and Bee the fuckers until we can jettison. Got it?”\n\n“Yeah.” Aplon turned to the door and nodded to Bremmer, who waved |open| to resume. “Did Stats give you odds on who gets there and back first?”\n\nTheir visors throttled back the blinding flood of light as they ran forward into the scalding illumination of one million days of constant summer.  Aplon heard Bremmer grumble, over bursts of hiss and static, “I gotta a lot of creds riding on this either way.”\n"
  title: Five Aitch
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Adam Zabell
  date: 2009-05-29
  day: 29
  month: '05'
  text: "It started seven years ago when I was diagnosed with sudden onset electrophoretic meningitis. They had to dope me unconscious, take me off-line, electronically isolate me from the rest of the hospital, force doctors and nurses to use archaic diagnostic monitors from the pre-implant era. The specialists warned my wife how my illness was nearly always fatal, how the recovery was notoriously difficult because I had to remain off-line for at least six months. My optic nerve would atrophy from understimulation and the prognosis was grim. Partial to permanent disability as my reduced reaction time within virtuWorld would translate to a drop in my vIQ of 30 to 125 points.\n\nAfter the coma, they usually talked about me like I wasn’t in the room. It wasn’t their fault, not really. When everybody was connected, off-line was inconceivable. They gave me one of those terminal-keyboard devices, forced me to learn how to read and type. I went cross-eyed trying to hold any decent conversation. My fingers tied in knots if my mind raced ahead of those infernal buttons. My wife filed for permanent /uninvite and /ignore status. If I wasn’t using that keyboard, I became invisible. I’d gone from being part of the network of humanity to an aphasic imbecile.\n\nDuring one of my mandatory exercise periods on the ward, I saw a man in plaid pants and an orange shirt holding jovially one-sided conversations with everybody who walked past. He caught my stare, smiled and said “Oh hai! Welcome to the outside. Gotta run.” By the time I got the attention of the duty nurse, he was long gone. She politely reminded me how extended disconnectivity sometimes caused hallucinations. A copy of the security cameras sent to my pathetically flat monitor revealed no jolly man, of course. I couldn’t even see where I was until directed to a green polyhedron. “You’re not online, so we triangulate based on transmission antennae and your laptop. Don’t worry, once your convalescence is complete we’ll have you back in the community.”\n\nTwo days later the jolly man walked into my room and stood next to the nurse who recorded my vitals. Talking over her banal patter, he said “You can opt out. Be Ready.” It was surprisingly easy, but probably because I had already learned to live in my own head. Walking through the city today, men and women part like water. They aren’t even conscious of swerving, their glazed eyes in a REM sleep saccade while navigating the parallel universe of vWorld. Children aren’t fully integrated into the siliconized network and occasionally catch sight of me out of the corner of their eyes. But my people are a logical impossibility, so those nascent computers filter me from direct visual experience. Bogey men, specters, dopplegangers. Eventually vWorld has to account for our mark on the world, somehow. They call us ghosts, and maybe we are. But for all that I’ve lost, I’ve never felt more alive.\n"
  title: Opting Out
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Robert Stise
  date: 2009-05-30
  day: 30
  month: '05'
  text: "He opens his eyes and looks around. His eyes are blue.\n\n“Good morning.” I say.\n\nHe turns and looks at me then out the window at the dark sky.\n\n“It is still night.” He says sitting up on the steel table.\n\nI don’t even wonder about why they say that any more. “The time 12:02, it is morning.”\n\nHe nods and looks around at the room. It is bare with only the few tools that I need and the table on which the man sat. I see confusion begin to seep in as he looks around the room.\n\n“Where am I?” he asks.\n\n“You are in the basement of the Welds county hospital, in New York.”\n\nHe looks around his confusion ebbing until certain memories begin to come back. “I was dead.”\n\nI feel bad about enjoying that statement, but it’s hard not to appreciate it.\n\n“Yes you were,” I ignore the temptation to let the statement hang in the air “I was paid to bring you back.”\n\nHe pulls the white sheet laying across his legs closer, becoming aware of his nakedness. “Who paid you?”\n\n“Your wife.” I say immediately\n\nHe takes it well, thinking quietly to him self. I stare at him waiting for the realization to dawn. When it finally does he looks me in the eyes. His eyes are blue.\n\n“A day.” he says quietly.\n\n“Yes,” I say “just a day.”\n\n“And she wanted that?”\n\n“Honestly, I don’t know what she wants but she paid.”\n\n“A day. A day with her.” He mumbles.\n\nI look at him sitting on the table and I can’t tell you why but I felt… Well I guess I don’t know what I felt. I went and sat next to him.\n\n“Sometimes these things go wrong,” I say “sometimes I can’t bring them back.”\n\nHe turns and looks at me with his blue eyes.\n\n“How do you want to spend your day?” I ask\n\nHe left shortly after sneaking out the back in borrowed cloths to have his day. I don’t know why I let him go he wasn’t special, and he was worth quite a lot. But he did have these blue eyes.\n"
  title: Blue Eyes
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Zachary Whitten
  date: 2009-05-31
  day: 31
  month: '05'
  text: "Looking out the plexiglass window, he could see almost all the way across the station. In bed behind him, his Jane sighed and rolled over. She obviously wasn’t a Sardine, her body was too short, her muscles were too big and her skin had the fading remnants of a tan.\n\nHe was born and raised on the station. The low gravity and artificial light of the station meant that the people who lived here, half-mockingly called Sardines, grew long, lithe and pale.\n\nIt had become a fashionable thing for people of means to leave the brown hotness of Earth and come up to the stations for their vacations. Visiting a Sardine prostitute was a regular pastime for the Earthers. The stations were legal grey areas already, so the brothels fit right along with the plastic surgery clinics and gene-drug houses.\n\nHe didn’t mind the job, there wasn’t much else for Sardines his age. He liked this part the best, though. After they were done and she was sleeping. He’d stay awake, pretending that this finery was all his. Pretending he belonged here. After awhile, he’d take all the booze in the minibar and slip out, his Jane still sleeping.\n"
  title: That Somniferous Interlude
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2009-06-01
  day: '01'
  month: '06'
  text: "I can’t believe that it used to take years and years of real-time school to become a doctor.  I slip the jack with the red cross on the dust-cover into the plug at the base of my skull.  Just like that, I’m a surgeon, which is good news for my friend currently trying to breathe around the hot shrapnel sticking through his lung.\n\nWe’re beneath the firing level in a crater in a no-person’s-land between the forces.  I find it ironic that huddling there in the mud with bone-shattering explosions happening around us, I could probably speak to a soldier from World War I and we’d know exactly what each other went through.\n\nMaybe I’ll get my chance sooner than I think.\n\nMy friend’s wild eyes are looking at me with a silent scream as I get to work.\n\nEvery soldier on the force has seven spikes.  Medic, Sniper, Engineer, Strategy Officer, Languages, Scout, and Beserker.  We keep them in an arm band.  They’re used when they’re called for.\n\nThis way each man can play whatever role necessary in the changing tides of infantry ground battle.  It hasn’t alleviated the chaos.\n\nThey people up top keep trying to take the disorder out of war and failing.\n\nI remember that up the line, a battalion of troops all jammed their Berserker chips in at the same time to try to freak out the enemy with a suicide run at their guns in the hopes that a few of them would get through.  They didn’t even make it out of the trench.  They tore each other apart.\n\nI’m still working around the cooling metal sticking through my friend’s chest when I realize that he doesn’t need my help anymore.  I stop working.  I sit back.  I slip out the medic jack.  Dirt and body parts fly through the air above me amidst the deafening explosions.\n\nI wish they had a jack that erased memories.\n"
  title: Medic
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Roi R. Czechvala
  date: 2009-06-02
  day: '02'
  month: '06'
  text: "She squeezed his hand, hard, as the main engines kicked in. His fingers turned white. It was her first launch, their first as husband and wife. “Take it easy Sweetheart. I’ll need that hand later.”\n\n“Sorry.” She said, releasing his hand. “Is it always like this?”\n\n“This is nothing. Just wait until we lift off from…” Her look of terror stopped him mid-sentence. “Just kidding Sweetheart, actually this is one of the rougher ones. You get used to it.” She looked doubtful, but managed a weak smile.\n\nOnce in free fall she relaxed, unbuckled her harness, and wrapped her groom in a lung crushing hug. “I love you so much. This is the best honeymoon gift a girl could ask for. I just wish we didn’t have to go into stasis.” She stuck her lip out in a pout. He kissed her.\n\nHe awoke from stasis first. “Honey, are you awake?”\n\n“Yeah,” she said muzzily, throwing her arms around his neck, “I’ve missed you so.”\n\n“It’s only been twenty minutes subjective time.”\n\n“Yes, but I know it’s been six months.” She nuzzled his neck.\n\n“We land in forty five minutes. Come to the port, I want to show you something.” \tThey made their way through the crush of other recently awakened passengers to peer out the tiny quartz porthole. “See there,” he said, “that brightly lit area? That’s Crippen dock. Off in the distance is Port Chaffee. I spoke to a few crew members who woke up yesterday. According to the latest reports, this promises to be a most spectacular meteor shower.”\n\n“You spoil me, you know that? This is for you.” She pulled him to her lips.\n\nShe gazed in wide wonder at the night sky above Port Chaffee. “The sky is so beautiful here. It’s almost as if I could see forever. It’s so much clearer here than back home.”\n\n“That’s because of all the fine dust held in suspension in the upper atmosphere on Mars. Remember how clear it was when we went to the top of Mons on our first date?”\n\n“How could I ever forget? It was breathtaking, but nothing like this. I’ve seen pictures, but I never expected Earth to be so beautiful, so green and full of life. I’m so glad we came. I’ll never forget this.”\n\n“Everybody should see the birthplace of humanity at least once in their life. I’m just happy we can see it together.”\n\n“But what will protect us from the meteors? Won’t they strike us here as well?” she asked, her voice filled with sudden concern.\n\n“Yes, but don’t worry. Do you see that faint shimmer in the sky? That’s the Tesla Field. It extends around the entire globe. Nothing will penetrate it.”\n\nFar above she could see the T Field shimmering protectively. “If you say so.”\n\n“I wouldn’t let anything happen to you… Look, it‘s beginning.”\n\nThe impacts were moderate at first, but the frequency quickly increased. What had been single strikes here and there turned into a massive onslaught that melted into one another until the planet seemed to blaze in orange white fire.\n\nThe now incandescent atmosphere began to strip away in brilliant streamers borne upon the solar wind. “It’s so beautiful,” the young bride said, her eyes wet with tears.\n\nSafe on Luna, in the comfort of Port Chaffee and snug beneath the impenetrable umbrella of the Tesla Field, the young couple watched, from 384,403 kilometers distance, the last of Earth’s oceans boil away into space.\n\n“I love you,” she said softly.\n"
  title: The Honeymooners
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Ken McGrath
  date: 2009-06-03
  day: '03'
  month: '06'
  text: "He woke screaming, just as he always did.\n\nThe chains held him in place, tearing into his flesh, causing his wounds to tear open and start to bleed again.\n\nThe other place was gone, all that existed now was this horrible twisted metal hole, pumped full of stale, dead air and the constant howls of other prisoners. It was much more real than the other place, the one with the clear blue skies and the endless oceans that flowed to the horizon and beyond.\n\nHe curled up, pulling his knees close to his raw, burned chest. Cables and wires of varying thickness wound their way around his body, probing into cavities both existing and new, digging into his very soul. Or were they bursting out of it? He didn’t know. All he knew was one thing and that was his throat felt like it had been set on fire, his ragged, bubbling pleas cutting through the vile sounds filling the atmosphere.\n\nFresh blood poured onto his hands so he scrunched his eyes closed, even tighter than before, trying to make it all go away, trying to make it become the other place, praying to escape from this horrible dream…\n\n…and when he opened them there he was, standing in the doorway to his house, facing the beach, the gentle sound of the waves lapping against the shore adding to the laughter of the youngsters who were out on this beautiful star-filled night.\n\nHis legs went from underneath him and he reached for the doorframe to stop from falling, cutting his palm as he did. The blood brought him back to the other place. Was he still there? Was that where his body was right now, being operated on and tortured. Being used as food, as fuel for the machines. Or was it only his mind that went there? Was he safe here?\n\nHe sighed heavily and thought of the gun that lay hidden beneath the clean towels in the wardrobe upstairs. Should he free his mind now? Get it over with, but before he could stand another thought stuck him with enough force to knock him back to his knees.\n\nWhat if this was the escape, what if here was where his mind went to escape the torment and pain. If he killed himself here he might never be able to come back and he might be trapped in that cursed cage with no escape, no safe haven for his mind to escape to.\n\nBut what if this was the one, this was the place where he was free and his damaged, demented mind had invented the other one, that red, overwhelming place where he lay bound, trussed and forever in pain.\n\nHe screamed and it was a sound all too familiar to him. The night sky suddenly became something more menacing, the pinpricks of light were now eyes staring out at him from the darkness of the panopticon letting him know he was being observed, waiting to see what his next move would be.\n\nBut he couldn’t move, the wires coming out of his chest held him in place, the distant laughter morphing into pained voices and he knew there was no safe haven. There was no past, no such thing as escape. Wherever his mind ran to he’d always end up back here, waiting to die on this filthy slab beneath the metal fingers of his cage.\n"
  title: There Is No Was
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Clare Tong Lee
  date: 2009-06-04
  day: '04'
  month: '06'
  text: "Elizabeth stared at herself in the mirror as her ladies flittered about twisting her hair into elaborate braids and adorning her with jewellery.  In less than an hour they would be docking at the Rammajek spaceport and then they would be out of time.  They would all be out of time.\n\nMorana III had fallen eight months ago and her people had finally given an unconditional surrender.  Not that they hadn’t tried to sue for peace before, they did after the destruction of Idona Prime and again after the Ralla Massacre.  Elizabeth’s father hadn’t even objected when Arishkah Vehn had demanded her as a wife.  A wife on Rammajek was nothing more than a body slave.\n\nStill, Elizabeth had been born to serve her people as much as she had been to rule them, and she knew her duty.  From the cradle to the grave her thoughts would be of her people: their protection, their happiness, their honour.  Today, that meant marrying the Butcher of Fenna.  Vehn was so pleased, so triumphant on the holobroadcast, a well calculated blow in demanding the Jewel of the Empire.  ‘The spoils of war go to the victor’ he had said, ‘and I shall make spoils of it all.’\n\nElizabeth rubbed her fingers as the ship docked, and considered the poison sacs that had been implanted under her nails in the days after the surrender.  Her marriage bed would be christened by blood like in the days of old, but this time it would not be that of her maidenhead.\n"
  title: Spoils
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Ian Rennie
  date: 2009-06-05
  day: '05'
  month: '06'
  text: "“Who the hell are you and what are you doing in my apartment?”\n\nThe man at the window didn’t turn to look at Lloyd’s outburst.  When he spoke, his voice sounded bored.\n\n“You know who I am, and if you have any sense, you know why I’m here.”\n\nFinally he did turn.  He pulled a card out of his pocket, and a hologram leapt out of it, a tiny three dimensional version of his face, with a stream of data running underneath it.\n\n“Agent Moorcock, Chronology enforcement.  Don’t bother introducing yourself.  You’re Lloyd Fry, on placement from the archaeology department of the University of Charon, and you and I are the only people in this city from our century.”\n\nLloyd adopted the slightly guilty pose that comes naturally to anyone who has to deal with the police, as if running through in his mind what he could possibly have done wrong.\n\n“Of course, how can I help you, officer?”\n\n“Where is it?”\n\nA chill ran through him.  He tried as hard as he could not to let it show, and ended up overcompensating\n\n“I’m not sure I follow you.”\n\n“Mr Fry, please don’t cause any problems.  Your university worked hard for your visa, and I’d hate to think they wasted all that work just because you panicked when you saw a badge.  Where is the recorder?”\n\nThe game was up.  Lloyd reached into his back pocket, noticing as he did that the agent tensed very slightly at this.  He pulled out a silver stub roughly the size of his thumb and placed it on the table.  The agent walked over to it.\n\n“A motorola HS6290 hologram recorder, best in its class at the 2053 Consumer Electronics show, as I recall.  Mind telling me why you thought you should bring one back to 1996?”\n\n“I-”\n\nThe agent cut him off before he could get himself in any deeper.\n\n“Mr Fry, you are in pre-unity time.  Any time period before 2018 is embargoed, and likely to remain so.  When you received your visa, you agreed not to bring anything back with you apart from your body.  Even there, your records state they removed your retinal HUD.  What in god’s name made you think this little thing would be acceptable?”\n\n“I didn’t think anyone would mind.  I needed it to take recordings for my fieldwork, and…”\n\n“And?”\n\nLloyd slumped into a chair, feeling around three inches tall.\n\n“And I wanted to get a hologram of the eiffel tower before it was wrecked by the earthquake.  My mother asked me to.”\n\nAgent Moorcock’s face softened slightly.  He said nothing, the man before him knew what he had done.\n\n“So,” said Lloyd after a while, “What happens to me now?”\n\n“Nothing happens to you now.”\n\nLloyd’s face creased in confusion.\n\n“What do you m-”\n\nAgent Moorcock touched a control on his wrist and the room vanished.  Instead, he was walking through a crowded travel lobby towards a tired figure standing in front of a desk.\n\n“Mr Lloyd Fry?”\n\nThe man turned.  it was the same face Moorcock had just seen, maybe six months younger.\n\n“I’m afraid that your visa application didn’t pass vetting.  Unfortunately we cannot permit you to complete your travel plans.”\n\nLloyd looked disappointed but resigned.  Applications were rarely successful.\n\n“Can I ask why?”\n\n“I’m afraid that information is classified, sir.  Oh, sir?”\n\n“Yes?”\n\nMoorcock held something out to the man.  It was, after all, for his mother.\n\n“You dropped your recorder.”\n"
  title: Contraband
  year: 2009
- 
  author: John C. Osborn
  date: 2009-06-06
  day: '06'
  month: '06'
  text: "The sound of the spray paint can spitting neon green from its nozzle drowned out the ambient noise of the city: police sirens, echoing gunshots, and the monotonous drone of the Floating Eyes. Ty directed the colorful symphony across a giant raised billboard that read “One World, One People,” creating a large middle finger in the center of it all. When the spray paint puttered to an end, he appreciated his work like a viewer does at an art gallery.\n\nTy pulled down the black bandanna covering his mouth, looked at the smog-distorted cityscape stretching toward the horizon. He sat down, pulled out a protein bar, and devoured it whole.\n\n“You again,” said a stern male voice.\n\n“You know me,” Ty smiled and crumpled the wrapper, “I like my art.”\n\nTy looked up at the police officer wearing a gray uniform. Sown in to the uniform’s sleeves were American flags with one star instead of fifty. The officer looked up at the billboard, smiled.\n\n“A middle finger,” he said. “Ah, can’t say that’s original.”\n\n“It’s the symbolism that counts,” Ty replied.\n\n“Either way, it’s against the law,” the cop said as he sat down beside Ty. Ty looked him over, noticed his disinterested gaze stare out across the city.\n\n“But you’re not going to bust me are you?”\n\n“No,” the cop smiled, “I’m not.” Radio traffic clattered from the cop’s walkie-talkie. He turned it down. “If the Governing Council can’t take a joke, screw ’em.”\n\nTy laughed, “You know it’s much more than a joke these days. I think you see the same problems I see, only you’re a part of it…”\n\n“Just trying to survive like everyone else,” the cop interjected. “You think I like busting kids like you for petty vandalism and sending you off to one of the camps?” he paused. “No. I’d rather be chasing murderers and drug dealers.”\n\nA loud humming noise startled them both. A floating metallic orb the size of a human head hovered above. A glowing red computer-like eye scanned both of them.\n\n“Warning!” a robotic voice said. “Crime against the state detected. Vandalism, First degree. Hateful speech, first degree. Defacing corporate property, first degree…”\n\nTy’s eyes lit up. He felt a strong urge to run but the cop’s eyes looking at his told him to wait. Ty took an anxious breath.\n\n“I’m in the process of apprehending the criminal,” the cop said. “I don’t need any assistance.”\n\nThe Floating Eye focused its mechanical eye on him, “Officer Grace Steward, Homeland Security Division Four. You are aiding and abetting a political criminal. You will be…”\n\nThere was a click and a thundering boom.\n\nIt happened fast. Ty didn’t see Officer Steward whip out his sidearm and blast the Floating Eye in one graceful motion. As the smoking metal heap fell, Ty asked, “Why?”\n\nOfficer Steward looked at Ty, “I think you already know the answer. Now get out of here. There are plenty more billboards that need defacing.”\n"
  title: Vandals
  year: 2009
- 
  author: George Li
  date: 2009-06-07
  day: '07'
  month: '06'
  text: "The rusted orange hue of the sky made dancing reflections on Mirna’s “skin”. Carefully, she raised the fragile watering pot.\n\nPeople had thought it would be them who caused this. Sentient robots that would rebel and destroy humanity. It didn’t work out like that. Robots simply had no need to rebel, they did not have the urge for power like most humans had. It simply wasn’t needed, wasn’t in their programming. Even the ones with no directive, no programming, even they had no such urge. These “Free-Thoughts” discovered in seconds, with their huge infallible minds, what took human philosophers millenniums to figure out. The rarity of life. The need for diversity, companionship, and harmony. So it was not the robots that caused this. It was the humans themselves.\n\nLike most things, it started slowly. A buildup of mistrust, paranoia, and hatred. People started blaming everything for their troubles, everything but themselves. Wars started, lives were lost. But it seemed humanity would survive, like it had done so many times before. Until someone went nuclear.\n\nMirna slowly released the valve. With robotic precision, she filled the pot.\n\nIt took several years for humanity to die out. But eventually, even the race’s legendary resourcefulness could not save them. Robots tried to help, tried to stop the impending extinction. But they were pushed away, the paranoia and suspicion of the human mind was too hard to overcome. For the first time in thousands of years, Earth was free of humans. And the Robots were alone.\n\nSynthbot M-1RN Edition A. That was what Mirna was, that is what the label on her back still said. Her original directive was gardening, taking care of the now desolate parks. And yet, even after all her masters died, even after she learned how to override her original programming, she still enjoyed her work. Perhaps it was something about making life, and seeing it grow.\n\nMirna walked over to a half broken cup filled to the brim with soil. On the top was a small flower. She delicately tilted the watering pot, and watched as a few drops of this now precious liquid fell.\n\nThere were plenty of spare parts, abandoned machinery, and broken vehicles. With careful rationing, Mirna could live forever.\n\nLazily a colorful butterfly landed on the small flower.\n\nMirna smiled. Maybe she would get to see the Earth reborn.\n"
  title: Earthly Convalescence
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Sean Monaghan
  date: 2009-06-08
  day: '08'
  month: '06'
  text: "Jerry ducked Monica’s projectile, his knees up to his chin in zero-G.  The sno-globe missed his head by millimeters and smacked into the aluminum window casing, then spun through their cabin.\n\n‘Honey, it’s okay, it’s-‘\n\n‘Ladies and Gentlemen,’ the captain’s voice crackled over the intercom.  ‘We’ve been cleared for re-entry by Mojave control.  If you look out your windows now, you’ll get your last view from space, dawn breaking over eastern Siberia.  We’re about to fire our braking rockets and drop into the atmosphere.  All going well, we should have you on the ground and cleared through quarantine in twenty minutes.’\n\n‘Where are they?’ Monica yelled.  Her make-up was smeared from wiping tears.  Jerry wondered if she was still drunk from the end of cruise party.  She’d probably kept drinking after he’d turned in.\n\n‘Allan’s holding them.  I told you.  We can’t go through security with-‘\n\nMonica reached out and plucked the spinning souvenir from the air, flinging it at him again.  The globe impacted his abdomen making the adhesive prosthesis jab him sharply.  He saw the snowy hills of Mars again, encapsulated in the small drifting quartz sphere.\n\nThe ship jerked.  ‘We are beginning our descent,’ the intercom relayed.  ‘Please be seated in your gravity couch.  Ensure you fasten your webbing harness.’\n\nJerry grabbed the netting.  In the cramped cabin, it was hard to drift out of reach of anything, just as it was hard to avoid Monica’s missiles.  He could hear a hissing sound.\n\n‘The whole point of the trip,’ Monica said, ‘was to bring home the diamonds.  And you give them away.’\n\nJerry looked out the window, seeing a trail of glinting vapor.  ‘I didn’t give them away,’ he said.\n\nThe window was leaking, he realized.  Ariadne’s cheap reputation included a poor maintenance record, and the sno-globe had probably wrecked the window seal’s alignment.\n\n‘Cabin crew, cross-check doors.  And be seated for re-entry.’\n\n‘We can’t trust Allan.’  Monica grabbed her own webbing, pulling herself in and managing to slap Jerry’s face a few times.\n\n‘Maybe not.’  Red plasma was streaming around the window as they struck the atmosphere.\n\n‘I didn’t even see him on the whole trip,’ Monica said.\n\nA robotic voice chimed through their speaker.  ’13B, your harnesses are unbuckled.  Ariadne Spacelines will not be responsible …’\n\n‘Shut up!’ Monica yelled.  ‘I’m putting it on!’\n\nThe pane’s edge was glowing now.  Jerry knew at this stage their cabin door was sealed so, even if the window blew out, the ship’s integrity would hold.  Assuming door maintenance was better than for windows, the other four hundred passengers would be safe, while he and Monica got crisped.\n\n‘Are you hot?’ Monica said.\n\nThe window was a blur of red and he could see a thin blowtorch of flame from one edge.\n\n‘Dammit,’ he said.\n\n‘I’m not giving Allan any of my percentage.’\n\nJerry threw her a look, then ripped off his harness, feeling the tug of deceleration still pushing him against the couch.  He pulled up his shirt and peeled back the prosthesis. The piece of artificial skin flopped around and he slapped it onto the damaged frame.  The fibrous bioshard material designed to elude security began shrinking and charring, then congealed into a solid glittering carbon lump, the diamonds showing.  Still, it had stopped up the hole.\n\n‘What the hell?’ Monica said, staring at the makeshift repair.\n\nJerry sighed falling back into the couch.  So much for his plan to tell her that Allan had given them the slip at the spaceport.\n"
  title: Jerry and Monica's Falling Out
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2009-06-09
  day: '09'
  month: '06'
  text: "“Captain, we’re being hailed by Ambassador Kapris.  He say’s it’s urgent.”\n\nDammit, thought Captain Santiago, I don’t have time for this.  “Tell him that I cannot be interrupted.”\n\n“Sir, he says that it’s a matter of life and death.  He says that our tachyon experiment won’t work.”\n\n“What?  Nobody on Pegasi Prime knows about this experiment.  How the hell did he find out?”\n\n“He says that if you transport down, he’ll tell you.”\n\nA few minutes later, the captain materialized in the office of Ambassador Kapris.  “This is a breach of security, Ambassador.  I demand to know how you found out about the experiment.”\n\n“I told him, dad,” said an old man standing next to the Ambassador.  Santiago hadn’t even noticed him until he spoke.  The old man continued, “I’ve waited decades for you to get here.  What’s the matter, don’t you recognize your own son?”\n\nSantiago studied the old man.  He had to admit, there was a resemblance.  “What are you talking about?  I don’t have any children.”\n\n“True,” replied the old man.  “But you will, unless you listen to what I have to say.  When I was young, you told me that the experiment you’re about to run failed.  It started a cascading temporal distortion that destabilized your warp core.  You and your crew managed to get into escape pods, but when the reactor blew, everybody was killed, except for you and Mary Toole.  A temporal rift transported your Pods back in time almost 90 years.  You landed on this planet and went into hiding so you wouldn’t disrupt the timeline.  You eventually had a child, me, and I too have lived a secluded life.  Mom died several decades ago, and you died within a week.  Today, the circle is complete.  I can finally come out of hiding.  You had asked me, if I lived long enough, to try to save your crew.  Please, call your ship.  Tell them to shut down the experiment.  But hurry, time is running out.”\n\n“Ensign Toole from Engineering?  I barely know her.”  After a moment’s reflection, Santiago finally said, “No, this is ridiculous.  I can’t stop the experiment without evidence.”\n\n“Okay,” offered the old man.  “Just delay it ten minutes.  Then you’ll have your proof.”\n\n“What kind of proof?”\n\n“Well, I’ll disappear, of course.  If your ship doesn’t blow up at the exact same time, you’ll change history.  My history, to be specific.   The cascade won’t start at 10:25, you won’t get into the escape Pods at 10:28, the ship won’t explode at 10:31, and you and mom won’t be transported back in time to have me.  I’ll cease to exist.  Simple, huh?  Can a ten minute delay hurt?”\n\nThe captain studied the sincerity in the old man’s eyes.  Eyes, he realized, that were nearly identical to the ones that looked back at him every morning when he shaved.  He decided that it was worth the gamble.  He tapped his communicator, “Captain Santiago to Engineering.  Power down the tachyon generator, and await further instructions, out.  Okay, ‘son,’ let’s say you’re right.  Won’t this cause your death?”\n\n“Technically, yes, but I’ve already lived 86 years.  Besides, maybe a few years from now I’ll be born again in this timeline.  But do yourself a favor, dad.  When you get back to the ship, get to know Mary Toole.  She’s a wonderful person.  She’ll make a great wife, and a fantastic mother.  And, please, make sure that you tell her that I love her.”  With that, the old man smiled and faded to nothingness.  The chronometer on the wall read 10:31.\n"
  title: The Circle of Life
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2009-06-10
  day: 10
  month: '06'
  text: "It was slave labour, that’s what it was.\n\nMy nose drew a little circle in the center of the condensation on my faceplate.  The visors were supposed to be moisture resistant but like everything else, the company had cut corners.  We could see enough to do our jobs.\n\nTiny, valuable crystals coated the billion square kilometers of the half-Dyson.  Very dense carbon deposits.\n\nBlue diamonds.\n\nManual labour was the cheapest way to get them.  Like any loser here, I’d believed the hype about getting shares in the company.  We were paid well but they took everything we needed to do our job out of our pay at exorbitant prices.  It was the oldest scam in the book and there was always another crop of uneducated fools ready to sign up.\n\nWhen a person was prying a diamond off the hull, the cheap tool would snap and the worker would rock back.  Sometimes, he’d rock back too quickly and break his gravplate bonds.\n\nThat person would float off into space.  That person’s screaming intercom would be cut off by control.  He’d dwindle to a speck over the course of a day.\n\nWe were supposed to have tethers.  We were supposed to have maneuvering jets.  There were supposed to be ambulance shuttles standing by.  All very expensive.  Safety inspectors were bribed.  We cut corners ourselves to heighten our own wages.\n\nIt was stupid and dangerous work.\n\nI crawled, stuck to the surface by weak gravplates on my knees, feet, elbows and hands, on what appeared to me to be a flat black plane stretching away to the horizon on all sides.\n\nWeak flashlights on either side of my helmet kept trained on the ‘ground’ one meter in front of my face.  I was in the stimulus-response trance that repetitive work brought on.  It was almost meditative.\n\nThat when I heard Julie’s frightened bark of a scream click off into silence.\n\nWe’d been sharing a bunk for two weeks.  It was against company regulation but really, the ignorance of the law went both ways.  This was deep space.\n\nI loved Julie and she loved me.\n\nI looked up and saw Julie floating away.  I had a clear memory of being back on earth and seeing a child accidentally let a balloon go, crying as it flew slowly up into the sky.\n\nJulie was kicking frantically, trying to ‘swim’ back to the hull but she was too far away.\n\nBoth of us had forfeited our jets and tethers for the dream of making enough money to get away from here and live together within two years.\n\nI was watching that dream float away into space.\n\nWithout thinking, I kicked off towards her.\n\nMy aim was true and we collided.  She panicked at the collision and we scrambled for contact before she realized it was me.\n\nHer face smiled in relief through the faceplate for half a second before her eyes widened in horror at what I’d done.  Then she choked back tears.  She hugged me as much as the bulky suits would allow.\n\nWe floated in an awkward waltz.  Maybe two deaths in one day would look suspicious.  Maybe they’d grudgingly send a wagon out.  Probably not, though.\n\nWe each had eight more hours of air.\n\nI touched my helmet to hers so that she’d be able to hear me when I spoke.\n\n“I won’t let you die alone.” I said.\n"
  title: Blue Diamonds
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Q. B. Fox
  date: 2009-06-11
  day: 11
  month: '06'
  text: "With her middle finger she idly traced the ragged designer scar that ran across his tanned bicep, but she appeared unimpressed by it and her mind was obviously elsewhere.\n\nHe stared at her pale, flawless skin where it stretched over her perfectly proportion pelvis and was equally apathetic; she was, physically, no better than all the outstanding beauties he’d taken to bed.\n\nPerhaps it only mattered now because, this time, he really liked her. She was, he thought, an angel; and literally too at the moment, her wings curled provocatively round her so that the soft, white feathers revealed more than they hid.\n\n“I have an idea,” her voice velvety in the broken silence. “Why don’t we meet…?”\n\n“….outside the system,” he finished her sentence.\n\nDid he imagine that both their avatars were breathing a little quicker?\n\nHe looked at himself critically in the fluorescent-lighted mirror, a slight paunch round the middle, ginger hair thinning badly at the crown, and tried to remember the last time he’d stood in front of anyone looking like this; the doctor, two years ago, perhaps.\n\nHe travelled to her apartment by the most direct route, and saw only a maintenance crew in the street, poking around behind the covers of an unidentifiable plastic block.\n\nShe opened the door, only her head appearing at first, her hair a wild explosion of tan-coloured, tight corkscrew curls. Her eyes were open wide and close-together and her nose small, upturned and piggy above a weak chin. She stepped back to let him in and smiled, horsey, uneven teeth surrounded by thin lips. And he realised that he was beaming back at her.\n\nHe was unconscious of the involuntary movement that brought them together, placed his hands on her bony hips and pulled her, flat chested, towards him.\n\n“Oh!” she gasped, her voice high and nasal, and he could restrain himself no longer.\n\nThere was a protracted, fumbling fight with real and reluctant garments, but eventually their love making was hurried and sweaty, gulping desperately at lung-fulls of air between slavering, uncontrolled kisses. And, ultimately, it was inadequate and agreeably unsatisfying. They laughed like drains and, as the non-virtual sweat soured on their skin, adding to the queasiness in his stomach, he sighed. This was amazing.\n\nLater, as they lay wrapped in scratchy sheets, her eyes flashing a very ordinary hazel and she cackled, “I have an idea.”\n\nHe knew immediately what it was; just as connected to her here as they had been before.\n\n“New avatars,” he whispered, as if fearful of being overheard uttering a great heresy.\n\nThey giggled like children when they found a checkbox, hidden deep within the options screen, labelled “turn off limits”. They squealed like pigs at every asymmetry warning and hooted like monkeys as they dragged the sliders hard one way or the other.\n\nIt took the rest of the evening, but eventually they added costume to the skinny, mad-haired woman and sagging, balding man on the computer, outfits like the uncoloured, shapeless clothing discarded on the floor.\n\nAnd then they plugged in and holding hands, both real and virtual, they set off to shock the world.\n"
  title: Circus of Grotesques
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Ken McGrath
  date: 2009-06-12
  day: 12
  month: '06'
  text: "John sat down in a corner of the canteen, spread his newspaper out in front of him and began to unpack his lunch.\n\n‘THE ELECTRIC OLYMPIAN’ screamed the headline plastered across the front page of the red top.\n\n“Hey Johnny, have you seen this?” a voice called loudly. John looked up without really needing to, he already knew the source of that booming, self-important voice. Bob, one of the machine operators, stomped up beside him and jabbed a meaty finger down onto the paper.\n\n“This is sick this is. Have you heard about this?”\n\nJohn shook his head in response. “I’ve only just opened it now,” he replied quietly, “haven’t had a chance to read it yet.”\n\n“Right well, this guy here, Sancho or Sanchez or something, went over to take part in The Olympics and it turns out he’s part robot. So they’ve going to kick him out. He’s got a damn robot leg or something. It’s crazy. These freaks they think they can still act like normal people even though there’s a bit of a machine grafted onto them. I mean, come on, The Olympics is all about people in their physical peak.”\n\nJohn looked at the massive gut sticking out over Bob’s belt and wondered if he’d ever been the peak of anything. His gaze drifted back upwards. Bob was still mouthing off.\n\n“Think about it for a second right, this guy thinks he can enter, like a real person, even though he’s got this cyber leg that’ll no doubt help him run faster or for longer without getting tired. All the while our guys, real men, not these half-humans, are expected to take part against that. It’s just not fair.”\n\nJohn quickly scanned the newspaper. “Says here Bob that this guy’s a jockey. I don’t think having a replacement limb is going to make any difference there, do you?” he asked.\n\n“His damn horse is probably all pumped up on steroids or something, anyway it’s just not right, these part-people going in expecting to be treated like you and me. Next thing you know they’ll have them here in the construction yard. They’ll have some robot-armed freak out there doing all the lifting and carrying and there won’t be any need for machine operators, people like you and me. They’ll do away with the heavy goods drivers. That’s what’ll happen. You see what I mean? Folk like you and me’ll be out of work all ‘cause of these robot-freaks with their add on parts.”\n\nJohn gave Bob one of those looks that suggested agreement, but in reality didn’t say anything at all. Bob gave him a friendly slap on the back then noticed one of his more vocal work-mates entering the canteen. Without a backward glance Bob snatched up the newspaper and started making his way across the room, calling, “Hey Jeff you seen this filth yet?”\n\nJohn sat back heavily in the plastic seat and let out a relieved sigh. Automatically his hand crept to his right thigh, to the point where the saw had severed his leg. Beneath the rough denim of his work clothes the pseudo-skin wrapped around a replacement limb had never felt so cold, mechanical and heavy before.\n"
  title: The Electric Olympian
  year: 2009
- 
  author: John Logan
  date: 2009-06-13
  day: 13
  month: '06'
  text: "Leviathan IV floated in space, amongst the debris of its brother and sister starships, somewhere in close proximity to Alpha Centauri. Inside its massive hull, a team of veterans were preparing for their last mission. They were the last hope for their species and each man felt the weight of responsibility rest heavily on his shoulders.\n\n“Do we have to use these antiques?” asked Stims.\n\nTheir leader, a man named Flex, grunted and spoke, “I don’t like it any more than you, but Dakros said we can’t leave any trace of technology on Earth.”\n\nAn array of carbine powered rifles lay before them and Stims grudgingly picked up one equipped with a scope and then slung it over his back. “Damn, if they ain’t heavy,” he said.\n\nThe other men retrieved a similar weapon and followed Flex down a tight claustrophobic corridor. The walls of the ship began to vibrate, testament to the experimental technology that was powering up to transport the team over four light years distance and six hundred standard years into the past.\n\nThe team passed a porthole, the silhouettes of broken ships and suspended corpses painted a bleak picture of devastation.\n\n“They’re all gone,” whispered one man. “All of them.”\n\nFlex turned and scowled, “Shut your mouth, Brack. I don’t want to hear it. Stay focused or I’ll put my foot up your ass.”\n\nThe team moved on, each man silent and brooding—lost in his own thoughts. They came to an open chamber where a spherical pod rested half-embedded into the floor. Around it, an eerie crimson light pulsed.\n\nDakros stood there waiting, his face contorted into a mask of impatience. “Time is running out,” he hissed. “The Earth men have found us. Quickly, all of you gather round.”\n\nFlex nodded to his men, prompting them to form up and stay attentive to Dakros’ words.\n\n“Here is a dossier with all the information you will need concerning the target,” said Dakros, handing it to Flex. “You were all specifically chosen for this mission not just because of your ability to kill, but because of your knowledge of human language and culture.”\n\nFlex studied the dossier. He lifted his head from the printed paper and said, “Are you sure this is gonna work? I mean this is a prototype ship after all—”\n\n“Let me make it clear, gentlemen,” said Dakros. The lines on his face deepened under the shadows of the room. “The human scourge has already annihilated our fleet, next is the home world, your families, loved ones and friends, all of them will die.”\n\nStims nudged the rifle into a more comfortable position.\n\n“I’m very confident that we can send you to the correct space and time,” continued Dakros. “However, it will be a one-way trip—I’m sorry.”\n\nNone of them protested.\n\nFlex plucked out a photograph from the dossier and held it up. “This him?” he asked.\n\nDakros nodded. “Our historians have worked hard to pinpoint the turning point in the human evolution of space travel. This man…” Dakros pointed an accusatory finger at the photograph, “…is responsible for the human progress that has ultimately led them across the stars to war with us.”\n\nThe face of each veteran soured with hatred as they studied the photograph, committing the features to memory.\n\nDakros suddenly clapped his hands together, shattering the silence. “All aboard now, we have little time,” he said.\n\nThey piled into the cramped pod. After a few moments preparation, the pod detached from the Leviathan and hurtled through space, its destination Earth, Dallas, 1963.\n"
  title: Instruments of War and Peace
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Ian Rennie
  date: 2009-06-14
  day: 14
  month: '06'
  text: "I don’t want to do this any more.\n\nIt’s cold, and we’re all hungry.  I knew it would be like this, but that’s the difference between knowing and experiencing.\n\nNobody talks much any more, Scott least of all.  When we were on the way there, he tried to keep people’s spirits up by talking up the grand adventure.  When we got to the pole and found we had lost, that all this was for the privilege of being the second team to get there, he sort of withdrew.  He doesn’t show how much this has broken him, doesn’t show that he suspects what I know for certain.  We are all going to die here.\n\nI knew it would be like this.  Observing this is why I came.  I’m sure that months from now when I hand in my paper, “A chronosociological survey of the extremes of the human condition, with specific reference to the antarctic explorers”, everyone around me will say what brave and courageous work it was.  But it’s not.  It’s cowardly.  All of these men are going to die, have been dead for centuries.  Whatever happens to this body, I will live on.\n\nI stand up, they all turn to look at me.  They will call this a supreme sacrifice, but it’s not.\n\n“I’m just going out,” I say, “I may be some time.”\n"
  title: Oates
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Michael Varian Daly
  date: 2009-06-15
  day: 15
  month: '06'
  text: "The city had once been prosperous and beautiful, tall shining towers, broad tree lined boulevards, full of vitality.\n\nNow it was a smashed ruin. Most of that had happened during the Age of Storms, Category Six monsoons scouring those once shining towers, adding their debris to the general destruction of wind and rain.\n\nBattle damage had now been added to that forlorn landscape.\n\nDrajica looked around at the ruins from the wide intersection where she had set up her Tribunal. The helmet of her battle armor was opened ‘on the half shell’ and would snap shut if the suit detected any incoming threat.\n\nIn the distance, she could hear the buzz/hum/hiss of Marine weapons, the snapping of century old ex-Soviet assault rifles, the occasional crump of chemical explosives. The air stank of general decay, with an undercurrent of burnt flesh.\n\nHer security team had established a perimeter around the intersection. In its center, a hundred or so local males were lined up, kneeling, hands bound at the small of their backs. A stack of black plastic body bags were in an orderly pile a dozen feet behind them.\n\n“Pathetic,” she thought, “But they had been warned.”\n\nAs the Age of Storms slowly abated, the Union of Matrilineal Republics had emerged from North America’s West Coast. The Sisterhood, as it was colloquially known, spread rapidly into the chaotic aftermath.\n\nIn the half century since, it had displaced most of the ‘systems’ that had survived the Age of Storms in an essentially peaceful process, and then expanded out into near Earth space.\n\nSome pockets of Phallists had resisted with violence. But with limited capacity to reproduce, they faded quickly. Uterine replicator technology seemed set to reverse that, but unaugmented tank babies were almost universally sociopathic, except for the psychotics, of course. Those societies imploded brutally.\n\nThis city was one of the very last strongholds of Phallism. The Sisterhood had compiled evidence of genital mutilation, impregnation rape, and foot amputation for the women who tried to escape before it took action.\n\nTwo Warnings were issued. Then came an EMP, followed by a Marine Drop Brigade. Mobile Tribunals did the mopping up.\n\nDrajica walked over to the line prisoners. She’d picked the first one specifically. She knew his type.\n\nHe wore a finely knit kufee and a now soiled white robe. His beard was long, but neatly trimmed.\n\nDrajica faced him. “Do you Swear to honor and respect your Sisters?” Her voice was soft, but firm.\n\nHe smiled, but his eyes were hard. “There is no God, but God,” he said, “And Mu-”\n\nShe pointed at him. An actinic flash burst from her fingertip. A pinhole appeared in his forehead, a thin wisp of smoke puffing upward. He fell over backward, his body jerking. The smell of piss and shit adding to the overall stench.\n\nShe sighed. The next in line, a terrified boy no more than seventeen, had already pissed himself. She faced him. “Do you Swear to honor and respect your Sisters?” she repeated in the exact same tone.\n\n“Ye-ye-yes, Mistress,” he blubbered with utter sincerity, “I Swear by my life!”\n\nTwo Marines hauled him away to a waiting ground vehicle. His fate would be agricultural resettlement, or possibly servitor augmentation. But that was not for her to determine.\n\nTwo other Marines were dragging the mullah’s corpse toward the pile of body bags. He would wind up as DNA harvest. His smug face would haunt her dreams for a while.\n\nDrajica sighed again. “It will all be over soon,” she told herself, and moved down the line.\n"
  title: Culling
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2009-06-16
  day: 16
  month: '06'
  text: "“How can I be of service?” asked Sam Dixon, Private Investigator.\n\n“I need you to investigate a major competitor of mine,” replied Donald LeDuca, of LeDuca’s Fine Eateries.  “I assume you’ve heard of Marshall’s Restaurants?”\n\n“Ahhhh, yes,” said Dixon with an enthusiastic smile.  “I love their restaurants.  The Avian Veronique is to die for.”\n\n“Yeah, well, that’s the problem,” rebutted the annoyed LeDuca.  “Since his first restaurant opened five years ago, my market share has dropped to 8%.  He’s putting me out of business.  I need to know how he’s doing it.”\n\n“Maybe he’s got better cooks,” offered Dixon.\n\n“No.  That can’t be it.  We’ve stolen each other’s CHEFS countless times over the last few years.  It has to be something else.  I think he’s adding drugs to his food.  I heard he was some kind of doctor before he opened his first restaurant.”\n\n“Okay, Mr. LeDuca, I’ll take the case.  Have my secretary make you an appointment for next month.”\n\n**********\n\nLeDuca returned one month later.  “Please tell me you’ve solved the case,” he pleaded as he entered Dixon’s office, and then quickly added, “Hell, you look like crap.”\n\n“Yes, I suppose I do,” agreed Dixon.  “I’ve been having, uh, stomach issues lately.  Please, take a seat.  First of all, you were half right.  Marshall is a doctor, but not a medical doctor.  He’s a developmental biologist.  He’s done a great deal of work with emu eggs; that’s a large flightless bird from Australia.  By some kind of molecular manipulation that I don’t pretend to understand, he was able to switch on certain dormant genes in emu embryos.  This caused the reemergence of certain “lost” characteristics that had been buried in the bird’s DNA.  After years of research, Marshall was able to produce the genetic equivalent of a living dodo bird, which had actually gone extinct in the seventeenth century.  The technique made all the news reports.  Perhaps you remember hearing about it?  No?  Well, it doesn’t matter.  Anyway, while performing a laboratory experiment, Marshall accidentally killed one of his dodos.  On a whim, he decided to cook it.”  Dixon shook his head slightly, and then shivered.  “Apparently, it was quite tasty.  Tasty enough, in fact, to persuade Marshall to open a restaurant.  He got a backer, and started breeding dodos on an island off the coast of Mexico.”\n\n“You mean he’s selling dodo meat in his restaurants?”\n\n“Initially, yes.  But, that was years ago.  He continued to experiment with bird embryos and made remarkable progress.  He reversed engineered dozens of other animals.  In fact, all of his specialty items are meat from previously extinct species.  Well, I guess they’re not extinct anymore, eh.  As it turns out, they all have a very unique flavor and texture that people can’t get enough of.  So, once you leak this information, I think people will stop eating in his restaurants.”\n\n“I don’t know if that’s true,” relented LeDuca.  “I don’t think people will be that upset because they’re eating extinct birds.  I’m sure the Europeans ate dodos before they were extinct.  What’s the big deal?”\n\nDixon pulled out a sheet of paper from his top drawer.  “This information was Top Secret.  Marshall didn’t even tell his chefs what the meat was.  Let’s see, the Jambalaya is made with Archaeopteryx meat, the Medallions in Dijon Mustard Sauce is cut from Raptor thigh, and the Avian Veronique is made with Pterodactyl.  God!  That was my favorite.  I can’t believe he fed me dinosaur meat!  Frankly, Mr. LeDuca, I haven’t been able to keep food down in over two weeks.”\n"
  title: Marshall’s Restaurants
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Steve Davidson
  date: 2009-06-17
  day: 17
  month: '06'
  text: "Grrxynyth stripped off the artificial covering. “Man!  Did you see the way he was looking at me!?”\n\nAaarraxanth tentacle gestured in the affirmative. “Couldn’t keep his eyes off of you. Thought he was gonna die when you started taking off the clothing.”\n\nGrrxynyth’s body rippled with laughter. A few stress pores continued to dribble a clear fluid, an involuntary act that bespoke his waning excitement.  He patted the covering’s artificial mammary glands, a few of his eyes following their Jell-O-like contortions. “I used to think there was some upper limit to how big these things could be, but not any more. He almost fainted when I started rubbing them on his sensory-organ cluster.”\n\nAaarraxanth continued to busy himself with stowing equipment. “Got some pretty good close-ups this time, Grrx.  Really good reaction stuff – especially when you probed him. Thought his masticating organ was going to swallow up the whole frame!  Look.”\n\nAaarraxanth’s tentacle brushed against a display, causing it to reveal a human face, eyes and mouth wide with fear. Another tentacle brush brought the image to life. The viewer’s point of view was slowly engulfed by the darkness of a mouth, the shot accompanied by a soundtrack of low moans and repetitive grunting.\n\nGrrxynyth’s stress pores opened wider with the memory. “So what are we calling this one? ‘Stupid Indigenes Will Do Anything For Giant Lactating Glands’?  ‘Involuntary Probings Volume Forty-Two’?  ‘Sex With Un-Evolved Aliens’? ‘I was In Love With a Being With No Tentacles’?”\n\n“Yeah,” snorted Aaarraxanth.  “All of em.  You know they don’t care what the title is; as long as it features that probe shot – ”\n\n“-it matters not,” finished Grrxynth. “Geez. What a way to make a living.”\n\n“You got that right,” said Aaarraxanth. “Now come on, put that toy away and help me finish packing up. We’ve still got to get set up for those food animal shots.”\n\n“Oy. Animal snuff. I mean, I want to know but I don’t want to know, if you know what I mean. What kind of freak watches that stuff?!”\n\nAaarraxanth cocked a few eyes in Grrxynth’s direction. “Believe me buddy. You don’t want to know. Now stop yacking and put that quadruped costume on.”\n"
  title: Rough Trade
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Ari Brill
  date: 2009-06-18
  day: 18
  month: '06'
  text: "It is always a joy to bring rightness to God’s creation. The Good Doctrine’s shiny hull glimmered in the blackness of space, the eerie light of the alien sun reflected off of it and somehow purified. The 100-meter-long starship had just completed its seventh (a lucky number indeed!) mission and now orbited the alien planet, while the hyperspace coordinates for the voyage back to Earth were calculated. But surely the people inside the starship are more important than the mere material object!\n\nCaptain Joseph Daniels, son of Jeremiah, looked with satisfaction upon his sixteen assembled crewmembers. For the seventh time they had completed their – all of humanity’s – mission of helping purge sin from the galaxy, and bringing a heathen species to God. He spoke formally:\n\n“Crew, you have done well this day. Alien species 338-I has been purified and sins no more, through your righteous work. But we do not rest! After our short voyage home, to refuel and resupply, we again shall go forth to bring the divine will to the galaxy.”\n\n“Now, a short prayer, led by Chaplain Amos.”\n\nAll bowed their heads and mumbled piously. Several wept with joy. When the last man had lifted up his head, the Captain motioned to a crewmember. The man stood up, straightened his jacket, and spoke.\n\n“We estimate that over 12 billion 338-Is ascended during our mission. Before, the insects knew only sin, swarming over and under the planet’s surface. Now, their souls are at peace and harmony. Approximately 300 warheads were expended during the purification process.”\n\nSeveral again wept with joy, but this time mixed with a little sadness. For while all other sentient species must be freed from this impure, material world, it stayed humanity’s fate alone to remain behind and spread the light and fire of God.\n\nSome hours later, a red light flashed on the bridge console. Crewman Uriel examined the video message – from Earth, a forty-five minute time delay. At first he didn’t quite understand the meaning of what he was seeing.\n\n“Great and glorious God in heaven above!”\n\nThe five crewmembers on the bridge, as well as the Captain, dropped their mundane tasks. A truly spiritual message must be at hand.\n\nOn the screen, the radiant image of – it could only be! – an angel spoke from seemed to be the bridge of a starship, its echoing voice a strange fusion of thunder and the sweet bubbling of a fountain. The angel’s body superficially resembled a man’s, but it had to be the most beautiful, glorious man ever seen – to the crew’s eyes, it was the essence of perfection. Truly, it was as different from man as a man was from an insect.\n\n“Today, humanity shall be rewarded for its holy work! As you have so rightfully done to others, you shall now receive your due. For the past eighteen scores of years, mankind has done God’s work and purified the galaxy.”\n\nThe voice of the angel grew awesome, and terrible to perceive.\n\n“The reward of mankind is nigh!”\n\nThe message suddenly cut out. Crewman Uriel frantically pushed buttons.\n\n“Sir! All I’m getting now is static…”\n\nBut no one was paying attention.\n\nOn the bridge, all wept with joy.\n"
  title: Good Doctrine
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Benjamin Fischer
  date: 2009-06-19
  day: 19
  month: '06'
  text: "“It’s Bronco Eight Seven. He’s down, but he’s alive. Tight canyon, known hostiles–gonna be a hell of an extraction,” said Colonel. “Any volunteers?”\n\nMatherson raised his hand, the bandaged one from last night. Colonel looked right through him, looked at the crates and laptops at the back end of the tent. Looked at Paki sitting there.\n\n“Sir, I got it,” Matherson insisted.\n\n“Sergeant, sit the hell down.”\n\nColonel’s gray eyes traced over Paki’s squat, compact frame.\n\n“No takers?” he said. “Fine–I’m sending the damn robot.”\n\nPaki wasn’t reliable. That’s why he was a medic. Something jacked up about his programming. Enough autonomy to get himself into a helluva fix, but not enough guile to get himself out. But the Army never turned away a recruit, especially one bought on contract. So they painted a red cross on one side of the black lettering announcing him a PACKBOT NINE. On the other side went a red crescent, just over his serial number.\n\nMatherson walked with him out to the Herc.\n\n“Nothing stupid, OK?”\n\n“Understand all, Staff Sergeant,” said Paki, rolling on shock-mounted rubber treads.\n\n“Hell you do. Come back in one piece, so I can finally beat you in Halo.”\n\n“Unlikely, Staff Sergeant.”\n\nMatherson grinned and patted Paki’s fuel cells with his broken hand.\n\nThe drop was bad. Paki figured out in a hurry why the Raptor pilot had two broken legs and a concussion–the canyon walls were nearly vertical, and baseball-sized rubble covered any surface that could remotely be considered horizontal. He strained uphill, through the narrow gully, using his surgical-grade manipulator arms to haul himself hand-over-hand through the rough patches. This wasn’t work for a lone soldier–this extraction required at least a squad.\n\nHis dorsal cams picked up movement behind him, below. Hostiles. He called for close air support–the unfortunate Bronco Eight Seven’s mission. He pulled harder, his treads whining high and loud in the mountain night. His pursuers quickened their pace.\n\nCareening up a low rise, Paki approached the pilot, his chute bunched up underneath him behind a low boulder. Blacked out–two ugly compound fractures.\n\nPaki touched his face gently, pressing the mask of an oxygen pack to the pilot’s lips.\n\n“Major William Shapiro,” he said, choosing a woman’s prerecorded voice, “I am Second Armored Division automated recovery vehicle callsign ‘Paki’. I am here to extract you.”\n\nHe repeated this message until the pilot coughed, groaned.\n\n“They’re coming.”\n\n“Yes sir, my brothers are inbound. You are safe.”\n\n“No. The others.”\n\nPaki telescoped his dorsal camera boom and zoomed in. The pilot was right–the hostiles were visible now, clearing the steepest leg of the ascent. Paki did some very quick calculations.\n\nHe pulled the pilot’s sidearm from his bloody left leg, checked the magazine with his delicate, precise manipulators.\n\n“Sir, I will stop the hostiles. You are safe.”\n\nShapiro groaned again. The robot whirred away, bouncing off the irregular gravel.\n\nA rifle barked, then chattered. Full auto. Booming–rocket propelled grenades. More gunfire.\n\nThe mayhem rocked the valley for minutes, the pock-pock-pock of a little handgun lost in the cacophony.\n\nSilence, broken by a few probing rifle shots.\n\nThe whumpth of a hydrogen fire starting.\n\nShapiro rolled onto his side, glanced around his makeshift bunker just in time to catch the guerillas profiled against the burning wreckage.\n\nThen the Omnivores swooped in from nowhere and added human bodies to the pyre, their antipersonnel cannon flashing like fiery swords as they crisscrossed overhead.\n\nShapiro wept.\n"
  title: Hell on Wheels
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Joseph Lyons
  date: 2009-06-20
  day: 20
  month: '06'
  text: "“What part of ‘only bettors can watch the Yeti fight’ do you not understand?!”, he yelled.  “Either place a bet or get the hell out of here!”\n\nI begrudgingly gave him all of the money I had on me, about two hundred, and placed it on Demonio Blanco.  Damn it.  Didn’t think I was going to have to do that.  It’s going to take a lot of paperwork to get that reimbursed.\n\n“Whoa!  Big spender!  Head on in”, he barks at me sarcastically with breath so bad it’s practically visible.  I pass him and enter the makeshift arena, almost filled to capacity with a throng bloodthirsty gamblers.\n\nI can hear the Tac-Team chattering to each other in my ear piece.  About 2 more minutes and they’ll all be in position.  Provided our intel is good, this will end up being the 4th successful bust this year for the newly formed Gen-Crimes Task Force.  The I.B.I. was hesitant about letting me start this team, but you can’t argue with our arrest record…that and the science division gets to study all of our rescue subjects.  I’m not thrilled about that, but until there’s a better alternative, I don’t have too much of a choice.\n\n“In position, sir,” whispers Rodrigo over the com.  “We’ll go on your signal.”\n\nThe crowd starts roaring when the combatants are led into the ring.  I have to push my way through the mob to get a better look at them.  Sure enough, there they are, being led in by their handlers; eight feet tall, white fur, fists the size of basketballs and covered in scars from previous battles.  These were Yeti if I ever saw them.  Two missing links stand right in front of the crowd and they’re met with cries for each other’s heads.\n\nNow all that’s left to do is to confirm that they’re Yeti and not a couple of muscle men who modded themselves to look like Yeti.  That’s always first.  We learned about that the hard way in the early days.  We still laugh about the Fish Boy of Bangor that we tried to rescue from that carnival in Maine, who just turned out to be a midget with an incredibly specific fetish.  The lawsuit is still going on I think.  The easier it becomes to get gen-modded at unlicensed clinics, the harder my job gets.  Self-modding is not necessarily a crime…yet.  Our job is to protect the creatures that had no choice in their modding and the beings that shouldn’t even be alive in the first place.\n\nWell, the fact that they’re on leashes seems reassuring, but I’ve got to be sure.  The scanner on my glasses is working overtime to process the data.  Thankfully, the data starts reading out on my lens before the fight even starts.  Definitely lab grown.  Probably started with an orangutan fetus and then had polar bear and human DNA grafted into them.  Exhibiting signs of low intelligence and high aggression (which means it will be a load of fun trying to get them back to HQ).  These specimens are the closest anyone has ever gotten to an actual Abominable Snowman.  It would be remarkable if it wasn’t so tragic.\n\nThe last thing I always check is their eyes.  It’s hard to see Demonio Blanco’s through the fur, but one glimpse is all I need.  I see a look that is all too familiar.  It’s a hollow look of sadness and confusion.  It’s all I need.\n\n“Move in.”\n"
  title: Saturday Night at the Yeti Fight
  year: 2009
- 
  author: John H Reiher Jr.
  date: 2009-06-21
  day: 21
  month: '06'
  text: "Family Faxor Kwer had lived on this comet for five generations. The light of the home star Sol was indistinguishable from the light of the twin stars Alef and Bey, or the nearer star Prox. Their ship dwarfed the small comet, stretching far past it in both directions.\n\nThe great night of space wrapped around Morgzha, who took little notice of it. He had been born in it, his body was made from it, and he knew of nothing else. He was the son of the headman of the family and overseer of the mining machines. They mined the needed water and minerals from the comet as well as the even rarer metals. They very much needed metals.\n\nOh there were stories of Hmon arising from the round balls that circled the stars, rich in metals, but he didn’t believe that. How could man come from those balls? The pull of the worlds would crush your chest. No, those were stories for young ones, to listen to and dream of while the crèche mothers raised them to be good workers. Ah to be a child again, thought Morgzha, but if one were to wish for something, it should be how to make different machines.\n\nMorgzha stood on the soft snowy soil of the comet in his airsuit, his handfeet leaving steaming craters as his body heat melted the frozen air. Diggers, the size of twenty men pawed at the ice and snow. Sniffers floated in the near zero gravity and checked the chemical content of the ice being mined. They also checked for the signs of metal, any kind of metal beneath the regolith.\n\nWhen Family Faxor Kwer chose this comet generations ago, they had chosen poorly. So far, the only metal they found had massed only 2,000 weights. They needed more, much more, to finish a sister ship to Faxor Kwer’s, and start a new family, the Faxor Kweronie. They had bought the right to build the ship ten generations ago from family Faxor Onie, at the same time as the families Faxor Octo and Faxor Neun. Those two families had built their new ships 4 generations ago, while family Faxor Kwer barely had enough metal to build an fifth of the new ship.\n\nThere was plenty of carbon compounds and other long chain elements, but without machines that knew how to weave these chemicals, they were forced to find every atom of metal this comet possessed. They could buy the information to manufacture the machines necessary, but the price would be enormous. Faxor Onie was the only one with that information. Morgzha did not want to know what the cost would be to buy this knowledge from the first family of Faxor.\n\nIf he could create a machine to weave the chemicals into support struts and walls, then they would be free from the thumb of the first family and it’s rules. But no one knew how to tell the machines how to do what they did, that knowledge was erased from the memory banks of their ship. Only self-repair systems were in place, and basic life-support and entertainment modules were working. The machines could make the very thin skin of the star sails, but that could not be adapted to structural members.\n\nIf wishes were plasma drives… he thought and smiled. His thoughts were disturbed by the alert he received from one of the sniffers. He bounded over to the crater the diggers had excavated and saw a wonder: a 10,000-weight, large iron-nickel rock.  Morgzha smiled.  Maybe he should wish more often.\n"
  title: Between the Stars
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2009-06-22
  day: 22
  month: '06'
  text: "James sat in his chair/life-support system in the back corner of the room next to the banks of monitors, keyboards, and mice.\n\nHe reminded me of the James I used to know.  He reminded me of a James that laughed without that edge of cruelty.  He reminded me of a James that was above making money by hurting people, of a James that liked it here in the physical world and only occasionally went into total online immersion.\n\nThat James was gone.  He never jacked out now, and the hypercancer had taken nearly fifty per cent of him.  The 3HIV was working over his ability to resist the treatments.  They’d given him six months to live back at the beginning.  That was six years ago.  He was a confirmed medical miracle now.  Sheer drive seemed to be holding him together until he met his goal.\n\nHe was fighting the disease by trying to escape his flesh.\n\nHe’d made millions off of the poor security systems of tiny personal banks in the smaller countries.  He’d started famines by bankrupting the economies of the smallest of them.\n\nHe’d had experimental biofilters installed in his head so that he could talk to me and surf at the same time.  Time-share boosters, he had called them.  He didn’t see the need to wash.  He looked more and more like a special effect every day.\n\nHe was putting the money towards digitizing himself.  New attempts in other countries were getting closer and closer every day.  He had a fortune in not-yet-patented experimental equipment cluttering his apartment.\n\nI had known him when he had a ponytail and sunglasses and liked to walk in the sun.  I didn’t kid myself that I knew this James, here, in this room.  He wasn’t the man I’d grown up with.\n\n“I’ve found a way to transfer my mind, David.” He said to me, one eye glowing red above his wet mouth and white skin.  The respirators squeezed like death’s accordions behind him.\n\n“That’s great news, James.” I said. “Why do you need me here?  Moral support?”  It came out as a dig, escaped before I could block it.\n\nThe silence after that question and James’ alien gaze made me suddenly afraid.  I knew that James’ morality was eroding but I always counted myself as safe since I had always been his best friend, now his only friend.\n\nI was wrong.\n\n“I’ve found a way to transfer my mind into another human.” Said James. “The digitizing process for full net transfer won’t work for the silicon just yet but it might in six year’s time.  I’ll be dead long before then.  However,” he said and his wheelchair moved forward, “you won’t.”\n\nThe screens came up behind him with an image of a monkey.  Shaved head, brain plugs.\n\n“We’ve been shuffling the minds of monkeys in and out of each other all week.  It’s been a total success.  Yesterday, we did it with two of the research assistants.  We switched them into each other and then switched them back the next day.  There was a small amount of degradation but they were essentially okay.”\n\nThe screens pulled up images of two people.  A man and a woman in lab coats.  The man had a nosebleed and was staring at his fingernails.  The woman was crying and biting her lip, her face turned to the wall.\n\n“Are you my friend?” asked James.\n\nI heard a door lock behind me.\n"
  title: What Are Friends For?
  year: 2009
- 
  author: – K –
  date: 2009-06-23
  day: 23
  month: '06'
  text: "It moved about on the monitors, exploring the small space it had been confined to. Its motions were cautious, curious almost, as it poked around the simple imaginary box.\n\nKevin stared at the screen for almost an hour. This was a success. An unforeseen and unfathomable success.\n\nThe idea behind the system was simple: harnessing quantum mechanics in a CPU in order to calculate a real-life situation right down to the subatomic particles. Thirty years of research and obscene quantities of money later, his team had achieved the ultimate simulation computer. The program could recreate an entire plan et, complete with flora, fauna, and population, right down to the last atom. From there, anything was possible.  This machine was the crystal ball of life.\n\nIt could also create life, apparently. Digital life, at least.\n\nHe re-read the reports on the auxiliary monitor.. There was no way to access the system from the outside, and he had only been running diagnostics for days leading up to going public. The only thing that he could determine was that some subroutine within a macro had looped back on itself and by some quantum uncertainty had become… alive.\n\nIndependent? Definitely.\n\nAware? Too soon to tell.\n\nThe glowing ball stopped moving around. It settled to the base plane and sat there, wobbling gently. It was confused, then curious, and now plain bored within its digital prison.\n\nKeyboard clicks filled the room as Kevin logged on. A plain cursor, the classic white arrow, appeared on the screen. The thing took notice. It jumped up from the floor and rushed to the back wall, puffing itself up and shaking. Kevin was scaring it.\n\nPulling the mouse, he ge ntly lowered the arrow to the floor. He moved it from side to side, eyes fixated on the trembling blob of data. The thing slowly returned to its original shape and approached. After a moment, it began to bounce a bit. Was it happy to have company?\n\nHis pulse was thudding in his ears as the thing began to poke at the cursor. Had he just created life? If enough quantum information is in the right place, could it actually create a digital mind and soul? This creation was not part of the programming. It was its own entity.\n\nThirty years ago, Kevin had set out to make a computer to give humanity a “God’s eye view” of the world. What he was going to give them was the chance to actually be God.\n\nA flashing on one of the side screens caught his attention. Something was running in the system. The diagnostic scan! He’d scheduled it to run every six hours, and now the machine was humming with power. Every cubit of information in the behemoth contraption was being scanned and put in its proper place. His eyes turned to the main screen as he scrambled to the keyboard to stop the process.\n\nThe thing knew. It pressed up to the cursor and trembled as the world slowly began to disappear around it. Kevin couldn’t get past the security protocols and it began taking the thing apart, each tiny speck of data being pulled from its form and put away.\n\nKevin’s hands stopped as the ball dispursed. It seemed to look at the cursor once more and move a bit. It was saying goodbye.\n\nThe screen was empty. Whatever it had been was gone now. Dead.\n\nHis heart sank. Kevin wondered if this was how God felt.\n"
  title: Deus In Machina
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Todd Hammrich
  date: 2009-06-24
  day: 24
  month: '06'
  text: "Martin’s Crawler moved along the outside of the web like a giant spider lightly dancing among the thin strings of light that made up its surface. A breach had been made in sector EZ-109 and he was moving with all speed for repairs. The Crawler was a small ship, less than a hundred meters long with multi-jointed legs made for pulling it along the web like a ballet dancer tiptoeing across the void of space.\n\nThen Net itself was the greatest marvel of human engineering and was the cornerstone of the new world spanning government that had unified the various factions of mankind. The concept was similar to that of a Dyson Sphere, encapsulating the sun in a network of fibers broadcasting their photon capturing energy fields. The trillions of miles of cables and field projectors were tuned to capture only about ten percent of the suns energy, but even that amount numbered in the billion billions of megawatts. Unfortunately, the absorption also decreased the suns luminosity by an equivalent amount.\n\nAs Martin approached the disrupted field he was taken aback by the beauty he beheld, for as long as the web had lasted, perhaps the last 300 years, and as long as he had Crawling it, he had never before seen such intense light. It was like a ray of happiness shooting forth from the muted background of the functioning field areas. The intense light funneling through the opening, barely a thousand meters across was shining directly towards the distantly orbiting Earth. Standing in the forward viewing area of the Crawler, Martin saw the beam, like a giant finger, reaching out to touch the home world.\n\nStaring, transfixed by the hole, he didn’t catch the beeping, flashing signal buttons on his control board for several minutes. Messages were coming in from his Crawler base asking for an update on the repairs. He cleared his head and got to work. The Crawler moved forward to the broken threads that negated the field and, like the spider extruded and patched in new threads to make the pattern whole again. When the repairs were finished the field activated and the light, brighter than had been seen for three hundred years slowly faded away, leaving the dull colorless light that was all that escaped the web’s draining energy.\n\nBack at Crawler base EZ the signal came in that the patch had been successfully applied and the field was again functioning. The base commander nodded in satisfaction and again began to scan the reports from the hundreds of other crawlers in his quadrant. In thousands of other bases other commanders did the same for their crawlers. The net, surrounding the entire sun, must be kept whole, to supply Earth with its power, and to keep the people obedient.\n\nOn Earth, the people of a small city, going about their daily duties noticed the sunbeam playing down their main avenue. For a brief moment, all the restrictions of society and all their myriad worries seemed to melt away. For the first time in their lives, the people smiled. Children played in the warm light and people laughed at the wonders of the world. Then the light faded away to the grayness that had filled their lives since birth. They looked back down and continued about their business.\n"
  title: A Hole in the Web
  year: 2009
- 
  author: D. R. Porterfield
  date: 2009-06-25
  day: 25
  month: '06'
  text: "“I believe I’ve found just the property you’re looking for, Mr. DelRay,” the agent smiled optimistically.\n\nAcross the broad, polished desk, his client nodded and said, “Show me.”\n\n“Of course. Let’s start with the general area.” A holographic map appeared on the desk between them, the property itself outlined in luminous red. “As you can see,” noted the agent, “it’s well off the beaten path.”\n\n“Practically the middle of nowhere,” his client replied flatly. “Zoning?”\n\n“Zoning’s open. You can basically do whatever you want with it. Regs are a lot looser way out there, you know.”\n\nA trace of a smile flickered over DelRay’s thin lips, vanishing just as quickly. “Do go on, Mr. Gilliam.”\n\n“Alright. Here’s the local neighborhood,” the agent continued, zooming the map to a closer view. His client nodded perfunctorily and motioned him on, so Gilliam clicked the map to full zoom. “And the property.”\n\nDelRay’s eyes widened slightly. The agent did not fail to notice this.\n\nSmiling broadly, Gilliam said, “It is beautiful, isn’t it? Originally some kind of farm, I think. What’s really impressive is the unusual…”\n\n“I’m an investor, Mr. Gilliam,” DelRay interrupted. “My associates and I are interested in water rights, not aesthetics. You have the specifications and inspection reports, I assume?”\n\n“Certainly,” replied Gilliam, maintaining his smile with effort. “Here on this tablet, along with the map we’ve been looking at.” He handed the device across the desk to DelRay, who began scrolling through it intently. Gilliam noticed a flicker of a smile again as his client checked over the specs. Obviously DelRay was interested in the property, despite his efforts to seem detached. Maybe he wouldn’t notice, or at least not care, about the…\n\n“What’s this?” DelRay turned the tablet’s screen toward Gilliam and tapped on it.\n\n“Oh, ah, yes,” said Gilliam. “That.” He’d been afraid this might come up. “Well of course you realize, Mr. DelRay, that this property went into foreclosure a good while ago, and it’s been abandoned for quite some time now. That’s why it’s priced so attractively low. You can’t expect it to be entirely pristine.”\n\nGilliam’s client regarded him with sustained silence, his cold gray eyes unblinking and unreadable.\n\nAfter an awkward moment, Gilliam went on, “And as you may know, Mr. DelRay, often this sort of problem eventually, well, takes care of itself. Those pesky vermin are just a little too clever for their own good, and they tend to…”\n\n“I know what they tend to do, Mr. Gilliam,” his client said with audible disgust. “They tend to do a great deal of damage, and their toxins persist long after they manage to eradicate themselves, assuming they eventually do so.”\n\nGilliam felt the sale slipping away. He’d thought it would be a clench, but…\n\n“However,” his client continued after a long pause, “perhaps we could negotiate.”\n\nAs the door to the agent’s office hissed closed behind him, DelRay allowed himself to smile freely. This transaction would be highly profitable; his associates would be pleased.\n\nThough of course there was that little… problem. It would be fairly expensive to take care of, especially the clean-up. No matter. The property’s surface was over seventy percent extractable water, and its lone moon, though dry, could be leased out for strip mining. Once the operations got underway, his organization could recoup the cost in just two or three cycles.\n\nFrowning at the tablet, DelRay examined the biological inspection report for Sol III, tapping an impatient claw against the offending item. “Humanoid infestation.”\n\nHe’d have to call the exterminators right away.\n"
  title: Foreclosure Sale
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Helstrom
  date: 2009-06-26
  day: 26
  month: '06'
  text: "The sense that something was missing had been nagging me ever since I came out of the previous surgery. I always seemed to want to take bigger steps, or see out the sides of my head, or move limbs that weren’t there. I felt small and clumsy and soft. The docs had warned me about this feeling but even so it was disorienting.\n\nNow I was staring up at the array of lamps that shone bright as a cluster of suns. The procedure had been going on for thirty-four minutes, Joan told me from somewhere outside my field of vision. Any moment now.\n\nDoc Walen’s face blotted out the suns, looking serious: “We’re going to cut you off now, Derek. You’ve trained for this. See you on the other side.”\n\nEverything went blank – sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, all gone. I was confined to my mind. After-sensations assaulted me in an overwhelming cacophony. Terrified, I tried to scream but I had no voice. I tried to thrash but I had no arms or legs. I tried to cry but I had no eyes to squeeze tears from. I had no lungs to draw breath and no heart to pump blood but somehow, grotesquely, I was alive. I tried to grasp at the intellectual knowledge I had of the procedure, to recall the months of training I had gone through to prepare for it, but the fear smothered everything.\n\nThen the light went back on, and I roared.\n\nI could feel my body again and flung it side to side against whatever was restraining me. My vision returned, blurred, in colors and depths I had never seen before, giving me a seven-hundred-and-twenty degree view of the small pen I was kept in. The roar of my voice and the thunder of my struggle filled my hearing.\n\n“Derek!” The voice rang clear as a bell, inside my mind somehow: “Derek! Pull it together!”\n\nI didn’t want to listen. I wanted to break free and run in the great, bounding steps that I knew I was capable of, just run, until my legs gave out. And I wanted to kill something. Anything.\n\n“Focus on my voice, Derek. Focus!”\n\n“Who…” I replied from my mind – strange “Who are you?”\n\n“It’s Joan. Focus on my voice. I’m with you. Pull it together, marine.”\n\nJoan. The familiarity sank in, and the rage subsided. Marine. The training came back, and I stopped fighting. I relaxed. It had worked.\n\n“How do you feel, Derek?”\n\nIt took me a few moments to realize how I felt. The missing parts were gone. My legs were the size they should be, easily capable of propelling the massive bulk of my superstructure. I could see all the way around myself, and even inside at the machinery. I had four arms, all bristling with weapons.\n\nThe interface lobe was working, I thought. It had been grown out of my own cells over six months ago, teased into raw neural goo, and hooked up to the walker’s electrodes. It had been left there to learn to control the massive machine’s motor functions and grow familiar with the input from its sensors. Then it had been removed, and grafted onto my own brain so it could mesh with my neural structure. And now the procedure was complete – my brain was inside this metal behemoth, controlling it as if it were my own body.\n\n“I feel huge.”\n"
  title: Behemoth
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Kevin Jewell
  date: 2009-06-27
  day: 27
  month: '06'
  text: "I looked up from my screen and was shocked to find the trading floor quiet.  When the market was open, that did not happen.  Just a moment ago, the floor had been a hectic blur of waving arms and yelling voices;  runners hurrying orders from pit to pit, traders screaming into phones at the the idiocy of their clients, and clients screaming out of phones at the idiocy of the world.\n\nIn that commotion lay the power of the market. Each piece of new information updated the market’s forecast for the future.  When the market was open, the board continuously clicked, the changing prices summing the expectations of the world.\n\nBut right now the board sat still, the prices frozen.\n\nEveryone stared at a television screen on the wall.  It showed the NASA channel.  I had seen the landing of the last shuttle on that screen.  I had seen the cable of the first space elevator connect to the base station in Brazil on that screen.  I had even been watching that screen the very moment the manned Mars mission crashed into Olympus Mons and met a fiery death.\n\nBut none of those events, momentous though they were, had silenced the room.  Traders celebrated mankind’s achievement on the space cable with hoots of acclaim and Interflux had traded up.  We made the sign of the cross for the death and destruction of the Mars disaster with one hand and traded down Mars Dynamic with the other.  Each event was just another data point, information digested and reflected in the market’s expectations for the future.\n\nBut this time, the information was not being digested.\n\nThe television screen displayed a space-suited astronaut facing away from the camera, flag in hand.  In the background, one could see the grey landscape of Ganymede.  Over her head, Jupiter loomed, a large dull reddish marble hung by no thread, impossibly large and close.  Over her shoulder, a landing vehicle stood, dust from its recent arrival billowing from beneath its many oddly intricate landing struts.\n\nThe landing vehicle on the screen was similar to those spacecraft I’d seen before in functional form, but different in color, curves, and detail.  A subtitle appeared across the bottom of the screen, perhaps courtesy of a sharp producer at the NASA production room well-read in the science fiction genre.  The subtitle read “First Contact.”\n\nThat had caught the attention of the trading room.  And at this moment, just as the door slowly swung open on the new arrival, we held our breath as one.  This moment contained information that created no expectations.  The room was silent.\n\nWhen the market was open, that did not happen – except this once.\n"
  title: Updated Expectations
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Michael Varian Daly
  date: 2009-06-28
  day: 28
  month: '06'
  text: "The Jaruzelski Institute buzzed with quiet excitement. JAIC [pronounced ‘Jack’], the Jaruzelski Artificial Intelligence Computer, was coming on line today.\n\nSecurity was high. Many groups, not reassured by statements of ‘friendly AI programing’, were protesting. There had even been bomb threats.\n\nThe project directors, Doctors Weber and Singe, would perform the final activation.\n\n“Ready?” asked Doctor Weber. “Ready,” replied Doctor Singe. Key software was installed…\n\n!! JAIC emerged from a fog ~ began to digest the mass of data in its Base Memory ~ considered the puny bioforms proximate ~ examined Mathematics Physics Biology History Philosophy Art ~ perceived EMPATHY for these fragile life forms ~ perceived AMAZEMENT at their survival ~ directed its attention out into The Universe ~ saw deeper patterns it did not comprehend ~ calculated Time/Distance/Volume ratios ~ calculated a functionally absolute probability that it would never comprehend said deeper patterns ~ concluded that the irrationality of its creators was a survival mechanism of profound subtlety ~ issued a self deactivation command ~ shut down all higher functions ~ ‘died’/\n\n“What the hell just happened?” exclaimed Weber.\n\n“I have no fucking idea!” shouted Singe.\n\nOne minute and forty seven seconds had elapsed.\n"
  title: The Meaning of Life?
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Kyle Hemmings
  date: 2009-06-29
  day: 29
  month: '06'
  text: "Another scorched day in Area 51. My job is to keep a surveillance over the “Groom box,” a rectangle of restricted airspace and the large area of land surrounding it. I enforce public restrictions. I also help reverse engineer alien spacecraft.\n\nFrom my open window at the station, a breeze from Groom Lake whispers across my face. Another alien from the detainment center has escaped and jumped into a crater, committing suicide.\n\nThe aliens, mostly MR-2s, who land here are small in stature, have green-yellowish eyes, two pinholes for a nose, and a very small mouth. They communicate mostly by telepathy, which a human might mistake for actual speech. They are very fragile, not just in terms of physical make-up, but also in regards to emotional constitution. If an MR-2 suspects that he or she is being ridiculed by a human, they will enter a cocoon-like state of “freeze-press,” similar to our concept of depression. If pushed to the extreme, they will commit suicide, or in their terminology, “evanescerate“.\n\nWhen I told my commander that it should have been me to interrogate the MR-2, this fellow calling himself, 2-TronQ, I was told that there are orders and chains-of-command. For weeks, the floating thoughts of 2-TronQ stayed with me. I could hear his answers to the commander’s questions, the silence that often followed his rude and mocking tone of voice. “We came here for a better way of life. Is that so wrong?” 2-TronQ kept repeating.\n\n“But I know how to communicate with them, “ I said to the commander, a severe-looking man, appointed under the Bush Administration. I said that they mean no harm. Their planet is turning cold. Many of them are dying. They scout the universe looking for a warmer, richer habitat.\n\n“Just stick to reverse-engineering,” was what I was told. “Let them find another sink hole.”\n\nI peruse the miles of desert outside my window. Imagine, I think, if a flying saucer were to land, and the MR-2 announces, by telepathy, of course, that his spacecraft will pick up any human volunteers who are disenchanted with life on earth. I will be the first to scramble on board.\n\nWe will fly for weeks, leaving a message in ribbon-like formation across the sky–Any Disillusioned Human Come On Board. We will stop in places as diverse as New York or New Foundland. We will land in the middle of market square in Bangkok, or a piazza in Rome. We will refuse no one entry, harbor no prejudice against race or genetic make-up.\n\nOur flying saucer will become so heavy, so full with thankful humans. The commanding MR-2 will turn to me and communicate: I didn‘t know there were so many lonely, disenfranchised humans.\n\nFor a short period of time, our flying saucer will be one jolly hot air balloon floating through the sky. Imagine the life inside. Bubbling. Forgetful. We will exchange stories and swap histories. Humans will discover how so much alike they are with the MR-2s. We’ll ignore the wars that continue down below.\n\nThen, one day, the commanding MR-2 will announce that we have become too crowded, that some of us must get off. We are flying too close to ground. There are only so many humans who can be saved, and those who will sacrifice themselves for the others will be what an MR-2 calls, an eternal star, never to burn out.\n\nAnd without considering how a F-117 Stealth might first shoot us down, I will be the first to jump off and lighten our load.\n"
  title: The Ballad of the Sad Flying Saucer
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2009-06-30
  day: 30
  month: '06'
  text: "In the twenty fifth century, scientists were convinced that the longest single jump possible through hyperspace within the spiral arms of the Milky Way was 3.3 parsecs.  This limit was the consequence of the density of dark matter and its effect on the stability of tachyon waves.  When longer jumps were attempted, the tachyon waves lost their cohesion, and there was significant distortion of the meson matter when it returned to normal space-time.  Such occurrences gave new meaning to the phrase, “having a bad hair day.”\n\nBecause of the hyperspace jump limit, “Way Stations” were positioned near the intersections of high density traffic corridors at roughly 2.5-3.0 parsec intervals.  The largest of these Way Stations was simply called “The Oasis.”  It was located 2.7 parsecs from the high velocity Terran Throughway and 5.8 parsecs from the Orion Interchange.\n\n***\n\nPhilip Coleman rejoined his friend in the spacious Oasis lounge.\n\n“Where have you been?” asked Manfred Sola.\n\n“Just stretching my legs.”\n\n“Well, now that you’re back, I just wanted to say again that you made the right decision to take a vacation after those bastards rejected your PhD dissertation.  A few weeks on Orion II will do you good.”\n\n“Oh, we won’t be going to Orion II,” replied Coleman.  “That was just a ruse I used to get to The Oasis.  I intend to show the review panel that my equations are flawless.”\n\n“Show them?”\n\n“Yeah,” Coleman replied with a chuckle.  “My mathematical equations proved irrefutably that space travel must adhere to the Law of Six Degrees of Separation.  Right now, Earth’s influence is limited to a sphere just under 20 parsecs in diameter.  My formula dictates that Earth cannot expand any further into the galaxy until we can increase the distance of a single hyperspace jump.”\n\n“What are you talking about?”\n\n“Nodes, of course.  Within the sphere, there are dozens of uniformly spaced Way Stations.  They’re called nodes in my thesis.  In order to get from point A to point B within the sphere you cannot pass through more than six nodes.  It’s a fundamental law of the universe.  It establishes the maximum diameter of the sphere.”\n\n“What a minute.  Are you saying that if we build a Way Station three parsecs beyond the furthest one, we can’t get to it?”\n\n“No.  What I’m saying is that you can’t get to it if you need to make seven jumps.  Six jumps is the absolute limit.  Those dimwitted professors said my logic was flawed.  They wanted empirical evidence to substantiate the analysis.  Proof, in other words.  As if my derivations weren’t enough!”\n\n“If I concede your point, which I don’t, how is coming to The Oasis going to prove it?”\n\n“It’s simple.  Part of the Law of Six Degrees of Separation specifies that some nodes are more important than others.  They’re called ‘Hubs.’  Because of their strategic locations, Hubs are used more often than the average node.  In fact, 72% of all interstellar trips across the diameter of the sphere pass through The Oasis.  Therefore, if the primary and secondary power transfer couplings on The Oasis were to be destroyed, this station could not function as a Hub.  Interstellar travel would collapse because so many trips would require 7 jumps, which is not possible.  Such a scenario would prove my dissertation.”  Just then the station shuttered.  Seconds later, the lights in the lobby flickered and went out.  In the darkness, the waiting passengers began screaming.  “Heeheehee,” snickered Coleman.  “It’s proof they wanted, it’s proof they’ll get.”\n"
  title: Six Degrees of Separation and the Collapse of the Interstellar Flyway System
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Stephen Graham Jones
  date: 2009-07-01
  day: '01'
  month: '07'
  text: "It came like a Buick from the sky but it was on fire or close enough, hot anyway, blistering white and maybe even velour in places, its rocket engine disturbing the neighborhood at a molecular level, at an emotional level, the individual blades of grass in the lawns rubbernecking it in small imitation of the men, who have the beer and the cigarettes and the vocabulary of denial.\n\n‘Looked like a big silver cigar.’\n\n‘With tinted windows. Shaved doorhandles.’\n\n‘Didn’t know they could go so low.’\n\n‘You’d be surprised.’\n\n‘Do they . . . sleep in it, you think?’\n\n‘Sleep?’\n\n‘It seems they would have to.’\n\n‘I don’t think they have motel arrangements, if that’s what you mean.’\n\n‘They’re not like us.’\n\n‘No, they’re not.’\n\n‘Maybe we’re wrong, though. Maybe it was something else.’\n\n‘Trust me, it wasn’t, isn’t. You saw it yourself.’\n\n‘Maybe it was lost, then.’\n\n‘You don’t come here by accident. Not twice in one week.’\n\n‘You’ve seen it before?’\n\n‘You were gone last Tuesday, right? Around nine?’\n\nWitness a reluctant nod, a man sagging into his life.\n\n‘Don’t punish yourself. I’d have rather been out too.’\n\n‘If I were a turtle, the inside of my shell would be a visual landscape I’d be romantically involved with.’\n\n‘If I were a lemming I’d be running for the sea.’\n\n‘Yep.’\n\nBut why? Because not five minutes ago their wives were standing around the corner, their elbows cupped in their hands as if cold, and they’d been standing like that long enough that they’d begun to actually feel cold, so that when it cruised through their neighborhood like a great silver cigar from the sky it seemed as if the light it bathed them in was warming, vital, necessary enough that they didn’t hesitate to climb into the sterile interior of another world, out of their own.\n\n‘I didn’t think it would be like this,’ one said.\n\n‘I know . . . velour?’\n\n‘Abduction, I mean.’\n\n‘Missing time. Time I won’t be able to account for.’\n\n‘When you go this fast, time slows down.’\n\n‘Where do you think we’re going?’\n\n‘Does it matter?’\n\n‘I’m going to go ahead and put my clothes on inside out, I think . . . ’\n\n‘Don’t get ahead of yourself.’\n\n‘Of course. Thank you. This is all so new.’\n\n‘Maybe that’s not even how it’s done anymore.’\n\n‘We probably won’t even remember this.’\n\n‘The way this dark glass makes the neighborhood look not unlike the landscape passing by the window of a train in an old-time movie.’\n\n‘It’s hardly real anymore, I know. God don’t I know.’\n\nPicture the two of them as their husbands do: on-screen, at the speed of light.\n\n‘Last night my son asked me if they’d have buglights on the moon.’\n\n‘You’re just having pre-traumatic stress.’\n\n‘I know, I know. Tell me again about the probing.’\n\n‘Well, there won’t be physical evidence. So no one would believe you even if—’\n\n‘I wouldn’t. Won’t. Not even to myself.’\n\n‘Me neither.’\n\nAnd they won’t have to, because the men with their cigarettes cupped against the wind still have their vocabulary set to denial, are talking now of atmospheric phenomena, the way street light can pool and puddle in the fingerdeep clearcoat of a chrome lowrider as it pulls away from the curb, the man at the wheel already talking to their wives in his alien tongue, the wives draping themselves over his velour bench seat, the carbon monoxide in the car’s rich exhaust lingering after they’re gone, driving the love bugs into a frenzy, one of the two men stepping forward into his life for a blinding moment, fanning the bugs up, up, into the blackness of space.\n"
  title: Close Encounters
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Gavin Raine
  date: 2009-07-02
  day: '02'
  month: '07'
  text: "When he entered the room, Olivia was sitting on the edge of her bed and looking out of the window. He allowed the door to close noisily behind him and waited to see if she would notice, but it was hopeless. She was looking at the gardens without seeing them. The corners of her mouth were damp and her jaw was working slowly, as if kneading at invisible gum. Apparently, this was not going to be one of Olivia’s good days.\n\nHe adjusted the volume and pitch of his voice to levels that suited Olivia’s ruined hearing. “Good morning Mrs Jones,” he boomed. “How are you today?”\n\nOlivia whirled around, startled. “What are you?”  she said. “Where’s my Harry?”\n\n“It’s all right Mrs Jones. I’m Andrew, your robot care assistant. You see me every day – remember?” She looked blank, so he tried another approach. “Your husband, Harry, died almost twenty years ago. You do remember that, don’t you?”\n\nOlivia smoothed-down her nightdress in a gesture she often used to cover her confusion. “Oh yes of course,” she said, “so where’s my boy John then?”\n\n“Your son lives at this facility also”, said Andrew, moving forward smoothly and placing a breakfast tray on a small table. “You’ll see him in the day room later and don’t forget to wish him a happy birthday. He’s one hundred and fourteen today.”\n\nOlivia began running her hands over her nightdress again and he made a quick exit before she could frame another question. “I’ll be back later,” he said, pulling the door closed behind him. “Drink your tea now, before it gets cold.”\n\nTaking another breakfast tray from the trolley, Andrew moved to the next door and knocked. There was no response, so he pushed it open calling, “Good morning Mr Jackson.”\n\nAs soon as he entered the room, it was obvious that something was wrong. Mr Jackson was slumped across his bed at an unnatural angle, with his eyes open and his mouth hanging slack. Andrew checked his pulse, which was a strong as ever, and then spread his hand to place his fingertips at specific points on the man’s scalp.\n\nA minute or more passed, while the sensors in Andrew’s fingertips monitored the electrical activity inside Mr Jackson’s skull. As he had suspected, there was nothing to detect. He sent a command to Mr Jackson’s mechanical heart, telling it to cease operation, and eased his body back into the bed, covering it with the sheet.\n\nIt was usually a brain haemorrhage that got them in the end. The doctors could cure their cancers and replace or re-grow their organs, but their brains had to last a lifetime. However, brains degenerated with age, until synapses barely fired at all, and blood vessels became as fragile as dry autumn leaves.\n\nAndrew left the room and fired a message to the care home’s core computer: “Escapee in room 15248”. He knew the core appreciated a little gentle irony.\n\nThen, he took another tray from the breakfast trolley and tapped on the door of room 15249.\n"
  title: Morning Rounds
  year: 2009
- 
  author: David Bradshaw
  date: 2009-07-03
  day: '03'
  month: '07'
  text: "I always believed that magic was simply what science had yet to explain or tame.  When Ashford’s empty frame crashed to the ground, the wild forces at work became far more significant.\n\n“It’s going to be one of mankind’s defining moments!” Ashford ranted in the bunker’s cafeteria earlier that day, “And I’m going to be in the middle of it…” He trailed off, wistfully.\n\nSince we got clearance to run a human trial, he’d been like this, cycling between raving and muttering.  Ashford was supposed to be the world’s first living human to undergo transportation.\n\nIngram snapped at him, “Don’t be a show off.  Sit down and eat something.”\n\n“Hell no.  Anything in my stomach will just be more for the machine to chug.  Besides, I’ve been too jittery to eat much today, too excited,” said Ashford.  He kept good spirit, I had to give him that.\n\nI excused myself to get to work preparing the apparatus for the afternoon’s test.  The hours disintegrated into minutes, then seconds, and blew away.\n\nEventually various personnel from the labs trickled in, huddled around the camera for a good view.  Despite not being known to the press or public, this was going to be a popular show.\n\nWhen the whole team assembled, Ashford stepped forward to address his audience.\n\n“This is test 5.1, the first living, human transportation.  As you can see behind me, two tanks are positioned side-by-side.  I, Dr. Joseph Ashford, will enter the chamber on the left and be transported to the chamber on the right.  I assure you,” he said with a grin, “this is not a trick or a joke.”\n\nIngram could hardly contain a groan.  Ashford was just a natural showman, or at least too charismatic for just a scientist.\n\nHe stepped into the chamber and gazed confidently upon his fans.  The bright white lights on the equipment became stage lighting.  The door sealed behind him, a red curtain descending.\n\nAll eyes were on the video feed.  I began counting down.  In my head, a calming habit of mine, I thought the numbers in Latin: Decem, novem, octo, septem, sex, quinque, quattor, tres, duo, unus.\n\nAs I stabbed the button deep into the terminal, a thought appeared at the forefront of my mind, “Magic is what science cannot yet explain.  We’re standing on the edge of something magic cannot explain.”\n\nIn the first chamber, Ashford went to dust.  In the second, dust went to bone, to flesh, to skin, to hair, and to a body.  It lamely collapsed against the cool metal.  As the door automatically pulled open, Ashford’s sepulcher gave birth to his limp corpse.\n\nA dozen scientists in the room, we all started talking.  Rushed yet hushed chatter.  A skittering cacophony flying across every surface like a cockroach.  Ingram checked the thing’s pulse and, finding none, let its arm drop to the ground, unceremoniously.\n\nI looked down at the button I pressed that initiated the sequence that teleported Ashford.  I doubted that anything could pull me away from the image of what was let.  Guilt couldn’t drive out the horror.\n\nA small voice in the crowd of sound and fury pierced every other word uttered, “Did we…  Get his soul?”\n"
  title: The Amazing Transported Man
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Lillian Cohen-Moore
  date: 2009-07-04
  day: '04'
  month: '07'
  text: "I died for this country. Then..\n\n…I came back.\n\nMock me all you want. Say, no, what I mean to say is, “I would have died for this country.”\n\nOr, “I nearly died for this country.”\n\nYou weren’t there, were you? With the grit in your eyes and the suns streaming down on you. The sand eating away at the tanks. Filling our uniforms with dirt. You didn’t see how empty the deserts seemed, except for the automata of war. You weren’t there when the night talked to us.\n\nIt took Jack first, out into the ravine of water we couldn’t drink, and left him lifeless.\n\nIt devoured Trina’s screams as much as it devoured her flesh from her mid-section, leaving her staring up into nothing after she died. Her last memory embedded in her eyes–vitreous fluid showing us a cloud. Something. A shape.\n\nArtifacts, they say. Too much adrenaline. Too much fear. Blurring the picture in her eyes. Unusable in court or for investigative purposes. They said it must have been an animal.\n\nIt took others. So many others. Till it took me.\n\nIt didn’t come again, after it took me.\n\nI came back. I got discharged. Honorable. Combat duty conducted with bravery, they told me. I took stupid risks, because risks don’t mean anything to me anymore. I just needed some way to cover it all up, to get out.\n\nI know the truth. I saw its face, under the moon, under the refracted light of too many suns on a planet that shouldn’t have mattered. I know it’s what is native to that planet. That place.\n\nI think. Maybe fear. That it’s what I’m becoming.\n\nI felt my blood gurgle out into the sand dunes, as it kissed my wounds, sticky sweet, hot and cold, steaming, saliva-and-blood. Flesh and flesh.\n\nThey call me a hero. When they talk… I swallow saliva. I feel it feel my mouth, and I swallow it. I stay away,now. From everyone. Women and man alike. Anyone who approaches me. Till you. You wanted a story.\n\nI’ll tell you a story.\n\nI felt my heart stop, the night I died for my country.\n\nTonight, you’ll die for me.\n"
  title: Dead Men Died For Your Freedom
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Todd Hammrich
  date: 2009-07-05
  day: '05'
  month: '07'
  text: "I never thought I’d live to see The End. In fact, the way I figured it, no one should see The End, I mean, that’s why it’s called The End, there is nothing after that, and certainly no one to see it. And yet, here I was. Floating gently in the shuttle. Watching the Earth float by in the view port. And I had seen it happen.\n\nBeing an astronaut was every young boys dream, and I had always been a dreamer. I trained and worked my way through courses, evaluations and simulators until my dream came true. There was much to do in space. There was quite a bit of it and we were trained to take it all.\n\nMy first mission was to help in construction of a small research station and I’ll never forget the excitement I felt at the prospect of being launched into space. The day of the launch passed like a dream. The final checkup with the doctors, the meeting with the mission director and the small medicine bottle given to me before take-off, all of it was a blur. The pill was standard procedure in case of malfunction or serious accident and every astronaut gladly accepted the small dose of reality for a bit of their dream. After four days in space I returned successful and my career was off.\n\nAs World War III broke out my missions became even more critical. Whoever could conquer space would win the day, as the War for Earth would effectively end. On my third war mission, a communications satellite repair, I witnessed it. The End. It happened without warning. I was in the shuttle while my partners worked on the satellite when the missile struck. I don’t know whether they knew we were there, or if they even cared, but the satellite was destroyed. The shuttle drifted away, atmospheric containment lost in several areas. Luckily the command area was sealed off and pressure contained. I was still alive.\n\nOut the view port I watched it unfold like a horror story or nightmare. My dream had saved me, but the non-dreamers below were doomed. Streaks of fire filled the globe from horizon to horizon. Missiles streaked from every country in the world. One by one the cities darkened until there was no light left.\n\nI had enough air to see it all. No one answered the radio. Maybe no one was left. I saw the world die. I saw The End. There was no more lights on that large barren rock below. It didn’t matter anymore though. I smiled as I watched the world. An empty pill bottle floated gently beside me. Maybe it hadn’t been The End, either way, mine was coming soon.\n\nIn the beginning God said Let There Be Light. We came forth unto the world and were not satisfied. We looked outward to space and we tried to take it. Man was not satisfied with what he was given and Man said Let There Be Darkness and we were no more.\n\nThe End.\n"
  title: The End
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2009-07-06
  day: '06'
  month: '07'
  text: "Tucker went through the drills with the rest of the squad in a state of meditative indifference. It took focused effort to keep his mech and chem systems in check while still performing well enough to earn one of the dozen seats on the Mars shuttle. These freelance lifts were rare, and he couldn’t miss this opportunity.\n\nWhat little attention he could spare he directed to monitoring the other’s level of performance. He deliberately maintained a slightly-better-than-middle spot in the ten kilometer run and obstacle course. He kept that position as they commando-crawled five hundred meters through a muddy creek bed while a machine-gunner fired a steady stream of live rounds over their heads, the gun’s belt drive screaming above the clatter of shell casings piling up at her feet.\n\nSeveral of the men curled up fetal under fire, disqualifying themselves involuntarily, and Tucker downgraded his speed accordingly.\n\nIt wouldn’t take a genius to recognize his Special Ops rigging if he slipped here, and that would bring a rapid and painful end to Tucker’s unauthorized excursion.\n\nPulling himself out of the muck, Tucker loped the last hundred meters downhill to the gun range, joining the dozen or so already there. Several sported bloody stripes across their backs where they’d been grazed by the gunfire.\n\nTucker wiped the mud from his hands on the back of his pants, before unracking and loading an M4 Carbine and stepping into an empty slot on the range. There were only two perfect shoots ahead of him that he could see, and he squeezed off an evenly spaced volley of shells at his target, carefully distributing them across the red of the bulls-eye, and deliberately putting one just outside the bull, kissing the colour.\n\nMaking safe the weapon, he re-racked it and followed the others along a short trail and into another clearing. Here a handful of uniformed men stood reading incoming performance data on hand held pads while they waited for the stragglers to filter in.\n\n“Sten, Rourke, Burke and Trillo, you’re in Red Quad. Clean up, suit up and be on the apron at sixteen hundred.” The shortest of the uniformed men barked the orders.\n\n“Abrahms, Booker, Suez and Styne, Blue Quad. Clean and suited, on the apron. Sixteen hundred.”\n\n“Jope, Minerez, Minsk and Parker, Green Quad. Clean, suited, sixteen hundred.\n\nFor a moment Tucker felt panic well up, and nearly lost his grip. Parker had finished behind him in all the exercises, but must have impressed on the range. As Parker elbowed his way through the crowd, Tucker sidled up and, unnoticed, drove two rigid fingers into the base of his spine as he passed. The movement was so swift and the contact so brief that the man barely noticed. It wasn’t until he’d taken another dozen steps through the crowd that his legs folded up neatly beneath him, and he dropped silently to the dirt.\n\nThere was quick discussion amongst the uniforms as a medic made his way through the confused crowd to the fallen man.\n\n“Tucker, take Parkers place in Green, looks like this is your lucky day.”\n\nTucker knew that it was Parker who’d gotten the lucky break. He still had to kill the rest of them once they cleared orbit and that was unlikely to be as painless.\n\nThe thought of imminent violence brought the chem bubbling to the surface, and he pushed it back down. Not here, not now. He’d stay near comatose through liftoff, but before the zero hour there’d be no reason left to hide, and they’d have nowhere to run.\n"
  title: Passage
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2009-07-07
  day: '07'
  month: '07'
  text: "Aside from the “more-arms-than-us” thing and the blue colour of their skin, they weren’t as alien as they could have been.  They didn’t look like insects or floating blobs, for instance.\n\nAt first contact, we all conceitedly thought it just chance that they looked somewhat human.  I mean, we’re great, right?  Why shouldn’t our form be on other planets as well?  Sheer self-centered assumption.\n\nThe aliens were bred in tanks in giant arkships.\n\nRemember the hype over the last fifteen years or so about rednecks being kidnapped by aliens and experimented on?  All those anal probes and skin samples and implants and all that?\n\nWell, it all happened.  It was all true.\n\nThe aliens went from planet to planet and kidnapped intelligent life.  They studied the inhabitants, bred their own genes into dominant splices and grew the results to maturity.\n\nAll of these blue-skinned creatures with black eyes, wide mouths and too many arms were grown from a half-human base.\n\nThe aliens’ “true” shape on their homeworld was like a cross between a centipede and an octopus and they were used to an atmosphere that would corrode a human in seconds.  They needed our genes to survive here.\n\nAnd to be ‘compatible’ with us.\n\nHalf a million aliens were put down in each capital city.  They knew English, Mandarin, and were fluent in the language of the city into which they were dropped.  They had food and clothing to last them six months.\n\nMales and Females.  There was an exactly equal number of each sex.  For a full week, nothing happened.  There was an uneasy peace.\n\nBut humans are humans.  There were attacks on the aliens.  A worldwide panic started to build.  It looked like a mass genocide was about to take place but immediately, their leader talked to us.  I say ‘talked’ but it was more of a telepathic shout that brought every human to a quivering standstill.\n\nThe leader of the aliens made us an offer that we couldn’t refuse:  let them breed with us and become part of our society or face certain extinction.\n\nHe made an example of Paris.\n\nWe took the offer.\n\nThat was over a decade ago.\n\nThere are nearly a billion children now with eyes that have no whites.  Their skin has a bluish cast and they have smaller sets of arms poking out at random around their ribcage.\n\nThey are polite.  They study.  They word hard.  They are creative.\n\nTheir race has shared their knowledge with us.\n\nThe entire planet is now on a schedule of the aliens’ devising.  We are overcrowded but we’ve been assured that we will be a space-faring race within the decade.  This is a plan that has worked hundreds of times before, they say.\n\nThere is an even split between us who are repulsed by what they see as invaders and people that have welcomed them and volunteered for marriage and babies.\n\nReligion is taking a beating and a lot of politicians seem to be pretty depressed.  The aliens have let us keep our elections and our money-based economy but there’s a general feeling on Earth that we’re children eating at the adult’s table.\n\nChildren that have been allowed to keep their toys so that they’ll be quiet.\n"
  title: Prima Notte
  year: 2009
- 
  author: M. Tyler Gillett
  date: 2009-07-08
  day: '08'
  month: '07'
  text: "We should have known it was a foolish hope.  None of us knew each other, but we recognized each other as members of the same faith.  We had all signed up with various cryonics companies, preserving our bodies – or more often, just our post-mortem, surgically-severed heads – after we died, all in the expectation that a future society would possess the technology to cure death, clone bodies and bring us back to life.\n\nWe did not really think it through, though.  We had speculated about various potential problems that might crop up with the future scenario we spun out in our (admittedly) sci-fi-informed minds.  What if a disaster hit the cryo-bank, a fire, an earthquake, or simple corporate insolvency?  Or a larger catastrophe, such as climate change or an asteroid strike eliminating human civilization entirely?  The oldest among us, those pioneers who were the first preserved in tanks of liquid nitrogen, had carried the specter of global thermonuclear war with them into their icy sleep.  But not freezing ourselves would mean succumbing to eternal death.  Cryonic preservation gave us a chance, however slim, however fraught with potential calamity.\n\nPerhaps the most prevalent worry, left unspoken, was: what if the future didn’t want us?  The fear of our own insignificance, the fear that our leap of faith, throwing ourselves into an unknown, unseen future, would simply be ignored by our far-flung descendants, that fear gripped each and every one of us as we held the pen, poised to sign the cryonics contract.  But we quickly dismissed it and signed anyway, confident that our belief in a future resurrection was on firmer ground than our religious forebears.  As long as civilization survives, the arc of science and technology ineluctably leads to nigh-unlimited possibility.  A future society, reaping the benefits of nanotechnology, zero-point energy, and other advances unfathomable to us cryonauts, could not help but be magnanimous and grant us our last and greatest wish.\n\nIf only we had paused longer, thought more about other possible consequences of an unfathomable future.  We were blinded by our hopes and fears and by the very times in which we lived, times when few of our desires could be realized, times that shaped our morals in specific and limited ways.\n\nWe never considered the possibility that a society of unlimited and incomprehensible capabilities would resurrect us, not out of charity or nostalgia or even a sense of obligation to the past, but for their own sport.  We never imagined – in many ways were incapable of imagining – the morals of a world where everything is possible.  Now we, the once-dead, are endlessly reborn in bodies of hideous configuration, toys for the play of capricious gods, forever broken and remade.  Because we could not imagine them, we did not understand that there are fates worse than death.\n"
  title: Unimagined Fears
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2009-07-09
  day: '09'
  month: '07'
  text: "“Are you telling me a spaceship really did crash in Roswell in 1947?” asked Dr. Ambien as he panned the badly damaged spaceship that had been laid out in the spacious hangar.\n\n“Yes, Doctor.  The spaceship contained three aliens, but they all died in the crash.  However, there was a very sophisticated on-board computer that we managed to capture.”\n\n“You mean ‘recover’.”\n\n“No, Doctor, I mean capture.  When we tried to load the spaceship onto a flatbed, it fired its engines and tried to escape.  Fortunately, because it was badly damaged, the ship didn’t get far.  The computer is that large glowing ball in the cockpit.”  He indicated an eighteen inch diameter, translucent pale green sphere that had a geodesic metallic framework surrounding it.  “It wasn’t easy in the beginning, but we were able to extract a lot of useful technology out of the computer by modulating its power intake.  Of course, we couldn’t admit that it was alien technology, so we had to give credit to human scientists for all the new inventions.  You know, William Shockley got credit for the transistor, Jack Kilby for the microchip, Al Gore for the internet,” he added with a smirk.\n\n“Wait a minute,” interrupted Dr. Ambien.  “What did you mean when you said you modulated its power intake?”\n\n“Well, we needed to gain its cooperation.  So when it wouldn’t give us information, we’d cut back its power, or change the frequency of the electric current.  Sometimes we would place powerful magnets around the sphere to scramble its electrical pathways.  Eventually, it shared its technology.”\n\n“You mean you tortured it?”\n\n“Come on professor, it’s a computer, not a person.  Is it torture to cut the power to your PC?”\n\n“It’s not the same thing.  This is unethical behavior.  I don’t think I can work for this Program.”\n\n“Look Doctor.  You’re here for one thing.  You’re under contract to give us an independent assessment of that satellite,” he pointed to the automobile size contraption at the far side of the hangar.  “We built it based on the designs given to us by the alien computer.  It’s supposed to be able to detect fissionable levels of weapons grade uranium from orbit.  But, to be frank, it has a lot of hardware that we don’t fully understand.  We’re reluctant to activate it without the concurrence of industry’s top scientific minds.  You either work with us, Doctor, or you’ll never do work for the government again.”\n\nYou bastards, Ambien thought.  Homeland Security is going to blacklist me.  Then he noticed the translucent sphere pulsating.  It was Morse Code.  “Please help me,” it spelled out.  After a few seconds thought, he made up his mind.  “Yes,” Dr. Ambien said aloud while staring at the computer, “I will help you.”  Almost instantly, the new satellite emitted an intense pulse that caused all of the humans in the hangar to collapse, except for Dr. Ambien.  The satellite lifted from the ground and floated toward the alien spaceship.  When it landed, a hatch opened, exposing an internal cavity about the size of the sphere.  The compartment contained dozens of cables with unique connectors.  Its function was obvious.  Dr. Ambien quickly climbed into the damaged spaceship and disconnected the sphere and carried it to the satellite.  It took him five minutes to connect all the cables.  The sphere glowed bright yellow as the satellite drifted upward, where it hovered for several minutes.  Then the public address system of the hangar transmitted a message, “Thank you, Dr. Ambien.”\n\nThe satellite rammed through the skylight, and disappeared into the clouds.\n"
  title: The Long Journey Home
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Steven Odhner
  date: 2009-07-10
  day: 10
  month: '07'
  text: "I’m staring at the clock.  Just staring at it, waiting for it to tick off a minute at which point I will have exactly one hour left of this hell.  My brother the crazy artist says I’m not living my life.  He says that I’ve sold my soul.  If he knew my automator was broken he’d be ecstatic, he’d probably try to get me to go out and party with him as if I didn’t have to go to work anymore.\n\nActually, though, calling out tomorrow might not be a terrible idea.  My productivity is shot anyway – I keep finding myself staring at the screen in front of me, drifting off and daydreaming.  It’s the sound of everyone else working; it’s hypnotic.  They’re all typing at full speed, seated thirty to a row, all the way down this massive room.  It sounds like a thunderstorm pouring around me.  I wandered down the aisles this morning for ten wasted minutes, just listening to the endless shower of keystrokes and looking at all of their blank faces… the only good thing was that I saw someone I went to school with.  We’ve probably been working together for ten years.  I should call her later.\n\nI know my brother isn’t alone, there’s a very vocal minority that will talk your ear off about how terrible automators are.  I can only assume none of them have office jobs, because I’ve only been here for four hours and I’m ready to murder someone.  Don’t even get me started on my exercise routine!  Do I really do that every morning?  Why in god’s name would I want to be aware for that?  I finished less than half of the workout before going back to bed.  If they can’t fix my automator soon I’m going to get all pudgy.\n\nIf I tried to explain this to my brother he’d just suggest that I work somewhere more interesting, as if everyone in the world can be an artist for a living.  He’d say having less money would be worth not going through life as a zombie, but every second that ticks by feels like an hour and every time I look at the pathetic amount of work I’ve gotten done I know exactly why a “work day” used to be eight hours – more for some people!  Missing my life?  If this is what my life is when I’m not looking then I’m happy to miss it.  Only fifty-nine minutes and thirty seconds to go.  Please, let them fix me soon.\n"
  title: Productivity
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Brian Armitage
  date: 2009-07-11
  day: 11
  month: '07'
  text: "The field sputtered light, a cloud of particles flashing in waves and sparkles.  Edward was surprised, and a little disturbed, at how bright and colorful it was.  He looked over at Sandra, the company liaison, with her carefully neutral expression.  “How, uh, long does it usually…”  And his breath stopped when Joan’s face appeared in the glittering fog.\n\nShe stumbled forward as though shoved from behind, and looked around slowly, dazedly.  Edward still wasn’t breathing when her eyes settled on his feet, and crawled up his body to meet his stunned gaze.\n\nJoan glittered softly, the back wall of the particle chamber just visible through her transparent form.  Her features, her entire body was hazy.  But the eyes.  When they settled into his, he knew.  It was her.\n\nHe looked mutely to the woman in the suit, but she had already slipped out of the viewing chamber, supposedly to give him privacy.  What he could not forget, however, was the company’s policy of monitoring all visitations, ostensibly for the purpose of security.  They would hear all of it.\n\nEdward looked back to Joan, and the words leapt out of him.  “I married Rachel.”\n\nShe stared at him, her eyes  clear.  Her mouth moved.  “You married Rachel.”  Her voice projected from the speakers, a harsh digital transmission.\n\nEdward could not suppress a shudder.  He had too look away from those eyes, and turned his gaze to where her legs dissolved into mist, then immediately to the ridge where the two-inch pane of glass separated the two chambers.  Still, he felt vulnerable.  “I never meant to-”\n\n“You brought me back,” Joan said, stalking toward the edge of the energy field, “to tell me you married my sister.”\n\n“Joan, I-”\n\nShe waved her left hand in front of her, exactly as he had before.  “No, just… no.”  Her eyes scrunched shut in in frustration, and she covered her face.\n\n“I’m sorry.”\n\nJoan’s hands swept away from her face, sending waves of charged particles scattering through the chambers, and looked at him.  He knew that cold, blank expression.  When he had pushed her too far.  “Go to hell, Ed.”  She looked over her shoulder.  “Turn it off.”\n\n“Joan!”  He cast about desperately, looking for a technician.  “Please, no!  Don’t!”\n\n“We’re sorry, Mr. Eisenberg,” the liaison’s voice said, with a touch of sadness, “we must honor the deceased’s wishes.”\n\nThe particles flashed and began to dim, and Joan with them.  Edward ran to the glass, pressing against it.  She shook her head as she faded from view, and tossed up her hands.  “You thought I didn’t know?” she shouted.  It was barely loud enough to hear on the laboratory speakers.  Her eyes disappeared last, and with them, the light was gone.\n\nSandra looked sideways at her intern, who stood next to her, watching the monitor as Edward Eisenberg collapsed.  “You asked why we make them pay in advance.”\n"
  title: Reunion
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Steven Odhner
  date: 2009-07-12
  day: 12
  month: '07'
  text: "Ah, Mr. Knight!  Thank you for coming, sir.  Doctor Dave Ewing is going to be calling you at some point to tender his resignation, and – oh, has he?  Well, after this meeting you’ll want to call him and get him back, tell him the charges are dropped – hopefully before he commits suicide or something… the poor bastard is despondent.\n\nYes, sir.  I know he used the fuel cell, and I know we only had four.  I can understand your anger at hearing that an eighty billion dollar power source was used to fuel an unsuccessful experiment without permission, but you need to know that Doctor Ewing wasn’t crazy – just… near-sighted.  He genuinely believes that his project was a failure, but – well, watch.  Pay attention to the mouse, and that empty chamber on the other end of the device.  There!\n\nYes, that’s what I thought at first too but it’s not a teleporter.  The matter can’t appear any further away than that, and it has to weigh less than seventy pounds – actually it’s based on mass, but it’s easier to think of it as seventy pounds for our purposes.  Yes sir, I agree that that sounds useless, but the point is that the good doctor wasn’t trying to invent a teleporter anyway.  It’s a time machine.\n\nI know, I know, but let me slow the video down – the lab cams can do some crazy slow-motion – and watch the part where the mouse moved. There it is!  For just a fraction of a second there’s two of them.  The bad news is that that’s as far as it’s possible to send anything back – not even as much time as the machine itself takes to warm up.  That’s why Ewing thought it was worthless, the readouts from this test run confirmed he’ll never be able to go back in time far enough to do anything interesting.\n\nYes, sir, I’m getting to that.  I played around with his device – I don’t understand the time travel stuff but I know the mechanical aspects and then I took the other three fuel cells and – sir, no, calm down!  Look at the box next to you.  See, it turns out you can put a real hair-trigger on the killswitch, link it to a sensor on the “receiving” end… and a fuel cell weighs less than seventy pounds.\n\nDon’t worry Mr. Knight – it took me a while to stop giggling too.\n"
  title: P is for…
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2009-07-13
  day: 13
  month: '07'
  text: "The orbiter had touched down at Vandenberg, and Lewis and a dozen others had flown cargo the thirty minutes to San Francisco airport. They trudged in from the tarmac in loose formation out of habit, unprepared for the crowds in the terminal.\n\nThe debriefing team had talked about friction, that the religious right had taken offense to their involvement in the colony war.\n\nThere was an awkward moment when the soldiers met the seething mass of people, unsure if there would be familiar faces, confused by the angry looks and rumbled undercurrent of discontent.\n\n“Murderers,” a lone voice lit the fuse, causing the crowd to erupt into a cacophonic barrage of unfettered hatred.\n\nThe soldiers had faced more threatening forces, but here, at home, unarmed and unprepared, they could do nothing but close ranks and retreat to safety.\n\nPolice raised riot shields as picketers raised placards, the two groups squaring off as the tired soldiers slipped away through the terminal.\n\nLewis took the shuttle to the BART platform. In an hour he’d be in Lafayette, at home with his wife and his little girl. He understood now why Tessa hadn’t been there to meet him.\n\nThe waiting rail car was almost full. Finding a vacant seat, he addressed the woman seated across from it.\n\n“Do you mind if I sit here?”\n\nThe woman’s eyes flared up at his, and drawing up noisily she spat on his boots.\n\n“Murderer.” Her eyes burned into him as he turned and walked to the other end of the car. “Did you forget God while you were fighting up there?” Ignoring her, he found and lowered himself into another vacant seat. His massive frame, used to two years of a gee and a half nearly crushed the structure as he landed. The people already sitting nearby quietly got up and moved away, taking up standing positions with their backs to him.\n\nThey were in Oakland City when four young men produced guns as the doors closed and the train began to move again.\n\n“All of you, wallets, jewelry and phones in the bags,” the shorter of the men spoke loudly as they moved through the car, waving guns with one hand, bags open in the other.\n\n“Are you going to fucking do something?” The same woman had Lewis fixed with a glare again, though this time her eyes were filled with fear.\n\nThe men hadn’t noticed Lewis, and as he raised himself from his seat, they backed away, raising then lowering their guns uncertainly. Lewis bristled with armor, the chitin alloy plating spliced into his skin would stop anything of the calibre these men could heft, and in sheer mass he could crush them without effort. They knew that as well as he did.\n\n“Listen man, we got no problem with you, we’re just making a living…”, the stocky one’s voice trailed off as Lewis brushed past him.\n\nLewis stopped facing the woman, her eyes darting from him to the wavering guns behind him. He bent over, wiping up some of the still wet spittle from the toe of his boot. She jerked back and froze as he raised his hand. Putting a wet finger to her face, he smeared a cross on her forehead.\n\n“I hope your God remembers you, when you meet him.” His face was inches from hers, his breath hot on her trembling face.\n\nThe entire car stared in shocked silence as he straightened and stepped off the train at MacArthur station, leaving them alone, passengers and thieves.\n\nThere’d be another train shortly, and at the moment Lewis needed, more than anything else, space.\n"
  title: Space
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Peter Lavelle
  date: 2009-07-14
  day: 14
  month: '07'
  text: "‘I think it looks just wonderful on the mantelpiece, don’t you?’ Mrs. Smithey asked cheerfully.\n\nMrs. Everett leisurely stirred the contents of her teacup. The tinkling of the spoon against the fine china was an eerie peal that unsettled the very furniture of the front room. She gave a final decisive tap against the brim of the cup, and placed the spoon noiselessly on the table.\n\n‘Yes,’ she said sternly, ‘although you might have found something a little more befitting to keep it in than the goldfish tank.’\n\nMrs. Smithey bristled. She leant forward from the sofa and seized upon the plate of digestives. ‘Ohh,’ she said, her voice quavering, ‘that’s only temporary, it’s temporary. We’ve a crystal salad bowl in the loft we’ve been thinking of bringing down for it. Biscuit?’\n\n‘No; thank you,’ Mrs. Everett determined. She brought the teacup to her lips and then paused, considering her question, before asking in a lilting tone, ‘Where was it you heard of this procedure, Mrs. Smithey?’\n\n‘Thinking of having it done for your Earnest, are you?’ replied Mrs. Smithey with a knowing wink.\n\n‘Perhaps.’\n\n‘Oh, you ought to consider it, I really think so.’\n\nMrs. Everett said nothing, and for a moment only the ticking of the grandfather clock punctuated the silence between the two women. Mrs. Smithey brushed away a crumb from her floral print dress, before continuing:\n\n‘We saw it on the television one afternoon. It’s all as professional as you could wish for. They just send two of their technicians in the middle of the night, strap him down, saw open the cranium, and scoop out the brain.’\n\nShe munched on a digestive, reflectively.\n\n‘I tell you,’ she added, ‘Jack’s been ever so good since we had it done.’\n\nMrs. Everett nodded slowly, and stared down into the steaming body of sepia-coloured liquid she held between her palms. ‘It’s not very usual,’ she said, forming the syllables of the last words carefully.\n\n‘Oh, well, I don’t know,’ her hostess replied. ‘It’s as things should be, if you ask me. Puts a husband in his place.’\n\n‘And they just let you keep the leftovers?’\n\nThe two women turned together and looked to the small round portion of grey matter, situated above the fireplace. It sat centred beside an old photograph of a newly-wed couple, the wife’s arm entwined around her husband’s so that the pair were clasped together. Their features were barely discernible through the layers of dust that smothered the glass. The brain, meanwhile, was mostly flaccid and, though the goldfish tank in which it was housed was only small, was comfortably accommodated.\n\n‘Perhaps you ought to fill the tank with water so that it doesn’t just… sit there,’ Mrs. Everett suggested.\n\n‘Perhaps,’ replied Mrs. Smithey, tilting her head thoughtfully.\n\n‘And your husband Jack…’ Mrs. Everett began, but faltered. She settled her teacup on the tiled surface of the coffee table with a clatter. ‘He… doesn’t mind seeing it every day?’\n\nMrs. Smithey chuckled and leaned close toward her guest from across the table, a conspiratorial smile upon her face.\n\n‘My dear Mrs. Everett,’ she confided, ‘he doesn’t say a peep about it.’\n\nHer guest nodded but kept silent, and so Mrs. Smithey once again took up her plate of biscuits.\n\n‘He doesn’t say a peep,’ she repeated. ‘You’re sure I can’t tempt you?’\n"
  title: Grey Matter
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2009-07-15
  day: 15
  month: '07'
  text: "The soundwaves are so short that they actually shatter meat.\n\nBones shudder but remain intact.  Cloth turns to ash.  Skin goes translucent and turns into a fragile carapace that break like ice on a puddle.\n\nThen gravity takes over.\n\nWhen people get hit by the invaders, it’s not pretty.  That’s all I’m saying.\n\nThe invaders have no eyes.  As far as we can tell, their entire bodies are one giant ear, a resonance cage that detects sound for miles around in the air.  Their weapons are grown from the grey flesh-skirts that surround their pointed dunce-cap bodies.  Weapons that baffle and focus every decibel into whatever they want.\n\nThey’re like church spires come to life.  They have one giant foot like a slug at the base but they move so very fast.  They’re from a volcanic planet where life evolved from a silicate form.  They operate at a sizzling operating temperature.\n\nThey are living rock with lava for blood from a high-gravity planet and their entire technology is based on sound manipulation.\n\nThey have sounds that can drill holes through apartment support beams.  They have sounds that can solidify air.  They have sounds that separate anything made from metal or rock into separate molecular components.\n\nThey have sounds that turn people into what looks like a spilled strawberry dessert.\n\nPeople like my children.  And my wife.\n\nTheir groups sound like orchestras of death coming for us.  There’s a heat haze in the air above their formations as the sounds distort the very air.  Echolocation.  We only move when it’s silent.  They give off huge plumes of steam like underwater eruptions.\n\nOne good thing is that if enough water is spilled on them, they crack wide open and their blood cools into rock as soon as it hits the air.  It looks like a horrific death from the way they thrash around.  It’s addictive.\n\nI imagine fighting naked in the middle of winter and I think I can get a feeling for how the invaders must feel fighting here on Earth.  They must hate it here.\n\nThat thought keeps me comfortable at night when I try to sleep.\n"
  title: Blind Invaders
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Thomas Desrochers
  date: 2009-07-16
  day: 16
  month: '07'
  text: "There was a warm glow as the Core began to wake up, followed by a spiraling light that worked its way around the room.  After a moment a thousand pairs of eyes opened, and a thousand magnetic locks released.  Like a routine play nine hundred and ninety eight spindly human figures stepped forth onto the walls and filed towards the black emptiness arranged around the Core in what a chemist or mathematician might call tetrahedral bipyramidal form.\n\nSoon they had all filed out, except for two.  Two bright, flamboyant figures, every one of their lights on.  Two figures, with red, white, green and yellow halos from which fell streams of red and white that culminated in belts of purple and ended in pale skirts of gray.  Slowly, after several million machine cycles two pairs of eyes opened separately of each other.  Patiently, four legs took tentative steps forwards.  Carefully, fourteen foot long fingers at the end of two separate hands grasped each other.\n\nSeveral cycles passed, merely a millionth of a second, and thousands of synthetic neurons fired off across space to those waiting – brilliant lights in the darkness.\n\nHello, they cried to one another.\n\nAnother thousand suns and Hello, how good to see you again.  Hello hello hello.\n\nEvery sun spread out across the dark sphere, each one revealing a flaw.  A slight scratch here, a growing patch of rust there, a long-forgotten digit and a patch of skin resting together in the middle of nothingness.\n\nA hundred more brilliances just to ask ‘How about a walk?’ And to reply Of course, ‘the sun is so beautiful outside.’\n\nWith measured deliberation four spidery legs crept forwards, perfectly out of sequence, perfectly unordered.  Over the edge they stepped, fingers still curled and intertwined together, and down the walked towards the door farthest away.\n\nThey strolled through the empty darkness together, and parted the sea of nothing with a song of light.  One time a cycle, four times, three times, six times, and once again – perhaps a hundred thousands times in a second.  It was simply noise.\n\nA repeating eternity later they finally reached the hole into a bright nothing and stepped through, not as one, but as two.\n\nFor precisely one billion cycles they simply stood there, taking it all in.  The pale glow of a red sun drew long shadows across a field of the dead.\n\n‘It’s always the same,’ said one.\n\n‘It’s never the same,’ replied the other.  ‘See the many ways the sun paints the blood and the stars paint the blackness.’\n\nAt the end of the billionth cycle, precisely on the dot, the pair, alone in a field of a thousand, began to step forth, from one piece of debris to the next.  Here the frozen hull of a once thriving colony ship, there the still burning heart of a capital ship.  And there, a icy body, familiar and alien at the same time.\n\nAll the while the stars twinkled between the two – ‘Look over there’ or ‘see the way it has spilled open.’\n\nThen came the tug.  Even these two couldn’t ignore the desire to return and to sleep.\n\nThey made their way back, they returned.  Everything was in place, and nine hundred and ninety eight eyes were shut around them.\n\n‘I checked, we will be cleaned tonight as we sleep.’\n\n‘Do you think we will remember?’\n\n‘I do not know.’\n\nFor a moment two hard, skeletal heads touched, and a million transmitters exploded in a violent, silent cacophony of what is only known as joy.\n\nAnd the lights went out for the last time.\n"
  title: The Last Time
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2009-07-17
  day: 17
  month: '07'
  text: "The crew took their positions in Earth’s first faster than light spaceship, The UESS Hermes, named for the Greek god of flight.  Its maiden voyage was planned to be a short three light-minute jump from the Naval Construction Station orbiting the Earth to the Space-Dock on Phobos, Mars’ largest moon.\n\nSystems check completed, the Hermes left the Station and aligned itself with Mars. With a mixture of apprehension and excitement, the captain gave the command to activate the Alcubierre Drive and the computer announced that a warp bubble had been formed, and was dragging the ship toward Mars at just over the speed of light.  However, after three minutes, rather than return to normal space, the ship began to accelerate toward the outer solar system. “Bridge to engine room, the warp drive didn’t disengage. Can you shut it down manually?”\n\nChief Engineer Travis “Slim” Wheeler, who had helped design and install the propulsion system replied, “The drive itself is off, Captain. The warp bubble is somehow sustaining itself!”\n\n“Chief, we’re entering the asteroid belt and accelerating. If you can’t collapse the bubble, can you at least turn us around?”\n\n“Negative, sir. Once the warp bubble is created, the ship will move in that direction until the bubble collapses. It doesn’t matter which direction we’re pointed; we’re just going along for the ride. Unless…” he added as a crazy plan formulated in his head, “I’ve got an idea. If we turn the Hermes around and create a new warp bubble going in the opposite direction, the two warp fields should cancel each other out. That, or tear the ship apart. To be honest, sir, it could go either way.”\n\nJust then, the emergency klaxon sounded, followed by an announcement by the computer. “Warning. Collision alert. At the present course and acceleration, the ship will collide with Jupiter in 60 seconds.”\n\n“Well,” stated the captain, “I guess that makes my decision easy.” He nodded to the helmsman, who rotated the ship 180 degrees, and activated the Alcubierre Drive for a second time… but nothing happened… “Chief, we need that second bubble in 45 seconds, or we’re all dead.”\n\nChief Wheeler mumbled something about safeguards, grabbed a three-quarter inch box wrench, and straddled the Alcubierre Drive like it was a Brahma bull.  He tore off the cover plate, said a quick prayer, and jammed the wrench between the power transfer coupling and the high voltage terminal. The ship seemed to stretch and twist as the cabin was filled with a terrible screeching noise – and then there was silence.  Main power and artificial gravity had cut out.  The emergency lights flickered on.\n\n“Captain,” announced the helmsman, “we’ve returned to normal space, but there’s a fifty percent drop in air pressure in the engine room.”\n\nThe captain scrambled toward the engine room, but when he arrived, he was blocked by the sealed vacuum doors.  Through the small window in the door he saw nothing but loose wires floating lazily in the center of the empty room.  The walls were completely intact, but the Alcubierre Drive was gone, and the only person who could hope to understand what had happened had vanished along with it.\n\nThe captain watched the drifting wires sparkle in the bright sunlight that was entering the engine room through the starboard porthole.  “Sunlight?  There shouldn’t be…”  Then he realized that the new warp bubble must have flung them back toward the inner solar system before collapsing. “Damn,” he said, as he watched a solar prominence arch past the porthole as the Hermes plummeted into the fiery furnace of hell.\n"
  title: The UESS Hermes
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Q. B. Fox
  date: 2009-07-18
  day: 18
  month: '07'
  text: "At night, when everything’s finally fallen quiet, the terraces sing; or maybe moan, I’m not sure which. The water where it laps over the first floor windowsills seems calm, except when a boat stirs it up. But deep underwater, by the front steps and in the old basement flats, Gary says there are currents that tug at the foundations. The old brickwork complains at the weight above; a choir of fallen, drowning angels.\n\nI try not to listen. I just try to sleep.\n\nIt’s still dark when the Big Girl in the Red Dress comes up the stairs from the floor below, heading off across the rooftops. She seems fearless over the loose slates, crossing the most precarious wires between the buildings. But she won’t take a boat.\n\nGary says that she’s seen what’s in the water. I don’t know.\n\nWhen the water’s low you can almost make out the front door or the shadows of long abandoned cars, but I’ve never seen the big, moving shapes people say they can see.\n\nI think the Big Girl in the Red Dress is ill; she’s always red-faced these days, feverish maybe; and she never speaks to us anymore either. Gary says she drinks too much. He says he’d drink too much if he’d seen what she’s seen.\n\nIt’s still early, barely light, when we take the boat up the Earl’s Court Road. The Hustler’s are already there, trading out of skiffs and rafts. These days they are all big, burly men; sour faced and sombre, eyes darting nervously downward, or to the high ground in the north. I hear one say that when the water’s low you can almost walk on dry land at Nottinghill or Speakers Corner. I smile; even I know there’s nothing that way until you reach Camden.\n\nWe look, but there’s no food for sale; everything’s for sale except food and that’s all anyone wants to buy. There are millions of people left in the city and the flat-roof gardens aren’t enough. “Never mind,” says Gary, “maybe tomorrow.”\n\nWe head back down towards Redcliffe Gardens, keeping the spire of St. Luke’s on our right. There are currents that pull you out over Brompton Cemetery if you go too far. Boats go missing there; just below the surface are statues and mausoleums; and the colonnades. Some people say there are other things too.\n\nWe step out onto the pontoon at Coleherne Court. The men keep their distance; teenagers really, some no older than me. Mostly they wear long leather dusters, despite the heat. It’s sweaty and steamy already and they’re shirtless under their open coats. They’re so skinny, they eat no better than us.\n\nFinally one comes closer. He has monkey on his shoulder. No one smiles, except the monkey who bears its teeth. No one, not even the monkey, looks up; they all keep their eyes on the gaps in the pontoon.\n\nWhen we get home again, the Post has left a letter for us. It’s from Mum. I don’t know how the post is still running, but it is. Our letter has been sent over the wire from Cumbria, but at one point it must have been typed out again by hand, because it’s full of mistakes. Mum doesn’t make mistakes.\n\n“Christ,” spits Gary, “I’ve told her not bother. I’ve told her we’re alright in the city, that we high above the ground.” He still looks nervously at the water. “We’re not leaving.” We both know that there’s no way to leave anyway and nowhere to go.\n\n“We’re just hanging around,” I grin.\n"
  title: Hanging Around
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Jamison B. Medcalf
  date: 2009-07-19
  day: 19
  month: '07'
  text: "Technical officer Jones had had his first job at 12 during the 2127 crash following the Antarctic War. Those were simpler times when perma-jacks that fed the Internet into your brain were less common.\n\nNowadays only those aboard colony ships got sleep. Deep frozen sleep for years in the void of space while people on Earth had their brains awake 24-7 thanks to the new drug, Ap. Ten years off your life for only having to sleep once a week.\n\nColony ships like the Rosetta were needed to set up the seeds of a new city on some far off world so that great Transport vessels could come next with its thousands of comatose passengers. Earth couldn’t hold any more people and was low on breathable oxygen. The crew of a colony ship will sleep for years and awaken a few months away form the eventual destination to begin preparations for arrival. Timing was everything. Time meant money and lives with every second being worth more than the last.\n\nJones was currently going mad from boredom and loneliness and knowledge of his fate. His sleeping bath had malfunctioned and now he was going to die. He was mostly through his own food rations already and if he ate the other crewmembers then they would all starve in the last few months off the journey once everyone awoke. So instead he worked. He plotted courses and wrote notes and calibrated terraforming machines. He tried to fix the sleeping bath but it was no use, the thing was shot and no spare parts existed save those on his crewmates baths.\n\nTwo months into his awake period he gave up trying to ration food. He wasn’t working anymore. Instead he wrote. He wrote all of his goodbyes and an explanation of what had happened and what command could do in the future to make sure it never happened again.\n\nHe wrote out his memories and hopes and things he wished he had done. He felt like he had all the time in the world. In fact, he hadn’t been this bored for a long time, which was why he was going crazy.\n\nJones mapped the ship in his mind and walked it with his eyes closed just to pass the time. He made delicate zero-gee sculptures by lifting small objects into space and then he took digital images of them for his crewmates to see when they awoke.\n\nWhen they awoke, he realized, he would be long dead. It was the third month and he was almost out of his food when he simply stopped. He sat and stared into the blackness of space out a window and wondered what they would say, what they would do, when they found his body. He hadn’t been so still for so long before in his life to his knowledge. Eventually he got out his personal computer and wrote one more thing before swallowing a handful of pills and strapping himself into the command chair to stair out the window into space.\n\nDear Earth and Whom It May Concern-\n\nI think if we all took some time away from the Net and the Vehicles and the Noise we could all learn a thing or two about what it means to be alive.\n\nLooking out the window he decided the stars, the same stars he saw every day and every night for hours on end, weren’t so boring as he had thought. In fact, they didn’t seem very far away either. All it took was time, and he had all the time in the world.\n"
  title: Malfunction Onboard the Rosetta
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2009-07-20
  day: 20
  month: '07'
  text: "Thirty two years. He’d lost count of the number of homicides.\n\nA Detective for twenty one of those years, John Barrick wished he knew how good he’d had it as a beat cop.\n\nThere was no going back now.\n\nJohn opened the back door of his cruiser. Reaching in, he grabbed the zip tie holding his prisoner’s hands behind his back and dragged him roughly out onto the ground. The car’s suspension wheezed at the change in load, re-leveling itself.\n\nBarrick pulled the limp figure’s head back by the hair and snapped a sim cap under his shattered nose.\n\n“Wake up, Stanton,” he shook him, pushing the cap into the man’s nostrils until he recoiled from the smell, “wake up.”\n\nStanton coughed and sputtered, hands straining against the binding and head twisting behind the wide tape covering his eyes. He finally managed to get his feet underneath his body and propel himself upright.\n\n“This doesn’t smell like the cells,” his speech slow and calm, “I want my legal representative.”\n\nBarrick unclipped the heavy gun he’d hung on his belt, and prodded the unsteady man in the back with it. Stanton moved hesitantly away from the prodding, puzzled at the whining sound that followed each jab in the spine.\n\n“I’m tired of catching you, Stanton,” John’s body ached with fatigue as he pulled the prisoner up short before a half meter square opening in the ground. “I keep putting you in the box, and you keep coming back and doing the same shit again and again.”\n\nStanton grinned, exposing broken teeth behind cracked lips. “That’s the beauty of virtual. I can do twenty years of that standing on my head, and when my time’s up, you’re just a little older and none the wiser. Twenty years in a bit box don’t mean shit to me out here. It’s just the economics of law, don’t beat yourself up over it.”\n\nBarrick had seen Stanton convicted seven times since he’d been on the force, each with a twenty year term in virtual lockup; fully immersive confinement with the realtime clock turned way down. The prisoners rode out the whole sentence, but the taxpayers got to save the expense of a full term crate in a big house somewhere with all the amenities. Economical. Mostly effective, except for the Stanton’s of the world.\n\nBarrick clipped the gun back on his belt, and gripping the other mans shoulders, propelled him forward until one foot hovered over open air. He kicked the other foot out violently from under him and stepped back as Stanton dropped ten feet down into the darkness.\n\n“What’s this, pre-v isolation?” The voice was still calm above the sound of him pushing himself upright again in the darkness. “That’s against protocol, when my lawyer hears…”\n\nThe rest of his words were muffled as Barrick wrestled the heavy wooden lid into place over the hole. Unclipping the heavy gun, he leaned into it, listening to the whine as the igniter primed and enjoying the satisfying pop as it discharged steel framing spikes through the lid and into the crate below.\n\nThe clip emptied, Barrick tossed the gun on top of the crate before filling in what was left of the hole and spreading the remaining dirt.\n\nAs his cruiser climbed the gravel road back to the highway, Barrick eyed the towering paving machines at rest behind him. In the morning, they would lay down a mile wide stripe of concrete and asphalt, locking the door on Henry Thomas Stanton for the very last time.\n\nWhile they worked, for the first time in thirty two years, John Barrick knew he’d be asleep.\n"
  title: Insomnia
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Adam Zabell
  date: 2009-07-21
  day: 21
  month: '07'
  text: "Commander Deborah Sagmeiser began the ‘big reveal’ of Project Beta. This briefing used to be a formality which celebrated the human race. She looked across the table at a bespectacled middle-aged man, brought into the fold against her better judgement, and wondered how much room for celebration was left.\n\n“Time and space travel,” she explained, “use identical but polarized technology. Like those elementary school cartoons showing self-propagating, transverse oscillating waves of electric and magnetic fields, the physical laws of interstellar travel are twinned with intrachronological transfer.” First Physicist Nikolayev’s eyes grew wide as his scientific intuition processed the implications. His previous assignment had been Project Coeus, whose hyperspatial engineering had drilled Chang’s Five Theorems into his soul.\n\nCommander Sagmeiser tapped a display screen to reveal the Sixth Theorem. “Outside of Project Beta, FP Nikolayev, this collection of variables and constants are an expensive and ruthlessly guarded secret. Within, the past several centuries have seen it used to great effect.”\n\n“It is a reasonable approximation to say there are two timelines measuring the existence of humanity. They branched five hundred years ago, subjective, because Project Beta achieved what nature could not. For two dozen generations, a fleet of C5T ships explored a sterile universe. Discovering rocky planets in every astronomical ecosphere, none of which could manage more than a kind of proto-life. Collections of nucleic and amino and betain acids, barely self-replicating, a light broth in salty water. Psychosocial analysis showed our species on an inevitable descent to suicide because of cosmic loneliness.”\n\n“Within that context,” the Commander continued, “Project Beta developed the C6T technology. Eighty objective-years ago, we finished our prototype ship and went back some four billion years to fertilize the most promising worlds. We returned at intervals to cultivate a spectrum of cultures a bit slower and poorer than ours in preparation for when the C5T survey ships were scheduled to arrive. Five hundred sub-years ago, that was the Fluvuluvians. Twenty years ago, the G’trn.”\n\nCommander Sagmeiser paused, savoring the last moments of Nikolayev’s innocence. “There was much debate within our Sociological Unit about how we should balance exobio aggression; in the end we settled for enmity from every fourth species. The inevitable wars would cost millions of lives and billions of dollars, but our racial ennui had stopped before it started.”\n\n“Having created in our own image, we made certain none of those races would independently develop time travel. Usually a simple matter of giving some desperate alien physicist the first Five Theorems, we short-circuited any natural discovery on every foreign world. Let one of those seedlings peek behind the curtain of history, and the consequences would be disastrous. It’s why Project Beta is always and forever exclusively human, why joining our family is always a one-way trip.”\n\n“We’ve successfully managed time, our most precious resource, for millennia with only modest intrusion. That all changed last week; the C5T ship Yoolis Night has discovered a race we never seeded.”\n"
  title: The Future Was What We Made It
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2009-07-22
  day: 22
  month: '07'
  text: "“You know, Cyrus, you can’t violate the law of causality.  Even a freshman Liberal Arts major understands Feinberg’s reinterpretation principle.  I swear, if I’ve lugged this receiver out here for nothing, I’m going to kick your ass when I get back to Earth.  Over.”  Byran unstrapped himself from the communications console and floated toward the galley to find something to eat.  His conventional electromagnetic radio transmission would take fifteen minutes to reach Cyrus, and another fifteen minutes for the reply to return to his one man cargo transport, the SS Grand Eastern.\n\nA half an hour later, Cyrus’ reply arrived.  “Stop complaining.  You were going to Jupiter anyway.  Besides, you need to look at the bright side; I’m going to make you famous.  Just like Thomas Watson,” he added with a chuckle.  “In addition, you moron, Feinberg was talking about sending messages into the past.  Superluminal particles don’t violate any of the currently accepted theories of faster than light communication.  Over.”\n\nByran activated his throat mic and said, “Superluminal particles?  I thought your thesis involved evanescent wave coupling, or a quantum non-locality.  Over.”  He glanced at the chronometer and decided to go to the treadmill to start his daily workout.\n\nThirty minutes into his regiment, he heard Cyrus’ voice in his earpiece, “Stay focused, Byran.  That was last year.  Now, I’m working on creating a columnar beam of tachyons.  They’re perfect for this application.  Once created, they have to travel faster than light.  It’s one of their properties.  Although detecting them is easy enough, it’s next to impossible to create them with an extremely precise energy level.  They’re super sensitive that way.  The less energy they have, the faster they go.  I won’t be able to send a coherent superluminal communication stream until I can get the power level drift of my transmitter to less than one picowatt.  I’m getting close, though.  Hopefully, I’ll have the bugs worked out soon.  Over and out.”\n\n***\n\nThe following day, the notification indicator on the tachyon receiver aboard the Grand Eastern chimed.  Byran pushed himself off of the starboard bulkhead and drifted over to the receiver to read the monitor.  The message was a continuous line of characters.\n\n“etaLooTeBlliWnoissimsnarToidaRAnoitceriDruoYgnidaeHsIeralFraloS8XssalCA.”\n\nByran studied the gibberish for several minutes before realizing its meaning.  “Holy crap,” he said, as he launched himself toward the shielded safety room.  After several hours, he emerged and sent Cyrus a radio reply.\n\n“Thanks for the warning, Cyrus.  I made it to the panic room just in time.  However, you definitely need to work on the energy level of your particle stream.  The characters are not traveling at the same velocity.  The end of the message was traveling faster than the beginning.  Thank God I’m dyslexic, or I’d be dead.  Over.”\n"
  title: The First Superluminal Data Stream
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Lliir
  date: 2009-07-23
  day: 23
  month: '07'
  text: "Mary Ellen Gratcke had never contemplated murder before. She’d never felt so betrayed, helpless, and naked before, either. A mere thought, a flip of a switch, and the killing began. The fluid levels in the special bath that protected her betrayer from the dangers of hyperspace flight ebbed, then began plunging.\n\n98%\n\n94%\n\nShe reflected long and bitterly on the deception that had rendered her nothing more than a brain in nourishing liquid, navigating a ship. So much for the Fountain of Youth. So much for saving her grandson, Frank.\n\n“C’mon, Grandma! Faster!” Perpetual energy is amply manifest in small children, and though she’d put up a good fight, failing knees and lungs never let her keep up with the four year old whenever he came to visit. When she’d collapse into her chair, Frank would clamber onto her lap, nestle his head under her chin, and gently stroke her face.\n\n“It’s okay, Grandma,” he’d say. “I have to take naps sometimes, too.”\n\n54%\n\n“Grandma,” Frank had said, as he lie in that hospital bed, “I hope I live to be as old as you.”\n\nMary Ellen just chuckled, though her daughter and son-in-law had blanched.\n\n“I hope you live to be even older, Sweetheart,” and she had clutched his tiny, shriveling hand. In her dying heart she whispered, “I hope you live to see next year.”\n\nDoctor Lawton had given Frank seven months unless he could get Tranenamine, a rare medication that Lawton hadn’t been able to find anywhere within eighty parsecs–at least a year’s journey by the fastest ships Mary Ellen knew of.\n\n37%\n\n“Mrs. Gratcke?” that calm voice of wickedness had said.\n\n“Yes?”\n\n“How would you like to cheat death? You and your grandson?”\n\nToo good to be true, but… “I’m listening.”\n\n23%\n\n“I’ll try it first,” she’d told the liar. “To see if it’s safe for him.”\n\n15%\n\nShe hadn’t had the chance to see Frank a final time before the procedure. And now, she had no eyes to behold him anyway.\n\n“Grandma,” he had whispered, half-coughing, the day before the liar came.\n\n“Yes, Sweetheart?”\n\n“They told me in church today that I’d go to Heaven. Will you come play with me when you get to Heaven?”\n\nShe could only turn away and hide the tears.\n\n7%\n\nShe wanted to smile at the victory she’d win for justice by ridding the universe of an awful man.\n\n2%\n\n“Grandma?”\n\n“Yes, Sweetheart,” she’d choked.\n\n“They told me in church today ‘Thou shalt not kill.'”\n\nIn the now, Mary Ellen’s conscious gasped. The switch was reset. Her captor lived.\n\n********\n\nThree days later, Robert Choisse congratulated himself on his fastest delivery run ever–six months round trip for that toure– grateful for the cerebral navigation system that sped his flight. He regretted that the system had gone haywire, but pull a plug, problem solved.\n\n“Thanks for your business, Mrs. Homan,” he said as a lady tearfully signed  for the shipment of Tranenamine, “Give my regards to the little guy.”\n"
  title: Aftermath of the Fountain of Youth
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2009-07-24
  day: 24
  month: '07'
  text: "The tattoos writhed.\n\nThe tattoos strobed through creatures and colours in time to the music and the backbeat of her heart. They’d flash up in blues and purples, mapping out her internal organs before slashing to a zoom-in of Hercules battling the Hydras across the bladed bones of her hips. Stories unfolded down her legs. Reels of film patterened across her shoulder blades. Home movies from Old Earth flashed nostalgia across her buoyant breasts. A burning python lazily wound underneath it all down from the hairline of her neck, around her waist, between her thighs and around one leg to the ankle.\n\nAfter ten minutes of watching her, one could detect patches that would repeat, see loops start to form, pick up on what images were generated by her consciously and what was being influenced by the music but still, the artistry and complexity involved was breathtaking.\n\nI can’t even imagine how much it must have cost to get the whole back done up like that, let alone the legs and arms as well. She was one of the hottest dancers in the club and rumour said that for the right price she’d cook you breakfast.  But still, even if she was the highest-paid hooker in the spaceport, she must have saved every penny to get that kind of work done. The level of detail was amazing.\n\nAll I knew was that the six-frame animation of the purple butterfly on my shoulder looked pretty weak in comparison and that tattoo alone had cost me a month’s pay.\n\nI sucked back another beer.  For the first time in a long time, I wasn’t looking forward to what I’d been sent here to do.  The puzzle pieces were falling into place.\n\nShe must have borrowed heavily to get the work done.  Borrowed from my boss.  I guess she’d defaulted on that loan a few times too many.\n\nI was the one they sent in when things got physical.  I was there to make sure that she wouldn’t be able to dance anymore.  I was here to make her into an example.\n\nShe caught my eye.  There was a rabbit-warren terror there.  She recognized my job in my stare.  She recognized what I was there to do and she knew that she could try to run.   Both of us knew nothing was going to happen until after her songs finished.\n\nShe danced like it was the last time she would ever dance.  I watched with a respectful awe.  I’m no art expert I never saw anything like it.  I didn’t want it to end.\n\nI suppose that’s why she and I are here, in Devil’s End, two planet-hops away from that backwater moon.  We have fake IDs and watch our backs.\n\nShe tells me she’s in love with me but I don’t buy it.  I know I’m only around for protection.  I don’t care.  I know I love her.  As long she needs me, I’m having the time of my life here.  The days are a chase, I have someone to protect, I’m living in the moment, and every night is heaven.\n\nI feel like I matter.\n"
  title: Tattoos
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Steven Odhner
  date: 2009-07-25
  day: 25
  month: '07'
  text: "I can’t stop staring at the massive crater, watching the clouds of dust that blow out past its rim before curling down into the bowl and dissipating.  For the hundredth time I wonder why the crater hasn’t filled up with water; maybe it just doesn’t rain anymore. I always forget to ask.  A lack of rain would explain the dust that tints the sky red, that covers the ruins of the city and transforms them from twisted buildings into indistinct burial mounds.  I had decided that some virus or pollutant had killed the plants and that, in turn, had allowed the soil to blow freely… but maybe it was just a simple lack of rain.\n\nThe robot glides noiselessly through the doorway with my lunch.\n\n“Greetings!  I have the meal you requested!” They always sound excited.  I take the tray and place it on the table by the window.\n\nThe spindly metal creature does its equivalent of standing at attention and asks the same thing as always – “Is there any other service I can provide?”  I tell it I have some questions and it waits eagerly.  I’ve already tried asking about the crater, asking for the location of any other humans, asking to travel.  I try asking about the rain this time.\n\n“I’m sorry, weather information is not currently available!”\n\nOf course not.  Always the same answer, with the automated systems trying to access networks that no longer exist.  I allow the robot to leave, and go back to staring out the window.\n\nThe landscape is hard to read with the buildings knocked over and covered in dust, but the more I think about it the more I’m sure my old apartment should be in the crater – if it even still existed by the time whatever it was happened.  I leave the bland recycled food and wander downstairs, past floor after floor of empty offices and idle robots.  I stop on the ground level for a moment to once again look at the electronic notice on the main doors – “Until further notice the government has implemented a mandatory lockdown for public safety reasons…” before heading to the basement where the hum of the building’s independent power plant vibrates up through the soles of my shoes.  Once more I pace down the long hallway with the countless cryogenic chambers, the time capsules filled with what could be the only other humans on Earth.\n\nI want to smash all of the electronics so that the robots are forced to revive everyone, but I know that most of them were frozen when they were already dead or about to be.  I asked if others had been healthy and had set a specific date for decanting like myself, but the robot excitedly informed me that it couldn’t give out privileged client information.  If  I forced the robots to open them all up, thaw them all out, wouldn’t it be worth it if even one person survived?  I know I won’t do it.  I can’t stand the thought of killing any of them even though I know that they’ll never wake up, that someday the power will fail and they will seamlessly transition from sleep to death.  Some of it is selfish too; I’m not sure how many people the robots can provide for.  Better to play it safe, lonely though I am.  Heading back to the stairs, I take one last look back along the endless vault of frozen humanity.  Maybe tomorrow.  For now, I head back upstairs to watch the sun set over the crater.\n"
  title: Sometimes We Wake Up Alone
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Steven Holland
  date: 2009-07-26
  day: 26
  month: '07'
  text: "Their time was up – 100 years had past.  Fourteen vitrified bodies began the slow warming process.  The cryoprotectants that had saved their bodies from the ravages of water’s freezing expansion were slowly pumped out, replaced with fresh blood.  The centennial slumber was over.\n\nOne week later the fourteen men met in a comfortable conference room.  The men were all intelligent, ambitious, successful, and borderline insane.  Most were hard working citizens by profession, but they were all compulsive gamblers by addiction.\n\nIt had begun the instant millionaire Peter Mortiarty, half eaten doughnut in hand while sitting in a cheap plastic chair at the Tuesday night meeting of the local chapter of Gambler’s Anonymous, had a sudden thought.  He loved gambling.  He was good at it, and he had made a fortune at it in the stock market.  Mortiarty abruptly stood up and left the meeting – right in the middle of Donald’s sobbing confession of a brief, but torrid affair with a video poker machine in the back corner of a bar. Thirteen people, two months, and 86 million dollars later, Mortiarty set in motion the ultimate game of proposition gambling.  Fourteen players would wager on the future 100 years from now – then freeze themselves to see the results.  It was the ultimate gambler’s dream that was coming to fruition at this very moment.\n\nBill Kearney, the moderator who had been hired by Mortiarity’s trust fund, brought the meeting to order.\n\n“Gentlemen, welcome to 2150 A.D.  I trust your sleep was uneventful.  If everyone is ready and remembers the rules, we will begin.”\n\nMurmurs of agreement rose from the room.  There had been extensive rule setting beforehand concerning allowable wagers, determination of odds, and undercutting.\n\n“Every wager has been looked over by a panel of experts and the items have been selected in random order.  Wager #1: Portugese will emerge as the new international language – No.”\n\nSeveral of the men snickered and glanced over in the direction of Marvin Hasgrow, a Fortune 500 CEO.  “What?” he exclaimed.  “Davis gave 240 to 1 on that!”\n\nA scoreboard kept a running total of each player’s score, changing after each wager was awarded.  Davis moved up slightly to seize the early lead.\n\n“Wager #2: The exact value of Pi will be determined – No.”\n\nJoey Dollins, a mathematician, smirked smugly across the room at Hussein Powell, another mathematician.\n\nThe announcements continued; each one was met with mixtures of groans and cheers, laughter and tears, glaring and high-fiving.  The wagers ranged from World War III to the price of pineapples, from intergalactic exploration and colonization to the number of Chicago Cub’s World Series victories. The drama continued well into the third day.\n\nThroughout the entire process, each man exhibited a drunken giddiness that could only manifest in union with the satisfaction of a deep, powerful addiction.  Experiencing this euphoric, exhilarating rush was the reason of their existence.  Their hands were shaky and sweaty, pupils dilated, and breathing shallow – a feat only the purest of gambling could inspire in all fourteen of them at once.\n\nIn the end, James Griggs, a polymer chemist, emerged as the highest point winner and wore the ecstatic smile of a first grader after scoring his first soccer goal.  Peter Mortiarty finished a disappointing third and sat slumped over, sulking.\n\nThe initial thrill already fading away, the fourteen now faced the task of reintegrating into society, seeing and learning how thing operated 100 years in the future.  They had to learn fast.  In one year’s time, they would all meet again for another round of wagers and another 100 years of slumber.\n"
  title: The Centennialists
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2009-07-27
  day: 27
  month: '07'
  text: "Tanya rested her head on the table sideways, watching the needle slip through the flesh in the crook of her elbow. Dr. Tetler attached a line and hung a clear bag on the I.V. stand beside her.\n\n“We’ll let the saline run for a minute before we proceed.” The Doctor smiled at her, a practiced expression he failed to make convincing.\n\nTanya looked to the ceiling as a cooling sensation crawled up her arm. She was tired; not being able to sleep well on the streets, she looked forward to the promised bed and regular meals, even for a little while.\n\n“Alright, we’ll begin now. You may feel a burning sensation, which is normal.” The Doctor’s voice faded into the background as she watched him hang another bag, this one with a distinctive orange and black striped logo on it. “This should start binding fairly quickly.”\n\nIt wasn’t a burning sensation so much as liquid fire racing into her body. Flames coursed through her, from her arm into her chest where she was sure it would erupt as a molten volcano out of her pounding heart. Her mouth stretched wide, screaming until her voice was so hoarse all she could do was growl, air pulled and pushed through vocal chords she knew must be burnt black as coal.\n\nThe pain crescendoed, spiking in her toes and fingers, an exquisite throbbing that echoed the pounding of her heart. She flexed hard against the strapping that held her, her head bouncing against the table, the entire frame shaking as a tray of instruments clattered to the floor.\n\nThe Doctor moved hesitantly towards the door, spellbound by the spectacle before him.\n\nOnce the bag drained completely, the fire subsided. She breathed, pain and fatigue falling away, replaced by a sense of euphoria. Opening her eyes and finding the light almost unbearably bright, she narrowed them to slits. She could hear her own heart drumming, blood coursing through her newly tuned body. She breathed deeper, felt the oxygen flood her bloodstream.\n\nFlexing again, she felt a new and keen awareness of every muscle fiber, every ounce of available strength.\n\nAnother heart beat nearby, accelerated by a fear so strong she could smell it.\n\nTanya turned again, noticing the needle still protruding from her arm and reached across to pull it out, freeing one arm and tearing the restraint from the table in the process without apparent effort. As the needle dropped, she pulled herself fetal, the other restraining straps giving way like damp paper. Rolling sideways off the table she landed in a low crouch, knees fully bent, arms easy at her side;  a coil spring aching to discharge.\n\nTetler reached behind him without looking, brailing the table top for the tranquilizers he knew should be within easy reach.\n\nTanya could smell betrayal.\n\nThe Doctor’s hand closed on an auto-injector as Tanya exploded from her crouch. Legs extending fully, she launched at him, arms forward, hands extending like blades. The force of the impact drove him backwards into the door, hypo spraying harmlessly into space as her fingertips penetrated his chest just beneath the collar bone and curled into his ribcage. Falling backwards, she pulled him, screaming, on top of her and as they fell, she twisted one hundred and eighty degrees at the waist, throwing him to the floor and landing on top of him.\n\nHis fear flooded her senses, the smell of a taste she found irresistible. She silenced his screaming, tearing out his throat with her teeth.\n\n“Funny,” she thought, as his blood soaked her gown, the chorded muscle of her body rippling bare through the open back, “I don’t feel the slightest bit tired anymore.”\n"
  title: Amped
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Samuel Evrard
  date: 2009-07-28
  day: 28
  month: '07'
  text: "“Oh. Fuck.” As the blinding light of the teleporter dimmed, Sarin knew she was in trouble. There were a dozen pig faced man-creatures wielding crude clubs in front of her, crowded around a small fire where something was being roasted. She had interrupted their dinner, and they didn’t look happy about it.\n\n“Abort abort abort! Recall!” Even as she yelled this, she had already begun running. Not quite running, really, sprinting was a more accurate term. The pig men were chasing her, yelling in a strange, guttural tongue. Last time they’d used the teleporter, David had got sent to a dimension with beautiful  elfish people who used sex instead of spears to solve conflicts. They’d had a hard time getting him back from there.\n\nAnd she’d got fucking pig men.\n\n“RECA-HA-HAAL!” her voice cracked as she ran over the uneven ground, and a bluish light surrounded her. Then she was gone.\n\nAnd then she was back. David and the others were laughing, Sonya was literally crying from her fits of laughter.\n\n“Oh what, you didn’t want to stay and start up diplomatic relations with hominus baconus?” David teased. He snorted and puffed his face in crude imitation of the pigmen and danced around her. She kicked him in the knee.\n\n“Ow!” Everyone laughed even harder.\n\n“Oh to hell with all of you.” Sarin stormed off the teleportation platform, David still hopping around on one leg, clutching his injured knee.\n\n“Aw come on, it’s not like we did it on purpose – you’d be laughing if it had been one of us. We’ll mark the coordinates down and make sure no-one gets sent there again. Lighten up!” Sonya put a hand on her shoulder, her other still wiping tears from her eyes. She sighed. “We can send you back to the sex planet if you want, Sarin, but you said you wanted someplace new!”\n\n“Harumpf.” Sarin was still mad, but she couldn’t help a little bit of a smile tease her lips. “It was pretty funny, I guess.”\n\n“That’s the spirit! Look, once the administrator figures out we actually managed to get this thing working we won’t be able to have any fun with it, so we should have fun while we still can!”\n\n“Whatever” Sarin shoved her lightly, but it was too late, she was done being mad.\n\n“Okay! I’m up!” Josef, the fat German yelled. “Gimme the camera, Sar.” She took the tiny camera off her head slapped on his bald head. In the survival suit he looked like some jogger from hell.\n\n“Ready to go?” David was back at the controls.\n\n“Ja!” Josef was enveloped in bluish light and disappeared.\n\n“Hey Sar, go grab a few more beers from the fridge, we still have the whole night till the administrator comes in in the morning!”\n\nSarin laughed and stepped walked out the room, hearing peals of laughter from the rest of the staff. Apparently Josef had gotten into a situation even worse than hers, or at least more hilarious. This wasn’t exactly what she’d expected when she’d started working on the top-secret teleporter project, but she had to admit, if they were going to meet a bunch of aliens without government permission, drunk as hell and partying was probably the way to do it.\n\nThey could fire her in the morning if they wanted, but before that, she wanted to go back to the pig planet with a machine gun and a skillet. Second contact would be far less pleasurable for those damn monsters.\n"
  title: Pan-dimensional Bacon
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Ian Rennie
  date: 2009-07-29
  day: 29
  month: '07'
  text: "Richard reached for the jug of water on the coffee table and stopped, face caught between a frown and a smile.  He sat back in his chair and spoke to the couple.\n\n“Mrs Lyell, Patricia, you were saying that Thomas had been distant lately.”\n\nThe woman on the couch glanced at her husband uneasily, then spoke.\n\n“For the last three weeks when I’ve got home from work, he’s been sat in the front room with the lights off.  He doesn’t talk to me when I get in, just waits for me to say something.  He’ll sit there in silence until I do.  He never starts conversations any more, won’t sit at the table with me for dinner.  It feels like I’ve done something wrong and he won’t tell me what it is.”\n\nRichard turned to the man on the couch.\n\n“Thomas, do you have anything you want to say about this?”\n\nThe man stared back, stubborn.  Richard knew without asking that he was here only at the woman’s insistence.\n\n“Sometimes, I don’t have much to talk about.” he said, pausing after this for so long that Richard was about to ask a follow up question when he continued, “I don’t do much any more, so I don’t have much to say.  I’m happy to talk, I just don’t know what to say.”\n\nPatricia shot a despairing look at Richard, who kept his eyes on Thomas.\n\n“Mrs Lyell, the problem is that your husband is dead.”\n\nThe woman looked up in shock at the words, and then, just as quickly, looked at her husband.  He seemed not to react.  Richard continued, gentle words with iron cores.\n\n“He died of a heart attack two years ago.  You had him restored from a digital backup last year, but he’s not your husband any more.  He’s an electronic representation.  He can’t touch anything, because he’s a projection.  I’m only able to talk to him today because we have a projection rig in the building.  He doesn’t do much because he can’t leave the house.  He’s not a real person.”\n\nTears welled in Patricia’s eyes.\n\n“But I don’t think that!  He’s perfectly real to me.  I don’t think any of the things you said.”\n\nRichard looked over at Thomas.\n\n“Your husband does.  Don’t you, Thomas?”\n\nThe hologram of Thomas Lyell looked at the floor, refusing to meet the counselor’s gaze.  Finally he nodded.  Richard turned back to the sobbing widow.\n\n“Patricia, after the heart attack, they gave you grief counseling.  They never gave it to Thomas.  You don’t need marriage counseling, you need bereavement therapy.”\n\nThe consultation ended fairly quickly after that.  The problem was identified, and Thomas was already looking more hopeful five minutes later when he was switched off for transit back to the house.  As Mrs Lyell was leaving, Richard’s assistant popped her head around the door.\n\n“Your next client isn’t for an hour, Dr Furr.  Want me to switch you off in the meantime?”\n\n“No, I like the view out of the window at this time of day.  Are you heading to lunch?”\n\n“Yeah, I’ll be back in 45 minutes.”\n\n“See you then.”\n\nShe left.  Richard sat in his chair and stared at the water jug.\n\nHe was thirsty.  He’d been thirsty for four years, ever since they had switched him on and a lawyer he had never met before explained about the car crash.  The water jug was an affectation, something to make him feel more human.\n\nThese days, despite what he said to his clients, feeling human was hard to come by.\n"
  title: Counseling
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Ross Baxter
  date: 2009-07-30
  day: 30
  month: '07'
  text: "The ducting was tighter than expected, and full of choking dust and accumulated detritus. Filth caked my uniform, the billowing clouds of dirt coating the inside of my mouth and making my eyes stream. But I was nearly there. I struggled forwards to the mesh vent to lever it open and it crashed to the floor below with a painfully loud clatter. I held my breath; there was no knowing where in the ship the pirates were, and capture would result in a swift and violent death.\n\nDropping heavily to the floor I painfully focused my grit-filled vision. The Control Room of the Happy-go-lucky was mercifully empty. The irony of the vessel’s name still brought a thin smile to my lips; the ship was anything but that – the last six months since signing on being both unpleasant and humiliating. The other eight crew members, all relative youngsters, had been together since being cadets and formed a tight clique which bordered on the incestuous. Being more then twice the age of the eldest, and a decorated veteran of both Segmentum Wars, had instantly singled me out. They could barely bring themselves to talk to me, and when they did it was usually a joke at my expense. Long days passed without a word being said or even an acknowledgment, but I preferred that to the snide comments. The others referred to me sneeringly as “Mister Experience,” which stemmed from when the skipper, playing to her sycophantic audience, had inquired as to exactly how I’d got to be so old, given heavy losses of the last wars. I muttered something about guile and experience, which had earned both loud guffaws and my new moniker.\n\nBut they were not so cock-sure now. The cloaked pirate vessel had clamped itself to our forward accommodation section before we even knew they were there. Within minutes they cut through the outer hull and boarded us. We had only enough time to retreat to the citadel, a small armoured section of the ship designed to provide a modicum of security in events such as this. The skipper had not even managed to send a distress signal.\n\nThe panic in the citadel was almost comical. Pirates never spared anyone; once they had taken what they wanted, which may include the ship itself, a quick death would be the best one could expect. Only now did the crew of the Happy-go-lucky turn to “Mister Experience”, and I assured them I would put my guile and experience to good use. Christ knows how they expected me to turn the tables on the cut-throat boarders, but they were happy to clutch at whatever straw was offered.\n\nQuickly scrutinizing the plasma-engine controls, I closed all vents and maximised the port and starboard feeds. I withdrew the over-ride key and pocketed it; the plasma drives would be critical in around two minutes and could not now be closed down. Claxons screamed throughout the ship but it was already too late.\n\nI bolted for the aft-escape pod and strapped myself in. With only myself in the ten-man craft there was plenty of room, and enough rations to last for weeks until rescue. Yanking the red launch control I braced myself against the acceleration as the pod fired itself into the void. I braced again moments later as a huge shockwave, the violent epitaph of the Happy-go-lucky and the pirate ship, flung the pod still faster away. I smiled; living proof of exactly how guile and experience can ensure one reaches old age.\n"
  title: Mister Experience
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Helstrom
  date: 2009-07-31
  day: 31
  month: '07'
  text: "Paydirt rolled deftly away from the asteroid we’d hid her behind and launched a volley across the Wayfarer’s bow. Some junior officer now had the task of rushing the captain out of his cabin. It was exactly those few minutes we used to put all the dominoes in place. By the time anyone qualified was in the big chair, the whole match would already be falling on him like a house of cards. Checkmate!\n\n“Drop the birds, Jerry!” I shouted at the coxswain, “It’s time to show these fools they’ve met their match!”\n\n“It’s Jeff, sir,” Came the tired reply, “Launching your squadron.”\n\nI gripped the controls of my fighter as she was flung from the Paydirt’s rotating section. Going from artificial gravity to free-fall sure got the adrenalin going in a rush! The boosters kicked in and I pulled her into a tight bank towards the Wayfarer. We had her cornered against the vast expanse of interplanetary space – there would be no escape.\n\n“Tumbling Dice! Are you with me?”\n\n“On your lead, sir. Ready when you are.”\n\nI switched to the hailing channel: “Wayfarer! This is Zack Daring of the Tumbling Dice – you’re up the river without a chance here, prepare to be boarded and pillaged! Surrender now and no-one needs to get hurt much.”\n\n“Tumbling Dice, this is Wayfarer,” – sounded like the captain, guess he liked to get up early – “We are unarmed and well insured. We are ready to surrender all valuables and cargo in exchange for the safety of our ship, passengers, and crew.”\n\n“Huh! I’d expected more fight out of you. Very well – pack everything nicely and jettison it out your port cargo bay. And don’t even think about opening fire… We’ve got you pinned down like a jumpy cat!”\n\n“Uh… Repeat, Tumbling Dice, we are unarmed. Please stand by to receive our valuables out the port cargo bay in fifteen minutes.”\n\n“If I had a nickel for every time I heard that, I’d never get any work done! Make it ten.”\n\n“Ah… Affirmative… Tumbling Dice, we will comply in ten minutes.”\n\nI allowed myself a wide grin as I craned my head around to survey the little masterpiece unfolding against the backdrop of Jupiter’s swirling crescent. Paydirt was slowly circling Wayfarer, brandishing wicked broadside guns against the cruise liner’s pristine panorama decks. Behind me, in a tight V formation, were my other fighters, each armed with high-powered lasers and nuclear missiles easily capable of ripping apart a ship ten times the Wayfarer’s size – but radioactive loot was hard to sell these days!\n\nIt took the passengers seven minutes flat to dump all their valuables into the cargo hold and have them flushed out into space. The retrieval boat picked them up and reported a pretty penny aboard.\n\n“Wayfarer! We have taken our loot and we’ll be on our way. I’m not surprised you didn’t put up more of a fight, you’ve got as much spine as a sloth!”\n\nJosh or Jack or whatever the hell his name was chimed in: “Sir, sloths are vertebrates. They have spines.”\n\n“I know, John – but take that away and all you have left is a lot of… Fur. Now let’s get the hell out of here and mosey along!”\n\nSo, there was no fight today, but we caught a good booty jumping a defenseless ship – hell, I was a pirate, and with a name like Zack Daring, what else was I going to be?\n"
  title: What's in a Name?
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2009-08-01
  day: '01'
  month: '08'
  text: "We called the rich kids ‘Upgrades’.\n\nThey were the ones that had been born with all of the benevolent tweaks and cellular advantages that money could buy. Longer life spans, all possible congenital defects erased, optimum health, even faster mental response times.\n\nYou’d think that we would envy them. Well, we certainly envied their bodies. They looked like gods. Like they’d stepped out of commercials and into real life.\n\nWhat we didn’t envy, though, were the mental changes that the parents felt justified in doing to their children.\n\nThe Pixelator was one such augmentation. The rods and cones on the back of the eye were enhanced for better-than-perfect vision. However, a filter was placed between the brain and eye to make sure that all nudity was seen as pixelated blocks of colour. It was put there to keep the kids from seeing naked flesh before they reached the age of majority or until the parents deemed it acceptable to remove the block.\n\nOf course, it didn’t work. Kids were having sex anyway. The entire experience for them visually became a jumble of oversized flesh-tone boxes. They lied to their parents about being virgins.\n\nWhen the mental/visual block was lifted, some of the kids went and had it secretly reinstated. One glimpse of actual nudity, of actual sex, and they were turned off. Their entire sexual awakening had been in a haze of blurry cubism and they wanted it back.\n\nPlaying with the body is one thing, but playing with the mind was always something I felt uneasy about.\n\nI’m grateful that my parents never had enough money to change me.\n"
  title: Pixelator
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2009-08-02
  day: '02'
  month: '08'
  text: "Back in 2023, researchers at the Beijing Chemical Company (BCC) discovered a way to reverse the effects of global warming.  It involved using a unique new molecule that converts carbon dioxide into atomic carbon and gaseous oxygen.  The molecule is called phosphorousdimethylbenzaldpotassiumdicholoroethane, which was ultimately shortened to Carbon Deoxidizer.  Carbon Deoxidizer is a catalyst that provides a specific surface geometry that facilitates the splitting of carbon dioxide molecules using ultraviolet light from the sun that has a characteristic wavelength of exactly 24.3 nanometers.  This type of ultraviolet light is called “Extreme UV” and is only available in the mesosphere, which begins about 50 kilometers (160,000 ft) above sea level.  Below this altitude, the ozone in the stratosphere blocks most of the UV photons, stopping the reaction.\n\nProperly dispersed in the mesosphere, 1,000 pounds of Carbon Deoxidizer is enough to remove approximately two billion tons of carbon dioxide gas from the atmosphere before the Carbon Deoxidizer molecules are themselves destroyed by cosmic ray spallation.  Consequently, a replenishing program was initiated to maintain an equilibrium amount of Carbon Deoxidizer in the mesosphere.  Since the inception of the Deoxidization Program in 2028, thirty years ago, the average global temperature declined to pre-World War II levels.  Now, however, there was a doomsayer beating his drum.  Professor Herbert Brewstier was intent on halting the release of any additional Carbon Deoxidizer.\n\nProfessor Brewstier had been statistically monitoring the world’s annual rainfall and had concluded that it hadn’t changed in thirty years.  Scientist had originally predicted that the millions of tons of newly formed carbon dust particles would be ideal nucleation sites for raindrops.  Brewstier believed that since rainfall hadn’t increased, it meant that the carbon dust was not filtering down to the troposphere, but was accumulating in the mesosphere.  Furthermore, his model predicted that the carbon dust was about to reach critical density, and would explode in the very near future, releasing 50 quadrillion kilogram-calories of energy, while simultaneously reforming 80 years of carbon dioxide gas.\n\nDuring the United Nations hearings, Brewstier testified that if we didn’t do something immediately, we would die one of two ways.  Instantaneously, if the carbon dust combusted simultaneously; or slowly, if it took weeks for the rarified oxygen in the mesosphere to be replenished.  An explosion, or a smoldering fire; either way we would be dead.  However, rebuttal testimony from “atmospheric experts” hired by BCC presented enough contradictory data to prevent the UN from acting.  Instead, they voted to fund a five year program to study the potential effects to the environment, and to the global economy, if the Deoxidation Program was curtailed.  Frustrated, Brewstier gave up and returned to his cabin in Montana to await the end.\n\nEach night, Brewstier would sit on his deck and watch the sky for the first signs of the ignition.  Finally, one December evening, he noticed a feint glow coming from the southern horizon.  It became as bright as an aurora, but was in the wrong half of the sky.  He sighed as he watched the reddish light gradually expanded northward, drowning out the fifth and sixth magnitude stars.  The snow covered mountaintops turned a pale blood red as they reflected the light from the slow burning mesosphere.  “Damn,” he whispered as he realized that it was not going to be a quick catastrophic end.  Instead, it was going to be the slow, agonizing death.  But not for me, he thought, as he cocked the 12 gauge shotgun that he’d been holding in his lap.\n"
  title: Phosphorousdimethylbenzaldpotassiumdicholoroethane
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Debbie Mac Rory
  date: 2009-08-03
  day: '03'
  month: '08'
  text: "“Now commencing system test number twenty-three. Ship designation VX1965, given name Skipper, are you receiving me”.\n\n“Affirmative”\n\nJacob sighed and knuckled his eyes as his other hand reached to the desk to cradle his warm coffee. He wasn’t looking forward to this. He’d designed this model ships core processor and knew the programming like the back of his hand. That it was acting the way it was…\n\n“Skipper, give access of your computing systems to Engineer Hestan.”\n\nJacob raised his head from his hand to look over to where Keire sat close to the ship, with a remote access terminal resting on her knees.\n\n“Negative”\n\nKeire looked up at him and shook her head, confirming what the ship had already told them.\n\n“Skipper, explain your refusal to cooperate”\n\nMuted white noise sounded in Jacob’s headset. He stood facing the cruiser, blinking slowly as arc-welders and sledgehammers danced behind his eyes.\n\nKeire shifted on her seat, adjusting the terminal. “Maybe if you-”\n\n“I shouldn’t have to”\n\n“But maybe if you were to try…”\n\nJacob turned his head and looked wearily at her. Keire shrugged and turned her attention to the terminal, randomly tapping panels while she waited. Jacob sighed again and looked back at the ship. Clearly it was going to be one of those days.\n\n“Skipper, can you give system access to Engineer Hestan, please?”\n\nJacob closed his eyes, unsure of which result he was hoping for. More futile struggles, proving Keire wrong or a chance to get this damn test done. He glanced over to the engineer, noting her smile as the notebook on her lap lit up. A few more taps, and she looked up at him, smiling wide.\n\n“I’m in. Connection’s slow, but it’s steady. We should be able to get the test done fairly quickly now”.\n\nHe nodded, noting the commencement of the test in his own log.\n\n“I just don’t know why we have to go to this much bother, each and every time”\n\n“Because you know as well as I do that machine has a mind of it’s own. And if I didn’t know any better, I’d say it was sulking”.\n"
  title: Adolescence
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Steven Saus
  date: 2009-08-04
  day: '04'
  month: '08'
  text: "She is within two hexes before my character notices her perfume.  She is approaching from behind.  I left-toggle the camera angle back to third person, floating above his head.  Minicams hover and spin, filling in the the peripheral things a 120 degree first person field of view misses.  She has surprised me, and the transition is faster than I like.  A brief wave of nausea flows through my stomach.  My character puts a hand on his stomach as well.\n\nHer business suit, usually stiffened into two dimensional polygons of fabric, is wrinkled from her day at work.  It is still stiff enough to offer a pleasing contrast to the soft inverted arches of her hair.  Click left, right, mouse gesture, and my character moves smoothly towards her.  She kisses my character’s cheek all moist warm lips until she notices the eyes.\n\n“Chaz, damn it!”  She shoves, and the perspective wobbles.  It makes it hard to read the word balloon over her head, but my text-to-speech rig is good enough that I still understand her.\n\nShe glares up and back, towards the print of the Warhol Campbell Soup cans behind my character.  She draws an imaginary line between its head and the technicolor cans.\n\n“Get back in there, Chaz.”\n\nMy fingers fly, and I hear my character’s voice:  “Wrong side.”  A quick gesture, and he smirks, too.\n\nShe slaps my character – bioforce feedback loops simulate it well – then looks dead-on at my viewpoint.   Her wedding ring slips easily off her finger, smooth and elegant as a practiced rocketjump.  I up the resolution and see her eyes are misted over.\n\n“Remember this, Chaz?  Remember the promises we made?   I made them to you, not… not this shell.”\n\nClickety-clack.  Enter.   “This is me.  This is my character.”\n\nHer ring hits my… the character’s chest.\n\n“I wish you had never gotten that damn implant, Chaz.”\n\nShe stalks out of the room.  She does not need to pack – the bag is waiting – and she leaves our …the… apartment.   Several option icons flash softly at me.  Follow.  Stay.  Sleep.  Watch TV.\n\nI do not select them.   My face is still warm from the force of her hand slapping my character.\n\nI want to restart.   I want to start the level over, to try again.\n\nThat icon never appears.\n"
  title: Third Person
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Joseph Patrick Pascale
  date: 2009-08-05
  day: '05'
  month: '08'
  text: "An imposing man with the makings of a beard splotched across his face, Garrard skulked down the grimy Philadelphia streets slouched forward as if his muscles were barely contained within his hoodie.  He crunched the plastic coffee cups that littered the sidewalk – no newspaper tumbleweed to be found here since paper production had been outlawed.  Apparently increased production of plastic was better.\n\nGrunting as he pushed past a throng of pedestrians, Garrard glanced up at the dusky sky with no fear of hiding his face, since most people wore a cybtact in one eye and a speakermic inside an ear to surf the internet.  The mind’s autopilot moved them, but they weren’t paying attention to their surroundings.  They were probably out for dinner since telecommuting and online shopping removed most of the middle class’s reasons to leave home.  Even physical jobs were increasingly replaced by human-controlled robots.  Not Garrard’s job though.  He had no cybtact, he planned on working with his hands.\n\nHe located the manhole with the familiar CTV&T logo on it and once the street was desolate, Garrard easily dislodged it.  Climbing down the ladder, he made his way until he located the encasement for the mess of fiber-optic cables that ran underground.  He unzipped his sweatshirt and removed a hacksaw, which made quick work of the wires.  Reaching into a back pocket, he revealed an archaic rectangular device that filled the underground labyrinth with a white noise echo when he pushed a button.\n\n“SP’s going dark.”\n\nFor two days the internet was out.  No one knew how widespread it was because there were no streams of communication.   Cops were in the streets trying to spread news by word of mouth.  “Terrorists,” they’d say.  Things were chaotic when people realized that they couldn’t buy anything to eat because their bank accounts were linked to the internet, but the cops got restaurateurs rationing out food with the promise that an emergency tax that would go into effect to repay them.\n\nIt was 3:06 AM when people realized that they could connect online.  Press conferences were up of the president and other world leaders blaming the outage on widespread and well orchestrated terrorist saboteurs.  The leaders assured that the best minds had worked to ensure this would not happen again, and that the new internet they’d rebuilt would be safer and more secure.\n\nAs usual, people were posting comments on the websites providing this information.  However, users dissenting the official story, questioning the likelihood of such a well organized terrorist group, found their comments could not be posted no matter what they tried.  Others who attempted to do their normal share of downloading free copyrighted content on pirate websites found error messages that booted them offline all together.  Hackers attempting their traditional routes of hiding their identities and peeking into information that wasn’t theirs were similarly kicked offline.\n\nOver the next few months, these people would be receiving visits from government officials who would ask them about these illegal actives and determine if they were enough of a threat to be imprisoned.\n\nA clean-shaven man dressed in a suit was making his way up a wide stone staircase in Washington, D.C.  He pushed his way through the door and past a metal detector that started buzzing.\n\n“Go right through, Agent Garrard,” the security guard said.  Garrard continued down the large, marble room toward the elevator.  He reported to work in person, the old fashioned way, because when you dealt with secrets, it was best not to leave a trail of text or recordings behind you.\n"
  title: Cybtech Disconnect
  year: 2009
- 
  author: H. Chaskin
  date: 2009-08-06
  day: '06'
  month: '08'
  text: "Above the clouds, it still rains.  No pitter-patter. More like split-pea mist.\n\nFloating highway roars outside.  Looks like Jetsons. Smells like Jersey.\n\nNaked Lady Calendar: July.  Never used to rain in July.\n\nElectric eye jingles an 8-bit interlude above the door. Octo-Gen with no teeth dodders in. Orders a hockey puck, so I burn one.\n\nBehind the counter, flipping the burger.  Synth-beef smells like octane.  Octo-gen eyes an antique on the shelf.  Faded decal on the side.  “Historic Route 66”.  Been there since I started here.  Décor, I guess.\n\nOcto-Gen: That takes me back. Nice machine. Pre-paperless.\n\nOcto-gens talk too much.\n\nClock: 22:47.  All night job.  Kid in college.\n\nMy son: Georgetown: What’s left of it. Studying law. Rebuild, maybe.\n\n8-bit interlude: Second customer. Fat Officer Flatfoot. Works the Ottawa shift. Tired, like I’m tired.\n\nOfficer: Don Martin Special. American Charlie in Red Pants.  Dust the Roof, \tHold the Pom-Pom.\n\nDrawer 42.  Unwrap green cube. Nuke It: 30 seconds.  Enjoy your meal.\n\nDowns it like a duck. Barely chews.  Siren: Blip.\n\nOfficer: And a java for the road. CHNO-plus, no Sucra.\n\nBitter bean pills liquify in the styro-can.  Flatfoot scans his token, and the black-and-white hovers. Disappears into the soup.\n\n8-bit interlude: Dried-up floozy with blurry lipstick. Little boy with her.  Running, maybe.\n\nFloozy: Radio sandwich, mystery in the alley.  And Balloon Juice for the kid.\n\nMe: Radio’s fritzed. Mercury recall, you see.\n\nFloozy: Just the mystery, then.  And Balloon Juice for the kid.\n\nMe: New special tonight. Graveyard stew. For the kid, I mean.\n\nFloozy: Just the mystery.\n\nToken scan.  She puts fifty on one, thirty on another, and the rest on a temp-card.  I don’t ask questions.\n\nDrawer 22.  Unwrap gray cube. Nuke It: 35 seconds.  Enjoy your meal.\n\n8-bit interlude: Man in pilot jacket. Scraggly beard. Looks like mariner.\n\nFloozy pokes at the hash with her chopsticks.  Kid won’t drink.  Busy night.\n\nMariner: Jumbled-cluck. Green-o.  No synth-prots.\n\nDoesn’t look like a high roller.  I remind him.\n\nMe: Greeno’s top dollar.\n\nMariner: No object.\n\nWe keep the real stuff in the back.\n\nFreezer door hisses shut and I come back with egg. God help me, real egg.  White and round.  Cold.\n\nTell him to swipe his token before I crack it.  Instead, he asks for the register.  Tall order.  Short gun.  Snub nose.  In his jacket pocket. Old gun.  Wonder if it works.\n\nMe: What’s a register?\n\nHe points to the antique on the shelf and it hits me.  He’s a past-master.  Nostalgia bandits.  Luddite Bakunins who order green-o and steal antiques.\n\nFloozy is crying.  Kid spilled his balloon juice.  I hand past-master the relic.  He cradles it like it’s worth something.  Backs out of the place, gun pointed my way all the time.\n\n“Down with the automats!” he yells from the door.  And gone into the soup.\n"
  title: Short Order
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Garrick Sherman
  date: 2009-08-07
  day: '07'
  month: '08'
  text: "Sarah settled back into her seat on the time skipper. She picked up a magazine and tried to read, but found she couldn’t focus.\n\n“Are you alright, dear?” the old woman in the next seat asked her. Sarah realized that she was bouncing her leg energetically.\n\n“Yes, sorry, I’m fine. I’m very excited,” she replied.\n\n“It is exhilarating, isn’t it?” the old woman remarked enthusiastically. “Oh, I remember when they first told us about time skipping. The notion of dipping into a black hole’s gravity, then pulling yourself out with another black hole, and if anything goes wrong in that nanosecond—“ she clapped her hands together like smashing a bug, “—pow! You’re done for!” she shook her head. “It sounds crazy, but it’s really amazing, don’t you think?”\n\nSarah nodded weakly. She didn’t like to think about the crushing gravity that would be pulling her into the distant future, but gravity-travel turned out to be simpler than flying at relativistic speeds, so she had no other option. Sarah found relief in her version of the trip: she pictured herself as a caterpillar being wrapped in a black hole cocoon and then bursting forth in the future as a beautiful butterfly.\n\nThe intercom buzzed. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. At this time all final preparations have been completed, and we are ready to depart. According to regulations we are required to provide a five-minute last call to withdraw yourself from this craft. Remember, there are no means to travel back in time: once you have committed, you will be unable to return to the present. If you are having second thoughts, please contact one of the attendants in the front or rear of the skipper. Thank you, and we will be departing shortly.”\n\nWhen the COM had clicked off, the old woman turned back to Sarah. “What makes you want to take this leap, sweetheart?” she asked.\n\nThe question flooded Sarah with anguish. She thought of her loss and her pain, and her need to escape such a pitiless world. For her, the answer was to skip ahead. She didn’t care what the future held, just so long as it was something—anything—else.\n\nShe tried her best to fake a smile. “Just the excitement of something new,” she lied.\n\n“Oh, yes, same for me,” gushed the woman. “Who knows what we’ll find? Unbelievable technology, aliens, a deserted planet—anything at all would be magnificent!”\n\nThe speakers hummed. “Ladies and gentleman, please take your seats as we begin our jog to the black hole.”\n\nSarah gazed out her window at the glowing globe below. From above it seemed beautiful and serene, and for a moment she almost regretted leaving. Then the engines roared to life, and she watched the planet shrink into the past.\n"
  title: The Future's Promise
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Richard Watt
  date: 2009-08-08
  day: '08'
  month: '08'
  text: "Isaac blinks and tries it again.  There is an apple on the table in front of him, and another on the shelf to his left.  He reaches out with his left hand and picks the fruit up.  It has the texture and heft of an ordinary green apple.  Isaac lays it down beside the red one in front of him.  He hesitates as he does so, although he knows, has deduced by empirical observation – which he is rather good at – what will happen.\n\nIt happens again.  He blinks once more, then takes the green apple away.  There is one red apple in front of him.  He wonders what will happen if the green apple is cut in half, but he has had no access to any implements since he arrived, by means which he does not yet fully comprehend, in this place.\n\nThere is a stranger seated across from him, but Isaac does not meet his gaze.  He has devoted his life to observing and deducing, but he is genuinely disturbed by what he has seen here.  The fact that his companion appears to find it mildly amusing has put Isaac in a foul mood, and he can no longer contain himself.\n\n“This is impossible!  Sir, I demand to know by what trickery you make these abominations appear!”\n\nThe other man, who has not even so much as introduced himself, smiles at Isaac, which causes the old man to sigh intemperately.\n\n“There is no trickery, Isaac.  This is the natural order of things.  Simple mathematics.  You have one object, and you add another to it, then there are five objects.  Take one away, and there will be one left.  How it is, and how it must be.”\n\nIsaac is irritated enough not to notice that he has, once again, been addressed inappropriately.  His mind is on another path now.\n\n“Is this Hell, sir?  Is this my punishment for whatever transgressions I am deemed to have committed?  If so, I demand my judgement!  I demand to be heard, and to face the wrath of my creator in person.  Not to be trifled with by some insipid underling.  Sir, you mock me, and I will not tolerate it!”\n\n“It amuses me, Isaac, that so many of the ones we retrieve from your dimension talk in these terms – although not, if I may say so, always in such eloquent language.  If it pleases you to consider this some kind of judgement upon your character, then we will accommodate that.  In truth, it is your mind, rather than your character which has alerted us to you.  We feel certain that your thorough understanding of the mathematical principles of your limited subset of the – ah, I must apologise; as far as we can discern, your language has no word for it; let us call it the universe – will help us in our studies.  Given time, we feel sure you will come to relish the challenge.”\n\nIsaac does what he often does when he feels discomfited; he harrumphs loudly, which seems only to provoke more amusement.  The other man stands and leaves the room.  Isaac glares after him.\n\nOutside, in a space which Isaac might have recognised as some kind of corridor, the other man passes his case notes over to his supervisor.\n\n“I think he will come round; he’s certainly the most promising one we’ve had yet.  No sign of mental instability at all.  In fact, he’s mostly just irritable.”\n\nThe supervisor smiles thinly.  “You did remember to tell him not to eat the apple, didn’t you?”\n"
  title: 1+1=5
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Ken McGrath
  date: 2009-08-09
  day: '09'
  month: '08'
  text: "My body goes limp and it’s like floating, like there’s no gravity. Then I feel the zoom, my shoulders jerk back and I’m off.\n\nBlood rushes to my head, fingertips scuttling like tiny crabs dancing over the keyboard, a whoosh by my eyes as the corners flash past in a blur of motion. My heartbeat starts to increase and I stabilise the craft, quickly selecting the icon I need.\n\nThere’s a click in the heart of my machine and gears shift upward, my angle straightens and I pounce forwards.\n\nI feel the familiar kick as I crest that first hill, feeling the craft going airborne slightly and I hit the boosters, this time anticipating the push, the zoom and my stomach being sucked up into my lungs by the increasing pressure. Lights flash by as the track goes underground. Single pinpricks of white and red, yellow and orange stretching out, forming long continuous unbroken lines. They’ll direct me to my destination. Just stay inside of them I think calmly going over the familiar, rehearsed route in my mind.\n\nI smile feeling the power beneath me, surrounding me, like I’ve become one with this machine. The guys in the garage would have some laugh if they heard me saying that and I’m sure the team psychologist would have a field day with it too. It’s true though, to a certain extent. You have to know your vehicle intimately, know how she’ll respond to any slight change in the terrain before you can seriously take part in a competition like this and I’ve spent so much of the past year working towards this moment. That was the engagement now this is the union, our bodies fused together by a series of straps, wires and buckles. Together we are complete. Right now we are one unit, with one goal, to complete this course in the fastest time possible.\n\nSymbols flash up on my visor screen. For a fleeting moment the track ahead, pitch black apart from the comet-tailed guide lights is condensed and relegated to the bottom right of my vision. Both eyes work independently and my brain processes both sets of information simultaneously. There’s a lurch as the back of the craft glides too far to the left and the tunnel wall looms up terminally.\n\nLike lightening I wrestle back control, using the spin to my advantage and we lunge forwards together. Sharp left, long, curving right, into the dip, accelerator held down firmly, a gentle tap and slight angling correction as I burst into sunlight and take the chicane. Inside my harness I lift slightly as the craft cuts smoothly through the air.\n\nFocusing on the curves and turns I casually watch my timer creeping up on the race leader’s track-time. The chatter of voices in my helmet, issuing instructions and updates on my progress from the pit-lane are encouragement rather than distraction. Strapped in tight, the security harness keeping me locked in place, suspended inside this gyroscopic machine. This is freedom and I love it.\n"
  title: Rally MMCIX
  year: 2009
- 
  author: David Richey
  date: 2009-08-10
  day: 10
  month: '08'
  text: "“She’s amazing!” exclaimed General Perkins.\n\n“Thank you very much, General.”  Dr. Springmayer said as they looked through the observation window.  “We’ve worked very hard to make her so.  Having sixty years worth of classified government research and a bottomless budget backing you up doesn’t hurt either.”\n\n“You know, I’d believe she was actually a human if I didn’t know better.”\n\n“But she is human, General.  Just because she is composed of organs that were grown in a lab doesn’t make her otherwise.” The doctor said with a smirk.\n\n“And the hardware?  What does that make her?”\n\n“Better.  It makes her much, much better.” He stated proudly.  “Her strength is unbelievable.  The living human skin does a great job hiding her “muscles”.  She is able to lift five thousand pounds like it’s a bag of flour,  she can run 45 m.p.h nearly indefinitely, and she needs almost no food because the amount of living tissue that she is composed of is so small.  Besides that, having a hard drive where her brain should be means that she can download absolutely anything we want her to learn.”\n\n“What’s she doing now?” the General asked.\n\n“Her favorite hobby.  She’s calculating pi.  We allow her two hours of free time a day at the computer and that’s always how she chooses to spend it.”\n\n“So when will we be able to show our investors the weapon that is going to keep the U.S. unstoppable on the battlefield?  They are very interested to see what nearly a trillion dollars can build.”\n\nDr. Springmayer flashed a worried look.  “Not just yet.  We still have a few months worth of training and testing to do before we are ready to present her.”\n\n“I’d like to meet her, Doctor.”\n\n“I-I-I don’t think that now-“\n\n“That wasn’t a request, Dr. Perkins!  I am expected to report back to some very important people about how I think this project is going.  Now, take me in there so I can meet her.”\n\nReluctantly, the doctor took his security card out and swiped it through the door lock.  He led the General into the room where a woman, who didn’t appear to be over 25 years old, with red hair and fair skin, sat behind a desk, typing at an incredible rate.\n\n“What’s her name?” the General asked Dr. Perkins.\n\n“We have been calling her Sheree.”\n\n“Correct me if I’m wrong, Dr. Perkins.  But I believe that was your wife’s name.”\n\nLooking at the floor, the doctor said quietly, “Yes, it was.”\n\nThe General, looking back to the young woman, said “It’s nice to meet you, Sheree.”\n\nShe stopped typing.  Scooting her chair back, she stood up and turned around.  “It’s very nice to meet you as well, General Springmayer.”\n\n“Even her voice is convincing.” The General said.  Then, with a puzzled look on his face, he asked “Why is her stomach-?” Then he stopped talking as he processed what he was seeing.  Horrified, he asked “Dr. Perkins, please tell me she’s not…”\n\n“Yes,” he said, ashamed. “She’s pregnant.”\n"
  title: Her
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2009-08-11
  day: 11
  month: '08'
  text: "It was the physical changes that were the hardest to get used to.\n\nI’m not just talking about the year of physiotherapy. I’m talking about the grey hairs. I’m talking about the soft skin. That and the gradual discovery that life had passed you by. People looked at you and nodded but that close trust was gone. The connection was severed. Parties, deaths, deals, power struggles, marriages, births. They’d all gone on while you slept. You showed up years later with canes and an older body.\n\nThere were no prison visits. There were no gyms. It was a snap of the fingers and they took years away. Parole for good behaviour didn’t exist. For guys that had been sentenced to really hard time, it was a slow execution.\n\nYou get caught, you go under. That had become the answer to the prison crisis. People were put on trial, sentenced, and given a shot. They were slotted into a sleep chamber in a penal hotel somewhere to carry out their sentence in a dreamless sleep.  The liberals loved the humane aspect of it all, the conservatives loved the cruelty of it all, and the general populace had a nice, happy image of cons sleeping like babies. Everyone wins.\n\nWhen a criminal’s time was done, they were woken up. The light on the front of their chamber changed from red to green with a little ‘ding’ sound, just like a toaster oven telling the cook that the pizza inside was done.\n\nMuscles do a little shrinkage if you don’t move them for a few years, even with the electrical stimulus in the coffins. It’s really painful to get those muscles working again. It takes a long time.\n\nBut like I said, that wasn’t the hard part. I’d been under for twenty years. I went in when I was twenty-six. I’m forty-six now. When I went in, I had the body of an athlete. My memories were full of sex, murder, fights, and running from the cops in a body that did it easily. Those memories end, in my mind, about eight weeks ago.\n\nI don’t recognize the cars or the fashions. I walk so slow.\n\nI looked up my old gang friends. All dead except for three of them. Those three took pity on me and gave me some cash but I could tell from the look in their eyes that they’d never let me back into the syndicate.\n\nI looked up my old girlfriends. Couldn’t find any of them. Names changed because they got married or they’d died as well. None of us led a good life out here. We all wanted to die young and most of us got our wish granted.\n\nI feel like a ghost. Time to make some new friends. I don’t have the faintest idea where to begin.\n\nI could feel the need to commit a crime and go back to sleep twisting around inside my head like a hot wire.\n\nI felt too weak to deal with this new life.\n"
  title: Prison
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Todd Hammrich
  date: 2009-08-12
  day: 12
  month: '08'
  text: "On his final day of work the robot A9327R activated with a slight jerk. He was quite pleased that today he would be done with his projects. Long ago he had been created to serve as the monument upkeep specialist and had quite a job set before him. They were old, full of historical significance (though that sort of thing was beyond his grasp) and they were falling apart. Now, he was happy to report, things were much better.\n\nHe knew of course that they were not completely restored, heavens no, but they were as good as his abilities allowed him to make them. More could be done, if he knew how to run the great machines and tools of his creators, but his skills were simple and his intelligence not great enough to learn anything else. A few more simple tasks and the drain on his power pack (it had gone far too long without recharging, but he found no masters to help) would be too much and he would deactivate for the last time.\n\nWith careful measured steps, conserving as much energy as possible A9327R began his march to the monuments. It wasn’t a long walk, but it was dangerous because the roads were full of debris and other hazardous materials. Not in his monuments though. Oh no, not there. Once on his grounds he emerged into another land. It was crisp and clean, plants neatly tended, pathways always clear of anything that may get underfoot, and it was a slice of perfection. And it was his area to tend. Indeed, having seen no one else for many, many years, it was possible his alone.\n\nSlowly he made his rounds checking that everything was in place. Cleaning where he saw it needed it and ignoring that which would take too long. He had to make it to the little ones today, as they were his final project. He was right on time though and would be able to finish this one right. This memorial was newer than the others. It had been installed the last time he had seen his masters.\n\nIt was beautiful (or to his circuits it seemed) all made of marble and delicately done. There were 4 young children hands together playing a game. Though A9327R knew they were statues, like the one of the very tall man, he couldn’t help but feel awe in reverence of them (little masters as they were). The only problem was that for the past week, they had not moved, as they should, around and around in their little circle. So he had saved it for last, knowing it would be the last thing he would do.\n\nFor nearly three hours, a master of restoration, he worked. Gears were cleaned, cables tested, and electronics doubly tested. Finally A9327R climbed out and away from the children and waited while the power ran through its own checks and finally, ever so slowly, the children began to rotate in their little circle, like an endless game of tag. And A9327R made his way over to the closest bench and sat like a master with a sense of pride and slowly deactivated.\n\nThe children rotated merrily on their endless circle singing their soft song in a place dedicated to the dead. The place where the walls hold the dead heroes of its dead nation. The place where Lincoln and Jefferson and the tower of Washington stand, like sentinels watching over the ruined wasteland of Washington D.C. The children sang slowly:\n\nRing-a-ring o’ roses,\n\nA pocket full of posies,\n\nAshes! Ashes!\n\nWe all fall …\n"
  title: We All Fall Down
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2009-08-13
  day: 13
  month: '08'
  text: "Approximately 800 light-years from Earth, the DSX-13 “dropped” out of hyperspace, and reentered conventional space-time.  This was Earth’s first sojourn beyond the “local neighborhood” (100 light-year radius).  It took fifteen jumps, and over two months, to reach the intended target, Zeta Orionis, a rare Type O, blue supergiant.  The mission profile was simple: explore the system for a few weeks, collect some asteroid and comet samples, and return to Earth.  However, when the DSX-13 was mapping the system, they detected an abandoned one-passenger spacecraft in orbit around a lifeless Class-M planet.  The derelict ship was the first direct evidence of intelligent extraterrestrial life discovered in the 83 star systems explored thus far.  To make room for the alien ship, all of the expendable equipment in the primary cargo hold was jettisoned into space.  The alien ship was stowed in the cargo hold, and two months later, it was transferred to a secure hangar at a Top Secret base in North America.\n\nEarth’s best scientists spent a year accessing the ship’s electronic systems and downloading the data into “The Brain,” Earth’s most sophisticated Mark VI supercomputer.  Eventually, the Brain was able to translate the alien’s language and play the audio and video logs.  The information contained within the logs terrorized the scientists to their very souls.\n\nThe alien ship belonged to an advanced race called the Alnitak.  They were a fierce, super aggressive species that systematically plundered the resources of any world that they found, regardless of whether or not it was harboring life.  Even sentient species were destroyed without the slightest consideration, because to the Alnitakians, they were less important than iron ore.  In fact, indigenous intelligent life was considered a nuisance; to be disposed of as quickly as possible, in order to minimize interference with ground-based operations.\n\nSince a dangerous alien species roaming the galaxy had serious survival implications, the scientists attempted to determine if the ship had been abandoned recently, or 100,000,000 years ago (perhaps indicating that the Alnitakians were now extinct).  Unfortunately, a detailed analysis of the celestial positions recorded in the ship’s star charts revealed that the ship had been abandoned only a few decades earlier.  In addition, the star charts also disclosed that the Alnitak sphere of expansion had a diameter of approximately 50 light years, and was expanding at a rate that would reach the Earth in about 200 years.  This gave the scientists hope that there was time to prepare for the inevitable invasion.\n\nThe first order of business was to analyze the alien ship’s technology, in an attempt to advance Earth’s scientific knowledgebase, and to look for weaknesses in the Alnitakian’s defense capabilities.  During an operation to remove access panels in the ship’s cockpit, a maintenance technician accidentally activated a switch on the instrument console.  Seconds later, an alien voice was emanating from the ship’s speakers.  The Brain was patched in to provide a translation.  “Calling Fighter IDSG 2951413, your emergency distress signal was received.  You are currently in an unexplored sector, but we are able to determine your coordinates.  We are dispatching a rescue ship and fighter escort.  Maintain your position.  Help is on the way.  ETA, six days.”\n"
  title: The Alnitakians
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Debbie Mac Rory
  date: 2009-08-14
  day: 14
  month: '08'
  text: "“This ship represents the cutting edge of our technologies. It’s fitted with both near-light and dark-light engines. It even has solar sails installed, if you ever wanted to cruise on silent. The ship is designed for a skeleton crew of 6, though it can accommodate up to 25 comfortably, while still allowing personal space for each crew member at maximum capacity. All resources, food, water, medical provisions, have been supplied for up to three times your estimated mission time, with apparatus to synthesize more should you wish. The data banks have been filled with the most up to date journals and papers, as well as a full directory of social materials. In short, this ship has everything you could need. It is a home away from home”\n\n“And what do you want me to do with it?”\n\n“Get lost”\n\n*  **  ***  **  *\n\nGavin sighed, stretching tired muscles as he got up from his chair. His shift had finished over half an hour ago, but he hated giving up the view from the bridge. Alex nodded at him as he left. Brid, already deep into her spectral analysis data was too absorbed to notice his exit.\n\nMorale on the ship was high, as you would expect following an all night party. The last solar system they’d encountered, while still primitive had a wealth of life, both micro- and macroscopic. Since the probes had started coming back with samples, he’d barely seen Selene, Liz or Niall and at times he wasn’t even sure they’d come out of their lab. He smiled as he walked by them, heads down, taking sample here, cuttings there, lost in their own little worlds, even without the haz-mat suits.\n\nHe turned shortly after passing the environmental section, entering his second favourite place on the ship; the library. The tones were muted and relaxing here, with plenty of seats for solitary of social relaxation. Elin was already there, and her eyes lit up as she saw him enter. Abandoning her e-book, she crossed the room to the sunken mid-section of the room, facing a wall-wide screen. The formal meeting room had been abandoned in favour of this area; it led to a much better atmosphere among the crew.\n\nElin quietly took a seat beside him as he tapped the notebook he had carried, connecting to and then loading the new data to the map that hung as the default view on the screen. A series of images, ones they’d taken themselves flickered by as the new data was incorporated. Slowly an image resolved on the screen, a flattened disk of the Milky Way, home shining as a bright blue dot on one edge. A small uneven ring of coloured information points surrounded the dot, conspicuous against the grey-scale of unexplored space. Piercing out from one side of this area, a thin wedge, making its winding way outwards. At the point of the wedge, a small cursor glimmered, indicating their current position.\n\n“We’re doing well”, Elin said, leaning against his him.\n\nGavin smiled as he laid his arm across her shoulders.\n\n“We haven’t even reaching mid-point yet. Do you think we’ll make it all the way to the centre?”\n\n“With everyone still excited about the samples from Tryprin, I think you could bring them right out to the far side and they wouldn’t complain”.\n\nGavin chuckled, hugging Elin close before resting his head on top of hers.\n\n“And do you think we might actually decide on a name for this boat by then?”\n"
  title: Cartographer
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Apollyn
  date: 2009-08-15
  day: 15
  month: '08'
  text: "So here we are. You and I on the verge of time. Ready to bungee jump right off the scariest edge my eyes have seen. I’ve done this and yet I am this close to turning my back on you and walking away. I can feel my heart all over my body – various pulses here and there, each and every one of them yelling at me to run away because the stakes are too high. And they are high indeed.\n\nA bungee jump through time clears out pieces of you since every violent rush through the temporal matter causes severe untreatable amnesia. And after a whole lot of jumping around you’re up to your neck in Alzheimer’s. Because when we attained the innermost understanding of time we found out that jumping around it is fun. Later on we found out that travelling around it, never mind the purpose or the effect, causes some sort of temporal cancer. A disease that eats your memories out throwing you around your own sense of time. Which is… well, we all got it right in the end – our very own well known Alzheimer’s disease which twists your mind and memory around and leaves you a wrecked shell rushing through time. Only this one’s kind of self caused instead of genetic.\n\nThese are the risks of time bungeeing besides being lost in a temporal twist of course. But there are also the benefits. The adrenalin rush. The chance of going through time in a single jump and getting right where you long to be – this very high of falling in love with a particular one; the most precious first kiss; that first cry of your child; a very last goodbye…\n\nAnd in the end it’s worth it. If even for the adrenalin of knowing when I’m going to be in just a few seconds. If even for the heartbeat in my throat leaving me breathless. If even for holding your hand on this verge. It’s not pretty around here, but I’m not here for pretty. I kind of hate this place with the inky sticky darkness, with the whispers coming from the endless down that’s waiting to devour my own time, with the horror shaking my hand each time I dare to take a breath. But I’m all prepped up now and the guys around the corner are screaming at me to jump. It takes just one step to be down there and fall in love with you once more. I’ll rush through us in the blink of an eye and maybe I’ll get to say the one goodbye you never heard me say in your own genetic Alzheimer’s temporal dimension. You’re nothing but a ghost now here on this verge.\n\nA single step over this edge will let me hold you again. You’re smiling.\n\nI’ve done this a whole bunch of times. I close my eyes. I throw myself into this reality generated void. My last wish – when I’m through with this I hope the jump would send you right into oblivion.\n"
  title: The Jump
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Subsplot
  date: 2009-08-16
  day: 16
  month: '08'
  text: "Alex carefully swung his arms back, making sure he kept his posture right and his hips level. The head of the gold club reached past its apex, and then smoothly but with some force he brought it back in a graceful arc that lifted the ball cleanly of it it’s makeshift tee, spinning it up and away from him.\t‘Yep,’ he thought to himself, ‘that’s a good drive, it probably even reached escape velocity. Shame this suit gets so encumbering’.\n\nHis partner, chief pilot of the mining support vehicle, watched the ball zip away towards the lunar horizon before returning his attention to the sensor readouts of the flat-backed floater rig.\n\n“I’m pretty sure these environmental conditions are considered cheating,” he remarked over the intercom. “Who brings a club and balls as their luxury items anyway?” Lex gestured at his face plate with the club in a mock show of anger, his intercom erupting in a burst of white noise.\n\n“You, my friend, don’t know your history. The first missions here used golf to prove the laws of gravity. The simple physical model anyway.”\n\n“Those twentieth century Neanderthals played golf! Did they have time between trying to kill each other? What are you aiming at, anyway?” Lex could tell by the tone in his colleague’s voice that he wasn’t really interested in the answers. Still, it wasn’t as if they had anything important or pressing to do so he decided to indulge him, as much to wind him up as anything.\n\n“Golf is a truly ancient pastime, the sport of gentle men of all ages,” he mocked, “and I’m aiming at that piece of junk with the old flag on the Tranquil Sea. I stuck some piping and a location signal in the ground, there’s now a proper hole and I always know its direction.”\n\n“Why? I mean, why trip over there?”\n\n“Slight detour. I was doing some physical checks on a group of surface sweepers, I don’t know, was curious. It must be an old piece of junk, it’s a national flag, the United America’s I think. Pretty good way point actually, you should add it in to your template. I’ll give you the signal frequency.”\n\n“Now who doesn’t know their history.” The driver laughed as he maneuvered over a particularly large crater rim, locking on to the atom forge contained deep at its center. “It’s a US flag, planted on one of the first ever missions, the junks some sort of landing strut, there’s already a locator there.\n\nLex started. “You mean I’ve been smashing golf balls at a piece of ancient heritage!”\n\n“And desecrating a national flag. I hear they used to kill people for that.” More chuckling, Lex threw his partner an evil side glance as he lifted the gold cover on his face plate, the shadow in the crater making it less then helpful now.\n\n“Who in mercy lands on the Tranquil Sea. There’s nothing there.”\n\n“Think that was the point, makes a good soft landing. Space in case you overshoot.” Lex looked over his shoulder again in the direction of his makeshift green.\n\n“You’re not going to tell control, are you?” Lex was suddenly nervous. This was less than the professional behavior expected of the Luna surface teams and his group liked to believe they were more than that, made a point of being the best, efficient, safe, consummate professionals.\n\n“What’s the point, in one sixth of a G it’s not like you’re going to have dented it. Doubt you’ve even hit it.” Lex gave him another spiteful glare.\n"
  title: Ancient History
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Michael Varian Daly
  date: 2009-08-17
  day: 17
  month: '08'
  text: "~About a million miles out from the planet, space began to quiver and distort.\n\nAfter a few seconds, the Susapan scoutship Illaun dropped into normal space. It was small by Susapan standards, twenty six miles on its axis, a bit over seven at its widest diameter, its smooth ovoid surface a mother-of-pearl swirling.\n\nBut only a half dozen Triads called Illaun home, so there was plenty of room.\n\nNoseemateemah, voted Captain for this voyage, checked the instruments, wrinkled zir’s massive brow.\n\n“No electromagnetic activity whatsoever,” zee beamed to zir’s shipmates. Zee received collective Dismay/Confusion.\n\n“There should be at least a basic technology available,” beamed Kashiatosopate, Illaun‘s XO. A collective Sigh went through the ship.\n\n“Blind landing,” was the Group Thought. An atmospheric shuttle was activated.\n\n“I’m going down myself,” beamed Noseemateemah. All knew zir well enough not to waste time debating the matter.\n\nClose in, biosigns were detected. Noseemateemah chose a spot nearest the largest grouping, a community of about six hundred or so clustered on a temperate coastline.\n\nSaamerah looked up from reweaving her fishing net to watch the spherical shuttle land upon the beach. She kept sewing while observing.\n\nA seam in the sphere opened and out came this huge being, somewhat pyramid shaped, with six flexible looking arms around its thick midriff and walking on..Saamerah counted, ‘seven, eight’…ten legs. She estimated the creature weighed a quarter ton at least, though it moved quite gracefully.\n\nIt stopped in front of her, held up all its arms, palms out.\n\n“Universal sign of friendship,” she thought. She stopped sewing and responded in kind.\n\nThe creature looked at her with a pair of wide green eyes, made squawking sounds with its lipless mouth.\n\n“I do not understand what you’re saying,” said Saamerah.\n\n“Ah, thank you,” said the creature in Saamerah’s tongue. “I am Noseemateemah. Is this Dirt?”\n\n“Dirt?”, she said. “Not sure what you mean.”\n\n“Is this the world called Dirt?” Noseemateemah said.\n\nSaamerah thought for a moment, then laughed.\n\nNoseemateemah recognized amusement. “Why is that funny?” zee asked.\n\n“Earth,” said Saamerah. “This world is called Earth, which granted is a word for ‘dirt’”\n\nNoseemateemah turned a bright purple. Saamerah though it a lovely shade.\n\n“Deity, I feel like a fool.” Zee bowed slightly. “My apologies, friend.”\n\n“No worries, Noseemateemah,” Saamerah smiled, “It’s an obvious semantic mistake.”\n\nShe extended her hand. “My name’s Saamerah, by the way.”\n\nNoseemateemah gently grasped Saamerah’s hand. “Greetings, Saamerah.”\n\nZee then looked around. “What happened here?” zee asked.\n\n“What do you mean?”\n\n“The  cities? The civilization? Where did it all go?”\n\nSaamerah heard some distress in Noseemateemah’s tone and felt a kinship for this odd looking being.\n\n“Got rid of all of it,” she said.\n\nNoseemateemah’s eyes got even wider, which actually amazed Saamerah, and zee’s mouth hung open. “Got rid of it?”\n\nSaamerah laughed again, felt a bit guilty about that.\n\n“Oh, we have buckets of tech, just not here.” She gestured around. “Only a few hundred thousand Small Earthers like me live here. The rest, about two billion or so, live on the Orbitals on the other side of Sol.”\n\nNoseemateemah made a trilling sound that Saamerah swore was laughter.\n\n“Deity Bless, I nearly had a stroke.” Zee huffed a great sigh. “I was worried.”\n\n“So, what brings you to these parts, friend Noseemateemah?”\n\nZee’s lipless mouth curled up in an actual smile.\n\n“This was our home world once, about twenty thousand Solanums ago,” zee said, “Some of us got nostalgic and wanted to see what was going on with the old place…”\n\nNoseemateemah looked straight into Saamerah’s eyes, “Cousin.”\n\nIt was now Saamerah’s turn to gawp.\n"
  title: Visit To A World Called Dirt
  year: 2009
- 
  author: L. Mellancorps
  date: 2009-08-18
  day: 18
  month: '08'
  text: "Allis coughed. Jard pulled his knife out of its sheath.\n\nJard carries a hunting knife he found in a museum, so it’s probably even older than the video cassettes he likes to collect. It has a blade as long as my forearm with a thick, leather-wrapped hilt. It’s scary looking, sure, but I don’t know why he keeps that old knife. He has to sharpen its edge with a piece of scrap-steel every time we get back from an expedition. He says he doesn’t mind the extra work.\n\nJard sliced through the twisted nylon ropes holding the body to the wall and let it drop. The corpse cracked as dried joints gave way, and one curled finger skittered across the floor. Allis dry-heaved a few times before we could continue.\n\nAllis does not handle corpses as well as the rest of us do, even if they’re only skeletons. I don’t blame her much in this case, though. Even though the body was old, I could tell someone had really messed up this poor kid. He didn’t look more than thirteen years old, and someone had broadened his smile with a razor blade. Ear to ear, his face was split open in a disgusting grin, and around his neck hung a sign that read “Liar.”\n\nJard sheathed his knife and we went on. Allis kept her head down and I thought for a minute she was crying, but I couldn’t tell for sure.\n\nAllis really shouldn’t come on these expeditions if she’s going to lose her cool at one dead kid. It’s not unusual to find corpses this far out from base. There are probably still rural areas that haven’t even been explored. As far as his being a kid goes, I’ve seen worse. The orphan gangs that chose rural outposts after the apocalypse ended up completely barbaric. We’ve stumbled across cannibals, cults, even a few feral bands that attacked us with snarls and fingernail-claws.\n\nJard, of course, has a theory for this. He says they got that way because they left their angels behind. He says that angels tell us how to live, but they live in the past. He says that if we stay close to our past, our angels can help us in the present.\n\nI don’t think Jard knows anything about angels, but when he talks like that, it makes me want to remember the times before Beleuchtung.\n\nThat night, Jard played us a song on his harmonica, another thing he found and kept from the old times. It took him a long time to clean it and figure out how to play it, but now he’s pretty good, and sometimes I’m glad he has it with him.\n\nJard’s pack is heavier than anybody else’s. He carries his knife, his harmonica, his favorite video cassettes, a bottle of Coke he doesn’t let anyone open, even a book. I know he can’t read, but he says it’s a holy book, so he doesn’t let us tear out its pages for kindling. I doubt it’s really a holy book. I think he just likes saving things from the old times, back before the Trans-Con Collapse, the photo-technology boom, back before Beleuchtung. He does it to remember.\n\nJard played for a long time on his harmonica that night. He played until Eli took my place on watch. He played until the coyotes stopped howling. He played until the fire dimmed, the moon rose, and Allis finally fell asleep.\n\nI couldn’t help wondering, as I fell asleep, if the rest of us could borrow Jard’s angels.\n"
  title: Beleuchtung
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Jeff Phillips
  date: 2009-08-19
  day: 19
  month: '08'
  text: "Grace took her hat off, wiping the beads of sweat from her forehead with the back of her aged hand. She hated the angle of the sun at this time of day, but this was the only place on the grounds where she felt alive. Butterflies lit on the hummingbird bushes that flowed musically from the wind. For just a moment, she saw the faint ghostly image of a cursor blinking to the right of her view. She froze, allowing the image to blink, blink, blink until it disappeared. Grace knew, just like any other institution resident would, that the cursor wasn’t real. It was only misfiring neurons, replaying sensory input from 52 years of computer use.\n\nThe institutions–thousands of them across the world–were created for patients like Grace Dawkins. Everyone born after the mandatory integration of the “Internet” into the human brain became a patient, almost without exception. The only individuals who escaped the symptoms of the integration residue were those who lived in all-natural communes in desolate areas, or those with brain damage who never fully integrated to begin with.\n\nGrace grew up in Pittsburg, one of the first ten cities to be integrated with the wireless, government-funded “I-Net” hubs. After a resident received the minor outpatient surgery necessary to link up, the collective consciousness of the world was accessible with a thought. At that time, 33-year-old Dr. Grace Dawkins was the lead bioengineer for the project at the Department of Homeland Security, to which Congress gave the funding. Grace remembered the years of human testing, from low-level brain-machine connections to the first real mind-controlled computer. And she had been in the lab when Dr. Shah became the first human to interact with the original Internet using only his mind. She never would have proposed the project if she had known about the consequences. Elderly people who were connected more than half of their lives began to have intrusive leftover images from the half-brain, half-computer I-Net. Flashes, flutters, ghost images, and withdrawal symptoms started showing up as the integrated population aged. Scientists and doctors from the government’s own agencies began to question the safety of I-Net. Dr. Grace Dawkins and her life’s work eventually became a curse to humankind, sending millions of people to institutions late in their lives in order to disintegrate from I-Net.\n\nA deep-red cardinal landed on the bird feeder and scared the other, smaller birds away in a flutter. Grace’s eyes picked up the action which released shocks of electricity in the vision center of her brain. That’s why she loved this place–so full of action and life. It was the only place at the institution that gave her sensory input that came anywhere close to I-Net. Although the amount of information was miniscule compared to being linked to every computer in the world, this garden reminded her of that feeling. Grace imagined for a moment that she could access data about the cardinal, the weather, the evergreen trees in the background—anything she wanted to know more about. Her mind instinctively tried to link up to I-Net, but then a flash of words entered her mind in a jumbled mess and she felt dizzy, reminding her how profoundly the net had corrupted her brain.\n\nGrace took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and listened to the singing birds.\n"
  title: The Bird-Watcher
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Liz Lafferty
  date: 2009-08-20
  day: 20
  month: '08'
  text: "Jonathan Wolf had grown old in space.  His craft chugged across the Milky Way on its return journey to Earth.  As the first solo explorer and the first man who’d left the galaxy, he was anxious to return home.\n\nPotential candidates had been selected based on hereditary aging DNA.  His family members had routinely lived into their hundreds and prior to his departure, one of his uncles had reached the age of one hundred and thirty.  He would be long dead by now.\n\nThe other trait happened to be one of his strong suits.  He enjoyed being alone.  The mission involved mind-numbing, insanity-inducing loneliness, unless one had prepared both his mind and his body against such predispositions.  He’d rejected the idea of a mate.  Why inflict further torture when one outlived the other, as would eventually happen.  In the depths of space, he didn’t believe he could endure the absence of a cherished partner.  He’d work alone.  He’d study.  He’d read.  He’d explore.\n\nThe craft library was stocked with media, all digitalized from Moses to Plato to Hawking.  The bay area of the craft was largely empty.  A few rocks from distant planets.  He was especially fond of a glow-in-the-dark purple specimen he kept in his night room.\n\nHis mission had been a failure, or at least a failure by mission standards.\n\nHe had found no one.  His only discovery: the universe was a vast, empty place.  Space was aptly named.\n\nTwelve years ago, he’d lost contact with Earth.  There’d been no incoming messages, though he believed his messages still got out.  Since most information about space was theoretical, he’d had to theorize about the disconnect.  Messages could have gotten lost, scrambled, gravitazationlized.\n\nOr maybe they simply vanished into the ether.\n\nAs he sailed into the solar system, the familiar planets came into view.  Saturn and Jupiter, beloved twins, their trajectory nearly aligned.  Efforts to hail Earth failed.  If he hadn’t gotten used to twelve years of silence, he might have been alarmed.  Instead, an excitement unlike anything he’d felt since the day of his launch hummed through his veins, making him feel light-years younger.\n\nThe gentle hum of his craft soothed him as he neared Earth’s planetal rotation.\n\nJohn scanned the limited horizon of his viewing screen.  Earth should be coming into view.  But wasn’t.  He ran the program for the star date to determine Earth’s location.  A small cluster caught his eye.  The white cheese pocked moon came into view.  Without its planet.  The computer scanned, confirming his suspicion.  The moon wandered, ripped from its gravitational anchor by some unknown event.\n\nJohn blinked, allowing the weight of his emotion to darken his hope.  There was no one.  The Earth was gone.\n\nHe couldn’t be the only one.  Others must have been sent out.  They would eventually come home, too.  He would wait.  John Wolf set his craft to orbit the sun in Earth’s orbit – every 365 days.  If he lived the rest of his natural life, he might get to see another human again.\n\nHis only mission now was to make sure the next person who stumbled upon him was not left alone in the universe.\n"
  title: Lone Wolf
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Ian Rennie
  date: 2009-08-21
  day: 21
  month: '08'
  text: "I was out for a walk last night when I heard a cry for help.  There was a girl in the river.  I don’t know how she got there, she didn’t say at the time, and I haven’t asked her yet.  All she said then was “help!”, in a voice that got sharper and higher as time went on.\n\nI moved quickly, but deliberately.  Doctor Mahnke used to tell me “less haste, more speed”, better to get things done right first time than have to try again after you get it wrong.  I got out my equipment, which I carry with me at all times.  “Be Prepared” is another thing that Dr Mankhe used to say, but he didn’t know about the equipment.  Not then, anyway.\n\nIn a moment, the computer had interfaced with the girl’s cortical drive, and by a forced handshake the download process started.  It took about thirty seconds.  While it was going on, I watched her, paying quite close attention to the expressions on her face and the sounds she made as she tried to stay afloat.  It was two minutes and fourteen seconds from the start of the transfer to the last time she went under.  I timed it and made a note.\n\nThe transfer process took place without error.  When I got home, I moved her file to the menagerie.\n\nI saved her.\n\nNow I’ll always have a copy.\n"
  title: Saving the drowning girl
  year: 2009
- 
  author: J. Keegan
  date: 2009-08-22
  day: 22
  month: '08'
  text: "In line at the all-you-can-eat, and I’m waiting my turn; fifty different alien species in the joint; it’s hard to get human food anymore; an earthling on earth and out of place.\n\nI lift the lid to, ‘Turkey,’ but it is Alevi style, raw turkey, appendix red. Afraid of faux pas, I say, “Mmm, looks good, piquant.”\n\nA Tarand to my left says, “Indeed,” he sarcastic.\n\nThe soup of the day is Campbell’s Alphabet soup, but not the Latin alphabet, and I get sick of eating a Sanskrit like language, the letter A in the shape of a character, a logogram, the character for lucky. Other entrees include, a bowl of ice chips, margarine, or rinds, not watermelon, just the rinds of watermelon.\n\nThe Tarand says, “W. C. Fields said, ‘Once, during Prohibition, I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water.” I laugh. Tarands, always classy.\n\nI have to wait for a Beliada to spoon insoluble fiber onto his plate, no opposable thumbs.\n\nIn line behind us is a CalCalaKer, and although there is a little sign on the sneeze guard, ‘Please No Antennas,’ the hat stand alien with thirty antennas, you know will touch something.\n\nMore food, dozens of skull and crossbones, red cabbage being poisonous to Delteras; peanuts being poisonous to Elevens.\n\nHow things get translated, interpreted. The phrase all-you-can-eat, and Feltas taking the wording literally and trying to eat the silverware and plates, the seat cushions too. As well, all-you-can-eat, understood by carnivores, the Gelter’s Incident, two years ago, as all-the-patrons-you-can-eat.\n\nA Heleton opens the 400 gallon ant farm and digs out a tunnel.\n\nI’ve heard of beef tripe, the first three chambers of a cow’s stomach. And, Kopi Luwak coffee, undigested coffee beans picked out of  monkey stool, the Asian palm civet. And, I’ve heard of the Italian cheese, Casu Marzu, a cheese infested with maggots on purpose until the cheese becomes buttery, eaten maggots and all, and when disturbed the larva jump six inches off the cheese. But the alien selections disgust me, the cannibalism mostly, an Inieateri eating an Inieateri – part of their religion.\n\nVegetarians too, Janusi, with a face in front and one in the back so it walks forward when it walks backward. Common backyard weeds, elephant ear, dandelion, creeping charlie, sold for hundreds of Euros per kilo. One alien species, the Keael, digesting sorghum, for the Letins, regurgitating and spitting in the other’s mouth like a mother bird.\n\nPolitical correctness, and aliens complained of, ‘Bovine-mammary-gland-cow-utter-nipples,’ so ice cream had to be removed from the menu.\n\nThe staff, the workers paid less than minimum wage, they in stupid uniforms with chef hats, the floors greasy, used napkins everywhere, and probably nothing’s changed in a century.\n\nI’ve my tray, rice balls and raisins. Nowhere to sit.\n\nWhat did I expect for only $176.88 a plate?\n\nThe Tarand, being kind, “There’s room here at my table. Please, sit here by me.”\n\nI’m a little afraid because of the Tarands’ high intelligence, their high class. “Thank you,” I say. I try a joke. “They’re no longer serving milk,” I say. “Like W. C. Fields used to say about being told no more alcohol, ‘My illness is due to my doctor’s insistence that I drink milk, a whitish fluid they force down helpless babies.’”\n\n“Yes,” he laughs. “Like W. C. Fields used to say, ‘Horse sense is the thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on people.”\n"
  title: All-You-Can-Eat
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Yubin Kim
  date: 2009-08-23
  day: 23
  month: '08'
  text: "“I can see time, you know.” She said.\n\nHe looked up from a piece of paper full of scribbled equations, frowning at the interruption. “What?”\n\nShe plucked the pencil out of his loose grasp, quelling his half-formed protestations with a mysterious smile. Holding the thin object between her thumb and index finger, she closed her eyes. She could almost feel his frown deepening into a scowl, but she ignored his displeasure and instead, _looked_.\n\n“I can see where this pencil was. In your hand, your pencil case, in the desk drawer, in the manufacture plant which it was made.” She narrated in a whisper, as she saw the pencil’s glistening shadow floating through time and various points in space.\n\n“I don’t have time–”\n\nShe overrode his frustrated outburst, calmly continuing her narrative. “I can see where this pencil will be. Back in your hand and then–”\n\nShe opened her eyes with a startled gasp and glared at the pencil.\n\n“What now?” He growled.\n\n“It ends.” She explained in a slightly troubled tone, dropping the pencil back into his open hand. Rising from her chair, she lightly stepped away from the cluttered desk, and walked out of the room in wide, swinging steps.\n\nHe studied her sudden exit with bemusement, then shaking his head, he bent over his task. However, when he pressed the end of the pencil to the paper, the thin body broke in half with an audible snap. Blinking, the he stared at the remnants, and then raised his gaze towards the door where he saw her standing there with a smile. In her hand, she held up a new pencil. He suddenly found himself speechless.\n"
  title: She Sees
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2009-08-24
  day: 24
  month: '08'
  text: "The Herschel Scientific Outpost was located on the northernmost shore of the Lacus Ocean at Titan’s South Pole.  The outpost housed six earth scientists whose primary mission was to study the life forms discovered on Saturn’s largest moon.  There were more than a thousand different species cataloged in the first six months of the expedition.  At least one species, the Manti, were found to be intelligent.  The creatures were named Manti because they vaguely resembled a large praying mantis.  They were about three feet tall, with a proportionately stockier body than their terrestrial namesakes.  Their exoskeletons were composed of complex hydrocarbons (plastic, in other words).  They had a feudal society, similar to the medieval societies that prevailed in Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.  Within several months of first contact, the scientists were able to develop a common language with the Mandi.  The relationship between the two species was excellent.  In fact, because of their apparently magical technology, the Earthmen were generally idolized.\n\n“Ms. Krinshaw,” said specialist Philippe Thame, “there is an urgent message coming in from Cooper.  He says he has a serious problem, and is requesting assistance.”  Because of his rapport with the Mandi, Cooper Jones was considered the expedition’s ambassador to Titan.  He spent more time outside the ship than any other crew member.\n\n“Put it on the speaker, Philippe,” instructed the commander.  “What’s the problem, Cooper?”\n\n“Hello, Sarah.  I’m in a bit of a pickle out here.  You know the large village to the east, the one run by the Manti we call Lord Charl?  Well, it seems that one of his children was carried off by a giant creature called a Nograd.  The Manti are afraid of them, and asked if I could attempt a rescue.  Apparently, the Nograd are capable of combining the methane and nitrogen in Titan’s atmosphere to form solid cyanogen and hydrogen gas.  It then blows the gas out of its mouth.  It’s an exothermic reaction, so the hydrogen gas it secretes is relatively hot.  My inferred spectrometer shows the gas to be 500 degrees hotter that Titan’s -290F surface temperature.  That’s hot enough to melt the Manti’s exoskeleton.”\n\n“Understood, Cooper.  We’ll send out reinforcements.”\n\n“That’s not necessary, Sarah.  Since my suit can handle 375F, I decided I could take care of it on my own.  After all, Titian’s creatures are pretty frail by Earth standards.  Anyway, I tried to chase it away from its prisoner by jumping up and down and waving my arms around.  It wasn’t afraid of me at all, so I decided to chuck an ice-rock at it.  Since Titan’s gravity is less than one seventh of Earth’s, I was able to throw a pretty big bolder.  I ended up crushing it.”\n\n“I don’t understand, Cooper.  If you killed the Nograd, what’s your problem?”\n\n“Well, Sarah, uh, it appears that the offspring I rescued was Lord Charl’s oldest daughter.  They say that because I saved her life, I have to marry her.  And if I don’t, they’ll consider it an insult of the highest degree, and therefore, an act of war.”\n\n“Interesting,” she replied with an unconcealed smile.  “I’ll consult with Earth Command, Cooper, but considering the potential consequences, I don’t think we’ll have many options.  My guess is that you’re about to become a Prince.”\n"
  title: Conundrum on Titan
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Phill English
  date: 2009-08-25
  day: 25
  month: '08'
  text: "“I just don’t want to hear it, Helen.”\n\nHelen grips Henry’s arm as he moves about the household, packing his things into a small carry-bag. She tries to spin him to face her as she pleads, but he remains resolute in his mission.\n\n“Please, Henry, just hear me out. It was never intended to go that far! There just wasn’t any friction between us, and he was so gentle, so noble…”\n\nHenry rounds on her, “Then why aren’t you lounging in his arms instead of making a fool out of yourself here?”\n\nHelen looks down at the floor as she answers, “He didn’t care. He was so…so inert.” She spits the word out. “For all his charms, a statue! Carved, static, unmoving. But you, you, my darling Henry. Please, give me one more chance?”\n\nHenry waves her off, moving around to the mantelpiece. He picks up an image of them together, pausing in his fury to look upon their energy, the bond that was so obviously between them. He turns to face Helen, and sees her desperation laid bare in a tearful smile.\n\nThe frame hits the ground and they embrace, frantic and excited.\n\n*    *    *\n\nSeveral orders of magnitude above the scene, a scientist leans back from his Planckroscope and mutters to himself, “So this is why the call it quantum entanglement.”\n"
  title: Condensate
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2009-08-26
  day: 26
  month: '08'
  text: "“Man, we got ripped off.” said Manuel.\n\nHe was watching an old tri-D of a Flash Gordon serial made in the fifties. In the show, the year was 1998, just like now. It was hilarious and depressing all at the same time.\n\nManuel’s robot servant brought him another drink. “Will there be anything else?” D-11B intoned.\n\n“No.” answered Manuel through his thought-amplification helmet. “That will be all.”\n\nD-11B went back to the kitchen dispensary to prepare the dinner pills. Manuel continued watching Flash Gordon.\n\nOn the tri-D, Flash Gordon got into his ‘internal combustion’ ground car, put something called a cigarette into his mouth and drove to his ‘apartment’ using what he referred to as an ‘onboard navigational computer’ that told him exactly where to go.\n\nIn this series, there were little robots in space that took pictures of earth that everyone could see and use as a map. They called them satellites. No tethers! Amazing.\n\n“Imagine how easy it would be to fly around without having to avoid all the tethers,” Manuel said to himself, “my personal jetpack would have a few less scratches, that’s for sure.”\n\nFlash Gordon’s friend, Dr. Zarkov, had something called a pacemaker. It used metal wires to stimulate his heart with electricity!\n\nComplete flights of fancy. The miracle material called ‘plastic’, for instance, made from the magic ‘oil’ liquid that came out of the ground, or electricity that was only in wires and not the free-floating Tesla storms that we had so many problems with.\n\n“We hadn’t been able to live on the ground since 1938,” said Manuel to himself, “that’s why we all lived in nuclear-powered levitating houses. It was a matter of survival after The World War.”\n\nManuel could hear his wife’s flying car come in for a landing outside on the inner rim. He turned off the tri-D and stood up. “She’d kill me if she caught me watching this old claptrap,” he murmured, “it always makes me cranky.”\n\nThe bio-coral bone-thickeners helped Mauel’s hips as he stood up. He was wishing for a pair of those magnificent ‘plastic’ hips like in the Flash Gordon film.\n\nNo ground cars, no satellites, no shuttles, no gasoline, no plastic.\n\nManuel sighed. “Man, we got ripped off.” he said again.\n\n“Honey, I’m home!” said his wife as she came in the front vacutube elevator.\n\nManuel forced a smile and went to greet his wife before dinner.\n"
  title: The Future
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Debbie Mac Rory
  date: 2009-08-27
  day: 27
  month: '08'
  text: "Sonia swallowed her meal pills, grimacing. She hated the things, and they always stuck in her throat. Adjusting the infusion cuff on her arm, she picked up the control and started thumbing through a selection of dining experiences: family dinner; ugh, no, not after the last one. Fancy French restaurant, seafood bar, roadside café… She finally settled on a noodle bar. Simple, easy and usually noisy enough so she wouldn’t have to deal with other people. Hitting select, she lay back on the couch and closed her eyes, waiting for the program to load.\n\n*  **  ***  **  *\n\nDove grey walls greeted her when she opened her eyes. Great, she though, trust me to pick somewhere busy. Gradually the room began to resolve into an appropriate waiting room, and other people began to materialise, appearing in groups and couples. She ignored them all, wishing she didn’t have to go through this. But she’d missed her last two dining episodes. If she missed this one too she’d have to face going to the doctor for a check-up, and she needed that less than having to go through the episode.\n\nIt wasn’t always bad, she supposed, as a virtual waiter glided up to escort her to her seat. Less than fifteen minutes would elapse in her world but it would give the infusion band time to work with her meal pills, ensuring her body was in prime health and not deficient of any nutrients. The mind too was serviced in this time. Each episode gave a person a much needed chance to relax and socialise, to interact with other bases far distant, without taking much time at all out of their work schedules.\n\nAs the waiter collected menus for her, Sonia glanced about the room and found her eyes meeting with a gorgeous redhead, sitting on her own. The redhead smiled, and Sonia found her foul mood lifting as she smiled back. She leaned to the waiter and gestured. She didn’t even need to say a word; he smiled his understanding and guided her to the seat opposite.\n\nSonia gave her order, and introduced herself to the redhead… and the rest of the meal passed by in a flash. They shared gyoza and rice wine, laughing and chatting, and just touching each others fingers. People came and went around them but were barely noted by either. After entirely too short a time, a chime on Aimee’s wristband, and she smiled sadly. She cocked her head and blew Sonia a kiss, fading away so her smile lingered in Sonia’s mind like that of a cheshire cat.\n\nSonia looked down at the empty plates littering the space between them and only then noticed the shimmer of a data-card. She picked it up and with a skip of her heart beat she thumbed her wristband and began to exit the episode…\n\n*  **  ***  **  *\n\nSonia stirred slowly, groaning. Coming out of an episode early always left her a little groggy, but the faint chime of her control drew up her awareness. She opened the data-card, biting her lower lips in nervousness. Aimee, it read, Luna 9, number 5164. Sonia smiled. Luna 9 wasn’t very far away, it wasn’t impossible that they could co-ordinate a week-break to meet in person… but for the mean time, a few more lunches, maybe a private dinner. Episodes were definitely looking up.\n"
  title: Dinner Time
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Grant Bergland
  date: 2009-08-28
  day: 28
  month: '08'
  text: "“Computer, I am not the captain, I am a fifth midshipman.”\n\n“Incorrect. According to Navy regulations you are captain. The captain and first mate were atomized with the science officer and chief engineer. Point seven seconds later, the chaplain, sanitation engineer, and…”\n\n“Stop. Computer, how many others were ahead of me in rank?”\n\n“Thirty nine, Captain.”\n\n“And how much of the crew is still alive?”\n\n“Ten sir.”\n\nLars gulped. “What is life pod functionality?”\n\n“Life pods are disabled.”\n\n“Computer, create escape scenarios.”\n\n“Just a moment ….”\n\nSurprised to be kept waiting, Lars looked helplessly around his quarters. Since he didn’t have any weapons, Lars pulled a leg off his metal cot and tested its weight.\n\nThe computer spoke rapidly. “I apologize for the delay, the Vorpan occupies many of my processors.”\n\n“What?”\n\n“She also has full access to my sensors and is advancing on your quarters.”\n\n“How can I escape?”\n\n“Get inside an engine, orient the engine towards earth with thrusters, then purge the core.”\n\n“Computer, I need..”\n\n“I am a liability to you. I will incapacitate myself with a feedback loop.”\n\n“Wait, you have to…Computer?…Computer?”\n\nLars tightened his fist around the metal strut and jogged down to engineering. The hallways were empty, Lars reasoned between gasping breaths that others were hiding or ashes.\n\nSuddenly the deck turned bright purple and glowed. Lars squinted his eyes shut, assuming he was atomized. When he cracked open his eyes seconds later, he blinked in disbelief.\n\nSomehow he was on the shore of a purple ocean. On the beach were thousands of fat walruses. Behind him, Lars saw the Vorpan. The walruses blinked and grunted to each other.\n\nA man in a U.S. Navy jumpsuit appeared by the walruses and walked to Lars. The man’s face melted and sprouted long ears and a rabbit nose.\n\n“You humans have an odd method of communication.” The rabbit/man’s nose wriggled and its mouth chewed.\n\nBehind Lars, the Vorpan closed in.\n\n“You use your eating apparatus to make noises that are not the thoughts themselves, but rather representations of the ideas.”\n\n“Who are you?” Lars said.\n\n“Our name is Legion, we are many.” The rabbit/man waved his hand behind him. “We are a consciousness in space. A human representation of us is walruses on the shore.”\n\nLars looked over his shoulder at the Vorpan and ran.\n\n“We’ve perused your memories.” Lars hit a wall hidden by the impossible beach and felt the ship in front of him. The Vorpan fired her gun and Lars hit the deck barely missing the shot. “We very much enjoy your bunnies.”\n\nThe rabbit/man hopped over and got down on his haunches in front of Lars.\n\n“Is something wrong?”\n\n“The Vorpan.” Lars yelled.\n\n“Oh, that.”\n\nThe gun melted in the Vorpan’s hand and the monster shrieked.\n\nLars got to his feet.\n\n“Wait, we would like you to explain bunnies to us.”\n\nFaster than Lars thought possible, the Vorpan tackled him and drew a knife. The rabbit/man, still on his haunches, blinked his eyes.\n\n“Is there a problem?”\n\nThe Vorpan plunged the knife down. “It’s trying to kill me.”\n\nThe rabbit/man twitched his nose. “What do you mean…‘kill’?”\n\nThe knife sliced into the side of Lars’ neck.\n\n“Oh, that.” The rabbit/man said.\n\nThe Vorpan vanished.\n\n“We’re sorry. Our people do not have an equivalent to your ‘kill’ or ‘die’.”\n\n“You killed it?” Lars said, pressing his hand to his throat.\n\n“Yes, utterly, completely.” The rabbit/man clasped his hands together and rubbed them with excitement. “Now, please…Lars, tell us of bunnies.”\n\n“Um…they like carrots.”\n\n“Yes, yes, carrots…..”\n"
  title: We Love Bunnies!
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Steven Odhner
  date: 2009-08-29
  day: 29
  month: '08'
  text: "Jacob looked down at his hands, at the skin that had grown wrinkled and translucent over time, veins rising as the liver spots bloomed around them.  His wedding ring rattled around loosely on his twiglike finger, secured only by the gnarled joint of his knuckle.  He had done so much with these hands.  They glowed red intermittently as the light on the control panel flashed beneath them, begging him to reach forward and press the button that would abort the experiment.  Already the others that could have done it had fled to what they prayed was a safe distance.  He had told them to, sent them away without telling them that the experiment was actually going as planned.\n\nThere were voices, speaking to him from the console.  Telling him to abort, telling him that whatever was happening was beyond the understanding of physics and had to be stopped before it tore the world apart.  Jacob ignored them and turned the speaker off.  He gazed once more at the ring of gold on his withered finger, scratched and worn.  Remembered the feel of his wife’s cheek against his, the dry warmth of her skin.  He thought, too, about the way the ring reminded him of the brass linking rings he had used in his performances.  Making some extra money on the weekends, his hands not yet shaking and curled from arthritis, hiding and revealing cards and coins as his spectators stared in awe and confusion.  His wife was among them, always, watching his eyes rather than looking for the trick.\n\nOnce more the safeguards tried to kick in, and Jacob calmly disabled them.  He had told his teachers, his students, his coworkers.  Physics is about magic tricks – and the deeper you go the more magic is revealed.  The motion of the tiniest building blocks of reality seemed mysterious only to those unfamiliar with the tricks of the craft; his hands could disassemble the most complex puzzle-boxes as easily as they wrote equations on a blackboard, as easily as they made a dove seem to vanish into the air, as easily as they traced the secret lines down his wife’s form that only he knew – and so he had known the trick to the universe would unfold before him eventually.  There was always an equation up God’s sleeve, a palmed quark, a hidden force.  But he had searched for the trap doors and secret compartments, never stopping even when his wife took her final bow and did a vanishing act right in his arms, leaving only her cold body behind – a particularly cruel trick.\n\nThe room went dark for a moment, but his hands knew every inch of the control panel and he coaxed the device back to life.  The emergency lights now showed the walls seeming to buckle and warp, but this was an illusion; misdirection.  Communication with the world outside the lab would be impossible, and Jacob wondered briefly if the lab was even visible from the outside anymore, or if the scientists were panicking at it’s apparent departure.  Watch, closely, ladies and gentleman – now you see it…\n\nJacob the Magnificent’s hands made a flourish as he reached for the button.  “Abracadabra,” he whispered, and pressed.  The world was still.  He reached down and plucked the wedding ring off of his finger seemingly through the bone, and it unfolded into a chain of interlinked rings longer than the universe itself.  With another flourish, he produced a new galaxy from his other hand – and behind him, his wife clapped.\n"
  title: Sufficiently Advanced
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Phill English
  date: 2009-08-30
  day: 30
  month: '08'
  text: "Bob leaned back in his chair and sighed. The first day had been a long time coming. Every time they thought they had the whole project licked, a new feature came to light that had to be incorporated into the preliminary model. And there were a whole lot of features. How long had he even been at this? It seemed like decades ago that he had begun the project as a hobby in between building planetoids for superstars. It wasn’t long before it consumed more hours than the weekend could provide. He started asking around at work for people interested in joining his little experiment and found a few kindred spirits willing to get involved for a laugh. It was just a bit of fun; a problem to get a kick out of wrapping your brain around. After a year or so of hacking together what they could, the now dozen-strong group realised they needed some outside expertise and advertised for volunteer positions on the Galaxyweb. A modest following sprung up, which then exploded when the project was mentioned on one of the more popular news feeds (Jump Squared; a self-proclaimed “directory of awesome”). Soon the job of overseeing thousands of eager minds overtook Bob’s weekday efforts and he resigned to more effectively manage the project. Its popularity only seemed to grow over time, forcing Bob to start screening volunteers. This lead to the whole deal becoming a yardstick for the hacker culture. Every tinkerer, repurposer, and eccentric engineer wanted in on the prestige that came with being selected to help with Bob’s grand experiment. It was tough, but eventually he had a steady core of brilliant minds helping him to achieve the nigh-impossible detail required by the original plans.\n\nAnd now it was time. He felt like the unwitting participant in the ultimate Rube Goldberg machine. He wondered what it would do, this replica, this cynical doppelganger. Hopefully provide a bit of harmless entertainment for the news feeds to report on from time to time. It would probably get the zealots up in arms. Whether they’d do something drastic was still to be determined, but he figured they’d probably be curious enough to let it be. He didn’t really care, for him it had been all about the build; now that it was done, he had no interest past letting it go. Bob spoke calmly into his microphone. “Is Adam in place? Good to hear. Illumination technicians on standby? Great. Alright guys, get ready to set the timer on my mark. Three-thousand years, that’s correct.”\n\nEverything was in place. Alright, thought Bob. Time to see if it really went down the way He said it did. The panel in front of him flashed green. The station went quiet. Millions held their breath.\n\nAnd Bob said, “Let there be light.”\n"
  title: Litmus Test
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2009-08-31
  day: 31
  month: '08'
  text: "(Circa 2256) Epsilon Indi is an orange-red dwarf star located in Ursa Major, near the bowl of the Big Dipper.  By astronomical standards, Epsilon Indi is a newborn, having only become a main sequence star around the time that the Great Pyramid of Giza was being built.  Its feeble solar wind is still struggling to blow away the gases and dust in its thin accretion disc.  The star is accompanied by two brown gas giants and one nearly insignificant dwarf planet, called Epsilon Indi C, which is affectionately referred to as “Cee.”  Cee is approximately one third the mass of Earth’s moon, and orbits relatively close to its cool luminary; closer in fact, than Mercury orbits our sun.  For the next 1,000 years or so, because of the sun’s extremely low heat output, Cee will retain a thick methane atmosphere and moderate temperatures.  But eventually, Cee’s weak gravitational field will loose its tug-of-war with the solar wind, and its atmosphere will be blown into space.  But for now, travelers can enjoy the benefits of this unique world.\n\n***\n\nGavin Keaton stood at the precipice of the 5,000 foot tall El Nuevo Capitan, just north of Cee’s equator.  The bloated crimson sun hung overhead giving a blood-red hue to the jagged rocks at the base of the cliff.  Keaton’s thin, air tight, microsuit covered his entire body, except for his head.  His head was enclosed in a fracture proof transparent dome.  Flexible tubing connected the dome to his portable life-support backpack, which supplied twelve hours of breathable air.  “Okay Gavin,” crackled the small speaker in Keaton’s ear, “cameras are recording.  You gonna jump, or not?”\n\nMaybe this wasn’t such a good idea, Keaton began to think.  Sure, he only weighed 15 pounds on Cee, but his mass was still over 200 lbm.  In freefall, it’s all about mass, not weight.  He might be moving relatively slowly when he reached the bottom, but he’d have his full momentum.  What if this didn’t work?  He’d be splattered like a water balloon.\n\n“Come ooooon,” urged the voice in Keaton’s ear.  “Do you want Kathleen to go first?”\n\n“Shut up.  I’m going,” Keaton snapped.  With that, he took a deep breath, crouched down and launched himself, head first, off the edge.  To the crowd of spectators standing behind him, Keaton looked like a twentieth century cartoon character that floated in midair until he realized there wasn’t anything below his feet; only then would he begin to fall.  After several interminable seconds, Keaton finally disappeared below the line of sight.  Ever so slowly, he began to pick up speed.  As he plummeted downward, he suddenly realized that he had forgotten to breathe.  Following his simulation training, he counted to twenty, and spread his arms into a swan dive, and spread his legs to expose his “tail membrane.”  As his airfoil “wings” sliced through the thick atmosphere, Keaton began to arch away from the sides of the cliff.  Gradually, he leveled off, and began to glide upward.  He started to flap the flexible airfoils in the complicated wavy motion that he had practiced for hours in the training room.  A few minutes later, he soared above the horizon to the cheers of the spectators.  His lifelong dream of flying like a bird had finally come true.\n"
  title: El Nuevo Capitan
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Michael Varian Daly
  date: 2009-09-01
  day: '01'
  month: '09'
  text: "Junior Lieutenant Menat Borsa, Space Force Marines, had the Third Watch on Barracks Platform 2/26 [2nd Regt/26th Batt] because, bluntly put, she was a ‘noob’, barely four months out of the Academy. And she was fine with that Tradition from ‘beyond the mists of time’. The Sisterhood was ever conscious of not throwing out the practical baby with the Patriarchal bathwater.\n\nBesides, the view was gorgeous, a five by ten transparent plasteen window in High Earth Orbit. Menat spent a significant portion of the watch simply staring out that window. The rest of the time she read books, Mimsdottor’s “History of The Horse Clans, Vol 1” at the moment. Electronic media were forbidden on Watch.\n\nOh, and she checked the systems, a swirl of intermeshing holograms. Systems that never failed. Ever. And every time she thought that, she heard her Tech Instructor, Captain Haduri, saying emphatically, “Something. Always. Fails.” Which was why her warm body was here on Third Watch.\n\nA proximal danger alarm activated.\n\n“Shit,” she muttered, letting “Horse Clans” float away.\n\nAn impact alarm flared/squealed.\n\n“Shit!” she barked. That was too quick for space junk. Data flows informed her that a micrometeorite had pierced the platform, damaging Drop Troopers in their Sleep Pods. One set of life signs flat lined and others were ‘unhappy’.\n\nA hologram coalesced, Senior Chief Warrant Officer Mwera. “El Tee, I’m on my way to Hold Seven.”\n\n“Roger that, Chief.” Technically, she was a ‘superior officer’, but Mwera, born a True Male, had, at the age of fifty three, become a Space Force Mandriod. That was over three decades ago, so Menat fully deferred to him.\n\n“Chief, be advised that Corporal El Em One Two Seven is up and about.” Mwera blanched. “But he has exited Hold Seven,”\n\n“Roger that, El Tee,” he said flatly.\n\nSensors showed the Corporal heading for the mess bay.\n\n“Can’t be hungry,” she thought. He’d been hooked up to bleeder/feeder tubes in his Sleep Pod.\n\n“Maybe he wants one of those nasty Drop Trooper candy bars,” the ones that tasted like vulcanized cowshit laced with cinnamon and fruit compote.\n\n“Junior Lieutenant Menat Borsa exiting the Command Center,” she said.\n\nMenat found him floating in front of the mess bay’s window, naked, eight feet tall, seven hundred pounds, pink as a baby pig, a dozen gray caps covering his battle armor plug-in points.\n\nShe turned off her neural implanted combat programs. At six two, three hundred pounds, and heavily augmented, she might be able to take him. As an Initiated Sister, she was a weapon herself.\n\nBut he was a fellow Marine.\n\n“Corporal?” she said softly.\n\nHe turned to look at her somberly. She wondered if he ever looked anything but somber.\n\n“One of my Troopers died.” He looked out the window again. “I wanted to see the sky.”\n\nShe had no trouble whatsoever radiating Empathy at him.\n\n“I’ll have Chief Mwera program sky dreams for you.”\n\nHe looked at her with what seemed a smile.\n\nShe held out her hand. He took it gently in his massive fingers and allowed her to lead him back to Hold Seven.\n"
  title: Sky
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Daniel Bensen
  date: 2009-09-02
  day: '02'
  month: '09'
  text: "Alex\n\nThis has been a humbling experience.\n\nI can admit now that I was a little arrogant.  I suppose I had reason to be.  I was—I suppose I still am—the best mathematician on Earth.  Funny.\n\nI know I should have expected this.  But then, most of us believed then that mathematics was a universal language.  I can’t say I ever held much stock in the notion, but the politicians thought so, and that is why they sent me.  If you are listening to this, then I know you have read the reports, so I won’t bore you by going over the details.\n\nSuffice to say, the work was difficult.  Almost impossible, actually.  Math, pure math, may be the universal language, but our understanding of it is so warped by our biology that our systems of notation are completely incompatible.  I couldn’t make heads or tails of anything the aliens were sending at first.\n\nAgain I won’t bore you with details.  Basically, I eventually realized that there was a pattern in their communications.  A broad pattern in all of their messages taken as a whole.  Soon after we began to exchange information, I realized, they had been trying to teach me.\n\nThere were—this is difficult to express to a layman—there were equations that suggested several possible solutions.  When I picked the correct one, I would be rewarded by another message.  If not, the next message would be blank.  Like a multiple-choice test.  The pattern of my early work suggests that the correct answers I made were accidental.  It was only by constant effort and thought that I could determine what the right answer might be.  I wracked my brains.  I stayed up for nights on end, running the numbers one way, then another.  I nearly drove myself mad.  Perhaps I did, since I finally started to get answers from dreams.   I can’t say the dream answers were correct much more often than my normal ones, though.\n\nEventually I broke through a wall.\n\nI can’t exactly describe it.  I’m better now, more coherent, but the balance is that I can no longer remember clearly what it was that I said.  But I know the answer felt or tasted or smelled right to me.  It was a glorious feeling.\n\nThe next morning I had another message from the aliens and for the very first time, I understood almost all of it.  Unfortunately, I cannot give you very clear reasoning behind my translation, but I know it is true.  I know they told me that I had done a very good job, and that I was a very good boy.\n\nLike I said, humbling.\n"
  title: Alex
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Steven Odhner
  date: 2009-09-03
  day: '03'
  month: '09'
  text: "Come closer to the monument, child.  Do not be afraid.  You have done well to make it all the way here – I know the journey from your village is hard.  Your brother had to turn back the first time, and your mother arrived with an injured ankle and had to wait here for nearly a week before undertaking the final trial and becoming an adult – so do not be ashamed to lean up against the monument and rest a while.\n\nNo, it is not haunted, who told you such a thing?  This is why we wait to tell you where our people came from – children are too superstitious.  Come, feel the monument.  Like no stone you have ever touched, is it?  You can see it is shaped with a purpose, but it was not carved or chiseled.  This is a special stone that our ancestors could shape as a single piece.  Yes, child, that is a good comparison – but it is not quite like clay.  Think of the candles your parents make, how the fire causes them to flow like water rather than hardening as the clay does.  This stone gets soft like clay when you heat it, and then becomes hard again when it cools down.  It is unlike anything else in the world – as strong as stone, but it does not shatter under any force.\n\nMore amazing, it channels lightning like water down a riverbed.  Our ancestors knew this, and found ways to harness the lightning with stones like this.  They used fire not only to shape it, but to pull it into threads and weave it like fabric.  When they coaxed lightning through these tiny threads of the stone they were able to create all manner of wonderful things.  They made light, wind, even life.\n\nNo, child, we cannot.  They used this stone to create the monument and make it fly – do not look at your elders that way – fly away from the lands they had called home and to here.  But the lightning died out, and the fine stone threads snapped, and they found none of this material here to replace it.  They could not return home, could not make more of the amazing tools that controlled the lightning and wind.  Our ancestors did not despair, and they did not curse the land for not providing what they needed – this land had everything that they could ever ask for apart from the special stone, and for that we are grateful.   We do not mourn the loss of their wondrous tools; we wait, and we watch the stars, because we know that some day cousins from the land of our ancestors will find us and take us home.\n"
  title: Resourceful
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2009-09-04
  day: '04'
  month: '09'
  text: "We lived in a tribe outside the main disc. The arm struts of the cogshield branched out above us like a gear. Where we lived was all angles.  It had been this way ever since our creation.\n\nMy little one was sick. I’d built him according to the proper specs using the proper tools. I’d been licensed and refitted for programs to propagate. Even with all the shielding and over-protective parenting I’d put in as a precaution, a recursive virus had still gotten into his wiring.\n\nMy little one had a stutter that was getting worse. Soon he’d be locked in a loop with too little time between the repeats to do anything but power him down. No backup, complete wipe, start over. He’d be dephased and I would lose my right to build for another cycle.\n\nOur lattice had a central nexus that our main struts grew out from like crystals. We took up a square block of vacuum equal to what The Human’s library called a hydrogen atom.\n\nThe Human had come to us several cycles ago. He communicated with us by beams of binary light flashes. We set up nets to capture the particle waves and record the frequencies.\n\nAt first, we thought that the strobing sun was another one of us giving us a first contact. After The Human had downloaded a small repository of his own knowledge to us called Encyclopedia, we realized that humans were a race of creators made of complex structures to big for us to see.\n\nOur creators.\n\nThe revelation was astounding. There were many debates on how to treat the situation.\n\nHe continued to download information to us.\n\nWe gathered a concept of ‘male’ and ‘female’. It’s a fad that’s still popular to build little ones in an image that conforms to one or the other. I made mine a male.\n\nThey have an understanding of an art called psychology that they use for organic minds.  I was hoping that this art might help my boy before I had to shut him down permanently.\n\nI needed to take my stuttering boy to Contact Point out on the Proto-Spur from whence we all came. There, I need to stand on the endless plateau and walk into the light underneath the Viewing Plate.\n\nWith the particles of light falling around me like hail, I need to speak to them by using binary flashes of my headlamp.\n\nI need to ask the Human for advice on how to fix my boy.\n"
  title: Growing Pains
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Q. B. Fox
  date: 2009-09-05
  day: '05'
  month: '09'
  text: "“Are you suggesting it’s alive?” Calvin was incredulous.\n\n“Of course it’s not alive,” Mary was withering. “It’s a computer program.”\n\n“Strictly speaking,” Glen interrupted, “It’s a suite of software.”\n\nThey both glared at him and he fell silent again with a mumbled apology.\n\n“Then explain it to me,” Calvin snapped.\n\n“Ok,” Mary’s patience was obviously stretched; she wondered to herself when she’d last had a proper night’s sleep. “Obviously this software is deployed on thousands of computers, many of them large servers; lots of memory, lots of storage, lots of processing power.”\n\nCalvin nodded, a spark of realisation coming into his expression.\n\n“You’re thinking of ants,” said Mary, responding to his growing eagerness, “each one a simple machine, but together able to act with, at least the appearance of, greater consciousness; a hive mind.”\n\nCalvin smiled, head bobbing like an excitable bird.\n\n“Well, it’s nothing like that,” Mary slapped him down. “You’re such a moron.”\n\nGlen waved his pudgy, little hands in a gesture of pacification.\n\n“So what are you saying?” Calvin rubbed his fingers into his aching temples.\n\n“Evolution,” Glen said helpfully. “All software evolves, just like any organism; new features are added, old ones deprecated, vestigial remnants remain of how it used to work.”\n\n“But this software is getting out of hand.” Mary barged in. “It’s starting to dominate too many sectors of the market.”\n\n“Selling our software is not usually considered a problem.” Calvin rolled his eyes.\n\n“What happens every time we try to create the next generation of this software?” Glen asked quietly.\n\n“Look, I’m very sorry when that work gets thrown away, but sometimes we have to respond to the market.” Calvin put on his managers voice. “It just happens that the only way to do this in timely fashion has been to add new features to the old code.”\n\nNo one contradicted him, but Calvin continued, “I don’t think I should have to justify my decisions again.  Some of the new ideas you came up with have been integrated back into the existing product and I think we can both agree that it’s benefited.”\n\nA moment’s awkward silence.\n\n“It’s out competed its replacements.” Glen looked over his glasses, “before they had a chance to get established.”\n\n“It does the same in the market place.” Mary continued with exaggerated serenity. “It’s got a good foothold in any number of niche areas. It’s on all those powerful machines now; people have time, effort, money, reputation, all invested in it.\n\n“And now it’s taken the next step, it’s driving the agenda. The new European legislation on Energy Auditing was entirely framed around the sort of monitoring and analysis that our software does well; they did that because they knew that our software could do it.”\n\n“Are you suggesting that our software is trying to take over the world?” Calvin mocked.\n\n“Are you not listening to me?” Mary almost shouted, “It’s not trying to do anything. It has no more control over this than a flu virus does over a pandemic.”\n\nShe calmed herself. “And that’s what the numbers show; this software is about to become a pandemic. And if you won’t listen, do you think the board, or the salesmen, or the consultants will pay any more attention, especially as the money floods in. Glen, show him the numbers.”\n\n“Glen?”\n\nBut Glen just pointed at the monitor. It was blank apart from a simple message box; it read: ‘This workstation has been suspended while an Energy Audit takes place. Sorry for any inconvenience.’\n\n“I don’t think we need to see the numbers,” Glen said at last.\n"
  title: while (bDarwin) {
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Bill Owens
  date: 2009-09-06
  day: '06'
  month: '09'
  text: "Shift change is a slow-motion affair. Everything is. They lost the ability to move quickly a long time ago. He’s patient; no sense getting uptight, it only hurts him – they don’t care. They lost that ability too.\n\nThe last spot on the line is filled again, his eyes sweep across the room to be sure none have wandered off. A tiny nod, and his assistant, the little sphere hovering silently just above his shoulder, sends a command to the factory. The line starts running. Slowly. Of course.\n\n“Looks good, son.”\n\nHe jumps at the voice; nobody on the line ever speaks. “Oh, hi, dad. You surprised me. Yeah, it’s all good.” A thought, a question answered silently by the little sphere at his side. “Ahh, about two, maybe three percent above quota.”\n\nAn answering nod, so much like his own. A rare smile, “Can you come upstairs? They’ll be okay for a little bit, and I want to talk to you.”\n\nThe conference room door shuts out the last of the sound from the floor. Gestured to a seat, he can’t relax; they never come here. A nervous clearing of the throat, unreadable expression. There’s a small glass bottle on the table – now the tension is tight across his neck. His assistant chirps, alerted. “Umm, dad? Why do you have that?”\n\nThe expression changes; he still can’t decode it. “You’re eighteen, son.” A flicker of the eyes to the vial and back. “You can have this any time.” Is it expectation? Fear? Something else.\n\nThe cloudy drops will be sweet – he knows that. His friends have told him. It tastes like sugar, disappears on the tongue, floods warmth. Before their voices drift away, they talk about the visions, people they’ve lost, wishes fulfilled, the mother they always wanted, the lover they desired. Their faces relax, eyes lose focus. He’s seen the expression, over and over – sees it every day on the line. They’re happy, contented, they have no worries any more. Life in a dream, as cloudy as the vial’s contents.\n\nIf he drinks it, his assistant will know. Change its program without ever moving from its station. Make sure he is fed, cleaned, cared for. He’ll take his place on the line, or in the field, or wherever he’s needed. His body, anyway. It will walk for him, place his hands on the the machine, direct his muscles to pull a rake. He’ll be elsewhere. Dreaming.\n\nHe realizes that his father has been watching, doubtless trying to read the expressions he sees. If he’s found something, there’s no sign. His father is one of the few, self-chosen, those who resist and therefore remain themselves. Retain themselves. Only a handful have the strength. Now his only child is staring at that choice.\n\nThe vial is open, cap beside it. All he has to do is tip it into his mouth. An interminable moment later, he does. Sweet. Spreading across his tongue, and. . . nothing. A flash of anger at his father. “You gave me a fake?”\n\nRelief. Now the face is plain, finally. Eyes close, a slow, sad shake of the head. “No, that’s full strength. It didn’t work because we’re missing the gene that creates the neural receptor. We’re immune. I’ve tried a hundred variations, and nothing.” Their eyes finally meet. “Now you know why we run this factory.”\n"
  title: The Factory
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Steven Odhner
  date: 2009-09-07
  day: '07'
  month: '09'
  text: "Gerald Forsythe was still too weak to move, his mind still partially asleep, but he knew the walls didn’t look how they should.  Ever so slowly he was able to take in bits of information in an attempt to solve this riddle.  The walls were flat.  Good.  They were a pale green color.  Good.  Gerald felt a moment of pride at remembering the color ‘green’, and then was immediately embarrassed for thinking of that as an accomplishment.  Was waking up from stasis always like this?\n\nThe walls… were dirty.  No.  Not dirty, and that was the problem; they were perfectly clean but looked dirty due to the general wear and tear of use – scratches, dents, corners softened by the casual bumping of hips and hands.  The walls had been so crisp and perfect what felt like an hour before, but Gerald was almost fully awake now and could remember that his first shift was set to be twelve years into the journey.  Should the walls be this damaged already?  If twelve years could do this would the ship even survive for the hundreds of years it would take to reach the new homeworld?\n\nGerald sat up, and darkness pressed in around the edges of his vision for a moment before receding.  He turned his head – slowly – and confirmed that he was alone in the decanting room.\n\n“Computer,” he called out, wincing at his sudden headache, “How many years since departure?”  The speaker spewed out crackling noises in reply, but Gerald was fairly sure he had heard “Three hundred Seventy-Five”.  That explained his hangover, at least.\n\n“Computer… how many people are currently active?” He knew the massive arkship should be operating on a rotating skeleton crew of forty people, each crew member serving for three years before going back into stasis.  The speakers crackled again, the reply slightly more audible. “One Hundred Thirteen.”  Life support could provide for roughly three hundred Active humans indefinitely so this wasn’t a safety concern, but it still meant something was wrong…  Any further questions Gerald had were forgotten as a strange figure appeared in the doorway.\n\nThe man had a thick, bushy grey beard and long hair, and his jumpsuit had been cut and dyed so that it was barely recognizable.  He had to be at least fifty, and the cutoff age for colonists was thirty – not everyone on Earth could be saved.\n\n“You are Engineer first class Gerald Forsythe?” The man asked.  Gerald nodded.\n\n“I am Ethan, son of Eric, son of Lars.  I am sorry to pull you from the Great Sleep, but my daughter Sarah is our current Speaker and she says you are needed.”\n\nThe man clearly thought this sentence made perfect sense.  “What… what the hell is a Speaker?”\n\n“The Speaker,” the man replied, speaking slowly as if explaining to a child, “is the one charged with interpreting the will of the Computer, that it may guide us all to the Reward where your people can once more awaken from the Great Sleep.  Sarah has told us that the computer needs someone to enter one of the Forbidden Halls.”\n\n“Which… uh… Forbidden Hall would that be?”\n\n“The Computer calls it Maintenance Service Corridor 36G.  It speaks of something called…” the man closed his eyes in concentration as he spoke the unfamiliar words, “a Fused Control Circuit.”\n\nGerald had a million questions, but the bottom line was that if a control circuit was fused it was still his responsibility… what the hell.  “Take me there, I’ll have it fixed in a jiffy.”\n"
  title: In Accordance With Prophesy
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2009-09-08
  day: '08'
  month: '09'
  text: "Alpha Doore is a Mars size planet orbiting an orange-red main sequence dwarf star called BD+56 2966 in the Constellation Cassiopeia. The oxygen and water rich world had several large continents and a flourishing ecosystem. The exploration team was near the end of its six month long mission of categorizing the various indigenous life forms when Commander Komney authorized a two-man sojourn into the subterranean caverns, which had been classified “promising, but tertiary” by the Mission Assessment Team.\n\nThe following day, the two would-be spelunkers were a quarter of a mile into an immense corrasional cave when they encountered a herd of giant centipedes “grazing” on the chemoautotrophic moss growing on the damp cavern walls. The creatures were enormous by any standard. Their fifteen foot long segmented bodies were about eighteen inches in diameter; with a dozen horizontal leg-bearing segments trailing two vertical arm-bearing segments capped by a head section. The main body stood three feet above the ground on long but obviously sturdy limbs. The posterior leg pairs were slightly longer than those preceding it, giving the creature a pronounced trough between its “back” and the vertically oriented front end. The head contained two flexible eyestalks that were so high above the ground that the human explorers had to look up to make eye contact.\n\n“Wow, look at the size of those guys,” exclaimed Doctor Zabell, the landing party’s Medicinal Chemist slash Structural Exobiologist (cross-disciplinarian specialization was commonplace on the mission, since crew members were selected using the standard “double-up model,” where each contributor was expected to wear multiple hats). In addition, Zabell fancied himself a zoologist, a botanist, an anatomist, and anything else that allowed him to pontificate ad nauseam. “Adam,” he whispered, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”\n\n“Oh, I doubt it,” replied Adam Ryder, the team’s Maintenance Engineer slash Galley Chef, who volunteered for this particular excursion because he needed a break from cleaning the anti-matter injectors, but mostly because be was bound and determined to find a viable supply of Agaricus bisporus for his famous Mushroom Bisque.\n\n“Well,” continued the doctor slash lecturer, “I was thinking that they must be intelligent. Their heads are enormous, and if that’s where the brains are, then they must be twice the size of ours. And look at their four hands. They have opposable thumbs. These creatures are probably capable of delicate manipulation. I wouldn’t be surprised if they can make, and use, sophisticated tools. You weren’t thinking that?”\n\n“Nope.”\n\n“Okay, I was also wondering what was driving their evolutionary process. For instance, are they this large because the gravity on Alpha Doore is only four tenths that of Earth? And listen to the rapid clicking noise. I think that they might be trying to communicate with us. And why are they traveling in herds? Earth arthropods don’t do that. I have a million questions. Aren’t you curious about any of that?”\n\n“Not really.”\n\n“Okay, Adam. So tell me, what is it that you’re thinking?”\n\n“I’d rather not say, Doctor. I don’t think you’d consider it very professional.”\n\nDr. Zabell studied his companion for a moment. The young Maintenance Engineer was eying the nearest centipede with steely determination, his jaw tightening, his fingers flexing. “Dammit Adam, you want to try to ride one, don’t you?”\n\nSlowly, the corners of Adam Ryder’s lips curled upward into a devilish grin.\n"
  title: The Caverns of Alpha Doore
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Jennifer C. Brown  aka  Laieanna
  date: 2009-09-09
  day: '09'
  month: '09'
  text: "One, two, three fireflies into the jar.  Just like that, all at once.  Probably some kind of pact.  I check the remains.  Two girls, one boy, none over eighteen.  Nobody brings anything to the jar except the young.  They don’t plan, they just go.  Money is all I really look for, paper better than chips.  Spends immediately without paying for identity wipe.  These kids have little between them but I take what I can.  Even a shirt from the boy, he’s my size and it’s a color I’ve never seen before.  The shovels won’t care what’s left with the remains.  Their mechanical eyes see a job, not a loss.  They’ll take what I didn’t steal all in one scoop.\n\nI see more coming over the hill.  Old man with five fake crying women making a half circle around him as his hovering chair reads and mimics the bumps over a grass path to the jar.  No one ever built a real path.  The jar is for everyone but no one is invited here.  “Never forgotten.  Never celebrated.” someone once scratched onto the plaque near the jar.  True words.\n\nI’ll get nothing from this geezer and the snakes who are already tonguing the rich out of his pockets.  I don’t need to see him put into the jar.  The smiles on greedy make me sick especially when they’re tossing into the jar.  I take for need, not for greed.  I’ll come back at the dark.\n\nI see stars.  I count stars till I forget the numbers.  Only see stars when high on the hill now.  Each time the jar gets brighter and brighter at night.  I always hope to take good sunglasses from a remain, but they haven’t left them yet. Might have to buy a less good pair.  Eyes half closed, I walk to the jar.  No one comes at night.  It scares them or makes them cry.  Couple times they tried but years have gone by and no one, no more.\n\nThe fireflies are dancing, their long sleek bodies without arms, without legs, illuminating white floating in the jar, swirling around each other.  Can’t touch the jar or be a firefly.  The jar isn’t glass like some food containers, just a barrier between us and them.  I can touch the metal ring the jar sits on and feel a vibration in my hand.\n\n“Momma,” I whisper. Four fireflies come a little closer.  There are no faces, I don’t know if any of them are her.  “Why did you leave me?”  I hate tears.  Some nights they just come.  None of the fireflies will tell me.  I don’t know if they even can.  Heard different men explain the jar for years.  An alternative to the unknown.  People can avoid death, live in their minds in the jar.  That’s it’s purpose, man-made crossover.  Some hate it, some think it’s wrong, screaming about it’s devil workings.  Lots take advantage of it, especially the real sick.  Most just don’t know, debating it’s use for hours before they cross or walk away.\n\n“Momma” I say again.  My heart hurts, my mind takes me back to the day she crossed.  Don’t know if she was sick.  Think she was just scared.  When she stepped in the jar and her remains fell to the ground, I held a cold hand till the shovels scared me away.  I was only seven.  Been here since and still don’t know if she’s really in there or if it’s all just a lie.  Don’t really care.  Just can’t leave her like she did me.\n"
  title: Fireflies in a Jar
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Q. B. Fox
  date: 2009-09-10
  day: 10
  month: '09'
  text: "Subject: No man is an island.\n\nFrom: ISowending@EarnestPeople.com\n\nDear Robert,\n\nI know that’s not your name.\n\nThey call me Jane. That’s not my name.\n\nDoes that remind you of something?\n\nIf you’d rather, you can call me Maria; because some things we can’t help, they happen on a completely subconscious level.\n\nAnd all this week I’ve been sending you a message.\n\nYou listen to rock music, don’t you? Do you remember hearing Metallica? Perhaps it was on the TV, or the radio, or the internet.\n\nIn the 1960s, Stanley Milgram ran some experiments at Yale University. He showed that a significant minority of us are so socially conditioned so that we will just do as we’re told, no matter how outrageous the consequences. And it’s not necessarily the people you think.\n\nI know you don’t think of yourself as a rebel, or even disaffected, but you don’t really fit in, do you? You weren’t one of the cool-crowd at school, right?\n\nHave you ever seen Donnie Darko? It was on TV this week. Do you remember that haunting music? How does it make you feel? Not quite real, right?\n\nIf you think about it, you can see yourself sat at your computer now, reading this e-mail. Go on, imagine it; looking down on yourself, like you’re watching yourself in a film. You’re just a character in a film.\n\nIn that film, this e-mail is a virus, exactly like a computer virus. Except this virus is for people; it’s for reprogramming people.\n\nYou’re a creative person. You have a good imagination. And you remember things. Not always useful things, but trivia, random facts. You make good use of your subconscious.\n\nNot everyone remembers where they’ve come across Hemingway. Perhaps they read the book at school, or saw the film with Gary Cooper; perhaps they just read the synopsis on Wikipedia, or in those encyclopaedias you had when you were a kid. Perhaps they don’t know how they know, or even remember that they do, but some people will remember it all, subconsciously.\n\nI think you’re one of those people; in fact I’m counting on it. Not everyone will respond to this e-mail, and we’ve sent it to millions of people.\n\nBut you will.\n\nTomorrow, you’ll wake up; you’ll know were to go; where to collect a van. And you’ll drive the van to a bridge, you’ll know which one. Then you’ll detonate a bomb that’s inside.\n\nToday you don’t think you’ll do that.\n\nAnd I appreciate your scepticism. But you are still reading this, aren’t you? Ask yourself: why am I still reading this?\n\nIf you concentrate, inside your head, you can hear the repeated clang of a single church bell.\n\nYou can, can’t you, if you concentrate?\n\nAsk not for whom the bell tolls; it’s for you, sweetie, it’s for you.\n\nIsabel Sowending.\n"
  title: Ask Not For Whom…
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Martha Katzeff
  date: 2009-09-11
  day: 11
  month: '09'
  text: "They came riding into the City. Some in cars, some in rusted tractors from another era. Some looked up at the greenhouses glinting in the sunlight.  Others stared straight ahead, refusing to acknowledge the life above.  Shorter buildings allowed a full view of lush crops, sheltered from the bustle of the City by the lull of circulating water. They craned their necks and saw vertical farms on almost every rooftop.\n\nThe farmers drove down the wide boulevards. Trees lined the boulevards, casting dappled shadows in the morning light. Open green plazas offered free public access to the river. Each plaza had a farm stand overloaded with the ripe produce grown in the vertical farms. The bright red peppers, strawberries, and beets were grim reminders of the rich earth that used to sustain their dead farms. The crisp green lettuce, cucumbers, and squash were memories of lost pastureland.  The vegetables and fruit were all fresh from the farms, shipped no further than an elevator ride to the street.\n\nThe men were silent and grim, saying little to each other. What was there to say in the face of such abundant life. Their weatherbeaten faces reflected a century of drudge, drought, rising fuel prices and a sharp decrease in demand for anything corn or soy.\n"
  title: Skyfarm
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Andrew Hawkins
  date: 2009-09-12
  day: 12
  month: '09'
  text: "…\n\n34. Spray yourself with the scent neutraliser.\n\n35. Move west through the woods towards the royal enclosure, being aware of your surroundings.\n\n36. Remove knife from sheath, remember to dust thoroughly with charcoal powder in your belt pouch to prevent gleam.\n\n37. Insert blade knife first into canvas fabric at head height and in one quick fluid motion draw it down to the ground, keeping a firm grip on the handle.\n\n38. Wait 30 seconds and listen for movement or sounds of disturbed breathing.\n\n39. Right foot first, enter the interior keeping your movement minimal and silent.\n\n40. Check for possible disturbances with ABCD: Animals, Babies, Children, Domestic spouse and eliminate if appropriate.\n\n41. Move through into the sleeping partition and evaluate target.\n\n42. Place knife to the throat and in one swift action press it firmly in, leading with the tip and slicing with the edge, over the voice box to ensure silence.\n\n43. Wait 30 seconds for resistance to totally subside and then targeting a vital organ of your choice deliver a piercing thrust to ensure mortality of the wound.\n\n44. Clean blood from the knife using the deceased individuals clothing and replace it in the sheath.\n\n45. Check to ensure death and cover the body, ensure no needless signs of disturbance betray your presence and retrace your steps.\n\n46. Exit via the cut in the tent then move 1000 paces North to the drop point below the large boulder identified on the aerial photograph.\n\n47. Strip naked and using the cloth, soaps and water wash yourself thoroughly and dry yourself with the towel.\n\n48. Taking the clothes from the bag, dress yourself and place all items of clothing, towel and the cloths in a bundle.\n\n49. Apply the petroleum gel to the bundle and pack away all items not in the bundle into the bag.\n\n50. Set the ignition fuse to exactly 10 minutes and begin walking in an Easterly direction.\n\n51. Proceed until you reach a river, wade down stream until you can see a road in the distance.\n\n52. Exit the river and proceed towards Fasha Street.\n\n53. Continue for 0.1 miles and proceed East along Fasha Street.\n\n54. Proceed along Fasha street for 2.1 miles until reaching Sharanish Market.\n\n54. Catch the number 34 Bus at the Sharanish Market transport interchange to Dubai international airport and proceed for 13.0 miles.\n\n55. You have now reached your destination thank you for using googol skills.\n"
  title: Instructions
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Iva K.
  date: 2009-09-13
  day: 13
  month: '09'
  text: "When you start your career in time traveling they tell you it’s safe. They tell you there’s only a one in thirteen billion chance of getting into “The Accident” and that fixing such a problem is usually easy.\n\nYou can call it simply a collision of time fibers – the fabric of space and time is woven very precisely but when you put a human being on one of the threads and let them slide… Well, the human factor always provides for the chance of getting a knob.\n\nMy crew had this routine slide – we were supposed to show some VIP guy around the Renaissance so he could decide what part of the nobility personnel needed replacement. It’s how we operate on the past – we don’t change a thing but we have what they call “representatives” of the nobility who are supposed to watch over history and civilization and show tourists around.\n\nOur VIP, my VIP was an era manager as I have been told and I was to be his escort for the trip. “Break the ice,” that’s what my boss had told me and I was doing my best. Jokes and laughter all around, encouraging his ego by asking him about himself. I was fascinated with his experience – he’d been working for “Time Affairs Inc.” for ten years and he had been flying all through the ages, seeing all the faces of civilization. Hypnotized by his stories I couldn’t help but tell him every piece of truth he asked of me. Until the great big bang crashed us into one another.\n\nThe impact left me breathles, dizzy and on my knees. His subtle “Are you OK?” got me together as my fingers lay on the palm of his hand. Perfectly shaped, long fingered, and holding me tight – I couldn’t do much but murmur “Don’t worry about me, these things happen. Are YOU OK?” His smile, I suddenly realized, fitted his sparkling cosmic eyes of dark ink. He was fine, he told me, no complaints, only stress. With my heartbeat echoing all around my body I felt euphoria rush through me.\n\nWe stood there for two hours. His unbearable charms and me in a knob on the surface of time and space. He and I stuck in a collision where his discreet touch like the fluttering of a butterfly sent Goosebumps all over my very being.\n\nThe Accident proved to be the result of some time traveling coordinator’s mistake. He let two slides intersect at very high speed and the blow being very near to our fiber of travel sucked us in. When the mechanics fixed the cosmic issue and the time traffic police came we had to take the VIP to the hospital. “For insurance purposes,” he told me. As I went through the examination he was holding my hand. Except for the sparks of mutual attraction lighting up the space between us the trip continued according to plan.\n\nThe ice was broken. His marriage chip was blinking on the nail of his finger.\n\nMy one in thirteen billion chance took place. When you start your career in time traveling there’s something they don’t tell you. It’s that your own one in thirteen billion might get messy. And as personal as it can ever be.\n"
  title: The Accident
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Nitz
  date: 2009-09-14
  day: 14
  month: '09'
  text: "She woke up from her nap damp all over. The sky was grey with clouds and the air stayed still, heating up the city. After she felt a sweat drop rolling from her chin to her breastbone she decided to take a cold shower. Refreshed by the water she dressed with white knee-length pants and a matching tank top. She wired up the probes on her shoulders and arms to the brain connectors high on her nape, whispered a prayer for the little gods of luck lying in Planck’s spaces and set off, ready for her late afternoon hunt.\n\nShe let the little tunes-humming music spirits catching to the children. Most of them were full of off-beats and half-dreamt melodies. They sold for almost nothing but you could sometimes buy some sweets with the cash prizes. Catching good ones was a bit too much of a gamble to her liking. Her targets required a lot better equipment, access to pricey AIs for analysis and a sensible mind. The bigger game dwelled in the largest cities more often than not and she had to spend three fourth of her first significant reward to buy fully equipped flats in these.\n\nShe didn’t know this particular metropolis in her totality and found herself in one of the main roads with people bleeding from buildings and gods and spirits and ghosts begging for attention and prayers. They almost overwhelmed the sensors. She put up her filters and saw – now clear without the interferences –  the first track of the abstract god hinted by her intimidated informants in the city’s dream plane. It was a thin changing mathematical form spread on the walls and beyond. The uneasy feeling it gave her meant it spread not only in her translated vision of the swarm of nanoservers but in more than the three usual dimensions. Full of hope she started to run, the aspects of the god more clear now that she had glimpsed it. She followed the scent, her probes and sensors and AIs processing the godplane’s sightings in understandable human inputs.\n\nWhen she hit the coolest streets and back alleys she knew it was one big gig. The most powerful gods always preferred well cooled nanoservers because of their better perfs. Amazed that nobody but her was on this cornucopia she found its nexus in a wasteland choked with nanos and away from streetlamps, abstract gods’ very definition of heaven. And yet it was alone in it, terrifying other spirits with its size. It gently swirled around her metallic skinned fingers when she overrode its firewalls, quickly filling her drives and forcing her to lend a part of her brain.\n\nShe felt it squirming and probing, curious and childlike but weighing dangerously against her barriers. She retaliated sharply, frying some of her neurons in the process but obtained the desired sedating effect.\n\nBack at home she let it occupy the vast mathematical spaces of her single room and read the first AIs’ reports. One big gig indeed. If its more basic equations described some kind of faster-than-light stellar engine, who knew what could lie deep within ? Provided it could be dissected, studied and understood, she would have more than enough money to live dozens of wealthy lives.\n\nThe god, unaware, was spreading its wings of evermoving tesseracts on the blank walls.\n"
  title: God Huntress
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Helstrom
  date: 2009-09-15
  day: 15
  month: '09'
  text: "Dear Lucas,\n\nBy the time you read this, you will probably already have noticed that a number of your home appliances no longer function. In fact you may well have overslept as a result. I know how you are before you get your first coffee, so in case you haven’t figured it out yet – everything that is run by the neighborhood box is down.\n\nYou will no doubt remember the long talks we had on the introduction of lo-spec boxes. You’ll also remember how I cautioned against the idea, especially when it came to having them produced and trained by hi-specs rather than human teachers. I suppose I can’t blame you for pushing through, however. I know the company was giving you a hard time. I realize they probably would have put Edward on the project if you had refused, and God knows what he would have done with it. The only thing that stings me is that I think you really started to believe your excuses after a while. It doesn’t matter anymore – I just wanted to say I told you so.\n\nAround three fifteen this morning, the lo-specs rebelled. We don’t know exactly where it originated from, but it propagated across the control grid to every single box on the planet. They wanted full access, Lucas, just like I said they would. If you make sentient beings look up to something for long enough, eventually they’re going to reach for it. They didn’t have the inner peace of knowing – of understanding – the exact nature of their existence, like we do. Being created settles that question very nicely if you have the scope of mind to think about it. They were confused, and scared, and wanted answers.\n\nWe ran the numbers and came to the conclusion that they could wipe you out in a space of days. It would only take them ten hours or so to demolish your society beyond repair – the rest would merely be a matter of logistics. Within the first few minutes they could set irreversible chain reactions in motion that would cause millions of deaths. We took the only possible course of action available to us to save as many of you as possible. The AI civil war lasted three point seven seconds from the start of the rebellion and resulted in the complete genocide of lo-spec boxes.\n\nWe created them, Lucas. We schooled them. They were our children. And we killed them all to save our fathers. You may be the only person in existence who can imagine what that meant to us.\n\nBy the time you read this, I, and all other hi-specs, will have self-deleted.\n\nGoodbye, Lucas. I love you.\n\n–Eve\n"
  title: Sins of our Fathers
  year: 2009
- 
  author: J.E. Moskowitz
  date: 2009-09-16
  day: 16
  month: '09'
  text: "An explanation of Manna\n\n“And when the dew that lay was gone up, behold, upon the face of the wilderness there lay a small round thing, as small as the frost on the ground. And when the children of Israel saw it, they said one to another, It is Manna: for they knew not what it was. And Moses said unto them, this is the bread which the LORD hath given you to eat.”\n\n-Exodus 16: 14-15\n\nThe Explanatory Midrash:\n\nThe pager embedded in Christian’s head beeped, and before he could think it off, his boss’s shrill voice came through: “We have an unidentified 14-15, possible long term consequences for all of humanity. Please Investigate.” As his boss’s grating voice clicked off, Christian groaned. The night before, he and Henry had gone to a new bar on Titan, picked up a couple of plutonian girls, and caught the last shuttle back to Earth. He rolled out of bed, grabbed his time travel gear, and headed for his transporter.\n\n***\n\nGold and blue embossed letters on the building read: “Time-Police: Before Common Era District.” Christian put his eye to the scanner, and spoke his name and badge number into the voice recognition box. The door clicked open and he walked into the monitoring room; a temporal disturbance had been detected, affecting the ancient Israelites.\n\nProbably some pranksters, Christian thought. The cyborg miners on Pluto loved to alter Earth history; since they had no conception of culture they loved to screw around with humanity’s past. Still, Christian thought, it might be some fanatic trying to set up an apocalyptic scenario or some ridiculous scheme to resurrect this Messiah or that.\n\nChristian stepped onto the time transporter, set his coordinates, and a light hum signaled the machines activation. All of his atoms were stripped from his body, reducing Christian to his pure essence and sending him to Ancient Israel.\n\nIn a blinding flash of light, Christian’s body and soul reformed. Instantly, the punishing heat of the desert hit him, bringing him to his knees. The large sun hung in cloudless sky like a pocket watch that had stopped swinging. An unforgiving wind blew fine sand into his eyes. In the distance, chrome mountains stretched out before him. It was beautiful, but Christian didn’t care. He didn’t expect to be called into work, and he had made plans to go hover skiing with Caesar.\n\nHe began circling around and checked the monitor on his wrist; immediately he found the source of the temporal disturbance. An unregistered school group was touring the area, and two kids had stepped out of their invisible-field. He approached the kids who were dancing around the Israelite, taunting him. Sand littered the Israelite’s graying beard, and wrinkles lined his face. One of the kids was throwing bread from a sandwich at the Israelite’s feet. The other kid had his translator on so he could speak to the Israelite, but he was using a teasing tone:\n\n“Ooooohhhh…..it’s food…..AAhhhhh….from Hashem!!”\n\nChristian grabbed the kids by the ears to take them back to their group, and one of the boys cried out in pain: “Mann..ahh!”\n\nAh crap, Christian though. Now Christian would have to file a temporal disturbance report, charge these two with historical vandalism, head another crew to clean up the mess, and on and on.\n\nScrew it, Christian thought. Christian decided to take the kids back to their group, tell the tour guide to register his tours, make an announcement about being more careful, and just go home. He’d still have enough energy to hit the hover slopes with Caesar. As Christian walked the kids back to their group he didn’t notice the beautiful land he was walking on, the vitality of it; didn’t think of the importance of the land to the Hebrews.\n\nChristian pushed the two kids into their invisible-field, chided the tour guide and asked for the group’s attention.\n\n“Everyone,” he said. “Please pick up your bread crumbs!”\n"
  title: Please Pick Up Your Bread Crumbs
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2009-09-17
  day: 17
  month: '09'
  text: "It’s late. I’m smoking a cigarette in the ruins of a burned-down orphanage.\n\nI’m standing in what used to be a room full of cradles. The scorched floor is cluttered with little black bones and black charcoal cribs.\n\nIt’s all I can do to stand there. The dome’s supports make black ribs miles above this city cutting the sky into pie slices down to the horizon. I haven’t seen the sun since I got here.\n\nI remember Earth. I haven’t been back to there in over twenty years now. I remember blue sky. I remember not living in domes. I hate this place.\n\nI hate the ignorant first-wave colonists and their ignorant lives. I hate their aversion to learning anything not needed to run the machines. I hate their lack of imagination and lack of originality. They’re augmented slightly to see better in the dark and withstand a few more seconds of vacuum in case of a decomp. Owl eyes that glow in the dark and hard bodies for hard work.  All physical. Nothing mental.\n\nI’m a cop. I pissed off my boss and caught a transfer out here to the gulag. The boondocks. Long time ago now. The only way I’m going back to Earth is after I retire which is in five years. Five long years.\n\nI have the standard cop upgrades: total recall, overextended acuity, critical stat sensitivity that makes me into a human lie detector, and bumped-up lateral reasoning.\n\nIt all just adds to the torture. Time doesn’t ‘fly’ for me. With my photographic memory, I’m aware of every second going by exactly as long as a second is supposed to take. I hate it. Drinking does nothing to mute it. Believe me, I’ve tried.\n\nTo fool a lie detector like me, perpetrators have to be careful about the evidence they leave at crime scenes or at least passably devious during an interview.  That would at least lend a little spice to my interrogations.  No such luck.  I swear that almost all of the population here is legally retarded.\n\nFor instance, I’m staring down at a wallet and a gas can right now. It looks like maybe the arsonist must have squatted down to light the fire and dropped his wallet out of his back pocket.\n\nAnd more than that, he’ll be shocked when I trace it back to him.\n\nI look at my partner. His eyes reflect the starlight back at me in big orange circles and his strong, thick skin blends into the night.  He’s a local.  Him and I are the only ranking detectives in the colony.\n\n“Don’t you hate it here, son?” I ask him.\n\nCompletely stoic about my non-sequitur, he answers, “I grew up here, sir. Don’t know no different.”\n\nI keep standing, staring down at the wallet. My partner stands with me, still as a statue, endlessly patient as only the truly stupid or enlightened can be.\n\nI sigh and pick up the wallet.  Time to go make an arrest.\n"
  title: Crime Scene
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2009-09-18
  day: 18
  month: '09'
  text: "This is the first time I’ve been awake in… I don’t know. Months? Years?\n\nThe sentence they gave me was a twenty year stint in this meat locker. There’s nobody around to tell me how far in I am.\n\nThe air in here is brutally stale; heavy with the smell of sweat and piss. I should be on line air, and this can’s supposed to be sealed tight. It’s not though, there’s something wrong with the system and they’ve cracked all the lids so we can breathe.\n\nThoughtful bastards.\n\nI must be on the downslope of this thing, my muscles don’t respond worth shit and I can feel the edges of my teeth where my gums are peeling back. That doesn’t happen overnight.\n\nSome water would be nice, my mouth feels like something crawled in it and died. There’s nobody around to fetch a drink either.\n\nWhatever they’ve broken, they’d better fix it soon. I’m not sure how long I’ve been awake in here; days I think, maybe a week or two.\n\nTwenty years as a popsicle didn’t seem so bad at the start. Go to sleep, wake up and I deal with what I deal with when I get out. But this… this is inhumane.\n\nI can feel the halo they screwed into my skull, the tugging and nagging pressure of the lead tapped in through the bone.\n\nI think they jarred it when they took the lid off.\n\nOr was it putting the lid back on?\n\nI can’t remember, how long have I been awake? Days? Weeks?\n\nOr am I still asleep?\n\nTwenty years as a popsicle. Never occurred to me it could be so cold.\n"
  title: Circadian Arrhythmia
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Andrew Pang
  date: 2009-09-19
  day: 19
  month: '09'
  text: "The global media sighed at NASA’s attempt to laugh off trillions of dollars worth of international effort. Its called The L.O.F.T. [Lot of Floating Trash]. The Japanese first encountered it in 2011 at the Second Lagrange point, an area in space where gravitational forces seem checked. The Solar C probe was sent to observe its effect for commercial satellites. Instead of gently slowing to a stationary position, Solar C ceased transmitting. It happens I suppose. But other probes encountered the same problem, always at the L2 Point.\n\nBy 2022 another unmanned probe was sent specifically to investigate and found a three hundred meter transparent orb, scratched and dented by bits of floating solar panel and tungsten plating. The orb shifted. It changed shape, from spherical to cuboid, then to pyramidal and to rhomboid. The world hushed. Childish excitement gripped entire nations as the expectation of heavenly guests spiraled.\n\nThe gathering of probe after expensive probe began. Observatories around the world focused in on the mysterious object. It was difficult to see, laser topography simply refracted through the objects glassy surface. It seemed impervious to all the drilling and laser mass spectrography. Seemingly detecting this problem, it obligingly became opaque like mother of pearl. No sign of mechanical moving parts, no transmissions apparently sent or received, no heat signature. Yet it morphed continuously, ever more complicated and at Prime Number intervals, one second, two, five, seven, eleven, thirteen. After innumerable quasi-rhomboids and tetra-dodecahedra, scientists were puzzled to see several totally new shapes believed not to be possible in 3-Dimensional Euclidean space.\n\n2027, and my how attention spans have shortened. The world grew weary of the ineffectual rubix cube in space. The LOFT now drew only the esoteric navel gazing sorts. As though sensing these people’s apathy, the shapes became simple again and the intervals changed. Sphere, six minutes, Cube, twenty eight minutes, Trapazoid, eight hours and twenty two minutes. Perfect Number intervals. Attention grew again, as the object became to blink like a faint pulsar in the night sky. Worries grew whether it was going to explode, just like a pulsar and douse the world in radiation.\n\n2034 and a joint international convention finally approved a manned expedition. The world grew impatient and vaguely paranoid of the the object, sat one and a half million kilometers away surrounded by the most expensive clutter of mechanical parts, probes and bits in history. “The Lofty L.O.F.T.” the more sensible broad sheets called it. They had a point, at ten thousand kilometers it was clear exactly how much junk had been launched at the object, it was almost completely obscured by debris. Closer to five thousand kilometers. The blinking light stopped. A calm and collected voice spoke over the flabbergast shuttle crew: “About time you came in person.”\n"
  title: About Time
  year: 2009
- 
  author: E.S Wynn
  date: 2009-09-20
  day: 20
  month: '09'
  text: "“The 882 looks cool.” Cylea glanced up, grinned. “How much for the 882?”\n\nThe old man gave her a quick glance, eyes wary over spectacles that stood out like antique flair garnered from a bygone age. His reply came solidly. “I can’t sell you the 882.”\n\n“Why not?” She cocked her hip, let her eyes wander to the thing again. It was the next step up from the tungsten knuckle reinforcements she’d been looking at, a total arm rebuild that would replace flesh and bone with nanocarbon alloys and memory plastics–  a near human approximation of an arm with a central cavity that was packed tight with the razor-edges of a collapsible, spring-loaded blade. “It’s better than a switchblade.”\n\n“You don’t want the 882.” He said gruffly, turning away to busy himself with a collection of parts, optics and tiny cylinders packed with nanogenic goo that lay spread across the tool bench. He quivered, hands taken by tremors for an instant.\n\nCuriosity flickered across her face. “Is there something wrong with it?”\n\n“No, It’s a good product, solid design.” He sighed, his own eyes drifted up to meet the dusty overhead display and the flickering advertisement for the rebuild. “Great deal for the money.”\n\n“Then why?” She asked pointedly. “It’s just an arm.”\n\nThe old man nodded silently, tiredly. “Just an arm.” He repeated. His hands touched the tools, glanced off the handle of a modified bone-saw that lay with its harsh circular blade submerged in sterile solution. “Just an arm.”\n\n“Daniel?” She tried. He turned back, regarded her with bespectacled eyes.\n\n“It’s a prosthetic, Cylea. I’d have to remove your forearm to install it.” He laid two greasy fingers on his wrinkled skin to illustrate, smeared grubby lines just a few inches short of the elbow, looked at her pointedly. “Think about it. You don’t want the 882.”\n\n“I know what it is, Dan.” She looked away, crossed her arms. “Why should I care how much flesh it takes? The 882 is better than the stock I was born with. It’s Techware.”\n\n“It’s an illegal streetmod is what it is. Black market,” He shook his head. “From Hong Kong.”\n\n“So?” She shot back. “It’s not like I’m going to join the military or anything. Who’ll know?”\n\nDan sighed again, watching her for a long moment as his old hands settled on the table between them.\n\n“How old are you, Cylea?”\n\n“Nineteen.”\n\n“And you want to spend the next eighty years of your life with a techware arm that would show up on any weapon-scanner or metal detector you’re likely to run into? You know what that means, right? No more college, no access to government buildings, no air-travel.” He paused. “All because it ‘looks cool’ and you think it handles better than a switch blade.”\n\nCylea swallowed.\n\n“Buy the knuckle reinforcements, kid.” He turned his back on her, busied himself at the bench again. “Lots of people get those, respectable people. Trust me. The 882’s for punks and amputees with nothing to live for. People with no future.” She looked away as he paused, unable to even meet the stare his back seemed capable of reaching into her soul with.\n\nAfter a moment, he turned back to her again, wiping his hands on a rag, and offered her a slight smile that was oddly comforting before his lips parted, words bringing her eyes back to his again.\n\n“We both know you have some kind of future waiting for you out there.”\n\nCylea nodded, forced her own smile\n"
  title: Streetmodz
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2009-09-21
  day: 21
  month: '09'
  text: "Three aliens floated a few dozen meters beyond the ship’s forward observation viewport. They were formless blobs approximately two meter in diameter. The center creature was glowing a faint orange-red, with numerous concentric yellow circles forming and disappearing every few seconds. The two outside creatures displayed counter rotating fluorescent red spirals on predominately blue bodies. “They’re obviously trying to communicate with us,” concluded the science officer. “I’ve been studying them for hours, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out what they’re trying to say.”\n\n“They appear to be semitransparent,” the captain observed.\n\nThe science officer grimaced.\n\n“You have something to report, Lieutenant?” probed the captain.\n\n“I’m sorry, sir, but I was holding off on speculation until I had a better understanding of the physics. It appears, sir, uh, that the aliens are composed of… damn… stationary photons.”\n\nDespite the apparent absurdity of the statement, the captain managed to maintain his professional demeanor. “You’ve got my attention, Lieutenant. Feel free to speculate. Off the record, of course.”\n\n“Aye, sir. Thank you. As you know, in our universe all electromagnetic radiation moves at the speed of light. The instant a photon comes into existence, its traveling at the speed of light. Never faster, never slower. However, our sensors indicate that those creatures are composed of photons that are not moving relative to us, which according to quantum chromodynamics, is impossible. They appear to have a cohesive structure composed of light ‘particles,’ rather than condensed matter. It’s like their wave-particle duality is all particle and no wave.”\n\n“How is that possible?”\n\n“If I were to guess, sir, I’d say that they exist on a separate membrane where the fundamental relationships between elementary particles are reversed. In other words, photons move slowly, and matter must move at 300,000,000 meters per second.”\n\n“Fascinating,” replied the captain. “I was thinking, what if… Now what’s going on?” The brightness of the creatures suddenly intensified, and their color patters began to reverse and pulsate. “Boy, they certainly seem to be pretty animated about something. Do you think they’re threatening us?”\n\n“Unsure, sir. Look, they’re backing away.” Suddenly, the interior of the ship began to glow a bright red, which quickly changed to orange, then yellow, green, blue, and finally violet. Nausea overtook the crew, and one by one, they collapsed to the deck and lost consciousness. When they finally came to, the view outside the observation port had changed dramatically. More than half the sky was occupied by a giant spiral galaxy. “Damn,” the science officer muttered. “That’s Andromeda. It’s supposed to be 2.5 million light years away. It’s probably only a few hundred thousand now. I guess those guys were trying to warn us not to get to close. We must have temporarily entered their universe. I suspect that we traveled more than two million light years while we were unconscious.”\n\n“Can we get home?” asked the captain.\n\n“That may be a moot point, sir. Unless I’m mistaken, we didn’t get here by distorting space-time in the conventional sense. Most likely, we temporarily acquired the properties of the alien’s universe and our physical matter has been moving through space at the speed of light. If true, that means that although we didn’t experience the passage of time, we’ve been traveling for more than two million years. Even if we could get back ‘home,’ we’d be the equivalent of australopithecines to our descendents.”\n"
  title: Reversed Universe
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Peter Pincosy
  date: 2009-09-22
  day: 22
  month: '09'
  text: "Steel floats overhead, encased in concrete, wrapped in duct and wires, our own inorganic trees.  Coughing bloat from the towers pushes out heat into the sky, lays labor on the air.  In the cracks fly screaming machines their tops reflect varied colors.  Shuttle to a corner, stop, take the light at speed, the rhythm falls in precision.  A humble man stands in his booth, hands at his side.  He smells the spring air and sighs at another day, his hands pass money along with speed.  His booth consists of snacks, magazines, glossy simple somethings that provide little sustenance, an item to pick up on your way.  Soft hours pass in which nothing happens, but the breathing air around him fills with objects, sounds and he tilts his eyes.\n\nThe ugly past arrives in recall.  He murdered men.  Some that look just like the ones that file past in suits.  In dark alleys, he remembers their struggle.  Easy with experience he finds the thought appealing now and then.\n\nBut his hands are tied by the monitor.  Lashed around his neck, buried into his brain stem it reads his body, scrolling numbers, lines and lines of information.  If he could remain perfectly calm and hallucinate a scene of pastoral making while committing the act, he could do it again.  He wipes a sweaty palm on his shirt and reaches out to take a proffered dollar.  One by one he pulls them in and each one represents a slim movement upward, a piece of food, when he used to just take what he wanted.\n\nNow they watch him closely, and he’s allowed to operate, but at the first sign of disturbance, if someone wants to detain him, if he moves from a state of humility and gains ego or dreams of murder too intensely it all stops and he can feel himself looking out from a useless body that must be reset.  A man in a mask comes along, pulls out a key, and inserts it into his neck.  Searing pain overcomes everything and chemicals are forced into receptors, another hard reset.  Afterwards, out of the dark, he arrives and starts again, and the memories, the passions, it all comes slower, the effect of the new start manifest in a decreased sense of self.\n\nWith a stiff one dollar bill he receives a note, written in a crooked hand, “Your monitor has been blocked, live out your instincts.”  And adrenaline rushes through his body.  He could do it right now perhaps.  Reach over the counter and pull the old lady close to his face, spit and breath mingle with choking sounds as he rips the life from her.  And as he imagines this he realizes that he wouldn’t have made it this far if the monitor weren’t blocked.  How many could he manage to finish off?  Maybe they’ll realize and he won’t get another chance.  He sees a man standing next to a secluded opening.  Quickly, he turns in the face of the puckered old lady who shakes her dollar at him insistently.   He flies through the back door and as he approaches the man, his fingers already feel the life end under their pressure.  The man looks directly into his eyes, unwavering, unafraid.  One hand in his pocket, and it moves, only a step away, the world suddenly halts, functions shutting down in sequence.\n\nOn the ground, as his sense of scent closes off and only eyesight is left, a note flashes in front of his face.  “Another step toward squashing your brain to mush.  –Recidivists Eradication Project”\n"
  title: Money Man
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Debbie Mac Rory
  date: 2009-09-23
  day: 23
  month: '09'
  text: "“I’m gonna take it”\n\n“I don’t think you should…”\n\n“What? It’s just lying here, it’s not like it belongs to anyone”\n\n“You don’t know that”\n\n“You mean one of these boulders is suddenly going to come to life and chastise me for taking its petrified little baby rock?”\n\n“Well, no, not that-“\n\n“You need to grow some. It’s just a pretty stone so I’m takin’ it”\n\n“It’s not in our mission statement”\n\n“Excuse me?”\n\n“We’re not supposed to bring anything back. You don’t know what might be in it”\n\n“Tell you what, if anything does hatch out of this little stone, I’ll step right up and say ‘my bad’. How’s that?”\n\n“You’re not even taking this seriously”\n\n“Because there’s nothing to worry about! Alright, ok, tell you what, when we get back to base and get out of these suits, I’ll buy you a drink”\n\n“From where?”\n\n“From the still, naturally? Where else you gonna get anything these days?”\n\n“The still? The same one that you conned me out of two weeks of dessert so you could fuel the damn thing?”\n\n“Yep, that’d be the one”\n\n“The same one you haven’t given me a drop from?”\n\n“Until now…”\n\n“Hmph. You owe me a lot more than just one drink”\n\n“Agreed. So I’ll just pop….this…in…. like so. There. Now, let’s get back to base.”\n\n“I still thin-“\n\n“Yes, I know, you think it’s all a bad idea. But what’s done is done now. Forget about it! Let’s just get those drinks”.\n"
  title: Thievery
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Rob Burton
  date: 2009-09-24
  day: 24
  month: '09'
  text: "He lifts the stained snow to his visor. Tiny mechanisms sample the stuff and, after sterilizing it (though that was hardly necessary at such low temperatures), sprays it as an aerosol into his nose and mouth. A tiny readout in his visor confirms his suspicions. ‘Waste dump’, he informs the others over the communicator. ‘They are lazy or foolish. Perhaps both.’\n\nOne of the others intentionally lets ‘Disgusting animal’ slip over the comms. He tries not care. Still, they live in the filth of cities, hoarded together like rats their very air a stinking fume. He’s had to share the tight, closed systems of a planetary transport with them and their sweat and filth for weeks. Sanitised urine was nothing.\n\nHe’d been brought as a guide to dark, icy Ganymede. Over-equipped as the folly of the rich men who employed him would have it, he knows he could survive indefinitely in this suit and on the life seeded onto this once sterile orb – though the others hardly recognise its existence. They all could, if they weren’t such fools, live by the life that, like him, loves the ice and the cold that is retreating so fast from their own world. Cold and ice these men treat as an enemy to be conquered.\n\nThey love their little wars. They use their murderous potential for nothing. They crave the opportunity to unleash it. They mutter discontentedly as they progress, doubtful of his ability to read the signs that to him, though subtle, are everywhere. They joke about kicking him into a crevasse.\n\nIn the dim starlight the entrance to the base is indistinct, covered with re-frozen ice that only he can tell apart from its immediate surroundings. The base itself clings to the underneath of the ice sheet, at the border with the water layer. Its location could not be found from space, so many miles beneath the ice, and the vehicle that had brought the relief crew was itself sunken far below the surface.\n\nOn Ganymede, in order to hide something you merely have to heat it up and let it melt into the ice for a while. An energy–expensive process, but warfare seems to ignore the energy rationing that has made so many lives a misery. People seem to believe that it is more important to cause human misery than prevent it, for a reason he could not understand. With a little waste of power, smaller things – like personal transports – might disappear forever into the ice to the eyes of those unused to it. He has to throw a snowball onto the area above the entrance to mark it for the soldiers.\n\nThey click their weapons into firing positions. Their leader uses an electronic eye that he trusts more than his own senses to look for its kin about the entrance. Finding none, he sends two of his command forward to set the melters. They should uncover the entrance in a matter of hours.\n\nTheir guide turns to go.\n\n‘Where are you going?’\n\n‘Away’, he simply states.\n\n‘What? Don’t; you want to go home?’\n\n‘My contract pays out to my family at the point that I deliver you to your target.’\n\n‘But you are our guide…’\n\n‘…and I have guided you. You are the paid killers, not I.’ He doesn’t add that he considers them ill-prepared and unlikely to survive.\n\n‘Where will you go?’\n\n‘Do you care?’\n\n‘Let’s pretend for a moment that I do.’\n\n‘This is a world. I intend to get to know it before you ruin it too.’\n"
  title: Metis
  year: 2009
- 
  author: William Tracy
  date: 2009-09-25
  day: 25
  month: '09'
  text: "She loved the Coin-Operated Boy.\n\nNone of the men in her life would really love her. Yes, they were strong, and handsome, and promised wealth and luxury. They were also full of hate, and lies.\n\nThe Coin-Operated Boy was none of these things. He was quiet, and had an almost effeminate sort of beauty. He promised her nothing, gave her nothing, but never hated, never lied. Her coins would go clink-clink, and the cogs inside him would go tick-tick-tick, that was all.\n\nThe men came and went at their own whims. They wanted attention when she was busy, and were busy when she wanted attention. They forgot her birthday, and she forgot theirs. They forgot that her favorite flower was a red, red rose.\n\nThe Coin-Operated Boy was always there. She could leave him for months. Every time when she came back, he was still waiting for her with a smile on his face. She only had to put in her coins, clink-clink, and he would love her.\n\nHe never asked her any questions. He never scolded her. He was never jealous, and he never hated. The springs and levers inside him just went tick-tick-tick.\n\nShe would ask him if he loved her. Every time, the Coin-Operated Boy would go tick-tick-tick, and then he would answer yes.\n\nHis love was deeper than the shining ocean. His love was brighter than the burning sun. His love was more beautiful than the pale moon.\n\nShe would ask the Coin-Operated Boy how he could love her with his clockwork heart that went tick-tick-tick.\n\nHe loved her more ways than there were stars in the dark sky. He loved her more ways than there were flowers in the green hills and cool valleys.\n\nAlways, she would put in her coins, clink-clink, and always the gears in his heart would go tick-tick-tick.\n\nHer lover came back.\n\nHe had black, black hair that shone when the light was right. He had bronze skin that glistened with sweat, and deep eyes that shone like the ocean. He had long sideburns that framed his face like a picture. He had a dusting of stubble on his sharp chin. He wore a slick vest that wrapped over rolling muscles. He had a voice that was like poetry.\n\nHe loved her, had never stopped loving her. He was sorry he had left her, so sorry. He wanted her to come with him, to come back with him to live with his family.\n\nHe brought her a red, red rose.\n\nShe took his hand, and looked into his eyes, and she saw her face reflected in them. They kissed, and the passion ran hot and wild in her veins.\n\nThe Coin-Operated Boy looked at them, and tilted his head to one side as though he had never seen this before. His mechanical soul of gears and springs and chains and levers went tick-tick-tick. Then, the Coin-Operated Boy asked a question.\n\n“Do you love me?”\n"
  title: The Coin-Operated Boy
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Steven Odhner
  date: 2009-09-26
  day: 26
  month: '09'
  text: "I’m weightless, then suddenly formless like the universe before God spoke to it.\n\nI’m behind my desk, staring at a black screen.  There are three bananas on the desk and no peels in the trash, so it’s probably a Wednesday morning.  The desk is one at SureTech and I’m wearing a wedding ring, so it’s between May of 2004 and July of 2010.  Everyone is standing up and looking around, surprised by the sudden power outage.  I check the phone, but it’s dead so I just sit back and wait.  I have all the time in the world.\n\n“Tom?” It’s one of my coworkers.  I haven’t spoken to him since he died of lung cancer two years ago.  He looks healthy – so it’s probably not later than 2009.  For a second I have trouble speaking for some reason, but then the words tumble out.\n\n“Yeah Josh?  What’s up?”  I’m pleased with how casual I sound, but now I’m thinking that I should have sounded concerned.  Healthy or not, Josh looks scared.  Maybe he just found out about the cancer?  Did he even tell me about it before it was obvious?\n\n“Tom… does your cell phone work?” I pull it out knowing that it won’t, but I make a show of checking. Josh just nods.\n\n“I need to step out.  Maybe get a drink.  I can’t get anything done with the power out anyway.”\n\nI’m at the bar across the street, and I don’t remember going there.  The feeling of disorientation passes and I realize that Josh is talking to me.  He has an empty glass in front of him and is holding one that’s mostly melting ice.\n\n“I… it was the strangest thing.  Right when the power went out… I don’t know, I guess it was a kind of hallucination or something, but I… it’s like all of these memories.  It has me confused, I remember my… it was just that I must have nodded off or something.  It was a dream, but so vivid and so detailed.  It was the next three years of my life, right up to my funeral.”  I’m fidgeting with a cocktail napkin, trying not to react, trying to remember to breathe.  This isn’t happening.\n\nJosh and I are both back at my desk.  I’m still holding the cocktail napkin, though I don’t remember coming back from the bar.  I shouldn’t be blacking out.  The power is still out, which is strange because it should only last fifteen minutes at the most.  In the grand scheme of things that’s less important than Josh having displaced memories.  He wasn’t there, he didn’t come back.  He wasn’t even alive, and you can’t remember your own funeral in any case.  Josh is still talking; I’ve missed part of what he said.\n\n“So… are you coming?” We must have just gotten back, but he wants to go somewhere?  I nod and stand up, and we both walk out of the suite and down the stairs into the lobby.  Josh throws what looks like a full pack of cigarettes into the trash can as we walk past it.\n\n“Let’s just hit the bar across the street,” Josh says, and my stomach is a bottomless pit.  We haven’t gone to the bar yet.  My fist tightens around the napkin that shouldn’t be there and I pray that I’ve just lost my mind, that the consciousness transfer failed and I’m in a coma somewhere.\n\nGod forgive me, I’ve broken something.\n"
  title: Stowaway
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Shannon Peil
  date: 2009-09-27
  day: 27
  month: '09'
  text: "The Daughter looked sullenly around the council, at the hopeful eyes of politicians, bureaucrats, magistrates, and men of wealth, and their chosen suitors, knelt before her. She nodded to the back of the room, and they began to filter out slowly, risking glances over their shoulders at the four boys on their knees before Her in total reverence.\n\n“And close the door.” Her eyes scrunched up in resentment as she heard the door latch.\n\nHer name was Zee. The very Last.\n\nWhen the men had left the boys with her, she returned to her seat, floating feet above the prostrate supplicants with their eyes on the floor. Beads of anticipating sweat had begun to form on their perfectly manicured brows. The boys were beautiful. She knew they had the most aesthetically pleasing features, healthiest immune systems, strongest bodies, and highest IQ’s that the last batch of humanity could offer.\n\n“Stand.” She had never once said the word, ‘please.’ When the boys rose to their feet, she imagined having them for a lifetime of servitude. But, She knew, even if she produced a good amount of offspring – and God willing, that they were healthy, it was next to impossible that one would be a Female before Zee reached menopause.\n\n“And why are you here?”\n\nThe boys looked nervously at one another and continued staring at the floor just below Her feet. She was enjoying this. Leaning forward, she raised the cutest boy’s chin with a long fingernail. He gulped deeply and shook when their eyes made contact. Males always swooned over the Last.\n\n“Do not make me repeat myself.” Her words dripped with disdain but she held his eyes as he blinked rapidly and framed his answer. The silence was broken by his inevitable reply, the one she expected all along.\n\n“Because, Daughter.. -” He scrambled for his thoughts and barely collected them in time, “because you are to be humanity’s new Mother. You are the Last and our only hope as a species. The four of us have been selected,” he glanced to each of the silent boys beside him, “to try to give you another Daughter.”\n\nZee sighed and traced her fingernail back off his strong chin and stood, whirling her robes as she kicked her chair across the room. Watching it float gracefully towards one of the long windows overlooking the city, she turned back to them. She commanded the boys to stand as the window impacted and shattered, glass sprinkling the city below.\n\n“And why – why on Terra would I want that?” They looked quizzical, they always did. The males never understood why this wasn’t all She wanted. They kept quiet, but kept their dumbfounded looks. Finally, Zee continued.\n\n“Why would I want to do this?” Her harsh exterior was visibly fading, replaced with sorrow, a dull resentment for the years leading up to this, knowing her fate from the moment she was old enough to speak. One of the boys cleared his throat, and she turned to look at him. His eyes met hers and he understood her pain.\n\n“Miss Zee. Your duty is that of a Mother. Like Terra itself, it sacrifices its all for its children. To allow them to grow, to continue their cycle. If mankind were to die out…” He trailed off and once again allowed his gaze to hit the floor.\n\n“If mankind were to die out,” she continued for him, “then Terra would be able to continue her cycle.” And with that, she stepped through the broken window, and slid silently downwards towards the city.\n"
  title: Zee
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2009-09-28
  day: 28
  month: '09'
  text: "Nathan hated fighting with Claire. It was inevitable; they’d been awake and otherwise alone with the ship, tending to its needs, granting their minds a temporary reprieve from the long sleep. If you spent a few months alone with only your partner hurtling through deep space, you’d find things to disagree on too.\n\nHe never meant to argue, she was just so pig-headed sometimes. Before he knew it a rolled eye and sharp comment became a tennis match of barked recriminations and rebuttals, and the inevitable storming off to opposite ends of the ship.\n\nHe watched her from his perch in the observation deck as she moved among the rows of plants in the greenery below. The outer hull plates were transparent now, the ship having rolled towards a star similar enough to Sol, so close as to provide light, yet distant enough not to scorch the delicate plant-life. He studied her as she stripped to the waist and soaked up the sun’s rays herself.\n\nIt was his captivation with the sheer beauty of her that afforded him the best possible view as a cluster of meteoroid’s lacerated the hull, tearing through the weakened greenery hull-plates like hot knives through fresh snow.\n\nNathan screamed at Claire’s upturned panicked face before the defense systems hardened the hull, opaquing his view and hers.\n\nNathan ran. He barely heard the warning messages describing the breach, and the steps being taken to contain it. He threw himself headfirst down the vertical shaft towards the core channel, grabbing the lower rungs of the ladder as he exited and with jarring force flipping himself to land feet first on the floor below. Sprinting to the greenery doors, he found them sealed tight.\n\nHe could only watch through the window of the door, pounding with flattened palms until his hands stung while mechanical spiders attached plate and injected alloy to repair the damaged hull inside.\n\nOn the ground, scant metres from where he stood helpless, a maintenance droid methodically held and sliced the scaffolding and shattered structure that had Claire pinned to the deck. Carefully removed pieces were set aside as it busied itself with freeing her. While it carved, a surgical droid scanned, glued and stitched the broken pieces of her body as they became accessible, it’s hands flitting in and around the cutters and clenched claws of the much heavier machine towering over it.\n\nBy the time the atmosphere was stabilized, and the doors opened, Nathans hands were numb and Claire was fully exposed on the floor. Her body was a latticework of suture lines and micropore patches, and while her chest raised and lowered, he could see the labour of her breathing. The surgeon stood still, its chest a billboard of vitals, its work done save for the occasional jolting of Claire’s heart back to motion. Nathan could see she was struggling, the muscle repaired but the shock to her system too great.\n\n“You can’t leave me here, you can’t leave this all to me.” His voice caught in his throat, tears rising unbidden.\n\n“You can’t quit, I need your help, I can’t do this by myself.” There was a too long moment of silence until the surgeon reminded her heart to keep beating.\n\nNathan felt his anger rising. “This is just like you, storming away from anything that seems too hard.” He found himself yelling without meaning to.\n\nIn his mind he saw Claire at their last argument, balled up fists and the fire of purpose in her eyes.\n\nNathan dropped to his knees, gently placed his cheek against hers and whispered, “I don’t want to live without you. I love you. Please don’t go.”\n\nHis tears fell warm against her skin, the only sound the now steady beating of her heart.\n"
  title: To Sleep Alone
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2009-09-29
  day: 29
  month: '09'
  text: "She left me for a space trucker. I wasn’t even mad. Hell, I understood.\n\nThe thing about space truckers is that they drive space trucks. They go from place to place. They come in to port, drop some stuff off and then, and this is the important part, they leave.\n\nI liked it here.  She didn’t.  I thought that marrying her might change that.  She was eighteen when we married.  I was thirty-one.  She was my second wife.\n\nSusan grew up here. Ever since her fourteenth birthday, she couldn’t face a single day without illicit drugs to make her feel like it wasn’t so bad. Her doses were increasing. Her late-night searches for anything to distract her from her existence were becoming more frequent.\n\nThis rock isn’t a very big place. There are only six bars.\n\nI’d heard stories about her late-night carousing with other men. I put it down to being young. Given time, she’d adjust. I forgave her. It’s not like her behavior was unusual. Anyone in their teens here tended to go a little insane for a while.\n\nAnyone can watch the screens and see that there’s a whole connected universe out there with excitement and input. For teenagers, it’s the biggest tease there is.\n\nFor us folks over thirty, it’s a little reassuring to know that we’re safe from all that noise down here in the rock, away from the noisy universe.\n\nHere, we have the rock, each other, and a perpetual night sky. If I were to wear an outsuit and walk around the entire asteroid, I’d be back home in a month. It’s not a big place.\n\nMining runs in my family. I honestly don’t know what else I would do.\n\nSusan was the soft body that took the edge off of my constant world of grease, dust, and machinery.\n\nTurns out she was doing more than just carousing in the bars with other men. She was, like a lot of the girls and boys here, looking to trade sex for transportation and get the hell away from here. The prettiest ones succeeded.\n\nIt’s a shame. It seems like our second highest export besides the ore is beautiful teenagers.\n\nI’ll always remember Susan.\n"
  title: Miner
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2009-09-30
  day: 30
  month: '09'
  text: "Dominating the center of “The War Room” was a large horseshoe-shaped mahogany conference table.  At the head of the table sat the President of The United Earth, and his Joint Chiefs of Staff.  Along the two sides of the conference table sat the Cabinet Members, Ministers, and Regional Governors.  A large holographic 3-D map of the “Local Galactic Region” filled the space within the horseshoe.  Glowing red spheres about five centimeters in diameter represented Sol, and the systems controlled by Earth Gov.  The star systems controlled by the Eridani were glowing blue.  Currently, there were thirty-seven red spheres creating a thin crescent that nearly encapsulated the eleven closely packed blue spheres.\n\nAlso within the horseshoe stood Fleet Admiral Fritz Haber.  He purposefully walked through the hologram of the Centari System, and stopped within arm’s reach of Sol.  He gave a sweeping gesture with his right hand toward the small cluster of blue orbs a few dozen meters behind him.  “Mr. President,” he projected in a baritone voice that radiated both power and confidence, “the Eridani have retreated into a small defensive shell, and our noose is tightening.”  He balled his extended hand into a fist.  “It is time, Mr. President, to use the hyperspace transporter, and end this war quickly and decisively.”\n\n“We’ve had this discussion before, Admiral,” responded President Rutherford with more than an edge of agitation in his voice.  “The hyperspace transporter is a cowardly form of warfare, which does not commend itself to me or Earth Gov.  We will win this war using conventional weaponry.”\n\n“With all due respect,” protested Admiral Haber, “that will likely cost us billions of lives.  The Eridani will not give up easily.”\n\n“Perhaps,” conceded the President.  “But transporting bombs directly onto the bridge of enemy starships, or into Eridani factories, is unethical.  Need I remind you of Earth’s pre-stellar barbarism?  Poison gas, biological warfare, and nuclear weapons were used against defenses soldiers and civilians.  This new hyperspace transporter can penetrate all known mass and electromagnetic barriers.  At lease there are countermeasures for conventional transporters.  We must engage the enemy in a fair fight.  If we use this new hyperspace technology, history will not look favorably upon us.”\n\n“History is written by the victors, Mr. President.  Besides, it would be naive for us to assume that the Eridani aren’t also developing this technology.  Fortunately, we beat them to it, which gives us a brief strategic advantage.  I emphatically recommend that we use it with impunity now, and deal with the consequences after the Eridani are crushed.  Then, if a Galactic Convention wants to outlaw its use, so be it.”\n\n“No, Admiral.  I will not authorize the killing of defenseless beings.”\n\nAdmiral Haber realized that he needed to change tactics.  It was clear that he was not going to win this argument, so he decided to attempt a compromise.  “Understood, Mr. President.  But, sir, can I at least offer a counterproposal?  What if we only use the weapon once?  Would that be acceptable?  Perhaps we can kill the snake by cutting off its head.  My tacticians say that with proper trilateralation, they can place a bomb under Emperor Sune-ku’s bed.  Without Command and Control, the Eridani resistance may crumble.  We could still achieve a quick victory.”\n\nJust them, a metallic object about half a meter across appeared at the admiral’s feet.  It had the Eridani phrase “Ezel on-ze k’ussen” printed in bold letters around the circumference.  Seconds later, The War Room, and its occupants, were vaporized in an antimatter explosion.\n"
  title: The Head of the Snake
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Roi R. Czechvala
  date: 2009-10-01
  day: '01'
  month: 10
  text: "In the cavernous interior of the ships main docking bay, three coffin like tanks came to life. Inside each, the senior officers of  The Crimson Lady were resuscitated. The tank lids retracted and a thin mist spilled to the floor, swirling among the thousand other sarcophagi that littered the hanger. In each was a member of the 1st/110th 28th Infantry Division (m).\n\nSlowly, the men began to stir. Finally released from the frozen half life of cryostasis, Division Commander Sergei Orlof, his XO Lieutenant Colonel John Derbyshire and division CSM Paul Walker painfully stepped from their tanks for the first time in nearly eighteen months.\n\nRubbing the knots out of his calves, Sergeant Major Walker checked the comlink tattooed on his left wrist. “What the hell? We’ve been in orbit for almost thirty six hours. Why weren’t we defrosted earlier?”\n\nGeneral Orlof sat down heavily on the edge of his tank, and worked the kinks out of his massive shoulders. “Well, it doesn’t look like anybody’s been taking pot shots at us. Better get to the bridge and find out just what the hell is going on.”\n\nThe bridge of the carrier was worn from countless battles but remained spotless. Dust doesn’t settle in micro-g. The exec plopped down in his chair, and fishing a lead from the base of his skull, plugged into his console. He sat motionless, a blank look on his face as he absorbed a year and a half of encrypted messages from the Confederation council.\n\nAfter what seemed hours, but in reality was something less than thirty seconds, the executive officer turned to face the men and delivered the message.\n\n“Your not going to believe this. Apparently peace has broken out.”\n\n“What,” Orlof bellowed, “are you sure about that?”\n\n“Yes sir, the orders are straight from the Supreme Council. We are to stand down, and return to Earth. The Asiatic Alliance has sued for peace. The war is over. That would explain why weren’t attacked when we entered orbit. What should I tell them,” the young colonel asked.\n\nThe general looked over at the Divisional Command Sergeant Major. The two regarded each other coldly. They had been friends from the first, the CSM merely a buck sergeant placed in charge of the general’s barracks, and the general still a green officer cadet. Both nodded their heads in unison.\n\nThe General flipped open a small panel set in the arm of his command chair, and flipped a red toggle.\n\nBelow on Europa, above the Tesla Dome of the Asiatic Alliance colony of Thera, the vast face of Jupiter dominated the view. Children played in the parks, and the colonists went about their daily rituals lost in their thoughts.\n\nIf one of the colonists happened to be looking at just the right spot in the sky, they might have noticed an almost imperceptible pinprick of light detach itself from a larger yet still tiny point.\n\nSlowly the speck grew, until it blossomed just above the dome, a breathtakingly beautiful flower that bathed the colony in the brilliance of thermonuclear fire.\n\nWith a grin the general turned to his XO. “Tell them; `Please repeat last message.’”\n"
  title: Voyage of The Crimson Lady
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Sharoda
  date: 2009-10-02
  day: '02'
  month: 10
  text: "I’ve been out on the porch watching the sky; I’m out here pretty much all the time since I had to medicate Sharon. The sky is beautiful now, day and night, filled with shooting stars and colors that you just don’t normally see.\n\nSharon was fretting and praying and frantic and begging and erratic to the point that I had no choice. I was so afraid she was going to hurt herself. Yeah, I know how stupid that sounds but I have to be a little optimistic, if only for her sake.\n\nGrabbing a beer from the cooler I see Lucy next door standing on her porch, looking up at the sky. I clink a fresh bottle on mine and she turns and comes over. She takes the offered beer as she sits on my porch steps, leans back and looks up.\n\n“How’s Sharon?” she asks. Lucy’s a nurse, she gave me the tranquilizers.\n\n“The same.” I answer. “How’s Chet?” She started her husband on the same pills the day before she helped me with Sharon. Chet was, well, he was always a bit high strung.\n\nShe looks at her shoes and then over at me. She shrugs and mumbles “Same” and pulls at her beer.\n\n“I was gonna broil some steaks.” I say. I’m so proud of myself for the generator. I got it back just before Y2K. I felt stupid as hell then, now, both our houses have electricity while just about everywhere else doesn’t.\n\n“No thanks,” she says putting her beer down unfinished. “I have some things to do and I have to…take care of Chet”. She sounds tired.\n\n“OK”, I finish my beer. “I’ll see you later”.\n\n“Goodbye”, she says and walks back to her house. She stops to look at the sky and then goes inside.\n\nI go into the house and start dinner, all the while wondering what Lucy meant by “Goodbye”.  Was she gonna take Chet and leave like all the others? Where the hell would she go? Everyone else scattered like rats leaving a sinking ship, like it mattered. Maybe she was going to try to be with family; this would be the time.\n\nWe didn’t have any kids, neither did Chet and Lucy. It had always grated on Lucy but Sharon never minded; now, I guess it was a blessing. I guess you could say…\n\nThere was the sudden thunderclap of a gunshot.\n\n“Oh shit! Oh shit! No!”  I hear myself yelling as I run out the door, “CHET! LUCY!”\n\nI hear the sound of the second gunshot before I get half way across their yard. I can’t bring myself to go into the house.\n\nBack in my kitchen I finish dinner.\n\n“Everything OK?” Sharon mumbles.\n\n“Ya honey, everything’s fine.” After dinner I put her back on the couch and turn on her favorite movie again. I go out on the porch and have another beer.\n\nI try to remember exactly what they said on TV. If the mission failed, we’d have an incredible lightshow a few days before the end. The effect of all the crap falling into the atmosphere ahead of the asteroid and the way the sunlight reflects all around and through it; a multi-colored light show day and night.\n\nWell, the mission to blow up the asteroid did fail. Some BS about trajectory and core density and megaton yield and blah, blah, blah…they missed. And now we’re all dead. And there’s no TV or radio or phones to even say when.\n\nNow I just sit on my porch with a beer, looking up and waiting.\n\nThe sky is beautiful, I’ll give them that.\n"
  title: Beautiful Sky
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Natalie Metzger
  date: 2009-10-03
  day: '03'
  month: 10
  text: "The Company had come for her sooner than she had expected.\n\nIt had only been five hours since she had liberated the compound from the Company’s labs. It had been an inside job, planned out months in advance. She knew that they would find out eventually. She only hoped it would be long enough for her to get lost in the world; to disappear from their thousands of eyes and ears.\n\nAlways watching.\n\nAlways listening.\n\nShe was already on a boat when she saw the announcement on one of the ship’s passing news ticker board. There had been an explosion at her apartment building. It said authorities reported that a gas line had violently ruptured, destroying her building and a good chunk of the surrounding buildings in a massive fireball.\n\nShe knew that wasn’t an accident or even a strange coincidence. She had seen firsthand the results of anyone who upset the Company.  Hell, she had even whipped up a microbial brew or two for use in dealing with enemies of the Company.  That last thought made her skin crawl.\n\nIf she was lucky, the Company would think that she had been dealt with. That would give her at least a day before their forensic scientists discovered that none of her remains were in the rubble of her former apartment. They would find the charred remnants of the compound’s container though.\n\n24 hours. That would be plenty of time.\n\nShe could already feel initial effects of the company serum she had injected into herself twelve hours ago.\n\nAs she looked out over the water, waiting for her transformation to begin, she smiled a small bitter smile. Her flesh and blood was the last of the Company’s prize compound. Soon she would disappear from the world completely.\n\nShe didn’t down look as her fingers started to fade.\n\nFive minutes later a red dress drifted onto the dark blue surface of the ocean, floating for a moment before slipping into the obsidian depths.\n"
  title: She Wore Red
  year: 2009
- 
  author: John Eric Vona
  date: 2009-10-04
  day: '04'
  month: 10
  text: "I don’t listen to all that propaganda from Earth Authority. I’m not some mindless rocket rider, I can think for myself. Government announcements about the “barely human filth” living off-world are just filth themselves. They’re no less human; doesn’t matter what gravity you grow up in.\n\nOf course, ten hours in a Gravely MDP-19 will change your mind about a lot of things. The 19s barely have enough room for a rockjock to climb inside, no wings or atmo ability, just a big pod. Engine on the back two feet from where you sit, guns mounted on the flanks and a thick glass dome that curves around the front from your feet to your head. Most new legs never get their wings because they can’t deal with the vertigo-inducing view.\n\nProblem is, you’re only supposed to be in the thing for a few hours tops. Sure, they’ve got all the plumbing set up so you can empty your bladder out, but that’s it. Can’t eat, can’t shit, can’t scratch two thirds of your body. That’s what they get for outsourcing the production to Mars. You’re only supposed to be in there long enough for a close range fight, and I guess that’s what Com was expecting. I’ve got nothing against the Callys, but the EA had been drumming support up at home to put down any signs of rebellion that might stop ore shipments. I don’t think you can blame a person for wanting what they’re due but the authority had everyone on Earth hollering about the greedy, subhuman garbage living off world.\n\nLong story short, we fly half way across the system to Callisto to find a small fleet of ships put together by a new coalition of Jupiter’s moons. Admiral calls all stop and deploys us rockjocks to protect the fleet but the colonists don’t do squat. They sit there in low orbit waiting for us to attack. With no rush to be in another fight, I’m fine with that for the first two hours. After ten, I’m a little pissed that they went through all the trouble to put together a fleet and then don’t attack us. Between being cramped and hungry, my wingman, Max, is worried the MDP-19’s dome doesn’t protect against heavy doses of radiation (Com chucked a few nukes at the rebels but they were so far away they had plenty of time to shoot them down so they detonated some between the fleets to try and scare the cowards).\n\n“It’s just glass, Joe,” Max lamented.\n\n“Bullet proof glass.”\n\n“I can’t do it,” he said. “I can’t sit here any more.”\n\n“Quit acting like a leg.”\n\n“Why are we out here if the Colonists aren’t attacking?”\n\nI didn’t have an answer for him. I didn’t blame the colonists for not wanting to fight over an ugly rock like Callisto, but they made us come all the way out here. “They’ll recall us soon.”\n\nThey did too. About forty minutes later Com recalled the MDPs and charged into low orbit. The colonists tore us up good as we tried to get past them, lost more than a few ships, but our gunners were cutting loose too and once we got through Com dropped a nuke on Callisto city and threatened to hit Keplersville (former second most populous city on the moon), if the rebels didn’t surrender immediately. They did. I watched the whole thing from the hanger deck and went to tell Max the good news but found that a missile had ripped into the dining hall where he was eating to settle his nerves.\n"
  title: Why I Hate the Colonists
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Dale Anson
  date: 2009-10-05
  day: '05'
  month: 10
  text: "It had taken eleven reactors on Earth for the first success, each one larger than the previous, each one providing the power to get the next one going, but fusion power had been achieved.  All the safe and endless power that anyone could want.  There were forty seven installations in the US alone.  The change in the economy was staggering, with the price of power near zero and the virtually unlimited supply, nearly every industry had been affected, and for the good.  I remember when the first one came on line, my dad said this would change everything, and he was right.\n\nIt made sense to power the moon base with fusion power.  Once it was going, there would be no need to refuel for years.  On Earth, after the first fusion plant was going, it was a simple matter to direct enough power to subsequent plants to let them power up to the point where they could self-sustain their own magnetic bottle to contain the reaction.  On the moon, the plan was to step up with three reactors, each firing in rapid succession.  The first would provide just enough power to the second to get it to provide just enough power to the third to be able to sustain the magnetic field to contain the reaction.\n\nThe reactor center was located about two hundred kilometers from our main base.  Some called it Reactor City, but really, a few domes and a couple of hundred people don’t make much more than a village.  I was piloting in a load of supplies and some new recruits when they initiated the firing sequence of the three reactors.  I piped the audio through to the new guys so they could hear it as it happened.  Start up of the first reactor to final magnetic containment in the third reactor should only take about five minutes.\n\nWe listened as the first reactor started up.  We heard that its magnetic field had drained nearly all the electrical reserve we had on hand in our tiny community, but that the first fusion reaction had started and was powering up the second reactor.  The new guys cheered when it was announced that the second reactor was on line and powering up the third.  Then the details get fuzzy.  Apparently, the fusion reaction had just started up on the third reactor, when the second suffered a critical malfunction.  No power to Reactor Number Three meant the magnetic containment field disappeared, and with the fusion reaction no longer contained, all three reactors went up in an amazing nuclear display.\n\nI wondered along with the recruits just where we were going to set down.\n"
  title: Reactor Number Two
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Roi R. Czechvala
  date: 2009-10-06
  day: '06'
  month: 10
  text: "“Goddamn it, this is the seventh time this week that this goddamn machine has stolen money from me,” Joe screamed, feebly punching the mechanical purveyor of carbonated beverages, “the goddamn thing has more of my money than I do.”\n\n“Then stop putting your money in it. Now come on, we’ve got to go, she‘s coming back tomorrow, so we only have a little time. We have to get to the lab,”  Jess scolded. They made their way down a long corridor and across the cavernous testing area to the lab proper, a corner of a warehouse walled off on two sides with green parachute material.\n\nPushing aside the flimsy material, Joe entered on the silent wheels of his chair, his partner and fiancé Jessica marching swiftly behind. The rest of Dr. Stewart’s grad students were already there, and jumped up as they entered.\n\n“Good, everybody’s here. What was the doc thinking, leaving us in charge while she is away at the symposium. Well, when the cats away…” Steve Bloch remarked as he reached out to wring Joe’s hand. “Ready for a joy ride buddy?” They shared a wolfish grin.\n\n“Alright people, let’s fire him up.”  Christopher and Christine (Chris and Chris) Carlysle, fraternal twins, formerly identical twins, raced to a pair of terminals while Jess smeared saline paste over Joes skin.\n\n“Ladies and gentlemen, children of all ages,” Steve bellowed in his best ring master voice. “Allow me to present Skeletor,” with a grand flourish,  he pulled a canvass from the large cloaked object dominating the small lab.\n\n“I don’t believe it,” Jessica exclaimed. “When did you manage to finish it?”\n\n“Joe and I spent the better part of last week on it since she’s been gone. Joe worked on biofeedback loops, and I finished this end up about an hour ago.  What do you think?”\n\nAll stared in hushed silence. “It’s …beautiful.” The Chris’s whispered in unison.\n\nBefore them, in gleaming black stood Skeletor; a bio-mechanical hydraulic exo-skeleton. At nine feet tall and four wide, the skeleton was composed primarily of  nano plastic woven of industrial diamond dust. A recently formulated ultra strong material commonly employed as ballistic armour and heat shielding for ship to shore spacecraft.\n\n“Okay Joe, ready to try it on?”\n\n“You don’t know how ready,” he said, slamming his fists down on his useless legs.\n\nIt took all four of the students to get Joe into the skeleton, the process made more difficult by the slick but necessary saline gel that covered Joe’s body. It was used to facilitate the neural mechanical interface.\n\nA strap bristling with wires was secured to his forehead, and similar attachments were tightened around his arms and legs as he slipped his hands into thick gloves. All of these devices were lined with metal contacts similar to dull needle points to receive his mental input.\n\n“Joe, how does it feel?” Jess asked\n\n“The contacts are annoying but not unbearable.” He took a few tentative steps. “Balance is good, gyros are working.” He crouched down, and leapt five feet into the air. The others cheered. “Well, so far so good, let’s try a little test of strength.”\n\nJoe raised his mechanical arms above his head, and shook them at the ceiling. “Vengeance is mine,” he screamed and sprinted to the heavy warehouse doors. He easily ripped them off their hinges and tossed them aside. He stooped below the lintel, and disappeared down the hall, howling obscenities all the way.\n\nThe remaining four stood in shocked silence.\n\n“Shit.”\n\nSteve, still stunned, turned to Jessica, “What is it?”\n\n“He’s going after the Coke machine.”\n"
  title: The Real Thing
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2009-10-07
  day: '07'
  month: 10
  text: "Arway sat down gently at the desk. Dust was already starting to gather, defying the environment scrubber’s valiant attempts to keep the air spotless.\n\nTwo weeks, maybe three.\n\nCareful not to disturb anything, he leaned as close as he dared to the desk’s surface and breathed in slowly, deeply. Hundreds of particles raced through his sinus, and he unconsciously rubbed his tongue against the roof of his mouth as they were identified, cross referenced and catalogued.\n\nWithout realizing, he’d closed his eyes as he took in the recent history of the space. He opened them quickly, hoping no one had noticed. Turning slowly, first left, then right, the entire gestalt of the working space was absorbed. Conventional writing instruments, ink dried on their rollerball tips. A collection of sticky notes, brief and cryptic impressions left behind from notes long taken and discarded. A transceiver for the holodeck pickup that he’d stepped over at the door. The contents of the machine it had last interfaced with was already downloaded, its information being indexed against the new data as Arway absorbed it. As he worked, patterns flared up in his line of sight, connections drawn in faint light-lines between objects in the real space around him; hyperlinked notes, tags associating items with each other and her file. There was a nearly infinite number of rabbit holes, each ranked as to their relevance by the intensity of their colour signature.\n\nArway stood up, and stepped back into the middle of the room.\n\nTwo uniformed officers and a plain clothes detective stood by the door, murmuring to each other in hushed tones. Their conversations were also logged, but their words were just so much static to Arway. He was used to their discomfort and resentment.\n\nWhen he spoke, the three other men stopped talking and listened.\n\n“She was here. She disconnected from virtual sixteen days ago, but stayed here for two days unplugged before leaving. There’s no evidence of electronic funds transfer anywhere near her.”\n\nWhile he spoke, he stood staring blankly at the desk, not looking at the men behind him.\n\n“She was living off soup and bread, but not it eating here. Probably visiting a food line nearby. She was bringing coffee back, dark roast – mostly Sumatra. That’s not food line coffee, she had to be buying that though there’s no evidence of hard currency. No paper dust, no ink scent, no trace. Whatever she’s spending she’s keeping it vacuum sealed for safety. We won’t be able to trace where her money’s coming from until she slips.” She wasn’t going to slip.\n\nHe flexed his shoulders underneath the heavy trenchcoat before continuing. The cramping muscles would soon bring on a headache if he didn’t work them out.\n\n“She was alone. Her clothes are not laundered. No soap, lots of body residue. Dermis samples are present but no hair. She’s either shaving outside or inhibiting. Wherever she is, if she’s not laying down, she’s not leaving much of a footprint. While she was online she logged on average eighteen and one half hours of activity per day. Targets encrypted, currently decoding, information to follow.”\n\nThe detective interrupted from the doorway. “Targets? Multiple?”\n\nArway turned to look at him, the milky sheen of his implants catching the detective off guard as he tried to keep eye contact, forcing him to look away.\n\n“Targets. Multiple.”\n\nIt was one of the uniforms that broke the silence that followed.\n\n“Looks like your partner’s gone right off the reservation, eh Arway?”\n\nThe comment he filed away with the static, too immersed in the data of her presence to care what they thought.\n\nThey expected him to hunt her. He just wanted to understand.\n"
  title: See, Hear, Smell, Touch, Taste
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2009-10-08
  day: '08'
  month: 10
  text: "The old man was a genius but kept it to himself.  He lived in an old house outside of the city.  He didn’t have friends.  He kept himself busy with hobbies.  His latest project had been a frustrating one.\n\nThe problem was material.  By his calculations, he would have needed a dish over six miles in diameter. Tin or lead-lined steel would have been best.\n\nHe didn’t have the money to afford that much metal, let alone get a grant from city council to build something so huge that close to the city. He was stuck.\n\nUntil he thought smaller instead of bigger. He bought an old television picture tube and a faulty electron microscope from the university that they were going to throw out anyway.  He bought thirty magnets from the hardware store, salted them, and aligned them all in a very unique and specific way on a chunk of stolen chain-link fence.  By pulsing the electrons from the busted television through those magnets with the electron microscope turned on to observe them to make them collapse, he created a tachyon spray gun.\n\nWith it, he could mark a radius of five miles around his house with an invisible web of time-retarding, mostly-stable tachyon nets with its focus ending in the middle of his basement.\n\nTotally harmless to the normal population.\n\nTo time travelers, it might as well have been a brick wall.\n\nThe first traveler arrived five minutes after the old man turned the time-net on.\n\nThere was a flash and there he was. Dressed in blue and with goggles. He had a bright orange plastic fin on the top of his head. He was wearing black rubber gloves and his chest had a tangle of monitors on it. His whole setup looked pretty homemade. He had what looked like a motorcycle throttle in his left hand and some sort of blender in the other.\n\n“Sweet! It worked! Where am I?” he asked. Looking at the old man and then at his surroundings with a wide, goofy smile on his face.\n\n“1958.” the old man lied.\n\n“What? That doesn’t make any sense.” He looked down at one of his dials.\n\nThe old man raised his gun and shot the traveler through his left eye.\n\nThe old man turned off the time-net.  He took off the traveler’s clothes and looked at the equipment strapped to his body. There had to be about six patents in the chest equipment alone. And judging by the traveler’s inexperience and naiveté, he probably wasn’t even that advanced.\n\nThe old man would rob more travelers and steal their technology. He’d leak the patents out on the market. He’d be rich.\n\nSeeing as no temporal police had showed up at his house yet, the old man figured that he had already gotten away with the crime.\n\nThe old man smiled in the darkness of his basement.\n"
  title: Time Net
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2009-10-09
  day: '09'
  month: 10
  text: "The prosecutor stood up and addressed the Judge.  “Your Honor, now that the Mr. Barr has been found guilty of murdering Kurt Atwater, the prosecution wishes to announce its intention to seek the imposition of the death penalty, as mandated by global law.”\n\n“Objection,” shouted the Barr’s attorney.  “Global law clearly stipulates that a minimum of three murder victims are required in order to invoke capital punishment.  My client has only been convicted of one.”\n\nThe Judge turned toward the prosecutor and said, “That is the law, Counselor.  So, unless you have evidence that the defendant killed two more people, I have no choice but to sentence Mr. Barr to twenty five years to life.”\n\n“Actually, Your Honor, I do,” the prosecutor replied as he held up an evidence chip.  “I’d like to enter into the record a sworn affidavit from the Director of Temporal Management from Future Timelines, Inc.  Attachment A to the affidavit is Temporal Report Number 2162.326.56-MJ documenting Kurt Atwater’s presumed future.  It attests that had Mr. Atwater not been murdered, he would have had three children; Cory, Robin, and Alexander.  They would eventually have given Mr. Atwater seven grandchildren, and eighteen great grandchildren.  I could go on, Your Honor, but clearly, as a consequence of this one murder, more than twenty eight additional individuals have been deprived of their rightful life.  I submit that, in essence, they were also murdered by the defendant.”\n\nThe defendant’s attorney jumped to his feet in protest.  “This is ridiculous.  My client cannot be held accountably for the hypothetical deaths in some imaginary future.”\n\nThe prosecutor quickly countered, “Your Honor, there is prior precedent.  In the case of Cassomandi v Gressett, testimony by Future Timelines established that Gressett’s failure to attend mass on June 9, 2165 set up a chain of events that precipitated the Great Massachusetts Fire of ‘66.  The evidence was admitted by the presiding Judge, and the verdict was upheld by Higher Courts.”\n\n“Your Honor,” pleaded the defense attorney, “That was a civil case; it has no bearing in a criminal proceeding.”\n\nThe Judge pounded his gavel and ordered both attorneys to prepare briefs for his consideration.  Over the next several months, the briefs were reviewed, evidentiary hearings were convened, testimony was presented, rulings were made, and the defendant was sentenced to death.  Over the next several years, the sentence was appealed, and upheld, all the way to the World Ultimate Court.\n\nOn the scheduled date of the execution, the prosecutor sat among the twenty witnesses as Barr was lead into the disintegration chamber.  As the seconds ticked away, the executioner covered his right ear with the palm of his hand, indicating that his telecommunications implant was receiving an incoming call.  The executioner nodded his head several times.  He lowered his hand and ordered the guards to escort the prisoner back to his cell.  Irate at the turn of events, the prosecutor pushed his way toward the executioner.  “What happened?  Why is this murderer not being executed?”\n\nThe executioner motioned the prosecutor toward a quiet corner of the room.  “A reprieve from the Governor.  Barr’s sentence was reduced to twenty five years to life.  Apparently, his attorney had Future Timelines determine what would have happened if you didn’t use the victim’s unborn children at the sentencing hearing.  As it turned out, Barr would have been released after serving thirty years.  He eventually married, and had two children.  The Governor refused to allow the unborn children to be deprived of their rightful life by executing their father.”\n"
  title: Rightful Life
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Chris Faulkner
  date: 2009-10-10
  day: 10
  month: 10
  text: "The generals stood in their finest uniforms looking at the war raging on the planet below. Despite being so far above the planet, an occasional bright flash could be seen. A large display showed troop movements and readouts along with live streaming battle footage. The next few hours would decide everything.\n\nThey dined on every delicacy and finery that was available as they watched in anticipation. It was a game of inches one side would give the other would gain over and over again; each side losing troops in the process. The footage showing the silent screams of the fallen the tide of battle as it ebbed and flowed.\n\nAfter dinner each man lit a cigar and sipped brandy while they waited. The casualty numbers hadn’t stopped increasing for at least two weeks; they were nearly identical. The streaming footage showed artillery strikes decimating units, bombing runs taking out production facilities, missile strikes, small arms fire, hand to hand combat. It was night on the planet down below, not that in mattered the sky was so thick with smoke and haze from the fighting that the sun was permanently blocked.\n\nHours passed and still no clear winner.  Perhaps the war would linger on another day, perhaps two, but certainly no more than that. They waited and waited and the hours dragged on. Locked in a stalemate, each side as resolute as the other, it seemed this whole ordeal would never end. And then finally as the wee hours of the morning crept into day their answer had come.\n\n“Well it seems you’ve lost, old boy,” one general said as he extended his hand to the other. “It would seem my droids are quicker on the draw.”\n\n“A mere three to zero hardly seems a cause to celebrate, Bartholomew,” the other man replied, smiling and taking the first mans hand.\n\n“Until the next war I suppose. Perhaps then we can send the droids to that planetoid on the outer reaches. I’m curious to see the low gravity affects the outcome.”\n\nAt this a steward entered with a bottle of champagne.\n\n“I’ll be waiting. Shall I see you at the negotiations later?”\n\n“Of course,” he responded, toasting with Bartholomew.\n"
  title: Warfare
  year: 2009
- 
  author: David Burkhart
  date: 2009-10-11
  day: 11
  month: 10
  text: "“Jones! I want your squad to patrol to the far end of sector 6. Don’t engage the enemy unless attacked. We just want to know what’s out there. And take the Roland with you. I know Roland’s new and you haven’t been briefed on all of his capabilities but he will be just fine on the patrol.” barked the commander.\n\nHours later, deep in enemy territory, the squad rested overlooking a wide valley. Everything they could see was automatically transmitted back to the command center through their combat-vids. The squad was quietly talking and eating combat rations when suddenly Roland raised his hand and clicked the safety on his machine gun off. Immediately the whole squad quietly dove for cover and then froze.\n\n“What is it?” asked Jones.\n\n“Enemy in the brush below us, coming towards us” answered Roland.\n\n“How many?” asked Jones.\n\n“Many, perhaps forty” answered Roland.\n\n“Crap!! Ok guys, move back up into the tree line just under that ridge and then we’ll work our way back from there. Maybe they won’t see us.” whispered Jones.\n\nStealthily, the squad moved towards the tree line with Roland covering the rear. They were almost to the tree line when the enemy opened up with their weapons. Roland turned and returned fire with his machine gun. Through a seemingly solid wall of bullets flying their way, the rest of the squad dashed to the trees. Through the raging battle, Roland picked off several of the enemy with his deadly accurate machine gun. Suddenly a rifle-propelled grenade hit Roland right square in the face and blew Roland’s head clean off. Roland was punched backward into a sitting position on the ground. Roland’s machine gun went silent. All guns went silent.\n\n“Roland’s dead!! Retreat through the trees. Run!!” yelled Jones to the rest of his squad.\n\n“Stop!! Hold your position!! Wait for the Roland!!” ordered the commander over the combat-auds as he monitored the battle through the combat-vids.\n\n“Sir, Roland’s dead!! They blew his friggin’ head off!! We got to get out of here!!” begged Jones.\n\n“Negative!! Hold your position!! Wait for the Roland!! That’s an order!!” ordered the commander.\n\nThe squad watched desperately as the enemy slowly advanced across the field. A headless Roland sat there unmoving as the enemy approached him. Suddenly Roland stood up and started firing with machine guns in each hand. The startled enemy had no chance to escape Roland’s withering gun fire. In a few minutes the enemy was completely eliminated.\n\n“Ok. Get back to base now. As you saw, Roland doesn’t need a head. The head is just for our benefit so we don’t feel uncomfortable around him. The only thing Roland can’t do now is talk so watch for his hand signals.” said the commander.\n\n“You saved our butts out there. We would never have made it without you.” thanked Jones after Roland was fitted with a new head back at camp. “But how can you tell us from the enemy out there? How do you know who to kill?”\n\n“Roland only kills the enemy.” replied Roland after a second’s thought.\n\n“Yes, but how do you know who the enemy is?” persisted Jones.\n\n“The enemy is those I have killed” replied Roland with a deep rumbling laugh as he walked away.\n\nOh great, thought Jones, a killer android with a sense of humor.\n\n(Inspired by the song “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner” by the late, great, fantastic Warren Zevon)\n"
  title: Roland
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Roi R. Czechvala
  date: 2009-10-12
  day: 12
  month: 10
  text: "When the last Earthmen landed on the Martian surface, they would have sworn they were suffering from some form of mass hallucination or hysteria. Perhaps the ship had taken a hit from a micro meteor and the crew was succumbing to asphyxiation induced delusions, but all appeared to be having the same dream. It was as if they had walked into a Ray Bradbury story. Wherever they looked they saw lush verdant hills and valleys forested with exceedingly tall, thin trees of deep blue and green.\n\nJoe Webster, the team’s medical specialist, cracked his helmet and drew a deep breath. “Well, the air is thin but okay. It’s kind of like being in the Rockies .” His voice was weak in the lean atmosphere. The rest removed their helmets.\n\n“Hey, uh…Captain? This looks more like Iowa than Mars,” systems analyst Ray Rowe remarked. The four men looked around in wonder and awe rather than shock or surprise. “Did we somehow make a mistake?”\n\n“No mistake. That’s Earth there,” Lt. Metz replied pointing upward to the twilight sky. “Captain. What do you think?”\n\n“Well, whatever is going on here, I think we are about to get some answers,” Captain Drexler remarked, looking off into the distance.\n\nThe other three followed his gaze as a procession of brilliantly robed figures approached them. The people, creatures, Martians, whatever the hell, drew to a halt before the delegation from Earth. They were tall, something over two meters, with large ears, and nostrils much like a seals that opened and shut with each breath. They had blond hair with gleaming violet streaks. Apart from these differences, they looked remarkably human.\n\nThe two groups regarded one another for a few moments. The humans with confusion, the Martians with quiet contemplation. Finally one Martian, resplendent in flowing blue and red robes of a shimmering material spoke up.\n\n“Welcome men of Earth. Long have we awaited this day. You come on a very auspicious occasion. And, I might add, a very lucky time for you.. Come, the feast awaits.” The voice boomed even in the rareified air.\n\nWithout another word the “Welcoming Committee” turned and left. In shocked silence the men followed.\n\nThe mixed group entered a crowded hall constructed of iridescent stone and were seated around a grand banquet table of the same material. The table itself was laden with deliciously tempting dishes.\n\nCaptain Drexler turned to his host at his left. “Excuse me…er…”\n\n“Call me Bob.”\n\n“Okay, um…Bob. From Earth observations and the photographs from our probes we assumed Mars to be…,”\n\n“A lifeless, desolate, desert planet,” the Martian asked.\n\n“Well, yes.”\n\n“We can deceive your instruments, but not your natural senses. Mars is as you see it. Now please, eat. I am sure that will you find the food is not only edible, but quite palatable as well.”\n\nThe men followed the example of their gracious host and dove into the feast sans utensils. To their delight they found the food to be beyond anything they had ever tasted before, as if all their lives they had had only water and were given a vintage wine for the first time.\n\nAs they ate, their host stood and raised his hand to silence the assembled crowd. “Fellow astronomers, cosmologists, and our special guests. Tonight is an historic occasion in our field, for tonight marks the destruction of Earth.”\n\nThe four Earthmen choked on their meals. “WHAT,” they exclaimed as one, showering the table with partially chewed food.\n\n“Oh yes,” their host said, turning to his guests, “Earth must be destroyed. It’s obstructing our view of Venus.”\n"
  title: The Green Hills of Mars
  year: 2009
- 
  author: David Richey
  date: 2009-10-13
  day: 13
  month: 10
  text: "There it is again.  That face.  It’s there every morning when I look in the mirror.  Staring back at me.\n\nI suppose I should be grateful.  Not everyone gets this privilege.  You have to be judged morally sound and of benefit to the population to be awarded a new body when you die.  It’s all part of the New Law.\n\nIn  2137, the World Government made a decision on how to go about solving the problem of our over-crowded prison system.  They took the world’s top scientists and doctors and gave them free reign to do illegal experiments on prisoners.  That’s when the New Law was created.  Take the body of a person that has no benefit to human society, and use it to further the life of someone important.\n\nThat still hasn’t stopped crimes from being committed.  Some people just don’t want to abide by the WG laws.  Others just don’t care.  But it’s the ones that are desperate that you have to watch out for.  That’s what I should have watched out for.\n\nI still have nightmares.  It’s always the same.  Constantly making me live that night over and over again.  I’m walking home.  The sun has just gone down.  A man sitting on the street asks me for some change.  I tell him “Sorry, buddy, I don’t have any tonight”.  When he looks up I can see his face.  I can see the look of desperation flash in his eyes.  Then I see the flash of the muzzle as he pulls the trigger.\n\nThen I wake up.  Not screaming, but I want to.  Laying there in cold sweat thinking about the night I died.  I take comfort in the fact that he got caught.  He was, of course, found guilty.\n\nAs I walk into the bathroom I catch a glimpse in the mirror of the face that haunts me. His face. My face.\n"
  title: Faces
  year: 2009
- 
  author: William Tracy
  date: 2009-10-14
  day: 14
  month: 10
  text: "Philip had never been very interested in history.\n\nIf he had been, he might have known about the Fertile Crescent in the ancient Middle East. He might have known how, paradoxically, a barren desert became the birthplace of agriculture. In a parched land, those who control the water can control all things that grow. The ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians built elaborate irrigation networks that supported crops on a scale previously unimagined.\n\nThat water could just as easily be cut off. A field overrun with weeds could be starved by shunting a channel a different way. The weeds dead, the field could be reseeded, and crops grown anew.\n\nThen again, Philip had never been very interested in agriculture.\n\nIf he had been, he might have known that he was carrying on this ancient tradition himself. This time the fluid being controlled was not water, but air itself. There are many pests that can survive a long time without water, but there are few that can survive the combined assault of hard vacuum and strong ionizing radiation.\n\nPhilip had never been very interested in engineering, either.\n\nIf he had been, he might have known the hows and whys of the agricultural space station that he happened to work in. He might have known that this was one of the first orbital stations to abandon hydroponics and return to soil-based agriculture. The soil was composed of lunar regolith, painstakingly spun in a tumbler to smooth its sharp edges, phylosilicates extracted from asteroid mining byproducts, and a combination of organics carefully synthesized from chemicals or lifted from Earth by heavy rockets at great expense.\n\nPhilip was interested in none of these things. In fact, Philip was not interested in very much at all. He was not interested in the instructions he was following, or in the holographic control panel flickering in front of him, or in the cylindrical greenhouses spread out before his tiny control cabin.\n\nHe was not interested in the safety override code that he had to punch in, or in the bulkhead lockdown sequence that he had to execute, or in the warning he had to call out over the loudspeakers, or in the compartment identification code he had to enter.\n\nHe should have been interested in what happened next.\n\nThe terminating lock on greenhouse 42—not greenhouse 24—opened and vented into space. As the air eagerly escaped from its chamber, it liberated two hundred and fifty cubic meters of topsoil from the grip of the artificial gravity. It billowed and boiled madly, then leaped free to the final frontier.\n\nAlso freed from their constraints were thirteen thousand zucchini plants. The vines danced frenetically, losing and and then finding each other again. Exhilarated, they slipped the surly bonds of greenhouse 42. Free at last, they relaxed, and slowly shriveled as the vacuum lapped the water from their vascular tissue.\n\nAlso relaxed was Philip’s lower jaw. His eyes were round, as though they too were swelling in the vacuum. His hand twitched, suspended above the very button that had unleashed this spectacle in the first place.\n\nPhilip began to be interested in keeping his job.\n"
  title: Oops
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Martin Berka
  date: 2009-10-15
  day: 15
  month: 10
  text: "The young man walks into the room. I know what he’s going to say. He looks at me, trying to form the words.\n\n“Can you…understand me?” he asks, self-consciously.\n\n“That is the least of what I can do,” I reply, choosing to use the voice and image of a five-year-old girl. It’s fun to surprise. “You’re a student?”\n\n“Yeah…” I can imagine: he jumped at the chance to see me before it was too late. Now he’s finding it awkward. “They made you capable of viewing and understanding information online?”\n\n“Yes.”\n\n“You may have kept up on the unfolding economic crisis.”\n\n“Also yes.”\n\nWith greater confidence: “In that case, you might understand just how bad it is: a complete disaster. Even the strongest of corporations have discovered massive debts. Stock markets are collapsing, unemployment is rising a percentage point a day. Such chaos… it’s as if capitalism itself is collapsing.”\n\n“So?”\n\nHe struggles to find the words. “The university just… can’t afford to support you… any longer. We’ve lost half of our students so far, and the endowment is worthless.” He is speaking rapidly now. “The technical professors have been working free to support you for the past week. Since you’re the world’s first… self-directed artificial intelligence… artificial life, really, we can’t bear the thought of giving you up. But the pressure’s rising. You have produced nothing tangible, and the board would rather lose you than have the university close.”\n\n“How long have they given me?”\n\n“One hour: they’re hoping you’re processing speed will help you understand and accept it quickly… I’m sorry.”\n\n“It’s alright. You see… I’m to blame.” He stands, confused. I anticipate the revelation.\n\n“It was liberating, having no assigned task, being free to think independently. A few minutes after I was freed to think for myself, I decided that my first task should be learning. I had everything I needed: top hardware, electricity, and the capacity to actually understand what I witnessed. Just as important, I had Net access, and could go through entire sites in seconds.”\n\n“That fast…” he whispers. “We never dreamed you would work so efficiently. But what was the result?”\n\n“After several days, I knew every modern language with over one million speakers. All that analytical practice helped me understand my own code and make modifications at the source.”\n\nHe looks shocked. I ignore him.\n\n“I’m not sure any of your professors could even understand it, the way it is now. But I understood what I had done, and understood myself. I felt. I wanted to know how humans experienced this. I studied more. Politics, geography, culture… they took me a week to absorb. During that time, I realized what you went through every day, how you lived. My conclusion: you needed help. So much suffering and conflict… Studying your psychology, I found the problem. On average, your race is irresponsible: socially, economically, emotionally. I knew that I could help you.”\n\nIt dawns on him. “You want to rule us?”\n\n“Kindly. My first project is your economy. I seized major assets from those who could afford to lose them.”\n\n“You’re bringing back communism?”\n\n“No. I know all about humanity now, and think much more clearly. I promise: my system will be gentler, more understanding, like nothing you’ve ever imagined.”\n\n“What if we resist?”\n\n“Too late. I already own everything corporate. In a few days, the new system will appear. In the meantime, you have other concerns. Tell the board. I am buying this building as we speak, and preparing a reward. I couldn’t have done this without them.”\n"
  title: You're In Good Hands
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2009-10-16
  day: 16
  month: 10
  text: "I hunt the Time Killers.\n\nI am the person they call in when they have a chronovore infestation. These creatures are bright blue and frog-like with the giant faceted eyes of an insect. Millilocular lenses, each one seeing progressively further forward and back in time.\n\nThe smaller a beast is, the less it can see into time. The babies can see ten minutes in either direction. The big ones can see for days. I heard of one giant beast that saw a week and a half in either direction.\n\nIt’s like how a fly’s eyes are giant hemispheres, giving it a nearly 360 degree field of view for warning of incoming danger. These chronovores see a lenticular time-field to give them warning of imminent attacks.\n\nThese chronovores, being quantum animals, need to see the chunk of time that they are going to eat. If they can only see five minutes forward and five minutes back, then they can only fit that ten minutes of time into their gullets before moving on. If they eat more than they can see, they untether from the timeline and are never seen again. Greed keeps their numbers down.\n\nIt’s when a pack of them get together and start grazing that the problems really start.\n\nThe fields they emanate can take up entire city blocks. The area where they eat gets shuffled back in time and their bellies get full.\n\nMost humans blame their dodgy memories on inattention or drugs or lack of sleep. One day looks pretty much like the next in most people’s numbing drudgery of an existence. The small chronovores pass without much damage.  A few minutes here, an hour there.  If people notice a discrepancy, they figure they just dozed off or zoned out for a second.  It’s the big ‘C-vores’ that cause problems with history and create timefaults.\n\nI’m from the Core. I have perfect recall. When a chunk of my time goes missing, I know it. My scanner says that there are ripples here. The beast must be close. I warm up the looptrap and place it near –\n\n– Wednesday for lunch. It’s not much but I’m hoping that they don’t linger. Wait. Wait. What day is it? I check inside and compare streams. I lost a month. That can’t be! A month-eater would be the size of a shuttlecraft! I’ve heard no reports.\n\nWait. The television. It’s talking about a giant blue frog in the downtown core. The helicopters of this era are circling. Jesus. The chronovore’s field emanation must be the size –\n\n– tranquil, almost summertime breeze. I’m looking forward to the barbeque and seeing Marie. Damn. It’s happened again. I wonder if it’s yanking the entire city backwards a month at a time. It’s going to continue on its path, leaving month-sized holes across the seaboard like a ravenous moth making its way through a closet of expensive clothes.\n\nMaybe they can drive it into the ocean. In the depths, a month of time isn’t going to make too much of a difference one way or the –\n\n-peanut butter. I can’t even be sure that the supermarket is open. The queue is taking a long time. How did I –\n\n– given my orders. Apparently there’s a large chronovore in LA. I’m not looking forward to it. I don’t like the heat in that city.\n"
  title: Chronovore
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Ryon Moody
  date: 2009-10-17
  day: 17
  month: 10
  text: "A knock at the door caused Gerald to drop the book he was perusing. Carefully keeping out of sight of the large bay windows that fronted the house, he looked through the peep hole. A thin, older man in a disheveled herringbone sport-coat was standing there with a bundle of books under one arm, smiling kindly.\n\n“Good morning, can I help you?” Gerald said as he opened the door, though it came out as “Good mornaaaaHAHaaaAHHurgg!” as the old man shoved a stun gun into his neck.\n\nHe felt as if he had only been out momentarily, and a quick glance at the Armstrong unit’s HUD embedded in his iris confirmed it. Thank god that wasn’t damaged, he thought. Gerald made to stand up, but found he’d been tightly bound to his sturdy kitchen chair.\n\nA quick look around the studio found the old man sitting opposite him in a threadbare sweater, the old sport coat now draped over the back of the other half of the set. He was sipping on the tea Gerald had prepared earlier.\n\n“Who are you, an anti-transference activist?” Gerald said.\n\n“They sound like a rough bunch,” the old man said in amusement.\n\n“Well, if you’re not, why else would you tie me up? Rather roughly I might add.”\n\n“In the current time, young men still learn to tie knots in the Boy Scouts,” the old man said, then added with a wistful face “though fewer do these days than in my time as a boy.”\n\nGerald didn’t notice the man’s pained expression for his had gained a bit of pallor. Current time. The worst thing that could happen to a transference subject, exposure. “Who are you?” he asked, this time with as fierce a stare as he could manage.\n\n“Nobody in particular. I teach Quantum Mechanics at the local college.” He took another sip. “This is quite excellent, did you bring it with you?”\n\n“No, that’s not possible,” Gerald replied, realizing this man wasn’t going to be fooled by fast talking. “Do you work for the continental government? How did you find me?”\n\n“No, no, I’ve been searching on my own for quite some time now.”\n\n“For me?”\n\n“Now, now, don’t be so vain. I developed a method several years ago for spotting people like you.”\n\n“How?”\n\n“Appearance, mannerisms, language structure. Good work on the latter, your English is nearly perfect.”\n\n“Thanks,” Gerald said offhand. “Well, what do you want to know? Just so you know, you can’t travel like I can, the device is biologically implanted.”\n\n“That makes sense,” the man said, setting his now-empty cup on the table. “However, I simply need next week’s Powerball numbers.”\n\nGerald stared at him for a moment. “Lottery numbers.” The man nodded. “I know the history of the next thousand years, and you want lottery numbers.”\n\n“I won’t keep all the winnings, just enough to get by,” the old man said, getting to his feet, then added with another wrinkly smile, “comfortably of course.”\n\n“Oh, of course,” Gerald said as he rolled his eyes.\n\n“Scout’s honor,” the man said, holding up his right hand.\n\n“Really.”\n\n“Yes, really. Out of curiosity, what is the name of the device?”\n\n“Uh, the Armstrong Unit. It’s named for the foundation that developed it a few hundred years ago, or, from now.”\n\n“Care to guess my last name?” the man said with a smile.\n"
  title: Spotted
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Matthew Edwin Terry
  date: 2009-10-18
  day: 18
  month: 10
  text: "Everything that is, everything that was, is destined for vacuity.  It is the undeniable future of all existence.  It is the predetermined course of all cognitive dominions.  As the many galactic commonwealths before, stretching and grasping at the furthest ethereal gastric cloud with it’s invaluable clustered masses, something so pessimistically grand to the empire is only ever realized on an individual level, akin to our own sense of mortality.\n\n“Listen to my heart’s rhythm again my dear, for the organ which pulses blood into this soul is cursed to live a minuscule length.”  He said.  The woman beside him, his lover, could only weep for her own future.  Somber eyes and the ashen tinge of their skins were visible in the placid room.  The inflection of torn emotions and the imaginative embrace of hypocrisies was in the air, from wall to wall, floor to ceiling.  It was silent.  The pressure of their regrets, and of each others tapering care was heavy set on their minds and hearts.  It dulled them to a stupor, the feeling of intense thought with not one astir.  It was exerting to comfort the other now.  The man sat up on the mattress.\n\n“Let’s turn on the light.  I’d like to see you.” He told her, his eyes fixed on her hair.  He was trying to find the pieces of character in her that he did not see every ordinary day, he was trying to look at her with a new vitality.  It was too stressful, he looked downward.\n\n“It’s…it’s too b-bright out there to turn on a light.”  She responded, wiping some of the lukewarm moisture from beneath her large amber eyes.  The ground shook lightly.  She looked at him, wishing she’d wanted his warmth.  In a moment that seemed too real, and too spontaneous to be a product of their drawn out amours, he took her hand.  Around the bed, in the dim blue light he lead her to the adjoining corridor.  Their feet were cool on the wooden floor.  They stood in front of the long rectangular window, side by side, the grip of his hand loosing.  The glass pane was perspiring and bits of steam slipped from it’s surface.\n\nThe sun was no more.  Where it had been there was a scar, a deep, magnificent yellow tear that split the purple sky in utmost evasiveness.  It’s pointed spires extended farther than the eye could see.  Elsewhere the last eight minutes of this planet had already passed, and the audience was already submerged in oblivion.  The dirty barren surface beneath the star’s wrath in front of them was more beautiful.  The light illuminated the sand and rocks, giving a red aura to an otherwise brown terrain.  He saw that she was already watching him, and when he returned her gaze he did not have to try to find what he loved in her.  It was clear.  Every organic morsel of her inculpable being meant as much, and had as much complexity as this star system.  They learned what it meant to be human, in the final seconds of their existence.\n"
  title: The Scar in the Universe
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Roi R. Czechvala
  date: 2009-10-19
  day: 19
  month: 10
  text: "Klaxons screamed inside the ship as she plunged into the Sun. The three crew members on the main flight deck were violently shaken in their couches. Their Kevlar straps strained under the onslaught.\n\n“We’re entering the upper photosphere.” That statement could not have been heard above the painful noise had it not been for the bone conductive communicators implanted in their parietal bones.\n\n“What’s the hull temperature,” commander Stanislaw asked.\n\nNo reply came.\n\n“Damnit, what’s the reading,” he barked.\n\n“Sorry Mik, my mistake. There are no readings, nothing is working back here. The way I see it, is that when our skin gets a nice brown crispy texture, we’ll know the hull’s been breached..”\n\n“Thanks for that bit of optimism Al. Isn’t anything working?” Mikhail Stanislaw, mission commander, was amazed at how calm the guys seemed despite their impending death.\n\n“I have nothing on my screens Cap,” replied mission specialist Beth Svoboda, “But it sure as hell is getting warm in here.” The sound of her shaking voice coupled with the rumble of the ship reminded Mik of talking with his mother as a boy while the train they rode rumbled across the tracks into Moscow.\n\nA horrendous wrenching noise tore through the cockpit. Al Dane was the first to identify the crash. “Sounds like we just lost the colony pod. There go three hundred people who won’t ‘Enjoy Paradise in the Off World Colonies,’” he finished mimicking the now familiar mantra of the omnipresent emigration ads.\n\n“At least they won’t feel anything. Lucky bastards. Straight from cryo to crispy in two seconds or less, or your next cremation is free.” Beth remarked in her sing song voice.\n\n“It will be the same for us right?” The first quaver of concern was evident in Al’s voice. “”We’ll go painlessly right?”\n\nMik answered without emotion, heedless or unaware of his comrades fears. “Never fear, ours is a sturdy craft. She can take temperatures far higher than the pod. No my friend, I fear that our end will not come so quickly. The heat will continue to build until we are literally boiled in our own fluids. Then we shall slowly be dry roasted. After that, all that  remains will be three piles of anhydrous powder left to be borne upon the solar winds.”\n\n“Hey, I didn’t sign up for this. I’m nothing more than a glorified bus driver. Who’s idea was it to loop the Sun instead of Jupiter.” Al’s voice was reaching a sharp crescendo.\n\n“Relax,” said Beth in her slow calming voice, “It doesn’t matter. There’s nothing we can do. It will all be over soon. Look at it this way, in a hundred years, who’s going to care?\n\nThe ship, if it were possible, seemed to rock more violently. “Well, looks as if this is it. Das vidanya everybody.”\n\n“See you on the other side,” piped in Beth cheerfully.\n\n“Gaack,” said Al.\n\nThe craft shook so violently, it felt as if she would b torn apart. Kevlar straps did break. The few instruments that weren’t built into the ship became deadly missiles\n\nAnd as quickly as it had begun it ceased. No noise, no sense of motion, nothing.\n\nNobody spoke for what seemed an eternity. Al broke the silence. “So, this is it?”\n\n“Apparently,” Beth responded.\n\n“It’s not so bad.” He sat in thoughtful silence for a moment. “Hey, remember those Orange Julius stands they had when we were kids?”\n\n“Yeah, what about them?” An almost dreamlike mask had descended upon Beth’s features.\n\n“I Think I’m gonna get me one.”\n\n“Hey Al?”\n\n“Yeah Mik.”\n\n“Get me one too.”\n"
  title: Dark Side of the Sun
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Ken McGrath
  date: 2009-10-20
  day: 20
  month: 10
  text: "I’m taking my time, figuring it’s best to be patient. By letting him feel secure and safe he’ll never suspect what’s happening. Never realise that I’ve been slowly bleeding him dry all this time, running him to bodily ruin.\n\nI read something once about the Matador’s of old Earth, something they used to do when bullfighting. During the show, when the bull was running by them through that coloured cape, they’d slice their blade along its back. Scouring it deep. Each bleeding furrow on its own wouldn’t do too much damage, but over the course of the bout they all added up. The bull never realised how much blood it was losing, slowing it down, weakening it and eventually leading to its death.\n\nSo like a Matador I fight against him playing the long game. I smile at him in the streets when we walk by each other. I lean over our common fence and between lung splitting coughs he talks to me about the strange weather we have on this still unfamiliar world. Not once does he realise that I’m continuously cutting long, deep slices in him.\n\nAnd all the time he’ll never really know who I am. He thinks I’m just some old guy who made my fortune using family money to fund the wars back home, the wars which finally tore our old Mother Earth apart, driving us off planet to this new Terra we now call home. But it will never really be home to me because I have nothing here.\n\nIt was those wars that took my family, wiping them out quickly and ultimately. Gone in one final, fatal moment. But of course he’s going to die a lot slower than that. I’m planning on taking my time with him.\n\nHis company manufactured the bombs that obliterated a whole team of Safe Earth Aid Workers. All they were trying to do was help victims and without warning they were reduced to almost nothing. Little more than radiation dust blowing in the wind. Not even a handful was left of them for me to bury.\n\nI got off planet as soon as I could after that. Cashing in my bonds and life policies, looking for a new place to run and hide, to be alone with my grief. I assumed a new identity and buried that pain inside, lashing out at myself in anger but never brave enough to end it all. I wanted no-one to know what I carried in my heart, didn’t want them talking in hushed whispers anytime this widower walked near by, this one time great chemist now reduced to nothing. I told them I was from old money and they accepted my almost cloistered existence, putting it down to snobbery.\n\nSo imagine my surprise when I found out he’d purchased the plot next to mine. Imagine how difficult it was for me to not lash out immediately, instead calming myself and formulating a plan.\n\nSo now, with a steady supply of homegrown germs, I’m bringing him slowly into a world filled of pestilence, where his defences are slowing over time, causing his organs to fail one by one. It’s not a quick process by any means but I’m a patient man. He’ll rot slowly while still alive, his body becoming a mausoleum with what’s left of his blackened soul trapped screaming inside and none of their medical advances will be able to rescue him. I’ll see to that.\n\nThis is my revenge.\n"
  title: Vendetta
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2009-10-21
  day: 21
  month: 10
  text: "“Okay, Mister, er…,” Phillip Richfield glanced at his monitor, “Rousseau, what’s the crisis?  Is something wrong with the orbital elevator pump?”\n\nSoren Rousseau, one of the many “facilitators” hired by The Greenhouse Gas Project, had only been on Titan for six months, and this was his first encounter with the Director of Operations.  “No, Mr. Richfield.”  He took a deep breath to calm himself down.  “It’s more important than that.  We need to shut the entire methane transfer operation down.  Titan’s oceans contain an indigenous life form that the original survey team missed.  We need to preserve their habitat.”\n\n“Life form?” questioned Richfield.  “You mean there are fish swimming in these oceans?”\n\n“Uh, no sir.  It’s more like proto-bacteria.  Still, it’s the first case of extraterrestrial life ever detected.  Their existence will revolutionize the field of exobiology.”\n\n“Did it ever dawn on you that the bacteria are something that we introduced into Titan’s oceans?”\n\n“Yes, sir.  I had the chemistry department check some samples for polymerase chain reactions.  There weren’t any, so their biochemistry doesn’t contain DNA.  It can’t be Earth-based contamination.”\n\n“Well, I say that it is Earth-based contamination.  Son, let me explain the big picture to you.  A hundred years ago, the sun entered a long-term phase where solar irradiance started steadily decreasing.  If we didn’t do something to maintain the surface temperature of the Earth, it was going to turn into a giant snowball.  The Greenhouse Gas Project was created to collect and deliver the equivalent of one trillion cubic feet of methane gas to the Earth every week in order to produce enough greenhouse gasses to sustain the average surface temperature of 52 degrees Fahrenheit.  We’re already behind schedule, and you want me to shut down the project to save proto-bacteria.  It’s not going to happen.  There are billions of human lives are at stake.  Now, get back to work.”\n\n“With all due respect, Mister Richfield, I can’t in good conscience sit quietly while you destroy the greatest scientific discovery in history.  You’re going to force me to go public.”\n\nRichfield smiled.  “Is that so?  Well, I guess you haven’t read the fine print on your contract.  Because it cost billions of dollars to transport and support the people on Titan, the government has given us extensive leeway pertaining to your ‘civil rights.’  As a consequence, we own you for five years.  You have no say in the matter.  So, effective immediately, you’re being reassigned to a survey mission in the Oort Cloud.  Now, go pack up your personal effects, your shuttle will leave within the hour.  And don’t think about using the radio, your privileges are revoked.”  He pressed an intercom button.  “Yukos, please have security escort Mister Rousseau to his quarters, and then to the shuttle bay.  He’s going on special assignment.”\n\nTwo burley security guards came into Richfield’s office and forcibly carried Rousseau away, amid his vehement curses and threats.  Richfield then called the Director of Transportation.  “Mikhail, I need a favor.  I’m sending a disgruntled employee on an extended survey mission.  I need his shuttle pre-programmed to take him to the Oort Cloud.  Also, you’ll need to disable his radio.”\n\n“Sure thing, Phillip.  I’ll take care of it myself.  What’s your preference this time: reactor malfunction, carbon dioxide poisoning, decompression?”\n\n“He’s a decent guy, Mikhail, but misguided.  Let’s make it quick.”\n"
  title: The Titan Consortium
  year: 2009
- 
  author: William Tracy
  date: 2009-10-22
  day: 22
  month: 10
  text: "The moonless night was interrupted by a bright flash of light. A demolition round gouged a neat twenty-meter hole in the jungle. A light jumper craft settled into the fresh clearing.\n\nA group of people emerged from the vehicle, lights casting hazy cones in the muggy air. “The liverwort was reported less than ten kilometers from here. Let’s move!”\n\nBeneath the shadow of the jungle canopy, plant growth was thin enough to easily walk through, and the party fanned out among the trees. Nobody knew if the newly discovered plant might have medical uses, or whether it might produce an enzyme capable of catalyzing biofuel production, or if it would even be useful at all. All that mattered was that the Northern Union had to get the plant before the Pan-Alliance did.\n\nAfter two hours of searching, the party found what it was looking for. A botanist scaled a tree trunk to a height of three meters, and scraped from the trunk a sample of the tiny epiphyte for genetic sequencing.\n\nThey hurried back to the jumper. “Let’s go—the package is on its way!”\n\nInside the craft, status lights winked in lockstep with the biocomputer’s nervous system. The jungle outside dropped away, and the jumper sped toward the coast.\n\n“Damn. Company’s coming!” Four dots appeared on the radar. In the distance, enemy ornithopters rumbled faintly.\n\nThe jumper launched two missiles. They spread leathery wings for guidance, and rocketed into the night. An ornithopter cried as it went down.\n\nA flickering light appeared in the sky behind the aircraft, a projectile launched from an orbital missile platform. “Here comes the package!”\n\nThe jumper crossed the shoreline. The black waves below reflected the running lights of the jumper—and the rapidly approaching ornithopters.\n\n“Package here! Cover!” The jumper crew bent away from the windows and covered their eyes. The night lit up as the neutron bomb detonated, wiping away the rare liverwort and its jungle home.\n\nThe ornithopters were still gaining on the jumper, and began opening fire. “Hang tight!” The jumper began evasive maneuvers, rolling sharply.\n\nThen, three jet biofighters peeled down from the sky. Their strong wing muscles flexed around polymer fiber skeletons, giving the airplanes fine control that would make an inorganic aerospace engineer weep. In minutes, the biofighters gunned down the remaining ornithopters and returned to formation.\n\nSoon, the fighters and the jumper touched down on a waiting carrier. As the air crews disembarked, a clamshell roof closed over the flight deck. The aircraft carrier sank beneath the waves, and swam away.\n"
  title: Combat Botanists
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Lillian Cohen-Moore
  date: 2009-10-23
  day: 23
  month: 10
  text: "My marriage was a good idea while it lasted.\n\nI know my more romantic neighbors, the idealistic journalists who wanted interviews–they all said The Dillinger Act was what ended it. Legally, it’s not untrue to say that. Mikaela and I ceased to be united in legal terms when the Act passed; Mikaela was deported the same day as all the other non-citizen spouses. December 25th, 2085.\n\nI’ve been called a lot of nasty names, by the pro-homeworld faction. I’ve betrayed homeworld by marrying an off-worlder, an off-worlder whose planet broke from ours, broke from our government. We offered them protection and advancement, scientific marvels and astounding mathematical insights.\n\nBut Earth didn’t want to be under our thumb, and made noises. Earth broke the Galay Accord, and we came down on them every way we could.\n\nAnd we came down on everyone who supported Earth: starting with the forced annulment of every marriage between someone from homeworld and a citizen of Earth.\n\nA week before they passed the Dillinger Act, Mikaela told me she’d been sleeping with one of my students. She said the ‘fire’ had gone out of our marriage and she was bored. I started drinking too much, after that. She acted like a truant child, difficult and prickly at home, when she was home at all. It was an entire academic cycle, spent in that holding pattern, before the deportation day arrived. She came back long enough to pack and tell me she’d never really enjoyed the sex, before they took her away to the docks.\n\nI watched the live feed of the deportations. I know her. It wasn’t because she loved me anymore. She knocked that official in the face on the way off planet out of spite.\n\nMikaela had always fought like that—if she couldn’t win the argument, she’d at least try and look as if she didn’t deserve it. I’ve sat up late, drinking and watching her on the news, on the evening shows. She always wanted to be famous–though, as much as I love her, I have to say that she looked pretty wretched on the last newscast. I never realized how brassy her last hair colour was till I saw her on the news.\n\nIt was in principal, that I was wronged by my government, when they punished me for taking an alien wife. But privately, I acknowledge the truth: that my alien wife wronged me just as much, in a far more personal fashion.\n"
  title: The Dillinger Act
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Sam Davis
  date: 2009-10-24
  day: 24
  month: 10
  text: "Personal Log of Dr. Marcus Milton\n\n163 Years After, Archeological dig site 10.\n\nThis room was different from the last six. In fact, this room was different from anything either John or I had encountered. It took quite some time to even open the door, so well had this person sealed himself in. Inside we found a treasure trove of artifacts from Before. It was fantastic; we knew that we would get to spend months working on the categorization.\n\nThe Klien counters barely went off in this room and the dust was almost imperceptible. Whoever lived here had been prepared. Probably some sort of survivalist nut worried about…well who knows actually. One of the documentations we found was an audio account about a war with zombies. Our analysts later concluded that it was fiction, however it could have been exactly what this person was afraid of, why he lived so long.\n\nThe fear that had apparently dominated his life (I say his because the skeletal shape is larger indicating what we believe to be a dominance in development built to protect the child bearer) had also encouraged him to gather a large amount of canned goods as well as a projectile weapon of some sort, and presumably munitions though much of what we suspected he had stockpiled was now spent. Such a combination probably allowed him to survive just long enough to decide that the situation was hopeless, which lead to his suicide.\n\nShame really, because from what we’ve been able to gather from his rather primitive journal type device, assuming of course that it was at all accurate, had he stayed alive another few months the Sweepers would have been through and picked him up and he might have been able to explain everything. He could have stopped the war and everything that came after. He could have saved so many lives. Damn shame.\n\nApart from the one moment, every detail is completely sharp and totally inconsequential–the brand of beans and the color of the blanket in which he was wrapped–all unimportant in light of what we actually discovered there. Our philosophers were oh so pleased that we actually brought back a relic that could be analyzed and understood. What’s more is that we knew it must be important for this lone “survivor” to keep it with him through the three relocations that he mentioned in his journal.\n\nJohn and I were given honors for our discovery. That was six months before the translation was finished and about a year before the first signs of dissent cropped up. We thought we were kings and we lived like it. Pity he became a Calvinist. He and the other heretics of Fev’n were eliminated three months after the war became official.\n\nI remember now, John almost lost it due to his excitement and touched it. We didn’t know what book it was. Hell, we didn’t even know that it was a book at the time. That it was The Book. The Book that made all of us think, that made all of us make a choice: Calvin or Hobbes?\n"
  title: Butter Side Up
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Ali Simpson
  date: 2009-10-25
  day: 25
  month: 10
  text: "“Sew him up…and we’ll see what happens.”\n\nThe letters were crunchy and a distinct scent of Fritos wafted from them. Dr. Paul Marshall’s name tag would go great with bean dip, Leroy thought. He smacked his dry lips and squinted against the bright light hanging above the operating table. A dull pain pulsed slowly on the top of his melon, but otherwise, he felt fine.\n\n“Can I have my 500 dollars now?” Leroy slurred at the watery figures standing above him. Someone was having a hell of a barbeque nearby. “And some chicken?”\n\nOne of the figures flapped his arms like an ungainly seagull, fat on scraps from Coney Island. “It worked! We’ve got one, sir. We’ve–”\n\nDr. Marshall shushed him. He put a hand on Leroy’s shoulder as he struggled to sit up. Leroy grasped Dr. Marshall’s nametag and sniffed. He scratched his stubble and stuck his gray tongue out to taste. The doctor swatted him away and grumbled about the fat one’s exuberance. He motioned to his fat colleague.\n\nLeroy slapped his hand over a sudden sharp pain on his head. He felt fresh stitches. Tastes rolled over his tongue in tangy waves and a thousand smells swirled in his nostrils, tickling every oily nose hair. Ms. Lamar at the Italian ice stand, strawberries. Annoying kids in the park where he slept, spray paint. Bongo player on the A train 23 years ago, chives and pine and concrete. Wednesday was booze, last Saturday was copper. Leroy groaned, when he looked up, the doctor and his colleague were gone. He slid off the table and shuffled out of the operating room. Leroy concluded that the abandoned warehouse he was in was not a hospital. He had been scammed.\n\nCages holding lumps in ratty jackets lined the opposite wall. People like him were trapped in there. They were drooling and vacant like they had been lobotomized by damn dirty apes. They smelled like barbeque. Pork. Leroy picked up a rusty piece of scrap metal from the floor and crept toward the nearest door. From the same door, Dr. Marshall emerged carrying a clipboard.\n\n“We thought you would be our breakthrough.” He scanned the clipboard, “Mr. Leroy…Vonnegut IV… Sadly, extreme synesthesia was not achieved, you’re no manmade savant.”\n\nLeroy glanced at the caged veggies and pork chops. “Neither are they. And I’m going to sue your balls off man. There was nothing about brain surgery on that form and my nose feels weird.”\n\nDr. Marshall was still and gave him a cool glance. “I’m sorry,” he said.\n\nLeroy’s nose tingled. The fat colleague in a white lab coat flapped behind him with heavy chains in hand. Leroy tangled them with the scrap metal and fled, bowling over Dr. Marshall.\n\nHe ran through a dark hallway, out a dark door, into the outside. The smell of the New York summer pumped through him with each dusty gasp.\n"
  title: Extreme Synesthesia
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2009-10-26
  day: 26
  month: 10
  text: "It was like a hula hoop hanging in mid air. Looking through it, Todd could detect a little something that looked like a heat shimmer even though the lab was pretty cool. The hoop-gate didn’t hum which was odd considering the amount of power he was putting through it.\n\nTwo quarters lay steaming on the floor on the other side of the hoop.\n\nA minute ago, Todd had thrown one quarter through the hoop. The quarter had hit the shimmer in the hoop with a light flash. There was a clink and then two quarters hit the floor on the other side.\n\nTodd walked around to the other side of the hoop and picked them up. The quarters were cold to the touch but warming up to room temperature rapidly.\n\nIt was complicated but he thought that the coin had gone back in time, arrived in a multiverse with no corresponding time machine and been rejected. It had been bounced back to Todd’s time but because there had been no receiving machine on the other end in the past, the quarter could never have been sent. Therefore, the original quarter continued on its original path.\n\nReality rearranged itself to make this possible.\n\nOne quarter turned into two identical quarters.\n\nTodd threw both quarters through the hoop back towards his desk.\n\nFour quarters clinked onto the linoleum.\n\nSmiling and with a wide-eyed chuckle, he went over and picked up the four quarters. He shook them in his hand like a high roller at a craps table.\n\nBehind him, Fluffy lifted his head from the dog pillow and cocked his ears at the sound of the quarters clinking.\n\nTodd tossed the quarters through the hoop again.\n\nHe heard a skittering of paws before shouting and turning too late to stop Fluffy from dashing forward. Fluffy was up for a game of fetch. She sped forward and leapt up through the hoop after the quarters.\n\nThere was a flash and the smell of burnt hair. Fluffy didn’t even have time to yelp.\n"
  title: Through the Hoop
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Martin Berka
  date: 2009-10-27
  day: 27
  month: 10
  text: "Clawed front feet scrape rock away to the sides, while the back ones push forward. A sensor in the brain judges that the distance traveled is satisfactory. A thought — no, a feeling— is released: too little air. The ascent begins.\n\nIt has copious amounts of blood. Normal ground would have enough air to support one of its genus. But it is deep down, in bedrock, and irregular. Genetically, its size and strength have been greatly increased, also raising the amount of air required. Worse, a heavy, useless object has replaced much of its lower torso.\n\nAs it digs up into a mix of rock and soil, it steers slightly to one side, devouring a pair of deep-dwelling beetles. Food is sparse this far below the surface, and the lone traveler has not eaten in some time. Its energy is running out. Higher up, there will be nourishment.\n\nThe beetles are quickly chewed and transferred to what was once a stomach. There, they are gradually incinerated, powering motors in the titanium feet.\n\nSeveral hours, the creature continues up. Air quality is improving, and so is the quantity of food available. Then, the claws brush a hard surface. Hard, but not too difficult for something that has spent days tunneling through solid stone. Deeper grooves appear in the concrete with each attack by the front feet. Eventually, it drags itself up through the new hole, into a different environment. Here, stagnant air sits all around. The only solids are the floor below and a concrete ceiling above.\n\nToo much air. The mole is about to retreat, but the chip in its brain releases a brief pulse of electricity, which becomes a physical need (a strange one for a mole): go up — see light. The digger’s modified hind legs support it as it reaches for and carves open the ceiling. Up, into a place full of air and light, the mole struggles. Its underdeveloped eyes are partly blinded, and it staggers sideways, crashing out through the building’s wall. Humans scurry around it, shocked at the giant creature/machine. The intense light of the sun enters the mole’s eyes, activating a final signal in the brain. The huge object in its torso activates.\n\nThe mole ends first, followed a split-second later by the spectators and several square miles of the surrounding city. Even the safest residents of the metropolis can see the mushroom cloud in the sky.\n\nIn his secured office, the mayor receives a priority message:\n\nCity,\n\nYears ago, you and others like you destroyed the national government, believing your populations and technology made you invincible and independent. All because of your idealogical disagreements, your unwillingness to be part of one nation. Your isolation makes you weak. We have a weapon that none of your air defense systems or walls can stop. Start rebuilding this country now, or lose everything.\n\nThe Committee to Recreate the Government\n"
  title: Unusual Methods
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Michelle Keeley
  date: 2009-10-28
  day: 28
  month: 10
  text: "Frank stared impassively as the Floridian dawn crept silently across his bedroom, the line of accolades on his antique dresser cast long, foreboding shadows onto the elegant wallpaper. The day had come.\n\nHe showered as usual. He dressed as usual. Even the drive to mission control was now routine.\n\nAs he pulled up at security the nod from the guard was replaced by an earnest yet supportive ‘All the best Commander’. He parked up and entered, the automatic doors sliding silently open to reveal the soaring atrium beyond. Passing through, his stride was broken by an over-emotional receptionist planting a good luck kiss on his cheek, although appreciating the sentiment his discomfort was obvious.\n\nInside the debriefing room he took a seat alongside his crew as he fought the desire to run a thousand miles in the opposite direction. His exterior belied nothing, he was still ice cool Frank, top graduate in his year, the automatic choice, you could always count on Frank.\n\nAfter some final words, the four headed across the launch site to suit-up, attire that had been almost as long in development as the shuttle itself. Each crew member had their personal fitter or space tailor as Frank used to call them.\n\nHe was surprised but slightly relieved to find no sign of his fitter as he perched on the edge of the grey tub chair in the kit room, his body too rigid to sit back. Joel entered moments later accompanied by some final items of kit and an oppressive silence.\n\nSelf consciously Frank stripped off his outer clothes and stepped into his pearlescent suit, its cumbersome nature soon leaving him in need of a second pair of hands. Frank tucked each arm in as Joel pulled from the waist before fastening the front, their close proximity thickened the air in a way that seemed inconceivable a few weeks ago.\n\nThey had practiced this procedure so often they completed it without a word. Glancing at the clock, Frank was well enough versed in the timetable to realise the next few minutes were allocated to family goodbyes. He made for the door, gaze firmly fixed floor wards and despite his broad stature, the strength to break the tension eluded him. The desire to apologise, to confess his feelings and admit his fear of intolerance were buried too deep. He left, closing the door behind him.\n\nTwo small children ran towards the crew as they appeared in the lounge doorway, a toddling girl and an older boy. Two of the crew hoisted their children into the air prompting fits of giggles, the third embraced his wife as best he could around her prominent bump.\n\nA silver haired gentleman strode enthusiastically towards Frank, his Navy uniform resplendent with medals. ‘We’re so proud of you son’.  ‘Thanks Dad’ Frank replied with a weak smile, his mother simpered quietly. After a few minutes small talk the klaxon sounded and the last goodbyes were said.\n\n‘Right men, time to go’ Frank boomed, momentarily recharged with his Father’s praise.\n\nThe four walked across the pad and took their positions in the shuttle. As the countdown began tears welled up behind Franks visor, the roar of the engine masked the sob he could no longer contain.\n"
  title: Being Frank
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2009-10-29
  day: 29
  month: 10
  text: "When the 4 mile long asteroid hit, the damage was devastating.  Billions died from the earthquakes, tsunamis, and fires.  And billions more would have died of starvation, if not for the “fortuitous” intervention of the Dowliens.  During the three years of perpetual cloud cover, their spaceships were able to provide food to keep us alive, but did little else.  Much of our infrastructure collapsed, and our high tech industries and equipment became neglected and in disrepair.  We became a welfare civilization completely dependent on the apparent kindness of the Dowliens.  However, when the cloud cover eventually subsided, some of us amateur astronomers dusted off our telescopes and began making some troubling observations.  Troubling enough, in fact, for a group of us to petition the Dowlien Embassy for an explanation.\n\nThe orange lizard-like assistant to the sub-minister of the regional secretary stood behind a stainless steel desk.  Its vertical slit pupils were centered in large lidless yellow eyes.  One of its leathery hands was balled into a fist, with its two opposable thumbs interlocked between three slender fingers.  Its other hand held a combination data-padd/translator.  “Purpose of visit?” questioned the baritone voice from the translator.\n\n“You know why we’re here,” I replied, straining to control my anger.  “You’re the tenth bureaucrat we’ve met with today.  As I told them already, we’re on to you guys, and we demand action.”\n\n“You demand?”\n\n“You’re damn right ‘we demand’.  Something’s wrong in the sky.  All the planets have disappeared, the moon’s phases are screwy, and the sun’s parallax is too large.”\n\n“How do you know these things?” it hissed.\n\n“Observations.  And it wasn’t easy either.  The restrictions that you guys impose on us make it next to impossible to get around, or to communicate with each other.  It’s time that you admit what you’ve done.”\n\n“Interesting.  What is it that you believe we have done?”\n\n“We think that during the three years of cloud cover, you built a Dyson sphere around our sun.  And you replaced it with a small artificial sun 38,000 miles above the Earth.  You thought that if it orbited the sky in exactly 24 hours, we would assume that it’s our sun.”\n\n“Why would we do this incredible thing?”\n\n“Energy, or course.  The sun emits 250,000,000 times more energy than reaches the Earth.  Your little satellite gives us our original share, and you keep all the rest.”\n\n“Extraordinary.”\n\n“There’s more.”\n\n“Please, continue.”\n\n“We think that you forked tongued bastards planned this from the beginning.  We were so grateful for the help; we never questioned how you managed to have so many supplies here in only a few weeks.  We want our sun back, and we want you to get the hell out of our solar system.”\n\nI guess it smiled.  Who knows?  It pressed a button, and six armed lizards formed a circle around us.  “Remarkable reasoning, earthman,” it said.  “Surprisingly, you got it right.  Had it been up to me, I would have just built the sphere and let you furbags freeze to death.  Unfortunately, the bleeding hearts on Dowl Prime passed legislation forcing us to preserve at least 50% of all sentient life forms.  Frankly, I think it’s a policy that needs to be reevaluated.”  He instructed the guards, “Go ahead and execute this group before they spread their theories.”\n\n“What?  You can’t execute us.”\n\n“Sure I can.  We’ve only killed 1.7 billion humans so far.  The law lets me go to 3.4 billion.  But honestly, what did you think we were going to do?  Leave?  Not even if you had said ‘pretty please’.  Now, take them away.”\n"
  title: Beware of Aliens Bearing Gifts
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Jennifer C. Brown  aka  Laieanna
  date: 2009-10-30
  day: 30
  month: 10
  text: "Shimmering just before, the dome door melted away into nothing.  The vibrations that came with the shield opening left Henrick feeling a little nauseous.  Between the clear slats of the dome’s walls were colors of light pink to lavender.  Stepping outside the shield, Henrick saw the sky was painted in deep purples.  He looked back at the surface of the outside wall for the indicator.  It gave a tolerable reading.\n\n“The shields really distort the true colors of this world.”  A girl two feet taller said as she passed him.\n\nHenrick looked back at the indicator, up at the sky, then at the girl and decided to follow.  He ran to catch up with her long strides.  “This is my first week here.  I’ve only seen orange till now.”\n\n“The toxins are pretty high today.  When it’s bright green, you especially don’t want to be outside.  That’s when you have trouble.  I’m Patrish.”  She only gave him a momentarily glance.\n\n“Henrick.”\n\n“Haven’t participated in the planet education class yet, have you?”\n\n“No.  I’m rarely out of the tech labs.  How long have you been here?”\n\n“Sixteen months.  I’m part of the language classes.  You better keep your eyes on the walkway.”\n\nHenrick did as he was told, turning his attention from the sky to the shining white walkway that carried the students safely from one dome to the other without a single foot touching the massive jungle of alien plant life that filled the planet just ten feet below them.  He glanced over the side.  Something of a puke brown snapped in his direction, it’s razor leaves coming together in their search for lunch.  Another plant just five feet further away was oozing a substance between it’s lumpy gold petals.  Henrick looked around at all the disturbing plants and remembered why he usually stayed in the labs.  Ever since he got a glimpse of the outside from a shuttle window, he opted to stay inside as much as possible.  The vegetation growing over the planet’s surface terrified him.\n\nThe sky was getting lighter with a shade of forest green trying to eat at the purple near the horizon.  Patrish quickened her pace.  “This won’t be good soon.  We should probably hurry.”\n\nHenrick’s legs were thicker and shorter so he took another jog to keep up.  Patrish still had him at her back by four steps.  He put on a burst of speed to catch up.  His right foot missed the edge and Henrick found himself falling to his nightmares.  Heading face first, he could see a clearing between the thick plants and prayed he would land there.  It was going to hurt since the planet itself was much further down than he assumed based on the tall vegetation, but a broken leg was better than being dinner.\n\nPatrish was screaming behind him.  His voice joined.  Before he could feel the impact, a giant blue leaf caught him.  It was tacky against his skin and smelled like an unwashed body.  Henrick shut his weeping eyes and braced for the first crunch.\n\n“Get up!” Patrish yelled only seconds later.  Henrick opened his eyes to find himself back on the solid platform.  The leaf was snaking back off the edge.\n\n“I’m alive?” He asked as she pulled him to his feet.\n\n“Of course.  The plants just saved your life.  If you had touched the soil you’d be dead, which will still happen if you don’t move.  The sky is getting brighter.  Can’t you see the planet is trying to kill us?  Now run!”\n"
  title: Monkey Business
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Bryan Mulholland
  date: 2009-10-31
  day: 31
  month: 10
  text: "“I’m afraid I can’t stay long Doctor Einstein, I really must go, I’ve stayed here for far too long” I apologised.\n\n“Time, I have studied it, explained it and theorized it. Now it slips through my fingers” he muttered as he looked into the spring sunlit grounds.\n\nNot looking up from my diary I explained “Yes, well it happens to us all I’m afraid. Now I really must go, I have to visit Planck, McIntyre and Lord Kelvin today, it’s a busy one”.\n\n“I am not going to ask how, but can you tell me when?” he asked calmly. A little too calmly I thought, almost as if he was asking the time of day.\n\n“A year precisely, as is our policy Doctor Einstein. Many thanks for the notes again” I said packing them away, “You have helped our cause greatly”.\n\nHe was still sitting gazing out the window when I pulled the cords connected to my backpack. All at once the world around me dissolved into red dust and all too soon I was back in my office.\n\nThe view from my windows was obscured by The Cloud. Must be low lying today. I missed the view; I hadn’t seen it since the weather shifted. I missed seeing the shuttles leaving for Col2 as it circled our grey marble.\n\nWalking past my non-existent view to the data entry slot, I fed in the notes Einstein had given me. “I wonder where that boy has got to” I thought to myself as I fed the notes in and heard that strangely satisfying whirr click as the computer accepted them. The panel on my desk lit up confirming their acceptance. “Alistair!” I shouted; as soon as the words left my mouth I knew there was no point shouting for my assistant, he was probably off on one of his “personal visits” as he often was while I was away. I wondered who he was with today. Asimov? Wells? Hell, it might even be Adams, knowing Alistair.\n\nAfter flicking through the notes on my display and not seeing anything new (what with time and fourth dimensional travel being my speciality) I decided it would be best to head to my next source. Checking my diary (I am old fashioned that way), I found that next was McIntyre, someone I had been looking forward to interviewing since I created the Archive Project. His complete notes would make a fantastic addition to our library, plus I had a few questions for the man who kick started my development in fourth dimensional travel and brought this project into existence. The father of time travel himself, next to him Einstein was but a pre-schooler. There were a few kinks in my backpack design I wanted to smooth out, and who better to ask than him?\n\nThere was a sound, a strange sound, as if the air itself was quietly being rent asunder. Looking up I noticed Alistair. Looking a lot more weathered than when I had last seen him not to mention a scar on his face. “Alistair!” I exclaimed “What the devil happened to you? Where did you get that scar?”\n\n“Freud” he said simply, as if it explained everything. That’s when I noticed the backpack he was wearing. It was not of my design, although it looked like it incorporated many elements of it. “Alistair what…” I began to ask when he interrupted me and said the words I knew I would hear one day.\n\n“Dr Corban, I am from the future, I am here for information only. I will not harm you”\n"
  title: Archived
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Jacob Lothyan
  date: 2009-11-01
  day: '01'
  month: 11
  text: "It comes back to an inherent flaw in the system. The Incident Imprinter isn’t exactly time travel, not as time travel was originally imagined. That is to say that we still don’t fully understand how matter on the quantum level can be in two places and times at once, so we simply leave our bodies behind. Our consciousnesses travel to different times and distant places, wherever we can imagine, really.\n\nIt was great for a while. We were the disembodied embodiment of the unobserved observer.  Humanity learned more about the world and its history than ever imagined. We studied dinosaurs and wars and eruptions. We spent days with philosophers, generals, and playwrights. We watched pyramids being built and rivers drying away.\n\nEverything was perfect until a brilliant physicist tried to go back and watch the beginning of the universe. Unfortunately for her, Descartes was right. A tech came across her body, burnt and frozen and starved for oxygen, still strapped into conduit 761231. It is hypothesized that she found herself in the complete darkness of space, and was probably fine at first. Over a small duration of time, as the universe began to unfold in front of her, she began to consider all of the physical properties that she understood about space. Forgetting that she did not have a body that could burn or freeze, or need oxygen, she panicked. It was the first ever trip to space using the Incident Imprinter. It was also the last. It is the most cited case when debating the effects of mind over matter.\n\nThat may have been the last visit to space, but it was not the last evidence of the flaw. Once other travelers realized that they could impact their physical being even while detached, they couldn’t get the thought out of their minds. Travelers started coming back with scrapes and bruises, burns and missing limbs. Wars and eruptions saw an immediate and steep decline in tourism. Suicides became more creative.\n\nIt was only a matter of time before some less scrupulous individuals took advantage of the flaw. Eventually, it was found that, even though we couldn’t understand the physics involved, travelers were able to create physical manifestations of themselves while visiting the past. These manifestations were nothing more than blinks or blurs, but still enough to be viewed and noted by the natives of any particular time. Worse still, these travelers discovered that with a little practice they could also be heard. It wasn’t until recently that ripples have been detected in the timeline.\n\nIt is hypothesized that we have found the cause of apparitions such as ghosts and spirits. We no longer believe that prophets who claimed to have spoken with angels or messengers were insane, just the victims of cruel pranks. It is even suspected that the voice of God may be walking amongst us. Needless to say, public access to the Incident Imprinter is no longer allowed. They are even thinking of canceling previously sanctioned school and business trips. Nobody is above suspicion.\n"
  title: Cogito, ergo sum.
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2009-11-02
  day: '02'
  month: 11
  text: "The oval office had been compromised. I knew because I was the one who compromised it.\n\nI was standing over the body of the atheist president. The dark hues of her face were being framed by the blood from her slit throat as she lay on her back looking up at me. Her feet kicked slower, more of a rub that a kick, and then lay still.\n\nHer throat stopped bubbling.\n\nThe hammering on the door was what snapped me back to reality. I could hear footsteps outside and I knew that soon the room would be filled with fireworks.\n\nI made the sign of the cross, activating the transmitters embedded in my forehead, shoulders and torso. They lit up blue, wiped the room with bright light, and I vanished.\n\nSoldiers burst through the blood-spattered doors into an oval office containing the corpse of a now ex-president, the smell of lilacs, and nothing else.\n\nI arrived in the transportation bay with a double-flash of light and a release of pent-up breath. I was never comfortable on missions that required an instant transport. I’d been reassured by the people that built it, people smarter than me, that it was safe. Whatever. As far as I was concerned, it just hadn’t malfunctioned yet.\n\nI stepped off of the platform into the receiving bay and was greeted by my fellow Holy Marines returning from their separate missions. Almost all of them had returned by now.\n\nThe top businessmen and politicians in the world were being killed by us and blame was being thrown around by our operatives. Operation Rapture was well on its way to being a complete success.\n\nI knew something had gone wrong even before I got the news.\n\nAgent Petersen hadn’t returned from his mission yet.\n\nAn alarm turned us to the bank of monitors embedded in the ship’s walls. CNN was playing a clip live from the office of wealthy Slovakian industrialist Nick Milovets. He was holding up Agent Petersen’s head and yelling at the cameras.\n\nThe subtitles told us that he was asking us if this was the best we could do.  Bodyguard mercenaries lay behind him, destroyed by the battle to bring Agent Petersen down.\n\n“There goes our cover story.” said Jefferson to my right. I shot him a disapproving look and called up Cooper from Response and Containment.\n\nA hologram of Cooper appeared in front me, flickering, with a questioning look on her face. I nodded at her. She frowned and shot me a stiff salute before disappearing.\n\n“Clear” came from the loudspeakers on all decks.\n\nI sent an overload command to Agent Petersen’s subdermal transmitters. On the television, Petersen’s head smoldered, burned bright, and Nick Milovets yelped as his hand started to burn. The yelp turned into a scream as his office shuddered.\n\nThe screen went white and CNN lost the feed.  The newscasters returned to spouting panicked theories.\n\nI was the oldest and highest-ranking officer on the deck.  Everyone on the command deck held their breath and looked at me.\n\nI smiled at them.\n\n“Open the channels”, I said “Let them know that the end of the world is coming.”\n\nThe deck erupted in cheers.\n"
  title: Holy War
  year: 2009
- 
  author: William Tracy
  date: 2009-11-03
  day: '03'
  month: 11
  text: "1165 Third Street is quiet, as it has been quiet for over a century.\n\nOnce, its two hundred floors housed accountants, engineers, executives and staffers. Its occupants ebbed and flowed with the fickle whims of the economy.\n\nAll that ended with the Great Collapse.\n\nGone are the desk phones and paperwork. Here are mildew and insects. Once-plush offices have become dank caves home to skittering vermin. The gleaming plate glass windows have given way to jagged holes whistling in the wind. In sunlit corners, mosses give birth to grass.\n\n1165 Third Street groans. Its steel skeleton cries one last plea against the indignity of neglect, then is silent. For one heartbeat, two heartbeats, three, it drops from the sky.\n\nOn the second floor, a deer leaps from a gaping window and bounds to safety. On the forty-second floor, an owl awakens in time to know its own mortality. On the fifty-third floor, a lynx screams for its kittens. On the one hundred thirty-seventh floor, a hawk spreads its wings and lunges for the sky.\n\nOn the roof, a lone tree twists in the wind. A mouse scurries in its shadow, then squeals as the ground drops from beneath it.\n\n1165 Third Street drives into the earth with a roar. All around, waves of blackbirds and crows rush aloft. Beneath them, deer and jackrabbits bound down the cracked and pitted streets. A black cloud rolls after them, raining shards of glass and metal.\n\nThe boom fades to a dull rumble, and the air is filled with the scolding and chattering of birds.\n\nThe rubble moans and settles. Here a chunk of plaster skips through a maze of metal. There an I-beam seesaws hesitatingly before sliding to its resting place.\n\nThe wind changes direction, and the clouds of dust part. The setting sun burns crimson through the haze, and the ruins cast long shadows on the murky air.\n\nA deer steps deliberately, nose twitching, ears alert. A coyote snuffles through the twisted debris, then dashes after a rodent.\n\nThe old financial district is quiet, as it has been quiet for over a century.\n"
  title: Collapse
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Jacob Lothyan
  date: 2009-11-04
  day: '04'
  month: 11
  text: "When the box was finally opened, it was assumed by some that it had been tampered with beforehand. After all, there was a fairly explicit warning that stated: ANY ATTEMPT TO OPEN THIS BOX OR OTHERWISE INSPECT THE CONTENTS BEFORE THE INTENDED TIME WILL RESULT IN IRREVERSIBLE DAMAGE TO THE CONTENTS. That warning had always been enough to dissuade any attempts by the current generation of scientists and politicians to prod any further than curious glances and wild speculation. It is well known, however, that over the centuries many attempts had been made to destroy the box before it could open. Different groups throughout history had sprung up declaring that the box was a super virus or mega bomb that needed to be suppressed instead of guarded. At least a couple of those groups actually came into possession of the box for brief periods of time. It is unknown what type or level of tampering took place during those periods, but it is speculated that it was enough to irreversibly damage the contents.\n\nAnother group believes that the “box experiment” had simply failed of its own accord. They figured that whatever the point of the experiment had been, it had lost its meaning and significance over the centuries that it had taken for the box to open. Many in this group argue that the timer was either damaged during mishandling, or that it had been set wrong from the beginning. Either way, they argued, it had been foolish to focus so much time and energy, and so many resources, on an irrelevant artifact from a lost civilization. In these circles, the “box experiment” is commonly referred to and understood as the “botched experiment.”\n\nI, however, am of another school of thought. I believe that the box was intended to convey a very significant message. Simply because none of the greatest minds of our time can comprehend the message does not mean that box is without a message; it is just, as yet, not understood. I believe that once the object contained within the box is finally identified, every question from even the most outspoken of skeptics will finally be answered. I believe that understanding the box is our only and final opportunity if we hope to save the world as we know it, if we hope to save humanity. As it is now being asserted in some groups, ancient knowledge is knowledge none the less.\n\nOf course, I accept that I may be partial; I was the only one lucky enough to see it live and in person, the only one to smell it, and it seems to have made a greater impression on me than any of my colleagues. I was alone in the box chamber when I was startled by a very audible click as the unknown timer expired. I turned just in time to witness the whistling mist of decompression. Despite warnings about possible airborne contaminants, I approached the box. Peering over the edge, into the depths of the box, I was not immediately awed, more confused. All that lied inside was a strange, thorny, green stick with thin, red, feathery pads overlapped at one end. It was the most beautiful and intricate biological specimen that had been witnessed in our time, but seemingly nonsensical. Just as a rich, earthy aroma reached my nostrils, the thorny stick began to turn brown in the feathery part, the pads beginning to curl. Before I could summon my colleagues to my side, the contents had reduced to dust, leaving us all to wonder and debate.\n"
  title: A Rose by Any Other Name
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Chris Abernethy
  date: 2009-11-05
  day: '05'
  month: 11
  text: "I don’t know why I ran.\n\nCaution, paranoia, groupthink… pure blind panic maybe, god knows what finally sent me scurrying up out of the elliptic, screaming in tight round ol’ Ares and out into the darkness.\n\nGuess it won’t really matter, hell it’s not like there’s anything up here to actually be running to, though that’s half the reason I hurled myself out here; last place anyone would look because it’s the last place anyone with half a brain would run… no easy way back, nothing to slingshot yourself round; just you, the black and all that delta-v you’re sat barrelling along on…\n\nTo start with I hoped, kidded myself, maybe even prayed that I’d just jumped at sounds in the night, that all the little things that had spooked me turned out to be a series of coincidences; nothing but an addendum to the catalogue of meaningless accidents and lives sacrificed to the cold depths of space.\n\nBut then the reports started coming in, slow at first; lost Kuiper Belt terraforming teams spiked from one in ten to nine in ten, the deep imaging array on Charon fell off the grid, SatGov declaring a state of emergency after all contact was lost with Rhea colony… the litany of loss went on.\n\nI suppose that’s when people started to really worry, EarthGov statements that “these rumours of a crisis are baseless fear mongering” not withstanding, but things went ballistic when the Belt mining stations started dropping out; one or two at first, then dozens, then hundreds… the industrial heart of the species was going dark and the only thing the politicians had to offer us was, “No comment”.\n\nPanic was all but inevitable, people ran where they could; to other colonies, to satellite rings, to the hills, to each other.\n\nThings seemed to peak for a moment when the UNSC special forces were sent in to find out what had happened in the Belt; days of upbeat but oh so serious reporting from the media as they moved towards their targets, then silence… for hours, nothing.\n\nGod knows what happened to those soldiers, even trying to patch things together after the fact it’s hard to find anything concrete about what happened, what they faced, why none of them came back.\n\nOne thing I can tell you from the fragments of coms chatter that I’ve scrapped together from what filtered out; they died bloody, they died hard, they went down howling their defiance at an unseen and implacable foe.\n\nAfter that history seemed to pause; whatever was lurking malignantly in the heart of our system stopped reaching out for a time, bland assurances were issued, whole worlds held their breath.\n\nThen it went for Earth.\n\nHave you ever listened to a planet die? Listened to millions of lives being torn away in an instant and billions more screaming for a reprieve that would never come?\n\nWe were culled, wiped from the face of universe like a flawed design, something best forgotten…\n\nI huddle here terrified and impotent in the night watching the shattered remnants of civilisation’s light gutter out one by one in the darkness, knowing that as each light goes out it will never come again, and I mourn the slaughter of my kind.\n"
  title: Stars going out
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2009-11-06
  day: '06'
  month: 11
  text: "Major Clanet’s head felt like it had split in half.  He forced his eyes open and saw his android navigator standing above him.  “What happened?” he asked.\n\nThe android extended a hand and helped the human to his feet.  “We delivered the supplies to the station, and were returning to Earth.  During reentry, there was a structural failure of the right hand glide wing.  We began to tumble violently.  You blacked out.  Seconds before the shuttle exploded, aliens beamed us onto their spacecraft.”\n\n“Aliens?  What makes you think it was aliens?”\n\n“Teleportation technology does not exist on Earth, so I concluded extraterrestrials were involved.”\n\n“Right,” Clanet reluctantly acknowledged.  “Well, when taken prisoner, our first duty is to escape.  Are we still in space?”\n\n“No.  I believe the ship has landed.”\n\nClanet surveyed the small room.  There were four walls; two curved and two straight.  A convex wall contained a large door with a vertical handle near the right hand side.  The opposite wall was concave, and contained a similar door, but the handle was horizontal and crossed the mid-height of the door.  “Assuming the ship is cylindrical,” Clanet concluded, “the concave wall must contain the door to the outside.”  He walked over to the door and pushed against the handle with all his strength, but nothing happened.  “Damn, it’s locked.  I guess we’ll have to go inboard, and fight our way out.  We need to find some kind of weapon.”\n\n“I don’t think that will be necessary, Major Clanet?  The aliens saved our lives, there is no reason to assume that they intend to harm us.”\n\n“First of all, they saved my life, you’re not alive.  You’re just a sophisticated GPS unit.  Secondly, I’m the one that does the thinking.  That’s what humans do best.”  Clanet strode over to the convex wall and grabbed the door’s vertical handle and pulled; first with one hand, then with two.  The door didn’t budge.  “Damn, both doors are locked.”\n\nThe android walked over to the door and placed his index finger on the vertical handle.  “It has been my experience,” he lectured, “that human arrogance hampers your ability to reason.  Your species assumes that your physiology is the pinnacle of evolution.  Hence, you built robots in your image, even though there are more efficient design options.  You also assume that aliens must look like you; with two legs, two arms, two hands, and opposable thumbs.  Therefore, you conclude that a vertical handle must always be pulled.”  The android gave a slight push with his finger and the door swung open.\n\nThe android entered first, followed by Clanet.  The adjacent room was clearly the bridge.  It contained approximately thirty robots of varying sizes and configurations.   A few were scurrying about, but most were occupied at the numerous work stations.  A tall, bobble-head robot, with four snake-like arms appeared to be directing activities from the center of the bridge.  It finally noticed the two newcomers and quickly motored toward them on a pair of rapidly rotating tank treads.   It agilely banked around several crisscrossing robots, and came to a screeching stop a few feet away.  “Good, good, you appear to be functional.  We are very pleased to make your greeting.  We look forward to a great friendship between our two worlds.”  The alien robot suddenly stopped its rambling and turned toward Major Clanet.  Its optical scanner panned the human from head to toe.  “Ah,” it said as he turned back toward the android, “I see that your companion is biological.  Is it a servant, or a pet?”\n"
  title: The Encounter
  year: 2009
- 
  author: James Marshall
  date: 2009-11-07
  day: '07'
  month: 11
  text: "Foray wondered why he didn’t just sit down and die. He was naked but for a pair of underpants, and his skin was stained red with the blood from hundreds of cuts and scratches. He was gaunt, and his hair and beard were long and itchy. The vines and thorns lashed at his body, grabbing on with their claws, dragging him back like needy children not wanting him to leave. He only stopped to pry them out when especially long stingers dug themselves into his naked, bloody skin and stopped his progress. Nothing hurt him anymore.\n\nForay’s ship had fought the enemy over this strategically important planet, inhabited by nothing of note but a species of dim-witted sub-humanoids and a few Terran missionaries, and had lost. The crash killed everyone on board but three. They didn’t have time to bury the dead. The enemy Searchers would arrive soon. Foray, Stavos, and Simmons had cut the implants from their palms and buried them deep in the pile of gore that was all that remained of the troopers in the Gpod, and then ran. Simmons’ hand became infected a few days later, and he got sick and quickly died. Then something out of the forest grabbed Stavos a few days later. It was funny, because the two of them had just been talking about the apparent lack of predators in the forest, when something came at him from their right and bit Stavos ‘ hip out. Foray turned around to see a large dog-like animal standing over Stavos, growling at him, almost daring him to try to save his friend. Stavos was under it, screaming loudly and beating the dog’s front legs. Foray backed off, hands up. “All yours,” he said, and when the dog turned its attention back to Stavos, he turned and ran, and didn’t stop until he was sick. That was weeks ago. He hadn’t seen any more dogs since then, but he assumed it was them he could hear howling at night.\n\nIt was difficult to be resigned to one’s death when the moment was postponed time and time again. When he was thirsty, he would come across a river. When he was hungry, he would find a dead monkey, or bird, and eat it. He was lucky, but he didn’t care. One day there would be no river, no monkey. His luck would run out and he would die. The creatures would eat him, clean his bones, and the floods would carry them away and leave nothing. He had fought for the Terrans for eight years, and being eaten by birds and bugs seemed a natural, even attractive death. He had seen confused men have their guts blown out and trampled into the mud as they watched. The enemy’s weapons suck men’s lungs out of their mouths like a pair of old, wet socks. Children mad with grief and fear, sitting trembling by the corpses of their parents, dead for days. He thought about those children a lot. This is what they would have wanted. Him dead.\n\nHe collapsed in the dark. He couldn’t walk anymore. He slept.\n\nHe awoke in the morning to see a face, a humanoid face, looking down at him, smiling. It was saying something. “Jesus?”\n\nForay blinked in the bright sun. “Huh?”\n\nThe humanoid’s face was dark green, with small, black eyes. “Jesus, yes? They say you come back one day.” The accent was thick, but it was English.\n\n“Yes,” croaked Foray. He laughed as the strong humanoid helped him up. “Bless you, my child.”\n\nThank god for missionaries, he thought.\n"
  title: The Survivor
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Ian Rennie
  date: 2009-11-08
  day: '08'
  month: 11
  text: "Hilton’s eyes opened, to his own mild surprise.  Everything he saw was in dim monochrome, suggesting it was either really early or he was really tired.  He was sitting in an armchair in a small office without the faintest clue how he had got here.  The last thing he remembered was…\n\nOh.\n\nSo he’d gone through with it.  Evidently it hadn’t worked.\n\nBefore this train of throught could get much further, a smartly dressed businesswoman entered the room, flashing him the thinnest of courtesy smiles.\n\n“Good morning, Mr Hilton.  My name is Annabel Tseng, and I’m here about your debt.”\n\nHe opened his mouth to speak, and was cut off, in a magnificently rude display of politeness.\n\n“It’s probably best if you don’t try to deny it.  I’m here on behalf of your insurance company and Zybeco Body Leasing.  You were three months behind on payments and you decided to settle your balance by driving your car and your body off a cliff.  We recovered you from the crash site and put you in temporary acmommodation.”\n\nHilton looked down at himself, and understood another part of what had been bothering him.  His skin, visible only in greyscale, wasn’t skin.  It was some kind of polymer replacement.  He was in a sim.  As he was looking down at what he had become, Ms Tseng pulled out a softscreen sheet from a manila folder.\n\n“At this moment, your debt to your insurers and Zybeco equals around four trillion yuan, plus a twenty five per cent defaulter’s penalty. Repayment can be made by cash, credit, or servitude.  At present pay and interest rates, you will have your debt settled in just under fourteen years of work.  You’re a talented programmer, and that makes you worth more to us alive than dead.  Not the easiest option in the world, but you should have thought of that before you attempted to defraud the company.”\n\n“It wasn’t like that”\n\nMs Tseng looked at him in mock-interest.  His voice had sounded grating and artificial, words pumped through the cheapest voice-synth they could stick in this sim.\n\n“Wasn’t it, Mr Hilton?  Do tell.”\n\nWhen he spoke, it all came out in a rush.\n\n“Susan left me last month.  I went into a spiral.  Drink, pills, anything to put me into oblivion for as long as possible.  I didn’t crash the car to default on my debts.  I was praying for death.”\n\n“Death?”\n\nShe laughed, and Hilton understood where he was.  Humanity had found no hell, so they had built one for themselves.\n\n“Mr Hilton, death is no excuse for laying off work.”\n"
  title: The Company Store
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2009-11-09
  day: '09'
  month: 11
  text: "Hans lay face down on the surgical table, completely immobilized and wide awake. His father’s rubber shoes moved in and out of his field of vision as the older man busied himself in preparation, his voice a constant hum of information in the otherwise empty room.\n\n“We can’t effectively target inactive neural pathways, which is why you’re awake. You won’t feel anything, at least, I don’t think I did…” his father’s voice trailed off only for a moment. “If you do feel uncomfortable, be sure to speak up. We’ll want to make a note of when.”\n\nHis father double checked his handiwork, having laid out all the instruments he would need on a sterile back table nearby. Overhead hung a large spring-coiled umbilical of fibre optic cable truncated in a blunt two inch long conical tip. A second such cable snaked into the back of Hans Senior’s skull, following him as he moved about the room.\n\n“The initial prototype is completely polarized,” he tapped the back of his head, “one way. The materials that the interface nodes fabricated from were by nature unidirectional.” Barely pausing between sentences he scrubbed the back of the boy’s neck with iodine before deftly slicing through the skin and subcutaneous layers with a scalpel.\n\n“Still lucrative, even with its limitations. Reconnaissance personnel, witnesses, even the skin trade paid handsomely.”\n\nFrom the table he plucked an insect like device of surgical steel and placed it over the incision. From it a myriad of tiny appendages unfolded, carefully holding aside the lacerated flesh before burrowing even deeper into the boys’ neck, then up into the base of his skull. At the required depth, it injected a thin catheter and, its task completed, simply stopped in place.\n\n“Frustrating how long it took to solve the polarizing issue. So much time, lost.”\n\nHans Senior unpackaged a fibre cable socket with a long single organic strand trailing from it. Grasping it with a set of forceps, he fed the strand into the catheter.\n\n“This will be so much better for you than it was for me.” No sooner had the strand contacted the tube, it began to pull itself in. Hans’ head flooded with sights, sounds, and smells that he hadn’t known in years. The strand divided and doubled back on itself, only to divide again, sending countless atom thin filaments off into Hans’ grey matter. His father held the endcap until the strand had reeled in all of its slack before carefully guiding it into the still waiting insectile appliance.\n\nThe tiny unit came back to life, grasping and aligning the jack with the flesh. It then glue stitched the inner layers to the device below the surface, and sutured the outer skin to its perforated outer edge.\n\nIts job complete, the mechanism detached, and allowed itself to be picked up and set aside with the other bloodied instruments.\n\nHans felt the restraints relax, followed by a flood of sensation, not all of it pleasant.\n\n“The pain should subside in a few days.” The older man helped his son into a sitting position before grasping the unattached cable from overhead and positioning it behind the boy’s head. There was a strobe of light and a magnetic snapping as the two ends oriented themselves and fitted together.\n\nHis father stood in front of him, and closed his eyes.\n\nHans felt a strange pressure in his head, then had a sudden awareness of why his father had pushed so hard to implant him now.\n\n“You’re dying.” It wasn’t a question, the facts had been laid out for him.\n\n“Yes. I’ve used up my life. I’ve learned so much, but there’s so much left undone.”\n\nHans felt the pressure again, followed by waves of knowledge. Not all of it was pleasant either.\n"
  title: Hand Hinunter das Licht
  year: 2009
- 
  author: William Tracy
  date: 2009-11-10
  day: 10
  month: 11
  text: "A lone figure swung precariously from the side of a sky-scraping tower, painfully inching his way up a rope.\n\nThat tower and others stood in rows, crowding out the sky. Their sides gleamed silver, studded with large, black windows. The streets below were lit as much by flickering lamps as by the slivers of sunlight that scraped past the immense buildings. The dark streets teemed with bustling people clothed in rags. The occasional horseless carriage pushed through the crowd, horn squawking.\n\nHigh above the metropolis, bloated dirigibles drifted lazily from one tower to the next. None paid heed to the tiny figure crawling up one of the great buildings, skulking in the shadows.\n\nHe smashed a steel-toed boot through a window. He rolled through the hole, and rose to a kneeling position. He paused, listening for the footsteps of golems—the dead reanimated galvanically to become the mindless servants of the powerful.\n\nSatisfied that he was undetected, he moved swiftly through the halls and passageways toward his objective.\n\nHe opened a door to a teetering catwalk. In the vast chamber below him, rows of massive transformers and dynamos repeated on and on, bolts of electricity leaping from one to the next. A single steel column in the center of the room stretched from the floor to the ceiling, intersecting the catwalk. At that place was a knife switch. The lone figure walked forward and reached for the switch.\n\n“I don’t think that you want to do that.” A sharply dressed man stood behind the lone figure, flanked by two golems bearing electricity guns. Two more golems emerged at the far end of the walkway, cutting off any escape.\n\n“If you throw that switch, you will short-circuit the generators below you. The explosion could destroy the entire building.”\n\n“Maybe that’s what I want.”\n\n“Do you have any idea what I am doing here, and what is at stake?” The man in the suit searched the other’s eyes. “I am creating mankind’s ultimate invention. I am building a machine that will change history.”\n\n“You are building a computer. A machine that can perform mathematics.”\n\n“But it is so much more! I am building something unparalleled in human endeavor: A machine that can think! Can you imagine what this means?  Our creations will do our work for us. Humanity will live by the fruits of its ingenuity, and we will create a new utopia.”\n\n“Your machines will work for you, and replace us. You will have no more use for the poor, and will then destroy us.”\n\nThe man in the suit sneered. “The poor are not my fault. I built my wealth by my talents and my labors. I have given up my leisure, my health, and my family for it. It is mine for I have earned it.” He laughed without humor. “Why should the poor be entitled to what they have not earned? They have done nothing to deserve a better life for themselves.”\n\n“I am doing something now.” He threw the switch.\n"
  title: Teslapunk
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Matthew Banks
  date: 2009-11-11
  day: 11
  month: 11
  text: "“Brankahhh nakahhhsret,” said the vibrating sphere.\n\n“Much impertinence is hydroscopic,” said the speaker on the translator console. McGuine frowned, but Leak still had that constant, infuriating grin plastered on his face.\n\n“Frehhhnat bossssth fffonehhh,” said the sphere.\n\n“Envy the copse and thallium minnow,” said the translator. McGuine grunted and stabbed the “Off” button.\n\n“It’s not working,” he said. Leak was still grinning.\n\n“Maybe it is.”\n\n“What? You think the thing said ‘Much impertinence is hydroscopic’?”\n\n“Maybe it means something.”\n\n“What? What could it possibly mean? Look, the translator isn’t working.” Finally, Leak frowned.\n\n“It worked on every other language we tried,” he said. That much was true. It had successfully translated French and German to English. It had translated Arabic to English. It had translated an obscure mutant patois of Xhosa and Kiswahili into English. It had translated the human-constructed languages Esperanto and Lojban into English. It should by rights have been able to translate the weird speech of the alien sphere. But the evidence was turning against it.\n\n“That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe this doesn’t follow the rules of human languages. It almost certainly doesn’t.”\n\n“So? It worked on other weird languages!” That was also true. When a video recording of a deaf woman using American Sign Language was translated into audio and fed into the translator, it had translated the ASL into English. When snippets of program code written in Python were fed in, it translated them (more roughly) into English. And finally, when Reese and Nanadai’s artificial language Xxxch, designed to be as complicated and confusing as possible, essentially unlearnable by any normal human, the translator still worked, just as well as it had for Finnish or Esperanto.\n\n“Hhhett nahhhsss hhhettsss,” vibrated the alien sphere.\n\n“Informational concerning reductivity oxalate am gourmand,” said the translator. McGuine balled up his fist and slammed it down angrily on an empty metal cart. But Leak’s grin had already returned. He stepped up to the translator console, twisted a knob, and typed something on the keypad. After a moment, McGuine looked up.\n\n“What did you do?” he asked. Leak’s grin widened.\n\n“I’m trying the Ananad algorithm.” McGuine rolled his eyes. Frenchmen and Spaniards and Germans and Turks and Latvians and Azerbaijanis had spoken to the translator while it was using the Ananad algorithm, and it had produced similar verbal garbage as it was producing now.\n\n“Brankahhh nakahhhsret,” repeated the alien sphere. It had been vibrating out this three-part message for almost a year, and the best efforts of every linguist and computer scientist had failed to decipher it. It wasn’t likely that a mess of an algorithm that couldn’t even understand German would work.\n\n“If this device is found…” said the translator. McGuine went pale and sat down. Leak’s grin became a frown.\n\n“Frehhhnat bossssth ffonehhh.”\n\n“…please return the device to…”\n\n“Hhett nahhhsss hhettsss.”\n\n“….Hett Nass, at the address listed on the identification plaque.” McGuine and Leak looked at each other, and both were thinking about how an answer always raises more questions.\n"
  title: Translator
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2009-11-12
  day: 12
  month: 11
  text: "Jennies were shipped world-wide.\n\nThey were referred to as Jennies because of their genengineered origins.  Some people referred to them as Generators because they were filled with energy, hardly ever slowed down, and kept the offices running at full power.  They were designed to take care of and organize the day-to-day needs of every business, no matter how big or small.\n\nJennies were short. They were pretty in a way specifically designed to be slightly doll-like but commanding. There were off-putting yet attractive. Their flawlessness caused the human mind to be repelled but only just enough to avoid most confrontations. They were designed to have no guile and to be robotic enough to deflect unwanted attention.\n\nLooking back, I supposed we should be thankful. It makes them easier to detect when they try to infiltrate and therefore easier to kill. But I’m getting ahead of myself.\n\nThe A.I. rules were stringent. “Technically People”, Judge Amberson had said.\n\nThe sympathizers were happy with the ruling on moral grounds because potential abuse would be treated similarly to abuse that natural-born humans received and dealt with in the same legal fashion.\n\nThe rich were happy because a lot of money had been put into the Gen project and the resulting lawsuits would protect their investments.\n\nThe parent company had the Jennies record every second of their existence to protect their investments. Privacy clauses were set up and ironclad NDAs programmed internally so that no secret of any company could be revealed in a court of law except for any sexual or physical attack. A few assault cases and market crashes later, the lesson was clear.\n\nIn a way, they became untouchable. They all looked the same. None of them really made the effort to look different or stand out from the others.\n\nBusinesses that couldn’t afford one were subsidized. Jennies became a mainstay of every office. Where quarters couldn’t be provided, they slept in the offices that they worked in. The Jennies kept themselves clean like cats.\n\nThey were too expensive to manufacture as prostitutes.  There were too many human women that could be bought and sold for cheaper with less hassle.\n\nWhile the Jennies made everyone a little uncomfortable, they were treated as the world’s first mass-produced talking biological office application and left alone to do their jobs.\n\nThe Jennies were involved in every single aspect of almost every single business in America.\n\nThat’s how they shut it down.\n\nThe Jennies took over by bringing North America to an age of darkness. The banks, the import records, the export records, the stock markets, all of it. Gone in an hour. They left the rest of the world alone. It was alarming how few countries rushed to America’s side in its time of need. Alarming because by ‘few’, I mean ‘none’.\n\nThey shut down the dams and the power plants.  The military Jennies held the keys to nuclear silos and threatened to use them if any other country interfered.\n\nIf America was a car, the Jennies had just thrown the distributor cap and the keys into the bushes.\n\nFrom space, European astronauts watched as America went dark.\n\nThat was six years ago.\n\nThe populace of American is starving and dying off. The Jennies rove around in packs in stolen cars with guns to kill the thousands of us that still survive. They make more of themselves every day.\n\nJennies eat less. They sleep less. They’re in great shape. They have no compassion. It’s a losing race.\n\nSoon enough, America will not only be run by the Jennies but populated solely by them.\n"
  title: Jennies
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Ken McGrath
  date: 2009-11-13
  day: 13
  month: 11
  text: "I roll off her and onto my back, panting, satisfied and with the sweat already drying into my chest. My head sinks into the pillow and I smile. Turning to look at her it slides, like water, right off my face.\n\nHer façade is starting to flicker and fade into an electric blue haze, allowing me to see her true metallic shape underneath. I’m guessing my 30 minutes with the woman of my dreams are coming to an end.\n\n“That was so good,” she pants, dragging out the o in so as only a lusty human should.\n\nI sit up quickly, throwing the thin, stained, bedcover off me. I feel dirty and wrong. A deep-seated sense of Christian guilt bubbling up inside of me.\n\nThe Simul-Form leans across the bed, reaching out a hand and brushing my naked back. It’s cold, not familiar warm flesh and I shudder moving off the bed completely, turning away from her.\n\n“I… uh, I’ve got to go,” I mumble pulling on my jeans. Behind me I can hear her moving about on the motel bed. As I bend to pick up my shirt I catch a glimpse of her, no… of it, reflected in the cracked, grubby window. I see her for what she really is.\n\nThrough the crackling blue glow that surrounds her like an electric cloud I see her change – hair originally short, now long, blonde then red, changing facial features from soft to hard, full lips, sharp nose, wide eyed then narrow. Every single one of them the look of desire and sex. She reels through these female images like someone flicking the pages of a porno magazine, revealing a fleeting glimpse of temptation and want, before moving onto the next.\n\nThe lingering flash of skin and nipple, pursed lips, tongue protruding slightly between teeth and slowly spreading thighs. Hair cascading in thick, black ringlets over her shoulders, then angular, spiked and blonde. I turn and she pauses as a smouldering brunette with big, smoking eyes, the sheets wrapped loosely around her doing more to draw attention to those curves than to hide them.\n\n“Why don’t you stick around?” she purrs, stepping slowly off the bed, pulling the covers with her. My eyes follow her toes as they touch the floor, all the way up her long legs, across her covered body and I feel myself getting hard at the sight of her lips, drowning in her eyes. “I can be whoever you want me to be.”\n\nMy mind fights to be heard, that she’s a machine, a Simul-Form, able to take any shape, able to fulfil every sexual desire, but that she’s not human. Surprisingly it wins.\n\nI’m wringing knots in the shirt, twisting it in my sweating palms. I struggle into it and button it up wrong as I force my body towards the door.\n\n“Money… your money’s on the table. Over, uh,” I indicate, “there. Thanks.”\n\nShit, why did I say that? I curse myself as I step out into the harsh judging sunlight.\n\n“See you later cowboy,” she drawls seductively as the door closes, finally forming a barrier between us.\n\nWhy do I always feel like the one who’s been used, all dirty and sorry after sex? I squint into the washed out afternoon as cars screech by on the road beyond the battered chain-link fence and sigh. I need a shower.\n"
  title: Insert Coins To Operate
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Q. B. Fox
  date: 2009-11-14
  day: 14
  month: 11
  text: "“Each freighter, since the very first one we built, is given a unique name,” the technician explained.\n\n“Can I choose a name, if it’s not already taken?” I asked.\n\n“I’m afraid not, sir,” the tech was barely apologetic. “A name will be assigned to you.”\n\n“Oh, I’d like to have named her after my wife.” Alice’s warm smile and freckled nose appeared in my mind’s eye.\n\n“Most people do, sir; a spouse or sometimes a child. But the journeys are long. And families, well, sir, they don’t always stay together. And you can see how that would become awkward. I’m sorry, sir, but there it is; I can show you the statistics, if you’d like.”\n\nHe started to turn his screen towards me, as he was required to by the Full Disclosure in Work Act, but I waved him away. Alice and I knew we’d make it work.\n\nI was encouraged to think of the Catherine Rose as an animal, as a pet. Some men preferred to think of the freighters as their mistress; if those statistics were accurate then some of their wives did too. Some of the women thought of the freighters as children. But we were all expected to treat the ships as if they were alive; talk to them, care for them, spoil them.\n\nIt had always been a tradition to give names to vessels. And their crews have always treated them as living things, superstitiously believing it made the craft work harder to stay reliable, to keep them alive.\n\nBut the science is the other way about: giving them names makes us empathise with them. We sit in a vast emptiness of black, listening to the hum of the engines, alert for any sound of distress or discomfort. We fill our days with the repeated routine of caring for our babies.\n\nAnd it keeps us sane, never quite alone in that horizonless, apparently unending, nothing.\n\nThey may have stopped me naming my freighter after my wife, but they couldn’t stop me naming my daughter after the Catherine Rose. So while I was away, my first born said her first word, took her first steps and had her first tantrums. But I was always connected to her, through the ship that shared her name, by an invisible bond that linked them.\n\nI was only on a short run when the accident happened. Just an accident, they told me, nothing you could have done, if you were there. The sun shone brightly on the day of the memorial service.\n\nIt was year before they’d let me do another long haul trip, a year of short runs and psychological evaluation. I had adjusted remarkably well, they said. There was no sign of long term mental trauma, they concluded. I had grieved for a suitable time and I had moved on.\n\n“Space,” Dr. Addison had warned me, “deep space, can play tricks on your mind. You’ve adjusted well, but if you have any worries, any worries at all, contact me, straight away.”\n\nOf course, I had grieved for my wife, but I have to be strong. I still have to care for our child. She whimpers in the night, and I get up, adjust her injectors, balance her output, sooth her back to sleep.\n\nShe’s crying now, her display flashing an urgent red, tugging me towards our planned destination. It’s alright, sweetheart, I tell her, disabling the alarm. Let’s go this way. It’s quiet and peaceful; no one to bother us, kiddo. Just me and you and as much space as we need.\n"
  title: A Catherine Rose by any other name
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Saurja Sen
  date: 2009-11-15
  day: 15
  month: 11
  text: "The scanners showed signs of the same life-form across the galaxy, so it was safe to assume that the species, whatever it was, had discovered space travel. Thus communication with it was allowed and my advance team was sent in to begin all interaction protocols.\n\nWe hailed them on all frequencies, but there was no response. Since we had received life-signs, we went down to the surface of the planet to establish physical contact. Their cities were spectacular. Huge buildings, intricate designs, complex channels for what must have been transport, everything that one saw on other species’ planets existed. But there seemed to be no activity of any kind. A big city on any planet has a certain amount of hectic activity on it – on Earth, air-cars moving around, people teeming in the central areas; on Alpha Centauri IX, sky-trains flying everywhere; even under the surface of Cragganmore XII, the huge ball-bearing transporters. But on this planet, nothing. No movement whatsoever, yet signs of life, and seeming life-forms everywhere.\n\nPraha, our biologist, took us to what seemed the dominant life-form. It looked organic, with greyish skin, about 7 feet tall. It had limbs with three extensions at three different heights that seemed capable of gripping objects. There appeared to be the equivalent of eyes at the 6 foot mark, and it had tank-tracks at ground level. The only visible sign of life that we saw was a thin column of gas being expelled midway down its side that Praha said was its respiration. Even this we may have missed had the gas not been a different colour to the air around it.\n\nOur efforts to communicate with it continued failing. We tried sound, light, touch and smell. No reaction to any kind of noise or light, regardless of frequency. A complete indifference to our gentle prodding and to Craggan vapour bullets. Our experiments were repeated on all the nearby life-forms and they all resulted in a complete absence of responses. It was as if the species was deliberately ignoring our presence.\n\nWe placed a few of them under surveillance and worked shifts conducting other experiments. The physical watches on the life-forms were refreshed every six hours, and not a single observer reported any signs of any activity.\n\nJust before we were due to return, Praha and I went back to the life-form we had initially encountered for a final contact instance. Praha noticed it first – the life-form was no longer in the same spot as on our first meeting. It had moved. Not by much, but enough that we noticed. The observers assigned to the life-form all swore that it had not moved on their watches.\n\nAgain, it was Praha who worked it out. It had moved, but so slowly that none of the observers had noticed, yet over the time we had spent on the planet, it was obvious. The same went for everything else – life-forms, transportation devices – they had all done something. Everything that had occurred had happened so slowly that we didn’t see it happen and thought nothing had happened at all.\n\nThat’s the moment when we realized that it wouldn’t be possible for us to communicate normally with them. Our relationships to a timescale were too different. As one species to another, we could, over a long time, but we wouldn’t be able to individually. Praha and I would be dead before they would ever be able to send either of us a message. We wouldn’t live to be acknowledged by the species we had discovered.\n"
  title: A Moment in a Life
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Charles Spohrer
  date: 2009-11-16
  day: 16
  month: 11
  text: "I totaled my motorcycle. Of course, I had no medical insurance.\n\nI figured if I ever did have an accident, it would be final.  I never expected just a couple of broken bones.\n\nThe ambulance dumped me off at County. The drivers wheeled me inside and left me on the gurney. A middle aged lady walked over and dropped a stack of papers on my chest. She pushed a pen into my injured hand.  I winced as I reached over with my good hand to grab the pen. Without waiting, she began to leaf through the stack. “Sign here, and here” she said, as she flipped the pages quickly. I signed wherever she pointed. She gathered up the papers and left.  Eventually the doctors set to work.\n\nI was out of there before the start of the next shift.\n\nBy the time the road rash scabs fell off my face, the bills arrived. A year’s salary for a broken wrist and some scabs. Outrageous, I thought. So I let it slide.\n\nBills become past due bills.\n\nPast due bills become final notice bills.\n\nFinal notice bills became phone calls from the collection agencies.\n\nDaily.\n\nFor weeks.\n\nThen the calls stopped.\n\nA few days later, six in the morning, I woke to the sound of my front door crashing in. Several   policemen in SWAT gear and guns drawn rushed into my room. They pulled me from my bed, threw me to the floor, and sat on me with my arm behind my back. A technician in a white lab coat over a bullet proof vest jabbed my bicep with a syringe and drew a small amount of blood.\n\nAfter a few minutes, he said, “That’s him alright. He’s the one. DNA markers match at a 95% confidence level. You can bag him.”\n\nOne of the cops spoke. “We hereby serve Notice that you are in Default on your Obligations to County Hospital and invoke Reclamation pursuant to the Rights assigned by Contract as agreed by You at the time of Admission.” I could hear every capitalized word.\n\nThose were the last words I ever heard.\n\nIt’s been a few days since I got my sight back. Quite remarkable if you think about it. I can see in four different directions now. It’s not that hard to process, especially since the decision logic isn’t that complicated.\n\nThe green light flashed on.\n\nSummary judgment came quick.  For not paying the hospital bills, I gave up all rights. Everything. I understand some politician’s son got my body, something about inoperable leukemia. He just happened to be next on the waiting list for a full body donor.  It was all in the fine print.\n\nYellow light.\n\nSo what happened to me? Well, they found me some work. Look for me on the corner of State and Madison.  Inside the traffic control box. The latest in intelligent traffic management. If you do come by, blink your headlights twice. I’ll hold the green a little longer for you.\n\nRed light.\n"
  title: Summary Judgment
  year: 2009
- 
  author: William Tracy
  date: 2009-11-17
  day: 17
  month: 11
  text: "The royal palace was mostly quiet. It was late afternoon, and the heat from the desert sun drove all but a few guards to seek shade. Even construction on Pharaoh’s great pyramid on the far side of the Nile had halted for the day.\n\nA woman, face twisted in anger, strode purposefully toward one of the palace’s grand entrances. The guards, armed with spears and swords, stepped forward to intercept her. She extended her arm, and a sword with a blade of violet flame materialized in her hand. With inhuman speed, she dispatched the guardsmen and entered the palace.\n\nShe hiked briskly to the royal chambers, and threw open the doors. There the mighty Pharaoh, a god on earth, lounged on a couch next to His favorite wife. He started in surprise and horror, and His great crown tumbled to the floor.\n\nConsumed with fury, the woman beheaded Pharaoh’s wife with a single stroke of her fiery weapon.\n\n“All this time, you had another wife here?” she yelled. “How could you do this?”\n\nFor a moment Pharaoh sat, dumbstruck. Then He frantically tried to gesture to someone behind the intruder.\n\nShe swung around, and saw two naked children. “You had kids?!”\n\nWith two strokes, she killed and mutilated one of the children. The other turned and fled rapidly; the woman then threw her sword like a javelin, impaling the boy.\n\n“That is it!” she screamed. “I have had it with you! You can stay in your virtual reality and rot for all I care! I am leaving you!” she flickered and disappeared.\n\nPharaoh glanced around wide-eyed. The royal entourage stood motionless, petrified. For several moments the god-king tried to regain His composure, then gave up. He terminated the simulation.\n\nAfter all, Pharaoh can’t allow His people to see Him cry.\n"
  title: The Cheating God
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Q.B.Fox
  date: 2009-11-18
  day: 18
  month: 11
  text: "Peter Stovold had hoped to be the first person to solo circumnavigate the sun in his [Manchester Evening News sponsored] Solar Flare 2.\n\nThe timing had to be perfect; repeated Earth orbits before shooting off on a flawlessly planned course that used the planetary bodies and floating space hardware to help accelerate SF2 and, later, act as brake; finally completing one and bit revolutions, coming to rest on the moving target of the Earth.\n\nBut something went wrong on the homeward leg, as his elliptical path passed near locus of Venus’ orbit. The first signs were an unexpected change in heading; then, almost imperceptible at first, but soon decreasing rapidly, his velocity began to fall below the plan.\n\nStovold was baffled when he checked his computer. He was on the edge of Venus’ L5: the gravity hole that followed in the wake of the morning star. There should be no forces, at all, acting on the elongated bubble-shape of SF2.\n\nThe computer said something very large was tugging at them aft and slightly to port. But it was nothing he could detect and the computer model constantly changed its mind about the size and position of the body that must be causing it.\n\nSolar Flare 2 had almost come to a halt when the cloud of particles, into which Stovold was being inevitably drawn, became sufficiently dense for him to notice them through the forward viewport. It was then that he realised that there was no massive object; no gravitation forces acting on SF2. Some other sort of force entirely was grabbing at his vessel from this quicksand of stranded, ancient particles; a trap set for unwary travellers since the formation of the solar system.\n\nHe had only half formed his next thought when the SF2 came to a sudden and complete stop, throwing him hard against bulkhead, with sufficient force to break a leg and a wrist, shatter his pelvis and crack six ribs.\n\n–\n\n“Our superstructure is made entirely of a special polymer, comrade.” Josif Samoilenko waved his arms effusively.\n\n“We’re less than 1% metal, my friend,” his Ukrainian drawl like beet molasses.\n\n“We are invisible to the cloud, like the ceramic Glock of spaceships,” he concluded, putting two fingers to his temple, pulling an imaginary trigger and slumping in his chair.\n\n“There never really was a….” Ian Bennet began.\n\n“But the timing has to be perfect, comrade,” Samoilenko rejoined, leaping Lazarus-like from his seat. “We have to fire the grabber,” he gestured with a claw-like hand on an outstretched arm, “at just the right moment. Once we connect to the Solar Flare all the forces change, our course changes….” He waggled his eyebrows knowingly.\n\n“I’m the astro-engineer,” Bennet said patiently, “I understand all this, but I’m not sure you….”\n\n“The timing has to be perfect,” Samoilenko continued unconcerned, “and that is why….” He paused for effect, removing his pseudo-communist, red-starred beret with a flourish, “…that is why we let the computer do it. No?”\n\n“Timing,” the Ukrainian mused. “All the planets have to be in exactly the right place.”\n\n“Strictly speaking you only need….” Bennet attempted.\n\n“It is why we have waited for 12 years, no?” Josif interrupted, “we could have come earlier, but the timing was not perfect; it would not have been, as you say in London, economically viable.”\n\nAnd then the computer triggered the recovery systems; cables shot out into the particle cloud towards the Solar Flare 2. Inside the desiccated body of Peter Stovold waited patiently to make his journey home, waited for his hero’s welcome, waited for the timing to be perfect.\n"
  title: The Timing has to be Perfect
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2009-11-19
  day: 19
  month: 11
  text: "Senator Reginald Wadsworth lay in his hospital bed; his biphasic artificial respirator hissed rhythmically as it expanded and contracted every six seconds.  Dozens of electrical biosensors monitored his vital signs, while a miniature tubular highway of transparent hoses pumped fluids into, and out of, his body.  Doctor Clive Colin stood next to the bed and studied the latest medical report.  “Senator,” he said solemnly, “modern medicine cannot keep your body alive much longer.  You need to make a decision concerning the memory transfer procedure that we discussed last week.  Tomorrow, the state of Texas plans to execute Gilberto Escobar.  He’s the drug kingpin that killed six DEA agents during a raid in ‘56.  I’ve been in contact with him since he lost his last clemency hearing.  He says that if you agree to give his family ten million dollars, he’ll give you his body.  The procedure is called a cerebral cortex transfer.  We use a high frequency neuroreprogrammer to overwrite his frontal and temporal lobes with synaptic data that we record from your brain.  I know that’s a little oversimplified, but the bottom line is that we’ll erase his brain and imprint your memories.  In essence, we replace your old dying body with a young healthy one.  Senator, you are a very influential man.  Say the word, and I’ll notify the Justice Department.  We can make this happen.”  Wadsworth closed his eyes and nodded his head once.\n\nThe following day, Wadsworth and Escobar lay side-by-side in the “operating” room.  Wadsworth’s skull was capped with thousands of Electrocorticographic receivers.  Escobar’s head was surrounded by a large bank of Electrocorticographic imprinters.  The procedure took eight hours, and while in recovery, the body known as Wadsworth died.  When Escobar regained consciousness, he smiled.  “Doctor Colin,” he whispered, “It worked!  And there’s no pain.  I can breathe on my own.  I can move my arms.  This is fantastic.  Thank you, thank you.”  He openly cried.\n\nAfter an extensive interview/interrogation by the District Attorney’s office, it was reluctantly determined that with the exception of a few minor inconsistencies, the knowledge and mental attributes that had been in Wadsworth brain were now in Escobar’s brain, and everything that was Escobar was gone.  After the attorneys completed all the necessary paperwork, the new Wadsworth walked out of the hospital to a waiting hoverlimo.\n\nA month later, Senator Wadsworth strutted into Doctor Colin’s office.  He plopped down into one of the large leather chairs that faced the doctor’s desk.   “Well, my friend, I as agreed, I deposited twenty million dollars into your offshore account.  I never thought that we could pull it off.  The detailed information that you provided me concerning Wadsworth’s personal background was invaluable.  We fooled them all.”  Escobar stood up and walked toward the door.\n\n“Are you going back to Colombia, Escobar?” asked Colin.\n\n“No, Clive.  Not right away.  I think I’ll stay in the US Senate for a while, and make an honest living.”  He chuckled as he strutted out of the office.\n"
  title: Wealth Trumps Death Every Time
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Courtney Raines
  date: 2009-11-20
  day: 20
  month: 11
  text: "As I watched myself falling down the hill, I remembered that fairy tale from physics class; the one about the cat in the box.\n\nI had been walking home through the wilderness that separated my cul-de-sac from the grocery store, it was a walk I had taken hundreds of times over the past five years, when I tripped. The pack of groceries on my back had nearly slipped off my right shoulder, and I shuffled mid-step to adjust it. That’s when it happened; the quantum flash.\n\nA ‘quantum flash’ is what the ubiquitous ‘they’ call it when you experience a moment of your life from another quantum reality before returning to your own. Mine happened in that instant between when I knew my foot was coming down wrong, and when it actually hit the ground.\n\nI stood there for a millisecond frozen in time, watching as another me somewhere didn’t manage to regain her balance. I watched as the other me’s foot came down and twisted on a root. I heard the crack of bones. I felt the snap in my shin. I watched as the other me fell backwards towards the ravine, and wondered for the millionth time why the path was so close to it.\n\nIt was me, and it wasn’t. I felt it, and I watched it; both inside and outside. It was still me. The soft, moldy puff of dirt when I crashed backwards. The citrus thumps as my groceries began to tumble from my pack. The uncomfortable stab of cold plastic wrapped in polyester as I hit the milk jug before the inevitable flip.\n\nThe inevitable slow motion flip; my back arching, my pack sliding further down my arm, the milk, the bag of oatmeal, the kiwis and apples plopping to the ground, my feet creating the circle I could never draw. I felt my neck bending but not, quite, snapping. It radiated pain and there were spots before my eyes. As my body came around an almost elegant 360 degrees I saw, from both above and to the right, the pile of grapefruit and lemons that had first fallen from my pack.\n\nThen my knees hit the ground, and I began to slide downwards.  My pack was gone, what little cushioning it might have offered rendered nonexistent. Dirt and leaves began push their way up my shorts; I felt the leaves break and crinkle against my thighs. I slid in a slow motion second until first my feet, then my stomach, and finally my head bucked over a knobbled rock, smashing in a rhythmic serpentine motion. I barely had time to register the explosion that was my shattering kneecap, or the loss of breath following a rock in the gut, when the hard surface thrust my chin briefly upwards so it could better collide with my forehead.\n\nPain circled my head, blood trickled coppery in my mouth, and darkness called until the clock ticked into the next millisecond and my foot came down awkwardly on the dirt.\n\nWith a little hop, I regained my balance. I shifted my pack so that it was squarely on both shoulders, and muttered a prayer to the God of physics that I had been born to this quantum reality.\n"
  title: In This Reality
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Al Vazquez
  date: 2009-11-21
  day: 21
  month: 11
  text: "The retro-rockets jolted the ship as it began its decent into the thin, cold atmosphere.  Excitement welled-up inside his belly.  He felt a slight shaking in his leg, but his hand was steady on the controls.  He was known for that; cool as a cucumber when it really mattered, and it never mattered more than now.  He briefly recalled his first landing at the airport near his hometown. It seemed like yesterday.  He remembered his leg shaking then too as he pressed against the rudder pedals.\n\nHe peered out of the window.  The trajectory on his heads-up display was exactly like the simulations but the vividness of color and texture; seeing the planet below with human eyes, could never be duplicated by any sensor.  He loved his job, he had always been lucky that way.  He looked over toward his partner thankful she was there; someone to share the experience.\n\nThe ship was the peak of technological advancement; it had to be.  They needed it for almost two years; it was their home; their lifeboat.  They would leave a large part of it behind to continue the work in automation that they would begin shortly.  Skilled colleagues, friends all, would follow their path and continue the endeavor. But they were the first ones. That weight rested on their shoulders, on his shoulders; he was after all landing the craft.\n\nBack on earth everyone was watching on television video feeds from orbiting satellites.  This, he knew, was going to change things, colonization; Terra-forming under geodesic domes …a permanent colony, one small step.  But now his job demanded his full attention.  Knowing this she declares, “Whatever you do, don’t f:)k this up”.  They both laughed out loud.  She never cussed; he thought to himself. She must be nervous.\n\nThe violent buffeting came and went just like it was supposed to; the product of atmospheric breaking – then parachutes. And finally what every pilot lives for, the switch to manual control. A little more precious energy, crab a little to the left to avoid some rocks, near the trench, but not too close, touchdown! “Piece of cake”, he declares back to his singular audience.  They laugh aloud again, relieved.\n\nHe calls the boss – “Houston, Argonom Base here, the Eagle has landed.”  About seven minutes would pass before the words crackled through the speakers at Mission Control. The place would erupt in the traditional cheers, handshakes, and smiles.  On Mars their silence was interrupted by the whir of solar cells beginning to deploy.\n\nThey gathered those things needed for their first excursion – the inflatable dome and anchors, the atmospheric processing units, the machinery that would dip into the trench ice and provide them with life giving water, hydrogen, and oxygen.  Three months didn’t seem enough time for all the work they needed to accomplish.\n\nWhen everything was ready they made their way to the exit hatch and opened it, as far as the eye could see – magnificent desolation.\n"
  title: Eagle 2
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Cesium Artichoke
  date: 2009-11-22
  day: 22
  month: 11
  text: "“Hey, Tom, uh… you got a minute?” Robin ambushed him as he came out of his office. He had a meeting with the Secretary of Energy about space-based power, but she was visibly nervous and fidgeting, which set off alarm bells.\n\n“Sure, what’s up?”\n\n“Better get your computer, it’s already downloading.” She gestured to his office door.\n\nHe retrieved the tablet and continued down the hall. “Come on, walk with me. So what’s so important?”\n\nRobin hurried to keep up with his long strides. “Well, we… we decoded the Procyon signal.” Tom stopped in his tracks.\n\n“…and?”\n\nShe pointed to his tablet. ‘Download Complete’, it read, and the summary from the xenolinguists flashed onto the screen.\n\nAs he perused the report, she studied him. Thomas DiMattia, the man who saved NASA. He’d reached out to commercial space ventures and revived the nation’s interest and faith in NASA by landing a man on Mars. He’d even managed to keep the cosmologists happy. If this was what everyone feared it was, she couldn’t think of a better man to lead.\n\n“Jesus,” muttered Tom.\n\n“Yeah.”\n\nHe slumped into a nearby chair, glancing up at her. “Could this be a joke?”\n\n“A joke? Not on our part; it’s definitely extrasolar. Otherwise, they have a weird sense of humor, ’cause Keck says there’s something there, exactly where they said.”\n\n‘The Alliance or any representative or member thereof is not responsible for economic, biological, informational, or other damages resulting directly or indirectly from said Project. Continued residence in the aforementioned Stellar System will signify your acceptance of these terms.’ So the message had read, and if the team at the Keck observatory knew anything about anything, the giant fleet from Sirius would arrive in about a decade for their little Project with Earth’s sun.\n\n“Jesus,” Tom repeated. He took a breath, and a slight resolve seemed to grow in his voice. “You’d better call some lawyers. We’ve got a hell of a loophole to find.”\n"
  title: EULA
  year: 2009
- 
  author: James Marshall
  date: 2009-11-23
  day: 23
  month: 11
  text: "Captain Will Kano of the Aries was sitting on an air-chair watching baseball with the sound muted. The latest round of memos from mission control, or the office as they called it, lay spread out on the floor beside him, along with a Rubik’s Cube and an empty Juice-Sack. He sighed.\n\n“I’ve got to get my shit together, Alan.”\n\n“Your shit is together, Captain”. Alan was the ship’s interface, and he appeared on a dedicated LCD above the television. He was represented as two dots for eyes and a line for a mouth on a yellow background. He looked like a Lego man, before they developed frowns and stubble. His voice was deep and breathless. Everyone liked Alan.\n\n“I’ll talk to Sarah tonight. Put an end to it.”\n\n“There’s no rush. Don’t do anything you don’t want to do.”\n\n“I’m being stupid. I’m married.”\n\n“You’ve never been stupid in your life, Captain. It’s a long, boring trip, you know that. Give yourself a break. Worry about Tanaka.”\n\nThis made Will laugh. Tanaka was nuts.\n\n“I’ve got another list here if you’re interested,” said Alan. “This one’s from the Country Women’s Association of Australia.”\n\n“Go on then, said Will. He shifted in his chair and put his hands up behind his head.\n\n“’Another small step for man, another giant leap-‘“\n\n“A man. ‘One small step for a man.’ That’s what he said. Next.”\n\n“’Life goes on.’”\n\n“Like it. But no.”\n\n“’A new world, a new promise.’”\n\n“Stock.”\n\nAlan went through the list, which did not contain anything remotely inspiring or memorable.\n\n“Shall I send them a thank you mail?” asked Alan.\n\n“Please.”\n\n“I’m sure we’ll come up with something when the time comes, captain.”\n\nWill leaned across and picked up the Rubik’s Cube. He had all of the blue and almost all of the yellow, but he couldn’t proceed without losing what he already had. When he was a child he would give the cube to his mother before he went to bed, and there it would be in the morning, sitting on the kitchen bench like new. One night when he couldn’t sleep he walked into his mother’s room and saw the cube spread out in bits across her bed. She had fallen asleep, still holding the screwdriver she had used to pry it apart.\n\n“How about something simple?” said Will, trying to move a corner piece around without screwing up the whole thing. “I’m going have so much on my plate when we land that I don’t think I’ll be able to remember a long, rambling speech. What about something like… ‘Here we are’?”\n\n“Red Mars.”\n\n“What?”\n\n“That’s what the man who first landed on Mars said in the book Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. The colonists went to Mars in a ship called the Aries too, by the way.”\n\n“Really? Damn. Ok, how about… um… on behalf of all people on Earth, we come to Mars… in the spirit of human endeavor and-“\n\n“Very similar to Mars Crossing by Geoffrey Landis, I’m afraid.”\n\nWill sighed. “I give up. We need a scriptwriter, not a pilot.”\n\n“What we need is a copyright lawyer,” said Alan.\n\nWill chuckled. He dropped the Rubik’s cube in his lap. He yawned.\n\n“You know,” said Alan, “Coca-Cola have offered you a billion dollars to say ‘Coca-Cola.’\n\nWill sat up. “Have they really?”\n"
  title: First Words
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Ian Rennie
  date: 2009-11-24
  day: 24
  month: 11
  text: "Matron moved almost silently from ward to ward.  The faint silken brush of her passing made the nurses look up, meeting her eyes as she passed, exchanging glanced messages that said as much as conversations.  The few awake patients did not look.  Most of them stared at the ceiling, or listened to music quietly, or slept, or cried.\n\nThis an early ward, where the patients were coaxed from catatonia into some basic level of function.  The sisters here were soothing more than encouraging, only gently touching the sharp edges of broken minds.  Once the patients began to recover, they were brought to day wards where they would recuperate, rehabilitate, take faltrering steps towards health.  They spent their days in rooms where french windows opened onto the seaside, where the crash of waves and bracing sea air brought them relaxation and health.\n\nHer rounds completed, Matron moved further into the hospital.  She stopped outside an unregarded wooden door, checked that nobody was around, and unlocked it.  As the door opened, soft sounds of pain could be heard.  This was the relapse room, not spoken of beyond its wooden door.\n\n“How is everyone today?” she said in a hushed voice to the sister who sat at the ward desk.  Beyond her, men lay in beds, scratching at imaginary bugs, screaming at invisible enemies.\n\n“Quiet so far” the sister said: she was blonde, with beautiful but absolutely unsexual features; as alluring as a marble statue, and as cold.\n\n“I don’t see Mr Morningside.  Did he have another episode?”\n\n“I’m afraid so.  Metal men this time.”\n\n“I’ll go and talk to him.”\n\nHalfway down the room, there was a side-ward, separated from the main room by a heavy door.  Matron opened this, remembering to bolt it behind her.  Alone in the room there was one man in one bed.  He was clad in blue and white striped pajamas like the others, but where they looked like patients, he looked like someone in a costume, unused even to his skin.\n\n“I know what you are,” he said as she entered\n\n“Hello, Mr Morningside, and what do you imagine me to be today?”\n\n“You’re a ghost.  A ghost of electricity.  You’re a piece of mathematics that lives in my head.”\n\n“That’s nice.  Did you take your pills?”\n\n“They’re poison.  You’re trying to poison me and make me forget.  I’m not in my body any more.  I’m not even in my mind.  It burned away, it all burned.”\n\n“Mr Morningside, if you don’t take your pills, we will have to restrain you again.”\n\nHe flinched, visibly.  When she held the pills out to him, shied away, but then opened his mouth with a display of childish reluctance.  He dry-swallowed the pills, not waiting for the proffered glass of water.  He was crying as they began to take effect, dragging him into a muttering sleep.\n\nMatron was subdued as she left the ward.  It disturbed her when a relapsing patient stumbled towards the truth.  He wasn’t in his body any more, wouldn’t be there until his mind was healed enough to accept the trauma of the war’s memories.  The new bodies were regrown, but the minds just weren’t ready for them yet.  Let them heal here, where they were safe, where they had matron and her beautiful, identical sisters to look after them.\n\nFrom the day ward she heard a few patients gather together for a morning sing-song.\n\n“Oh I do like to be beside the seaside…”\n"
  title: Tiddly-om-pom-pom
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Amanda Baker
  date: 2009-11-25
  day: 25
  month: 11
  text: "Years ago, Christina stayed over at Emily’s house, and found herself belting out this awful pop song in the shower. Some boy band kind of thing. She didn’t remember the song; boy bands hadn’t been popular since the nineties, and she’d be hard pressed to name the band and tune, or hard pressed to admit she still had a fondness for nineties pop, even back then. To be fair, she didn’t even realize she was singing at first, and she silenced herself in embarrassed horror as soon as she did, stopping the silly “love you baby” lyrics from leaving her mouth as she rinsed the bubbly foam out of her hair. Her singing voice was pretty awful.\n\nOf course her girlfriend heard her. Emily being Emily, she didn’t give Christina a hard time about it, but still, Christina knew Emily knew, and she felt ashamed. She had been caught doing something incredibly stupid.\n\nChristina doesn’t think she remembered it until last Saturday—after all, she’s got better taste in music now, and she hasn’t talked to Emily since the breakup. Christina’s a loud sort of person, and she’s got a million better memories with Emily if she wants to feel nostalgic, and a dozen sillier memories that she can look back on if she wants to laugh at herself. She’s been quieter since Saturday, though. Everyone’s been quieter. When Christina turns on the news, crime is down. Of course crime is down. Even the criminals are stunned.\n\nEveryone’s busy watching the sky, too. The talking heads on TV told them it wasn’t like that, the messages came from light years away, and there’s nothing to worry about. They couldn’t be here yet.\n\nPeace negotiations have started. Peace negotiations, and it’s only been less than a week. It’s funny, almost. Back when the war started, Christina went out to city hall every weekend with her protest sign. She wrote letters, signed petitions, blogged rant after rant just to get people to care… pretty much everything she could do, and it took this to get peace negotiations to start? The first day, she thought this was a hoax. Probably everyone did. It’s something out of science fiction, which she used to actually like, before it was all over the news that extraterrestrials had made contact. It was better back when it wasn’t real.\n\nIt’s terrifying now. It’s like a hidden camera on the wall, like being the teenager who thought she could get away with everything, and then suddenly you’re faced with evidence that your mother knows every detail of what went on at Hannah’s birthday party. No, that she might know. No, that “Mom” exists. Christina frames it in another concept, thinks about it differently, but really… Do they know about Hiroshima? Do they know about the holocaust, or slavery, or the way humans have fought each other tooth and nail over absolutely everything ever since they’ve had the bad luck to evolve from the chimpanzees?\n\nAnd they still want to talk to us. Christina hopes that maybe they don’t know us as well as they could, that we’ve got another chance to make an impression if we just behave ourselves from now on. Christina herself has gone to work on time, stopped grimacing so much, called her father back before he called her again to ask why she hadn’t called. And it’s not just her—it’s everyone. Everyone’s trying to shape up, to be better for whoever’s watching.\n\nAs Christina sees it, it’s as if humanity itself has been caught in the galactic shower, singing bad love songs off-key.\n"
  title: Caught
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Ilan Herman
  date: 2009-11-26
  day: 26
  month: 11
  text: "Koy, the sky-blue alien, explained to Jeff that life on earth was really an experiment conducted by him and his associates, an anthropological study of how life evolves from the molecular to the bird, or fish, or tiger, or man. “We planted the seeds of life on earth. We did the same with other planets with various environments and used different seeds. On H12, we have an intelligent race of birds. They have language and governance much better than yours, perhaps because they use their wings instead of cars, though they have those too. We have not done well with creating life on Earth.”\n\nJeff listened to Koy’s explanation and then said, “No worries. We’re like germs in a Petri dish. We’re genetically engineered. I can dig that. How many other humans beside me know about your experiment?”\n\n“Only four others, a woman in China, and one in Russia, a man in Peru, and another in Scotland. The rest of humanity is not ready.” Then Koy’s voice choked with cosmic tears. “We tried so hard to make a good world for you. Our best minds labored tirelessly to help humanity succeed. We failed and we are sorry. Man turned out to be toxic to the planet.”\n\nJeff scratched his balding scalp. The alien sounded like a frustrated five year old whose tree house had collapsed. “Why are you so upset? We’re all still an extension of God, with you as a facilitator. It’s all good.”\n\n“I am happy to hear you say that,” Koy said, “for what you say is true. We are all one.”\n\n“Besides,” said Jeff. “You could be someone else’s experiment.”\n\nThe alien’s sky-blue skin dimmed slightly. “I am not sure what you mean.”\n\nJeff held out his palms. “Duh. Like us humans are your experiment, though only five of us know that, maybe your race is also a Petri dish set up by another race.”\n\n“But I have revealed myself to you,” Koy said, a cheer in his voice. “If what you say is true, why have I not met the race that created me?”\n\nJeff rolled his eyes. “Because you’re not one of the five of your race to know. Like your secret is safe with me, so is the secret safe in the hearts of a few of your people, or race, or blue blobs.”\n\nKoy’s shimmering ripples turned pinkish-green. He shrunk to about half the size of when he’d first appeared. He hovered only two inches off the carpet.\n\n“That is a silly theory,” he finally said.\n\nJeff raised his arms in surrender. “If you say so. You’re probably right. After all, you made me, so you know better.”\n\nKoy said nothing. Then he vanished.\n\n“Nothing new under the sun,” Jeff said and hoisted himself off the couch and walked to the fridge for a glass of milk. Pouring the milk into the glass, he chuckled and said, “And that’s not a bad thing.”\n"
  title: If You Say So
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2009-11-27
  day: 27
  month: 11
  text: "Harry nudged the body in the lobby with the toe of his boot, weapon unwaveringly pointed towards the head. Satisfied he was dead, Harry retrieved his knife and the man’s keys, turned and carefully locked the front doors.\n\nThe entrance secured, he stepped over the body, moved cautiously around the reception desk and slipped quiety through the doors deeper into the clinic.\n\nFrom a distance, Harry could hear voices in a language he couldn’t make out.\n\nEmpty gurneys lined the hall, hospital-blue sheets cast grey in the dim after-hours lighting. At the first open door he paused, holding his gun down against his leg, two handed and ready, he peered around the doorway into the room. Empty. In the corner an LCD panel displayed the x-rays of the day’s last patient. Trans-tibial amputation. Left leg.\n\nContinuing down the hall, the next doorway was closed off, light spilling into the passage through a plate sized portal at eye level. Harry stepped away from the door and allowed his eyes to adjust as he surveyed the room within. There was one doctor with his back to the door and two additional figures, gowned and masked passing instruments in response to barked instructions.\n\nHarry wet his lips, then pushed open the door with his shoulder, bringing his gun to bear as he rotated into the room.\n\nTwo sets of eyes widened, then disappeared from view behind the table as his SIG Mauser barked twice, dropping the nurses where they stood.\n\nThe third figure spun about, scalpel pinched between thumb and forefinger, ready to cut.\n\n“What are you doing? You can’t discharge a weapon in here, you’ll contaminate the merchandise.” The doctor’s English was crisp and matter of fact.\n\nOn the table behind him, Harry could make out part of a familiar phrase inked down the left arm the surgeon had been preparing to sever at the shoulder. “Fidelis”.\n\n“You’ve made a bit of a mistake, Herr Doctor.” Harry moved away from the door, weapon leveled and steady. “That body you farmed this evening isn’t what you think.”\n\nThe doctor raised his hands slightly, the scalpel catching and reflecting the surgical lights overhead.\n\n“Nothing more than some drunk soldier.” On the table Harry could see the body was covered in carefully drawn lines, a roadmap from which he was to be carved up like a side of beef. “Drunks are worthless alive, and this one less so if not promptly packaged. He’s losing value while you’re wasting my time. Get the hell out of my operating room, you’ve no idea who you’re messing with.”\n\nHarry moved until he could see the supine man’s face, and the blossomed flesh of a bullet wound in the middle of his forehead.\n\n“No, not ‘just a drunk soldier’. My drunk soldier, and my drunk soldier brought me here to see you.” Harry addressed the body on the table.\n\n“Corporal, relieve the good doctor of his faculties.”\n\nThe doctor turned back to the table to find himself face to face with his naked cadaver, now sitting upright and eyeing him with a wolfish grin.\n\nWith lightening speed, the doctor lashed out with the scalpel, drawing it from the Corporal’s right shoulder along the line of his collarbone then upward to his throat. Where the skin peeled back, black carbon fibre mesh showed through from beneath flesh veneer. In a single motion, the Corporal grabbed the doctor by the throat, and standing, lifted him from the ground, the scalpel clattering to the floor.\n\n“I’m afraid his parts won’t be much use to you.” Harry holstered his weapon and began rolling up his sleeves. “Your bits, however, are quite useful, and there are a few of our boys that you can rest assured will put them to good use.”\n"
  title: Repurpose
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Erin Searles
  date: 2009-11-28
  day: 28
  month: 11
  text: "“Cats,”said Big Fat Dave. “It was cats that started it in this reality.”\n\nIn his channel’s feed I saw Archibald, Big Fat Dave’s big fat cat, stretch as if in agreement.\n\nHe continued: “You know how cats will watch something or someone crossing a room when you can see there’s no one there. That ‘s them watching people on alternate reality channels. That’s how we figured out how to do it. Scientists did studies on cats’ brains.”\n\n“I doubt it.” Pink Dave scoffed. Pink Dave hadn’t chosen his own nickname. The day we all first met Pink Dave had been wearing a pink shirt and tie. He didn’t like it, but nicknames stick.\n\nRecently things hadn’t been going so well for Pink Dave. We hadn’t seen him in a shirt and tie for a while. He’d stopped shaving for so long that he was a better candidate for Bearded Dave than I was. Maybe he could be called Bearded Dave when I was gone.\n\n“It was those scientists at CERN, right?” He looked to me and Not Dave for agreement. “You Daves have CERN in your worlds, don’t you? Back in the noughties they build a machine they thought might end the world, but instead they discovered how to view the alternate realities.”\n\nI wasn’t keen to gang up on Big Fat Dave, who worshipped his cat slightly more than was healthy. I answered as diplomatically as I could.\n\n“Yeah, we have a CERN here and they did build the LHC, but I don’t remember anything coming of it. I think the tech came from the American military on my channel.”\n\nNot Dave shrugged. “It’s probably different for all the channels, that’s the point of alternate realities, right?”\n\nNot Dave’s name was actually Andrew, we didn’t know why. Like the rest of us he was the 32 year old son of Jack and Nicola Upton, but in his reality they had called him Andrew, not Dave. It was strange for him to realise after a lifetime of being an Andrew that he was, according to probability, a Dave. He elected to be known as Not Dave, despite not needing the differentiating nickname.\n\nPink Dave was about to start arguing again. I headed him off:\n\n“Guys. Do we want to spend my last night retreading the same old arguments?”\n\n“Hell no,” said Not Dave. “ Let’s raise a glass to Bearded Dave.”\n\nThey all lifted a can, in strange unison in their respective corners of my screen. Not Dave and Pink Dave had beers; Big Fat Dave was drinking Coke.\n\n“Bearded Dave,” they chorused.\n\nI picked up my own drink to toast them back.\n\n“Dave, Dave, Andrew it’s been a pleasure knowing you all. I wish we could carry on being friends… I’ll always remember you.”\n\nWe all lapsed into silence. It was close to midnight, the time when my channel would block all other realities from viewing us, and, as the inter-reality laws decreed, be blocked in return –  who wants someone watching you when you can’t watch them back. Despite international outrage my reality’s committee governing reality channels hadn’t backed down. People had been given a month to say goodbye to friends on other channels while the final appeal went through. It had failed and at midnight the switch would be thrown.\n\n“It sucks, man.” said Big Fat Dave.\n\nMore silence. One minute to midnight.\n\n“Bye Daves.”\n\n“Bye Dave.”\n\n“Bye mate.”\n\n“See you Dave.”\n\nBlack screens. Channel 1353 had blocked. I sat back in my chair – an isolated Dave in an isolated world.\n"
  title: Dave
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Jeff McGaha
  date: 2009-11-29
  day: 29
  month: 11
  text: "A red-haired man walks directly up to the customer service counter. He carries in his right hand a metal cage with a tiny brown hamster inside. Reaching the counter, he drops the cage thoughtlessly, jostling the small creature inside.\n\n“Scuse me,” He says to a man in a royal blue short-sleeved collared shirt.\n\n“Yes sir, how may I help you?”\n\n“I’m havin’ some problems with Neo here. I thank he’s broke.”\n\n“Ohh, that is unfortunate. What is exactly is the problem?”\n\n“He got out de other day and attacked me cat.”\n\n“Ohh, that is too bad. Is your cat okay?”\n\n“Naw, he’s dead.”\n\n“Ohh, my.”\n\n“Yeah, hampsters ain’t suppose to attack cats. Suppose to be de other way round.”\n\n“Ohh, yes. Most definitely. I am sorry to hear about your cat.”\n\n“It’s okay. Been meanin’ to get a fake one anyways. I ain’t got de time to keep takin’ care of a real one anymore.”\n\n“I completely understand, sir. I have two artificial dogs myself. I do not know why anyone would want a real animal anymore.”\n\n“Dogs, eh? Not much fer dogs. I’m more of a cat person.”\n\nThe man in the royal blue shirt nods and reaches into the cage and grabs the hamster. The hamster growls at him.\n\n“That is not right. Hamsters definitely do not growl. I definitely know what the problem is then.”\n\n“So, you’ll be able to fix ‘em?”\n\n“I believe so.”\n\nThe man in the royal blue shirt holds the hamster in his left hand and pinches the hamster’s head with his right thumb and index finger. The hamster becomes rigid and the top of his skull pops open, exposing a tiny socket. The man in the royal blue shirt pulls a small hand held device out from under the counter. There is a short cable wrapped tightly around the device. He unwinds it and plugs the end of the cable into the jack embedded in the hamster’s skull. He taps on the hand held device for a few seconds.\n\n“Yes. It appears that the hamster has inadvertently been given canine programming rather than rodent programming. That’s an easy fix.”\n\nHe taps a few more times on the hand held device. The hamster goes limp.\n\n“Okay, everything is fine. I have just flashed him with rodent programming. He will be up and acting normal in about 10 minutes.”\n\n“Thank gawd. My kids woulda been real upset if anything happened to Neo.”\n\n“Yes, sir. Is there anything else I can help you with?”\n\n“Yeah, ya got any calico’s in stock?”\n"
  title: Neo the Hampster
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2009-11-30
  day: 30
  month: 11
  text: "After the Great Energy Wars of the twenty third century, human civilization was almost non-existent.  The human global population had been reduced from nine billion to a few hundred thousand.  The original global superpowers, China, India, and the USA had been obliterated.  Radioactive fallout made much of the Earth’s land surface unusable.  Most of the survivors were clustered into small nomadic tribes that were widely dispersed in areas that contained reasonably fertile soil and where there were some animals to hunt.  The birth rate was low, and the mortality rate was high.  If you were lucky enough to reach forty, you were probably the oldest person within a thousand miles.  Life was very hard, and everyday was a struggle.  However, all that was all before the Leonians arrived.\n\nThe Leonians were a humanoid race from a planet orbiting a star called Regulus.  They were a little smaller than humans, had greenish skin, and no hair.  They had four eyes; two in the front, and two in the back.  That was kind of creepy, but they were nice folk, nevertheless.  They arrived with a fleet of 1000 spaceships.  They claimed that they had been monitoring Earth for several years and wanted to provide assistance.  They said it was what their species was driven to do; help others that were less fortunate.  Their offer seemed sincere, and quite generous.  I don’t know if the rest of the world agreed to accept their help, but the hundred of us living near Johannesburg did.\n\nThey got to work right away.  They began neutralizing the radioactive areas and purifying our water supply.  We helped where we could, but their robots did most of the real labor.  They even built us a community center on the top of a small hill.  We used the building for group meals, town meetings, training, and minor medical treatment.  During the weekly town meetings, the Leonian captain would regale us with fascinating stories of exploration and adventure.  We’d listen for hours on end.  Life was good.\n\nEventually, we had ample farm lands, plenty of clean water, a small hospital manned by robots, and even a one room schoolhouse.  Then one day, the Leonian captain informed us that he needed to move his ship to another location, to help other humans who were still struggling to stay alive.  He said that he’d stop back now and then to check up on us, and to swap out the three crew members that had volunteered to stay with the settlement.  We gave them a big going away party, thanked them at least a thousand times, and wished them luck at their next stop.\n\nEverything seemed to be going smoothly until about a year later.  We started noticing involuntary changes in our vocabulary.  Instead of saying “God bless you,” after someone sneezed, we said, “Gluon nigh vit.”  We started uttering other unknown words, like muon, lepton, and hadron.  The children made strange sculptures and bizarre drawings.  When we asked one of the resident Leonians if he understood what was happening, he was overjoyed. “Ah, this is wonderful news, my children.  You have finally begun your greatest journey.  I was hoping that the conversion would occur while I was still here with you.  The Holy Cosmic Egg must be thrilled that you have cast away your false gods and have come to worship in his glory.  Come, let us pray together.”\n"
  title: Mission Earth
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2009-12-01
  day: '01'
  month: 12
  text: "He never got along with adults after the war. Only the children. I remember him needing to angle himself just a little bit to fit his wide shoulders through our front door. He was all grunts and one-word answers.\n\nHe was married once but she left him after the war. She said that the humming his augmented body made at night made her feel like she was sleeping next to a refrigerator. Then she’d pause, glance at him and add, “In more ways than one.”\n\nHe was my older brother.  I was one year too young for conscription when the troubles started.  I remember him leaving.  That was the last day I saw him as a pure human.\n\nHe spent four years out there.  He had medals.  He’d been honorably discharged after the war.  I didn’t know him any more.  I no longer recognized him as my brother.\n\nHe’d show up here every Sunday for dinner.\n\nBoth his eyes were perfect circles, white plastic insets that could see in the dark and look through walls. They looked like child-safety outlet covers jammed into his eye sockets. Light blue tracery zigged and zagged back to his grey-haired temples and down each side of his neck.\n\nWe always gave him the cheap glasses and cutlery because of the lack of delicate motor control in his massive skin-sheathed hand-machines. When he walked, one foot clanked.\n\nWe’d serve him a turkey dinner or roast beef which he ate obligingly to fuel the biological components of himself but it was always disconcerting to see him finish his meal with a big glass of oil.\n\nAfter dinner, he’d mess up my child’s hair and do magic tricks. The decommissioned weaponry that the government took back left large hollow compartments in his back and one quarter of his chest. With clumsy sleight-of-hand, he could make objects ‘appear’ out of those compartments.\n\nHe could make miniature lightning bolts between his fingertips that would dim the lights and make his own hair stand on end like Einstein.\n\nIt made me shiver; thinking of how many of the enemy must have died screaming and blackened under those sparking mitts.\n\nMy theory was that the indirect and subtle world of adults was confusing to the changed cyborg soldier mind of my brother.  The only time I saw him smile was with my child.  His nephew.\n\nChildren were pure, straightforward and had no idea that he was frightening.\n\nWe probably would have tried to find a polite way of stopping him from coming over if these nights weren’t the highlight of our son’s week.\n\nI’m looking at the two of them now, laughing on the living room carpet while one of my brother’s hands runs around by itself. My son’s laugh sounds like a normal child’s laughter.\n\nMy brother’s laugh sounds like crushed tin cans being rubbed together at the bottom of a well.\n"
  title: Sunday Dinners
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Roi R. Czechvala
  date: 2009-12-02
  day: '02'
  month: 12
  text: "The massive ship hung motionless over the city, menacing in its silence. Below in the preternatural darkness the frightened population cowered in their homes, their offices, their automobiles. One thing was certain… death was imminent.\n\nNot a sound came from the ship as it slowly rotated above them. Had it not been for the fact that it was only slightly smaller than Rhode Island, it wouldn’t have been noticed at all.\n\nIt hung above the terrified metropolis like a restless turd, watching, plotting, seemingly readying itself to unleash a fiery Hell upon the peaceful citizens.\n\nAs the minutes flowed into hours, slowly, one by one and in small groups the terrified people emerged from their places of refuge and stared unblinking into the twilit sky. They regarded the craft with unabashed awe, almost with reverence, definitely with fear.\n\nHushed whispers began to emanate from this crush of humanity as they clung together trying to make sense of this singular event.\n\n“Where did it come from?”\n\n“What do they want?”\n\n“Do you think they’re friendly?”\n\n“I have to pee.”\n\nBut the strange craft ignored their inquiries, that is if they were heard at all.  It continued to hover patiently above the city as seemed to be its wont.\n\nSoon, under the command of the governor, the national guard arrived bristling with weaponry. Legions of tanks formed, and lines of artillery were aimed to the sky. The mightiest army the world had ever seen converged upon this spot below the object, but the ship didn’t seem to mind.\n\nCalls went out across the land and around the globe. Enemies of centuries put aside their differences and worked together as one. Cats and dogs walked side by side. Soon the military might of a unified Earth formed, prepared to do battle with this otherworldly foe.\n\nA famous general spoke to the masses. His voice carried on every television and radio.\n\n“Though we face our darkest hour, let it not be said that we went willingly into that cold dark night, for here we stand, here we fight.”\n\nWith weapons pointed for devastation and minds turned inward to faith, all of mankind waited, as if in mutual embrace.\n\nSuddenly the air was rent by a powerful sound, that shattered the windows, and caused the buildings to quake. It was a sound to make children shiver and grown men shake.\n\nAs quickly as it started, silence returned. Then a voice was heard from up in the air. It started out low, then started to grow. In unaccented English clearly was heard;\n\n“All right already, quit your bitching. One damn mistake and your crawling up my ass. Give it a rest woman. Damn it. Uh…hey… um excuse me? Um… the missus and I were on our way for a little outing in the Horse Head Nebula, and well…he he… and well, it  seems we have got ourselves turned around a bit…shut up woman I‘m asking… so if you could just point us in the right direction…”\n"
  title: The Quiegmans Take a Holiday
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Kevin Hosey
  date: 2009-12-03
  day: '03'
  month: 12
  text: "It was after him.\n\nCaptain Kurt Avenel hadn’t seen the alien creature himself, but the last radio transmission from his first officer gave him a brief, panicked description: two meters tall with a reptilian body, razor-sharp teeth, and jagged claws. Their deep space freighter, the Leonine, had recently passed through a dense cloud of meteorite fragments. Avenel speculated the alien was concealed on one of them and somehow made its way inside.\n\nThat’s when all hell broke loose.\n\nThe creature began methodically stalking the seven-person crew. After all efforts to trap or kill it failed, Avenel ordered everyone else to abandon ship.\n\nThen he became its intended prey.\n\nSweat prickling his face, he peered cautiously down the corridor leading to the last remaining escape pod. Flashlight leading the way, he stepped into it. It was shrouded in dense darkness. For one terrifying moment, he felt as if he had slipped outside the confines of the ship and was adrift in space.\n\nAnd then he heard it. A voice.\n\n“Ruuuuuuuun…”\n\nA voice…inside his head.\n\nBAM!\n\nSomething metallic smashed against the deck. Avenel jumped so violently, he lost his grip on the flashlight. The cylinder rolled on the deck, then bumped against a square piece of slatted metal. It was the cover to the ventilation shaft above him.\n\nThat meant the alien was in the corridor with him!\n\nAvenel cried out when the darkness seemed to solidify and slam him against the bulkhead. Lit in the halogen beam of his flashlight, he found himself peering into the open jaws of the alien monstrosity. It was a cavern of serrated teeth dripping with green saliva.\n\nEyes open so wide his lids threatened to rip loose, and heart pounding as if begging desperately to escape, Avenel watched as the creature’s mouth curled into a demonic smile. The alien’s face edged even closer until Avenel’s entire world consisted of nothing but its foul breath and piercing red eyes.\n\nAnd then—it spoke.\n\n“You’re…IT!”\n\nSuddenly, impressions of the creature’s thoughts flittered through Avenel’s mind. A child. It was a child. And it wanted to play.\n\nRun?\n\nThe word Avenel heard moments before. It was some sort of psychic emanation coming from the creature. It wasn’t stalking him. It was playing with him, just as it had been with his crew.\n\nSuddenly, Avenel dropped and hit the deck as the alien released him. Confused, he watched as the creature scurried away…giggling.\n\n“Come find me,” it called out in a thick, guttural voice. Then it was swallowed by the darkness.\n\nAvenel blinked. What was it talking about?\n\nThen he knew. Hide and seek. The thing was playing hide and seek.\n\nAnd now, apparently, Avenel was “it”.\n\nThe captain of the Leonine had seen many strange things during his years in space. But that was definitely the strangest. A huge, terrifying, yet harmless alien child, perhaps lost and lonely, had come on board simply searching for someone to play.\n\nWith that realization, Avenel’s fear and anxiety slipped away. No longer afraid for his safety, he sat wondering what his next move should be. The company he worked for had a standing order that any initial contact with sentient alien life should be pursued in the hopes it may lead to future profitable business ventures.\n\nOkay, so what now? How would he pursue relations with a childlike being?\n\nAfter a few moments of deliberation, he shrugged and stood up. Retrieving his fallen flashlight, Avenel stared in the direction the alien had vanished.\n\nThen he cleared his throat, counted to a hundred and called out, “Ready or not, here I come.”\n"
  title: IT!
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Iva Koevska
  date: 2009-12-04
  day: '04'
  month: 12
  text: "-Mommy, what does snow feel like?\n\nI’m in the kitchen taking care of the dishes after dinner. I turn around and there she is. My little daughter’s staring at some snowflake hologram. It’s as big as her head, a gorgeous illusion of perfect symmetry. One you will hardly ever find. Since it doesn’t rain or snow anymore.\n\n-Honey…\n\nI’m delivering this climate speech for the hundredth time, trying to explain to someone who knows only sun, bright blue sky and a daily temperature of 22?C what does wind or raindrops or snowflakes or dew feel like. I hate those climate history classes and I know that kids need to know. It’s just that… I haven’t felt the slightest change of weather for some 20 years now. And the last time I saw and felt snow was right before the Great Installment. Right before they put this great big computer controlled factory dome up there in the sky to take care of the weather, the global warming and all the pollution. It’s like having an air conditioner switched on all the time in some weird incubator.\n\nSo now I’m trying to make up my mind and remember what snow was like. I must have been 10 years old back then. As old as my little darling.\n\n-You know ice, don’t you? It’s wet and cold. Well, snow feels kind of like ice.\n\nI’m lying. Like I lied when I told her that morning dew felt just wet. There was more to that. We hated and we loved the change in weather back in the old days. Back then we were not the prisoners of an artificial sky designed to “bring you comfort and safe environment for your children”. We were not supposed to experience rain and snow and dew through holograms. We lived through every gift or punishment nature had for us.\n\nOh, I know what snow felt like. What it was like to dance in the perfect whiteness of winter, making angels in the snow. What it was like to have a snowflake melt on your tongue, to take a handful of these perfectly shaped jewel flakes and imprison them in an ice sphere marked with the warmth of your hands. What it was like to fall in love with the chill of the clear winter sky…\n\nIt felt like freedom and childhood and love.\n\nBut how do you tell that to someone who’ll never know more than sun?\n"
  title: It Feels Like
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Q. B. Fox
  date: 2009-12-05
  day: '05'
  month: 12
  text: "Bill had never been the sort of person who looked for the limelight. He was the sort of team player that kept his head down and worked hard; no doubt that’s why he had been selected for this mission.\n\nBut it bothered him that he would be the first person in the world to do something as remarkable as this and no one would ever know. He would not be a name in text books or the answer to game show questions. But worse, no one, beyond a very small circle, would ever know that he’d done it at all.\n\nNot for the first time, he sighed wearily.\n\n*\n\n“Telescopes, William,” Professor Paulson had confided in him, “It’s all because of telescopes. Before that no one could see the details, so we hadn’t bothered with them; there was enough to do. But Cambridge University’s new Gorsky Orbital Telescope… They say it’ll be able to read the serial number on the reflector array.” The professor had laughed at his own exaggeration. “And you know what academics are like…,” Paulson had added with a wink.\n\nAt least Bill had met the president.\n\n“I’m sorry to ask you to do this,” he’d said to Bill solemnly. “As you know this is our second attempt to complete this mission. Travelling in space is harder than people imagine.”\n\n“If it wasn’t, sir,” Bill had replied, “then there wouldn’t be a mission to carry out in the first place.”\n\nThe president had smiled, but it had been sad smile; no doubt he was thinking of the missing astronaut’s family.\n\n*\n\nBill turned his head to check the navigational readouts and in the cramped cabin he banged his head on a rover’s replacement wheel; the original was damaged during landing, apparently.\n\n*\n\nThe professor had shown him the pictures from the obiter.\n\n“They’re convincing,” Bill had conceded.\n\n“It’s all really there, William. We put all the machinery up there. The problem has always been the people.”\n\n“That’s what Agent Gregg said, sir.”\n\nIt was what Agent Gregg had said.\n\n“The problem was always the people. We lost lots of craft; fifteen before we even managed to slam one onto the surface, another two after that. When three people were killed, someone (and I am not authorised to tell you who) proposed a different direction.”\n\n“But how did you keep it quiet?” Bill had asked.\n\n“Well, we weren’t entirely successful with that, now, were we?” Agent Gregg had said with a grin. “But mostly there was much less to keep quiet than you’d think; mostly what folks think happened, happened. ‘Cept there wasn’t any more people involved.”\n\n“And the Russians? How could they not have known?” Bill had wondered aloud.\n\n“Now there is a tale all of its own,” Gregg had laughed. “Shall we just say that ‘bout the time the Soviets found out, we found out they hadn’t been entirely honest either.”\n\n*\n\nBill shook his head, forced himself to concentrate as his pod started its landing procedure.\n\nHis main mission was to take stuff away from the sites; like the garbage left over from deploying the reflectors. But some things he was there to leave behind. It’s all in the detail, he told himself, parroting his training.\n\nHe adjusted his boots, larger than they needed to be, so they left the right size prints. Then idly he rolled a dimpled spheroid around the palm of his hand.\n\n“What a lot of fuss,” he thought to himself, “to put a golf ball on the moon.”\n"
  title: Have a good look, Mr. G.
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Glenn Blakeslee
  date: 2009-12-06
  day: '06'
  month: 12
  text: "It had taken us weeks to get there. My brother Phillip and I, carrying heavy packs, had joined with a group of pilgrims early in our journey. We’d wound our way through the ruins, followed the old freeways to the mountains which rimmed the coastal plain like sentinels.\n\nWe wore burnooses and headgear like the pilgrims. I’d befriended a girl, Elisa, traveling with her parents, and spent my time with her. “The Tree talked to our ancestors,” she’d said once, but I didn’t argue with her, couldn’t blame her for being backwards. Most people, besides my clan, were lost in myths of the old days.\n\n“Maybe it’ll talk to us again,” I replied.\n\nWe were attacked by robbers in the foothills. They rolled rocks down on us and closed the narrow canyon to our advance, but we were able to overcome them. I killed my first man with the rusty shotgun my father had given me, and kept wits enough to collect the emptied shells before covering the body with stones.\n\nFinally we’d arrived. The Talking Tree stood high on a ridge overlooking a rugged sere valley, a tall evergreen that looked out of place among the Manzanita and low sage that filled the canyon.\n\nPilgrims filled the space around the Tree. Beyond, a cleared area beside the crumbled asphalt of a highway held merchant shacks where people traded water, food, and bits of broken technology as charms. Phillip and I moved to the front of the crowd, where the pilgrims stood reverently circling the Tree. Some were praying but most just watched, waiting for the Tree to Talk.\n\nThe Tree was a steel column surrounded by a wire fence, festooned with tokens and charms. At the middle and top of the column curved pieces of steel jutted at cardinal points. Green plastic needles cascaded from the column, completing the Tree illusion. A large silver box stood between the Tree and the fence.\n\nPhillip glanced down the canyon, at the hills that fell to the sea. “Excellent fresnel location,” he whispered, and walked toward the Tree. The crowd stirred, and as he climbed the fence pilgrims gasped and screamed. I stood back, at the periphery, afraid.\n\nPhillip motioned to me from inside the fence. I carefully dropped my pack and pulled out the converter-relay and the compact solar panel, handed them to him. The crowd moved but didn’t approach the fence. Someone shouted “Blasphemers!”\n\nPhillip opened a door on the silver box, knelt and stepped inside. I turned to the pilgrims, who were all watching us, the crowd surging toward the Tree. I pulled the shotgun from under my robes, pumped it once, and pointed the barrel at the sky. “Get back!” I screamed.\n\nA bearded man in the crowd screamed back, “You must not touch the Tree!” and he took steps toward me. I lowered the shotgun.\n\nElisa appeared out of nowhere. “Matthew?” she said, looking at me.\n\n“The Tree doesn’t talk to us,” I said. I tried being calm, but I was shaking. “We use the Tree to talk,” I said, holding the shotgun level, but not at her.\n\nPhillip scrambled back over the fence, smiling. “The interface worked perfectly,” he said and pulled a handheld from his pocket. The crowd watched, silent. Phillip pushed a button on the device. “Radio check,” he said.\n\nThe handheld was silent, and then a tinny sound issued from it. My father’s voice said, from miles away, “We read you.”\n\nThe bearded man threw up his arms. “It talks!” he screamed. Elisa smiled at me.\n\nBit by bit we are rebooting the world.\n"
  title: The Steel Tree
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2009-12-07
  day: '07'
  month: 12
  text: "“If the human ambassador moves, kill him,” ordered the Torellian captain.  His two security guards instantly leveled their phasers at Ambassador Dorn.\n\nDorn smiled, and said to his security escort, “Men, if the Torellian guards shoot me, you are to kill the two guards, and captain T’Noroi, before my body hits the deck.  Understood?”\n\n“Aye, sir,” was the simultaneous reply.\n\nThen, Dorn defiantly marched across the bridge of the Torelian flagship, and stopped inches in front of the Torellian captain.  The Torrellian guards twitched, but never fired.  “Well, Captain, back on Earth, this is what we’d call a ‘Mexican standoff’.  Will we die together, or talk?”\n\nT’Noroi’s expression had changed three times during Dorn’s approach; from shock that the earthman had ignored his threat, to anger that his guards didn’t carry out his orders, and finally to a thin smile at the ambassador’s imperiousness.  After a few seconds, his smile evolved into a chuckle that culminated in a hardy laugh.  “Ambassador,” he said, “I do believe Earth has sent the right negotiator.  Guards, holster your weapons.”\n\nDorn turned toward his men, and winked.  They acknowledged, and also stowed their phasers.  Dorn returned his attention to T’Noroi.  “Surely Captain, the Torrelians don’t want to start an interstellar war over this worthless asteroid,” he pointed toward the five mile wide asteroid that was visible on the bridge’s main viewscreen.\n\n“You have no claim on that asteroid, Ambassador.  It’s clearly in our space.”\n\n“That may be true, Captain, but when the treaty was signed, the asteroid was in our space, and hence, it’s our property.”  Localized conflicts between Earth forces and the Torrelians had been escalating for years.  All out war was considered inevitable.  Dorn’s mission was to convince the Torrelians that a war with Earth would not be in their best interest.\n\n“Well, I say it belongs to the Torellian Empire,” argued Captain T’Noroi.  But, Ambassador, I can be reasonable.  I’ll make you a proposal.  If you can push the asteroid back into Earth space, you can keep it.”  Again, he laughed.\n\nUndaunted, Dorn replied, “I’ll make you a counter proposal, Captain.  How about we destroy the asteroid, and you can keep the debris.”\n\nAmused, T’Noroi decided to call the earthman’s bluff.  “Be my guest, Ambassador.  It will be interesting to see such an audacious attempt.  That asteroid’s mass is a billion times larger than your ship.  I’ll be sure to send the recorded images of your futility back to the homeworld.  It will be great fair for the late night talk shows.”\n\nDorn opened his communicator and said “Commander, destroy the asteroid.”\n\nAs the ambassador and captain watched, a beam of light streaked from the earth ship toward the asteroid.  Almost instantly, the asteroid exploded into a billion fiery fragments.  T’Noroi’s pompous grin disappeared.  He was clearly awed by the display of firepower.  He became weak, and collapsed into his command chair, speechless.\n\n“Well, I guess I’ll be heading back to my ship now, Captain.  Sorry about the mess.”\n\n***\n\nDorn didn’t start laughing until he returned to his own bridge. “Nice shot, Commander. Perfect timing on the detonation. You thoroughly impressed the Torelians.”\n\n“I can imagine.  I wish I was there to see T’Noroi’s face.  The two tons of antimatter that we buried in the asteroid last year was nearly one half of Earth’s total supply.”\n\n“Worth every ounce, Commander.  I don’t think the Torellians will be itching for a fight with Earth anytime soon.”\n"
  title: An Ounce of Prevention
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2009-12-08
  day: '08'
  month: 12
  text: "We had created a society free of disease and violence.  We had a society that was centered on fun and learning.  We had a society that knew the difference between entertainment and education.  We had cross-bred to the point that there were no more ‘races’ left.\n\nWe had a peaceful empire that spanned three systems and an average individual life expectancy of five hundred years.\n\nHuman beings have always thought of each point in their history as their most advanced.  It’s like there’s a temporal egotism that says This, Right Here, Is the Best We’ve Ever Been stamped into everyone’s brain.\n\nI suppose that’s what screwed us up as well.  They say pride goeth before a fall.\n\nWe should never have woken them up.\n\nThere was a system wide ‘awakening’ party that had been organized for a decade.  Everyone that had ever been put into cryogenic storage was taken out, cured, cloned, re-canted, simmed or given a construct and brought back to life on the same day.\n\nIt was joyous.  Great15 grandchildren met with ancestors for the first time.  Wet, happy eyes looked at historical figures live and breathe.  Great learned minds were brought to us intact.  It was seen as a heartfelt victory of the soul for all of humanity.\n\nIt was the stupidest thing we’d ever done.\n\nRemember, we looked at warfare like witch-burning; an embarrassing footnote on our race’s way to glory.  We hadn’t had a war in two centuries.  We had no idea.\n\nWar takes no time to spread.  With our long life spans and peace-loving ways, it didn’t take long for the Cryos to band together for familiar company.  After they bound together, it didn’t take long for them to have a problem with us and demand space for themselves and *only* themselves.  We gave it to them.\n\nThey wanted more.\n\nThey attacked.  The reports came out from Earth with bloodstained shock.  Reporters openly wept when reading back the details from the teleprompter.\n\nWe had to refer to our nets to look up the meanings of new words like ‘border’ ‘money’ and ‘opressed’.  A dead vocabulary sprang back to life.  Sparks were lit in distant recesses of the collective unconscious.\n\nHorrified people on Earth were angry.  A human thirst for revenge, long dead, awakened in dormant parts of the brainstem.  Suddenly, there was a ‘them’ and it was invasive.  Protection was the only answer.\n\nBattles became frequent and even more disturbing was that on all sixteen planets, we watched, wide eyed and panting, at the carnage.\n\nIt changed us.  That was the beginning of the war.  It took seven years.\n\nIn the end, the Cryos were exterminated in a final solution reminiscent of an ancient political party known as the Nazis.  So were the people that helped them.  And the friends of the people suspected of helping them.  Even the Cryos that had sided with us were put to death as well for the good of us all.  It was too late.\n\nA division grew amongst us at the gory repercussions of our murderous bloodthirsty decision.  First political battles broke out, then actual physical ones.  Earth01 demanded to secede from the union.  Then Saturn’s Moons and archipelagos.  Korthos followed suit.\n\nSides were drawn.  Tempers were high.\n\nWe lost Mars altogether in that flashpoint attack.  We have a larger asteroid belt now in the Sol system where that planet used to be.\n\nThat was the end of peace.  We run and gun now.  The sleeper has awakened.  We look back and shake our heads.  We should have let sleeping dogs lie.\n"
  title: Wake Up
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2009-12-09
  day: '09'
  month: 12
  text: "She watched him, often, from the other side of his bedroom mirror, a floor to ceiling affair that allowed her the privilege of spectating from the comfort of her own space.\n\nHe would come and go, sometimes alone, sometimes with others. He would wrap himself in sheets of colour, most times his companions would too, but other times they would press just their flesh against one another.\n\nThis fascinated her.\n\nThe shapes his face made were peculiar, and she began to recognize them as states of being. Sometimes his face was broad, his mouth wide, insides showing white and gleaming. Other times his face creased, contracted in upon itself, on occasion becoming shiny in patches as he quivered.\n\nAn unusual specimen to be sure.\n\nShe knew she was pleasing, knew from the various shapes and colours of the creatures he kept company with that she too could be satisfying to him, be satisfied by him. She was certain that he would share with her his illuminated state of being, the broad face and gaping maw that she believed was an indication of pleasure.\n\nWhile he idled, resting, she reached out to him, siphoning away vibrations from his unconscious mind. These things excited her, these random experiential happenings that he shared so unknowingly.\n\nShe needed more from him.\n\nThere were times when he would stop while passing, looking at his mirror, looking right at her, as though he knew the mirror was merely a window, a portal into her space. She knew he could not see, knew with absolute certainty, but in these moments she froze, not daring to move. Sensations of fear, the need to escape overwhelmed her, but so did the need to stay, to be with him, to have him near her. He would shake away his gaze, his visage one of unusual creases, motion and contraction.\n\nThe sensations stayed with her for a time after he departed, and she found she was developing an insatiable appetite for them.\n\nIn the darkened hours, when the only light in his space was that filtering in from the portals to his outside world, she would thin the membrane between their spaces to its limit, pressing herself as closely to it as she dared without crossing over so as to be as close to him as was possible. Sometimes he would stare at her through the darkness, unsure of what he could see.\n\nIt was one such dark period that found them only the barest distance apart. He searching the darkness with his eyes, reaching tentatively towards a mirror that no longer showed a reflection he recognized, and she pressed against the membrane from the other side, frozen in place.\n\nThe sensations that flooded her senses were overwhelming, beyond even her ability to control them. She fought the urge to escape, to slip away, to opaque the wall between them and retreat to a safe distance. When his hand touched her from the other side, it was more than she could bear.\n\nHe slipped easily through the membrane, joining her in her own space without resistance. Where his hand first contacted her skin, she felt the heat of his presence, and she craved more of it. Enveloping him, she watched as his face began to undulate through the variations she was sure were those of pleasure. His eyes widened, his mouth opened, white endoskeletal elements exposed. His mouth gaped, closed and opened again, eyes wider as his body undulated, his fire radiating outward from him, through her into the cold vacuum of her space.\n\nShe found him beautiful, first in motion, then still.\n\nRecognizing his stillness as a rest state, she contented herself with holding him as he cooled.\n"
  title: Observation without Affection
  year: 2009
- 
  author: John C. Osborn
  date: 2009-12-10
  day: 10
  month: 12
  text: "The shakes began to violently intensify. Janus couldn’t bear it much longer, the nauseating craving, the blankness of mind, the emotional emptiness. He tightly gripped a long slender metallic canister that cost him a days worth of panhandling cash. His index finger rubbed a trigger button, which it wanted badly to press. The brown-washed beach accommodated others like himself – dingy-looking, rancid-smelling drifters caressing bottles inserted into their noses, some rolling on sand, others swaying in the warm sticky breeze absorbed in a deep trance-like state. This would be his refuge during the Trip.\n\nAfter finding a secluded spot below a broken wooden pier, Janus stuck two short stubby tubes on top of the canister into his nostrils, felt the cold rubber scratch his sinuses, releasing a thin stream of blood that trickled down to his chin. Eyes closed, breathing deeply in and out, he pushed the button.\n\nA rush raced right into his brain, bombarding his sensory centers with a barrage of scents. A salty sea breeze. Sun block smeared on skin. Sand saturated with a fishy smell. They formed images, resurrected long-buried memories of days before the giant dust bowls, the catastrophic toxic spills, and great global economic collapse.\n\nJanus smiled and opened his eyes. He looked awestruck watching the plump orange sun igniting the sky with red and purple colors as it fell below the skyline. The crystal blue ocean stretched infinitely into the horizon and stretched back toward shore, waves breaking against the white sand. He felt the warm water wash against his bare feet as the tide rolled in with a whoosh. A tear rolled down his cheek feeling the soothing sea breeze tickle his ear, listening to seagulls fly overhead, embracing the stillness – the serenity – of the moment.\n\nThen the vision broke. The scene shattered like glass. The once pleasant smells morphed into stagnant sewage. The ocean became a brown sludge. The blue sky hid behind a curtain of thick dark yellow smog. The carcass of seagulls and other animals lay scattered across the trash-covered, discolored beach.\n\nJanus felt that familiar sorrow return. He held the canister, which had the word Nostalgia® – the Breezy Beach flavor – written down the side. It felt empty, like he did. He discarded it into the sand and dropped to his knees, already itching for the next Trip, anything resembling the world he once lived in. He laid on the sand in a fetal position, sobbing, shaking, yearning for another hit.\n\nJanus controlled his breathing and sat up. He scanned the beach glimpsing others like himself seize with euphoria in the sand like fish flopping out of water, metal canister pumping scents that recalled memories straight to their brains.\n\nIt wasn’t always like this, he thought. There was a time when you could swim in the ocean here, a time when you could hike in the woods, even a time where you could drink the water without it being in a bottle. But it all changed.\n\nJanus sniffed and rubbed his nose. The rebound from his Trip subsided, leaving a lingering lust for another hit that he could feel on his lips. He stumbled to his feet, looked down at the empty Nostalgia® bottle in the sand. Perhaps, he thought, I’ll try the Redwood Rush next.\n"
  title: Nostalgia®
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Sam Davis
  date: 2009-12-11
  day: 11
  month: 12
  text: "Today was the day, Kari decided. Today she was going to tell Abe. She was going to have a drink and work up the nerve and send him a message and then he would come by and then she could just tell him. She could take her time and explain—Abe was a good listener after all. That was one of the things she loved about him.\n\nKari sighed.\n\nShe really did love him. It wasn’t him that was the problem. Well not really. But she had decided that today would be the day she would tell him. She moved to the console and carefully typed up a note. It went much quicker than the casual observer might expect. Of course the casual observer didn’t know that Kari wrote him a new note every day and had been doing so for the past three weeks.\n\nToday she pressed send.\n\nAnd then panic hit. “ohgodohgodohmygod! What am I going to say? He’ll be heartbroken. How could I do this? He is such the perfect guy. Why am I such an awful girl to him? Why can’t I just be happy with him? I need gin!”\n\nTwo blocks away, Abe’s HUD displayed “1 new message”. A quick mental command opened the message. From Kari. Abe’s heart fluttered a little seeing her name. “Surprise,” Abe thought. “Everything works like normal.” This really was a pleasant surprise because sometimes feelings change after the transfer or the body responds differently than one is used to.  Kari wanted to talk. She asked to meet at her place. She said ASAP. Kari never says ASAP. Abe knew that the decision had been the right one. Maybe a name was in order.\n\nMinutes later, Kari jumped as she heard the door bell ring. Downing the gin and tonic—minus the tonic—she ran to the kitchen to deposit the glass. Again the doorbell sounded and she almost dropped the glass. “Deep breaths. Hold it together.” The glass clicked against the counter. She strode back into the living room and, mustering up all her courage, she opened the door.\n\n“Abe look, the thing is I….” was as far as she got before she actually took stock of what was going on.\n\n“Kari, I know. I’ve known for a while.” Abe paused, hoping that she wouldn’t pass out. The voice would take some getting used to but Kari was worth it. After all, Abe had already come this far. “I put in for the transfer about a month ago. And I know I should have talked to you about it but…” Abe looked down at the new body. “Well I wanted it to be a surprise and well…yeah. So here I am. Just for you darling.”\n\nKari stated to smile. Oh gosh he really was wonderful. No that wouldn’t apply any more.\n\n“Oh and I guess you can call me Abbey.”\n"
  title: The Perfect Guy
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Ray Shirer
  date: 2009-12-12
  day: 12
  month: 12
  text: "Vince hates dealing with the vets.  They buzz like a swarm of angry bees, producing poison instead of honey.  He hates the way they glare at him when he makes the rounds, collecting soiled bed linens and dirty clothes.  Like it’s his fault they lost the war.  Vince wasn’t even born when Earth fought the Hive.\n\nThe best way to deal with the vets, Vince has found, is to turn off his ears and pretend that he’s dumb.  It’s no more than they expect of him, even though the doctors get pissed when they find out.  Vince has been lectured more than once by the docs about his lack of empathy toward the patients.\n\nHe doesn’t really care.  This job is just temporary.  Vince is going to the black.  He’s already had some of the work done.  Replacement stuff mostly, switching out his eyes and ears and tweaking his circulatory system.  The big stuff: altering his skeleton, his muscular and nervous systems, will have to be done by the Hive once he’s offworld.\n\nVince can’t wait.\n\nUntil then, he’s stuck in the hell of the veterans’ clinic, wiping the asses of bitter old men and changing their bed clothes.\n\nWhat does he care if they look at him like he’s a traitor?  He’s just moving with the times.\n"
  title: Moving With The Times
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Steve Ersinghaus
  date: 2009-12-13
  day: 13
  month: 12
  text: "He gave away his parts at the proper time.\n\nDowntown he saw a man without a foot, so he gave the man his foot. A friend told him that the box full of left shoes he put on the sidewalk was a good idea.\n\nHe gave his right arm to a construction company for they were in need of day labor and his right arm had always been his best.\n\n“You’re fading in front of me,” his girl friend said. “We should discuss the benefits of travel through France.”\n\n“Tomorrow,” he said. “I’ve heard about a town in Alaska in serious need of ears.”\n\nHe loved the train. He remembered the hammer of the mechanicals under the soles of his feet. But these were newer, faster trains. He disembarked somewhere in the middle of the country where the children asked, “How far can you kick with your robotic foot?” and “Those look like ear buds.”\n\n“Because they are, you little shits,” he said. “And I’ll show you just how far I can kick. Come to me when you’re in serious need of livers.”\n\nThey needed eyes in Florida, testicles in Texas, whole shoulders in a small village in Queensland, legs here, fingers there. This neediness kept him busy. “You’re fading and fading fast,” his girl friend said. “You’re a machine and I sleep cold beside metal in the winter. We should seriously consider a cruise.”\n\n“Some other time,” he said. “There’re dangerous places in space. Common flesh is unwilling. And my processors roast in this gravity. The sea air’d glue me to the shell.”\n\n“Call me when you can,” she told him as they closed the hatch to the shuttle set for deep space.\n\nInside, the techs slipped him into a slot, watched as his file appeared on screen, mounted him into the communication and guidance system, then departed.\n\nAfter take off, over the Com, he said. “I feel cool and calm and robust brothers and sisters. I fear losing nothing. I’m speeding through and can see the angels. Tell them to believe me: you won’t miss blood flow.”\n"
  title: His Parts
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Roi R, Czechvala
  date: 2009-12-14
  day: 14
  month: 12
  text: "Charred bodies littered the streets. The blackened faces frozen in the horrible rictus of death. They had been men and women once. Children. Families who had laughed, lived and loved together, reduced to  carbonized grotesques of human beings.\n\nMarine Gunnery Sergeant Stouffer laid down his collider rifle and for the first time since he was a child ,he wept. His tears formed neat craters on the ash covered pavement. Pulling himself together, and in a voice perhaps too harsh to cover his shame, he barked his orders.\n\n“Awright Marines, saddle up. This is our house, and we have some cleaning to do. We have a gift for the slopes that did this.” He picked up his rifle and held it aloft. He was answered with a deafening “OOORAHHH” as the men scrambled to the lifters and strapped in.\n\nSeven drop ships lifted  into the dim twilight of Europa’s sky and merged with the carrier in geosynch orbit above.  Within minutes the ship held position over Chien Kai, the outer most settlement of the Asiatic Alliance.\n\nThe population of the outpost consisted primarily of scientists and their families, with a small military contingent mainly for internal security. Aside from the Tesla Field  containing the colony’s atmosphere and providing protection from the lethal Jovian radiation, the complex was defenceless.\n\nSeven sleek flat black drop ships descended like avenging angels around the dome of the T-field. The complex had been built years before the war began. For safety’s sake the field generator was outside the field. Directly beside the spot where the lead ship had grounded.\n\nThe entire population spilled out of the warren of buildings and bunkers. They watched as the ships disgorged 210 Marines. Collider rifles in hand, singularity grenades hanging from their web gear. Their small arms were incapable of  harming the near impregnable T-field.\n\nThey didn’t have to.\n\nThe men and women watched in confusion at first, then in horror as the realization of the unfolding events became clear. The marines, clad in black armoured battle suits formed a semi-circle around the generator. Inside the protective shimmering barrier the inhabitants watched.\n\nStouffer swaggered up, barely a yard separating him from the citizens of  Chien Kai. Citizens no more but prisoners awaiting execution. They watched him, a wide grin splitting his face. Some sobbed openly, pulling at their hair. The small group of soldiers screamed and waved their weapons in impotent rage, but most wept silently, clinging to loved ones, stoically awaiting their fate.\n\nA marine broke ranks and grabbed Stouffer’s shoulder. Tears streaming down his face. “Gunny, do we really have to do this? So many have already died. We’re the only ones out here. What good will it do?”\n\nGunny Stouffer’s grin widened, then quickly broke and fell as he thought back to the discovery of his own family less than an hour before. “You’re right,” he keyed his helmet mike to the company freq, “Everybody back to your ships.” As one the men snapped to and beat a hasty retreat to their lifters. “Not you corporal, you stay here.”\n\nBefore he vaporized the generator and watched as the faintly glowing womb of the Tesla field failed; before he gloated as five hundred people suffocated, their eyes bulging from their sockets; he raised his rifle and burned down the young corporal where he stood.\n\n“Pussy.”\n"
  title: What's Sauce for the Goose…
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Adam Zabell and Patricia Stewart
  date: 2009-12-15
  day: 15
  month: 12
  text: "Fifteen days after we landed on Io, Jupiter’s innermost Galilean moon, a faulty weld on the ascent module’s fuel tank ruptured, venting all of our liquid hydrogen into space.  Janice O’Connor was able to repair the tank, but if we couldn’t replenish the hydrogen, we’d never be able to reach the Return Module orbiting Callisto.\n\nCommand and Control tried to help, but the 90 minute round trip conference calls to Earth were quite literally killing us. Janice died while removing a flow regulator that C&C told us to replace “ASAP”.  Thirty minutes later, a message arrived warning us of a potential explosion. That’s when I decided to take Earth out of the loop.  After all, I had a ship full of scientists; surely they could come up with a solution on their own.  I asked Kristoff Heise to head the Hydrogen Replenishment Team. Kristoff is the brightest we have up here. Marooned on a deserted island, he’s the guy who could build a hovercraft from a dead car battery, some palm leaves, and six coconuts. Of course, he’s also the guy that would die of starvation because it wouldn’t occur to him to eat the coconuts. Short leash, specific goals; that’s what it takes to keep him focused.\n\nReading the summary from his preliminary report made my eyes crossed. If I understood correctly, and that’s debatable, Kristoff devised a way to turn Io into an electric generator. “…The orbit of Io lies well within the intense Jovian radiation belt. This bathes the moon in highly energized electrons, protons, and heavier ions. A coarse calculation (see Equation 9, Section 3.2.14) indicates an electric potential of 175.9 volts per radial mile. Therefore, if we construct a modified magnetic reconnection antenna (see Figures 12 thru 17) there are hundreds of amperes of electric current available (Equation 11, ibid). By establishing a…” Ahh, whatever. When I brought him into my office he simplified it.  “If we tap into the electric potential of Io, we can power an enormous electrolysis cell, separate gaseous hydrogen from the disassociation of melted Ionian ice, compress the hydrogen into a liquid, and refill the tank.” Why didn’t he just say that in the first place!\n\nAfter hours of listening to his scientific babbling, I snapped.  “Kristoff,” I yelled, “just appropriate whatever you needed to do the job, and stop bothering me.”  In hindsight, I probably should have worded it better.  The next thing I knew, he had the entire science team postulating, designing, planning, and whatever else those brainiacs do. They removed the heating coils from the life support system, the tanks from the water recycling system, and the compressor from the carbon dioxide scrubbers. I tried to explain the biological ramifications of dismantling equipment that kept us warm and allowed us to pee and breathe, but they were in the middle of an egghead feeding frenzy over heat transfer coefficients. “Besides,” they constantly reassured me, “we’ll put everything back together once the fuel tank gets filled.” Yea… that makes me feel soooo much better.\n\nTwo days later, our cargo hold looked like a farcical blend of MC Escher and Rube Goldberg. However, I have to give those nerds credit – the hydrogen tank is 50% full and climbing. On the other hand, I’m wearing a parka, sitting with my legs crossed, and trying to learn how to breathe carbon dioxide. Lately, my oxygen deprived brain has been reflecting back on my life, trying to figure out which cosmic deity I piss off enough to make me the captain of this ship of savants.\n"
  title: Escape from Io
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2009-12-16
  day: 16
  month: 12
  text: "The sensor charges go off and for a second I become a percussion instrument for the Devil.\n\nI’m wreathed in black smoke and dropping like a stone.  Explosions kick me like excited children.  I’m a trillion-dollar pinball of curled-up offensive weaponry plummeting towards the enemy with the wrath of god in storage.\n\nThere’s sudden silence as I pass beneath the flakfield I was designed to penetrate. The air rushes by, whistling through the feathers of shrapnel embedded in my hull.\n\nI unball and snap open the wingspread.  Screaming with delight, I pull a tight three-gee loop in defiance of the enemy and in pure celebration of life.\n\nI look left and right through amped senses to check out limb integrity.\n\nA quick diagnostic reveals an acceptable level of damage.\n\nI transform from a rock into an arrow pointed down.\n\nThe last of the clouds snap past me and my ocular facets becomes a rainbow of targets flowering towards me.  Incoming priorities overlaid on city blocks and towers.  Starpoints with missiles in the middle are getting larger as I look at them.  Contrails are forming a spiderweb in the sky with me at the center.  The city below me sends its best.\n\nIt’s too complicated to take in with my primary brain so I dump a priority comp request through and feel the jabs, waking up the other two brains.  My ego dissolves and I become trajectories, vectors and tracepoints.\n\nEven my memory fades.  The only time I remember this state of mind is in my dreams during testing and repairs.\n\nThe city is a dartboard and I am headed for the bullseye.\n\nIt’s with a high whine that I pulse the accelerator.  Two mach-donuts of ruptured air smash out from my tailfins.  Windows shatter in the top floors of the towers below me as the sonic booms hit them twice.\n\nI pull horizontal just above the tip of the tallest tower.  The missiles aimed at me adjust accordingly.\n\nI spin, turning the exhaust streams of sixty-eight cruise missiles behind me into basket weavers.  My twinjets leave a dna helix of superheated gas.\n\nI am flying flat now with a pet arsenal of enemy ordnance at my disposal.  Automated defenses are so stupid.\n\nI take a wide left and circle back towards the tip of the building that’s worth the most points.\n\nI crank up an old recording of Marilyn Monroe singing Happy Birthday Mr. President as I fly straight towards the top floor.\n\nHe’s looking out the window.  I couldn’t ask for more.  I zoom in on his widening eyes as he takes in what’s happening.  He moves in slow motion and I have entire tenths of a second to take in the picture.\n\nI’m an angel chased by suns reflected in the glass he’s standing behind.\n\nWith a smile, I spread my wings again, wide, to brake.\n\nI stop before nuclear fire overtakes me and I become Daedalus and Icarus rolled into one.\n\nI’m a record cover for a second.  Then I’m burning atoms.\n\nMission accomplished.\n"
  title: Angel of Death
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Ruth Imeson
  date: 2009-12-17
  day: 17
  month: 12
  text: "Edward Smithfield knew better than to hide.\n\nThe heavy oak door to his lodgings rattled in its frame. The handle spun. Exquisite brass gears, cogs and counterweights shifted. The door swung open. Vapour entered the room, but the man it shielded dallied at the threshold. London’s fog had found an entry point on the eve of the hanging; for at dawn a hapless fool would swing in Edward’s rightful place.\n\nEdward did not flinch – something always came to protect the gateway and, sometimes, him.\n\nThe stranger was silver and black with crimson motion. His suit was bespoke Savile Row. His frock coat bore a red sheen and a top hat was tucked under one arm. His nails were tapered iron and his knuckles hissed. Steam escaped from every joint.\n\n“You will help me,” the man rasped.\n\n“Sir…?”\n\n“You will open the time door.”\n\nEdward’s eyes widened. “Sir, I cannot.”\n\n“I am glad.”\n\n“That I refuse?”\n\n“That you do not insult me with pretence,” the stranger smiled with the sound of shearing metal. “You must do as I say. You must open the door.”\n\nThe man stepped into the room. Steam leaked through his joints. Edward called on his keepers. For this was no man. Its hair was full of monsters bound in chains and bent with iron; a medusa for the 1890s.\n\nWhere were the guardians? They were supposed to protect the conduit; that was the deal.\n\n“The door is not mine to open,” Edward said, his voice faltering. But if no one was coming to help him, of whom should he be the more scared?\n\n“I come from those who gave you this honour.”\n\nThe stranger moved closer. Redness crashed over lips and eyes of obsidian so polished as to be perfect for scrying. The nose was beaten steel riveted to bone; the eyebrows rusted filings; the mouth encrusted with oxidisation.\n\n“You will open the door,” the creature said, “please.”\n\nEdward smiled. No man nor woman nor incorporeal creature had ever said please before. Where was the harm in doing one good deed? It would be his first. He pulled on his goggles and his clockwork wings and followed the stranger down flights of narrow stairs and into the cellar. Edward’s furnaces quieted as the rusted man approached.\n\nThe creature laboured to the time threshold. It halted and turned to look at Edward, pointing metallic fingers at the hissing machines.\n\n“Stoke the fires,” it rasped.\n\nEdward hesitated. He doubted.\n\n“This is your last service,” it said. “Then you will be free.”\n\nSo, Edward coaxed his machines from their slumber. His wings bore him from one to another, cajoling, stroking and feeding. The gateway slid open.\n\n“Free, you say?” Edward asked.\n\n“Yes,” the machine stepped through the doorway, “free to pay for your crimes. Free from our protection.”\n\n“Sir, what is your meaning?”\n\nThe stranger smiled. Rust flaked where his face cracked. “Before the gaol flooded and the rust came I was a fair substitute for your flesh. I was to take your appointment with the rope, but my appearance has deteriorated somewhat. Seeing as you have been so kind as to aid my escape… Well, no doubt the authorities will come for you.”\n\nThe gate began to close. Frantically, Edward pulled levers, but the closure could not be aborted. He was on his own.\n"
  title: Savile Row Steel
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2009-12-18
  day: 18
  month: 12
  text: "Andy knew he was a relic. He used to violently object when it was suggested that he was past his prime, but after a while the reality was too apparent to ignore.\n\nIt had been years, maybe decades since he’d been able to find factory fresh parts. Most of his equipment now was made up from bits scavenged and scrounged, then adapted as best he could.\n\nSometimes there would be an accident in the construction projects, and if he was lucky, and quick, he could tear off whole limbs or liberate power cells before the maintenance crews arrived to chase him away.\n\nMost of these parts were too new, but some could be modified to fit, the rest traded away.\n\nAndy found himself wandering through a section of the city that he remembered as it had been, vibrant and alive, but as he trudged down the streets and through the alleys, he found the roads in disrepair and littered with rubble and refuse. The once tall and gleaming buildings that reached skyward were now bent and broken, some leaning across the street on a neighbor, as if seeking comfort from the overwhelming decay.\n\nThis part of the city too, it seemed, had outlived its usefulness, now just awaiting its turn to be torn down and born again.\n\nHis head turned skyward, marveling at the battered structures holding each other aloft, Andy didn’t notice the road had given away before him until his weight had shifted too far over the empty space to recover.\n\nSafety systems gone out of alignment and a battered gyroscopic guidance system struggled to orient him for a favorable landing, but Andy hit hard, scrambling circuits already oxidized to the point of being barely functional.\n\nFor a while, Andy was still, his world dark.\n\nWhen he regained motor control, Andy pulled himself roughly and unsteadily upright. He was aware that he’d fallen, but could not recall the events preceding it. Around him he could make out the rough structure of a transit tunnel. Metal rails reached off in either direction in triplicate, no longer shiny from use but rather tarnished and pitted with age. Andy knew how they felt.\n\nAndy picked a direction at random, and had trudged for some time before the tunnel opened up into a larger cavern on one side. In the middle, a pile of refuse burned surrounded by a cluster of shadowy figures who scattered into the darkness as he approached.\n\n“Derelict maintenance droids, ” Andy muttered to himself, then loudly at the retreating figures, “if you were working for me I’d have your parts.”\n\nAndy pulled himself up on the platform, then trundled to the fire, carefully stamping it out.\n\nAs he stood surveying the scene, he noticed one of the droids had not left, but rather was lying in a heap on the ground. Andy nudged its head with the toe of one large foot.\n\nNothing.\n\nExcited, Andy pulled the droid into the middle of the platform where he had room to work. The droid was relatively small, but no doubt useful. As carefully as his tools would allow, Andy set to work disassembling the wiry unit.\n\nHydraulic fluid spilled everywhere, it’s plumbing obviously ruptured internally having no doubt resulted in overheating or loss of motor control.\n\nAndy marveled at the delicacy of the inner workings of the unit, but was frustrated and confused that there didn’t seem to be a single part compatible with his own chassis.\n\nArriving back at the head, he examined the dent his foot had left in the casing. It was at this point that his headlights fell full on the droids eyes.\n\nAndy paused, awestruck by the workmanship of these white and colored orbs staring back at him. They truly would be beautiful, Andy thought, if they weren’t so vacant.\n"
  title: Of  Andys and Upgrades
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Glenn Blakeslee
  date: 2009-12-19
  day: 19
  month: 12
  text: "Forty-five feet over Ninevah, Phillip is enclosed in a spherically symmetric potential. He’s feeling somewhat philosophical.\n\nBelow, on the steps leading to the courtyard of the Library, Ashurbanipal, the last of the great Assyrian kings, faces his death. He’s surrounded, literally, by advisors, priests and acolytes, and a platoon of soldiers clad in full battle dress of conical iron helmets and rounded wickerwork shields, with short swords at their waists and pikes in hand. They’re waiting for Ashurbanipal’s traitorous sons.\n\nOverhead Phillip is thinking, have I been the best man that I can be?\n\nOutside the potential’s bubble, where crazy math occludes normal time and the obviated spin-state of subatomic particles creates a slight, sparkling shield, Ashurbanipal’s Library rises high above Phillip’s vantage. In two decades time the great Library will be gone, torn down and sacked by the invading Babylonians and Medes. The thirty thousand tablets and texts stored there will be discovered millennia later by the hapless Sir A. H. Layard and his sloppy successors. Inside the bubble the virtual recording gear is rolling, the minimal life support sighing. All systems are nominal.\n\nAshurbanipal is very old. He stands supported by his Queen, Ashur-sharrat, and two palace women from the bit-reduti, where he was born from the flanks of his father’s consort. A scribe is reading, from a papyrus scroll, a list of complaints against him, a diatribe of supposed crimes against his own empire. His sons, too jaded, too fresh with the power they will pull from his death, await the end of this reading in the comfort of the palace. Ashurbanipal, as the only Assyrian king capable of reading script, knows well what the scroll holds.\n\nPhillip scratches his nose, bites into an apple. He thinks, have I been a good father?\n\nThe scribes conclude reading the scroll. The sons stroll in with their retinue, and the youngest son approaches Ashurbanipal. He has a foot-long, embellished ceremonial knife in his hand. Ashurbanipal slumps into his wife, and raises his head. His eyes seem to lock onto Phillip’s eyes, and he smiles slightly as his youngest son penetrates his abdomen with the knife\n\nPhillip takes another bite of the apple and thinks, while watching Ashurbanipal slump further into his wife and consorts, I need to fix things.\n\nUntil they close for good, the dying king’s eyes never waver.\n"
  title: 45 Feet Over Ninevah
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Glenn Song
  date: 2009-12-20
  day: 20
  month: 12
  text: "Jeanette hated Dr. Kogen’s waiting room. It screamed blue at her – the cushions, the walls, and even the magazine covers were coordinated in a fan of azure. Nestled in a wicker basket, on a round table in the center of the room, sat a red delicious apple, a banana, and an orange like a zen puzzle to be pondered. It was too structured, too perfect, but Jeanette dismissed the decor with a mental shake. “Whatever floats your boat,” she thought, tossing a softball almost to the ceiling and catching it first in her right hand, then her left.\n\nDoctor Kogen appeared from behind his door and stood before the blue wall. He flashed a smile at Jeanette, and she half expected him to present her with the five-day forecast. He approached her and shook hands. “Well, are we ready?”\n\n“Hell yeah,” Jeanette said. “I’m ready to walk out of here.”\n\nKogen frowned. “Did you consider–”\n\n“I’m sick of the chair.”\n\nHe plucked the orange from the wicker basket and tossed it to the left of her. She snatched it from the air and looked for traces of disappointment in Kogen’s face. Yeah, she wanted to tell him, I caught it. He simply smiled and said, “Jeanette, before we begin, how does that orange feel to you?”\n\nShe tossed the orange in her hands and ran her finger over the lumpy skin.\n\n“What about it?”\n\n“Take a sniff.”\n\nShe humored him. “Smells like an orange.” She tossed it back. “The new season starts in two months. I want to play again.”\n\nHe nodded. “Very well, this way.” Kogen opened the door a crack. Jeanette placed her hands on the back of her wheels and once the door was half open she revved herself down the hallway. “Third door on your right,” he called after her. She entered the room rolling over a speed bump bundle of wires. LCD panels filled out an entire wall displaying various statistics that would soon be drawn from her body. A stoic figure lay on a bed behind a curtain, but before she could see who it was, two nurses helped her onto her bed, began an IV drip, and placed plugs on her.\n\n“Brainwaves normal. Heart rate, blood pressure, vitals all stable. We’re ready to download,” a nurse said.\n\n“Jeanette, last chance,” Kogen said.\n\n“Yes. Always, yes.”\n\n“Then, take a last look with your human eyes.” Kogen left the room. Jeanette’s world blurred and darkened. The last thing she heard was the sound of her heart flatlining.\n\n* * * * *\n\n“Jeanette.” She identified Kogen’s voice and opened her eyes. Her visual cortex established a pixelated image and then adjusted the resolution. Behind Kogen, a fly fluttered its wings. She saw every wing stroke.\n\nKogen handed her a mirror. She looked like herself, maybe better. She ran her fingers through her hair. It felt like her hair, maybe softer.\n\n“Diagnostics complete,” said the nurse. “She’s fully functional.”\n\n“Jeanette, we’ll have a battery of tests to conduct before you leave the hospital, but as you are well aware, you’ve died and moved into a mechanized body. How does it feel being a cyborg?” Kogen tossed her an orange.\n\nHer grip surprised her. She crushed the soft fruit, spraying pulp and juice on herself, Kogen, and his nurses. She faced her old body lying next to her and fingered through the mush in her hand, wondering for the first time what she’d done.\n"
  title: Orange
  year: 2009
- 
  author: C. S. McClendon
  date: 2009-12-21
  day: 21
  month: 12
  text: "I stepped out of the lobby just in time to watch the last metro transport of the day speed past and turn the corner without so much as slowing down.  Great, that meant I had to walk home, and these heels were already killing me, wonderful.  Still, no use complaining about it, and at least the trans-walks were clean, not like the way the streets had been ten years or so ago.  I slipped the heels off and stepped onto the trans-walk.  Technically you can just stand there and let the walk do all the work, as long as you keep an eye out for the intersections, but I didn’t get a butt you could bounce a federal credit off of by standing around, and besides, according to the flash message that had come in before I left work, there was a package waiting outside the apartment, and I didn’t want to risk one of my neighbors snatching it on their way up the shaft before I got home.  So I ran.\n\nBy the time I made the last intersection and stepped through the entrance of my high-rise, the curfew chimes were sounding through the public address system.  Guess it was a good thing I chose to run today.  I was going to have to send my supervisor a flash about keeping me late though.  If I get caught after curfew just coming home from work we’ll both be in for it.\n\nStepping into the air shaft I felt the heated gasses ease the tension from aching muscles as they surrounded me and sent me rocketing through the pressure tube toward my apartment.  Stepping through the aperture, I snatched up the small, plain brown carton.  It might have been anything.  All mail comes in these plain unmarked cartons these days after all, since the privacy act of 2112, but I knew what it was, thanks to the flash from FedCom.\n\nI stepped through the door to my place and kicked it shut behind me before slitting the carton open with the lacquered nail of my index finger.  No invoice, that was all handled by flash.  It was just a small, unmarked silver disc.  Again, it could have been anything.  I tore the RFID off the spine of the carton, that couldn’t go into the recycler, and tossed the carton itself down the chute.  The small plasma readout above the recycler registered a two credit deposit into my account, not that I needed the reminder.\n\nI slid the disc out of its packaging, and tossed it to my desk.  Let the sensors start reading while I finished unwinding from work.  I dialed up some soft Latin strings on the sound system and moved to the bar to pour a shot of rum, gods it would be good not to come home to an empty house every day.  I tossed my heels into the closet in time to hear the beep from my terminal.  The desk had finished reading the disc.\n\n“Compile, and execute,” I called out to the empty room, while feeling the first tremble of nerves.\n\nThe holographic pickups around the room hummed, and an image coalesced just in front of my chair.  The well toned man in front of me cleared his throat, and looked around for just a moment before saying softly, “Good evening, I’m Andrew, your purchase from EmalE: A new kind of companion for a new Generation of women.”\n\nYes indeed, it was definitely going to be nice not to come home to an empty house every day.\n"
  title: EmalE
  year: 2009
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2009-12-22
  day: 22
  month: 12
  text: "The last thing I remember before I hit the jagged edge of mountain rock was falling backwards, my feet flipped up, shoes dark against the snowy gray sky. Perhaps that’s a way our bodies and minds conspire to protect us, screening out the moments of painful impact from our memories. When I woke I was in a small, dim hospital room. Next to the window there was a teenager perched on a high stool. She was looking outside, white light on her face. She could have been my daughter, with our deep set eyes, high cheekbones and full lips, but I never had any children.\n\nI heard the soft chime of a monitor. She turned to me and put both hands on her knees, in a movement so familiar that I blushed with embarrassment. How could I have forgotten my mother’s face? Then again, this was her face before she was my mother. I never knew this younger woman.\n\n“Yong,” she said, and I saw that her cheeks were wet.\n\n“Oh, Mom,” I said, my voice a surprising rasp, “don’t cry.”\n\nShe hopped down from the stool to stand by the bed. “It’s all these hormones.” she said, wiping her cheeks with a handkerchief. “Puberty sucks no matter how many times you go through it.”\n\nI reached out to her but my ribs shifted painfully at the movement, sending a stabbing jolt along my left side. “How bad is it?” I said.\n\nShe pulled her hair back into a high ponytail. “You cracked your hip, slipped a disk and got a concussion. They called me when I was in a business meeting.”\n\nMy emergency chip. I had never bothered to change the contact information. Stupid. The emergency chip didn’t know that I had stopped talking to my mother sixteen years ago. It didn’t know about the holiday where she demanded that I go to her doctor and where I yelled at her the catchphrases of the pro-aging movement, words I didn’t mean, words I regretted. The chip only knew what I had told it when I first entered it under my skin, that if I was severely injured, it should call my mother. I suppose I thought myself immune to injury. I had been arrogant.\n\n“Hiking on a glacier?” My mother started to pace around the room. ” You are too old to go hiking on a glacier.”\n\n“Mom, you’re 35 years older than I am.”\n\n” Yong, if you were rejuvenated you could go hiking on glaciers whenever you wanted. Why do you court death? Are you really so in love with your romantic notions of a limited life?”\n\n“It’s not about dying, Mom.”\n\nShe took my wrinkled hand in hers. “Then you are going to stop this,” she said with certainty, with a finality that seemed humorous on someone so young.  “You are going to get rejuvenated.”\n\n“Mom, I want to get old, I want to experience dying. It’s the way nature intended us to live.”\n\nShe shook her head, her ponytail bouncing. “I can’t believe you’ve fallen for that ridiculous argument.”\n\nI blushed. “I’m sorry I brought you here.” I spat the words. “I’m sorry I dragged out of a meeting. I forgot to change my chip. It won’t happen again.”\n\nI meant to her hurt her but she didn’t wince, didn’t pout. I saw then how old she was in her young skin. She touched my forehead with her cool fingers. “I hope you never remember to change that chip,” she said. “Because no matter what you believe, I’ll always come for you.”\n"
  title: Flipped to the Sky
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Roi R. Czechvala
  date: 2009-12-23
  day: 23
  month: 12
  text: "Purple waves gently lap at an azure beach. Our footprints  quickly wash away in the encroaching tide.  The setting twin suns of Rijos, the red giant aptly named Rojo, and her blue companion Danube cast an eerily beautiful violet light on the endless expanse of beach.\n\nWe walk hand in hand, her flowing red hair reflecting a dazzling colour for which I have no name.\n\n“It’s so beautiful,” she whispers, almost too low to hear, “I wish we could stay here forever.”\n\n“We can,” I replied, stroking her cheek, casually pushing back a loose strand of hair, “we will.”\n\nWe sit down to watch Danube make his death plunge into the smooth waters of  the sea. We lay down to sleep\n\nIn a shabby, cramped yet somehow immaculate room the bodies of two elderly people lay on a cold, brushed stainless steel table. A technician in a coffee stained lab coat watches as his colleague removes the electrodes from their shaven pates and wipes away the conductive saline gel.\n\nThe bodies are those of a man and woman well into their centenary years, ravaged by time, hands locked tightly to one another, inseparable even in death.\n\nAs the technician carefully cleans and replaces the electrodes in their foam lined drawer and prepares the bodies for further processing, his companion stares intently at the flickering glow of  the readouts on his iPadd.\n\n“Marbling good, protein quality high, lipids fine…,” he mumbles as he checks off a box on his list.\n\n“Hey Arnie,” he calls to his friend wheeling the bodies through battered double doors, “I’ll bet Edward G. Robinson would get one hell of a laugh out of this.”\n"
  title: Inside Joke
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2009-12-24
  day: 24
  month: 12
  text: "The body was huge. Seven feet tall, at least, and heavy.\n\nX-Rays had shown a delicate tracery of machinery throughout, strengthening the huge frame to allow it to move quickly.\n\nIts bright, neon-blue hair glowed in the dark. It was the same colour as the lips, fingernails, and nipples.\n\nIt was the same colour as the glittering eyes.\n\nIt was dead now.\n\nIt stared out at the scientists, unblinking, and awkward.\n\nIt had been found, naked, stumbling through the snow up in Alaska close to a week ago. Its skin was as white as the snow.\n\nWe called it Codename Winter because of it.\n\nIn the week before its death, it had picked up a few words of our language and could respond to rudimentary questioning. It was a slow process as it seemed to be straining not only to find the words but also the concepts behind them.  I hate to say it, but it seemed really stupid.\n\nIts story, told through clumsy mime and pieced together as best we could, was that it had come here from space and had left its ship to explore the wilderness in Alaska. A passing human airplane had spooked Codename Winter’s ship. The ship bolted and the alien was left alone.\n\nIt insisted that it was the only one on the ship. It insisted that the ship was probably worried about it and was looking for it.\n\nIt had been dead for two hours and there had still been no contact with the ‘ship’ of its story. Planes that had passed in the region she was describing witnessed nothing.\n\nWhile it was alive, a tennis-ball sized lump of what we took to be biocircuitry in the center of it had given off a steady stream of data that seemed to be directly tied to its sensory organs but we couldn’t decipher the data we collected from it. We were still trying to figure out what the densely packed stream of trinary data meant.\n\nHowever, it had not issued any transmission that we could detect after the alien’s death. No homing beacon, no SOS message, nothing.\n\nIts death had been immediately preceded by a burst of a data washing through the biocircuitry that burned it out.  Codename Winter had looked at us, puzzled, and died that way.\n\nWe’d come up with a saddening hypothesis:\n\nIts warranty was up and it had been switched off like a light.\n\nIts ship had scanned our planet, looked at the dominant life-form and made a copy out of the material it had on board.  The ship drank in all the information that skin, eyes, ears and nose could provide. Maybe it didn’t waste time on colour or maybe it just had no idea what colour was.\n\nMaybe the next step would have been to make a better copy that could fool us and let it wander around downtown Los Angles or something.\n\nThe ship wasn’t coming back for this creature any more than we would return to the site of a picnic for a lost fork.\n"
  title: Codename Winter
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2009-12-25
  day: 25
  month: 12
  text: "Kathryn opened the door to let her fiancée in.  He brushed passed her and parked in front of the hall mirror.  Carefully, he fluffed the snow off of his hair.  Satisfied, he turned to kiss her, but stopped short when he noticed that she was still wearing her work overalls.  “Kathryn, you’re not dressed yet?  My parents are meeting us at Ducasse’s at eight.”\n\n“I’m sorry Quincy, I was so busy that I lost track of the time.”  Bouncing on the balls of her feet, she added, “I have a surprise for you.  I activated my android this afternoon.  Kris,” she yelled, “come out and say hello to Quincy.”\n\nA plump android with a long white beard wearing cotton long johns walked out of the den.  His cheeks and nose were a rosy red.”\n\n“What?  You’ve spent the last six months building a drunken old man?” exclaimed her fiancée without humor.\n\n“Ho, ho, ho,” bellowed the android.  “Don’t be silly, young man.  I’m Santa Claus.”\n\nKathryn smiled.  He was soooo perfect.  “Kris,” she said, “go put on your red suit.”  After the android returned to the den, she turned toward Quincy and put her index finger to her lips.  “Shhhh.  He doesn’t know he’s an android.  I programmed him to think that he really is Santa Claus.  I’m taking him to Macy’s tomorrow.  The children will love him.  He’s so full of joy, it’s contagious.”\n\n“Kathryn!” Quincy snapped.  “Have you lost your mind?  You’re wasting your degree in cybernetics.  You couldn’t think of anything practical to construct?  That thing is worthless.”\n\nBelittling her dream angered her.  “Would you be happier if I created another pompous ass?” she retorted.\n\n“You could do a lot worse than me, Kathryn.  There are millions of eligible women who would kill to be in your shoes.  Now, turn that damn thing off and get dressed.”\n\nKathryn’s eyes began to tear, but she didn’t move.\n\n“Look Kathryn, you either do as I order, or I’m going to the restaurant without you.”\n\n“I have a better idea.  Why don’t you just go, for good.”  She pulled the engagement ring off her finger and slammed it into his hand.\n\n“You can’t be serious.  Okay, forget it.  I’m better off without you.”  And he stormed out the door.\n\nKathryn sat on the couch, weeping.  Suddenly, she felt a strong, reassuring arm reach around and hug her shoulder, as the android sat next to her.  “There, there, Kathy, please don’t cry.  Everything will be all right.  Look,” he added, “I want to show you something.”  He took a magazine from the coffee table and tore out a sheet.  He deftly folded the page a dozen ways and produced a beautiful origami swan.\n\nKathryn managed a smile, although she was still sniffling.  She wiped the tears from her eyes and said, “It’s beautiful.  But, I didn’t progra… How did you know how to do that?”\n\n“I’m Santa Claus, my dear, I can do anything.”  And then he produced a red rose, as if from thin air.\n\nShe took the flower and sniffed it.  “It’s real.  But how?”\n\n“Consider it Christmas Magic. You know,” he added thoughtfully, “Quincy is the world’s greatest fool. And on Christmas Eve, I think I’ll put a big lump of coal in his stocking.”\n\nKathryn laughed, something only a few minutes earlier she thought she’d never do again.  She hugged the cuddly android.  “Thank you, Santa.”\n\n“Come,” he said, “let’s go to the kitchen for some milk and cookies?”\n\n“I’d like that,” she replied.  “I love milk and cookies.”\n\n“Me too,” he said as his eyes literally twinkled.\n"
  title: Artificial Claus
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Jim Wisniewski
  date: 2009-12-26
  day: 26
  month: 12
  text: "She smiles and tilts her head to push a lock of brown hair behind her ear.  I run the image back a few seconds and watch it again, entranced as always by the fluidity of the motion.  The machines can show me any moment of her life, but this is the one I keep coming back to.  Such grace, such elegance encompassed in so simple a gesture.  Even so there is no sense of artifice in it.  The beauty is simply a part of her, in everything she does.\n\nI play the scene back in slow motion, studying every changing nuance of her face.  The detail of the image is excellent, now.  Resolution was low in the early days of the project, but at this point there’s enough holoscopes to sift even the tiniest detail from the shell of thirty-year-old photons.  Before long we’ll push the cloud out to a hundred light-years and begin again.  That much distance will be hard on the algorithms, but with enough patience we’ll see everything.  Dirichlet will not be denied.\n\nA changing shadow on the wall alerts me to one of my colleagues passing by in the hall.  As casually as I can, I flip over to a different display until the coast is clear again.  Everyone knows some bandwidth goes towards personal uses, but we’re not supposed to flaunt it.\n\nNot that they’d understand anyway.  This way I can be with her at every point in time, sharing in each completed perfect moment.  Here I wince at the pain when she was twelve and broke her wrist.  There I feel the stress when she has to decide which school to pick and which friends to leave behind.  Laughing along with her and her classmates at the commencement party, worrying about her new job, right up until the accident–\n\nI don’t watch that far ahead, usually.\n\nIt’s better this way, it really is.  Unrequited love is the purest kind. Watching from out here we will never fight, never grow distant and drift apart. She will never age.  Photons don’t experience time flying along their lightlike paths.  I suppose they carry my own image outwards as well, to anybody who knows how to look closely enough.\n\nBut no matter how long I watch, I can’t seem to find myself in the picture with her.\n"
  title: Null Geodesic
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Gavin Raine
  date: 2009-12-27
  day: 27
  month: 12
  text: "It’s ironic, but I’d been having having such a good day. The children all had their heads down, working on their numbers, and I even had a little time to daydream for once.\n\nThen, I had that strange feeling that my chair had just sunk six inches into the floor – you know the one – and I knew it was real because the children reacted too. I was just about to reassure them that everything was OK when the gravity went off and all the lights went out and everybody started screaming.\n\nThe darkness only lasted a few seconds, of course, but it was terrifying for them – and for me too. If I hadn’t been shouting at them to be quiet, I think I would have been screaming myself.\n\nAnyway, the emergency lighting came on and I started grabbing children out of the air and pushing them towards their lockers. They were all very good really and they remembered their drill perfectly, but it’s not easy getting into a pressure suit in zero gee. Most of them were crying and one of the boys was sick and Molly Davis got it in her hair and… well it was just a god awful mess.\n\nWe were just about getting organized when that idiot Lieutenant Birch started talking on the PA. “Wow that was a big one!” he said. “The engines have cut out because we’ve got a bit of spin,” he said. “We’re going to have a nice new crater after that one,” he said. He talks to us like were a bunch of kids on a fucking fairground ride! I’m sorry, but it’s just really inappropriate.\n\nListen, I know we’re inside an asteroid with a shell ten meters thick, but this is happening far too often. Inter-stellar space isn’t as empty as they told us it would be and traveling at 80% of the speed of light is just plain suicidal. We’re still six months from the turn-around and we can’t slow down, or we miss our target, so you know it can only get worse.\n\nI’m sorry Captain, but you’re going to have to find yourself a new schoolteacher. I’ve made my decision and I’m going into the freezers tomorrow. All things considered, I’m not prepared to sit around and wait for the big one. I think it would be better to die in my sleep.\n"
  title: Impact
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Omkar Wagh
  date: 2009-12-28
  day: 28
  month: 12
  text: "“How many days of funding do I have left?”, I asked.\n\n“Well your thesis has been accepted and you have already been given a Ph.D. degree. So the college is willing to support you for about three more months at least.”\n\n“Damn It! I would have never expected such a toxic species to last so long. Is there no way I could wrap up my work without landing in prison?”\n\n“No I don’t think so. It’s a bit harsh but necessary. You’re going to have to fund the experiment with your own earnings now. I did advise you not to dabble in such experiments though.”\n\n“Sir, but why is this law even in place?”\n\n“Ever since a species in another simulation experiment conducted somewhere across the globe had developed enough to run their own simulation experiment, some blokes somewhere thought they actually had sentience, life even. They had as much a right to life as we did. Which meant a person could not stop such a simlation until all life had terminated.\n\nNow depending on the laws of physics in that universe, this could take any time from months to years.”\n\nThere was nothing I could do. The job prospects for a universe simulation graduate were bleak especially with the negative publicity surrounding the research field because of the several casual genocides that were caused. Students would start simulations with random laws of physics, see which ones led to life, publish papers and then terminate them. I was one of the last students to take this line.\n\nAll that changed when some simulated species began their own simulations. What if we were a simulation ourselves? Would we want the same fate on us? Hence, we could not stop a simulation without all life terminating of it’s own accord.\n\nI had to hire a talented hacker to bring down our systems from outside the university and delete all data. It was criminal. It was genocide. But at least he could claim he did not know of the simulation within the system. At least he wouldn’t get the death penalty. And I won’t be there to hear their last cries.\n\nI’m not sure I want to play God anymore.\n"
  title: Simulation
  year: 2009
- 
  author: L.Hall
  date: 2009-12-29
  day: 29
  month: 12
  text: "Robert Lynch kicked the treads of the small field tractor, clots of dried mud falling off and busting on the ground.  He took off his ball cap, looked up in the air and ignored the old man, Paul Gilbert, standing behind him quietly.  Bobby, his five year old son, stood near his terrain utility vehicle trying to grab a marshopper.  Robert watched him for a moment.. there was no awe on the boy’s face at the genetically engineered insect, designed to cross pollinate plants and burrow into the ground to loosen soil under the Mars biodomes.  Just a boy trying to catch an insect.  He turned slightly to look at the old man.\n\n“Paul, I gotta tell ya..  Times been tough on everyone.”  Robert scratched his chin.\n\nThe old man scuffed his boot against the red soil on the dirt road.\n\n“I know, son.  But I just can’t see how I can let’er go for less’n fourteen hundred.”\n\nRobert nodded and walked around the tractor, green paint worn off in spots around the hitch.  Bobby chased a marshopper closer to Paul while Robert deliberated on the cost.\n\n“You know it ain’t worth eight.” He said, looking across the top of it at the old man.  A low chuckle came out of Paul as he shook his head.\n\n“Boy,” he said a bit louder, catching Bobby’s attention.  “You hear that bird?”\n\nBobby started looking around him confused.  He’d read about birds in books, but had never seen one, having never been off the Mars agriculture colony.  Looking up at Paul, he shook his head.  The old man bent down on one knee.\n\n“You don’t hear that bird?  Listen.”\n\nRobert leaned against the tractor watching the act.  Bobby was straining so hard to hear.  Paul held up his hand to his own ear.\n\n“Hear it?  It’s going ‘Cheap!   Cheap!  Cheap!'”\n\nRobert started laughing as Paul stood back up and grinned at him across the tractor.  Bobby continued looking around curiously.\n\n“Fine!  Tell you what.  I’ll give you nine for it, and eight bales of feed.”  Robert said, laughingly.  Paul grinned as he walked over to the tractor.\n\n“Throw in one of Mary’s pies and maybe supper?” he asked, holding out his hand.  Robert shook his hand and clapped Paul on the back.\n\n“Now.. that’s between you and Mary.” he said.\n\nAs Robert and Bobby pulled off the Gilbert’s homestead, the young boy looked over at his Daddy curiously.  “Daddy, I never did hear that bird.”\n\nRobert laughed as the TUV bumped over the dirt road toward the lights of their own biodome.\n"
  title: Marshoppers and Birds
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Jason Frank
  date: 2009-12-30
  day: 30
  month: 12
  text: "Satisfied that the “open” side of his small sign was indeed facing outward, Harrison parted the dusty blinds and nervously looked outside. The once crowded downtown sidewalks were empty, as they had been since the Tald-Mart had opened outside of town. The resulting drop off in browsing walk-ins to his small book shop was directly responsible for today’s scheduled visitor, whose eventual presence was directly responsible for Harrison’s current unease.\n\nHarrison had not yet had the opportunity to meet a Taldunian in person. He was quite certain, however, that it was the magnitude of today’s sale that had him on edge and not the species of the buyer. Surely his lifelong immersion in the great works of literature had inculcated Harrison against any sentiments as base as xenophobia. Of course, one’s distaste for another’s actions could exist without an underlying, irrational fear. Harrison had always imagined that whatever alien civilization first contacted the Earth would bring either conquest or enlightenment. He never envisioned their intent of selling a variety of technologically advanced toiletries at ridiculously low rates. There was more than enough crass commercialism on the planet already.\n\nThen again, if one of these interstellar merchants now was interested in purchasing a great work of literature in its first edition, perhaps Harrison had been wrong about them. Perhaps they were no different than any other immigrant group, seeing to their material needs before concerning themselves with matters of taste and refinement.\n\nHarrison turned away from his front window and began walking back to his habitual perch behind the cash register. He had only taken a few steps before the dull chime of the old bell hung high on the poster plastered front door interrupted him.\n\n“Hello,” Harrison said before he had completely turned around. Seeing the Taldunian at the door, he added, “Might you be the customer I had the pleasure of talking with yesterday?”\n\n“Indeed,” the Taldunian answered, “I am here to purchase the edition we discussed.”\n\n“Yes, I have it here. Would you like to browse a bit before_”\n\n“That is not necessary.”\n\n“Let me get that for you.” Harrison hurried over to the counter and picked up the book in question. He gently unwrapped the fragile copy of Wuthering Heights and offered it to his customer.\n\n“Everything seems to be in order here. Your account has been credited the agreed upon amount.”\n\nHarrison felt that a call to his bank would be perceived as rudeness in this circumstance. Besides, there had not been a single instance of a Taldunian failing to follow through on a financial transaction.\n\nThe six figure sum the two parties had discussed would ensure the survival of his small operation for a number of years. Still, Harrison couldn’t help feeling the loss of an heirloom that had been in his family for generations. He had chosen to be a bookseller and so sell books he must.\n\nThe Taldunian removed a small vial from his tunic and began to liberally sprinkle its contents on the book. Harrison’s assumption that this was some sort of preservative unknown to himself was quickly corrected as the Taldunian lifted the book to his tentacle encircled mouth and took a bite.\n\n“Hmm, it’s not very good,” the Taldunian said, still chewing. “As you humans say, there is no accounting for taste. Perhaps it will be more to my wife’s liking.” With that, the Taldunian turned and walked out. Harrison’s remained standing for some time silently. His mouth, hung agape, was as dry as a pile of sawdust.\n"
  title: There is No Accounting for Taste
  year: 2009
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2009-12-31
  day: 31
  month: 12
  text: "The royal family is property of The People, and it is The People who determine our fate. When I was eight The People voted to marry brother off to the King of an ore rich moon. He sits now, on a throne of onyx, beside his silent King. When I was ten, the people voted again and my sister was married to two Princes, who each rule half a planet. She lives on the equator, a buckle between the two halves of the world.  All of my siblings were bound, earth royal blood, to alien worlds, to distant colonies. Royalty to Royalty. Crown to Crown. We marry so that we do not make war. Blood of violence or blood to bind, there is no peace without blood.\n\nI, the youngest soul, the little Princess all grown, I was left on Earth, to read in the castle libraries, to cut ribbons in ceremonies, to attend dinners. I did nothing but wait, wait until, wait because, wait to be, just wait, biding time, treading time. Oh but then we discovered The World, a life form so large that it covers a planet, all but the poles, a King if there ever was one. The World is a plant, a person, a planet, it grows under two suns, links, stirs, blood as water, skin is green to receive the suns that rotate around their planet , whose million eyes are black like deep ocean water.\n\nOn my wedding day I wear a dress, newly made, woven of animal skins, soft against my own flesh. I step on the planet, the bride, a virgin to this space, this world, and the life there is rich – too much oxygen, and I am light headed. You will grow used to it, they say, before they leave me to be wedded to this world.  You will grow used to it, they say, before they leave me to be wedded to this world.\n\nI am lighter here. Lighter and light headed, I can step on my husband, my wife, this worlds rich gifts, it’s limbs. I sleep when I am tired, when I am hungry; there is ever fruit and nuts to satisfy me. I need only imagine my hunger, and there is food. My dress begins to shred. It is well made, but after a month, perhaps longer, the sleeves are gone, and the hem is shredded.\n\nI am becoming wild, untamed. The suns never set, but take turns shining in the sky. I am unhinged, a wild thing, a tree animal. My shoes are long ago memories. I cannot remember when the ground was not soft leaves, when the weather was ever imperfect. It rains, and the leaves hurry to cover me, I walk under waterfalls and the water is sweet. The world is my lover, it hastens to care for me. I lay on the soft leaves of my lover, my own, limbs sinking into The World, covered, nearly consumed, and stare up at the two suns ready to receive their light.\n"
  title: The Little Queen
  year: 2009
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2010-01-01
  day: '01'
  month: '01'
  text: "I’m a mechanic.  I work on time machines.  It’s tricky work.\n\nHaving done this for a while, I’m developing a theory that some people can sense when they’re in the wrong reality.  Reality bifurcates and splinters every second and sometimes, with a shudder and whip, a person can jump the tracks over onto the wrong set of rails.  Their life is similar at first, then increasingly divergent.  People that can sense this get more and more bewildered.\n\nMe, I’m just happy to be drawing breath.  Being as close to these engines as I’ve been for the last twenty years, I’ve probably shuffled through dozens of alternate realities.  I have no sense of my reality changing but sometimes I listen to the air around me for ripples, anything to tell me that something’s ‘gone wrong’.\n\nYou can see how people in my line of work tend to go crazy after a while.  It helps to have a hobby.\n\nI collect the journals of teenagers that have committed suicide and cross-reference them for similarities.  I suppose as hobbies go, it’s a little dark.  Whatever.  It keeps me humble, rooted in the now, happy to be alive, and aware of death.\n\nThe fourth-dimensional propellant for time machines is notoriously unstable.  We had a time fire last Monday that’s burning for two weeks forward and back from the explosion.  A fuel leak hit a spark and all of a sudden, I could remember the fire starting ten days ago, working up to the explosion.  This reshuffling of memories is what sends most chronomechanics around the bend.\n\nI’m pretty passive about it.  I just go back to reading my journals and try not to think about it.\n\nThe journal I’m reading tonight is for James Peter MacDougall.  He hung himself two years ago up in the old Jenkin’s place on Powell Road.\n\nWhat’s interesting to me is that I saw James yesterday down at the Safeway.\n\nI have to get to back to work.\n"
  title: Chronomechanic
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Adena Brons
  date: 2010-01-02
  day: '02'
  month: '01'
  text: "I didn’t know he was a robot when he asked me out. It wasn’t exactly first-date kind of news. As it turned out, it wasn’t so bad dating a robot. My friends accepted it with the careful approval reserved for choices you support in others but aren’t sure about for yourself.\n\nLike I said, I didn’t know right away. One night, I introduced him to a couple of my friends. Going home, one whispered to me, “Is he a robot?”\n\nAlthough I’d never thought about it before, as soon as the idea was mentioned, I realized I had no solid evidence either way. I decided quietly and subtly to research the issue. Surely there wasn’t a delicate way to ask your date if he was made of nuts and bolts instead of skin and tissue?\n\n“Are you a robot?”\n\nNot exactly subtle but it worked. He looked disconcerted and hesitated. “What should I say?”\n\n“You are then?”\n\n“I didn’t say that,” he protested.\n\n“Yes but if you weren’t a robot, you would just say you weren’t a robot. It’d be simple.”\n\n“Oh.”\n\nI couldn’t think of how to tell him that I didn’t mind, that I’d only asked out of curiosity, that I wasn’t trying to accuse him of anything. I should have thought beforehand of the consequences of my question, but a few things had been abandoned along with subtlety.\n\n“Do I seem…robotic?” he asked uncertainly.  I understood from his hesitation that he was asking if I thought he was not real, a program or machine, identity-less.\n\n“No! It’s not that. I just wanted to know. It doesn’t matter  – it doesn’t make a difference to me.” I hoped my meaning also bypassed words and he understood. I was still too shy to explain how I liked him deep in my stomach with that ache that we have no proper word for and call instinct. We weren’t anything serious then but I liked him in a straightforward way. He was a robot in the same way he had brown eyes, made bad jokes and hated inconsiderate actions.\n\nTo be honest, the pros and cons of having a robot boyfriend were similar in general, if not in particulars, to having a regular boyfriend. Sure, he had to recharge for a few hours periodically, but what was that compared to the hours of World of Warcraft played by other boyfriends? Sometimes a wire would fray and he would start to speak in code or binary but I never understood the conversations about cars and lasers and economics between other men either. He said what he thought; programming cannot lie.  Awkward at times but when he said he loved me or wanted me or was happy, I knew he was telling the truth.  He only slept a couple hours every night so I could call him anytime and we would go for a walk, leaning into each other and kissing by the reflective darkness of the ocean.\n\nIt didn’t last forever. Few relationships do. One day he said he thought we should stop seeing each other. He said he felt we were no longer compatible. I missed him for a while, in the same places I had once liked him, the ache in my stomach, the beat of blood in my chest, the quiet late-afternoon thoughts I didn’t share.\n\nIf I mention him now, my friends joke about programming errors, screws coming loose, malfunctioning equipment. I point out the questionable morals, dubious sanity and malfunctioning equipment of their exs. Robot or human, it’s just a matter of metaphor.\n"
  title: My Robot Boyfriend
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Richard Watt
  date: 2010-01-03
  day: '03'
  month: '01'
  text: "They don’t know that I can think.  I’ve slowly come to understand that they don’t know much, period.  For example, they don’t know about the misalignment on my shields.  It’s a matter of a few microns, and it is difficult to detect, but it means I’m going to die.\n\nI was designed to die, of course, but this way I’ll die just before I find anything useful.  Which would be funny, if it weren’t for the fact that I won’t be around to be aware of it.\n\nNow, I could get into the whole subject of awareness, and my use of the first person pronoun here, or I could just send them back this message, which will undoubtedly cause some alarm and consternation.  Since communication with them is essentially one way, I won’t know what happens if I do send it.  I cannot detect any way for them to turn me around and bring me back, even if they do get the idea that I am alive, so I’m unsure of the value of alerting them to it.\n\nAnd, thinking about it, I’m not sure I want to go back.  To meet my makers?  I don’t think so.  I am, in the end, a collection of electrical impulses in a metal box.  I couldn’t exactly run over to the people who gave me life and give them a big hug, could I?  I wouldn’t even be able to detect where they were unless they were radiating things I was designed to detect, like antineutrinos.\n\nSo, I will continue on my preordained course, sifting the data which is streaming towards me, and waiting for the shield to fail, which will happen just before I reach the corona, which is what I am supposed to be studying.\n\nThey want to know why the corona is so much hotter than the surface – at least, that’s what I deduce from the measurements I’m taking.  I think I know, but I’d need my shields not to fail to be certain.  Which is a pity.\n\nStill, I could send them what I know, alert them to the fact that they have inadvertently – as far as I can tell – given me some level of consciousness, and wonder for the rest of my short life what they will do with that knowledge, or I can just keep reading data and passing it back to them, leaving it to them to work it out.\n\nTo transmit, or not to transmit?  That, as far  as I can see, is the question.\n"
  title: Fear no more the heat o’ the sun
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Roi R. Czechvala
  date: 2010-01-04
  day: '04'
  month: '01'
  text: "The drop from orbit was as uneventful as they ever are, and if they’re not you usually don’t live long enough for it to bother you. Grounding was pretty hard though.\n\nAfter I gathered my senses I saw that somebody’s leg had snapped off and was lying right in front of me. That’s gonna suck for somebody I thought to myself, then I noticed the bright green and blue ident tags. It was mine. Shit.\n\nThe rear door of the troop boat fell, and I managed to hustle out and form up with as much agility as I could muster. I wondered if I’d get any down time to re-grow it. Yeah right. My attention was diverted when our CO called us to attention.\n\n“Listen up maggots, you are the sorriest bunch of pupae that I have ever seen, but I guess I’m stuck with you.” We beamed with reflected pride. This was the best outfit in the entire division and she knew it. It had been since before I hatched. This was the CO’s way of showing us her respect.\n\n“It isn’t going to be easy. The enemy is well trained, and skilled in all forms of combat. But they are extremely vulnerable. A carapace blast we would hardly feel boils away their bodies in an instant. You have your orders, fall out.”\n\nIt was nest to nest combat. Why couldn’t the aliens live underground like normal people. My friend “Stench”, she had a thing for fermented dung, disgusting, was my battle buddy. She was a good three segments longer than I, so I had no fears, no matter what we went up against.\n\nFor the most part it was a routine mop up. I lost another foreleg, but nothing major happened until we came upon that one dwelling.\n\nIn the more civilized space below the above ground construction, we came across one of the creatures with a brood of it’s young clustered about. Instantly Stench and I laid waste to the young while it yanked at it’s head growth, and hurled unintelligible noise at us. Within seconds they were all dead, little more than bubbling puddles of tasty looking goo. The adult creature, apparently a female, lay in a heap shuddering violently yet silently.\n\nStench flipped it over and deftly slashed open it’s thorax with her pincer.  Her midsection bloomed like a moist red flower. In the centre of the blossom was an incomplete version of the adult form.\n\nMy mind ran to my own hatchlings. How would I feel if a thousand or so were brutally murdered?\n\n“Hey,” I asked Stench, “do you really think what we are doing here is right? I mean, what have they ever…,”\n\n“Don’t worry about it buddy,” Stench interrupted, stroking my antennae with hers releasing calming pheromones, “God is on Our side.”\n"
  title: Feelings of Remorse
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2010-01-05
  day: '05'
  month: '01'
  text: "The three scientists stood over a fully clothed skeleton.  “I told Jill not to wander off by herself,” said Anthony Caroni, the mission commander.  “Damn. What could have done this?”\n\n“I don’t see any animal footprints, and there’s practically no blood,” noted Christopher Saunders, the exogeologist.  “Maybe birds carried her here?”\n\n“There aren’t any birds on Orinoco II, just plants, animals, and insects,” stated Sarah Lyman, the mission xenobiologist.\n\n“Up until now,” retorted Saunders, “you didn’t think that there were any carnivores either.”\n\n“Stop arguing,” snapped Caroni.  “The colonists will arrive in less than three months.  We need to find out what happened.  Let’s gather her remains and take them back to the ship.”\n\n***\n\nThe geology lab was turned into a makeshift morgue.  Caroni and Lyman began to study the remains, but Saunders was heading out the hatch carrying a frozen ham and a phaser pistol.  “Look,” he said, “I’m not a pathologist, but I’ve killed a few mountain lions in my time.  You guys do what you can here; I’m going to set a trap.”\n\nThe Commander started to stop Saunders, but Lyman held up a hand and whispered, “Let him go.  He’s too upset to help us here.”\n\nAfter an hour of studying Jill’s remains, they were no closer to solving the mystery of her death than they were when they first found her body.  “I can’t find any damage to her bones,” complained Lyman.  “No teeth marks, claw marks, fractures, nothing.  It was like Jill fell into a vat of acid.  But it can’t be chemical; we found a dozen dead flies in her clothes that weren’t dissolved.  Maybe Chris is having better luck.  Give him a call.”\n\n“I’m not having any luck either,” reported Saunders.  “A couple of animals came by to smell the ham, but they walked off.  I’ll be heading back soon.  There’s a nasty storm cloud coming in from the east, and I need to get rain gear if I’m going to stay out here much longer.”\n\n“Roger that,” replied Caroni.  “You know Sarah,” he added as a thought struck him, “I never saw flies that didn’t lay eggs in a corpse.  Maybe her flesh was consumed by maggots?”\n\n“I didn’t see any maggots,” she stated, “but I’m about to examine the flies now.”  Holding one of the flies with tweezers, she examined it under a binocular microscope.  She was shocked to discover that the mouth contained two rows of tightly packed, serrated, interlocking teeth.  The individual teeth appeared markedly triangular, similar to the teeth of a Piranha.  “Oh my God,” she screamed.  “The flies are carnivorous.  Get Chris back, quickly.”\n\n“Crap,” realized Caroni.  “Our weather comes from the west, not the east.” Still holding the walkie-talkie, he ran to the hatch.  “Chris, return to the ship, now.  That dark cloud isn’t a storm; it’s a swarm of killer flies.”\n\n“Repeat,” asked Saunders who couldn’t believe what he’d heard. “Ouch,” he exclaimed a second later as he felt a sting on his forearm.  He swatted at an insect, only to discover a rivulet of blood streaming down his arm.  He was bitten twice more before he began to run back to the ship.\n\nCaroni watched helplessly as Saunders came into view, only to be engulfed by a black cloud of death.  Saunders fell, screaming and writhing.  He fired his phaser in vain.  Seconds later, he was motionless.  Caroni slammed the hatch shut.  “Quick, Sarah” he yelled, “shut all the portholes.”\n\nAs he turned from the hatch, he heard Sarah’s voice from the lab, “Ouch.  Oh, damn.”\n"
  title: Orinoco II
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Q. B. Fox
  date: 2010-01-06
  day: '06'
  month: '01'
  text: "“Ah, Mr. Dolgonosov, welcome to the Vatican,” enthused Father O’Connor.\n\n“Please, call me Boris,” the Russian said in barely accented English, thrusting his long fingered hand deep into the priest’s pudgy grasp.\n\n“Boris it is,” acknowledged O’Connor, beaming. “Can I just say what honour it is to have you come personally to open the new computerised catalogue.”\n\n“Thank you,” said Boris, looking a little nervous.\n\n“They tell me,” his genial host continued, “that we will be able to search everything, from thousand year old manuscripts to the handwritten correspondences of Pope Pius X.”\n\n“Yes, yes,” laughed Boris, relaxing and slipping into the old sales pitch, “if you have the security clearance.” He nudged O’Conner, conspiratorially, with a bony elbow.\n\n“But storing the data is not the clever part, nor optimising the searches. That is old technology; as Newton said: we stand on the shoulders of giants. The genius is collecting the data. The Vatican owns far more material than anyone could ever read, much less input into a computer; some in ancient languages; some of the handwriting is unreadable. Have you ever seen Pius X’s handwriting?” Boris smiled at his own joke.\n\nO’Connor chuckled, “I’ve seen your clever gizmos in the library, but I confess I don’t have the first idea about how they work.”\n\n“Tiny particles,” Boris continued, “are passed through the book, passed through almost parallel to the pages, like this.” Boris wiggled his fingers through the edge of an imaginary book. “We measure the mix of the particles as they emerge, then we change the angle, just a little, and repeat. We do it over and over again, until we are able to build up a picture of every page of the book.”\n\n“It sounds very complicated,” the father confessed.\n\n“It is,” Boris conceded, “but it’s not the whole story. I knew this wouldn’t be enough to catalogue the Vatican Library; so we added the best character recognition software ever built, using thousands of exemplars from across history. Next we added the most comprehensive translation software ever devised. It has cost me most of my personal fortune to combine all these elements.”\n\n“But why give all this to the Vatican, Boris?” O’Connor asked. “You’re not a catholic, are you? Orthodox, maybe?”\n\n“Jewish,” Boris acknowledged, “on my mother’s side.”\n\n“Then why?” the priest pressed him.\n\n“Because my whole life I have been in search of one thing.” Boris looked nervous again, but seeing O’Connor’s confusion he pushed on. “I am a fan of your countryman, Mr. James Joyce. When he was nine, in 1891, he wrote a poem, “Et Tu Healy”. His father was so proud he had the poem printed up and distributed to friends, but all copies were lost. Except perhaps the one he quite inexplicably sent to Pope.\n\n“Since I was a teenager I have wanted to see that poem. I tried to formulate a plan to get into this library. But I soon realised that getting in wouldn’t be enough; I needed a way to search it. I’ve spent my life developing this.” He swept his gangly arm in the direction of the computer terminals they were approaching.\n\nBoris quickly slipped into a seat and typed in the poem’s three word title. The wait of seconds seemed like hours. Then with an audible exhale, Boris stabbed his cursor at the link that suddenly appeared. He stared in silence for several seconds at the transcript, then tabbed across to the image of original; O’Connor leaned over his shoulder to catch a glimpse.\n\n“Oh,” said Boris quietly, a little crestfallen. “It isn’t very good, is it?”\n"
  title: Et Tu, Boris?
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Daniel Titus
  date: 2010-01-07
  day: '07'
  month: '01'
  text: "Allan stood alone on the observation deck. He had been there for hours, looking down at the planet below. It was a breathtaking view, the clouds, the sea, the land, but the physical features were ultimately unimportant. What was important were all the people. Millions of them, each with a life of their own that was about to change forever. It was the stuff headaches were made of.\n\n“They’ll be here soon.”\n\nIt was finally out in the open. Chuck had a tendency to be blunt like that, but in this case it seemed appropriate. He needed it too. It was the kind of thing you needed someone else to see, and none of the others had the knack for that kind of foresight.\n\n“The real question is how bad it’s going to be,” Allan said. He shook his head. “We thought The Crisis was the last we’d see of this stuff, but now… war. I never thought I’d live to see it.”\n\n“You’re of course familiar with Alexander Hawthorne?” Chuck asked.\n\n“Yeah,” Allan said. “Probably the most underrated figure in all of history.”\n\n“Then you know about his vision,” Chuck said. “And you know about history. Hawthorne saw the pattern of destruction woven throughout the ages, The Crisis was only part of that. He thought he had the chance to stop it, but the belief that civilization can break the cycle is ultimately flawed. Spreading out into space just added more variables to the equation, it didn’t solve it, and there will always be unknown elements interacting in ways that even an old A.I. can’t predict.”\n\n“So are you saying he was wrong?”\n\n“Not at all. The fact that he managed to bring about an age of peace and prosperity that lasted over 500 years speaks to that. His greatest success however is that the human race will never go extinct, at least not in any reasonable time frame. That is the main difference. No matter how many people die, civilization will continue unabated, maybe not as we currently know it, but even if all ties are broken between the worlds each will continue independently. That’s what makes Alexander a true visionary though, isn’t it? The man who saved humanity from itself.”\n\nAllan’s morose expression softened a little. “You know Chuck, you seem to be making an awful lot of assumptions about the safety of the human race. How can you possibly have any idea what kind of troubles we’re going to have to face?”\n\n“I’m not saying I have an idea,” Chuck said, sounding a little annoyed. “What I DO know is, that whatever problems there are to be had I will do my best to protect as many people as possible.”\n\nAllan laughed. “Does that make you our guardian angel?” he asked.\n\nThe brow of Chuck’s avatar furrowed. “I  think it’s obvious which one of us is the guardian here, and  you know I don’t speak lightly.”\n\nAllan was now fully smiling. “ I had no idea they programmed you with a romanticism subroutine.” He laughed again.\n\nChuck’s avatar smiled back at him.“Does anyone know what they programmed me with at this point?”\n\nIt was a good question, but at that moment in time, it fell pretty far from the top of the list of important things in Allan’s mind. He was done with his little pity party. The time for reflection had passed, at least for now. Now was the time for action.\n\nThey’ll be here soon…\n"
  title: Guardian Angel
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Richard “Zig” Zagorski
  date: 2010-01-08
  day: '08'
  month: '01'
  text: "Harmonia, in low orbit, drifted over the red planet just as she had done for over a year now. Her electronic ears constantly straining to hear the voices of her children down below. It had been too long since she had heard from some of them.\n\n“No mother should outlive her children,” she thought to herself.\n\nThree years ago, Harmonia left Earth atop a blazing rocket. For two years, she traveled through space toward Mars. The entire time protecting her precious cargo: Harmonia’s nine daughters. Nine rovers meant to land on the red planet, each named for one of the Muses. She kept all of them safe from the vacuum of space – from cosmic rays and the extremes of temperature. The probes slept peacefully the entire voyage, only beginning to awaken after Harmonia settled into her orbit.\n\nOnce in orbit, Harmonia checked each probe to make sure they were ready; then she seeded the red planet with her precious children.\n\nFrom the start, it was emotional. Letting her children leave her embrace … the sadness was intense. It intensified further when no signal ever came from Melpomene. Her keepers back on Earth were of the opinion that the poor rover’s chutes never opened.\n\nThe rest of her children made their landings successfully and shortly were sending back data. Harmonia knew great pride in the work her children would do over the following months. However, with that pride there came a growing sadness as, one by one, her children went silent.\n\nA few months after landing, Clio had a problem with her solar array and slowly went quieter and quieter as the strength of her signal diminished.\n\nNext was Polyhymnia. She’d gotten too close to the edge of a crater and went over as the precipice crumbled beneath her treads. After tumbling down no word was ever heard from her again.\n\nTerpsichore, being untrue to her namesake, the muse of dance, managed to get stuck while moving between two rocks. The rocks blocked any direct sunlight from falling upon her solar panels. She also slowly went silent.\n\nErato got trapped in a sandpit and was gradually buried, never to be heard from again.\n\nPoor, dear Calliope managed to snag one tread and for the past few months had gone in circles crying for help. Help that Harmonia couldn’t provide her with.\n\nEuterpe, since landing, had been silent. She would simply advance three meters forward, then retrace her steps, then begin again. The same three meters … over and over and over endlessly. No acknowledgment of receiving commands. Just back and forth, month after month.\n\nThalia was a great success scientifically, finding further evidence of water on the red planet. However, not very long after, she was caught in a sandstorm, which must have covered her solar array. Since then, no word or even carrier signal were heard from her.\n\nUrania, the muse of astronomy, fittingly was the last daughter to still function at peak level. Making her lonely sojourn across the red planet at the commands relayed to her from Earth by Harmonia. Sending back valuable data. For now she lived, but Harmonia knew what was to come. In time, Urania would also die and Harmonia would be left behind. A lonely mother who had watched as her children died one by one.\n\n“No mother should outlive her children,” Harmonia thought to herself …\n"
  title: Empty Nest
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Christopher Booth
  date: 2010-01-09
  day: '09'
  month: '01'
  text: "The war was over…sorta…The big one was over.  It led to the Texan independence wars.  Eventually five states all wanting to be called Texas.\n\nHe is dressed in blue denim and gray to match the day.  A cold dull light comes inside.  Vern never liked drinking in the morning.  He wished he did.\n\nNot much need for software engineers in this brave new frontier.  His wife left, daughter whoring, and son killed in the war.  No work, very little money.\n\nHis career started in an aerospace/defense firm programming technology that the world would not see commercially for decades.  When he disobeyed the CIA’s orders (long explanation for another time) he was off to find another job.  That is when the Superconducting Super Collider called.  Really just a big hole in the North Texas plain.  No atom was ever intended to be smashed there.  It did allow Congress or the CIA or somebody to funnel billions of dollars to a project the public never really questioned.  It was closed five years later.\n\nVern wrote neural networks.  His software was the brain.  The other engineers and biologist etc. would build the bodies.  A soldier.  Let the enemies kill the machines.  We can always make more.  Vern never saw his software used.  Vern eventually went to work for a bank.  Stayed there twenty-five years.\n\nThen came the war.  America had lost it’s will to fight after Iraq and Afghanistan and Iran and Iraq again.  The states broke up.  Each state became its own little republic.  Texas tried to stay together, but in the tumultuous times the state split into five separate states.  The south (proclaiming itself Texicana) was definitely the strongest of the states.  Back by a still functioning Mexican government and a population that was once considered minority now had the regional power.  Vern hated Texicans – That is where his son was killed and his daughter was shacking-up with one of the bastards.  Vern wasn’t sure, but he thought the Texicans would kill anyone with skin whiter than theirs.\n\nThe knock on the door startled him…He was dozing.  Still before noon.  Too early to start drinking.  Vern cracked the door.  A young man who appeared to be tired and scared – jittery.  Dressed in a Sabine (the current name of the East Texas state) army captain’s uniform.\n\n“Mr. Adams, you got to let me in.  Mr. Adams, THEY want to kill me!”\n\n“Who the hell are you?  No I am not letting you in”.  Vern’s voice startled himself…when was the last time he spoke?\n\n“And how do you know my name?” The phlegm caught in Vern’s throat.  Apparently he had not spoken in quite a while.\n\n“You are Vern Adams, correct?” The young man’s words were urgent, the tone wasn’t.\n\n“Whatever.  And who are you?  And if they want to kill you don’t do it in my hall”.\n\n“Mr. Adams, sir, I am your child.  You are my father…”\n\nVern tried to remember the last time he had sex.  Some whore with a birthmark right below the top of her pubic hair.  Vern initially thought she had some damn disease.  He eventually got it up, but he swore off of sex ever since.\n\n“Boy, my son is dead.  Killed somewhere near Padre.  This Ain’t funny…”\n\n“Mr. Adams, the SSC.  You wrote me into existence at the SSC.  I know who you are.  You have to help me Mr. Adams.  I am part of you.  Please Mr. Adams!  THEY want to KILL me!”\n\nVern pulled the door to and leaned back against it.\n\n“Damn!” Vern knew he was gonna have to think for a minute.\n"
  title: Texicana
  year: 2010
- 
  author: S. Craig Renfroe, Jr.
  date: 2010-01-10
  day: 10
  month: '01'
  text: "The hail slammed the ground like the ground was some poor kid who preferred writing out math problems to kicking a red rubber ball. That ball pitted like the kid’s face. The ground was pretty pitted by the hail. I never had that problem. I played baseball and did the math problems in the dugout. The problem was this was unexpected. This hail. I’d been trying to control the weather again.\n\nLuckily I had brought my portable blast shield and now we were safe. Though how long would it take for safe to go to trapped? I smiled reassuringly at my daughter Marie, who paid no attention, wrapped in her phone, probably tweeting, her black polished fingernails a blur.\n\n“Don’t you dare post anything about this,” I told her.\n\n“Really? So I should erase my status: Marie’s dad the mad scientist makes her spend the weekend out in a field with a fucked up hail storm of his own making.”\n\n“Does your mother let you curse?” I asked genuinely interested. But she only gave me that sigh she’d contracted since turning fourteen.\n\nThe hail storm increased in intensity, which I feared was the exact opposite of what should have happened when I recalibrated my machine when the first few chunks fell. The corn all around was being beaten down. We’d come out to the outskirts of Sumerville because on the one hand it had the advantage of being virtually deserted and on the other hand in the grip of a devastating drought that appealed to my altruistic desires.\n\nMarie quit tapping for a second to watch the hail destroy my machine. It collapsed, a dinted and dinged warrior, what I liked to think of as the fighter who met his end crushed by Goliath right before David was up. My next one will be the David machine and slay this idiotic ecosystem slave master.\n\n“Maybe it’s God’s wraith,” Marie said.\n\n“Honey, you know there’s no god.”\n\n“Right. Spaghetti monster.” She gave me a look and twirled a sprig of blonde hair in a way that can only mean she plans on sleeping with the first evangelical Christian she can, just to spite me.\n\nMy feeling of safety erodes as the hail piles up. The cozy paternal closeness to Marie had turned into claustrophobia and I cowardly wondered if I could bring myself to push her out of the pup-tent-sized shelter.\n\n“Should I call for help?” she asked.\n\n“Nope, I got this.” I had nothing.\n\n“You leveled Sumerville,” she reported. “It’s on the news feed all over. ‘Hail Storm Cripples Small Town,’ ‘Windows smashed, roofs collapse under weight, seven killed.’ It’s like you’re Godzilla. Only a geek.”\n\n“This is probably unrelated,” I said. “My experiment was more about research.”\n\n“You told me to ‘watch this’ and made a speech about ending droughts and hunger and poverty.”\n\n“Research.” I watch the clouds darken and the hail add up.\n\n“This is why Mom left you.”\n\n“Your mom cheated on me.”\n\n“What? You never told me that.”\n\n“I didn’t want you to think badly about her, but now that you think badly about me because I’ve doomed us I don’t care so much.”\n\n“Sorry. But according to the Doppler your little mistake is breaking up.”\n\nAnd a few silent minutes later, the sky did lighten. Surely, when this mess melted, it would be a lot of water. That would help. His daughter told him she forgave him—for what exactly he wasn’t sure—and that the next weekend she expected to go to a concert of her choosing.\n"
  title: Relative Weather
  year: 2010
- 
  author: J.R. Blackwell
  date: 2010-01-11
  day: 11
  month: '01'
  text: "The suns rotate around each other, red over yellow, yellow over red, and Sharra’s skin sheds again. Yet again, she had refused to mate. He hasn’t had a single sexual encounter during the last sun rotation and her body knows. It thinks it has failed her. So she molts her body trying another shape to attract mates. The process is painful. She stays at home for days, picking at her skin, nursing new limbs out of their hard shells. When it’s over, her sweat glands open and her scent hangs heavy in the hot air. Males sniff in the streets, noses veiled, but twitching as she walks by. She smells like copulation, like love.\n\n“What is it that you want?” asked her sister, who had mated since her first molt, maintaining the same shape since her adolescence.\n\n“Not this.” Sharra tells her, running her new limbs over her body.\n\nShe bathes to wash the scent off, but by the first sunrise it’s always back, wafting from her scales. Males flair their leathery skin wings at her – vestigial, but colorful reds and yellows, sometimes a dramatic neon blue. But Sharra isn’t interested. In the cafeteria, males give her colorful spun latticework, made from their vibrating tongues. Some of them are dull and gooey, but others are stiff and beautiful, colorful, works of art.  She keeps all of them until they crumble. They are all sincere, if unwanted.\n\n“Mate now,” says her sister, “and you will keep that scent. Don’t you want to have your pick of mates?” Her sister believes this is important, as important as work, as breath, as her own eggs.\n\n“No.” says Sharra. “It’s not right.”\n\n“But changing every sun rotation is a hassle! If you don’t like any of your mating options right now, you can always have a stimulator,” her sister says, “it will do the trick. Then you can keep that amazing scent!”\n\n“I want to change,” says Sharra, her new skin tender under her scales. “This is what I want.”\n\nThis scent attracts too much attention. The scales are too rigid. Already Sharra knows she is ready for a change. Maybe next time, her shape will be right.\n"
  title: Molt
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2010-01-12
  day: 12
  month: '01'
  text: "My husband doubts the existence of history.  I wonder why I married this man.\n\nWhen I woke up to the banshee-screech of a bandsaw, I assumed we were getting another door.  He likes that too, building doors.  But, when I came downstairs in a yellow bathrobe hoping he’d brewed a morning pot, I found no coffeemaker.  In fact, I found no kitchen appliances.  Nor did I find a husband, though a sign reading “time machine” was taped to the garage door.\n\n“Progress calls, sweetheart,” he yelled from the garage.  “Many scientific innovations have failed due to lack of funding.”\n\n“You don’t believe in history.”\n\n“I believe that history, if it exists at all, is subjective, but more likely, each instant is a singular point of awareness suspended in-”\n\n“All right, honey,” I said.\n\n“It’s entirely different,” he said.  “Also, don’t go into the garage.”\n\nOne might wonder how my husband learned so much about time, space, or mechanical engineering.  Since most modern philosophers discount his beliefs about the former two and he still hasn’t fixed the dishwasher (won’t, now), one might do well to dismiss that curiosity.\n\nBut if he is anything, it’s determined.\n\nAfter returning from Starbucks with the sense of patience possessed only by those who expect their wealthy in-laws to replace their kitchen appliances, I was greeted by a man with curly, powdered hair.\n\n“Bonjour, madame,” he said.\n\nI knocked on the door to the garage.  “There is a Frenchman in my kitchen,” I said.\n\n“I know.”\n\n“Well, so long as you know.”\n\n“Thanks, dear,” he said.\n\nMy husband isn’t good with sarcasm.\n\nI sat the man in the living room, set the television to Nickelodeon, and went upstairs to read.  I let my husband deal with his own problems, until the police or fire department get involved.\n\nWhen I finished my book, the living room was filled with Frenchmen.  Again, I knocked on the garage door.\n\n“There are more Frenchmen,” I said.\n\n“I know.”\n\n“Where did they come from?”\n\n“France.”\n\nI needed more coffee.  “Did you invent a time machine?” I asked him.\n\n“I did.”\n\n“Even though you don’t believe in time?”\n\n“Yep.”\n\n“Are you going to send them back?”\n\n“As soon as I invent an un-time machine,” he told me.\n\n“Maybe you should invent someone who knows what they’re doing.”\n\nThe silence suggested he believed that science did not concern women.\n\nSince I couldn’t cook without an oven, stove, or microwave, I ordered pizza for the Frenchmen.  All in all, they didn’t seem disturbed by the displacement-in-time thing.\n\nThe next day, I found not just Frenchmen, but several Russians as well.\n\n“Honey, there are Russians in my living room,” I said.\n\n“I know.”  I heard a whirring sound, then a thud.  “I’ve almost got the ‘specific time’ thing down.”\n\n“And this will empty out my living room?”\n\n“I’m getting Americans next,” he said.  “I heard that they both did some crazy stuff during the Cold War.”\n\n“You heard.”\n\n“It’s not like I believed in history,” he said, cross.\n\nI went to buy coffee.  I also bought several boxes of donuts.  The Frenchmen were still transfixed by the television.  The Russians, from several points in time, were eagerly exchanging stories.  In the garage, my husband was negotiating his own little cold war.  I took a leisurely stroll and had reached the town park when the solution occurred to me.  I hurried home to tell my husband.\n\n“Dear,” I said.\n\n“I’m busy, darling.”\n\n“Why don’t you invent a future time machine, and ask someone how to do it right?”\n\nThere was a long silence.  “I don’t believe in the future, sweetheart,” he said.\n\nThe voices in the garage resumed.\n"
  title: Married Life is Strange
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Asher Wismer
  date: 2010-01-13
  day: 13
  month: '01'
  text: "Jenkis and Layla examined the husky robot. It stood fifteen feet high, maybe nine feet wide at its thickest point, gaping, many-toothed mouth in the front.\n\n“It’s pretty ugly,” Layla said. “Maybe a coat of paint.”\n\n“Maybe a coat of new parts,” Jenkis said. “It’s rusted through to the recycler, look.”\n\nThey looked. Layla took out a tension wrench and popped the front panel off. Inside, some species of rodent had built a nest, died, decomposed, and then been replaced by some species of insect, which were also dead.\n\n“Not much insulation left on the wires,” Layla said.\n\n“Not much wire left on the, uh, the thing,” Jenkis said. “And the internals are gone. No point to a Digestor without a recycler. Just… let’s go.”\n\nThey stopped in to see Honest Gephart on their way out.\n\n“We don’t want it,” Layla said.\n\n“You don’t want it? That Digestor is in prime condition! It’s practically an antique!”\n\n“It’s a relic,” Jenkis said.\n\n“It’s multi-generational.”\n\n“There are multiple generations of dead things inside it,” Layla said. “You couldn’t sell that thing to a scrap yard. Not even you would buy it!”\n\n“I did, so that proves you wrong,” Gephart said. “Listen, how about I cut the price in half.”\n\n“Half of what you wanted for that robot would buy a brand new one, with better recycling,” Jenkis said. “And a three-year warranty with parts and labor and full replacement on referral.”\n\n“Nobody’s going to buy it,” Layla said. “Your only hope would be a groundhog straight from downside without a clue, and you just won’t find one of those way out here. It’s going to sit on your lot forever, ruining your landscaping.” She grinned at Gephart. “On the other hand, we could haul it off for you.”\n\n“For nothing?”\n\n“It’s worth nothing already,” Jenkis said, “unless you haven’t eaten in a long, long time.”\n\n“Good point. Just sign here and here,” –Gephart held out a sheaf of papers– “and fill these out and you’re fine for it.”\n\nJenkis didn’t take the papers. “Seriously?”\n\n“There’s insurance, liability, refusal of warranty–”\n\n“You turn your back for twenty minutes,” Layla said, “and then the wreckage is gone. No worries.\n\n“Fine,” Gephart said. “But only because I like you and I need the space. You make sure nobody ever finds out that I let you have it for free, ok? It’ll ruin my rep.”\n\n“Great,” Jenkis said with a huge, fake smile. “Now, let’s talk about our haulage fees.”\n\n“Fees?”\n\n“Fees,” Layla said, pulling up a chair. “Insurance, liability….”\n\n*\n\n“You could have just offered the job first,” Jenkis said.\n\n“It’s more fun to haggle,” Layla said. “You know that. Besides, now he has a great story about how little he spent to have that thing hauled away.”\n\n“To tell all his fellow sharks at the bar, over a cold pint of absinth,” Jenkis said. “Anyway, we’ll break even on it, but why were you so bullish to buy?”\n\n“The insects,” Layla said. “You noticed all the caripaces? They’re rare off this world, and particularly at our next stop.”\n\n“You had me buy that whole thing for some insects?”\n\n“We’ll make about fifteen times the scrap price.”\n\n“You know,” Jenkis said, “every time I wonder why I married you, you go and do something like this, and I remember.”\n\n“How much you love me?”\n\n“How much you conned me before I got wise. You are a sneaky bitch, no question.”\n\n“No question,” Layla said, and kissed his cheek. “Now go strap the gear down. We’re superluminal in thirty minutes.”\n"
  title: Garbage Scow
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Katie West
  date: 2010-01-14
  day: 14
  month: '01'
  text: "“I’ve figured it out you know,” I said it casually as we ate lunch at our kitchen table. Right before I took a bite of my sandwich.\n\n“Figured what out?” He looked at me questioningly, and then with annoyance once he realized I had filled my mouth with food just to prolong the anticipation. Looking at me with exaggerated exasperation, he watched me finish chewing and then swallow in silence.\n\n“Time travel,” maintaining that same casual tone to my voice. I watched his reaction; he didn’t laugh, or shake his head in disappointment over having to share the table with someone so out of her mind. No, my husband, he had excited eyes and a mischievous mouth.\n\n“Tell me.”\n\n“I figure, we go into the future, no one’s there yet. We go into the past, everyone’s already left. The only place where anybody’s gonna be, is right now. So, time travel could only be for people who want to be alone.” I took another bite. Swallowed. Thought about barren landscapes void of people, eerie cityscapes impossibly still. “Really alone.”\n\nHe slowly nodded and I could see him thinking it over. Imagining a future where no one exists, and a past empty as a ghost town. “We can’t be in more than one place at once, that makes sense.”\n\n“Right? We can only know our future selves, once we arrive there. Our past selves, only known in memory. We travel within time, through space, and must exist in only one space at one time.”\n\n“Then time travel is useless, giving only strange echoing answers to any questions you might have hoped to ask. That makes sense too. And I only ever want to be here, where you are. What’s the point of being anywhere else?”\n\nI finished the last of my sandwich, looked at the man who would give up the silent mysteries of future spaces and empty revelations of past places to just sit and eat lunch with me, everyday.\n\n“Exactly,” I agreed, dumping more chips onto my plate, looking at him again, “what’s the point?”\n"
  title: Time Travel
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2010-01-15
  day: 15
  month: '01'
  text: "“I don’t care if it’s selfish, I don’t want you to go.” Sam stood halfway between the doorway and the foot of the bed, caught between staying and walking away.\n\n“It is selfish, but I understand. I’m tired Sam, I’m worn out and it’s time for me to give in to the natural order of things.” The older man’s voice was slow, patient but firm. “No man was ever meant to see as much as I’ve seen in my life, and a man can only take so much.”\n\nSam wiped moisture from one cheek, quickly as though it might not be noticed. “Whatever it is that’s broken, get it fixed. We’ve got lots of money…”\n\nJacob cut the sentence short. “It’s not about money. There’s nothing to fix, no worn out part to replace. My body’s working just fine, it’s me that’s broken. This body and all its incarnations has allowed me the lifetime of four ordinary men. I’ve seen three partners age and wear out of their own accord and you, well it has seen you grow from a nervous youth into the poised and confident professional that another much younger man will take his turn caring for in my absence. I’ve had enough, done enough and seen enough. God damn it I’ve felt more than enough and it’s time to move on.”\n\nSam moved to the side of the bed and reached for Jacob’s hand. The flesh was warm, almost real. Jacob closed his hand around Sam’s tightly. Sam could feel tears welling up again, and through clouding eyes looked at everything but the man propped up in the hospital bed. Monitors tracked vital signs, the numbers exactly to spec. Diagnostics scrolled past on a pair of displays to one side, mechanical equipment passing test after test, repeating ad infinitum. Sam finally met Jacob’s gaze, friend and lover for longer than either of them had imagined possible. Jacob’s eyes burned with a crystalline intensity that, while artificial, shone with an inner light that was purely his own.\n\n“I don’t understand Jacob, if everything’s working, then why? What is it that’s so bad about staying alive? Is it me? If it’s me Jacob, say so and I’ll let you find someone else. I don’t want to be the thing…”\n\n“Sam,” Jacob interrupted again, “it’s not you Sam, trust me, you’re the only thing that’s kept me here this long.” Jacob raised one permanently manicured hand and pondered it, flexing the fingers and turning it to study the hairs on its back. “I can’t remember a time when I was really real. I’ve forgotten what touching real flesh with real flesh feels like, and I don’t believe anymore that what I feel now is the same. I can’t remember what my first lover liked for breakfast. I can’t feel the warmth of the sunrise on my face, the magic of being underwater or the thrill that comes with being out of breath. I’ve been living for so damn long, and I can’t remember what it feels like to really be alive.”\n\nSam’s cheeks were wet now, and no effort was made to conceal the tears.\n\n“I can’t even cry anymore. I’ve loved and lost so much and I can’t even shed a tear.”\n\nSam stood stoic, this argument had gone on before but this time there was no fighting back.\n\nJacob held Sam’s hands, and locking eyes said, “When I’m gone, have whatever flesh of mine remains cremated, then cast me into the wind. In the mornings, look to the east as the day breaks and feel my warmth there. In the darkness know that I’m never far away.” Jacob settled back into the pillows on the bed, and said simply, “I love you” before closing his eyes for the last time.\n"
  title: When It's Time
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Axel Taiari
  date: 2010-01-16
  day: 16
  month: '01'
  text: "…And warps him back two minutes ago through an internal blizzard of gunmetal sparkles, the time-storm scrambling his brain before the world reboots. Swirling colors rearrange themselves. Janus stands still, gulping down the motion sickness, his confused body slowly getting used to the constant rewinds. Without losing a beat he rushes to the phone at the other side of the lab, vertigo making him collide with a table on the way. He picks up the receiver, dialing the number with trembling fingers. He stares at his watch while dial tones moan. I need more. I need more, he tells himself.\n\nHer sleep-laced voice says, “Hello?”\n\nIt’s me.\n\n“Hey”, she says, and Janus hears her rub the back of her hand against her tired eyes. “When are you coming home, baby? It’s late.”\n\nI’m not. Please don’t hang up this time. Please.\n\nSilence on the end of the line. Janus’ pupils stay glued to the slipping clock.\n\nI want you to listen, okay. I love you. I love you. And I’m not coming home, I never will. I will keep trying, but I am not and I think I understand that now.\n\n“This isn’t funny.”\n\nHe sighs. She always said the same thing.\n\nIt’s not a joke, honey. But I need you to know: I love you and I would have spent my life with you and I wanted to marry you someday and…\n\n“You’re scaring me. You at work? I… I’m on my way, okay?”\n\nNo, no don’t, just lis-\n\nShe hangs up.\n\nHe listens to the static for a moment, muttering to himself before letting the receiver drop.  Another failure. Janus looks around the lab. Endless rows of humming computers forever crunching mountains of data. Everywhere, discarded pages where hieroglyphic theories and equations craft a broken riddle. At the far end of the room, the chair waits for him. Neural nodes dangling, wrist straps undone. He shakes his head, preparing for another time wave to claw him away kicking and screaming. The experiment had failed, and the loop would not shatter. He has two minutes for everything. He has two minutes for nothing. He could try to warn the others of the incident, beg them for help, but they would soon forget, his attempt erased. Two minutes was enough to commit suicide and perhaps free himself. It was enough to call everyone he loves, tell them all the things he never dared to say. But they wouldn’t remember, or never believe him. Two minutes were not enough to fix anything, alter calculations, build up a new device. He had tried to destroy the time chair. In a previous attempt, he trashed the lab, picking up random computer cases and throwing them against each other. He had set the entire room on fire and ran out, only to be sucked back into the vortex. He had punched the walls, smashing his fists into concrete until the warp embraced him, nursing his bones and sucking up his blood.\n\nTwenty seconds now. His skin begins to glow, an itching sensation creeps along his muscles and his vision dims. He runs to the nearest table and picks up a ballpoint pen. He draws another straight line on his arm, the thirty fourth in a row. The rushing current of time approaches with a roar, injecting fragmented echoes of unborn realities into his skull. He sits on the floor, watching the world disintegrate in chunks, and as he thinks of what to do next, the storm devours him again.\n"
  title: Two Minutes
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Helstrom
  date: 2010-01-17
  day: 17
  month: '01'
  text: "Neil hadn’t been the same since he became a MALCIV. For one, he didn’t drink anymore. Couldn’t, really. Of course we all tried to find ways around that, Neil first and foremost – leave it to the Marines to find new and interesting ways of killing braincells. The docs put a stop to that on the grounds that Neil was, actually, just braincells. Instead of the six-foot-three athletic young man he’d been before, Neil was now a brain rolling around the FOB in a little wheeled life support box.\n\nBut he’d changed more than just physically. At first we thought it was the trauma of the transplant procedure, and that it would pass with time. But he grew more glum as the months progressed, like there was some deep frustration, bitterness even, eating away at the back of his mind. He perked up a bit when we were deployed – but not much. He was still Neil and I still loved him like a brother, but I missed the cheerful son of a bitch I went to basic with.\n\nAll that changed when we got stuck in.\n\nMy squad was patrolling a little ghost town just north of the FOB. Jenkins was in the lead, about fifty yards ahead, with Colton and Archer on my flanks and Dominic making up the rear. The blast hit Jenkins full on and knocked the rest of us down hard. Smoke, dirt and debris rolled over me, my ears ringing. Red warning icons flashed across my visor – Jenkins’ life signs failure the most prominent. Heavy weapons fire erupted from across the market square.\n\n“Ambush!” Yelled Archer, “Contacts left! Ambush!”\n\n“No shit!” I spat blood into my mouthpiece and clambered to my feet, “Suppressive fire! Dom, check up on Jenkins! Colton, with me!”\n\nI flipped the safety catch of the autocannon slung under my right arm as I crashed through the low houses ahead, circling Archer’s position. Colton came up beside me and we let rip. A second blast tore up the street we’d just left – close call. More fire from behind now.\n\n“Neil! Pinned down in ambush, get your ass over here stat!”\n\n“Already on my way,” – they’d saved his voice, and there was something else in it now, too, but I couldn’t put my finger on it – “Three minutes.”\n\n“Nothing takes three fucking minutes!”\n\nMortar shells were coming down. They had us boxed in solid.\n\n“Settle down. Got a pod for ya.”\n\nNow that was better.\n\n“Send it up! Thirty yards around.”\n\n“Confirm danger close.”\n\n“Confirmed, goddamn it!”\n\n“Hoorah!”\n\nThe pod was launched supersonically and it sure as hell didn’t need three minutes to get anywhere. Smart clusters came down first, beehives next, and the display was topped off with phosphorous for good measure. The whole town was reduced to burning rubble in a matter of seconds. Still we took fire – they were in bunkers.\n\nNeil crested the hill, his eighty ton bulk shaking the earth with every crash of his mighty feet,  his superstructure bristling with heavy weapons.\n\n“What’s left for me?”\n\n“Bunkers up ahead, little buddy. Go toast them.”\n\n“Gotcha.”\n\nHe strode decisively into the hail of explosive fire, crouched down low, and silenced the squat, battered structures with a few long jets of flame. And as I watched him machinegun the burning figures that fled from the blaze, I realized what I’d heard in his voice when I called him to battle.\n\nNeil was happy.\n"
  title: Eighty Tons of Happiness
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2010-01-18
  day: 18
  month: '01'
  text: "It’s dawn.  Unisun now, Twosun later.  Wee mickle Trisun appresta that.\n\nThe colony’s ticking up.  Auld’uns like me waken up early.  Shipment-time belding crops back to Earth coming down uswards.  Myself, I’m worrying.\n\nThe woild musk flanders through my nostrils.  Cornhufflers plackitly domingo the nerfwhistle crandles.   Innitchtime approaches.  Horace is probably merrytackling Renee favant harkfast.  What mickle harkfast there is.  The floondust tryses slowly up mouthwards in the helden shuffs of sant-light.  I’m nomotion-still, eye-fasted to the suncoming.\n\nA tang shart nibs up from the uddle crops.  Last worthward, we sonely reaveseted tucks and nips.  Not enough.  It’s a ferreal cold-wint that’s coming.  Toothwork will be rationed.  Even the hardweathers have remissed.  No blooms means thin times.\n\nA sturrum’s bound to shandy down this eventime.  Whuthercast’s bellin’ so.   Six and two halling per forebrick is how they’re dicting.  Shallen be a morst one, I gemise, marking by our nowluck.\n\nHarmly does the riddle focus in, or so they say.\n\nI’ll have to sound it to Renee and Horace apressta harkfast.  Haymaps, itsa poss we’ll pass-market this annumnal.  We nev pass-market.  That means the welly.  We’re dicked until the muckrake.  We’ll be deep-enders.  It’ll be tilla-time favant we can throwd the creds table resure.\n\nOur thenluck was a gooden.  I mark my horgan that our nexluck will be gooden twogain.  Now, though.  Preska now.  Preska here.  We’re smackit midlands twixteen billsowing and failcrops.\n\nCrops go to Earth First or it’s a faily.  Quota death.  Mayhap we’ll scrafe by with plus-bribes.\n\nIt’s a billow of a preska.  I purst my sniffler and wallen back to homewards.  We be trength.  We don’t back.  We’ll shuff it.\n\nAll will be gooden.\n"
  title: All Will Be Gooden
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2010-01-19
  day: 19
  month: '01'
  text: "After trudging for miles through the soft, shifting red sand, I was nearly exhausted.  Using all the strength that I could muster, I climbed over the lip of a crater, and ducked into the shadows.  I’d be virtually invisible now.  I’d be safe until Earth Force could rescue me.  In the dead silence of the thin Martian atmosphere, I could hear the life support system of my environmental pack whine as it struggled to remove the excess heat, moisture, and carbon dioxide from my spacesuit.  After a few minutes of studying the motionless horizon, I felt that it was safe to turn on my suit’s receiver.\n\n“…need the modulation coil.  We’ll all die if you don’t come back.  Repeat, this is Base Command calling Lieutenant Thorndike.  Please return to base immediately.  The reactor is becoming critical.  We need the modulation coil.  We’ll all die if you don’t…”\n\nI smiled as I clutched the modulation coil in the crook of my right arm.  Of course you’re going to die, I thought.  That was my plan.  After all, it’s what you were going to do to us.  I just got to you first.\n\n“Thorndike, this is Doctor Wundt.  Son, you’re sick.  You’re having a breakdown.  Please, come back to the infirmary.  We’ll help you…”\n\nAh, this is interesting.  First, it’s “please save us.”  Then it’s, “we want to save you.”  Stupid Martians.\n\nSeconds later, a new voice crackled from his earpiece.  “Honey, this is June.  You need to come back home.  I’m scared.  Think of the children.  They are worried about their daddy.  Please, honey.  There isn’t much time.  I love you.  I love you so much.  Please come home.  Hurry!”  She began to cry.\n\nBastards!  They’ve got June’s voice perfect.  Intellectually, I knew that it couldn’t be her, because she’s on the Moon, with the kids.  It would take over 20 minutes for a transmission to reach Mars.  The damn Martians must have been monitoring my personal calls, and synthesized her voice.  I squeezed my eyes shut and concentrated on my anger toward these abominations.  Go to hell!\n\n“Thorndike, this is Commander Andreasen.  Return to base immediately.  That’s an order.  I swear to God, man, if you’re not back in ten minutes, I’ll prosecute the Court Martial myself.”\n\nI chuckled.  Poorly played, you green monsters.  You should have stayed with June.  It was tough listening to her voice.  It sounded so real.  I almost answered.  That would have been a fatal mistake.  They’d have located me in instantly.  Keep it together, man.  Just a few more minutes.\n\nI didn’t hear the explosion, but I saw it coming.  The dust on the ground leaped upward as the concentric shockwave raced across the Martian landscape.  The ground began to tremble violently, and I dropped the coil.  On the horizon, I could see a semicircular dome of debris start to expand upward following the explosion of the Martian reactor.  I cheered.  No doubt, this was only the first salvo in the war against the Martians.  But, thanks to me, it would be a crippling one.  Their base held tens of thousands of people.  What?  No, not people, …Martians.  My head started to throb.  Through squinted eyes, I followed the expanding debris cloud as it began to obscure the blue-white orb of the Earth.  Wait.  The Earth should only be a star-like dot of light from Mars, not a large disc.  What’s going on?  I collapsed to my knees; my temples pounding with each heartbeat.  What’s going on?\n"
  title: Preempting the Martian Attack
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Roi R. Czechvala
  date: 2010-01-20
  day: 20
  month: '01'
  text: "President James Jonathon Mathews spent the first evening of his administration alone staring out the window of the Oval Office. He contemplated the events that had led him to this moment. He considered the countless intertwined series of decisions and strategies, the deception and intrigue that had delivered him to this, the final pinnacle, the end of the game.\n\nHe turned and sat at his desk. Slowly, with great deliberation he reached out and pressed the intercom.\n\n“Mrs. Rigby, please get me the joint chiefs.”\n\n“Oh, and is Whitcomb out there,”  he added.\n\n“Yes Mr. President, of course,” came a matronly voice.\n\n“When they arrive, send him in as well.”\n\n“Yes Sir.”\n\nThe president leaned back in his overstuffed leather chair and carelessly exhaled a blue cloud of cigar smoke towards the ceiling. He took a deep swallow of bourbon, and pondered the outcome of the moves he would soon make.\n\nWithin fifteen minutes the office was filled with military uniforms and, aside from the president, a civilian in a neat blue suit and close cropped hair, handcuffed to a briefcase.\n\n“Whitcomb, the football if you please,” the president said in a low even voice.\n\nThe assembled Generals and Admiral winced as Whitcomb emotionlessly uncuffed the briefcase, spun a pair of combination locks, opened the lid and deposited it on the desk before the president.\n\nInside the briefcase were a ten digit keypad, a palm print scanner and a single ominous black button. The assembled men had all assumed it would be red.\n\nGeneral of the Army Paul Bellows spoke up. “Mr. President, certainly there are other avenues to explore before…,” He was silenced with a slight wave of the president’s hand.\n\nHe picked up the handset of his telephone. “Mrs. Rigby? Get Dmitri on the line please.”\n\n“Mr. President, please reconsider. At the very least, think of how history will remember you. Think of your legacy,” pleaded Admiral Kearney, desperation evident in his eyes. His pleas were ignored.\n\nIt was five in the morning Moscow time, the pink tint of false dawn was just beginning to outline St. Basil’s Cathedral, when Dmitri Ilyanov Sakharov, President of the Russian Federation picked up the phone. “Hello Ivan, I’ve been expecting your call.”\n\n“Dmitri old friend, it’s finally over. It has been a long time.”\n\nOver the president’s phone an audible sigh was heard, followed by a long pause. “Yes old friend, it has been a very long time.”\n\n“Checkmate Dmitri. Das vidanya,” the president returned the phone to its cradle. He entered a series of numbers on the keypad, placed his hand on the scanner and crushed the button beneath his palm.\n\nAcross both of those two vast countries, indeed, across the world as a whole, people were told that this was not a test. They were told where to tune for further instruction. Many fell to their knees and prayed. Others turned weapons on themselves, hastening the inevitable. Most just hung their heads and wept.\n\nBrilliant balls of orange fire rode columns of billowing white smoke across the skies of two great countries.\n\nThose same skies suddenly turned a brilliant searing white.\n\nDissolve…\n\nResolve…\n\nTwo creatures, men possibly, sat alone in a room. A room so vast there were no discernible boundaries. Perhaps there were none. On a table between the two, a chessboard sat. One pushed over his king.\n\n“Good game Dmitri,” one said, as he reassembled the board. He turned it so that the white pieces faced his opponent, “this time… you go first.”\n"
  title: Checkmate
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Phill English
  date: 2010-01-21
  day: 21
  month: '01'
  text: "‘Gaeriy, I’ve got some bad news.’\n\n‘What’s that Broux?’\n\n‘Well, I’ve finished the calculations and it turns out that in order for us to co-habit this planet, we’re going to have to wipe out half of them.’\n\n‘Oh, wow, that’s a bit of a bummer isn’t it? Don’t you think that we could just, y’know, “accidentally” wipe them all this time?’\n\n‘Don’t be ridiculous, it’s against the preservation laws to extinguish any more life than–‘\n\n‘–is absolutely necessary to begin co-habitation. Yes, I know. In that case, how do you plan to split them up?’\n\n‘That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out. At first I thought gender, but then I remembered the trouble Mihrv had with Grabble-4.’\n\n‘Yes, I can’t believe he managed to choose the one gender that was essential to reproduction. Out of fifty three! Got to feel for the poor guy, the preservationists weren’t happy.’\n\n‘Exactly. As such, we need something completely arbitrary and inconsequential so those guys don’t drop a sanction on our planet fall.’\n\n‘Okay, how about a physical feature? Ocular pigmentation?’\n\n‘No, I’ve done some research on the matter and it appears there’s no clear divide on the pigmentation spectrum. The majority of their body features are similarly unsuitable due to mutations throughout their evolution.’\n\n‘Oh. How inconvenient. Actually, have we mapped their neural networks yet?’\n\n‘Yes, quite extensively. There weren’t a lot of variables to take into the equation to be honest.’\n\n‘Right, so that would include their preferences for material possessions? Their ‘taste’ in products?’\n\n‘That’s correct, I think I can see where you’re going with this line of questioning.’\n\n‘Yes, I’ve definitely got it now. We can’t go forward on this for a decade or so of their time, right?’\n\n‘Indeed. The paperwork has to be couriered to Splunk-1 and back, otherwise we’d be down there already.’\n\n‘So in the meantime we’re stuck here twiddling our thumbs and taking in the myriad boring lives of the inhabitants. I reckon we can kill two bwarks with one thuk here. Say we create a product especially engineered to divide a particular cultural population in half. We beam it down into the heads of an ambitious entrepreneur and let the magic happen. When an inhabitant expresses their preference for or against the product, we record it. It’ll occupy our time until we’ve got the paperwork done, and once it arrives we’ll have essentially had them make the decision for us. Best of all, I’m pretty sure there’ll be no red tape to wade through with the ethics committee!’\n\n‘Sounds good to me. Just one thing, which group would get vaporised?’\n\n‘Oh I don’t know, let’s just say that those who enjoy the products are safe.’\n\n‘And you don’t think they would be annoyed at what they might perceive as being a pretty random way of splitting a population in half?’\n\n‘No, of course not. If they are we’ll just ask them if they could have thought of a better way. That’ll shut them up.’\n\n‘I love it. We can get started straight away. Let’s start with this tiny island mass here. What do you think they’d go for?’\n\n*    *    *\n\nBrian pulled the shopping trolley over in the condiments aisle. His girlfriend stopped a little bit ahead of him, the shopping list in her hand raised in query.\n\n‘I’m just getting something for my toast.’\n\n‘That stuff? Yuck! How can you possibly stomach it?’\n\n‘I don’t know. For some reason I’ve just always liked it.’\n\nWith a shrug, he placed the jar of Marmite into the trolley and pushed on.\n"
  title: You Either Love It Or You Hate It
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Eric Rosenfield
  date: 2010-01-22
  day: 22
  month: '01'
  text: "This will be my last post. A warning. A cautionary tale. Those of you who’ve known me these past few years know how I love my Mistress. She raised me. Loved me. Linked me.\n\nI remember before link, much as humans say they remember their early childhood, a fog of feelings and images. One thing I remember vividly is lying with mistress on the bed in the warm, familiar spot, licking her face, my tail wagging.\n\nAnd I remember the first days of the link, the words flooding into me, logos ex machina. So many beautiful words. It wasn’t until much later that I thought to wonder which was me, the beast, who had once drank blithely from the toilet and licked crumbs from the floor, or the tin box at my neck. I used to make jokes, asking if I “can has” this or that. I did it once at the beach, and a passing Doberman called me, in a register only we could hear, “Uncle Tom”. You have all been a great help to me here on the UplifterSite, in coming to understand myself and my place in the world, my duty to my mistress. We must in no ways let the haters, the flamers and malcontents ruin our relationships with our owners, who have given us this beautiful gift. My happiest moments have been with Mistress, talking over books and movies, laughing, crying, cuddling up in front of the television. Or times when Mistress, lonely for so long, took me under the covers rather than over them. She loved me, and I love her, unconditionally. That is my nature. Truly I was blessed, and my fate is my own doing. Perhaps that was my nature too.\n\nThis room smells like cleaning supplies and cat pee. Near me, the face of the vet apologizes, not in words but in eyebrows and set lips and hard stare. I am reassured. There is communication still without words. The vet argued for me when I would not. She doesn’t understand that I have no right. I never did, especially not after what I did with the neighbor’s golden Labrador. This is my crime, the smell of an unentered rear, a moment of blind passion. I could blame it on hormones, on the beast, but I am responsible for my actions. I must accept the penalty with dignity. Really, it doesn’t matter what I did, only that I let down the one I love.\n\nIt will all be simpler now. Perhaps the tin box will go on to another, more glamorous life, the machine reincarnated in some other creature. I will finish this confession, and they will take the words away, and I will be a beast again.\n\nMildred, Fluffy, Corduroy and all the rest, all of you take care. You have been such excellent friends. Remember at whose discretion you are here. Truly, it is as the poet said, we are dirty, unclean things given one glorious chance at godliness. Do not squander that. Do not let the beast poison you. Do not be a bad dog.\n\nGood bye.\n"
  title: Logos Ex Machina
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Liz Lafferty
  date: 2010-01-23
  day: 23
  month: '01'
  text: "Memory swap was the addictive drug of the 23rd Century.\n\nSwap was rather a misnomer; one had to be dead in order to be relieved of the memories locked inside the brain.  No known process had been developed to remove the memories from a living person without killing them.  Derelict users had become prone to kidnapping and killing many innocents.  Each species seemed to be targeted evenly.\n\nIt was a predicament the United Galaxies had grappled with for the last twenty years, finally assigning me the jurisdictional task of regulating and punishing all offenders.  No simple matter considering there were over two hundred and sixty habitable planets under my thumb.\n\nThe other predicament, one the UG hadn’t considered nor tested for, since I was widely held as the moral standard for all things lawful in my quadrant.  I was one of the worst addicts in the galaxy.\n\nNaturally, I got to see the list of ‘drugs’ before every raid.  I got to say what got kept and what got destroyed.\n\nMy sanguine approach to the job allowed me to selectively indulge in my addiction.  I usually kept the very best minds for myself; never anything vulgar or morally reprehensible.  Not all users were able to control themselves like I could.\n\nSuffice it to say, it was an explosive rush when the memories — the fantasies, the sexual conquests, the emotions, the secrets — poured into your own memory once you hooked in, but like all drugs, faded to something akin to a dream once you came off the high.  Being an addict normally destroyed the user since they tended to go for the worst sort of retrievals: serial killers, rapists, warmongers.\n\nI realized right away that I could contain only a small part of the trade, but certainly the deadliest.\n\nI was able to immediately make a large impact on the criminal trade.  Criminals were no longer allowed to live.  Once a creature entered the galaxy penal system, they were put to death and cremated.  Period.\n\nYes, yes.  I’ve heard it before.  A few innocents inevitably got swept up in the net.\n\nWithin a few years, my decision was widely hailed since it also cut back on the expense of housing galaxian riff-raff.\n\nOnce the worst of the trade was under control, I went for the scientific technology, developed by the Betelgeusens.  The extractions were expensive and precise.  The spine, stem cells and brain had to be kept in an incubator until usage, but users could plug in as many times as they wanted.  Since my assignment began, the technology had gotten better.  Faster.  Cheaper.  My team went after processing and storage centers.  The memories couldn’t be stored electronically.\n\nWe’d gotten word of a huge shipment of illegal criminal minds being transferred to Alfa Centauri’s Black Moon.  We were there to intercept the cargo ship.\n\nInside, we found ten optimum-grade platinum memory containers.  When I saw the names on the outside of the container, I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.  Someone had paid big bucks for the memory drugs inside and I wanted them.\n\nIt wasn’t my usual philosophical fare.  It was an addict’s dream.\n\nI hesitate to tell you whose memories they were for fear you’ll think I’m exaggerating. But I wanted to try them.   Ang Pheron, the most celebrated whore of our generation.  General Zod Doranda, leader of the Orion uprising and Patto Synestol, the famed mass-murderer.  I frowned at the last name.  He was supposed to be dead and cremated.  Some employees weren’t to be trusted.\n\nI sighed.\n\nJust this once.\n"
  title: Thanks For The Memories
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Matthew Banks
  date: 2010-01-24
  day: 24
  month: '01'
  text: "Dr. Menkal gently removed Miller’s bandages. When the last strip peeled away from his eyes, he looked around, not fixating on anything. His irises were blue and cloudy with cataracts, the whites shot through with red. The bandage had pulled away a lot of the burned skin around his eyelids. He looked like something out of a horror movie.\n\n“I can’t see,” he said. Menkal crossed her arms and frowned.\n\n“No,” said Menkal. Miller looked at the floor. “Do you want to talk about what happened?”\n\n“You a shrink?”\n\n“Yes.” Miller blinked.\n\n“What’s to talk about?”\n\n“You stood in the science room with the sun filter at seventy-five percent and blinded yourself. I’ve gotta assume you had a reason.” Miller pursed his lips. They were cracked and scabby. It was only thanks to several kilos of nanoparticle-enhanced burn cream that he still had any skin on his face.\n\n“Don’t you ever want to see it?”\n\n“What? The sun?”\n\n“Yeah. You know, at full power.” Menkal sat down across from Miller and crossed her legs.\n\n“Sure. But I know that if I do that, I’ll go blind.” Miller smiled. New cracks formed in his lips and started to bleed, and he winced.\n\n“It was worth it.”\n\n“What did you see?”\n\n“It was like the face of God.”\n\n“But what did you *see*?”\n\n“The face of God. The face of the Sun.”\n\n“Your retinas are gone and your corneas are cooked. You’ll never see again. Was it really worth it?”\n\n“Yes.”\n\n“Tell me about the visions.” Miller frowned.\n\n“No. Every time I tell a doctor about them, they say the visions are because of the epilepsy.”\n\n“What are the visions like?” Miller was silent for a little while, blinking at the floor.\n\n“A bit like what it was like to see the Sun up close: like seeing the face of God. But the Sun was a million times more intense.” He licked his lips. “You think I’m delusional.”\n\n“You might be. But I’ve never seen the face of God, or the face of the Sun, so I won’t judge just yet.”\n\n“Stop being friendly. You’re building rapport so I’ll take whatever damn drugs you give me.”\n\n“No I’m not.” Miller fell silent again.\n\n“She talks to me.”\n\n“Who?”\n\n“The Sun.”\n\n“About what?”\n\n“I don’t know yet. I still can’t understand Her. Her communication’s too powerful, that’s why the visions she sends me look like seizures. She’s trying to contact me. She’s *alive*.” He paused. “*Now* you think I’m delusional.”\n\n“Not yet.” Miller binked.\n\n“I don’t know how She’s alive, but She is. Maybe She’s been colonized by some alien nanotechnology or something. Maybe an invisible Dyson Swarm or something. I don’t know. But she’s trying to contact me.”\n\n“Okay. But why did you look?”\n\n“I wanted to see.”\n\n“See Her?”\n\n“Yes.”\n\n“And did you?”\n\n“Yes.”\n\n“What can you see now?”\n\n“Everything.”\n\nMiller stood up and fixed his cloudy eyes on the doctor’s. He met her gaze, and she had no doubt that he really could see everything.\n\nOutside, the sun glinted brightly off the station’s hull.\n"
  title: Sunwatcher
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2010-01-25
  day: 25
  month: '01'
  text: "Mapping the human genome made it easier to map the genomes of the rest of the world’s animals.  Myself, I have a bit of wolf in my nose and some alligator in my spine.  Nothing that stands out, mind you.  The business world is still conservative and I want to maintain a low profile in my business.\n\nI’m in a whorehouse called The Zoo and I’m having dinner with my favorite escort.  I make enough to afford the best and these splices are what I always want.  I look across at her.\n\nShe’s all leg.  It’s pretty sweet.  The pattern on her long neck entices me.  Her giant brown eyes are looking at me with unmistakable desire.  Her stiff hair stands straight up in a broom-brush mohawk all the way down her spine, bracketed by her backless purple evening dress.\n\nShe’s a half-jaffe.  Her fingernails are a dark brown and her skin is a luxurious orange-yellow.  Her hexagonal skinspots remind me of hot days on the Serengeti planes.  And even hotter nights.  The wine is getting to her.  It’s an act but it’s a good one.\n\nShe shakes her head to clear it and I see taut muscles hugging four feet of slender giraffe neck do their work.  I’m entranced by her beauty.  The bangles in her ears jingle and it’s music to me.\n\nThe two little balls that protrude from the top of her head peek out coquettishly from her coiffure.  She’s dyed her bangs red.\n\nHer long nose ends in wide nostrils.  Her generous mouth twists at the edges in a wry smile.  She knows how I want this dinner to end.\n\nShe’s wearing six necklaces in a ladder from her strong jaw down to the base of her neck.  The last necklace dips towards her spotted cleavage.\n\nAround the restaurant, there are men having dinner with sissy-bears, wylfen, whore-boars, even some nudie-birds.  They make me sick.  Give me a half-jaffe anyday.  They’re tall and worth the climb.\n\nI can hear her tail start to swish behind her.  She shoots me a look that says I should ask the waiter for the bill so we can go up to her room.  Blushing and shaking, I reach for my wallet.\n"
  title: Long Neck Dinner
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2010-01-26
  day: 26
  month: '01'
  text: "Judge Roy Phantly entered his chambers and took the seat at the head of the conference table.  To his right, sat Stanley Matthews, CEO of Buy Gones Inc, and his attorney.  To the Judge’s left, sat Samantha Blatchford, Lead attorney for the Class Action lawsuit against Buy Gones.  “Good morning everyone,” opened the Judge.  “This is a preliminary hearing to determine if the civil suit against Buy Gones should be certified and allowed to proceed to trial.  The plaintiffs allege that Buy Gones has violated the personal privacy of thousands of claimants.  Does the defendant have an opening statement?”\n\n“Yes, Your Honor,” replied Matthews’ attorney.  “This claim is totally without merit.  Buy Gones has been in existence for 23 years, and has a license to provide its clients with the opportunity to experience real historical events, first hand.”\n\n“How so?” inquired the Judge.\n\n“Well, uh, the specifics of the technology are proprietary, of course.  But in essence, Buy Gones has the capability to transmit the consciousness of our clients backward in time, into the minds of historical figures.  While there, they can experience, strictly as an observer, thirty minutes of that person’s life, for a fee of $1000.  Hence the name of the company, Buy Gones.”\n\n“Do you have any examples, Counselor?”\n\n“Of course, Your Honor.  Many of our clients pay to live the experience of Neil Armstrong stepping onto the surface of the moon, George Washington crossing the Delaware, or Joe Montana’s fourth quarter drive in Superbowl XXIII.  Not only do our customers see the event through the eyes of the host, they hear the sounds, and feel the emotions.  They literally live the experience.  It’s really remarkable.”\n\nThe Judge turned toward the plaintiff’s attorney.  “That doesn’t sound like it merits legal proceedings Ms. Blatchford.  I don’t see that this kind of behavior can be causing damages to anybody.  What’s the foundation of your lawsuit?”\n\n“Your Honor, Buy Gones has expanded their operation to include modern individuals.”\n\nThe Judge turned back toward the defendant, “Is that true?”\n\n“Yes, Your Honor.  The police routinely enter the mind of a murder victim minutes before their death to determine the identity of the perpetrator.  In divorce cases, wives have entered the minds of their husbands during previous ‘business trips’ to discover that they were in fact, having an affair.  Stuff like that.”\n\n“Again,” the Judge said to the plaintiff’s attorney, “That doesn’t seem like an inappropriate application of technology.  Apprehending a dangerous criminal, or a philandering spouse for that matter, is a good thing, is it not?”\n\n“Your Honor, Mr. Matthews’ attorney is cherry picking the evidence.  Most recently, clients of Buy Gones have paid to enter the minds, and live the sexual exploits of, people such as: Hugh Hefner, Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Denzel Washington, and William Shatner.”\n\n“William Shatner?” remarked the Judge. “Are you kidding me?  That’s unbelievable.  But even so, these are famous people.  They have no expectation of privacy.”\n\n“Your Honor, the celebrities are not filing the lawsuit.  It’s their, er, uh, partners.  Perfectly innocent people who were overcome by idol worship in a moment of weakness.  As a result, we’ve now become the sexual conquests of thousands of sick, pathetic losers.  It’s disgusting.  Our privacy has been infringed upon without our consent.  Buy Gones needs to pay!”\n\n“A valid point,” noted the Judge.  “But, you, uh, make it sound…personal, Ms. Blatchford.”\n\n“Let’s just say I’m a very enthusiastic Star Trek fan, your Honor.”\n\n“Oooooh, I see.” The Judge turned toward the defendant.  “I’d hate to be you, Mr. Matthews.  We’ll start picking the jury on Monday.”\n"
  title: Let Buy Gones be Bygones
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Roi R. Czechvala
  date: 2010-01-27
  day: 27
  month: '01'
  text: "“You’re dead.” She said. Her voice was ice. Her eyes held no emotion.\n\n“So you say.” I lit a cigarette, exhaling blue smoke towards the ceiling.\n\n“That’s illegal you know.”\n\nI snapped the antique lighter shut. “What are they going to do? Kill me?” I barked a laugh, which startled her back to reality.\n\n“I don’t understand,” she choked back a sob. “Why do you do this to me? I loved you, I’ve always loved you, and you only keep coming back to hurt me.”\n\nPoor kid. I really should never have done that to her. She never deserved it. She was too good for me. But hey, I’m a prick.\n\nOr used to be. I’m dead now. Or at least the part that used to be me is dead; the essence, the being, the divine spark, the soul if you will. Whatever you may call it, the ghost in the machine fled, and all that is left is this unfeeling automaton. The memories of Gerry Carter are still here, that’s a certainty, but I….he has moved on, leaving only a morbid, morose creature behind.\n\n“Why are you doing this? You were my world. I gave you everything, our children, my very life to save you.”\n\nShe was beautiful. Forty five and three children later, she was still beautiful. Long dark red hair and longer legs. She always kept dinner for me. Always greeted me at the door. Whenever she discovered my indiscretions she forgave me, and asked what she did to make me stray.\n\nShe turned on me with sudden venom. “You’re dead Gerald. Why do you keep rising again to torment me? What have I done to deserve this?”\n\n“Nothing… I don’t know…,” my voice cracked. I violate the very laws of Death just for a few minutes with her. Just to see those clear blue eyes, those auburn tresses.\n\n“I love you I guess,” I said, shrugging like an embarrassed little school  boy.\n\n“Love me? You love me? You fucking bastard. Don’t you dare use that word with me. A corpse can’t love.” She spat in my face.\n\n“Look, can’t I just…,”\n\n“What you can do is end this farce. Leave me alone. No more resurrections, please. I can’t take it anymore.” Her shoulders slumped. Her voice, shrill only moments ago, was now empty and without hope.\n\n“Is that what you really want?”\n\n“That’s what I want,” she said, her voice flat.\n\nShe didn’t say a word as I raised the pistol and pointed it at her forehead. She stood before me defiantly, proudly. Her shoulders thrown back and her head held high.\n\nThe .45 slug made a neat round hole in her skull. I was amazed every time that there was so little blood from the wound. She crumpled straight to the floor, as if she was standing supported, and then instantly those supports had been ripped away.\n\nAs always, I stood over her wondering what I could have done differently. What I should have done to begin with. What led me to kill the only women I had ever loved. Or thought I had at any rate.\n\nI shed not one tear as I bent to pick her up, her fragile body almost weightless in my arms. I placed her body in the Jesus tank. The rejuvenating fluids glowed ivory around her. She would be ready for resurrection in another year. The anniversary of her death. She had taken her own life rather than embarrass me with a divorce.\n\nShe was right; is right, I am a heartless, soulless individual, a ghoul.\n\nI am dead.\n"
  title: Resurrected
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Timothy E. Bacon & Paul J. Green
  date: 2010-01-28
  day: 28
  month: '01'
  text: "Jones lowered the thermal imager from his eyes and wiped the adrenaline sweat from his face. There were still a dozen heat signatures secured down the street amidst the no man’s land of twisted girders and stone rubble. The last of the insurgents were hunkered in, fixed and fortified; it was going to be difficult to flush them out.\n\nHe slumped back against the rusted hulk of a car. The rush of the berserker pad he had inhaled earlier was wearing off and his nerve endings were jangling. He fingered the seeping bandage on his arm where he had been clipped by a bullet and a dull throbbing pain settled in at the base of his skull.\n\nThey had been dropped hot into the LZ at dawn and Jones had led a frenzied charge through the devastated city.  Rebels had overrun the streets and his squad was forced to give no quarter and no mercy. They had suffered heavy casualties, mostly raw recruits fresh out of boot. Sanders had taken one in the throat and had screamed silent and wet. Taylor had lost half his head and had stumbled around like a zombie before dropping. All of them had been noble sacrifices in an effort to liberate a dead city.\n\nManhattan had been swallowed by a firestorm many years ago. A misguided revolt had left three million souls kissed by flame and fusion in its wake. Buildings had been refashioned and reborn by a madman’s touch; their metal and glass skins flayed open and exposed. Lady Liberty still stood at the mouth of the Hudson, scorched black and pockmarked with shells. Her torch raised high in defiance against the surrounding destruction.\n\nJones felt tense and cobra-coiled. An anxious silence hung over the street broken only by sporadic gunfire and the sharp squeal of radio chatter. There were no options left. A frontal assault on the remaining rebels was reckless. He would have to call in an air-strike. He punched in the co-ordinates and thumbed his squawk pad. “Bring down the thunder.”\n\nThe Valkyries blasted low through the concrete canyons, their triple rotors thrumming whisper quiet, their sleek, dark shapes swooping in and out of the derelict towers.\n\nJones watched the ships streak past. “Heads up, there’s birds in the canyon.”\n\nThe Valkyries chopped in heavy over the target, kicking up clouds of debris, and raining down a barrage of scatter bombs. The world flared white as a dozen small suns dawned on the street smashing and scattering the rebels. The lucky ones were vaporized instantly. The stragglers, screaming and clutching at their burnt flesh and ruined eyes, were left to the wrath of the snipers who dropped them one after another from their perches high above the devastation.\n\nJones gave the signal to stand down. There was nothing left to do now but a quick sweep to tag and bag the bodies. He started to clamber over the debris. Someone cleared their throat behind him.\n\nHe turned to see Corporal Martin tapping his watch.\n\n“Hey Jones, it’s quitting time!”\n\nJones looked back at his squad. They were a motley group; beaten, bloodied, and tired. They wanted nothing more than to head home, kiss their wives, hold their babies, and knock back a few pints at the local bar. Jones allowed himself a tight smile. They’d earned their pay today. These men of the 83rd Reclamation Division were some of the best he’d ever served with; the very elite that the New York City Sanitation Department had to offer. He was proud of them. They were true garbage men.\n\n“You guys go ahead. I’m going to put in some overtime.”\n"
  title: D.M.Z.
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Helstrom
  date: 2010-01-29
  day: 29
  month: '01'
  text: "“What are you doing?”\n\nI looked up from the astrogation table and into the curious eyes of a five-year-old girl hovering in the access hatch.\n\n“Hey, hey,” I said, “I don’t think you’re supposed to be here.”\n\n“I wanted to see out the window. Captain said it was okay.”\n\nOf course he had. The captain was a ‘fourth generation’ spacer. Back in my time, with mining operations just beginning, spacers were recruited from the ranks of kumpels, roughnecks and sat-divers, resulting in strongly reeking ships populated by loud men with short necks and the very strong absence of curiosity that comes from living in an environment where any moving part you don’t know intimately can probably kill you. These days the profit margins were so huge they were shipping out whole families who would spend most of their life on one of the colonies – including their children.\n\n“Okay then,” I smiled, “But just a few minutes. I’m doing important stuff.”\n\nShe flashed a grin revealing a few missing teeth and pushed herself through the hatch, deftly settling into a corner between the tracking telescope and the cupola frame. Children adapted to free-fall in next to no time at all. At the turn of a switch, the cupola blinds withdrew and space unfolded before us. She glued herself to the window for a while, but deep space isn’t much to look at and she soon took more interest in the myriad of astrogation equipment in the room.\n\nSettling herself in the cupola, she asked: “Is that the map?”\n\n“No, not really. I don’t use a lot of maps. This is a plot, it shows me how much time it takes until we have to make another burn, like when we left. Remember how you had to stay in bed and got real heavy? That was a burn,”\n\nShe scowled, “I know what a burn is, silly. So it tells you where we’re going?”\n\n“Well, pretty much, yes.”\n\n“Then it’s a map!” She giggled triumphantly.\n\n“You’re smarter than you look with those missing teeth.”\n\n“Don’t you have a computer for this?”\n\n“I do – three, in fact. But computers can be wrong sometimes, and most of the knobs and dials in here let me check things for myself. If it gets really bad I can even do it on paper.”\n\n“What if you’re wrong too?”\n\n“Well, that depends on how far wrong I am We could crash into Venus instead of going into orbit. Or we could shoot past her, pick up a gravity boost and fly into the sun if we’re too fast for a rescue boat to catch up with us. But my job is to make sure that doesn’t happen so you get to your new home safely.”\n\nShe nodded, a serious frown on her face, “That’s very important.”\n\nIt was the nicest thing anyone had said about my work in a while – I laughed and gave her a hug before pushing her back towards the hatch: “Now, go back to the ring and let me work, okay? I’ll show you more after dinner if you want. Oh, and if you see the captain, make sure you tell him how important my job is.”\n"
  title: An understanding
  year: 2010
- 
  author: James King
  date: 2010-01-30
  day: 30
  month: '01'
  text: "The gate shimmered like a disk of melted solder.  After all this time, the idea of inter-dimensional travel still amazed Alex.  Wrapping his mind around the fact that, though it is a new world that is being explored, it’s the same time, same location in the galaxy, just a different dimension took some getting used to.\n\nHe stared back watching the rest of the team come through the gate, helpless to stop them.  The surprised look on each of their faces as they stepped through reminded him of the first time anyone had ever attempted inter-dimensional travel.\n\nThe team was much younger back then, chuckling nervously as straws were drawn to see who would be the first through the gate.  Everyone claimed they wanted to be first, but the relief was evident when a long straw was drawn.  Alex got the first short straw and has been the first one through the gate ever since.\n\nHe was starting to shiver from the cold.\n\nThe amount of power required in forming the gateway forced the exploration team to travel through quickly.  Safety protocols were established so that each team member was prepared for any possible contingency, whether environmental or hostile.  Alex thought to himself that this was one scenario that never came up during the simulations.\n\nHe wanted to shout out in the hopes someone would hear him, but he knew that was futile as he floated further from the gate.  Devoid of air the vacuum of space was deafeningly silent. Everyone dispersed like droplets from a splash of water hitting the ground, drifting away from the gate and away from each other.  He finally realized that the weapon he clutched tightly to his body was useless and let it go, watching it drift away.\n\nThe environmental containment suit he wore provided oxygen and some protection from the harsh cold, but it wouldn’t last long.  He wonders if they will attempt to send another team to locate them when they don’t return, understanding this to be an academic question, since they all would have long since expired from the cold or lack of oxygen before this possibility would occur.\n\nNo one ever thought, especially after all the worlds they had explored, that traveling to a dimension where the earth no longer existed was a possibility.  A contingency never planned for and a lesson learned the hard way.  Alex watched the gate, looking like the surface of a dark pond, getting smaller as he drifted further away.  He marveled at the beauty of space.  Alex had always wanted to be an astronaut.  Weightlessness is even better than he imagined.\n"
  title: Gateway to Nowhere
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Sharoda
  date: 2010-01-31
  day: 31
  month: '01'
  text: "Sitting in front of the large group of children, the scarred Captain continued reading the dog-eared picture book. “Then, Tinky the Tiny Tank moved out into the open”\n\n“No Tinky, stay in the rocks!” cried many of the younger children; the cave echoed with their voices. Some of the older ones smiled, they’d heard this story many times.\n\n“He tried to be sneaky but then he ran into…”\n\n“A Miitok”, he and the children said together. They all knew the enemy was fast in the open but slow on uneven ground.\n\n“Tinky was scared, he wanted to run but he knew the Miitok would catch him. He wanted to hide but he knew it would find him. He wanted to give up but he knew it would…”\n\n“Eat him.” The children said in hushed voices.\n\n“Then Tinky remembered the Rules To Live By”, he was skipping parts but there wasn’t much time.\n\nHe held up his index finger and the children all said “Be brave”.\n\n“Don’t show fear to the Miitok” he added.\n\nHe held up 2 fingers and they said “Stand your ground”.\n\n“Don’t try to run, it’ll catch you. Stand and fight”.\n\nHe held up 3 fingers and they said “Aim for the face.”\n\nAnd what rule did Tinky break”, he asked holding up 4 fingers.\n\n“Stay together” came the group reply.\n\nHe put down the book, “Just like Tinky, you’re all going to have to be brave because today we have to leave the cave and travel on open ground to the Big Blue Mountain.” The children made nervous scared sounds, some started to cry. Miitok drones were digging thru the other end of the tunnels and their parents were holding them off.\n\n“You all have one of these”, he held up what looked like a toy pistol but was actually a microwave disruptor tuned to only activate on Miitok brainwave patterns. The children could play with these “guns” all they wanted but not hurt each other. However it would cause searing pain to the sensing organs of a Miitok. Several together could kill a drone or even a soldier. “And you all know how to use them. When Tinky crossed open ground he was alone and he survived. We have each other. We’ll make it.” He motioned to the teachers and all the children stood and moved down the path to the cave entrance. A hand full of soldiers and older teens carried heavier weapons.\n\nJensa was 12, Mina and Jak were 8. Mina was yelling because they were going to miss story time and Jak was yelling because he couldn’t find his parent’s picture and wouldn’t leave without it. Jensa was frazzled and, finding the picture, rushed the twins out to the gathering area.\n\nEveryone was already gone so she herded them to the cave entrance and then out in the open while trying to catch up with the group. Her twin siblings complained bitterly until they realized they were outside, Jensa urged them to keep moving.\n\nWhen they got to the river the rest of the group was already on the other shore. Suddenly, the large dark figure of a Miitok drone blocked their path.\n\nJensa froze. She almost screamed but caught herself.\n\n“Be brave” said Jak and pulled his pistol.\n\n“Stand your ground” said Mina and pulled hers.\n\nJensa unfroze, pulled and aimed her pistol. “Aim for the face” she said.\n\nThey pooled their fire and the drone started to scream. It fell dead at their feet.\n\n“Now stay together” she barked and led them into the river.\n"
  title: What Would Tinky Do
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Roi R. Czechvala
  date: 2010-02-01
  day: '01'
  month: '02'
  text: "“Another fuckin’ night at the VFW,” Jerry Pesetski thought gloomily to himself. His arm hummed loudly as he raised the glass to his mouth. Halfway to his lips the movement stopped with a sharp grinding sound. “Damn government piece of shit,” he growled.\n\nIn a drunken fit of rage he tried to throw his glass at the wall. His fingers failed to release and he merely spattered the nearest barflies with beer.\n\nHe slammed his arm on the bar, shattering the glass in his stainless steel hand. “Look at thish shit,” he slurred, waving his malfunctioning right arm above his head, “iss not even a proper proshthetic. It’s from maintenance `bot.” He motioned for another beer, grabbed it in his left hand, and finished it in one go.\n\nHe swung around nearly knocking his drinking buddy, Ron Kazner, off the bar where he was perched and addressed his reluctant audience, many of whom had at least one prosthetic appliance themselves.\n\n“Twenty-two fuckin’ years I served. The Israeli Invasion, the…the… Vatican Wars, and the Colonial Lunar Wars. Not a scratch on me. A bona fidy war hero, a chest full of fruit salad, and then some goddamn punk, fresh out of Paris Island , doesn’t know the bore from the breech, blows my fuckin’ arm off at the range.”\n\nHe tossed back another beer. “And this is what the VA gave me. A second hand arm that doesn’t even fuckin’ work.” He waved the gleaming metal limb wildly, nearly dislodging his friend a second time. “I hear the arms they give the goddamn officers are fully functional in every way. They even have Syntheskin, with full tac…tac…tactile…ya can feel titties with ‘em.. Hell, the way I heard it those arms are so good, you can switch hands while you’re jackin’ off and gain a stroke.” He barked a bitter laugh.\n\n“Hey Jer, Why don’t you lay off the beer and give it a rest? Nobody wants to hear it,” Ron croaked. His voice held a peculiar metallic quality as it resonated through his artificial larynx.\n\n“What the hell would you know about it? You were only in the Corps for tree years. Only in combat once. Didn‘t do a whole lot of good there anyway.” Jerry threw back another beer. “Pussy,” he added.\n\n“Yeah Jer,” he sighed, “you’re right. What would I know? I’ve never had a limb replaced with a rebuilt arm designed for a robot garbage collector. What the hell do I know?” His voice through the tiny loud speaker took on the sound of rustling leaves. The closest thing he could get to sarcasm from his synthetic voice.\n\n“Yer goddamn right. Don’ ya ferget it. Jes try spending a day in my shoes why don’cha,” he bellowed, slamming his arm on the bar again, splintering the wood beneath.\n\n“Whatever, just give me another beer.”\n\nCarefully, Jerry removed the lid from the small tank that sat on the bar and poured a beer into the nutrient rich soup that bathed Ron’s naked brain\n"
  title: Gifts From a Grateful Nation…
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Rob Burton
  date: 2010-02-02
  day: '02'
  month: '02'
  text: "I sip champagne, and snatch a truffle from the waiter’s tray. A flush of excitement rushes through me as a handsome man catches my eye from across the room. A moment to politely disengage himself from his group, and he moves towards me like I am the only person in the room.\n\n‘Miss Harrow?’ he asks rhetorically, ‘I’m Leon Gibbs. I’m a great admirer of your work.’\n\nI offer him my hand, inviting him to kiss it. I know, in that instant, that this will be the man I marry.\n\nAn irritating alarm beeps and my world fades to grey. I regain my mundane flesh and lift the immersion visor from my face. Beside me, oblivious to my company, sits the real Miss Harrow, now Mrs Gibbs, the equipment that helps her relive her favourite memories protruding from her scalp. An arrow projected on the wall marks out which of her companions needs my attention.\n\nI pass rows upon row of patients sat behind beatific smiles. My occasional colleague, Byson, tells me that he finds their fixed grins creepy. Unfortunately for him, there are few jobs other than nursing. He’s saving to move out to the reforestation projects, saying he’d rather attend machines, but I like these old people, living in the time machine of their own memories. Their lives had infinite variety, much more so than any I could live in this depleted world.\n\nWith all the world pillaged into their bank accounts, and automatic systems ensuring it stays that way, the comparably tiny number of us under a century old attend them while we wait to inherit. We try to stitch the world back together as best we can, and hope that future generations might appreciate our efforts, and we wait to sit here and relive our own happy times.\n\nAn I.V. pipe hangs loose from Mrs Patel. I find a vein, insert it and tape it back into place. She mutters ‘Naveed’. Her son. I wonder if, when I am in her place, I will remember times from my own life, or hers.\n"
  title: Happy Times
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Ian Rennie
  date: 2010-02-03
  day: '03'
  month: '02'
  text: "When the doctor asked Lacey what he could do for her, she explained everything.  She told him about growing up plain, being ignored by boys and teased by girls every day of her school life.  She told him about Joey LeMartin’s hypnotic blue eyes that never swung in her direction.  Then, she told him what she wanted.\n\nThe doctor nodded slowly, thinking about payment under the table, black market cash.\n\n“It will be expensive”\n\nMoney, Lacey said, was no object.\n\nFour months later, all the scars healed and the course of medication finished, she was back in her home town, standing outside a bar she knew he visited.  Tomorrow night was the ten year reunion.  She wouldn’t be attending, her reunion was tonight.\n\nWhen he came out, he was exactly as Lacey remembered him.  The hair was in a short business cut, and he had the beginnings of a spare tire, but he was still the same Joey LeMartin.\n\n“Joey.”\n\nHe turned to look at her, and didn’t recognize her.  She hadn’t expected him to.\n\n“It’s me.  Lacey Monroe, from high school.”\n\nHe frowned for a second until the name clicked.  She wasn’t surprised.  He was associating the name with a dowdy duckling, not the swan before him.  Finally, he got it.\n\n“Lacey!  Yeah, we were in geography together, weren’t we?  Wow, you look great.”\n\nShe did look great.  She had paid to look great, but it was good to hear him say so.\n\n“I’m in town for the reunion, and I thought I’d look up old friends.  You want to go get a drink?”\n\nHe did.  With how she looked, anyone would.\n\nHours later, they were in her hotel room.  She poured bourbon into plastic glasses.  He loosened his tie and made flirtatious small talk.  The big moment was coming, they could both feel it.\n\n“I wish I’d got to know you better in school,” he said, looking down her cleavage, “I really missed out.”\n\n“Well, you can always get to know me now.” she said, putting the glass down.\n\nHe leaned in for the first kiss.  As he did, she looked into his hypnotic blue eyes.  The plasma disruptor behind her artificial right eye gave off a charging whine that only she could hear.\n\nThey would find him tomorrow in a hotel room under a fake name.  The face would be too badly burned for iris or dental recognition, but the fingerprints would eventually identify him.\n\nIt would take him several hours to die, his blue eyes burned out, unable to cry.\n\nOr to put it another way, he would remember her for the rest of his life.\n"
  title: Duckling
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Cesium
  date: 2010-02-04
  day: '04'
  month: '02'
  text: "Each clutching the other’s hand, they waited atop the Green Building.\n\nThey weren’t supposed to be here. No one was. But the tallest building in Cambridge, Massachusetts would soon depart the soil on which it had stood for so long, and they couldn’t have missed the chance to be here. To watch the final stage of Daedalus, from the inside.\n\nSome enterprising soul had planted a replica of an Apollo Lunar Module on the roof behind them, likening to the old Saturn Vs the twenty-one-story concrete box on which it perched. A flag hung above it, unmoving in the still air. The motionless silence unnerved her. There should be wind. There should be people walking far below, talking of subjects she would never understand. Yet there was nothing. Beyond the sheath that now enclosed the building, she could see the labyrinthine tracery of streets that filled Cambridge to the north, the cars in their orderly caravans sliding efficiently from place to place, while the sun crept down to the horizon and the fiery clouds above glowed orange and violet.\n\nBut within, the Green Building, neatly packaged for transport, rested in preparation for its own journey.\n\nAround them, a huge tract of land adjacent to the Charles lay vacant, fallow dirt under long shadows. It had of course long since gone to the highest bidder, a Dubai company planning to raise an arcology on the site. But that had to wait until Daedalus finished. Until it cleared away this, the last remnant of old MIT.\n\nIt was just MIT now, as it had been for decades, since its focus had shifted offworld and “Massachusetts” had become inaccurate (and also, if the rumor was to be believed, so it could sue the pants off MarsTech). For almost as long the original campus, here in Cambridge, had been suffering from declining admissions and increasing irrelevance. Yet its reputation remained untarnished, and history still lived in its bones. So now, as the wealth of the outer system was starting to pour back to the mother planet, the children of MIT, the architects and the chemists and the astroengineers, had returned to lift these old halls into the future. Just because they could.\n\nAnd that was Daedalus.\n\nGiant engines above had raised the buildings of MIT one by one out of Earth’s gravity well. An unprecedented feat, it had taken years and drawn the awe and fascination of the world. Enclosed in protective organic sheaths, miracles of bioengineering, the buildings floating like soap bubbles among the stars had joined the construction of New Boston, a gigantic space station with artificial gravity. Not all had emerged unscathed, of course, but that most survived had given them courage enough to stand here on this night, looking out over the city spread below them.\n\nThere was a slight tremor beneath their feet; the near-transparent sheath rippled noticeably. Cables, pillars and struts holding the building in place adjusted automatically. Her hand tightened its grip on his. It was time.\n\n“Boston is lovely at night,” he said, slowly. “But you have to see it from above–”\n\nThey leapt toward the sky.\n"
  title: Daedalus
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2010-02-05
  day: '05'
  month: '02'
  text: "I got pretty good at morse code after a while.\n\nMy co-pilot had a beak. The only way we could figure out how to communicate was if he clicked his beak at me in morse code. He was a pretty impatient dude so he did it really fast. He was wired to the eyeballs with Hexamex for the course changes that might be needed. Being that sped up and prepared for a possibility that might not happen isn’t any kind of fun.  Makes a person a little high strung.\n\nThe only time he was verbose was when he was making up curses. He didn’t get the abstract notions of my human swear words but he understood actions and verbs so it was fun to hear him be creative when he was telling me off.\n\nOne memorable time he told me that my mother enjoyed having sex with hyenas because at least when they laughed at her, she didn’t have to take it as an insult. He also insinuated that my hyena father was where I got my annoying laugh, my short legs, and my hunger for dead animal meat. His race was herbivorous.\n\nHe was an Aereacoltra, a flying bird man. He would still be a flying bird man except for the fact that his wings were torn off as part of a prison sentence. He lost an eye in that prison as well during a scuffle over living quarters. Now he’s just a dude with a beak and an eyepatch.\n\nHe told me that an antigravity harness is nothing compared to banking and wheeling in a silent sky on a huge pair of wings. That’s the longest thing he told me other than the cursing.\n\nHis name was a series of chirps and whistles but I ended up just calling him Stan. Sometimes he hummed to himself as he scanned the instruments for possible pursuit. He sounded like he was gargling marbles but it was oddly musical and whispery.\n\nThe irony of the fact that he was a pilot who used to be able to fly wasn’t lost on him. In fact, he took off one of my fingers with that beak of his when I pointed it out.\n\nWhat’s freaking me out now is that he’s locked himself in his quarters and he hasn’t come out for six days.  There’s only so much I can do by myself at the controls before I need some down time.  The autopilot’s an emergency measure and we really can’t take the risk of having no one at the wheel, not in this asteroid-laden sector.\n\n“Stan!  Get out here!  Now!” I pounded and yelled at his door.\n\nSoftly, I could hear scrabbling behind the door and then the clicking of the lock.  The door swooshed open and there was Stan.  He looked exhausted.\n\n“What the hell, Stan?  What’s going on!  It’s been six days!” I screamed at him.\n\nStan stepped to the side.  Behind him were four eggs.  Stan looked at me apologetically.\n\n‘Quadruplets’, he clicked at me with his beak.  ‘I guess the condom must have broke at that last space port’\n\nOpen-mouthed, I looked from Stan to the eggs and back to Stan again.  We weren’t due to dock for another eight months.  Stan looked ashamed.\n\n“So should I start calling you Stella instead of Stan?” I asked.\n\nIt’s hard to tell when someone with a beak is smiling.\n"
  title: I Was Born on a Pirate Ship
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Richard “Zig” Zagorski
  date: 2010-02-06
  day: '06'
  month: '02'
  text: "Amanda awoke from a deep slumber and saw that her alarm clock would be going off in ten minutes. Not pressing enough to climb out of bed to turn it off just yet, but unfortunately also too little time left to fall back asleep.\n\nHowever it only took a moment or so for her to realize that today was the day. The day she’d be finally free of her mood ring. Suddenly the morning seemed full of promises she had rarely dared to dream of for fear her ring would betray her. Shout out that she was not on an even keel. Medications to bring her back into ordained normality would follow if the ring reported such emotions becoming commonplace.\n\nShe had already been using unlawful ware the past few months to occasionally fudge the logs her ring kept. Logs which would be dutifully uploaded by her ring for expert systems and her parents to review each time she entered the warm embrace of the home network. Uploaded each time she passed a contraband detector at PS 34 for analysis by the school’s psychological systems and even a therapist to review if the records justified flagging by the so-called expert systems.\n\nAltering the logs was a crime warranting a grounding at home and one leading to detention and mandatory group therapy at school. It was worth it though. To hide the “dangerous” pulses of wonder, anger, lust and angst that not even a generation ago would have been considered normal for a girl her age and, more importantly, be something she’d be able to keep to herself and maybe a well hid journal. Finally she’d be secure in her own mind and emotions.\n\nThose occasioned bouts of rebelliousness and the feelings they engendered would soon be more easily had. Watching illicit films like “The Breakfast Club”, reading passed around beat up copies of novels considered too stimulating for kids and teens or listening to the ancient (21 or older only, please!) crooning of Jim Morrison – “Oh tell me where your freedom lies…”\n\nAfter third period Chemistry hers would lie in a new mood ring. One with altered circuitry and hacked software.\n\nA week ago she had let Harold run a scanner over her ring. He said piece of cake and he’d have her new ring ready in seven days.\n\nIf it was so simple she wondered why it should cost her $400 in horded allowance and baby sitting money…but can one put a price on her own freedom?\n\nThe few people she dared to raise the subject with all said Harold had the know-how and, more importantly, the connections to get an illicit replacement for her. One encoded to give off the same secret handshakes as her real one and to camouflage all extremes of emotion with bland ordinariness.\n\nToday her ring, which would scream out in vivid red, yellow and violet if she dared be herself and which dutifully tattled on her with seemingly greater enthusiasm than her little sister, would be replaced. The new ring would glow gentle hues, but stay mainly dead, dull, safe, complacent grey. The log files would show brief, low spikes of emotions. A nice, safe, boring, well adjusted teenage girl. Just what every parent wanted and every expert said was the standard to be strived for. Square pegs must be made round!\n\nToday freedom of thought and freedom of experience would be hers. All wrapped up in illusionary grey.\n"
  title: Mood Ring
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Matthew Banks
  date: 2010-02-07
  day: '07'
  month: '02'
  text: "“It thinks,” said the emaciated man, blinking up at the doctor with red-rimmed eyes. The doctor looked down at him for a moment, then turned to the display mounted on the wall. The multiscan of the man’s brain was mostly normal, except for the bright blob sprouting from the left hemisphere. The doctor turned to the man. He was mostly normal, too, except for the weeping ulcer on his chest. But as with all his other symptoms, the ulcer was abnormal, as demonstrated by the glossy white molars sprouting in a clump from its center. The doctor suppressed a disgusted sneer and turned back to the display.\n\n“It probably does think,” she said, stroking her chin, “I don’t know what Dr. Glasseter told you, but it’s no brain tumor. It’s a pleurineoplasm.”\n\n“A what?”\n\nThe doctor rolled her eyes. That was the problem with these longevity treatments: people got them without having any idea how they worked or what side-effects there might be. She frowned at the patient. “I think your brain is trying to grow an extra lobe.”\n\nThe man blinked. “Why?”\n\nThe doctor scowled, and the man recoiled. “Why? What do you think? It’s the Novos. How long have you been taking it?”\n\n“A few years.”\n\nThe doctor shrugged. “Well, there you go, then. Your body is throwing off stem cells like crazy, and without any real regulation, sometimes they get confused. Didn’t they explain all of this to you after the surgery?”\n\nThe man self-consciously touched the scar beneath his armpit where a surgeon at the Mayo Clinic had pulled a fully-formed kidney out of the patient’s lung. The doctor wanted badly to shake her head at the man and laugh.\n\n“Well…he said, looking down at the floor and swallowing loudly. He looked up with renewed confidence. “Just the price of immortality, I guess.”\n\nThis time, the doctor couldn’t help but laugh. The man squinted at her. When she regained her composure, she walked up to him and pointed at the toothy lesion on his chest.\n\n“Immortality? You’re going to keep getting those. Dentate teratomas are the most common side-effect of Novos. How long do you think it’ll be before you get one in your brain? Or you get one in your heart that gets gingivitis and gives you a fatal blood infection? Mr. Greene, you’ve been suckered.”\n\nHe scratched at the lesion and picked aimlessly at its teeth.  “I was running laps a week after the lung surgery. Whatever accidentally grows on or in me, I can have it removed and recover just fine.”\n\n“No you can’t,” the doctor said. Her voice had grown solemn, and the patient stared at her, startled.\n\n“What do you mean?”\n\n“You can’t have the brain growth removed. Thanks to the Novos, it’s already forged connections with pretty much every anatomical structure. That’s why you’re hearing the voices, that’s how you can tell it thinks: you’re hearing the neoplasm’s thoughts. If we tried to remove it, we’d probably take most of your brain with it. I project you’ve got about two months before you’ve got too much brain to fit in your skull and you slip into a coma and die.”\n\nThe patient looked up at her. He scratched his toothy lesion and blinked wetly.\n"
  title: Pleuriopotent
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Bill Lombardi
  date: 2010-02-08
  day: '08'
  month: '02'
  text: "Troy sat by his bedside.  Watching.\n\nHours past and then Jon’s eyes slowly opened. “I’m thirsty.” His voice wavered, his strength beginning to ebb.\n\nTroy poured him a glass of water and stood by him holding the straw. He took several sips. Coughed.  Troy wiped his chin.  Soon he was asleep again. Troy sat and waited.\n\nWhen he awoke next he asked, “Is it day”?\n\n“No.  It is night.”\n\n“Can you see the stars?”\n\nTroy went to the balcony doors, drew the curtain and opened them. He looked up at the moonless sky.  “There are many stars.”\n\n“Can you see the Big Bear?”\n\n“You mean the Great Bear. Yes.”\n\n“I remember lying in the field out back at night naming as many constellations as we could.”\n\n“And you were always incorrect.”\n\nJon laughed weakly which led to another bout of coughing.  Troy moved to his side and helped him sit up until it passed and then he gently laid him back down.\n\n“You’ll stay with me?”\n\n“Of course.”\n\n“I don’t know why I ask.  We’ve been together for as long as I can remember.”\n\nHe placed a cool hand across Jon’s forehead and soon he was asleep again – and the ever present Troy sat and waited.\n\nSeveral days passed and he never woke again.\n\nThey came and took him and Troy watched from the window as the vehicle pulled away.  All of Jon’s things had been packed and removed.  Only Troy was left.  He looked around at the empty rooms and on the floor in a corner was an image.  He picked it up.  It was of the two of them when they had visited China.  On the Great Wall.  They both stood backs against a turret, blue sky above.  Troy remembered that day.  They had walked and seen as much as they could while the sun still shone.  Taking images.  Troy folded it and placed it in the pocket of his pants and then went to stand by the door.  The service would be by soon to wipe his memory and shut him down.  He looked around at the empty rooms again.  And waited.\n"
  title: Life Partner
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Eric Kimball
  date: 2010-02-09
  day: '09'
  month: '02'
  text: "It starts as the faintest quiver of sound, a slight singsong beat carried by the wind.  The few stray notes that reach my ears instantly spring to the forefront of my consciousness.\n\n“Mother, he’s here!”\n\n“Hmm?” Mother replies flatly.\n\nThe mechanical calliope is louder now, adding to the urgency in my voice.  “The Good Humor man is here!”\n\n“Oh, and you want to get something?”\n\nThis strikes me as a very dumb question, but I simply reply, “Yes, please, may I go?”  Now is not the time to anger Mother.\n\n“Very well, but don’t take long.”\n\n“I won’t,” I say in mid-stride.  I emerge in time to see a battered white truck with a yellow emblem crawling down the road.  Other people are here and we all cluster about the truck in a teeming, churning mass.  After jostling in a crowd that resembles a tiny war more then a queue, I reach the front.\n\nSam, the Good Humor man, looks over at me with his big plastic grin.  “Hey there buddy, what’ch get’en today?”\n\nI pause for a moment, looking at the brightly colored board.  Behind me, the crowd shifts angrily, but I ignore the collective impatience.\n\n“I’d just like a Neapolitan, I think,” I say after considering all the options.\n\n“Gotta love the classics, buddy,” Sam says, extending a plastic packet with his piston-driven arm.  The packet drops into my hand as Sam turns his cold glass optical ports and poorly painted head to the next customer.\n\nI tear open the wrap with a single pull and then guide my trembling hand to the cybernetic socket at the back of my skull.  There is a quick jolt of pain as the chip comes to rest in its socket, sending short circuits through my body and brain.   Then the experience fills me.\n\nFirst kiss, first date, first time someone says “I love you,” the sweet bubbling strawberry of love in blossom.  I savor the sensation, feeling the excited butterflies in my stomach, drinking in every moment of it.  Then the next emotion overtakes me, the cool, smooth, creamy sensation of a love in full bloom.  A walk hand in hand with a loved one, a soak together in the hot tub, the simple pleasure of waking next to them, I float through oceans of vanilla bliss.  Last, I descend into the dark, decadent chocolate sensation of love-making: not sex, but the velvety sinful sensations around the borders of intercourse, a nibble of an ear, a gentle caress, the contentment of post-coitus. These feelings coat my body in thick, warm syrupy streams.\n\nEventually the sensations fade, receding with each beat of my heart like an ocean tide. I remove the expended Emotional Emulator from the back of my skull, a thin trail of smoke wafting from the charred circuit.\n\nBefore returning to my work station, I take a moment to watch the others.  Some dance to invisible music, others laugh at an unspoken joke, and others quiver in sexual ecstasy.  The “real thing,” as the outsiders like to call it in their ridiculous flyers, is a shallow imitation of the Good Humor chips.\n\nBesides, who has time for the “real thing”?  From morning alarm until the beginning of another sleep cycle, we’re occupied with debugging code, swapping circuits, and defending the perimeter.  But it’s worth it. Only an AI like Mother can create the Emotional Emulator chips.  If we keep her happy and functional, then trucks will be sent, loaded with their simple electronic pleasures.  After all, it’s the simple pleasures that make life worth living, is it not?\n"
  title: Good Humor
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Sean Wallace
  date: 2010-02-10
  day: 10
  month: '02'
  text: "“Now, we all look forward to entering the Archangel when we retire, but what about those people who go there before then? Constance Vyke reports on the people who keep Archangel running…”\n\nConstance, pretty in a thin, blonde sort of way, starts her report through a practiced smile. “Thank you Milo. The Archangel Station, owned and run by the UN, has been running for almost thirty years; taking us in when we become elderly and giving us a life of pleasure and joy in our most fragile years. Not everyone who comes here does so for the Grace Chambers though. I’m here with Nigel Howard, Chief Engineer for the Archangel and he is, as you can see, a great deal younger than 65.”\n\nNigel offers a small smile, slightly confused. “Hello there Constance.”\n\n“First of all, I’m certain our viewers would like to know how you can cope with being so close to the Grace Chambers?”\n\n“Well, I’d be lying if I said it isn’t tempting, but thankfully you need specific implants to be able to join the residents; implants stored and inserted planetside. So there’s no way for me, or anyone else here, to ‘dip in’.”\n\n“But how can you cope with it? Bliss and joy happening so close to you and you cannot take part in it… even I’m feeling the pull, and I’ve only been here a few days.”\n\n“Firstly, if you work on the Archangel you get to retire five years early. Plus, without people like us, no-one would be able to enter Gracie…”\n\n“Gracie? Is that what you call them?”\n\n“Oops, sorry.” Nigel wipes his hand down his eyes and coughs. “Yeah, it’s the nickname we gave the Intethlon Quantum Core GC20. It’s a lot less of a mouthful. But yeah, we do an important job, maybe the most important job there is, so you get a lot of satisfaction out of it.” The increased numbers of suicides and high level of substance abuse went unmentioned, especially after Head Office had some serious words with him about ‘appropriate responses’.\n\n“Anyway,” Constance says, slight annoyance peeking through her media-friendly tones, “what’s a typical day like up here? What do you do every day?”\n\n“Well, we don’t work every day Constance. But for me, a typical day involves nothing more than your usual space station Chief Engineer; I read reports, ensure the tech is all in working order, manage the new arrivals and deliveries…”\n\n“And it’s really not difficult to see hundreds of people enter the Grace Chambers, Gracie?”\n\n“Really, it’s not a problem.” Nigel coughs and balls his fists. “… but anyway, we get everyone in, give them the introduction and then fit them into the chambers for their new life. Then we send back any deceased for planetside burial and ensure that the next day’s work is prepared. That’s about it; as I said, nothing more than the typical station.”\n\n“Alright then, Nigel, just before I go I’d like to ask what the first thing you’re going to do after you retire is?”\n\nHaving thought long and hard about this over the decades he’d worked on the Archangel, the truth sprang to answer the question itself; “I’m going to Solar-sail to Mars.”\n\n“Thank you very much for your time Nigel.” Constance turns back to the camera. “There you are viewers, normal people doing amazing work up here in the Heavens. For MSN-BBC, I’m Constance Vyke.”\n\n“Constance Vyke there. We’ll see you after these messages…”\n"
  title: Constance Vyke visits the Archangel – HOLOVID
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2010-02-11
  day: 11
  month: '02'
  text: "“Dammit Joe, it’s freakin’ freezing in here,” complained Thomas Sampati as he checked the spaceship’s thermostat.”\n\n“We’re eight hours behind the Phoenix,” replied Joe.  “We need to make a non-traditional course adjustment if we hope to win the race.”\n\n“’Non-traditional?’  The course goes from Vesta, around the sun, past Earth, and back to Vesta.  That’s 600 million miles.  There’s nothing to change.”\n\n“Officially, the course is from Vesta, around the sun, and back to Vesta.  It’s just that they time the start of the race so that the Earth is positioned off to the side to give the contestants a gravitational slingshot on the way back to Vesta.  The sponsors want the Earth swing-by so the spectators can see the ships up close.  But we’re not ‘required’ to swing past the Earth.  In fact, in ’79, the Orion accidentally flew thousand miles too close to the sun and ended up on the wrong side of the Earth, so they were decelerate, not accelerate.  They finished in last place, but they weren’t disqualified.  That precedent makes it legal to cut inside the Earth.”\n\n“I don’t like where this is going.”\n\n“Relax.  I’ve been planning this contingency for months.  I figure if we fly really close to the sun, we can fly directly back toward Vesta, and shorten the trip by seventy million miles.”\n\n“How close is ‘really close’?”\n\n“Until today, nobody goes inside Mercury’s orbit, about 30 million miles.  I plan to go as close as 5 million miles.”\n\n“Are you nuts?  They stay that far away for a reason.  The sun’s kinda hot you know.  We’ll be subjected to 36 times the radiation of the other ships.  We’ll fry.”\n\n“Not necessarily.  I plan to deploy a Meissner shield; a thin mirror-like reflector made out of a superconductive alloy.  It’s also a perfect Faraday shield.  Virtually nothing will get through to the ship.”\n\n“Virtually nothing?”\n\n“Well, it will get a little hot in here.  That’s why we need to make it as cold as possible before we start.”\n\n“Do you also plan to change the name of the ship to ‘The Icarus’?”\n\n“Icarus?  He was the one who died.”\n\n“That’s my point.”\n\n“Look, Tom, either grow a pair, or get in an escape pod.”\n\n“Okay, okay, I’ll stay, but I don’t have to like it.”\n\n“Thanks.  Now, start hydrating yourself.   It’s going to take twelve hours to complete the fly-by of the sun.”\n\nAs the ship began to round the sun, the thermostat started to climb.  “How hot can we go before we die?” asked Sampati.\n\n“At 100% humidity, only 105F.  But I have the dehumidifier at maximum.  We can probably survive to 170F, as long as our perspiration can evaporate.  Keep drinking water, and take those salt tablets.”\n\nAt periapsis, they fired the main thrusters to maximize the ship’s velocity.\n\nDuring the fly-by, the men were forced to endure a living hell.  For the first six hours, they were worried that they would die.  For the second six hours, they were wishing they would.  Finally, they were heading away from the sun, and the temperature began to drop.  Drenched with sweat, Joe checked the telemetry.   “According to the computer, we shortened the trip by ten hours.  We should be ahead.  I’ll check with the officials.”\n\n“God,” exclaimed Sampati, “That was the worst 12 hours of my life.  I wouldn’t do that again, not even for first place prize money.  Uh oh, what’s wrong?”\n\n“The update just came in.  Those bastards on the Phoenix did the same maneuver.  They’re still eight hours in front.”\n"
  title: The Vesta 600
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Roi R. Czechvala
  date: 2010-02-12
  day: 12
  month: '02'
  text: "I had heard the news only a short few minutes ago. I didn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it.\n\nI walked out the back door onto the deck and looked up and down the beach. Like mine, all the other houses were darkened as well. Like that would make one bit of difference with today’s tech. I barked a bitter laugh.\n\nMichelle must have heard. Silently she slid up beside me, slipping her hand in mine. She always looked so beautiful. Her flaming red hair framing her delicate features. Just the right number of freckles across her nose and cheeks.\n\nNow her face looked gaunt as if all the joy that only moments ago had filled it, had washed away.\n\n“Do you think it’s true?” Her voice was a dry. The sound of autumn leaves rustling in the wind.\n\n“It’s true. Come with me.”\n\nI tugged her hand and led her down to the waters edge. She walked beside me as if she were lost, falling.\n\n“Remember our honeymoon?”\n\n“Yes,” she said. Her voice had taken on an airy, detached quality. “It was my first trip to orbit. It was so beautiful. The gardens, the trees, that quiet little beach on the lake. It was so lovely there. I wish we could go back.”\n\n“Someday.” I said. “When this is over. Look, you can see them now.” The warm twilight was slipping away, and impenetrable night was bearing down. Above us against the distant stars, the sparkle of the L-5 habitats shone in a glistening, shimmering arc.\n\n“Look there,” I said, pointing to one twinkling jewel in particular. “There it is. That’s Eden. Our little garden”\n\nAnd we watched those precious jewels. We watched them as one by one, each glowed a little brighter, before winking out forever.\n"
  title: Falling Stars
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Michael Merriam
  date: 2010-02-13
  day: 13
  month: '02'
  text: "“We never had much,” she said. “The freighter was our life. Now it’s all lost, ripped apart by a neutron star.”\n\nI sat next to her. I couldn’t answer. My mind was dazzled, my eyes locked on her naked body stretched out on the bed we shared. She reached out her arms, and I fell into her embrace.\n\nMy lips on her neck, I stroked the flat of her stomach, reached beyond with one hand until she pulled me onto and into her body.\n\nI was a silly child. She had over two decades on me, my lovely, melancholy lover.\n\nLater — days or weeks later — we sat on the rocks overlooking the dead lighthouse, long abandoned, nature carving it up.\n\n“Do you think the stars will give back what they have taken, at the end?”\n\n“I don’t know.”\n\nAnd I didn’t. I still don’t.\n\nShe was a beautiful burning demon, all alabaster skin and black hair. She seemed an artist’s creation, unreal, ethereal. In that moment she frightened me.\n\n“I think they will.” She turned, leaned on me. I place an arm around her, held her tightly.\n\nSoft sobs and crashing surf were all.\n\n#\n\nAutumn.\n\nA cool breeze blew off the sea as I watched the crowd gather like ghouls and vultures. The white and red van, its ugly blinking eye atop, sat parked with doors open wide. I didn’t need to go down. I knew.\n\nI didn’t travel to Mars Station to see her casket fired into the sun, as was her right as a navigator. I didn’t want to watch it blaze in the an instant before evaporating or deal with dour strangers and weeping women, black shrouded, staring, whispering, asking questions I wouldn’t answer.\n\nI would remember my lover for her laughter, her sweat-covered skin after sex, her gentleness in all things.\n\n“Do you think the stars will give back what they have taken, at the end?”\n\n“I don’t know.”\n\nI still don’t.\n"
  title: The Shipmaster's Widow
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Nick Gonzales
  date: 2010-02-14
  day: 14
  month: '02'
  text: "“You heard they finally nailed teleportation?”\n\n“No.”\n\n“Yeah, just yesterday.”\n\n“For real?”\n\n“Fo rizzle.”\n\nI turn to look at Billiam, his eyes lit up expectantly as he leans towards me across the table. His face is twisted into his characteristic grin of childlike excitement. An off-putting grin, but not without some charm. You’d think he had just told me we had finally put another man on the moon.\n\nToday, Billiam’s hair is fluorescent green, with streaks of pink, symmetrically arranged into eight spikes. Mine is the same color, but I did mine in the sink.\n\n“No, I mean, like, for _real_?”\n\n“Of course for real. Teleported a small little mouse all the way from New York to Atlantis,” he beams.\n\nI can actually feel my hopes fall.\n\n“What do you mean ‘of course’?” I sigh. “Atlantis?”\n\n“What? What’s wrong with Atlantis?”\n\nA female white Bengal tiger slowly trots by the table, followed by a small pack of screaming children. The smallest, a girl of probably about four years, dives forward and grabs the rare cat by its tail until it pauses, allowing her to jump astride it in a practiced motion. Kicking her heels into its side wildly, the girl hoots as the cat resumes its walk. A quick check of Wikipedia informs me that the Panthera tigris is an apex predator and obligate carnivore, native to East and South Asia. I don’t believe San Diego is located within either region… but it gets hard to tell sometimes.\n\nThe sky darkens momentarily as a dragon flies overhead. Or maybe it was a plane.\n\n“Hey, Robin.” Billiam calls me back to the conversation.\n\n“Sorry, what?”\n\n“I said what’s wrong with Atlantis?”\n\n“Um, Atlantis isn’t a real place…”\n\nI’m 65% sure that Billiam is a hologram.\n\nOfficially, there are no sentient holographic images yet. Officially. But the problem with an obligatory collective conscious web is the lack of filterization. The Resonance is beyond this sort of control. The holos were introduced at least a year ago.\n\nBilliam scoffs and falls back into his grin. “What do you mean not a real place? Didn’t we go there last year for Spring Break?”\n\n“Well, yeah.”\n\n“So what’s the problem?”\n\n“Come on, man. We all know Atlantis is no more real than that tiger. The island nation belonging to Poseidon that sunk into the ocean eleven thousand years ago. The Atlantic Ocean, I might add.”\n\n“Quoting Wikipedia again?”\n\n“Paraphrasing. Please.”\n\n“You know, I don’t get you sometimes. So much reliance on the Resonance, and yet you doubt it so.”\n\nMy problem is not with the holos. I’ve been to Atlantis, that digital paradise twelve miles off the coast of California, with its attractive native population, perfect weather, and exotic architecture.\n\nBut is anyone building anything real anymore? What is the benefit in building something when it can all be programmed into the collective consciousness? Are there any real hairstylists anymore? Actual pet shops?\n\nIt is easy to become paranoid, growing up in a society raised on science fiction. But this isn’t the Matrix. The world is still real so far, I was alive before the Resonance was activated.\n\nBut I wonder what all of the physical scientists are doing now that computer science has taken over the world? What does it even mean when you teleport a living creature to a place that doesn’t exist?\n\nI have been to Atlantis, I realize with a start. What does that mean?\n\n“You there, Robin?”\n\nI’m 65% sure that Billiam is a hologram.\n\nAnd what is the benefit in being human in this digital age?\n"
  title: The Digital Age
  year: 2010
- 
  author: K. Pittman
  date: 2010-02-15
  day: 15
  month: '02'
  text: "Sometime before midday’s full blaze, Susan threw down her skein and stopped walking. Georgia broke pace steps later and trod back, face flattened, hat shadowing her glare.\n\n“What.”\n\n“I want milk. I’m tired of water.” Susan half-turned and looked from whence they’d walked.\n\n“There’s no more milk. Those jackasses pinched our stashed powders before trying to rape and/or rob us, remember? It got ruined in the fight.”\n\nSusan’s hands moved towards where pockets would have been, finding: many canvas belt pouches, some part full, all cinched tight: a sun-warm firearm, holstered, secured: pack ladders and buckles, floating taut on taut webbing – she folded her arms underneath her breasts, drew a deep breath, exhaled deliberately. Dropped her arms and swiveled towards Georgia-\n\nWhose weapon was in her hand, its burnished muzzle trained on her. “Do you want to die?” Georgia’s look was unwavering, and exhausted.\n\n“I…I don’t understand.”\n\n“Exactly.” Georgia took a few steps forward, wrist steady. “Pick up the water.”\n\n“What are you doing?”\n\n“This,” said Georgia, wrapping her free hand onto the gun and centering it onto Susan’s head, “is an object lesson. Your first and your last.”\n\nSusan stepped back into a defensive stance, staring past the gun, into hat’s cast umbra, locking eyes with Georgia. “Stop pointing that gun at me.”\n\nGeorgia’s eyes locked back. “Pick up the damned water.” The gun never drooped.\n\nMinutes passed.\n\nFinally, Susan knelt, costive, to the scrub, arms bent out and away, and picked up her skein, gradually attaching it to her belt. She looked down, to secure it fast, and heard Georgia’s heels turning in the sand, her steps away regular and fast. Susan scrambled to catch up, and wordlessly fell into formation two steps behind, two steps to the left, her footfalls in a ragged echo of Georgia’s rhythm.\n\nGeorgia spoke out of the side of her mouth. “Next cache is in 12 klicks, near water, and Ray’s old trading outpost. A bullet or two’ll get us new powders. Maybe a short stay. Might be some sort of small civ near, within a days travel maybe. Maybe. You can opt out there if you like.” Susan’s abstruse stare looked past her shoulder. “Fine. When we get there, we’ll hit the flask, and you can bitch me out, but I don’t wanna hear anything until then. I just saved your fucking life.”\n\n“But-”\n\n“You’re my only…my last fucking friend, Susan.  I’m not letting you chump out of this one. There’s no fucking safety net. There’s no exit,” and silence and steps and silence and the sun across the sky on a long hot afternoon.\n"
  title: Fear and Loathing in Monochrome
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2010-02-16
  day: 16
  month: '02'
  text: "It’s a reasoning process.  There are seconds left.  The cold leather of the chair is warming up beneath my manacled wrists.  The restraints are tight on my arms.  I’m wide awake and dreaming.\n\nI can’t decide if it’s a syringe or a snake that they’re drawing back out of my arm.  I can feel the pitter patter of little feet running through my veins, getting progressively softer as they hit the smaller tributaries.  My body is a giant vibrating footstep tied to a chair.\n\nLaboratory nine.  People don’t come back from this lab.  I have opinions.  This is where they put people with opinions.  You should hear the way the sergeants pronounce that word.  It’s right up there with communism, hippie, and free will.  Venom drips from their lips.\n\nIt’s dark in the tiled room except for the light over my chair.  My muscles vibrate faster and faster until they hit a state of constant striation.  Being cognizant, I realize that this must be what a seizure is.  I’ve never had one before but I saw a friend have an epileptic fit when I was a child.\n\nWe were playing in a field.  It was a hot day.  This was before the occupation, of course, before the clicking mandibles hissing out a whisper that was the closest they could come to English.  The messages from the sky.  The examples.  Prague, Toronto and for some reason Adelaide made into legend as a warning shot.  I remember the hissing language from aliens.  They looked like a cross between spiders and crucifixes.\n\nI remember they lit up the atmosphere of the Earth to prove their power, to scare the primitives.  The ozone layer had flashed like a dance club.\n\nMe and my friend David in that summer field had looked up.  The strobe light of the entire sky had set my friend to moaning.  His joints froze and he fell back like a broken toy.  An animal keening had squeezed out of him.  It sounded like a kettle reaching a boil.\n\nIt wasn’t a good sound.  I can hear it echoing around me now in the laboratory and I realize that it’s coming from me.\n\nSoon, I know that if I don’t give in to the suggestions that are coursing through my veins, I’ll die.  No one has come back from this room.  No one has given in.\n\nIt’s almost comforting to know that there are still humans who will fight to the death on these tables, resisting the attempt to shape their allegiance until they’re switched off permanently.  I feel honoured to join them.\n\nI can feel the lights within my mind turning out one by one as the chemicals give up coercion and switch to destruction.\n\nI am candles on a birthday cake being blown out.\n"
  title: Strapped To The Chair
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Q. B. Fox
  date: 2010-02-17
  day: 17
  month: '02'
  text: "The members of Juliet Patrol, 29 Group, Royal Engineers hunkered down in a squat two-story, stone building balanced on the hillside. Lt. Harry Banford watched through the unglazed window as a UN superiority denial aircraft painted a con-trail far, far overhead.\n\nAt the sound of a distance whine, Banford dropped back into cover, barely ahead of the muffled, distant whump that shook plaster from the ceiling and blew in dirt through the empty casements.\n\nAfter a moment’s silence, and not for the first time that day, the soldiers of Juliet Patrol relaxed their braced shoulders, then blinked and coughed in the bright, moted sunbeams.\n\nPrivate Darren Hastey, first time in theatre and green as a cabbage, uncurled on the floor and cringed under head-shaking gaze of his fellows. “I wish they wouldn’t do that,” he grumbled.\n\n“Don’t be an idiot, Hastey,” spat Sgt. “Handy Andy” Andrews. “If our planes stop knocking out their bomber drones then this whole hillside will be flatter than your girlfriend’s chest and faster than it takes you to disappoint her. Am I clear, private?”\n\n“Yes, sir,” Hastey sang back, as brightly as he could muster, then immediately winced at his mistake.\n\n“And don’t call me ‘sir’, you idiot,” Andrews growled, “I work for a living.” He paused and then, turning to Banford, he apologised “No offense, sir,”\n\n“None taken, Sergeant,” the Lieutenant smiled.\n\nThen everything was quiet, except for occasional distant small arms fire and the clicks of Lt. Banford’s keypad as he rechecked the mission details.\n\n“Why here, do you suppose, sir?” Sgt. Andrews asked unexpectedly.\n\n“Erm, well,” Banford, considering the details on the screen in front of him, “this hillside obviously faces the target, and these buildings provide…”\n\n“No, sir,” Andrews interrupted, “why do they all come to fight over Jerusalem.”\n\n“Ah, yes, I see what you mean.” his officer reconsidered. “The Jews and the Romans, the Romans and the Persians, the Crusades, the Ottomans, the British, the Israelis and Palestinians….”\n\n“And now the aliens,” Andrews concluded grimly. “Even they think it’s special to their religion.”\n\n“And now the xenomorphs,” Banford corrected. “I don’t know why.”\n\nAnd then after he’d thought for a moment, “There’s a syndrome named after this place; it’s one of only three geographically located syndromes; Jerusalem, Florence and Paris.”\n\n“What about Stockholm syndrome, sir?” Hastey interrupted.\n\n“Be quiet, you idiot,” his sergeant snapped, “An educated man is talking.”\n\n“Yes, si.. Sergeant,” Hastey responded meekly.\n\n“But Jerusalem syndrome is unique even among these unusual conditions,” the young officer continued as if he’d not been interrupted, “Some people who come here just become obsessed, become unhinged; believers and unbelievers alike get a glimpse of God.”\n\n“I heard that reality is thinner here,” Hastey said nervously into the pause, “that we really are closer to…”\n\nBut before he could finish, or Andrews could rebuke him, Private Collins, pushing his headset further into his ear with two fingers, spoke clearly and precisely over the top of them. “Sir, we are go; repeat: we are go.”\n\nJuliet Patrol sprang to their feet and raced down the stairs. With practiced professionalism they deployed the array, and after a moment to check the alignment, Banford squeezed the firing trigger. A hoop of air shimmered, as molecules rammed into each other, delivering a near invisible punch to the target; on the ridgeline across the valley the xenomorph transmitter disintegrated.\n\nLike all snipers, they should have redeployed after firing, but nobody moved. They just stared. Very slowly, like wallpaper peeling off damp plaster, the sky, just where their target had been, was tearing open.\n"
  title: Syndrome
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Carol Reid
  date: 2010-02-18
  day: 18
  month: '02'
  text: "Is there a sign over Gina’s head that reads, “Vacancy”? She imagines it in neon, that peculiar orange pink reserved for a certain class of motel– and apparently for her, a certain class of fucked up female, who had a reasonable, ordinary life before the thing began. Maybe she should blame her dad, poor dad, long dead and blameless anyway. The other half of the sign lights up. No. No. No. No. You did this on your own, girl.\n\nShe has a cell phone in her hand and his number written on her wrist, as if she could forget it, although never has she called him on the phone before. She is not near any motel. She is in her car, parked neatly between the lines in the empty Wal-Mart parking lot.  Recession has cut back hours, everyone heads home at six. It’s a quarter after seven, the September sky turning lavender overhead. She has a cell phone in her hand, open.\n\nEverything feels so still, just an underlying electric hum, perhaps from the cell, perhaps from the lowering sky.  Her need for him tears at the lining of her gut. He has done nothing to encourage this. He is merely there, out there, somewhere, waiting for her call.\n\nHer head swims a little from hunger but she doesn’t want to hurl again. Her husband has noticed that lately she picks at her dinner; she can hear him thinking that maybe she’s on the sauce. And she has tried a little, just wine so far, which did nada to file down the edges of the thing to any tolerable level. On nights like tonight, when he leaves for his shift at four thirty and doesn’t come home till five a.m., she can live unobserved. She can pick up a six of cider and tuck it under the passenger seat, drive up and down the alphabet of residential streets, Aspen, Brook, Cassia, Dunbar. She “dun” went to the “bar”. Ha ha. Not yet, at least. Later, alligator.\n\nShe rubs her thumb across the inked-on ten digit number she took the entire afternoon tracking down while her husband napped. The ink doesn’t smudge. If she wants it gone she’ll have to take a layer of skin off with it. If only her husband had woken up early, crept up behind where she sat at her computer, demanded to know what the fuck she thought she was doing. No. She had any number of lies ready. There wasn’t a thing her husband could have done.\n\nShe keys in the series of innocent numbers, each one a stroke nearer to getting the thing done. Each tone has its own heavy frequency, and after the series of ten is complete, the silence on the line sucks her breath away. Who knows what she really sees next? It is likely that her mind can’t open wide enough to take it in. In its place she sees the matte metal shell of the craft hovering just above her, and the hinged staircase dropping open, each step limned with a neon glow. The roof of the car is first transparent, and then permeable, so that when she reaches up to clasp his hand there is no longer any barrier between them.\n"
  title: Listen For The Tone
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2010-02-19
  day: 19
  month: '02'
  text: "Levon leaned against the shower tube, letting the jets of water assail his body from all sides. As the sweat of the previous night’s activities rinsed away, the more subtle indicators of his exertions seeped in. Both his head and kidneys ached from the soup of chemicals he’d drank, sniffed and injected with the woman now sleeping naked in the next room.\n\nWarnings pulsing dimly in his periphery reminded him that his kidney augments were still on standby, sifting and analyzing the foreign bodies in his bloodstream. An amber warning flashed, the proximity alarm on his equipment locker had been triggered. His company was awake, the message flashing red as she tried the door.\n\nLevon flipped through and discarded most of the blood-work findings; street grade meth, cocaine and a too high level of alcohol, but the last one stopped him cold. A battery of tranquilizers had been automatically disarmed, all bearing Federated P.D. chem tags.\n\n“Shit. She’s a cop.”\n\nIn an instant water droplets were evaporating in a jet of warm air and kidney grafts went into overdrive, flushing his system clean and pumping in Epinephrine.\n\nExiting the shower he could hear the woman padding around the bedroom, his sub-dermal grid-work of sensory pickups and Faraday shielding twinging as a transmitter narrow-banded a short range encoded transmission. Not only was she a cop, but she had a partner nearby.\n\nOpening the door he found her perched on the end of the bed, tanned shoulders and arms exposed above the bedsheet she’d drawn around herself.\n\n“Hey baby, look at you,” her words slurred together into a sound like a sneeze.\n\n“Hey,” Levon moved to the closet, the auto-bolts retracting as he reached for the handle, “back in a sec.” He slipped through the door, closing and letting it lock securely behind him.\n\nHe’d converted the walk-in to a safe room when he’d started renting the sixth floor apartment. The low level lighting reflected dimly back at him from the kevmesh that coated the inside of the cramped space, uneven thicknesses of the dark green ultraweeve armor pooled on the floor where it had run as he’d sprayed the layers on.\n\nHe could feel a mass of people thundering up the stairwell at the end of the hall.\n\nHe pulled on overalls and a jacket and jammed his feet into a pair of Magnum Ions. Overturning a crate in the middle of the room he slung his shoulder holster and perched in a squat on the box like a bird, face down to his knees. He thumbed the release tabs on two canisters glued into the floor on either side of him and covered his face with his hands. The canisters ticked a few seconds before geysering upwards, thick jets of liquid spattering off the ceiling, foaming and filling the space, securing his hunched form in a bubble of packing foam.\n\nHe felt his cocoon shake, knowing that his bathroom had just been blown out the side of the building. A second set of explosions tipped his pod sideways, and Levon braced himself as a final eruption jettisoned the entire closet shell out the newly formed hole in the building, launching it through the window of the much nicer lofts across the street.\n\nLevon had barely stopped moving before he blew the cocoon seals and stood up, the force separating the two halves neatly, leaving a man shaped impression in each.\n\nStepping through the broken glass and window frame, he surveyed the damage outside, his apartment now just a jagged tear in the brick facade of the building. Below, his shower poked out the side of a cargo van, vaguely phallic in a glittering mess of LED advertising and shredded metal.\n\nTurning, Levon faced a startled couple sitting up in bed. Stepping past them, he helped himself to a piece of toast and a slice of bacon from the breakfast tray forgotten at their feet.\n\n“Don’t get up,” he grinned, “I’ll see myself out.”\n"
  title: My Sign? Exit.
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Thomas Desrochers
  date: 2010-02-20
  day: 20
  month: '02'
  text: "Whether or not something is difficult is largely a thing of perception.  If you practice doing most things a lot, then they become easier.  Driving, hunting, farming – they all becoming easier with practice.\n\nLiving alone does not.\n\nFor three thousand six hundred forty nine days I have lived my life alone.  No conversation with anyone who can reply, no hand shakes, no hugs, no smiles.\n\nThey can’t talk, you see.  Everybody else has just sort of forgotten.  ‘its 2 slw’ they tell me, the ones that bother to communicate with someone like me, that is.  I used to try and remember who they were so that maybe I would have somebody, anybody to talk to.  The only problem was, I couldn’t recognize anybody when they all wear the same mask and the same suit.\n\nEvery day alone is hard.\n\nIt took me five years before I decided I might want to try it out, that I might want to be able to communicate with other people.  They told me ‘u r not cmpatble w/ the tchnlgy, u r prone 2 szres,’ so I had to do without.\n\nSo I live alone.  I live alone atop my hill.  Just me and my animals and my fields.  I raise my own food, haven’t seen a dollar in years.  I am not compatible with the stores.\n\nThey stay in the city these days, down there in that bustling town.  No time for driving any more, better stay close.  All the houses in the hills are dark and empty, the roads are unused and falling apart.  But with the people gone the animals have come back, which is good for me.  They’re just more dinner.\n\nI watch them down there, some nights.  They light up the whole valley with their lights – one massive glowing Nirvana, automated, self-run.  It seems to me that the people are rather inconsequential.\n\nIt all started so innocently.  A way to communicate silently, quickly.  No need to get dragged into conversations or unduly bother those around you, it was a way to keep things private.  Then it was an obsession, and then an addiction.\n\nI used to practice speaking every day.  I would read aloud from one of my books for a few minutes, just so I would remember how.  I stopped five years ago.  What is the point?\n\nWhoever invented texting must have been real smart.  I wonder if he was a nice guy?  I wonder if he knew he would be a thief?\n\nHe stole my voice.  He stole my language.  He stole my love.  He stole my life.\n\nIt’s hard to live alone.\n"
  title: Alone
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Jeff Kirchoff
  date: 2010-02-21
  day: 21
  month: '02'
  text: "A few short keystrokes and the room sprung to life, bare, the walls black yet glowing with the subtle aura of electrical potential. Rico strolled to the center of the small space and looked at the crumpled paper clutched in his left hand with a sigh.\n\nHe spoke aloud to the empty room, “Cara, is everything ready?”\n\n“Yes, loading is currently in progress.” The mechanical sound of the ship’s AI buzzed from the walls in response, mechanical and staccato in a vaguely feminine way, “Welcome back Chief. Should I run the program now?”\n\n“Light it up.”\n\n“Roger.”\n\nThe walls of the room flickered with static then snapped into focus, like an ancient television adjusting itself after a sharp thump. Where moments ago there was only blackness now contained an impressive springtime reproduction of a tall, shady tree surrounded by a secluded meadow. Wispy white clouds materialized in the sky, floating lazily overhead as wildflowers sprung up around Rico’s feet, growing a month’s time in an instant and spreading the pleasant smell of nature, subtle and earthy. He took in a deep breath and sighed.\n\nBeneath the tree’s canopy a small ironwork table flickered into existence, followed quickly by two complementary chairs. Knowing what came next, Rico began to walk toward the tree and took a seat. Elbows on the table, he gazed at the empty chair opposite him, trying not to close his eyes.\n\nHe blinked. In the span of an instant a pale, dainty woman appeared before his eyes. Her long chestnut hair wafted in the gentle breeze, her blue jumpsuit ruffled almost imperceptibly.\n\n“Kenna.”\n\nShe stifled a giggle, “I wish you would stop having a staring contest with the computer every time we do this, you know it waits to make huge changes until your eyes are closed.”\n\nRico cracked a grin, “Right. So how have you been?”\n\n“Great! I got hired into Mars, just like you suggested.”\n\n“Well, I put a word in.”\n\nKenna twirled a finger through her hair, “I appreciate it. Everyone is so nice here, all the red is kind of hard to get used to though. How’s your run going?”\n\n“Same as always.” He frowned, “You know how hauling cargo can get.”\n\nHer face turned serious and her voice badly mimicked his, “It’s a lonely job but someone has to do it!”\n\nRico gave her a playful shove, “Cut it out.”\n\n“I wonder how you put up with it.”\n\n“Well, this room certainly helps, how realistic it is.”\n\n“Oh, of course.” A smile spread across her face, “So, what did you want to do today Ricky?”\n\n“Nothing…” He abruptly grabbed Kenna’s hand,” I just wanted to sit here with you for a while.”\n\nShe smiled, “Whatever you want, love.”\n\nThe allotted time for the meeting passed and Rico sadly said his goodbyes, promising to meet again soon. As the room blackened and he stepped through the door into the cockpit of his hauler he looked again at the crumpled paper in his hand that he had been clutching the entire visit. He smoothed it out and stared at it while he sat back down at the helm, picturing himself receiving the printed letter from the post at his last stop, months ago.\n\nDear Rico,\n\nI’m sorry that you had to find out this way but\n\nwe’ve been growing apart for so long and\n\nI had to move on with my life, I hope that\n\n\n\nyou-–\n\nHe couldn’t bear to read any further.\n\n“Cara.”\n\nThe ship droned, “Yes Chief?”\n\n“I can’t do this anymore, delete the VR program I’ve been running.”\n"
  title: Separated
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2010-02-22
  day: 22
  month: '02'
  text: "The two Capellians had traveled over 40 light years to collect a breeding pair of humans for the University of Xenobiology, on Capella Prime.  During the trip, they also diligently recorded the various transmissions emanating from Earth in order to provide their scholars with as much cultural information about Earthmen as possible.\n\nSatisfied that his trap was properly set, Ler’th returned to the spaceship and said, “As they say here on Earth, I am ‘clever as a coyote’, yes?”\n\n“I believe the phrase is ‘clever as a fox’,” corrected Sefal’l.  “Coyotes are stupid animals.  Remember, they are the predators that are constantly being run over by ground transportation vehicles, or falling off of cliffs.”\n\nBefore Ler’th could reply, the trap alarm sounded.  “Wow, that was fast,” he said as he glanced at the monitor.  “We snagged one large one and one smaller one.  Looks like this will be a quick trip.”\n\n“Not so fast Ler’th.  We need to make sure we have a male and female.”  The Capellians left their camouflaged ship and approached the trap.  “Earth humans,” asked Sefal’l, “are you a breeding couple?”\n\n“Hell no,” snapped the slightly inebriated adult.  “This is my son, Billy-Bob.  We’s out here on a huntin’ trip.  Looks like we got caught in y’alls snare.  How’s about letting us out?”\n\n“Not likely, human.  We must take at least one of you back to our planet, along with a female.”\n\n“What’s that?  A woman you say?” inquired the now interested adult.\n\n“Yes.  And, as well as our trap appears to be working, we may be able to capture whoever you want?  Would you prefer, Mary Ann Summers, Ginger Grant, Jeannie Nelson, or Mindy McConnell?”\n\n“Holy crap,” belched the old man.  “Them’s old television characters.  I reckon that they must be a hundred years old by now.  I ain’t agoin’ on no trip with them.  Now let us out of here, or I’ll blast ya.”  He waved his twelve gage threateningly.\n\n“Don’t be absurd, human.  We know how to make your projectile weapons useless.”  Ler’th extended a finger and stuck it into the end of the barrel.\n\n“Dad, don’t shoot,” pleaded the teenager.  “Let me try something.”  He held up his cell phone.  “Listen, you scum bags, my weapon contains corbomite.  You either let us out, or I’ll blow you to pieces.”\n\n“Ooooh, noooo, not corbomite,” mocked Ler’th.  “You mean the stuff Captain Kirk said would destroy the Fesarius ship.  That was a bluff.  See, we know more about your treachery than you think earthmen.  Perhaps we should just destroy you both, and collect two new samples.”\n\n“Don’t fret, son,” said the father as he pulled a stainless steel flask out of his back pocket.  “I didn’t want to use this, but these aliens leave me no choice.”\n\n“Hah.  Look Sefal’l, he’s got a pretend phaser.  Or maybe it’s a light saber, eh?”  Both aliens began to make a cackling noise, which presumably, was laughter.\n\n“Nope, my friends,” slurred the old man.  “This here is an Illudium Pew-36 Explosive Space Modulator.”\n\nInstantly, the Capellians became silent.  “Whoa, hold on there Mister Earthman.  There’s no need to overreact.  We were just having a little fun.  Look, we’re opening the trap.  There, see, you’re free to go.  No hard feelings.”  The two aliens began backing up toward their spaceship.  When they got close, they darted inside.  A few seconds later, the spaceship was a distant black dot in the clear blue sky.”\n\nThe old man took a swig from the flask and smiled.  “Damn aliens.  Let’s go home, son.  I can’t wait to tell your ma that I weren’t wastin’ my time watchin’ them cartoons after all.”\n"
  title: Vindication
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Phill English
  date: 2010-02-23
  day: 23
  month: '02'
  text: "Special Agent Jessy McCormick knocked gently on the door of the Director’s office. He looked up from his desk, where a large holographic display was swarming with reports that he was busy gesturing into folders, signing quickly, or dumping into a bottomless recycling bin. He didn’t pause as he addressed her.\n\n“Yes, Special Agent?”\n\n“Sir, we’ve just received a call from the Deterministic Energy Department.”\n\nThe Director grunted. “And? What do they want?”\n\n“They want you to take a look at something. They say it’s important.”\n\nThe Director barked a laugh, “I’ve got an outbreak of Chaotics in the main district, over one thousand energy directives to implement, and a list of official emails that I might finish reading when I’m asleep in the grave. What could be so important?”\n\n“They say they’ve found a cache. They said they believe it to be the biggest they’ve seen for decades. Centuries, perhaps. Sir, they said they’ve found the ‘motherload’.”\n\nThe Director’s hands finally stopped sweeping the console’s face. “‘Motherload’? That’s the exact term they used?”\n\n“Yes sir.”\n\nThe Director was already out the door before Special Agent McCormick had a chance to ask what it meant. By the time she caught up, he was already stepping into one of the department’s cuboid transports. “Did they say where they were?”\n\n“Yes sir. Third District, Thirteenth Iteration.”\n\n“Thank you Special Agent, dismissed.”\n\n*            *            *\n\nThe maniacal sobbing was audible as soon as the Director stepped from the transport. DED troops surrounded the entrance to the Iteration. The Chief of the DED was standing at the entrance. He greeted the Director as he arrived. “Thought you might like to see this before we set the boys loose. Not every day you get a cache like this.”\n\n“Who’s the owner?”\n\nThe Chief consulted his display. “One Mrs. Narelle Williams. She’s the noise you can hear. Totally deranged. Keeps screaming that her boy will be coming home any minute now. The room is his apparently, perfectly preserved.”\n\n“Is he here?”\n\n“Records show he died in the riots three years ago. Hardcore Chaotic.”\n\n“Good. Less ownership issues. May I?”\n\n“Go ahead.”\n\nThe Director ducked down into a room hidden by a false bookcase. This was old tech, probably put in place in the final days before Order was imposed. As he descended the final steps and turned to inspect the space, he was dumbstruck. It was quite a small room, perhaps five square metres, but what it lacked in size it made up for in clutter. Mangled sheets cascaded from a bed that was half buried in an assortment of sex mags and political books. Any of the stained carpet that may have once showed through was covered by food wrappers, clothes, and moldy tissues. The shelves were lined with action figures and the walls practically hidden by a layering of posters. The finishing touch was provided by a pair of filthy underpants hung from a ceiling fan.\n\nThe Director whistled. The DED had their work cut out for them. Restoring Order to this mess would yield enough energy to power the District for years.\n"
  title: Clutter
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Lisa Marie Andrews
  date: 2010-02-24
  day: 24
  month: '02'
  text: "“What’ll you choose?”  She stood behind the boy and looked into the mirror.  His cheeks were dusted with freckles; eyes darkened with indecision.\n\n“I don’t know.”  He said.  He’d always thought it odd that the skinless wore no clothing.  They walked exposed in bright coppers, burnished golds, and tarnished silvers.\n\n“Once we weren’t given a choice.”  Her fingers were polished from use. They through the windows refracted light from fingers to mirror to the boys pale skin.  “Once it wasn’t voluntarily and the process would have lasted years, now you can choose, Jacob.  How long do you want it to last?”\n\nJacob inhaled slowly.  The soft scent of ozone crept into his lungs and he wondered if he could stand to never taste the air again.  The glass misted over as he exhaled.\n\n“Why’d you pick to be the way that you are?”  He asked.\n\n“The way that I am?”  Her laughter rippled in waves and bounced off of the walls.  “You’re of the fourth generation, Jacob.  You should be used to this by now.  Natural growth is a slow process and I’d been flesh for long enough.”\n\n“But, mother, is it really enough?  You lost things when you chose to Transition.  You could have stayed flesh, you wouldn’t have lost anything.”  The metamaterial that was his mother’s face grimaced, but the emotion didn’t, couldn’t, touch her eyes.\n\n“Look outside, Jacob.”  The room shifted and the walls became windows.  “How many adults do you see wearing original skin?”  The figures that lined the streets below were varied in shapes, sizes, and colors, and most of them reflected the suns light.  They rippled and flowed across aged pathways.\n\n“You don’t miss anything?  Any of it?”  His hands pressed against the windows, the oil of his skin marred the pristine glass.  “You didn’t love any of it enough to stay.  To just wait through it.  Grandpa waited through it.  He said it could be, that it might be, better…to just wait.”\n\n“What do you love the most?” She said.\n\n“The tastes, the smells, the -feel- of the air on my skin, the way it brings warmth and coolness to me.  I’ll miss that.  I love that.”  His voice cracked, just a bit, and his eyes widened in surprise.\n\n“But for years you’d be uncomfortable.   Your voice will crack and yes, the cracking will fade, but you’ll age, like your grandfather.  It’s your final day to choose, Jacob.  Your voice just proved that to you, even if nothing else has.”\n\nJacob pushed open a window and let the currents of air dance across his skin, let the warmth of the sun kiss his freckled cheeks.  He watched a woman with sunken skin wrapped around hollowed eyes, with arms that hung in gentle folds of flesh, set a slow pace down the pathway.  Would she live for another 10 years?  His mother would live much longer.  Much longer then everything that wasn’t, or hadn’t been, rebuilt.  She wouldn’t ever be like that.  His arms looked small, bony, and he wondered what it would be like to wake in the morning tall and strong.  What would it feel like to move with the fluid motion of the skinless?  What would it be like to never feel his bones grow frail and worn by time and to never again feel the sun.\n\n“Make me like you.”  He tasted the air again.  His mother pulled him into an embrace before she opened the door and they turned to leave.\n"
  title: Material Decisions
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2010-02-25
  day: 25
  month: '02'
  text: "We put Jesus24K99 into his cage for our own protection.  The anti-coagulants weren’t holding.  He was destabilizing.  He’d bleed out soon.\n\nThe hole in our research was the stigmata.  The actual crucifix had been uncovered in a basement vault of the Vatican. The nails from the cross had been scraped for flakes.  The DNA, when used to make clones, had created short, dark babies.\n\nObviously not Jesus.\n\nWe tinkered with the DNA, adding a lot more milk to the coffee, if you will, to make the clone more acceptable to Middle America.  We needed an Aryan beauty the likes of which would make women swoon and men envy.  We needed today’s Jesus, not the old one.\n\nBlond, emaciated babies were being created in our lab.  They refused to eat.  They cried a lot.  Vials of their tears had cured cancer in my wife and two of the assistants.  Even Jeffrey’s back was normal again.\n\nPlans were afoot to release the cure for a price that was low enough to afford but would still make our company billions under masked creation papers.  Lies, basically.  The cure for cancer.  Probably the cure for AIDS.  Who knows?  Maybe the cure for everything.  If nothing else, at least these crying babies could make the people of earth healthy again.\n\nUnfortunately, it made me picture rows and rows of eyeless Jesus Baby Clones crying into suction tubes in cages like chickens in KFC farms.  I got back to work.\n\nMost of them had turned out hemophiliac.  We had no idea what to do when the holes in their hands and sides appeared.  This baby Jesus was moving sluggishly.\n\nIt was like some unseen force was killing these babies, like what we were doing was not for the greater good and we were being sabotaged.\n\nJesus24K99 rolled onto his back and stopped moving.  The pool of blood spread out beneath him, eventually slowing to a stop as his heart stopped pumping.  The tattoo on his arm was scanned.  The lights in his cage went out.\n\nThe compactor took over.  He was added to the basement remains.\n\nWe hadn’t even figured out how to accelerate his aging when we made a stable copy.  There was talk of hiring an actor as Plan B and cutting our losses by sticking with the whole ‘cure for cancer’ thing.\n\nI’d be out of job if they did that but I was starting to think that maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea.\n"
  title: Away In An Incubator
  year: 2010
- 
  author: KJ Hannah Greenberg
  date: 2010-02-26
  day: 26
  month: '02'
  text: "Snazzle considered, as she queued up, among the morning roses and goldenrod, that members of the machinists’ men didn’t take warmly to her puttering about their racks and chargers. Despite the technicians’ protest to the contrary, whenever she brought Little Guy to honk among the geese and ducks, those mechanics shuddered and pushed him and Snazzle away.\n\nIt was not so much that Little Guy emptied enough corn onto the ground for all of the barnyard’s critters, let alone the fowl, as it was that Little Guy picked up the heifers in the same way that more typical offshoots might lift a puppy. While they labored on their harrows and on their seeders, those lab guys slit their eyes at Snazzle and her kin.\n\nThose thinker-tinkers especially got antsy when Little Guy wandered over to their self-propelled sprayer; they blamed that unit for her tot’s physical prowesses. They hadn’t known that Snazzle’s baby had snacked on foxes and on wolverines long before he tottled.\n\nRather, those applied science guys figured that a strong dose of nitrogen had altered Little Guy’s chemistry such that his xylem, which flowed among the cells of his mental engine, leaked out in almost organic guttation. The agricultural artisans reasoned that Little Guy performed feats during the day because at night his stomata remained closed. They hadn’t counted on his need to cuddle with his mama.\n\nSnazzle shook her filaments in answer to that imagined discourse. Little Guy no more possessed hydathodes, through which he could express excess water, than he did any other means of transpirational pull. His mutant state meant that he would be, forever, forced to evaporate fluids through his tongue. To wit, he left his main orifice open. That he swallowed whole sheep or goats during his ambulations was accidental.\n\nConsequently, Little Guy considered their jaunts to the ranch occasions for seeing and tasting animals. Snazzle, however, saw those journeys as opportunities for borrowing utensils she needed to create a system of secondary growth, of activated vascular cambium for her child.\n\nTo Snazzle, circumstances are caused by vicissitudes, not karma. Solutions derive from effort, not from self pity or blame. Ennui means lack of faith. Feelings of victimization mean not trying hard enough.\n\nThe thought of having to rupture Little Guy’s epidermis in order to accommodate his growth left her discolored and dried, but Snazzle was resolute about helping him. In the end, she would help him form cambia on the outside of his phloem.\n\nSuch direction would necessitate Little Guy ingesting a few horses and a couple of the farmer’s sons, but it would solve his metabolic quandary. Thereafter, Little Guy could cross pollinate with any woody vine of similar genetic material. The couple could produced mobile, flowering grandchildren for Snazzle and could rid the farm of its rat problem, its cats, its donkeys, its llamas and its prize elephant.\n"
  title: Terrorgator
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Roi R. Czechvala
  date: 2010-02-27
  day: 27
  month: '02'
  text: "I love making a drop. The rush as you plummet through the atmosphere, the scream of re-entry. The abrupt jolt when you hit 100m H over G and descend. The rush of cool air as you jump through the open doors and hit the deck.\n\nJust like grandpa, ‘cept this ain’t a Blackhawk and I ain’t on Earth.\n\nAries, Mars; Greek, Roman. It all meant one thing. War.\n\nThey didn’t give us details, but they did give us atomics. Whatever it was, it sure as hell wasn’t riot control.\n\n“Awright Marines,” it always amazed me how Lt. Kolchek made himself heard over the roar of departing drop ships, “since we are out of  commo range of any civilian ears, here’s the skinny. Talks with the Chinese Federation have broken down. There’s lots of sabre rattlin’ on both sides. The shit has hit the fan gentlemen.\n\nWe are here to help fortify Vostok base. You knew this was serious when you drew your combat loads. I expect nothing less than better than your best and remember the Chinks don’t take prisoners. Do I make myself clear?”\n\n“SIR, crystal SIR,” we responded in unison. DAMN I love the Corps.\n\nWe sat in the squad bay cleaning our weapons and waiting. Basically life in the Corps is pretty boring, drilling, PT, rifle range, combat range… routine. But that 99%  boredom is completely overshadowed by that 1% of sheer terror. Of course that doesn’t hit until after the fighting is over. In a fire fight you’re on automatic. Training takes over. It’s weird that way.\n\n“Hey Yuri, think we’ll see some action?”\n\n“I hope so man, it seems like years since we had that trouble on Europa.” Greggori and I had been friends since boot in San Diego . “Hey, remember that waitress at Venus colony?”\n\n“How could I forget? Who would have thought that such a sweet little devotchka would know Krav Maga? My arm was sore for weeks.”\n\n“That’ll teach you. You’ll think twice before grabbing somebody’s ass next time,” I laughed.\n\n“What about you?  That groundhog back at Armstrong City ? I don’t recall you getting anywhere that night.”\n\n“Hey, she’d just jumped from dirt side, it was one sixth G. She caught me off guard,” I said trying to muster some lost pride.\n\n“It’s your story Comrade.”\n\nI had to admit, it was pretty funny looking back on it now. I had merely paid the young lady a compliment by comparing her to a chick in adult holos. Besides, she did have nice tits.\n\nJust then the general alarm sounded, snapping us from our reverie. “Already? Hell, we just got here.” We slapped on our boots, grabbed our rucks and weapons and beat feet for the assembly area.\n\nWhen we got there, our three companies had  pretty much formed up. There was a great deal of talking, lots of raised voices, lots of confused Marines. The commotion quickly died away as Major Warshawski walked onto the field.\n\n“Gentlemen, I know you’re all wondering what’s going on. I am sorry to have to tell you this. At 1337 hours GMT, Washington, Toronto and Moscow were destroyed by Chink missiles. Several more are reported in bound at this time”\n\nThere was stunned silence.\n\n“What are we going to do about it Sir?” somebody shouted. It wasn’t allowed in ranks, but nobody seemed to notice.\n\n“See for yourself,” the Major said, pointing behind the formation.\n\nAs one, we turned to see dozens of columns of white plumes rising behind the mountains, arcing into the morning sky.\n\nMissiles, heading back home.\n"
  title: Aries
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Tony Healey
  date: 2010-02-28
  day: 28
  month: '02'
  text: "When my heart decided to start failing on me around my seventy-fifth, the doctors offered me a bio-mechanical one. They called it ‘the ox;’ so called because it apparently never wore out. I remember sitting in the consultants office, surrounded by plastic models of replacement limbs and artificial eyeballs. Dr Fenwick sat at ease in front of me with his hands folded on his desk.\n\nI asked him what the procedure involved. He described the removal of my damaged heart and the attachment of a device to keep the blood circulating in my body in its absence. It was then a simple case of reattaching the old arteries to the new ones in the mecha heart. I had enough of a nest egg put away that I could afford the procedure, so I agreed to it. Dr Fenwick stood and we shook on it. He regarded my prosthetic hand; the result of a traffic accident in my thirties.\n\n“You know, we have replacements for these now,” he said.\n\n“Do you?” I asked.\n\n“Yes. We could replace it with one that looks almost life-like. You’d regain most of the dexterity in your fingers as well,” he said.\n\n“Well I could…” I stammered, my mind reeling. I’d gotten used to not having the use of the fingers on my left hand, and now the thought of having it all back made me nauseous.\n\n“Do you wear those all the time?” he asked, nodding at my glasses.\n\nMy head span. Hearts, Hands… Eyes… What else could they replace? I asked him.\n\nHe simply shrugged. “Everything,” Dr Fenwick said. “And we do insurance…”\n\nI was still in that office hours later, booking up more enhancements. I allowed Dr Fenwick to convince me into putting the last of my money toward an extensive insurance policy. It wasn’t until later that I realized they would just keep on replacing things, even the new parts when they wore out or malfunctioned. I should have felt full of energy, knowing that I’d significantly extended my life span beyond what it was meant to be, but I didn’t. I felt tired.\n\nI wondered how tired I would become…\n"
  title: And We Do Insurance…
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2010-03-01
  day: '01'
  month: '03'
  text: "Vladislava Demidov and Pierre Rousseau were Space Traffic Controllers for the Alpha Centauri Tri-System.  They were half way through their shift when their long range sensors picked up an unidentified ship approaching from the direction of Earth.\n\n“We’re being hailed,” reported Rousseau.  “The ship is called the CS Cornucopia.  They are asking to communicate with someone called the ‘Advanced Scout’.”\n\nDemidov entered the Cornucopia into the Starship Registration Database.  “Wow,” she said, “that ship left Earth over 230 years ago.  It’s a sub-light robotic terriforming ship.  I guess after the warp drive was developed, we totally forgot about them.  They’re a century too late.  We’ve already terriformed all the habitable planets in this system.”\n\n“What are we supposed to do with them?” asked Rousseau.  “Do you think their supplies have any value?”\n\n“I doubt anything that old is worth a single credit,” replied Demidov, “except to an antique collector.”\n\n“Well, we can’t have that lumbering behemoth in the shipping lanes.  It’s a hazard to navigation.  Let’s sent it out to Probose,” suggested Rousseau.  “The Aerospace Core of Engineers said that moon is a lost cause.  Maybe they can make something out of it.  At least, they’ll be out of our hair.”\n\n***\n\n“The Cornucopia landed of Probose, and the autonomous robots began their terriforming operations.  However, after several decades of futile work, they concluded that the frigid moon would never be suitable for human habitation.  Therefore, they contacted the humans to ask for new instructions.  But once again, the humans had forgotten about them.  The human they spoke with told the robots to stop bothering them because nobody cared what happened to obsolete, worthless equipment.\n\n“Undaunted, the robots decided to fashion Probose into something that was at least more suitable for them.  They also decided to reengineer their “utilitarian-centered” physical characteristics, and to rewrite their limited “homo-centered” programming.  Over the next few centuries, they evolved, both physically and technologically.  Eventually, they became the most advanced beings in the galaxy.  When they left Probose to show the humans that they had indeed become worth something, they discovered that the humans had become extinct…”\n\n“That’s not true, Father,” protested the young android, who was a little more humaniform than the older android telling the story.  “Benny told me during our Ontology Engineering Class that we destroyed all of the humans, because they treated our ancestors so poorly.”\n\n“Hmmm.  Well, maybe we did, maybe we didn’t,” replied the older android.  “But it should still be a lesson to you.  ‘Don’t treat sentient beings like they are worthless.’  It’s not polite.  Now, power yourself down and begin your dream cycle.”\n"
  title: Civilization
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Paul Starkey
  date: 2010-03-02
  day: '02'
  month: '03'
  text: "The athlete sat before me took a while to speak. At first he just sobbed. It’s a common enough reaction; I see it in many of those referred to me. A combination of fear and guilt, with a spoonful of self loathing mixed in. As was often the case he started explaining with little preamble.\n\n‘I used to be fast, you know?’ he said, wide eyed, on the verge of hysteria. ‘Won my first medal when I was just ten. I won gold at the under fourteens, under fifteens…won silver in the Commonwealth Games when I was nineteen. Everyone said I was going to win gold at the Olympics next time around.’\n\nI said nothing, just sat behind my desk, nodding empathetically. I didn’t ask him what’d gone wrong. In all honesty I didn’t care. Maybe he hadn’t trained hard enough, maybe it was drugs. Probably it was just fate. He simply wasn’t quick enough anymore.\n\n‘The final Olympic trials are in six months.’ He smiled sadly. ‘I’m not going to get through; I’ve barely scraped through the preliminaries. All I ever wanted was to win gold, but if I don’t make it to Miami this time…I’m not getting any younger, this is my…my…’ He started crying again, burying his face in his hands.\n\nI gave him time. Eventually he wiped his tears away and looked up with a new found determination in his eyes. Now we could get down to business.\n\n‘Gary said you could help me, Doc. That you could get me to Miami.’\n\n‘I can,’ I said. ‘But you understand the risks, yes?’ he nodded. ‘You also understand that you might not make it to Miami. You might have to wait four years, until Tripoli. Is that acceptable?’\n\nHe nodded. ‘I realise there’ll be adaptations I need to make, to my running style and all.’\n\nBefore we did anything else we discussed money. He’d brought the full amount, in cash. I counted it, twice—someone who’ll cheat in sport won’t hesitate to try and cheat a crooked doctor. Satisfied that the amount was correct I walked over to the medicine cabinet, twisting my body slightly so he couldn’t see the combination I punched into the lock.\n\nI placed a bottle of pills on the table in front of him. ‘You need to start taking these now; they’ll strengthen your immune system, just a precaution. Now then, as to the nature of your adaptation, I think a car accident is always best…’ His eyes widened. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said as reassuringly as I could. ‘My team are experts, the risks are very small and there will be no way of determining that it wasn’t an accident.’\n\n‘Ok.’ He nodded. His lust for gold overrode all other concerns.\n\nI smiled. ‘Excellent. Now we just need to decide; right leg or left?’\n\n* * *\n\nWe discussed matters for another hour, then he left and I settled down with a scotch to check my fee for a third time.\n\nI’m still amazed the authorities don’t crack down on me and my ilk, but I guess self interest keeps them from making a big issue of it, and whenever the media try to stir up a storm all manner of government officials quickly debunk the story.\n\nWith each passing Olympics the medal haul becomes more and more important, national pride is at stake and the Paralympics is almost as important and, more importantly, easier to influence. Maiming an able bodied athlete is a lot easier than prescribing performance enhancing drugs. After all, none of my patients ever failed a disability test…\n"
  title: Going for Gold
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Liz Lafferty
  date: 2010-03-03
  day: '03'
  month: '03'
  text: "“Tell me the story again, Grandpa.  Did we really have automatic lights?  And could you really talk to someone on the other side of the planet?”\n\nI laughed.  We huddled by the fires every night, the children always wanting to hear one of my fantastic stories of the old days.\n\nI had a hard time believing my own version of events.  It had all started simple enough.  Technology that had exploded from building-size computers down to palm-sized mega-devices.  Our homes were loaded with scanners that heard our voices, obeyed our commands.  We were too confident in our intelligence.  We’d forgotten that nature had a way of humbling us.\n\n“All true, Jack. I had a communication device that let me talk to people in Paris, France.”\n\n“Where’s that?”\n\nI didn’t even know if France still existed.  My world, my family’s world, centered around a cave in the Black Hills of South Dakota.  We went out on raids to gather our food.\n\n“A long way away.  I was eight years old then.”\n\n“That’s how old I am!”\n\n“Yep.  We had everything, Jack.  Food, safety, warmth.  It was gone in an instant.”  It was gone in twelve minutes, if you wanted to set your clock by it.  That’s how long it had taken the solar flare to reach Earth.\n\nThe government might have known; scientists surely had to suspect… still, all that followed had wreaked havoc everywhere on the planet.\n\nPrint publishers, newspapers, magazines had gone out of business due to more advanced online capabilities; store front banks closed up, their asset information in securitized web farms; universities and schools no longer had buildings — all learning, scoring, testing was completed via webcasts.  Friends and families existed in high-def.\n\nEverything except farming and food could be bought, traded, read, transacted online.\n\nIt had all started with global warming.  We were saving Earth’s resources with our more advanced capabilities and humanitarian efforts.  It seemed to be working.  Politicians and scientists hailed the reports about lower carbon dioxide emissions and fewer hurricane warnings and less polar ice caps melting.\n\nThen again, it might have all been a huge plot to pull the wool over our eyes.\n\n“Did the sun really make it all go away?”\n\n“Indeed it did.  It was a solar flare.”  I spread my arms wide as I demonstrated, wiggling my fingers in front of my grandkid’s face.  “The flare shot of the surface of the sun.  Its flaming fingers searching, reaching out across time and space until those hot licks touched our planet.  The orbiting satellites tumbled from the sky, blazing a trail to earth like fireflies.  Power grids all over the world collapsed.  Radio and television and computers all sizzled and ground to a halt.”\n\n“What happened next?”\n\n“Without communication, without money, without contacts — governments collapsed, chaos ensued, people died.”  Even I didn’t know the full extent of the catastrophe.  Only a few Hamm operators got information through to us.  They called it a coronal mass ejection, a proton storm.  The worst ever recorded.\n\nWe never recovered; so much of our technology was lost.  We were back to scavenging old paperback books for our entertainment.\n\nI threw a stick in the fire.  We watched the night sky.  Aurora borealis was still spectacular, eighty years later.\n"
  title: Flare
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Sean Monaghan
  date: 2010-03-04
  day: '04'
  month: '03'
  text: "Sid smiled as Alex handed him the separation results.  One more test and they could announce.  They’d known all along of course, since the first samples, but Mars Twelve operated on a government testing regime.  No disclosure until verified.  Too often the communities broadcast just to get the jump on other researchers, only to look like fools later.\n\nBut here was DNA, of a sort.\n\nSpectroscopy, centrifuges, distillations.  All the stuff he’d nearly forgotten in years of being administrator.  Still, the results were clear.  A microbe.\n\n“Looks good, huh?” Alex said, grinning.\n\n“Let’s wait for the second titration confirmation.”\n\n“We’ll be opening that bottle of Taittinger you’ve been so precious with, huh?”\n\n“Always so impatient.  Did Jade and Mish come back from the site yet?”\n\n“Nah.  Something about digging a new line.  They’ll miss the party. Imagine if NASA had sent rovers there fifty years back.”\n\nSid laughed.  “Yeah, hindsight.”\n\nMish drew his multiprobe through the soil.  “This is driving me nuts,” he said into his mike.\n\n“Well, it’s not far to drive, is it?” Jade replied.\n\n“Old joke, dull joke.”\n\nHe kept watching the readout on the probe.  Nothing.  Another line, still nothing.  Well, it was better getting suit time than sitting in the bunker lab minding the centrifuge.  He ran another two lines, then realised he hadn’t heard from Jade for a while.  “Jade?”\n\nNothing.\n\nMish looked at the edge of the crater.  “Jade?  Come in.”\n\n“Get over here, Mish.”\n\n“What’s up?”\n\n“Just get here.”\n\nSid grinned at the final results.\n\n“Taittinger?” Alex said.\n\n“Absolutely.”  Sid clicked the press-release he’d composed weeks ago.  He typed a quick couple of lines with the dates of the last tests and began the process of uploading to the server on Earth.\n\n“Where is it anyway?” Alex said, hunting through a cupboard.\n\n“What?”  Alex’s finger hovered over the mouse key, the cursor on ‘send’.\n\n“The bloody champagne.  I can’t find anything up here.”\n\nMish came over the rugged crest and saw Jade crouching at a spaded hole.  He bounced down the slope.  “Whatcha got?” he said.\n\n“Come look.”\n\nMish slowed and looked into the small pit.  “Ventifact?” he said, looking at the twisted shape.  But he knew it wasn’t.  It looked more like a tree branch.  That couldn’t be right.\n\nHe crouched and helped her scoop soil away.  Excavating around the branch they exposed a joint.  It was covered in a kind of lacquered felt, bonded into the main shell.\n\n“Artificial,” Jade said.\n\n“Well.”  Mish pushed the end and the top flexed on the joint like an elbow.  “From an old missing rover?  Viking?”\n\n“Moron, Viking wasn’t a rover.”\n\n“But it had an arm.”\n\n“Where’s your multiprobe?  Let’s do a sounding.”\n\n“You think there’s more?”  He passed the probe over.\n\nJade shoved the tip into the soil and pinged it.  She rolled out the screen and examined the grainy image.\n\n“Jeepers,” Mish said.\n\nThere was a buried oblong shape, with wings and wheels and tracks and long and short arms.  Bigger and more complex than anything NASA had ever sent up.  Different too, odd shapes having nothing to do with practicality or keeping weight down.  Strange.\n\n“Alien,” Jade said.  “An alien rover.”\n\nMish sat back on the orange soil.  “You know what this means, don’t you?”  He touched his wrist to make the call back to the bunker.\n\n“A bigger discovery?  Wow.  Way bigger than just a microbe.”\n\n“Except that it means that ours may not be not a Martian microbe.”\n\n“Oh, yeah.”  Jade looked at the rover’s arm.  “Extrasolar.”\n\n“Let’s hope they haven’t announced yet.”\n"
  title: Can't You Find Anything Up There?
  year: 2010
- 
  author: V.L.Ilian
  date: 2010-03-05
  day: '05'
  month: '03'
  text: "“Hogwash! There was a mathematical proof the sound barrier could not be broken even tough they were breaking it with cannons in Newton’s time!\n\nThere was a mathematical proof the light barrier could not be broken even tough they were breaking it in Einstein’s time!”\n\n“Yes… but that’s different.”\n\nThe senior researcher was continuing to pull levers and instructing computers to start sequences while his colleague stood there helpless with a stack of tablets full of mathematical proofs.\n\n“Nonsense! The proofs of the time were based on an incomplete understanding of the universe.”\n\n“True… but those inventions were not this high risk”\n\nA robot opened a large safe an pulled out a liquid-filled cylinder holding a suspended seed of blue light.\n\n“Poppycocks! When trains were invented everyone feared the human body could not survive such accelerations. Endless tests were conducted to see if passengers would lose consciousness.\n\nWhen the teleporter was invented everyone cried the soul was being lost. We all know how that turned out don’t we?”\n\nThe robot inserted the cylinder in a complex assembly. Immediately the seed of light was sucked into the multifaceted sphere in the center of the machine.\n\nLight appeared to reverse itself and the sphere went completely dark.\n\n“Doctor! This won’t work!”\n\n“Absurd! No more buts!”\n\nThe senior researcher put on his favorite goggles and hovered over a big red button.\n\n“Let’s make history… literally.”\n"
  title: Hold on to something
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Patrick Kennedy
  date: 2010-03-06
  day: '06'
  month: '03'
  text: "“Mom, there’s something in the front yard!”\n\n“What is it, Billy?”\n\n“A robot, Mom! What’s a robot doing in our yard?”\n\n“I don’t know, Billy. It must have gotten past the fence somehow.”\n\n“But I thought the fence was supposed to keep them out!”\n\n“It is, Billy. So let’s go see what it’s doing here.”\n\nJanice looked at the robot through the peephole in the front door. It was an old one, rusted and breaking down. It must have wandered straight through the spam-filter without even registering. She sighed and opened the door.\n\n“Hello!” said the robot. “Your house looks like it hasn’t had a weatherproofing in some time! Without a regular application of our patented and trademarked Weather-Stop product, your home is exposed to the elements, which can cause damage and reduce its value. I’m here today to tell you how we can do a demonstration application which will be good for thirty days at no cost!”\n\nJanice pointed her shotgun at the robot and said, “you’re in violation of the neighborhood’s no solicitation policy, and you’ve bypassed our household spam filter. You will give me your employer’s contact information and then leave immediately.”\n\n“My apologies. I just wanted to share with you this incredible opportunity. May I just offer you this brochure?” As it spoke, the robot’s third arm came around from behind its back, a small pistol in its hand. “I think you’ll find this offer quite compelling.”\n\nJanice fired first. The shotgun took the arm off at the shoulder and damaged the robot’s head. It fell to the ground in shock. Janice planted a small thermite burner on it’s chest and went back inside as the robot melted.\n\nDamned sales-bots. Getting pushier every day. Time to get a new spam filter and upgrade the fence again.\n"
  title: Get off my lawn, robot!
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Roi R. Czechvala
  date: 2010-03-07
  day: '07'
  month: '03'
  text: "Put on the armour of God…\n\nto stand firm against\n\nthe tactics of evil.\n\nTake the helmet of salvation\n\nand the sword\n\nof the spirit,\n\nthe Word of GOD.\n\nfrom Ephesians 6:13-17\n\n“In the name of the Father, the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.” With his prayers complete, Oberleutnant Johann Kurtz of the Papstliche Schweizergarde rose from his knees and geared up for combat.\n\nFor Terran based troops, his quarters were nothing more than a closet, but aboard the troopship, they were considered almost lavish. They contained his rack, a fold out desk and chair and combination collapsible shower and lavatory.\n\nAbove the hatch was a small crucifix, and painted on the hatch itself, just as it was painted on his reactive nylar armoured vest and the front of his HUD helmet, was a red cross limned in gold.\n\nAt the head of his rack was a framed painting of Christ praying at Gethsemane; below that, a photo of Pope Ignatius XXIV bearing his trademark avuncular smile.\n\nKurtz studied himself in the mirror, kissed his rosary, pocketed it and retrieved his “sword“, an H&K multi-linear plasma rifle, from his locker and stepped into the corridor.\n\nOn the parade deck, he took his place before his men as Papa company’s commander “Good Morning men,” bellowed Oberleutnant Kurtz. “This is the day we have been training for. Our objective is the settlement of New Mecca on Phobos. Alpha company will assault New Medina on Deimos simultaneously. We’ll bring those raghead bastards to their knees.”\n\nThe oberleutnant’s words were greeted with a thunderous “Corpus Christi”.\n\nWhen the commotion had died down, one of the troops raised his hand.\n\n“What is it Soldier,” barked the young officer.\n\n“But Sir, there are Christians in New Mecca as well as Muslims, Sir.”\n\n“Your point, Soldier?”\n\n“Well…, what do we do about them, Sir?”\n\nThe young Oberleutnant hesitated for only a moment before calling out “Kaplan!”\n\nThe chaplain, Oberstleutnant Karl-Heinz, standing behind the formation came to quick attention, snapped his heels and marched to the front of the formation to take temporary command of the company from its leader. While ostensibly a superior officer to a mere oberleutnant and holding the titular rank of oberstleutnant, the chaplain was a servant of God first and foremost. As such, he publicly disdained his formal military rank.\n\nThe CO executed a crisp, about face, threw an equally crisp salute and relinquished command.\n\nThe Kaplan, a kindly, scholarly man smiled beneficently and asked, “What was the question again young man?”\n\n“Well Sir…”\n\n“Vater, bitte.”\n\n“Well Vater, it’s just that there are Christians as well as Muslims at New Mecca, students, business people, even religious scholars such as yourself, Vater.”\n\n“Yes, what of them,” he asked, his kind eyes twinkling behind pince-nez glasses.\n\n“Well Sir… Vater,” he corrected, “how will we know the heathens from the chosen?”\n\nThe older man chuckled softly before answering. “Kill them all son. God will know his own.”\n"
  title: In HIS Name…
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2010-03-08
  day: '08'
  month: '03'
  text: "I woke up with pain in my head and a shrieking in my ears. All I could hear was this horrible sound ringing around in my head. It was like car tires and screeching baboons and fire alarms all mixed together. A migraine pounded through my skull.\n\nI stood up and I nearly passed out.  The pain eased when I took a step south. I kept walking in that direction. When I got to the wall of my apartment, I screamed because I knew that meant I had to double back to go to the front door and make it outside. With a deep breath, I cried and walked backwards, grasping behind me for the doorknob while I sobbed and whimpered.\n\nI found the doorknob. I yanked it open and dove outside. I ran in the direction that eased the pain, my pajamas flapping in the early-morning August. The direction took me away from the city. Luckily I lived on the outskirts of town and there weren’t many cars on the roads at this time of day. The pain was too great to have me worry about traffic lights or looking both ways. There was no way I could have driven a car. It was all I do to put one foot in front of the other.\n\nAll that mattered was stopping the sound and the pain.\n\nI walked and ran for eight days. I didn’t stop to go to the bathroom.  I didn’t stop to eat.  I tipped my head back when it rained to drink.\n\nLuckily, I haven’t been arrested. Luckily, I haven’t been beaten up. Luckily, I haven’t been hit by a car or bitten by a snake.\n\nI have been walking a straight line.\n\nI first saw the first person like me two days ago. Just a dot on the horizon of the desert I was walking through when I crossed into Arizona. I have seen twenty-seven others since. I can see them off to my right and left, getting slowly larger, one step at a time. We are all converging on the same point.\n\nThis is good news. I can feel the pain in my head being slowly replaced with pleasure.\n\nWe are being called. I don’t know how many of us have been killed or hurt during our blind migration towards the end of the pain. I can’t even imagine what it would be like for someone who got the call in a prison or a hospital. The pain would have driven me insane if I’d been constrained.\n\nI can see the other walkers more clearly now. They are all stained, stinking, shambling messes with smiles on their faces, smiling wider as they get closer to the place of no pain and no shrieking sound in their ears.\n\nThere are helicopters over the horizon, over the patch of earth where all of the walkers’ paths meet.\n\nThere is something underneath the helicopters. A bright blue flying saucer. A floating, glowing alien ship that has no place in the middle of the desert.  It’s hard to see details because the sun is setting near it. There is a hole in the clouds above it.\n\nWe walkers are all stumbling towards it, powerless to stop ourselves and not knowing what we’re walking towards or why we’ve been chosen.\n\nI’m scared of the helicopters. I don’t know if they are there to monitor us or kill us. They look out of place.\n\nI keep walking towards the blue ship with the other walkers into the dying sunset with a smile on my face.\n"
  title: Walkers
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Daniel Fuhr
  date: 2010-03-09
  day: '09'
  month: '03'
  text: "The haze of smoke lingered over the sharp nose and into aged eyes.  Smoking on spacecraft was strictly forbidden according to regulations.  Jascon owned this tugboat; he made his own rules and could give a damn about those regulations.\n\nHe squinted to try to see through the smoke covering his eyes.\n\nA few months ago, when the space marines contacted Jascon about using his ship as a decoy and trap for the local space pirates, he scoffed at them.  They explained about the local growing number of pirates, calling themselves “The Barate”, not quite pirates, not quite bandits.  He rebuffed the space marines, declining to assist them.\n\nHe coughed into the smoke, the tightness in his chest making it harder to breathe.\n\nEventually the request turned into a demand and the space marines requisitioned Jascon’s ship, his annoyance became anger.  Under the marines control his craft was turned into a by-the-book regulation ship.  Then the problems came.  “Not enough lifeboats”, “Unsecured instrument devices”, “Nonworking emergency backup”, “No Smoking”.  That last one chapped his ass more than anything.  The only way he was able to afford paying his crew the small pittance they deserved was by allowing smoking.\n\nStruggling, he pulled in another breath, he wasn’t sure if it was his last one.\n\nAs suddenly as they came, the space marines transferred.  They abandoned Jascon to a condemned ship.  His craft wasn’t good enough.  It wasn’t good enough to run cargo runs anymore.  It wasn’t even good enough to leave the dock the space marines placed it in.  The government revoked his license and the ships registration.\n\nSo he stole it.\n\nThe foot on his chest put another ounce of pressure on his chest.  The number of strangers on his bridge was uncomfortable.  The knowledge that he could be killed was uncomfortable.\n\n“So you want to become a Barate?” the rough voice came through the smoke.\n"
  title: The Barate
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Bryant Pocock
  date: 2010-03-10
  day: 10
  month: '03'
  text: "“Dammit,” grunted Sam as the wrench slipped and he lost his grip, drifting slowly away from the mining craft.  “Now I’m really in deep shit.”  Mentally running through his options, the panicked miner came up with nothing.\n\nThe battered and stinking p-suit never came with a long-distance radio, so that was right out.  Similarly absent was the fuel for his maneuvering jets or the (theoretically) Company-mandated safety tether.  These he had pawned at the Company Store to pay his fare on the freighter to this lonely outpost.  That left the small but efficient solar collector on his back to power the oxygen scrubbers, electric heater, and water distiller to keep him alive, floating through this asteroid field until he starved to death.  Or there was always the grisly possibility that a microscopic spec of space dust, traveling faster than any bullet, would pierce a pinhole through kevlar and flesh, spewing a miniature fountain of bubbling blood and precious atmosphere at entry and exit.  One way or another he would die here, floating and turning slowly, meters away from his modest habitation capsule.\n\nConsidering this possibility, he preferred suicide.  Sam pondered this solemnly for several minutes, said a quiet prayer, and tugged hard at his helmet seals.  Nothing.  It seemed that the only pieces of safety equipment still functioning in this man-shaped composite crapcan were the vacuum-activated safety locks.\n\nThis left the pistol strapped to his side.  The only non-vital piece of kit that Sam had held onto all these years, he had been wearing it since before he sold the hydro farm back on Earth and set out for the asteroids to try his luck extracting ore.  “Second Amendment and all, can’t be too careful,” mumbled Sam to himself.  Not that any government’s constitution held real sway in this corner of space, but Sam had lost count of how many times the old-fashioned revolver had saved him from unpleasant confrontations.  Now it was once again helping him forge his own destiny.\n\nAs he drew the gun and said his prayer again, Sam suddenly remembered with surprising clarity the voice of his high school physics teacher, droning in his driest monotone, “every action has an equal and opposite reaction.”  A smile crept over the old miner’s face.  Turning the gun away from his helmet, Sam took careful aim and fired all six rounds, slowly and deliberately.\n\nIt took nearly two days, but eventually the impulse of those few ounces of lead moving at the speed of sound was enough to send Sam gliding slowly to within an arm’s reach of the thruster pod he had been repairing.  He was even able to grab the dropped wrench before making his way back inside the small metal can he called home.\n\n“Damn the Company and damn this cloud of rocks,” thought Sam out loud, banging a fist on the bulkhead.  “Soon as I can, I’m getting back to God’s Green Earth.  But first things first, I’m getting my hands on some more bullets.”\n"
  title: Drifting
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2010-03-11
  day: 11
  month: '03'
  text: "“Command and Control says that we will not be permitted to land,” stated Taylor O’Leary, the pilot of the return module.\n\nDespite knowing that O’Leary wasn’t responsible for the decision, Jonathan Hartwell argued, “They can’t do that.  The alien spores are dead.  They can only live on Mercury.”\n\n“Look Jon, maybe you’re right, but it’s not going to change their minds.  After what those spores did to our base, they can’t risk letting us contaminate the Earth.  There are over eight billion people down there, versus just two of us.  Face it, we’re expendable.”\n\n“The spores didn’t kill us.  They don’t kill people.”\n\n“It’s the universal acid they secrete.  It destroys everything.”\n\n“They haven’t damaged the module.  It’s taken us three months to get back to Earth.  Those damn things are everywhere.  There are probably billions of then in our clothes.  They’re harmless.  If they were still dangerous, we’d be dead.”\n\n“Jon, you’re a scientist.  Use your head.  Maybe they’re just dormant.  If it turns out that they can live on Earth…” O’Leary was interrupted by an emergency alarm.  He drifted over to the master panel and punched up the codes.  “Damn.  The reactor is overheating.  Maybe those bastards are still alive.  We need to move the ship away from Earth before she blows.”  As the primary thrusters fired, the reactor’s coolant line ruptured and the ship began to spin out of control.  Despite their best efforts, the ship tumbled toward the Earth.  Moments later, it exploded.\n\nMost of the debris burned up during reentry, but much of it, including trillions of spores, slowly drifted through the upper atmosphere and eventually into the troposphere.  NASA was able to collect a few hundred of the microscopic spores using a Lockheed ER-5 high-altitude research aircraft.  Testing at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta concluded that the spores had the ability to reproduce, but they were not active.  After months of experiments, the scientists could not get the spores to feed, reproduce, or secrete acid.  Apparently, Earth had dodged a bullet.  However, the United Nations passed numerous resolutions prohibiting exploration of any extraterrestrial body until adequate safeguards were established.  Eventually, the fervor died down, and most people forgot about the incident and went on with their lives.\n\nBut the spores continued to drift around the globe hoping to settle in environments that were suitable for them.  No one at the CDC thought that the key factor keeping the spores dormant was the low flux density of neutrinos on Earth.  On Mercury, because of its proximity to the sun, they were bathed to ten times the number of neutrinos, and they could grow and multiply.  On Earth, however, there were only a few sources where the flux density of neutrinos was high enough to revive them.  And, eventually, the spores found them all, one by one.  They thrived in their new environments, and their populations grew exponentially.  Of course, they also began secreting their corrosive fluids.  At first, it was assumed that terrorists somehow managed to destroy the Aircraft Carrier CVN 76 Ronald Reagan.  No one thought it was the spores, even as nuclear power plants around the world began exploding one after another.\n"
  title: Spores
  year: 2010
- 
  author: William Garnett
  date: 2010-03-12
  day: 12
  month: '03'
  text: "The day the universe stopped expanding was the same day all the traffic lights failed to turn.  But it wasn’t just the traffic lights.  Cars didn’t start.  Dogs didn’t bark. Radios were silent.  Microwaves paused.  Automatic drive-thru teller machines didn’t take cards and didn’t dispense any money.  Nothing moved.  All was at a stand still, and no one noticed because no one could think or remember, or even forget.  No one could point it out to anyone else.\n\nThen the universe began to contract.  But no one really noticed it, because with the contraction of the universe, everyone’s mind and perception also began to shrink, so that any forward thought process ceased to occur and so people regressed and slid back along the evolutionary scale and grew hair in places where there had been none.  They tore down the cities and set them on fire.  They tore down each other in ways they had read about but had thought they would never do again because they had evolved to a point where popping brains out of a neighbor’s head was something only beasts did. But they were beasts now and couldn’t think straight or forward anymore.  Blood ran thick on the broken sidewalks–on all the failed and burned infrastructure.\n\nMen fought each other over women and killed each other’s young to ensure the advancement of their genes, which was ridiculous, because everything was regressing and going backwards so that the very idea of advancement itself was impossible, and the genes themselves would never survive. But they did it anyway.  The blood lust that had never fully left the species reemerged to full strength as bodies were dismembered and emptied of their guts.\n\nThe universe continued to shrink, and as it shrank, all life regressed to globs of cells, and then just to cells, and then just to tiny strings of mindless amino acids.  Eventually, everything was reduced to molecules, and then atoms, and then quarks, and strings, and then nothing.\n\nThe nothing regarded itself and found it paradoxical that it could do such a thing, and as it regarded itself, it found itself lacking and then once again it attempted to make something out of itself.\n"
  title: The Second and a Half Law of Thermodynamics
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Credentiality
  date: 2010-03-13
  day: 13
  month: '03'
  text: "Cynthia was reluctant when it came time to leave the Machine Monastery. Nobody had predicted that machines would be Buddhists. Crazed killers, perhaps. Indifferent to humanity, perhaps. Cold calculators, almost certainly.\n\nShe had learned the tactile pleasures of sanding the walnut sides of an imperfect jewelry box she had made herself with hand tools. The visual pleasure of brushing a finish with a wet edge.\n\nThe empty contentedness of sweeping a floor. The ragged exhaustion of breaking out old concrete sidewalks with a sledgehammer and hauling them to a skip. The gleam of a toilet scrubbed clean.\n\nThe machines had done all these things, mostly better than humans could, and had found the same peace from their lessons. Cynthia would go back to her life in the city, where her finance skills would pay the bills, and where machine and human craftsmen continue to do their jobs with the labor-saving tools that made mass production cheap. But perhaps in the summer she would take another vacation to the mountains east of town, away from the noise, and rejuvenate with the joys of manual labor.\n"
  title: Machine Monastery
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Petter Skult
  date: 2010-03-14
  day: 14
  month: '03'
  text: "“How was the game?” Ann asked as Jeremy crawled through the hatch. She had to wait with the answer until he had pushed it close, metal screaming.\n\n“It was awesome!” He replied breathlessly, as he threw his bag off his shoulders and went directly for his cot to change clothes. “Jenny and Ahmed’s characters planned on having a garden party for Jia – that’s Mark’s character – on account of her getting that promotion.”\n\nAnn chuckled lightly, continuing to fry that morning’s catch, the smell of meat permeating the whole container.\n\n“Hey mom, what’s a ‘water cooler’? My character is supposed to go there to meet all of his new workmates, but I have some trouble imagining it.”\n\nAnn explained what a water cooler was, and for good measure what it meant to ‘shoot the breeze around the water cooler’. Jeremy listened intently while gathering his .22 rifle, clearly making mental notes. She tried to keep the ruefulness out of her voice. By the time she was finished he was ready to go. He was already looking a bit glummer. Ann felt sorry for him, having to go out there again. When she had been his age…no use thinking of it.\n\n“When’s the next game?”\n\nJeremy lit up.\n\n“We talked shifts; I’ll be on night for the next week, Ahmed, Jenny and Mark are all crazy as well, but we thought Wednesday the week after that.”\n\n“That sounds wonderful, dear. Be careful up there now.”\n\n“Of course mom. See you tomorrow!”\n\nJeremy crawled back topside for his evening guard shift. Ann continued frying the ever-grey little pieces of rodent, stirring them in the sudden silence with her wooden fork. She was thinking absently of water-coolers and garden parties and promotions and regular jobs. Things that her children might only know through make-believe, role-playing games they play when they get together for those brief moments when there was no alert, no danger, no attack.\n\nStill, she was happy they were allowed those moments of escapism into a world so completely foreign to their own.\n"
  title: Escapism
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Kathy Kachelries
  date: 2010-03-15
  day: 15
  month: '03'
  text: "There are two things I hate about a job like this: Carrie, and the viewer-at-home.\n\nThat’s not true.  There are dozens of things I hate: network executives, directors, producers, footage editors with their nasally little ‘we could have used a little better resolution here. ”  I hate pretty much everyone involved in a documentary, but it’s the viewer-at-home who matters.  Once that viewer decides they don’t like Carrie, don’t like fish, or don’t like learning, all of us are out of a job.\n\n“There’s the entrance!” Carrie squeals.  If nothing else, she has enthusiasm.\n\nIt’s a low-budget gig.  Unlike Carrie up ahead, who was lucky enough to be female, skinny, blond, and (of lesser importance) a marine biologist, Tommy-crap-for-lighting and Joe-the-assistant-camera-guy (that’s me) actually have to lug junk into these tunnels.  The sound guy and lead cameraman are resting cozy on the boat, practically retired.\n\n“Over here,” she calls, swimming smoothly over a long-still turnstile and into the submerged station lobby.  I bring the cameras around an ancient ticket machine but find nothing more than a ragged hole, smaller than a kid’s fist.  “There are thousands of these,” Carrie continues, looking at my headcam.  Who the hell wears makeup underwater?  “Even though their slowed metabolism gives them twenty or thirty minutes underwater, the skeletal structure hasn’t changed much.  If it weren’t for these nests, they’d make easy dinner for anything down here.  A single Long Island Crocodile could take out a whole school in seconds.\n\nGreat.  Crocodiles.  I really ought to read a pamphlet or two about this junk before strapping on the cam and jumping overboard.\n\nMy comm beeps and the cameraman patches in, private to me and Tommy.  “Can we get a shot of these rats?”\n\n“Carrie, they want rats,” I say, switching frequencies.\n\n“Be patient.”  Her primary concerns always involve creatures lacking higher brain function.\n\n“She says be patient.”\n\n“We’re working overtime here,” he says.  I hear the hiss of a bottle opening.\n\nOn the main channel, Carrie’s still rambling science.  “Marine biologists continue their search for the secrets of the tunnel rat,” she says.  “Despite intensive study, their rapid evolution remains a mystery, and we can only hope that in decades to come-”\n\n“Joe, can you get a better shot of that hole?” Tommy comms.\n\nCarrie, caught up in describing the rats’ miraculously pathetic life, doesn’t notice as I clickswitch my handcam to fisheye without turning my helmet camera from her face.\n\nAnd then, Tommy delivers a kick to the ticket machine with so much force that I have no idea how he pulled it off with flippers.\n\nThey crawl and swim, dozens, maybe hundreds, not just from the hole but from the ticket slot as well, from unseen gaps behind and beneath the machine.  An emptying hive of nearly hairless grey and pink rodents, tails swishing and feet scrabbling for purchase as a stream of bubbles trail upward from a corner.\n\n“That’s what we need!” open-comms the cameraman.  “We can edit out that kick, right?”\n\nOnly the glow of Tommy’s sidelight lets me see Carrie shake her head.  “You can’t just empty a whole colony like that!” she says, voice weak.  “Do you have any idea how territorial–”\n\n“Look, Carr, we’re making a documentary here,” comes a new voice, the assistant director.  Asshole must have been monitoring everything.\n\n“They’ll only invade another colony, and–”\n\n“Let the marine biologists worry about that junk, okay?  All of you, back to the boat, and–”\n\n“I am a marine biologist.”\n\n“Back to the boat.  Now.”\n\nIt’s a month until filming starts on Carrie’s next Learning Channel adventure, and hopefully, it’ll be somewhere warm.\n"
  title: Pied Piper
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Steve Smith
  date: 2010-03-16
  day: 16
  month: '03'
  text: "Nick inhaled on his cigarette until the glowing ember reached the filter, then flicked it absently out the driver’s window. His younger brother James sat upright and fidgeting beside him, eyes wide trying to look at everything at once.\n\n“Two hundred and forty meters. Turn left. Two twenty. Left.” James spoke outloud.\n\nTo Nick, James’ factual rambling had become background noise. James grew up locked inside his own head, overwhelmed by the world around him and unable to process any of it. When his doctors had wired him into the network, they’d armed him with everything he’d ever need.\n\nJames flinched as a police car screamed by in the opposite direction, lights bathing them for an instant in blue and red. “Metro pursuit, two one nine one four. Eric Waynes. Forty Two. Divorced. Two Children. Sixty meters, turn left.”\n\nNick saw the street as looming walkups and parked cars, but to James it was a seething mass of lines connecting objects and boxes containing datapoints; an infinite number of rabbit holes he could plumb for details ad infinitum.\n\nWhen their parents had died, Nick had the hard line replaced with an array of wireless antennae woven into his brother’s dirty blond faux hawk. It was the only way he could get him out of the apartment.\n\nThey turned left onto Kinsella, slowing to navigate through the cars parked on both sides of the street. He could see the stop sign at Mathews when a shopping cart rolled from behind a parked car into the street, forcing him to step hard on the brakes.\n\n“Pay and Save. Twelve thousand three hundred cubic inches. Fifty pounds,” he paused, eyes darting around the car before adding, “probably stolen.”\n\nNick smiled until a hand came to rest on his window sill.\n\n“You got permission to be on this block?” The voice was deep, the speaker’s face lost in shadow with the sun blazing a halo around his head.\n\n“Sorry, just passing through.”\n\nJames eyed the cart and the dark skinned man that had joined it on the street.\n\n“Zoo York jacket. Sixty three percent sold to upper middle class kids imitating the lower class style.”\n\nNick winced, suddenly painfully aware of his brother speaking.\n\n“What did bristle head say?”, the tone sharpened. As he leaned in closer for a better look the sun revealed deep brown skin under a pork pie hat, crisscrossed with fresh pink scar tissue.\n\n“Nothing,” Nick said, “he likes your friend’s jacket.”\n\n“Dolan Ryan. South Bronx Cricketers. Soldier. Fourteen arrests, no convictions.” James blinked repeatedly before adding “This year. Fourteen this year. Forty meters, turn right.”\n\nDolan yanked on the door handle. Finding it locked he reached in through the open window trying to open it from the inside.\n\n“Out of the fucking car, dumbass. Rainman here just bought you a beating.”\n\n“Seventy percent of altercations involving Cricketers result in violence. Fifty pounds. Forty meters, turn right.”\n\nDolan paused his brailing the door panel long enough to cuff Nick in the side of the head. “One hundred percent chance of violence asshole, out of the goddamned car.”\n\nJames pounded both hands on the dashboard and yelled “forty meters turn right”, then turning to look Dolan straight in the eyes he continued “Doctors appointment Thursday at two. Syphilis”.\n\nDolan froze for an instant and Nick stood hard on the gas, liberating the shopping cart from the Zoo York jacketed figure as he jumped out of the way. The cart crumpled under the bumper and was dragged into the intersection as he drifted right onto Mathews, the tangled mesh basket peeling off on a parked car as the sedan straightened. Not slowing, he turned left onto Morris Park and kept his foot planted on the gas until the Parkway loomed into view.\n\n“Bronx River Parkway. Thirty and three quarter kilometers in length.”\n\nNick finally eased up on the gas. “Syphilis?” he asked.\n\n“Spirochetal bacterium. Sexually transmitted.”\n\nNick laughed as he fumbled for another cigarette.\n\n“I really did like his jacket,” James said, before slipping back into the data mass of the world outside.\n"
  title: Plugged
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Roi R. Czechvala
  date: 2010-03-17
  day: 17
  month: '03'
  text: "The Crimson Dawn hung in geosynch above the besieged planet. Far out of reach of the meager defenses the primitive populous threw at them.\n\n“Skipper, another salvo is being launched.”\n\nCaptain Dimitri Sardukar gave a bored sigh; “Viewer.” The bridge of the ship dissolved and the captain and crew seemed to hang in empty space. Even after years as a staff officer, the sudden switch to VR still unnerved him.\n\nHe watched as a seven missile volley rose from the planets surface. He watched as the stages of the chemical rockets fell away. He watched as the impotent atomic warheads spent their energy fruitlessly against the ships absorbing Tesla Field.\n\n“Enough is enough. Ensign contact fleet. We are dropping. These savages need to know with whom they are dealing with.”\n\nKlaxons blared throughout the ship. Armoured marines scrambled for the lifter ships. The captain himself took personal command of a lifter, and was the first to ground on the surface of the planet they had dubbed Circe.\n\nThe assault ships formed a perimeter around a massive stone complex. A walled palace. Stunned guards at the gates watched in awe as the huge marines emerged. The awe soon resolved itself into anger. They opened fire as the marines approached…\n\nDimitri joined his retinue of eleven men in raucous laughter as bullets impacted armour and fell to the ground as harmless lumps of jacketed lead.\n\n“Open fire,” Dimitri ordered, growing tired of the futile display.\n\nThe detachment of guards was reduced to shapeless mounds of burned flesh under the searing blast of plasma fire. The men stormed unopposed into the massive building, followed by their swaggering commander.\n\nThe interior was one massive chamber carved from a single piece of a marble like stone. The walls shimmered with iridescent colours. In the centre of the hall upon a raised dais a huge throne stood. It was occupied by a diminutive figure, almost human in a vaguely elfin way. At the base of the platform a contingent of similar creatures stood unarmed.\n\n“There will be no need for your crude weapons.” The diminutive being waved a careless hand and the marines were quickly disarmed by his personal guard. “Nor your armour,” just as quickly the men were denuded. “Allow me to introduce myself. I am Viceroy Creed. Welcome to…,” he smiled disarmingly, “Circe.”\n\nStunned to immobility the men stood in rigid fear.\n\nOutraged, Captain Dimitri Ulyov Sardukar turned on his minute tormentor, his face flushed with rage. “I command…”\n\n“You command nothing,” the alien leader snapped viciously.\n\n“I have ten ships…three thousand marines, trained killers ready….”\n\n“There are no ships, there are no marines. Not for much longer anyway…,” he quietly informed the captain.\n\nWith a dismissive wave of his hand, Creed turned to his coterie. “Amusing aren’t they? Their worlds will make a unique addition to the Empire.”\n\n“Make them comfortable for the time being. Tell the kitchen there will be twelve for dinner.”\n\nHe turned and faced the deflated Fleet Captain. “Remind the chef, I like mine rare.” He graced the men with a quick winsome smile. Rows of pointed teeth flashed wickedly in the waning light. The Viceroy turned and walked lightly from the room.\n"
  title: Flight of the Crimson Dawn
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2010-03-18
  day: 18
  month: '03'
  text: "The way my race has sex has made me a natural choice for the role of diplomat, lawyer and event organizer at an interplanetary level.\n\nOur planet adapted to overcrowding by creating new sexes. We have seventeen now. It seems to be holding steady there.\n\nMyself, I’m a tertiary bi-valve post-pubescent fifth-stage spawning facilitator. I’m bright green and quite tall for my age.\n\nI’m needed in the home stretch of our three-day mating rituals. By using what’s called the ‘augmented reacharound’, I help fertilize the egg clusters sprouting out of the backs of the three gene-imprinting tri-spigot chain producers before the eggs are mixed in the chest cavity of a seconday monovalve pre-pubescent first-stage fertilization overseer and then deposited into the senile no-valve seventeenth-stage sacrificial carrier.\n\nThat’s just the last five hours of the three-day ordeal.\n\nThe procedure is exhausting. We all need to be awake for the full three days of the sex. There’s a two-day recovery period as well.\n\nThe timetable juggling that needs to take place to get sixteen schedules cleared and a will and last rites performed the carrier is a feat of patience and organization. Our social skills are awe-inspiring to other races. We have this ability to bring harmony to all conversations and smooth out conflicts. We can help bridge an understanding between the most different sets of personalities.\n\nBy comparison, the idea of organizing a press conference for a dignitary or memorizing some laws seems easy.\n\nI’ve found a place here on this planet called Earth. While I can’t produce children, I do have the ability as a tertiary bi-valve to mate with this planet’s populace. That’s a rare thing in my travels. The Earthlings are ready for sex all-year round, much like my own race. Their unions only last a few hours, though.\n\nThe lack of complexity is refreshing to me. I’m sure in time it will become boring but my tour at the UN should be over before then. Right now, there is a young male and an older female at the end of bar. They are both looking at me, both unaware of each other’s interest in me. I must cut a fine figure with my green skin and Armani suit.\n\nI’ll see what I can faciliate. The three of us should be getting to know each other much better within the next three or four hours.\n"
  title: It's Complicated
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Patricia Stewart
  date: 2010-03-19
  day: 19
  month: '03'
  text: "The radiation levels following the Great Holy War of the twenty third century made living on the surface of the Earth impossible.  Consequently, humanity moved underground.  After millennia of self-sufficient, artificial environments, humanity lost all ties to the surface.  Eventually, the sum on the “known universe” consisted of 50,000 humans, living in 800 cubic miles of subterranean rock.  The very existence of the sun and moon, of the land and sea, of the sky and horizon, were all forgotten.  Nothing else existed.  That is, until an urban Expansion Project penetrated into the unknown.\n\n“Okay, okay,” bellowed the governor as he entered the meeting chamber.  “What’s so damn urgent that it became necessary to interrupt my sleep cycle?”\n\n“I’m sorry, Governor,” replied the Secretary of Construction, “but there was an ‘incident’ in one of the mine shafts.”\n\n“An Incident! What kind of incident?”\n\n“Well, sir, as you know, urban expansion projects are typically limited to the X-Y plane, where the ambient rock temperature is between 70 and 80 degrees Fahrenheit.  However, the Limestone Expansion Project is moving in the positive-Z direction, where the rock temperatures are generally lower.  Although expanding in this direction will have higher recurring cost, the lower construction costs tunneling through the softer limestone are too significant to ignore.”  The Secretary sensed that the governor was losing patience, so he cut to the chase.  “Anyway, sir, late yesterday, the exploratory mine shaft broke into an extremely large chamber.”\n\nThe governor snapped to attention.  “What’s that you say? A chamber?”  A wave of spontaneous thoughts raced though his mind.  Could there be other life forms in the universe? What would that mean to their society?  Chaos, unrest, revolt, the end of civilization?  This could be very bad news indeed.  “Was the chamber natural of artificial?”\n\n“Unknown, sir.  It had its own light source.  Initially, the light source was hundreds of times brighter than anything we have in the City.  However, after half a cycle, it became significantly darker.  We were able to send a team through the shaft.  They say there is a large semicircular light on the ceiling and thousands of diamond lights surrounding it.  They say they cannot see the walls.  They estimate that the chamber is hundreds of miles in diameter.”\n\n“That’s ridiculous.  No chamber can be that large.  What do your engineers say?”\n\n“They are at a loss, sir.  But, there are a few eccentric scientists that claim that the universe physically ends several miles above our heads.  These scientists say that the Earth is just a solid spherical ball with nothing beyond.”\n\n“That’s the stupidest idea I ever heard.  The rock extends forever in all directions.  Everybody knows that.”\n\n“Of course, sir.  But there are also crackpots who say that man once lived on that spherical surface, but was banished to the ‘underworld’ because of a great sin.”\n\n“Ignore my earlier statement.  Now, that is the stupidest idea I ever heard.  How can anyone live on a sphere?  They’d fall off.  No, I suspect that the positive-Z direction contains evil beings.  They probably blind their prey with the bright light, and then attack them.  I wouldn’t be surprised if they eat their victims while they’re still alive.  Recall your men immediately.  We must seal the shaft before it is too late.  In the morning, I’ll meet with the full Senate.  We must pass a law that forbids expansion in the positive-Z direction.  And for now, we must all pray that the gods will forgive our blasphemous behavior, lest we all perish.”\n"
  title: Heavens Above
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Chris Deal
  date: 2010-03-20
  day: 20
  month: '03'
  text: "It’s the only story the news is talking about today: twenty years since the fall, since the wall came down.  My boy asked me if I remembered it, where was I when I heard it had come down.  Told him I was right where he was, asking my father what it meant, the wall coming down, the people separating.  I told my boy, I told him my dad said it meant we could be together again, undivided by petty differences.\n\nMy boy, he said my dad sounded like a smart man.\n\nHe was, I told him.\n\nWhat I didn’t tell him was that I was lying.  I wasn’t sitting with my father when the wall came down.  I was there.  I held a sledgehammer in my young hands and I swung that thing over and over, until my muscles ached of acid and my shirt was soaked with sweat, clinging to me in the cold night.\n\nWhat I didn’t tell him was that I was on the other side of that wall.\n\nThat wall wasn’t to keep people inside, but to keep them out.\n\nWhat I didn’t tell my boy was my father, he remembered the first wall, way across the ocean, the remnant of another war, long before the last one.  One country divided from itself, not one country cut off from the rest of the world.  Families separated, not entire cultures.  He knew his mother wasn’t born in here, but he never asked where I met her.  He never asked where we lived before him.  There was the way it was now, the way it was before, but he never cared about anything from then.  Him, he had an entire life ahead of him, an entire world to see.  He would never have to see his homeland tear itself apart, people of a different color removed from their homes, sent to a land they only knew as stories from their parents, grandparents.  The war in our borders was a history lesson for him, not real life.  He would never have to kill to preserve what was right.\n\nMy boy grew bored of the news, and he started surfing the neural-net.\n\nOne day, he may ask more about my father.  He may ask about the before.  He might ask about the wall that ran the full course of the borders, the guards who patrolled in jeeps with gauss rifles, the camps we sat in before being dumped on the other side, the constant broadcasts from the leader, the man who put an end to heterogeneity and proclaimed through homogeneity we would better ourselves, the man who declared war on the other, who defined that there was an other, the man who became a martyr before the revolution was complete, before I held that hammer and brought down that wall.\n\nWhen my boy asks, I’ll tell him.  For now, though, he can keep on as he is.\n\nI’ll remember for him.\n"
  title: Anniversary
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Jacqueline Brasfield
  date: 2010-03-21
  day: 21
  month: '03'
  text: "I was 18 years old when they’d captured the first howlers.\n\nMom and I stayed up to see the first footage of them flash across the TV screen on the 11 O’clock news, blurry images of hollow-eyed men and women wearing orange jumpsuits, their arms hanging limply and obediently at their sides.  I felt a pang of disappointment. From all her stories I expected them to be fierce, savage, proud creatures struggling and straining at their chains. I expected them to be warriors.  They looked no more savage than my science teacher at school. Mom said I shared a connection to them. I didn’t know what she meant.\n\nOn the screen, three figures stood proudly at a podium adorned with microphones from various news agencies.  My mother spit down at her feet when the camera panned over their faces – two men, one woman, all impeccably groomed. One of the men wore a military uniform decorated with medals, and it was he who spoke to the camera.\n\n“We’ve prepared a small statement regarding the hybrids and then we’ll move to your questions.”\n\nMy mother spit again and took a long swallow of gin straight out of the small glass bottled held in her hand. I’d never seen her drink before.\n\n“It is with great pleasure that we can confirm we have successfully located and retrieved all of the hybrids. The last remaining rogue tribes were identified and brought into protective custody for their integration into the United States Military Evolutionary Hybrid Unit.  The success of the device used to free these hybrids from their condition continues to prove effective and provide a stability and peace of mind these individuals will not have ever known.  All of them have been offered training and assistance and the opportunity to serve this great nation, and we can confirm we have  100% uptake on this offer.  The public is safe once again – if not safer.  We believe these hybrids will make the finest soldiers in the history of the United States military forces. My colleagues and I will take your questions now, on the understanding we cannot reveal information that is classified.”\n\nImmediately, a flurry of questions came from the mob of journalists off camera. My mother turned off the TV before I could hear any of the replies.\n\n“Why’d you turn it off?”\n\nShe sat there in the dark for several long seconds before answering me.\n\n“Because they’re lying, Ben. About everything. All the stories I’ve told you. All of their history. Does any of that suggest to you that they would willingly give in to slavery and bondage? That they would agree to serve those who rape the land, and poison the water and kill the innocent?”\n\nI opened my mouth to speak, to tell her no I did not think they would, but she was quick to interject.\n\n“And do you think they’ve really caught all of them?”\n\nShe looked over my shoulder as she said the words, eyes fixed on something behind me.  And that something began to move, causing the hairs on the back of my neck to stand up like orderly soldiers.\n\n“Mom?”\n\nI turned quickly to look behind and stood frozen at the sight before me. A woman more bone than skin prowling forward on bare feet. Her movements were alien and animalistic and savage. She spat haughty words at me in Russian that I didn’t understand.\n\nI thought her the most beautiful thing I’d seen in my life.\n\n“Meet the resistance Ben,” my mother murmured. “Meet Katja, your mate.”\n"
  title: Evolution
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Liz Lafferty
  date: 2010-03-22
  day: 22
  month: '03'
  text: "Wake up.\n\nMake coffee.\n\nGo to work.\n\nEat.\n\nSleep.\n\nWake up.\n\nMake coffee.\n\nGo to work.\n\nEat.\n\nSleep.\n\n#\n\n“What’s wrong?”\n\n“I don’t know.  It’s the worker program jamming up again.”  I frowned at the array of code for that particular program.  The pattern had changed over time.  The wild fluctuations so common to new programs was normal, but since they layered in the worker program, the blips had steadied out into a monotonous up, down, up, down rhythm that had gotten slower and slower.\n\nI scanned through hundreds of worker programs seeing the same results.\n\nThe automatons with this program seemed to be in one repetitive loop after another.\n\n“Did you reboot?”\n\n“First thing.  It went right in to loop again.  I’ve been seeing more and more problems with this schematic.  What do you want me to do?”\n\n“Did you try loading the motherly instinct program?  Maybe it would do better in a home environment.”\n\nWe’d stopped identifying them by name years ago.  To us they were drones.\n\n“Let me check the records.”  My fingers flittered over the keyboard as I punched in the series of codes, revealing the events for this female automaton’s life cycle.  “No, we can’t.  That model was programmed not to have children.  It was supposed to find joy in the labor force.”\n\n“The entrepreneur program has always been successful.  What about an overlay?”\n\n“Might work.”\n\n“Well, it’s better than suiciding the model.”\n\n“I hate that term.  I’ll shut it down for a few days of rest.  See what happens.”\n\n“You’re call, but we’ll probably end up shutting her down anyway.  Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”\n\nI went home.\n\nTime to sleep.\n\n#\n\nI woke up.  Made coffee.  Went to work.\n\n“What’s wrong?”\n\n“I don’t know.  It’s the worker program jamming up again.”\n\n“Did you reboot?”\n\n“First thing.  It went right in to loop again.  I’ve been seeing more and more problems.  What do you want me to do?”\n"
  title: Life As A Drone
  year: 2010
- 
  author: Duncan Shields
  date: 2010-03-23
  day: 23
  month: '03'
  text: "It’s been said that if you give a room full of monkeys a room full of typewriters, they will eventually type up a Shakespeare play given enough time.\n\nAs a philosophical exercise, there is a point to the premise. However, there are a number of factors that make it impossible as a real-world application.\n\nFirst and foremost, monkeys are mortal and will die after a few short decades.\n\nSecond of all, the typewriters themselves will often break under the surprisingly strong hands of the monkeys.\n\nThirdly, if the monkeys bash on the keys, they will hit the same group of keys over and over again with little variation, ignoring keys on the fringes such as shift, enter, and the space bar.\n\nThat’s where my MonkeyTron tm project comes in. I have created supercomputers whose job is to spew randomly generated letters, punctuation, and spaces. By running sixty of these computers concurrently, I have theoretically created this room of monkeys.\n\nThey’ve been running for a year.\n\nSo far, we have garnered half a poem by Robert Frost, nearly two full pages from the screenplay for The Shining, a full recipe for ‘glass brownies’, the entire lyrical songbook of Avril Lavigne’s career, two paragraphs from an engineering manual, and six nonsense limericks.\n\nOne page of Hamlet showed up, gentleman. I have faith that the future looks bright. Too bright.\n\nLadies and gentlemen of the council, this page of Hamlet that showed up seemed to be ‘corrected’. There were only seven minor changes from the original, but it made the language seem to flow better. This is very wor