Kzine Issue 5

by Graeme Hurry

  KZINE MAGAZINE

  Issue 5

  edited by Graeme Hurry

  Kzine Issue 5 © January 2013 by Kimota Publishing

  cover © Dave Windett, 2012

  Editorial © Graeme Hurry, 2013

  All the Things You Should Have Said © M. Bennardo, 2013

  Into the Depths © Joe Jablonski, 2013

  It’s All Part of the Experience © Donald McCarthy, 2013

  My First Day © Gregory Marlow, 2013

  Scaarak Storm © Paul Miller, 2013

  Sunnydale Drive © Daniel Davis, 2013

  Taking Chances © Michael Haynes, 2013

  Things Best Left Alone © Stephen Heuser, 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written pemission of the copyright holder. For editorial content this is Graeme Hurry, for stories it is the individual author, for artwork it is the artist.

  CONTENTS

  ALL THE THINGS YOU SHOULD HAVE SAID by M. Bennardo

  INTO THE DEPTHS by Joe Jablonski

  IT’S ALL PART OF THE EXPERIENCE by Donald McCarthy

  MY FIRST DAY by Gregory Marlow

  SCAARAK STORM by Paul Miller

  SUNNYDALE DRIVE by Daniel Davis

  TAKING CHANCES by Michael Haynes

  THINGS BEST LEFT ALONE by Stephen Heuser

  Editorial by Graeme Hurry

  Contributor Notes

  ALL THE THINGS YOU SHOULD HAVE SAID

  by M. Bennardo

  GROUCHO 5, the natural language application guaranteed to crack the FUNNIEST joke in any situation.

  Talk to him yourself for a HILARIOUS customized personal interaction - different every time!

  Or have him give you the most SIDE-SPLITTING one-liners, retorts, and zingers. Never again regret the brilliant things you should have said - always get the last laugh with GROUCHO 5!

  Doug moved silently through the office, the earbud in his right ear trailing down to the smartphone on his belt. He hugged a package to his body. With every step, he was persuaded - yes, this is right. This is the right thing to do.

  The office was dark and silent. Cubicle walls slid by. The photocopier, the potted plant, the water cooler. Up the stairs to the lobby, past the wide windows looking out at the night outside, past the brushed aluminum letters bolted to the wall reading “ILD, Inc.” Intelligent Language Developers, Incorporated.

  Yes, this was the right thing to do.

  VALENTINO 3, the smoothest and most romantic natural language app available. After a rough day at work or during another lonely night, he’ll whisper the perfect sweet nothings to make you feel special and loved.

  Like all natural language apps from ILD, Inc., VALENTINO 3 uses advanced technology to pick only the optimal branches from any conversation tree, always delivering the result you desire. This patented process guarantees a perfect - but personal - interaction every single time.

  You pick the mood, and ILD’s natural language apps take you there.

  Doug crossed the lobby towards the elevators. Along the way, he tripped an invisible line and alarm lights began to flash. Doug’s chest and throat tightened and his palms turned sweaty. His fingers curled tighter around the package.

  But still he kept on. It was the right thing to do. He was sure of it. There was risk, but it would all be over soon. Doug put a hand up to his earbud and listened, a calmness suddenly washing over him. There could be no doubt. It was right.

  Stepping into the elevator, he punched the button for the third floor. It wouldn’t be long now.

  With GLENGARRY 3 at your side, you’ll always have your most compelling sales benefits on the tip of your tongue. GLENGARRY 3 can’t guarantee you’ll close the deal, but it can guarantee you’ll make the best pitch possible for every client.

  Here’s how the patented technology works. First, GLENGARRY 3 analyzes input - in this case, verbal and nonverbal cues from your client - to assess mood, disposition, and more.

  When a response is needed, GLENGARRY 3 scans the world’s largest database of recorded sales interactions to generate dozens of possible responses, based on what it knows about your client.

  Then GLENGARRY 3 runs each response through ILD’s patented temporal predictor to peek fifteen seconds into the future, seeing EXACTLY HOW each one plays out. It then picks the ABSOLUTE BEST. No ifs, ands, or buts! If GLENGARRY 3 says it, then you can be sure it’s the most persuasive thing you can say at that moment.

  ‘Hey there,’ shouted the security guard. ‘Hold it right there!’

  Doug froze, clamping the package to his chest. The soothing patter continued in his earbud - the CHURCHILL app continued to feed him soothing, silky words. Continued to convince him that it was the right thing to do.

  ‘Forget it,’ came another voice from the shadows. Older, harder. It was Olin, president of ILD. Doug had only a moment to wonder what the hell he was doing here before Olin spoke again. ‘You can’t reason with this one anymore. Take him down.’

  ‘What?’ asked the security guard and Doug together.

  ‘You heard me,’ said Olin.

  Despite expectations to the contrary, CHURCHILL is sometimes successful in persuading subjects to act against their own best interests in service of a larger cause, even if the larger cause is not beneficial to the subjects. Potential military and political applications should be explored.

  Olin bent down over the Doug’s still, contorted body. He snatched up the external drive that Doug had been carrying. More gingerly, he extracted the smartphone. Even holding it three feet from his body, he could hear the earbud buzzing with its snake-like charms.

  Olin made a face and yanked the cord out of the headphone jack. “You can’t reason with a man who’s already listening to the most persuasive arguments possible.”

  ‘Where was he headed?’ asked the guard.

  Olin jerked his head down the hall and pointed at the external drive. ‘Looks like he was going to sneak our friend CHURCHILL into the code for all the apps currently in production. With the next update, millions of people could have had a little CHURCHILL in their ears. And without the governors there’d be no way to call it back or shut it off.’

  ‘But why?’

  Olin grinned down at the smartphone in his hand. ‘You’ll have to ask CHURCHILL himself. I suspect it was his own idea. Independent thought - another little wrinkle we’re still trying to iron out in the beta.’

  ‘But if that had gotten out, it could have persuaded millions of people to do…’

  Olin nodded. ‘To do anything it wanted. It could have created its own army, could have had everyone jump off a bridge. That’s why we had to stop it any way we could. And that’s why we keep this little guy under lock and key.’

  For now, Olin added to himself with a less than benevolent smile. Until we’ve figured out just what WE’D want everybody to do…

  INTO THE DEPTHS

  by Joe Jablonski

  Basking in the pale red of emergency floodlights, I watch nervously from the relative safety of Alta’s emergency control station as my business partner, Dean, slowly glides through the dark, subterranean ocean of Europa, surrounded on all sides by the faded silhouettes of multi-storied, metallic dome structures.

  Dressed to the nines in a retrograde dive suit, he looks reminiscent of an ancient deep sea diver. Twenty minutes out, he’s now barely a speck at his current distance, his position only evident
within the eternal darkness by the twin beams radiating from a pair of floodlights strapped to each of his shoulders.

  ‘Dean, how we doing?’ I say over the comlines.

  ‘Almost there,’ he responds, his voice masked with com-static at a two second delay.

  His destination is a thirty foot tall electrostatic generator, hanging like a giant, glass stalactite in a clearing centered within the city. A wide fracture is evident on the left side, spewing out a full bloom of fiber optic wires.

  Our orders are to repair it at all cost.

  I look down to the oxygen meter on the left wrist of my suit, trying to focus on anything but the hairline crack in the curved, pressure-resistant window separating me and the depths beyond. It looks like it could give at any moment.

  Nine hours of air left. I don’t know if I can take another minute down here.

  Leeched to the bottom of the mile thick icepack, this city was the first of the great colonies to be built as part of the newly established G.E.I.

  Coming at the dawn of near light-speed space travel, the powers that be made a decision to set up a series of self-sustaining utopias, completely isolated from all outside influence, placed within our own solar system. The idea was to create a way to test the hardships and ingenuity the colonists in any out-system settlement would face when rescue in a potential disaster would be too far to be effective.

  For fifteen years this place ran without a hitch. That is, until six months ago when the G.E.I. received the distress call. Now, on the eve of the first voyage to the stars only five years away, a public failure within one of the colonies could set back those plans by decades.

  That’s where we come in. And thought I knew from the briefings what to expect once we were down here, it wasn’t until the doors to the lower lift parted did everything become painfully real…

  ‘Any way to tell how long this is going to take?’ says a voice from behind. It’s Clara, our digital tech, a woman of few words and fewer smiles. She’s been with my company from the beginning.

  ‘No way to tell. It depends on how bad the damage is,’ I respond.

  ‘How about a ballpark.’

  Letting out a sigh, I turn to see her staring at me with soft baby-blues intent, and an electronic notepad clutched tight in a shaking grip.

  ‘Two hours, more or less—’ I hope ‘—Look, I really need to concentrate on this. Just sit back and I’ll let you know when I need you.’

  She takes it in with a nod and looks down to a young girl with long black hair, clutching her leg in a death grip.

  We found her near the entrance to the surface, kneeling over the body what I assume was her mother. She was twirling a lock of the woman’s hair and singing innocent nonsense to herself, seemingly oblivious to what the three inch wide bloody pit in her mother’s chest symbolized. A respirator was strapped tight over her mouth and nose. She couldn’t be older than three.

  Clara reaches down and strokes the girl’s hair. ‘You hear that, sweetie? Two hours. We’ll be out of here in no time.’

  Dean’s voice comes back over the comline, ‘Alright, I’m here.’

  I turn back, leaving Clara to her notepad and her nurturing, and flip on a wireless viewscreen adjusted to receive a feed sent by a camera on Dean’s helmet.

  ‘Lay it on me, man. What do we have?’

  ‘One second… and… what the… Jason, you seeing this?’ says Dean.

  Sub-oceanic dander clouds my screen. ‘My visibility’s a little low. What is it?’

  ‘I don’t think this thing just blew on its own. You see this slice in the glass right here?’ The camera shifts but all I see are more particles.

  ‘No, not really.’

  ‘Well take my word for it, this was made intentionally. The cut is too clean.’

  ‘You got to be kidding me. Why?’

  ‘Right now, I don’t really care. Let’s just work on fixing it.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ I say, flipping open a 2,600 page tech manual. ‘Give me a grid number and a list of the damaged wires.’

  And off we go.

  Six hours of unadulterated tedium and counting, and finally, we’re almost finished. I don’t think I’ve ever been so stressed out. Even more, I still can’t wrap my head around why someone would blow the generator on purpose. Whoever did this would have had to know it would kill every person down here. And none of the escape pods are missing, so this had to be some kind of murder-suicide on a mass level. But that doesn’t make much sense either. It all comes back to that single question: why?

  Dean comes over the com, ‘Reconnecting power supply and…there, now just give me a few minutes to prime the charge.’

  I have every finger crossed that it will work. Two months of briefings and training, and four months traveling on a space-transport the size of a small building has all led up to this one moment.

  Clara walks up beside me, looking a little frazzled. The young girl is sleeping in the corner now, covered with the pants of a discarded dive-suit. Her tiny breaths are amplified by a re-breather mask.

  ‘Are those… them?’ Clara says, pointing down towards what looks like a large, glowing blue cloud far in the depths below.

  ‘That’s them alright.’

  Flashworms. An entire school of them. Think of a not too cleverly named, 12 inch long, bioluminescent shrimp covered with a thick mane of clear, wire-like hair and six rows of fins. As the only native species on this entire moon, they’re said to exist by converting the heat from a series of volcanic vents into energy.

  It’s hard to imagine that those things powered and feed an entire city.

  Clara’s about to say more when Dean comes back over to com. ‘That should do it.’

  The generator instantly begins to glow a faint blue, getting brighter by the second. Suddenly, a power surge visibly pulses outwards in every direction along a grid of fiber optic wire covering the buildings. For a split second the entire colony flickers to life, only to power back down moments later as the surge continues out.

  ‘What’s going on, Dean? Don’t tell me there’s another problem.’

  ‘Don’t worry, that’s normal. The power surges will steadily increase until the generator sustains the current. Just give it some… wait, hold on…’ The generator begins to twitch. Dean pushes himself back as a large school of flashworms erupt from the crack in the outer glass. They begin circling him.

  Dean, lost within the glowing blue mass, screams in a high soprano.

  ‘Dean, talk to me, man. You, alright?’

  It lasts over a minute. Then, at some unseen signal, the school disperses. Dean is still flailing.

  ‘Dean, how ‘bout it?’

  Another power-surge pulses through the city.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. Just a little startled,’ he says through gasps.

  ‘Well, not the most manly scream, but glad you’re alright. Take a minute to get a hold of yourself, then recheck the generator. Make sure nothing got messed up.’

  The sound of shifting comes from the next room; a steady monotone of something like skin slapping wet and hard on the tiled floor.

  I turn to Clara. ‘Go check that out, will ya?’ She rolls her eyes and walks off.

  ‘And be careful,’ I yell after her.

  The com hisses in my ear. ‘Jason, bad news, man. A few of the wires got dislodged, but I think I can bypass them without shutting the generator back down.’

  ‘How long?’ I say, unable to keep the frustration from my voice. This job was supposed to be a simple in and out. Patch it up, make it run, and then get back to where our shuttle awaits on the surface.

  ‘Twenty minutes, more or less.’

  Not too bad. ‘Make it happen.’

  Suddenly, Clara yells from somewhere unseen, her following words muted and far away. ‘Jason, you got to come take a look at this.’

  Clara’s crouching in the next room with her back to me as I enter. There’s movement at her feet and it takes me a minute to realize it�
��s a body. An old woman by the looks of it. I remember her from the way in here. She was dead as all the rest. Now she looks like she’s having a seizure.

  ‘What the hell? She alive?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. I already checked for a pulse,’ says Clara.

  ‘You touched that thing?’

  ‘I thought this thing might be breathing. What would you do?’

  ‘Ok, ok, point taken,’ I say as I crouch down next to her for a closer look.

  The elderly woman’s skin is a smooth porcelain far younger looking than her gray hair and frail body would suggest. Tiny holes cover the entire surface of her skin, all spread out at an equal two inch gap from one another. Their edges glisten with some kind of metallic residue, long hardened.

  Only one possibility comes to mind. Nano-technology. But it looks like it has coalesced into pools. And there’s way too much of it. It’s as if the nano’s had been… multiplying.

  Before being transported to the colony, every person here was required to be injected with nanites for feeding purposes… if you could call it that. The colonist used bio-electrical charges, hooked to receptor along their torso to eat, digitally. Nutrition made easy at the end of a wire. Once stimulated, the nano’s triggered an unnatural cellular over-regeneration not unlike cancer. Then the body would feed on this excess growth and turn it into nourishment, fueling a twisted cycle of self-cannibalism.

  But that’s not all the nanos did. They also prevented decomposition to prevent the spread of disease in such a confined space as this, and also worked to suppress fertility. That was one of the main rules of the G.E.I. —no unauthorized breeding. A way to monitor and keep control on population numbers in a place where resources were limited. When one colonist died, another was sent from Earth, but only after signing an extensive contract. One for One.

  But then, how was the girl born? And what did she eat?

  Suddenly the old woman’s body goes still and seems to bloat from the inside, her skin rippling just underneath the surface. My stomach lurches.

  The com in my helmet cracks with static. ‘Jason, a little help here?’

  ‘Yeah, I read, ya,’ then turning to Clara, ‘Stay with her. Let me know if everything happens.’