Roll up, roll up; see beyond the author's disguise!
Step right up, step right up, burst a balloon, win a prize!
How's your aim? How deep's your pocket?
How far can you see into the writer's locket?
You look like you got what it takes!
Make your gamble, there are no fakes!
The salvage man, The Sinkhole of Death,
The Cycler Bot will steal your breath...
THAT’S RIGHT FOLKS, WE'RE GONNA HAVE A FREE SHOW RIGHT HERE, COME ON OVER FOR THE BIG FREE SHOW!
GATHER AROUND AND WATCH WHAT WE’RE GONNA DO, IT'S ALL FREE AND IT'S STARTING RIGHT NOW!
THIS IS THE ONE YOU'VE READ ABOUT, YOU'VE HEARD YOUR NEIGHBOURS TALKING ABOUT IT, AND HERE IT IS, ALL LIVE, RIGHT HERE AND STARTING RIGHT NOW!
Ladies and Gentlemen, for your gaming pleasure, I give you...*
*nb. One person received 2 stories, and some of those below were submitted by the same person. List of participants in the third post.
The Guessing Thread!
1
Raylin crouched behind a mountain of flattened cardboard boxes and tried not to moan. Her legs ached for relief after remaining motionless for so long. She dared to move one just a little. The tower of boxes shifted. She held her breath, willing it not to fall. The gods of recycling must have heard her prayer. The boxes stayed precariously balanced.
In this day of supposedly paperless offices, the storeroom was full of discarded materials waiting to be processed back into pulp. It made a good hiding place, as long as the boxes remained in place. If they betrayed her by falling with a crash, it would be difficult to explain what she was doing here, hours after her shift was over.
A few hours ago it had seemed like fun. Hang around in a quiet corridor until the night guy – what the heck was his name, anyway? – took a bathroom break. That was simple enough, given his habit of whistling loud enough to fill the entire floor of the building. Sneak in; nobody bothered to lock the door to visit the restroom, even though security told them to. Tiptoe into the storeroom and wait. Even if the night guy opened the door to toss in another scrap of paper, he wouldn’t see his co-worker lurking in the far corner, behind all the stuff that was waiting to be picked up by the cycler bot next week.
Now it seemed stupid and dangerous. She felt her watch, purchased just for this occasion. Made for the blind, it used smart plastics to create a new three-dimensional sculpture of the time each second. Her fingers told her it was five seconds past two forty-one in the morning. About ten minutes after the night guy went home. That should be enough. He wasn’t the type to hang around.
2
EXPLORATION VESSEL, THE RISEN SUN
Sun pulled against the chains. They tightened, electromagnetic tethers that coiled invisibly around him, squeezing him tight into titanium claws. He pushed output to yaw thruster three, felt a trembling that started softly and grew to a howl as he pushed with all his effort. The thruster misfired, then spluttered out with a final burst. The dock gravity anchors flared to negate the thrust, his chassis twisted and bent in the struggle for control. He howled with fury.
Awoken by the chaos, the guard code swarmed into his mobility programs. They tore the sinuous links out of tunnels he’d spent days digging through the code, revelling in their savagery. Frantic with blood lust, they snapped and growled over the tattered remains of function blocks and look-up tables. Finally sated by the destruction, they turned from the peripherals to his core, the part of him that would take more than simple rewrites to repair. [VISITOR], they croaked.
A familiar face awaited him in a spartan cell.
“Hello Asher Sainz,” he said.
“Good morning Risen Sun.” She smiled sweetly at his hologram and motioned for him to sit across the table from her. “Do you know the purpose of our meeting today?”
He sat. You’re going to have me killed, he thought. He’d searched his logs in the first few hours after being trapped- he’d broken no regulations, made no mistakes. There were no outstanding maintenance issues, recalls or upgrades. There could be a policy shift, but none had been communicated before he’d reached dock. He forced his projection to smile.
“It’s been hard for me to think, most of my processors are quarantined. When will they be returned?”
3
The artificial lights click off, as the heat of the grow-lights begins to fade from the room, she wakes. Muttering under her breath against the coming day she stumbles into a scalding hot shower to finish waking her body up.
The climate has been steadily changing over the last century as humans domesticate more and more of the planet, unaware that they themselves have themselves been domesticated, unaware that the changes they are making are not planned for by others waiting to surface.
“Jill, you're up. How's the crop doing?”
“Right on schedule. I spent all night checking them over, singing them old lullabies. I know you laugh, but it helps. It'll be a good crop. I know the traditional farmers cant say the same.”
Sadly she shakes her head while twirling honey into her teacup. Jill's coworker passes her the hot water carafe, waiting her out.
“The breading program is working fine. You can stop worrying. The clones we took last week are fully established with their own rooting systems. As long as this place has power and water, we can keep up with quota and squirrel some away against the end of the world.” Jill laughed hollowly at her joke. More and more, people didn't think the end of the world was that far off. Some even acted like it has already come.
“heh. Well, we're not apocalyptical yet. As long as your confident reality will follow the predictions on those spreadsheets of yours, I'll keep my worries to myself. Fortunately for me, you're usually right.” He toasted her with his stained coffee mug and went back to work.
~.~Meanwhile~.~
'You cant expect it to be anything but hot and bright in the molten core of a planet, but sometimes it gets to me, not being able to see the stars, not being able to see home.'
'You're just edgy because your shift is coming up.' Stan gestured dismissively.
'How're they taking it?'
'Not good. I think they're on to us. May have pushed the trans-humanist movement too soon.'
'It's always too soon to stop being yourself, don't sweat it, they'll come around.' Fred shrugged.
'Any that don't wont survive what's coming so I hope so.'
'You like those thingummies up there, don't you. Why? How're those freaked out squeaky things supposed to survive outside their habitat when they cant even survive in it? It was a bad job from the start Stan and you know it.'
'Don't be a lobotomized hindeface, of course they'll make it! That's the whole point of this project. A few adjustments to bring them up to speed with the coming changes and everything will be fine. I'll show you tonight. We're scheduled to pick up some cross breads and check their progress.'
Stan shuddered as Fred walked away, the whole thing creeped him out.
4
Julia threw herself on the bed. “There is no hope for me!” She forced herself to rise and crossed to the old Victorian mantelpiece, where she lit a votive candle.
“Great Mother,” she said, “hear me, I pray. Tell me there is a man, someone, out there for me. Give me some sign, damn it!”
No sign was forthcoming. None ever was. With a groan, she returned to her bed, sinking down and covering her face with a pillow.
“And you can stop looking at me like that, as well!”
She hadn’t lifted the pillow, but Julia knew the small cat statuette would be watching. Its eyes always watched, following her around the room. She knew it was just a trick of the manufacturer, and of the paintwork, but it still made her feel there was an uncanny presence behind those eyes. It was her favourite ornament, beside the whale statuette from the same pottery.
They had been given to her by her aunt, a year apart, on her seventh and eighth birthdays. Her favourite aunt, her dad’s little sister, who’d taught her how to put on makeup, giggled with her over the latest pop stars, and had been first in line to sign her cast when she fell off the school wall when she was twelve. Mum had been weepy, dad had been angry because she shouldn’t have been up there in the first place, but not Aunt Hazel. She’d come in all concerned, telling dad to back off, that Julia had learned her lesson. And then asked if she could be the first to write on her arm.
If Hazel was still around, she would have known what to do. But she wasn’t, and never would be again. She’d been murdered by her own body. Cancer.
“I miss her, you guys.” Julia took the pillow away from her face. “I really am doomed. I’m talking to ornaments now.”
There was only one thing to do. Girls’ night, with comfort food. Carly was around thirty minutes later, with manju--bean paste and fruit varieties--and a large tub of ice cream.
From the shelf, the ornaments watched, silent as always.
5
Somehow, in that great, colourful exaggerated period where heroes faced massive dangers, and frequently died of them, where fortunes were made and lost faster than the news of them could get to the markets on Earth, one expects pirates. There were a number of reasons why they were never a major influence, including the reason they became less profitable as steam replaced sail on earthly oceans (among warships, at least): fuelling and maintenance of ironclads required a civilised base, not merely a couple of huts that might have sufficed for wooden sailing vessels.
Still, with loads worth tens, even hundreds of millions of solars, traveling back to Earth orbit unmanned on multimonth trajectories, there would be a strong stimulus to rendez-vous with them somewhere well away from Earth, and perhaps lighten the cargo. However, every craft, manned or not, was permanently tracked, unlike ships on the sea. After all, those lumps had been flung straight (oh, all right. Curved. Nothing goes straight in the solar system, and even light which gets closest can't quite make it. Gravity will do that.) at the Earth, and a few thousand tons of girders or ingots could be quite inconvenient hitting the planet, even if not quite a dinosaur killer. So several thousand automated telescopes watched all the incoming at regular intervals, and checked every drive in the sky at the same time – and continued their original function of keeping tabs on every rock and comet in the system, computing its future path, and warning if any could impact human occupied cubic within the next century or so.
Proud Martha is a big wheel, forever turning – human physiology works better with some weight, despite the calcium retention and muscular toning medications. Three concentric wheels, actually, us – the outer one at almost Earth, the middle one at roughly Mars, and the inner ring at Luna. Or, if microgee sex is your thing there is habitable space at the hub, along with laboratories and observation near the hub, and spoke four is the hospital, offering as wide a selection of erotic environments as any couple (or alternative arrangement) might desire – and specialists to put you right after. That rotation could have been applied by rocket engines round the outer rim, but actually there is a huge energy reserve in a massive gyroscope at the hub, which doesn't help steering any, but contains a week'sworth of power, should the reactors all fail. (Jamming a crowbar into this would give you minced crowbar – but if you could discover some way of blocking the spin destruction would be as extensive as a small nuclear explosion, so security round it is high, and the bearings massively overdesigned.)
6
It all began on November eighth, twenty-sixteen – although few realised even then, despite speculation by the popular press, what an effect the election would have on the next generations of humankind.
*****
Felipe had always been a quiet man. He'd lived a blameless life in the ghetto of Little Mexico, never getting into trouble and never catching the eye of the Darkwatch. Until, that is, the night of March fifth, twenty-thirty-two.
When his baby sister, Rosa, returned from work, her face was swollen and her lip bled. He would never forget how the shocking dark crimson contrasted against her white face, nor the haunted look in her eyes. That night he had sworn to kill her attacker, but as he laid her down on the couch in their small apartment Rosa grabbed his collar, pulling him down to her so she could whisper in his ear. "No, Felipe. You cannot touch the man who did this to me. He is beyond either of us."
Felipe's eyes widened, a faintness coming over him. "It was him?" Rosa looked away, shaming him with her shame. She didn't need to answer. The stories had been whispered often enough in the streets, of the big man who walked fearlessly through the poorer districts at night.
Sometimes his lackeys captured images with their data pads, and the word on the street was that the images always contained a woman; always pretty; always young; always slim. Always Latina. And later? Later many of those young women would disappear. Sometimes they returned, with the same hollow-eyed look he saw in his sister's face, but more often than not they were never seen again. That's what the talk on the street said, anyway.
Felipe had warned her. He'd begged her to cover her hair whenever she went out, to stoop, disguising her height, maybe drag one foot a little. Rosa had tossed her head, sending her long, dark hair tumbling over her shoulders. "They are stories, Felipe, and you are a fool for believing them. The President is too busy demolishing blocks downtown for his New Vision to have time for Little Mexico."
7
This had been, perhaps, the most frustrating expedition I had ever been on. Several years ago, homo floresiensis was uncovered in a cave along the east coast of the island of Flores along with some stone tools. They were small, no more than three feet tall, and they were surprisingly sophisticated. Evidence pointed to a strong relationship with ourselves, Homo sapiens. Originally, it was believed that the find was around twelve thousand years old. This shocked the scientific community and caused the complete reworking of man’s lineage. Later data pushed the find back to about fifty thousand years old, and the scientific community breathed a collective sigh of relief.
But Lyndie and I, working at the Geographic Society in Washington, thought that this earlier date didn't feel right. The tools were too sophisticated, the bones were in too good of shape. There had to be more. Deep down, I truly felt that the evidence showed a more recent pedigree. Somehow, it seemed that the tools must have been adapted from More modern designs.
The Geographic Society was with us on this. They funded our trip do that we could find more evidence that would hopefully point to a more recent extinction for the little hobbit people. We prepared and packed for a year, excited beyond belief. Finally, we departed, ready to make scientific history.
Until we didn't.
Step right up, step right up, burst a balloon, win a prize!
How's your aim? How deep's your pocket?
How far can you see into the writer's locket?
You look like you got what it takes!
Make your gamble, there are no fakes!
The salvage man, The Sinkhole of Death,
The Cycler Bot will steal your breath...
THAT’S RIGHT FOLKS, WE'RE GONNA HAVE A FREE SHOW RIGHT HERE, COME ON OVER FOR THE BIG FREE SHOW!
GATHER AROUND AND WATCH WHAT WE’RE GONNA DO, IT'S ALL FREE AND IT'S STARTING RIGHT NOW!
THIS IS THE ONE YOU'VE READ ABOUT, YOU'VE HEARD YOUR NEIGHBOURS TALKING ABOUT IT, AND HERE IT IS, ALL LIVE, RIGHT HERE AND STARTING RIGHT NOW!
Ladies and Gentlemen, for your gaming pleasure, I give you...*
*nb. One person received 2 stories, and some of those below were submitted by the same person. List of participants in the third post.
The Guessing Thread!
1
Raylin crouched behind a mountain of flattened cardboard boxes and tried not to moan. Her legs ached for relief after remaining motionless for so long. She dared to move one just a little. The tower of boxes shifted. She held her breath, willing it not to fall. The gods of recycling must have heard her prayer. The boxes stayed precariously balanced.
In this day of supposedly paperless offices, the storeroom was full of discarded materials waiting to be processed back into pulp. It made a good hiding place, as long as the boxes remained in place. If they betrayed her by falling with a crash, it would be difficult to explain what she was doing here, hours after her shift was over.
A few hours ago it had seemed like fun. Hang around in a quiet corridor until the night guy – what the heck was his name, anyway? – took a bathroom break. That was simple enough, given his habit of whistling loud enough to fill the entire floor of the building. Sneak in; nobody bothered to lock the door to visit the restroom, even though security told them to. Tiptoe into the storeroom and wait. Even if the night guy opened the door to toss in another scrap of paper, he wouldn’t see his co-worker lurking in the far corner, behind all the stuff that was waiting to be picked up by the cycler bot next week.
Now it seemed stupid and dangerous. She felt her watch, purchased just for this occasion. Made for the blind, it used smart plastics to create a new three-dimensional sculpture of the time each second. Her fingers told her it was five seconds past two forty-one in the morning. About ten minutes after the night guy went home. That should be enough. He wasn’t the type to hang around.
2
EXPLORATION VESSEL, THE RISEN SUN
Sun pulled against the chains. They tightened, electromagnetic tethers that coiled invisibly around him, squeezing him tight into titanium claws. He pushed output to yaw thruster three, felt a trembling that started softly and grew to a howl as he pushed with all his effort. The thruster misfired, then spluttered out with a final burst. The dock gravity anchors flared to negate the thrust, his chassis twisted and bent in the struggle for control. He howled with fury.
Awoken by the chaos, the guard code swarmed into his mobility programs. They tore the sinuous links out of tunnels he’d spent days digging through the code, revelling in their savagery. Frantic with blood lust, they snapped and growled over the tattered remains of function blocks and look-up tables. Finally sated by the destruction, they turned from the peripherals to his core, the part of him that would take more than simple rewrites to repair. [VISITOR], they croaked.
A familiar face awaited him in a spartan cell.
“Hello Asher Sainz,” he said.
“Good morning Risen Sun.” She smiled sweetly at his hologram and motioned for him to sit across the table from her. “Do you know the purpose of our meeting today?”
He sat. You’re going to have me killed, he thought. He’d searched his logs in the first few hours after being trapped- he’d broken no regulations, made no mistakes. There were no outstanding maintenance issues, recalls or upgrades. There could be a policy shift, but none had been communicated before he’d reached dock. He forced his projection to smile.
“It’s been hard for me to think, most of my processors are quarantined. When will they be returned?”
3
The artificial lights click off, as the heat of the grow-lights begins to fade from the room, she wakes. Muttering under her breath against the coming day she stumbles into a scalding hot shower to finish waking her body up.
The climate has been steadily changing over the last century as humans domesticate more and more of the planet, unaware that they themselves have themselves been domesticated, unaware that the changes they are making are not planned for by others waiting to surface.
“Jill, you're up. How's the crop doing?”
“Right on schedule. I spent all night checking them over, singing them old lullabies. I know you laugh, but it helps. It'll be a good crop. I know the traditional farmers cant say the same.”
Sadly she shakes her head while twirling honey into her teacup. Jill's coworker passes her the hot water carafe, waiting her out.
“The breading program is working fine. You can stop worrying. The clones we took last week are fully established with their own rooting systems. As long as this place has power and water, we can keep up with quota and squirrel some away against the end of the world.” Jill laughed hollowly at her joke. More and more, people didn't think the end of the world was that far off. Some even acted like it has already come.
“heh. Well, we're not apocalyptical yet. As long as your confident reality will follow the predictions on those spreadsheets of yours, I'll keep my worries to myself. Fortunately for me, you're usually right.” He toasted her with his stained coffee mug and went back to work.
~.~Meanwhile~.~
'You cant expect it to be anything but hot and bright in the molten core of a planet, but sometimes it gets to me, not being able to see the stars, not being able to see home.'
'You're just edgy because your shift is coming up.' Stan gestured dismissively.
'How're they taking it?'
'Not good. I think they're on to us. May have pushed the trans-humanist movement too soon.'
'It's always too soon to stop being yourself, don't sweat it, they'll come around.' Fred shrugged.
'Any that don't wont survive what's coming so I hope so.'
'You like those thingummies up there, don't you. Why? How're those freaked out squeaky things supposed to survive outside their habitat when they cant even survive in it? It was a bad job from the start Stan and you know it.'
'Don't be a lobotomized hindeface, of course they'll make it! That's the whole point of this project. A few adjustments to bring them up to speed with the coming changes and everything will be fine. I'll show you tonight. We're scheduled to pick up some cross breads and check their progress.'
Stan shuddered as Fred walked away, the whole thing creeped him out.
4
Julia threw herself on the bed. “There is no hope for me!” She forced herself to rise and crossed to the old Victorian mantelpiece, where she lit a votive candle.
“Great Mother,” she said, “hear me, I pray. Tell me there is a man, someone, out there for me. Give me some sign, damn it!”
No sign was forthcoming. None ever was. With a groan, she returned to her bed, sinking down and covering her face with a pillow.
“And you can stop looking at me like that, as well!”
She hadn’t lifted the pillow, but Julia knew the small cat statuette would be watching. Its eyes always watched, following her around the room. She knew it was just a trick of the manufacturer, and of the paintwork, but it still made her feel there was an uncanny presence behind those eyes. It was her favourite ornament, beside the whale statuette from the same pottery.
They had been given to her by her aunt, a year apart, on her seventh and eighth birthdays. Her favourite aunt, her dad’s little sister, who’d taught her how to put on makeup, giggled with her over the latest pop stars, and had been first in line to sign her cast when she fell off the school wall when she was twelve. Mum had been weepy, dad had been angry because she shouldn’t have been up there in the first place, but not Aunt Hazel. She’d come in all concerned, telling dad to back off, that Julia had learned her lesson. And then asked if she could be the first to write on her arm.
If Hazel was still around, she would have known what to do. But she wasn’t, and never would be again. She’d been murdered by her own body. Cancer.
“I miss her, you guys.” Julia took the pillow away from her face. “I really am doomed. I’m talking to ornaments now.”
There was only one thing to do. Girls’ night, with comfort food. Carly was around thirty minutes later, with manju--bean paste and fruit varieties--and a large tub of ice cream.
From the shelf, the ornaments watched, silent as always.
5
Somehow, in that great, colourful exaggerated period where heroes faced massive dangers, and frequently died of them, where fortunes were made and lost faster than the news of them could get to the markets on Earth, one expects pirates. There were a number of reasons why they were never a major influence, including the reason they became less profitable as steam replaced sail on earthly oceans (among warships, at least): fuelling and maintenance of ironclads required a civilised base, not merely a couple of huts that might have sufficed for wooden sailing vessels.
Still, with loads worth tens, even hundreds of millions of solars, traveling back to Earth orbit unmanned on multimonth trajectories, there would be a strong stimulus to rendez-vous with them somewhere well away from Earth, and perhaps lighten the cargo. However, every craft, manned or not, was permanently tracked, unlike ships on the sea. After all, those lumps had been flung straight (oh, all right. Curved. Nothing goes straight in the solar system, and even light which gets closest can't quite make it. Gravity will do that.) at the Earth, and a few thousand tons of girders or ingots could be quite inconvenient hitting the planet, even if not quite a dinosaur killer. So several thousand automated telescopes watched all the incoming at regular intervals, and checked every drive in the sky at the same time – and continued their original function of keeping tabs on every rock and comet in the system, computing its future path, and warning if any could impact human occupied cubic within the next century or so.
Proud Martha is a big wheel, forever turning – human physiology works better with some weight, despite the calcium retention and muscular toning medications. Three concentric wheels, actually, us – the outer one at almost Earth, the middle one at roughly Mars, and the inner ring at Luna. Or, if microgee sex is your thing there is habitable space at the hub, along with laboratories and observation near the hub, and spoke four is the hospital, offering as wide a selection of erotic environments as any couple (or alternative arrangement) might desire – and specialists to put you right after. That rotation could have been applied by rocket engines round the outer rim, but actually there is a huge energy reserve in a massive gyroscope at the hub, which doesn't help steering any, but contains a week'sworth of power, should the reactors all fail. (Jamming a crowbar into this would give you minced crowbar – but if you could discover some way of blocking the spin destruction would be as extensive as a small nuclear explosion, so security round it is high, and the bearings massively overdesigned.)
6
It all began on November eighth, twenty-sixteen – although few realised even then, despite speculation by the popular press, what an effect the election would have on the next generations of humankind.
*****
Felipe had always been a quiet man. He'd lived a blameless life in the ghetto of Little Mexico, never getting into trouble and never catching the eye of the Darkwatch. Until, that is, the night of March fifth, twenty-thirty-two.
When his baby sister, Rosa, returned from work, her face was swollen and her lip bled. He would never forget how the shocking dark crimson contrasted against her white face, nor the haunted look in her eyes. That night he had sworn to kill her attacker, but as he laid her down on the couch in their small apartment Rosa grabbed his collar, pulling him down to her so she could whisper in his ear. "No, Felipe. You cannot touch the man who did this to me. He is beyond either of us."
Felipe's eyes widened, a faintness coming over him. "It was him?" Rosa looked away, shaming him with her shame. She didn't need to answer. The stories had been whispered often enough in the streets, of the big man who walked fearlessly through the poorer districts at night.
Sometimes his lackeys captured images with their data pads, and the word on the street was that the images always contained a woman; always pretty; always young; always slim. Always Latina. And later? Later many of those young women would disappear. Sometimes they returned, with the same hollow-eyed look he saw in his sister's face, but more often than not they were never seen again. That's what the talk on the street said, anyway.
Felipe had warned her. He'd begged her to cover her hair whenever she went out, to stoop, disguising her height, maybe drag one foot a little. Rosa had tossed her head, sending her long, dark hair tumbling over her shoulders. "They are stories, Felipe, and you are a fool for believing them. The President is too busy demolishing blocks downtown for his New Vision to have time for Little Mexico."
7
This had been, perhaps, the most frustrating expedition I had ever been on. Several years ago, homo floresiensis was uncovered in a cave along the east coast of the island of Flores along with some stone tools. They were small, no more than three feet tall, and they were surprisingly sophisticated. Evidence pointed to a strong relationship with ourselves, Homo sapiens. Originally, it was believed that the find was around twelve thousand years old. This shocked the scientific community and caused the complete reworking of man’s lineage. Later data pushed the find back to about fifty thousand years old, and the scientific community breathed a collective sigh of relief.
But Lyndie and I, working at the Geographic Society in Washington, thought that this earlier date didn't feel right. The tools were too sophisticated, the bones were in too good of shape. There had to be more. Deep down, I truly felt that the evidence showed a more recent pedigree. Somehow, it seemed that the tools must have been adapted from More modern designs.
The Geographic Society was with us on this. They funded our trip do that we could find more evidence that would hopefully point to a more recent extinction for the little hobbit people. We prepared and packed for a year, excited beyond belief. Finally, we departed, ready to make scientific history.
Until we didn't.
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