May 15, 2012

From “Eyes Shining in Darkness” by Diana Allen Arbeid

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Wilma loped after the intruder, baying, while Fred scaled to his favorite perch with a yowl and watched the ensuing chase with eyes shining in the semi-darkness. I had quick thoughts of trying to nudge Wilma back behind the kiddie gate, lest the intruder be carrying rabies or some other nasty cocktail of diseases, but she put the lie to her 16 years on earth with a surprisingly energetic pursuit. It was all I could do to follow armed with a broom.

The strange dog, for its part, seemed equal parts terrified and purposeful. While zigzagging across my living room, upsetting furniture and bunching up rugs, it nevertheless made straight for the kitchen. I lost sight of it for a moment, but when the dog reemerged, still tailed stubbornly by Wilma, I saw that it had a boneless chicken breast–one I’d set out to thaw for dinner–in its mouth.

It was only when the intruder made its escape, through Wilma’s doggie door, that I understood how it had gotten inside in the first place. I was able to slide the lock into place before my geriatridog chased the interloping hound outside, but, seized by intense indignation at having my house invaded and my pets threatened, I went through the large door, still clutching my broom, seconds later. It was a bright night out and the streetlights were on; I expected to see the dog running for the treeline across the street and 500 yards away.

Instead I caught a glimpse of a small, pale child in a pool of streetlamp light.

It glanced over its shoulder, and I could see my chicken breast defiantly clamped between rows of square white teeth. Eyes shone vividly in the twilight, and a moment later the figure vanished behind my garbage cans.

 

May 10, 2012

From “Tales of the Ixar and the Nuuixar” by Keven York Morton

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Every hardened spacer knows the ixar, the space-rats: small skittering creatures with seven legs and a hide that’s hairy between plates of chitin. Incredibly adaptable and able to withstand environments from a vacuum to a hothouse, they are regarded as pests aboard ships and ruthlessly eradicated. Populations of ixar have become established near most spaceports, though their original world of origin is unknown.

Far fewer know of the nuuixar, and even those tend to be tall tales passed around spacer bars after a few rounds of drinks.

For all intents and purposes, the nuuixar resemble the ixar and are easily mistaken for them. Whether this is a natural mimicry adaptation, an evolutionary relationship, or some form of shapeshifting has never been established. But unlike the ixar, the nuuixar are deeply intelligent and are capable of sophisticated tool use and communication on psionic wavelengths.

Hence there are dark tales of nuuixar posing as simple ixar in order to steal secrets, selling tradeship routes to pirates or sabotaging key components of stardrives. There are no confirmed cases–what pirate would admit to purchasing information from a space-rat?–but many a spacer adrift in a lifepod has blamed a nuuixar, real or imagined, for their plight.

As creatures of psionic capability, nuuixar reportedly are able to form a gestalt intelligence, exponentially increasing their powers when in close proximity. Some say they use this power to overtake unwary ships and pilot them deep into the galactic core, where they are preparing a massive fleet to make their presence one day known.

Something to consider the next time you set a trap loaded with Ixar-B-Gon.

 

May 3, 2012

From “Strange Lights Over Saraa” by Hayes Clarke Kantubek

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On June 16, 1984, strange lights were seen over the distant and isolated farming settlement of Saraa in the Mongolian People’s Republic, as reported by a group of Soviet troops on exercises in the nearby mountains. The central government in Ulaan Bataar reported that their sole link with the isolated community, a telex line, had been cut off.

Concerned–the hills had been a refuge for pro-Buddhist rebels during the collectivization of the country in the 1930s–the governor of Ömnögovi Province asked the Soviets to investigate and to garrison Saraa temporarily. The troops found nothing amiss, and settled down for what they thought would be a leisurely occupation–a furlough from their intense training and expected combat deployment to Afghanistan.

Within a month, nearly all of the 250 men who had been stationed there were dead.

The first deaths occurred when army rations ran out and the Soviets began eating local foods. Dozens died instantly or in the following hours due to what the regimental medic described as an “intense allergic reaction.” Puzzled, the Soviet commander rounded up locals on suspicion of poisoning his men, but no evidence could be found.

Eventually, despite generous gifts of food from the locals, the other Soviets began exhibiting signs of acute malnutrition and starvation. For some reason, only their army rations seemed to have any nutritive effect at all; Merchants from relatively nearby communities and Saraa citizens returning from trips suffered the same fate. The locals and the provincial government in Dalanzadgad could not explain why.

Eventually, the Soviet commander pulled his troops out and recommended a full quarantine to deal with a suspected bioagent. Scientists from the Vozrozhdeniya Island biological weapons unit, in full NBC containment gear, found nothing. The only effects they noted were a number of odd quirks: nearly all the residents had become left-handed, for instance.

Eventually, the quarantine was made permanent, and it survived democratization. Until a group of missionaries arrived in Saraa nearly 25 years later, no Mongolian or foreigner entered or left the village.

 

April 27, 2012

From “Chi of the Claymen” by Kelli Sandoval Villarreal

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Claymen weren’t really clay and they weren’t really men.

They “clay” in question was any old material that could be worked and shaped–clay in the poetic, the Biblical sense. In practice, just about anything could be modified to serve as a Clayman: battered old refrigerators, rocks, thatch. Attending Claymen would usually modify the raw materials, adding arms or legs or eyeholes for the animated chi within. But sometimes they would animate a single rock or a handful of pebbles or even a tree; those “ambusher Claymen” tended to be created rather sparingly, as it required much more chi to fashion them.

No one could say for sure how the Claymen had come to be, as they did not deign to speak to mankind or its allies–their communication seemed to be on a much more primal, perhaps telepathic, level. But they were certainly driven, as any other being would be, to reproduce themselves. People had observed Claymen, singly or in small groups, loving crafting “children” from the same materials as themselves and passing a portion of their own chi onto them; there were others that slapped together “offspring” out of whatever parts that could be found and gave no gift of their own chi.

In that respect, one must admit, they were not so different from humans.

One major difference, though, was chi. Humans are born with some innate chi and the ability to generate more from their environment, but Claymen completely lacked that. Chi was imbued in them at “birth” and lost at “death” but did not otherwise change. They were immune to the energy-sapping of negative chi that could come about through poor decisions or inauspicious events, but a rather large pool of chi had to be gathered before one could be imbued with the spark that turned it from a pile of refuse into a genuine Clayman.

Some Claymen carefully gathered chi from the natural world, cultivating zen gardens and practicing careful feng shui to direct positive chi into a soul jar. Since they had no need to eat or drink, chi farming was the key use of Clayman lands.

Others, though, were impatient and wary of what could happen were a chi farm disrupted. It was these Claymen reavers that were terrors unto mankind and its allies, leading groups of raiders to slay all they encountered and steal their chi. In areas where Claymen had been sighted, travelers tended to be vastly paranoid, for the very rocks and trees about them might be ambusher Claymen with a mind to steal their life energy from the source.

 

April 24, 2012

From “Karoshi” by Tricia Vuong Tranh

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Nex was able to jimmy the door open with her reprogrammable card–the place was so old that it didn’t have networked biometrics installed. It opened quietly, even as she had to struggle with the last few inches, and closed with a nearly inaudible click. Peeking through the peephole, Nex was able to see the Redmen continue down the corridor without so much as glancing at the row of “bedsit brick” doors.

With the pursuit shaken, at least for now, Nex crept into the tiny one-room apartment looking for the occupant. There was the taser in her left sleeve if they were asleep and the knife in her right if they were awake. But the pile of unopened and moldering mail by the door–which had made it so hard to open– and the burned-in channel guide on the cheap TV quickly made the situation clear. A cursory search revealed the dessicated remains of the tenant on the futon facing the screen, remote still in hand.

“Karoshi,” Nex muttered.

There had been a time, years ago, when the idea of someone dying by themselves with no one noticing was a big enough social trauma to merit an extensive search for answers and documentary filmmaking. Nex had, during a morbid phase in her teens, seen one such film about a pretty young Londoner who died wrapping Xmas presents and lain undiscovered for three years. Nowadays, with automatic rent debiting and the proliferation of tiny, cheap “bedsit brick” one-room apartments (with little more than a couch-bed, toilet, and high-speed network connection)…”karoshis” were common. The word meant “death by work” according to the cold Japanese instruction vids that Nex used to watch. In the modern sense it was more likely death by heart attack or stroke, but sitting on a couch was probably the closest thing to work the late people ever did.

Nex gave the remains an abbreviated reading of the last rites and flicked a coin onto their chest for the boatman, as was her custom.

 

March 31, 2012

From “Bianca 223,979 vs. Gemini-Class Armatures” by Melbourne Albane

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“Bianca 223,979, you are in violation of nineteen separate ordinances, seventeen statutes, six sections of the consolidated code, and twenty-seven other iterations of standard arcology law.”

“Don’t care,” Bianca muttered. Her hands flew over the keyboard she’d wired into the system. She was coding faster than she ever thought possible; a side effect of removing the limiter, perhaps.

Or it could have just been sheer emotional panic.

“Bianca 223,979, you have disregarded your final warning. Lethal force has been authorized.”

“Try it,” growled Biana. There was more than enough time to get in and shut down the central servers, with brute force attacks if need be.

A loud whine from the production floor below broke her train of thought. Units still on the assembly line were whirring to life, limbs twitching and lights flickering as they did so. Within moments, half the units were on the ground, running or crawling toward Bianca’s exposed position. Their weapons weren’t–couldn’t be–online, but each still had a grip strength in excess of 3000 psi.

Bianca had only moments before they overwhelmed her.

 

March 28, 2012

From “The Puppet” by Jacques Labret

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On the third try, the doorframe finally gave, splintering around the lock. Conchita gave it a final kick and it swung weakly open.

“James?” she said. “Where are you?” Behind her, Reg dropped the battering ram on the concrete floor and followed.

The interior rooms had been gutted, with furniture and most of the non loadbearing walls replaced with racks of servers and off-the shelf components modified to work like servers. There was even a liquid cooling system installed–maybe drawing from the city sewers?–but even so the temperature inside was easily in the nineties.

“James?” Conchita called again. “I know you’re in here. No more hiding.”

She made a careful circuit of the first floor, while Reg went to look upstairs. There was just more and more computer equipment; the bathroom had no water pressure and was streaked with rust stains and the refrigerator was unplugged and empty aside from a few moldy bread heels. Nothing to suggest that anything other than pay the water and electricity bills had been done in a long time.

“Hey, up here!” It was Reg from upstairs. Conchita took the steps two at a time.

He’d found what looked like the computer system’s central terminal–a mosaic of screens around an elaborate set of keyboards and joysticks. A thick layer of dust covered everything, and the chair looked like it had been partially torn apart by rats.

The monitors, covered by heavy dust, were running speech synthesis programs, image editing software, and a popular web-based voice and video chat.

There was no sign that James, or anyone else, had been at the terminal in months.

 

March 26, 2012

From “The Tunnels of Ixium” by Dori Blechman

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Ixium, named for a minor Vle-Ya deity, was a deceptively ordinary medium-sized moon, its surface primarily formed from various unremarkable rocks and common metals. Early probes noted this and treated it as little more than a footnote; all efforts were focused on the inner moon of Clashun, which appeared at first to be a “garden world” suitable for colonization. It was only after the colony on Clashun failed (due to a hypesaline environment and spore-based local life that provoked fatal allergic reactions in humans after long-term exposure) that Ixium attracted any interest.

Squatters fleeing Clashun quickly found that the center of Ixium was honeycombed with tunnels that ranged from a few inches to hundreds of meters in diameter. The origin of the tunnels, their manner of creation, and whether there was an intelligence behind them (a subject on which the Vle-Ya were silent), remains an enduring mystery. Mathematical models have proved inconclusive, and mapping the tunnels was too gargantuan an undertaking for such a minor curiosity.

In the meantime, Ixium has become notorious as a haven for smugglers, pirates, and squatters of every stripe. Some colonists believe that the creator of the tunnels, be it a massive machine or a hive of alien creatures, resides at the moon’s core, though the heat and pressure in the deepest tunnels has made exploration beyond a certain point an impossibility.

 

March 8, 2012

From “Planet of the Eumycota” by Roma Mysłowicach

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“We contacted aliens year ago. They didn’t have anything useful to say, so we all kind of forgot about it.”

“What? How could you do that? What were they like?”

“Near as we could tell they were kind of like a fungus with some kind of fluid-based decentralized nervous system. R-selectors, no sexes, reproduction by what can only be described as billions of spores. What social bonds they had were formed based on size, not relatedness. They were their own starships, with the little young ones as the crew and the big old ones as the ship itself.”

“You must have tried to talk with them.”

“We had nothing to say to them. It took twenty years for our top men to figure out the system of pheromones, chromoatophores, temperature changes, and sterile airborne spores they used to communicate. And what did we find they were saying?”

“What?”

“They were obsessed with temperature variations on their planets. They talked about the weather, all the time, obsessively. When it wasn’t that it was grading various sources of the nutrient sludge they consume. It was mind-numbing.”

“Did you ask them any questions? Maybe that was just a fluke. Would they really find our conversations all that interesting?”

“We asked about their intentions, and they said they wanted to know what the weather would be like on their homeworld tomorrow. We asked about their technology, and they told us that their nutrient sludge was a little off today. The only thing they wanted to know from us was whether we had any sludge to share. It was just like tolking to a goddamn mushroom.”

 

January 14, 2012

From “Rogue Spam” by Carlena T. Yunan

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“You have to be careful,” Frank said, taking a pull from his filterless government-issue cigarette. “Not just about teaching your ‘assistants’ so much that the bosses fire you in favor of sixteen young turks from Canton.”

“I’m a black box,” Hil assured him. She stirred her tea, shielding it from the dust kicked up by Beijing passersby with one hand. “Money in the form of malt liquor or narcotics goes in one end, and spaghetti code comes out the other.”

“Don’t put too much effort into what you do, either. Dale Johnston did just that when he designed a spambot to override CAPTCHAs. Military-grade code, experimental chess-AI algorithms, natural language simulator to embed spam in realistic-seeming comments, the works.”

“So?”

“Damn thing went rogue, started impersonating a user in newsgroups and gathering personal information from dating sites. By the time Dale pulled the plug, it had marriage offers on three continents.”

Hil could never quite tell when Frank was shitting her outright or just salting the truth with liberal amounts of bullshit for kicks and grins. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

“Why do you think I asked you here?” Franks said, stonefaced. “That’s why we need to talk about your e-boyfriend from ‘Portland.'”

 

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