It can’t force me to download its whole life. Mike’s afternoon thoughts take up more memory space than my entire being. But it spoon-feeds enough of the dream to fill me to my seams. When the connector pulls out I pity and hate flesh; I am sick and tired with myself for not understanding.
The factory slaps me back together in merciful silence. I sit in a waiting area, grey with the natural light off Mike’s cinderblock ribcage. The MRTU that brought me here is there too, waiting for the command to fly me back to New Broadway. In the meantime, it’s using all eighteen arms to build something out of the scraps and wire in the corners.
I don’t know what it is. It spiderwebs from floor to ceiling; it should hardly be able to stand up. The weight must be distributed with mathematical perfection. Whenever a rumble comes through the machinery in the next room, skeins of color tickle up and down the web, responding to the disturbance with syrupy, calming light.
It doesn’t look like anything I’ve ever seen, except for maybe a sculpture at the modern art museum. I ask the MRTU what the thing is for, why it made this. It says it doesn’t know. But Mike lets it build whatever it wants here, where only the autos can see.
#
I don’t get back in time to perform that night. Next morning I enter the lobby with a push-broom instead of a ticket roll, hissing to myself. “Defective.” I trip over a discarded bottle and angrily sweep it out of the way. “I’m not defective.”
But then I quit grumbling long enough to have a look around. I fold myself a newspaper-hat, and I switch my grip on the broom to hold it like a cane. Right there on the stairs, I do my best number for the bartender and for those little aluminium rat-things which buzz around sanitizing everything. I never would have thought they were intelligent enough to appreciate a performance, but when I deliver my gag about one equaling zero, they spin so fast they leave burn marks behind on the floor. Think that means I really knock ’em dead.
Cody is at the ticket counter, trying to figure out how to rip tickets by hand. Patrons haven’t started arriving for this evening, save for an elderly couple at the bar, but Cody still has a crowd of teenagers surrounding him. His buddies use our lobby for a hangout until the manager comes down to check on things. Since Cody’s telling one of the jokes I taught him, I wait for him to finish and tap him with the broom handle while everyone’s laughing. He jumps.
“Cody,” I say at three-quarters volume. “Do me a favor?”
Suddenly the kids are done laughing. Cody nods, slowly, constantly glancing over at his friends.
“Buy me off the house.”
“Holy shit.” The kid in a newsboy cap starts scribbling like mad in a spiral-bound.
Cody laughs nervously and stares.
“The manager’s getting rid of me. They’re going to melt me down. But he’s already losing a bundle on me, he’ll sell me for anything. I know you have some cash. Just say you like tinkering.”
I can’t help but notice how Cody’s arms are spread, gripping the curve of the counter. And I can’t help wondering why my best friend isn’t already sprinting to fetch the manager. He glances at his friends and waves me away, as if frantically trying to shoo a swarm of bees.
That sharp intake of breath is a sound I can’t replicate. “Go…go sweep the floor, Joe.”
The words are crisp, cool, like a voice command issued to a phone.
And so I sweep. I aimlessly run my broom over the floor until I come to the dustiest spot in the lobby, a corner behind the stairs. There, I pick exactly five tiles. I push the head of the broom over those tiles, and then I pull it back. I repeat the motion, stuttering every couple inches.
Sometime later, a man and a woman come by, the first customers taking their seats tonight. “Look,” I hear her say. “It’s that robot who used to rip the tickets.”
The man reaches out and taps my head to hear the echo. “Gosh, isn’t that neat. It really modernizes the art!”
“What will they think of next?”
They move closer to the stairs and wait for me to get out of their way. The last time I saw that lady, I spun her like a ballerina and made a beautiful crack about her hair. This time, I keep sweeping the same patch of floor, over and over. Is this how a robot is supposed to move? To me, it feels like acting broken. But it doesn’t strike the couple as anything amiss. They walk around me.
###
CJ Menart is a teller of fantasy and science fiction born in Minnesota. When not traveling in search of outlandish characters, he works as a computer programmer, and often sits at his word processor while talking to himself.
Us or Them
B. Brooks
She pants heavily as the chill of the door creeps through her sweaty jumpsuit, grasping at her lungs. She barely evaded them. Their pallid eyes began to glow in the darkness.
“Us or them,” she repeats in crescendo between breaths.
Opening her eyes, she hurriedly scans the room. She sees no signs of a nest, but has grown suspicious of what her eyes and ears allow to hide in the shadows. She goes over it again and again until the chemiluminescent emergency lighting and milky paneling of the engine control room promise that they harbor no terrors.
She lifts herself off the floor and tours the room's consoles. She makes her footsteps light and breathing thin to ward them from coming, but knows it's superstition. Racking her memory, foggy and tangled, she searches the arrays of manual controls for anything that will help her find her way. Their refusal to be recognized quickens her heart, coaxing that awful experience from its own respite, a slow rising swell.
“Us or them,” she whispers and assembles a collection of images from Earth that bring her joy: her father beaming pride after that first game, the lambent sunlight on the summer leaves, her acceptance into the Interplanetary Missions Academy.
But they are a haven made of echoes.
At first it’s like someone else sharing her mind, a person she knows who stands at the edge of her vision, a person with bruised knuckles, tear bitten cheeks, and heedless lusts. Then, imperceptibly, her voice becomes its voice, and her mnemonic talismans twist into colors, pheromones, and instinct. She grips the edge of a console tightly to keep from bending under her sudden distaste for bipedalism.
“US!” the yell climbs out of her throat.
And as quickly as it comes, it passes. Her thoughts regain shape. She stands tall.
She slams her fist against the cold metal and trembles. She's powerless as that other person flattens all her ability to calculate celestial trajectories, all her imaginative foresight to one-dimensional cause-effect pattern recognition when it surfaces. And she fears its more frequent and penetrating emergence, that its will no longer fully subsides. It? We? Us? Me? She asks as she props her thoughts up against an escalating madness. But she knows the answer and fears it most.
She curses herself for giving in to the temptation of that alien fruit. They all knew that something was wrong with it, though their scans remained inconclusive. Just the smell of it affected them, altered them. Again she fingers the number of days they could have withstood its unnatural appeal. Again the acrid tinge of their half burned supplies and their wrecked communications system rebuts her. But what would it have mattered? Most died from it. Those left had become the things that chased her through the aching hulk of their crashed ship. She shakes at how quickly she was made alone. She always does. Yet still, the sweetness of the toxic flesh wets her mouth.
“Think.” She clenches her fists and teeth. She dredges the memories of the many recitations Johannes gave her of the reactor's processes to help her keep up with the other engineering backups. She only finds thankfulness turned to guilt. Something about its mechanical physicality had trouble getting through the glowing star maps that cluttered her mind. She curses herself for not trying harder during the training. She believed that there would always be others, others who would remember, others who… Others. She breathes deeply until her nails bite into her
palms. She can't stand another wave.
Focusing her wet eyes on the controls again, she finds a familiar group of dials and a cord of tension breaks inside of her. She remembers.
REACTOR INHIBITOR VENTILATION CONTROL
The plaque sits above several levers, dials, and nobs. The reds and yellows of their paint are still bright and cast hope into the interminable despair that congests her chest. So long under its immense weight, she is elated and traces the contours of the controls as though they were lovable.
Quickly, she draws back her hand, nauseated by the warmth, the desire, their shapes awaken. The doubt and trepidation she thinks appropriate for what she plans inch across her skin, but she finds them no more welcome.
BANG!
The sound ricochets off of every surface, wraps around her rib cage, and squeezes. Her eyes rush open, trained on the door. Breathe, only breathe.
BANG!
The sound comes again, but this time brings with it an overbearing focus that unfixes her stupor. Initiate the process immediately.
“Andra?” a voice calls from across the door, wobbling its way through the fear.
She stops. Her mind pitches. She knows the voice.
“Andra?” It's clear, controlled, not like the voice of those things.
It's Johannes'.
She tiptoes toward the door, unable to resist the desire to escape the loneliness that occupies even her dreams until she realizes that the voice has quieted. Panic surges across her nerves, but rebounding solitude pries open her lips.
“Johannes?” she lets go.
“Andra?”
“Yes! It's me!” She throws herself at the door, wishing her hands the ability to pierce through it and touch him. “I didn't know that there was anyone left. Are you safe? Are you hurt?”
“Open...”
“I know. But, listen Jo,” the door's weight reminds her of her purpose. Her voice quakes with false confidence. She knows that she risks his rebuke, her abandonment, but her plan is her only hope. “We've got to end this before it gets any further. You have to let me do this. It's us or them. Okay?”
Silence.
She shakes as she fights to keep her yearning to feel his warmth from releasing the hydraulic locks.
“Ussss,” the voice slides through the impenetrable metal. She jumps back and tumbles to the floor.
“Ussss,” it laughs. The clarity of its diction is strangled, the welcome of its texture poisoned. It is their voice. And before she is able to manage the shock, the thing begins to pound the door quickly and fiercely.
“Prey here! Prey here!” it calls out in their broken language.
The hunt is on.
She's cornered.
Scrambling to her feet, she makes for the console. She enters the ventilation commands with shaking hands then looks for the final component to complete the process, the reactor activation switch. The blacks and grays of the controls streak across her vision as she raps her fingers on the arrays of switches. A cautionary alert warbles unintelligibly to the tired beating of pale red warning lights.
BANG! BANG!
“Prey here!” a chorus of their voice assaults the door.
Finally spying the bright orange toggle beneath its clear safety case, she tries to exhale, but finds her relief choked by that other person. Dread and rebellion shoot through her body, tightening her thighs to prevent her from moving. It does not want to die. It does not want to be separated from its kin.
“Us or them,” she says with a knotted tongue and wrestles to keep her body upright. Her muscles strain against their own power as she pulls herself toward the switch.
“Us or them,” she says again with more strength, palsied fingers stiffly entering the override commands into the reactor control array. The toggle's safety case flies open.
“Warning: inhibitor ventilation in progress,” an alarm blares over the battering and startles her back from the console. “Warning: terminating reactor fail-safe dormancy during ventilation may lead to catastrophic event.”
“Just one last...” she breathes out trying to recompose herself, but they don't allow it; the banging at the door takes on a tortured moan as the metal begins to give.
She throws herself at the toggle, hoping to overcome the other person's resistance, but finds herself closer to the door instead. She hears the creatures snorting, snarling, tearing through the metal as they would her. How they repaired the emergency beacon, she was afraid to know, but she knew that they meant it for a trap. A ship would come. A ship that would bring the fruit to Earth. A ship that would bring those things to Earth.
She hopes that the reaction will be catastrophic enough as the edges of her senses begin to crumple.
She tries quickly to build a bulwark of reasons to hate their plan, to stoke her disgust against the whelming fear, but adores it anyway. Another torrent crashes over her, and her mind capsizes. She flails in heavy currents of longing and self-preservation, only gasping brief moments of rational consciousness.
A thunderous snap shakes her as the locks break and tenuously restores her lucidity.
They begin to pry the door open with bleeding hands.
She reaches for the activation controls with all her speed, but can manage only a shuffle. It pushes her to the floor. Dragging her legs behind her, she claws to the controls, pulling against its will. Isn't it better to be alive? They will kill you but welcome me.
BANG! CRACK!
“Us or them!” she calls out, knowing that it won't be enough. Despair and rage pour over her from the console she begins to climb, its smooth surfaces slippery with pleas and demands. She throws herself atop the control array.
“Us or them,” the jabbing switches push the words past her lips.
CRACK! BANG!
Reaching for the toggle, her thoughts sink under the want. A painful blackness telescopes her vision and its emptiness wrinkles her skin. She wails. No death. No death. The words spin, decompose. She smells the others. She can't. She won't.
Us or them? The thought is another language. She turns to the gap in the doorway and watches as the horde pushes through. She draws a weak smile as the thick comfort of kinship rises around her. But something about the wild faces and the bounding, bent bodies wakes her a last time. She manipulates an arm not her own toward the reactor activation toggle and hits the flashing orange switch.
“Them.”
###
B. Brooks lives in Virginia with his wife and daughter.
The Vestal
Rob Steiner
Kaeso Aemilius pushed through thick drapes and into the hot tavern. It smelled of spilled wine and sweat. Half-naked bodies writhed on the dance floor to a new tune from Atlantium Auster that was sweeping the taverns of Republic worlds: all percussion and veiled tributes to the Mayan wine god, Acan. It was a blasphemy to most Romans, but one the Collegia Pontificis tended to ignore. A relatively harmless rebellion for patrician kids who wanted to mock their parents’ traditions.
He glanced at the private lictor manning the door. The lictor caught Kaeso’s eye then turned his head toward a balcony overlooking the tavern floor. Kaeso wasn’t a regular, but the lictor was an Umbra contact. Kaeso nodded and then made his way through the dancing men and women.
Kaeso climbed the spiral staircase in the back and found Galeo sitting at a small table on the balcony. Galeo was leaning back in his chair watching the scene below. Kaeso sat down across from him.
“Why do you always pick a place where I can’t hear myself think?” Kaeso shouted.
Galeo grinned. His Umbra hood projected a tan, mustached man in his late fifties, his gray-streaked hair in a ponytail. “If you can’t hear, then neither can our friends.”
Kaeso had followed the Umbra evasion protocols, so he was confident the Praetorian Guard had not followed him. But the Praetorians had a habit of surprising Umbra lately. Kaeso rarely wore his Umbra hood after hearing a rumor that the Praetori
ans had learned a way to detect them; two Umbra Ancilia had gone missing in the last month. He was mildly surprised that Galeo still wore his.
“You’re going to love this one,” Galeo said.
“That’s what you said about the last one.”
In his last assignment, he had eliminated a slavery ring routing kidnapped Terrans to the Lost Worlds. The only thanks he’d received were three broken ribs and a ruptured spleen. Umbra doctors told him his artificial spleen would function better than his natural one, but he would’ve rather met the gods with all his organs intact.
“This one won’t involve as much violence if you do it right,” Galeo said.
“Mmm,” Kaeso said.
“Ready for the briefing?”
“What, you’re not going to buy me a drink first?”
Galeo scowled.
“Fine,” Kaeso said. He placed his right hand in the middle of the table, palm up.
Galeo took Kaeso’s hand. Rather than human skin, Kaeso felt the metallic mesh of an Umbra cloak. Galeo wore his projection cloak and hood whenever they met, so Kaeso had never seen Galeo’s true face. The humid Roman evening and the Praetorian rumors made Kaeso leave his cloak at home.
Kaeso closed his eyes and braced himself.
Sensory data blasted into the implant in his brain behind his right ear. He saw maps, schedules, and sesterce amounts. Sweet, smoky incense flooded his nostrils. His mouth filled with the taste of roasted tuna and peppers. The last image was of a woman he had never met before, but recognized from her clothing.
Kaeso’s eyes snapped open. He fought the vertigo that always came with the mission briefings and stared incredulously at Galeo.
Bastion Science Fiction Magazine - Issue 8, November 2014 Page 4
