August 2, 2011

From “Days Until Impact” by Jessica T. Tubmann

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Days until impact: 19
I need to do something. Something meaningful that will stand the test of time, even if that time is short for all of us. Maybe if it’s meaningful enough, something, somewhere will take notice and do something. Remember me, maybe, or even intervene. It may be a long shot, but I don’t want to have lived a meaningless life.

Days until impact: 11
I’ve tried some things. Writing? Who’s got the time to read it, even if it were any good, even if it could be distributes. Taking pictures? Pedestian. Who’ll care to look at anything I have access to? Even if I dropped everything there isn’t time to make even a grand gesture, let alone a grand deed.

Days until impact: 5
It’s all been meaningless. Everything. Like shadow puppets on the wall: insubstantial and ephemeral. Trying to hold onto anything, trying to do anything, is just making a new and meaningless toy that will vanish as soon as the light fades.

Days until impact: 1
It’s a miracle. I daren’t even write it down, for fear of extinguishing that fragile flame. But it is, or may be, what we’ve all needed.

 

August 1, 2011

From “The Qaus Run” by Melina al-Maghriz Durston

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“No, I’m not going to that address,” Nasir said. “Not again.”

“Look,” sighed Dispatch. “He’s a good tipper, and you get a lot of business in his neighborhood so you’re always closest. Take the fare. If he bugs you, monkey with the meter a little to get time and a half.”

“It’s not the money. I’m not doing it.” Nasir cried.

“Look, I’m through arguing. You take the fare or you find another cab company to drive for. Plenty of Arabic speakers who can drive stick would do the Little Mecca loop for half what you’re pulling in.”

Nasir turned off the radio in disgust and made his way to Dr. Qaus’s apartment. The good doctor was curbside, loaded with satchels and papers.

“Good morning,” he said. Nasir glanced at his dash clock: 2:53pm. “Take me to the university cyclotron. I’ve a set of equations to test and there’s only a few hours’ window.”

“Which university?”

“I don’t have time for all your questions! Drive!”

 

July 26, 2011

From “Lanxisol Subject 112b” by Harry M. Guest

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Lanxesol had a variety of potent effects, the most notable of which were an increase in basal metabolic rates, greatly reduced muscle atrophy, and mild regeneration. The result was the virtual disappearance of superfluous body fat combined with an impressive ability to gain muscle mass and strength. A quadriplegic on lanxesol could regain full use of their body; an Olympic athlete taking the same dose would present superhuman levels of strength and coordination.

As with all such things, there was a catch: lanxesol was dangerously addictive and teratogenic. Even a brief period of use would produce debilitating withdrawal for months if not years; prolonged exposure resulted in multiple organ failure if the dosage was even lessened. There were, and would always be, some for whom that was not too steep a price to pay; the fact that lanxesol could be easily confused with a number of innocuous agents in a blood test meant that it was widely popular with athletes.

The most dangerous aspect of the compound, though, was its potential as a teratogen. Infants conceived by parents who were using lanxesol were born with the symptoms of prolonged exposure and would die if not immediately and permanently supplied with it. Worse, it produced an array of dangerous mental conditions, schizophrenia foremost among them.

And there were whispers of even darker effects.

 

July 14, 2011

From “High Score” by Donald Q. Ralstone

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The voice at the other end of the line was pleasant, but with a faint far-eastern accent. “Mr. Sanderson, we’ve had quite the time tracking you down.”

“That’s why I wrote under a pseudonym,” Sanderson said. “It’s kind of the point.” He thought about hanging up, but if someone had gone to such great lengths to track him down, he might as well hear them out.

“Of course, of course,” the voice said. “My name is Nokin Kobayashi, and I’m with the San Francisco branch of Sunstar Games.”

Sanderson could already feel a headache building up. “Let me guess: it’s about the High Score series.”

“Well, yes,” said Kobayashi sounding both relieved and a little embarrassed. “I’m sure you know how successful the series was–and frankly, I have to congratulate you on such a marvelous idea. Selling novel adaptations of video games to young readers? A masterstroke for the educational market.”

“So I told myself at the time,” Sanderson grumbled. The residuals had certainly made it easy enough to work on other projects, but those books were never intended to be his sole scrap of notoriety. That’s what the pseudonym was for, dammit.

“The reason I’m calling, Mr. Sanderson, is that we’d like to use aspects that you introduced in your novelization of Blaster Squad Attack for the upcoming next-gen sequel. We’ll give you full credit and compensation, of course.”

“Not in a million years.”

 

July 7, 2011

From “RegenKit” by Donald S. Truman Jr.

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“It’s…complex,” Dr. Wiesenbaum said. “There were studies of starfish, salamanders, newts, axolotl…tests on genetic chimerae…dozens of clinical trials and a limited test release in Portland before we had to pull it.”

“Pull it?” Sandy tightened her grip in the revolver. “Not the sort of terminology you want to use with triggers, doc. Now tell me what you mean by pulling it.”

“We marketed it for about a week in high-end pharmacies under the name ‘RegenKit,'” Wiesenbaum said. “It looked like we were on the fast track to FDA approval, when the results from a last batch of tests came in. the board of directors ordered us to destroy all units and seal the research files rather than deal with the legal ramifications we’d uncovered.”

“You mean your ‘RegenKits’ were killing people,” Sandy hissed.

“Oh no, quite the opposite,” Wiesenbaum stammered. “We’d intended it for healing cuts, scrapes, bruises…but people were beginning to heal missing fingers and perhaps even limbs!”

“That sounds like a lie,” said Sandy. “If it were true, you’d have a line  of amputees a mile long out the door.”

“That’s what I thought. But the last test…there was an accident, and one of the subjects lost a fingertip in an industrial press. And then that call…that horrible call, from the board asking why we’d had a set of identical twins in the same experimental group.”

“Why did you?”

“That’s just it: we didn’t!”

 

June 24, 2011

From “Jasper’s Hope” by Carla Y. Eleuard

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“There are dangers out there. Mutants. Barbarians. Savages. Some men speak of the Legion, say that it’s waiting out there to put things right, hidden by the men of old until it was needed. But we didn’t need to go chasing dreams or shadows; we needed real answers. That’s what Jasper Coop brought us.”

“You mean…the guns?”

“The guns are only a part of it, son. A very small part. Jasper helped us make them, helped Cooperston defend itself and trade, but there’s more to it than that. He showed us that there was value in hanging together, in building something that lasts.”

“But he’s gone now.”

“Jasper saw that he had done all he could do, and he went off to seek the Legion and to meditate on the cause of the world’s fall. But we have others who share his vision. Trixie. Kayla. Donald.”

 

June 23, 2011

From “Lebedev’s Specter” by Altos Wexan

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“He said he saw something, in the heart of the reactor, just before the meltdown,” Valerian said. His eyes seemed to grow cloudy with the weight of remembrance.

It was painful to even hear those words, after what had happened in the Ukraine. “What did he see?” Vasily asked, trying not to let his voice crack.

“Captain Lebedev…he’d gone aboard to try and stop Berenty, to try and leave the rest of us a way off of this rock. We were in radio contact the entire time. There was so much static…so much gunfire…it was hard to understand, hard to make out.”

“Uncle Valerian…what did the captain say he saw?” Vasily pressed.

“I thought I heard Petr Ulyanovich say that he could see into the pod the Elbrus IV had constructed, into the heart of its design. Something even that snake Berenty couldn’t conceive.”

“Uncle…”

“The captain said he saw a young girl. Not unlike his wife when she had been a young woman. It was the last thing he ever spoke of.”

 

June 22, 2011

From “Descent into Contagion” by Tamera M. Juarez

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Those who had survived the contagion described its throes as a descent into a personal hell: a sensation of fatigue and detachment eventually growing into complete dissociation from reality. They’d hear a roaring in their ears, like a distant waterfall, and then the colors of the world around them would change. Bright became dark and dark became bright; noise was amplified a thousand times, as was movement.

The worst thing, though, was the change sufferers perceived in human expression. The ordinary actions, words, and even facial expressions were suddenly suffused with menace, demanding violent–even lethal–retaliation. Sufferers would see themselves as beset on all sides by threats, and a sort of terrible paranoia borne of fever was the result. Curiously, this didn’t seem to extend to other sufferers, who seemed to see one another as erstwhile allies. At the very least sufferers would ignore each other while they turned tooth and nail, knife and gun, on their other fellows.

The contagion seemed to run its course in a few weeks, with something like twenty to thirty percent surviving if they hadn’t been killed in their violent frenzy. Those fortunates would gradually return to normal, though they were often emaciated and starving by that point and easy pretty for those that remained violent. The remaining seventy to eighty percent would eventually reach such an imbalance of activity versus caloric intake that they would simply shut down. Occasionally, heavy sedation had been shown to allow even the most violent afflicted to endure the course of their infectious madness, but the intense supervision it required–to say nothing of the medications and expertise involved–made it out of reach for all but a lucky few.

 

June 19, 2011

From “Battery Buckshot” by Leonor Ilene Hopkins

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Of course, Sebastian wasn’t going to let a little thing like the apocalypse get him down. Far from it: he saw it as an opportunity to play with a vastly increased store of components which he was free to scavenge. His slight frame and sixth sense for things that were large and angry–honed by many years on the playground–served him well in picking through the debris of a collapsed society. Things he never could have afforded for his experiments and gadgets were suddenly free for the taking.

Even with his avoidance skills, the question of what to do when confronted with another angry scavenger–or, worse, Slow Walkers or Fast Walkers–did occupy a fair bit of Sebastian’s time. Many of the other survivors relied on guns, but Sebastian saw a plethora of weaknesses inherent in firearms, not the least of which was that most gun stores had been thoroughly looted and ammunition was scarce. One thing there were plenty of, though, were batteries–every size from AAA to D, and kept in every corner grocery. For a long-ago merit badge, Sebastian has experimented with getting a battery to release its entire charge as a directed zap of energy. It was a simple matter to expand the concept and combine the necessary parts with a few springs, coils, and triggers from real guns.

The first scavenger had laughed when he saw Sebastian loading what looked like a shotgun with D cells instead of shells. He was still laughing when the expended charge stopped his heart and Sebastian ejected the smoking and spent batteries onto the cracked pavement.

 

June 15, 2011

From “Impermeable Army” by Mark Amiton

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The camp was completely abandoned, littered with the detritus that one might expect an army to leave behind: empty gasoline cans, bits of shredded paper, and discarded ration wrappers.

“What happened here?” said Davis.

“Do you really want to stop and find out?” Caroline snapped.

“I’m paying you, aren’t I?” Davis said. “And I want to see.”

“All right then,” Caroline growled. “But when you tell me you wish we’d just kept walking, remember that I told you so.”

More abandoned junk and deep tire tracks in the mud waited further ahead, but no sign of the massive army it would have taken to generate so much debris. In time, Davis came upon what looked like a reviewing stand with podium. A note was pinned to the lectern with a combat knife.

“We have set off to take that which is ours,” Davis read. “We will make a name for ourselves outside the Permeable Lands. History will long remember Coxley’s Division.” He adjusted the glasses on his head. “What’s that mean? I never heard of an army coming out of the Permeable Lands, certainly not one big enough to leave all this litter.”

“I guarantee you they never came out,” said Caroline. “You remember what I said about the rough triangle of Grant, Anhui, and Phesheya? The line’s not razor sharp, but cross it and anything permeable goes away. Every now and then one of these little armies springs up. Someone puts a lot of time and effort into making something that’s useless in the Permeable Lands. Then they convince themselves it’s real, it’s not permeable, and try to leave.”

“A-are you saying all these people died when they tried to leave, and that whoever created them is out there alone now, trying to make a new army?”

“I’m saying that whoever made this army was probably permeable themselves,” retorted Caroline. “They fooled themselves otherwise and fell to pieces with the rest of their permeable men.”

 

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