Category: The Future
Last Girl Standing (short story clip)
The first symptom of the virus wasn’t a sore throat or vomiting. It was denial.
Way back in the year 2018, Amelie was thirteen, and viruses were the last thing on her mind. She was all about school, working at her mom’s video store and riding her bike. Gliding along the shores of the Outer Banks in the glow of Earth’s rings, she dreamed of riding the Tour de France one day. But things got a little strange when she delivered “Paper Moon” to the nutty professor. He claimed to be from an alternate Earth where America won the Cold War — and no one nuked the moon.
She laughed. But he wasn’t joking. He said “Respect the Octopus. Listen to its song.”
A couple of years later, there was another war. Nobody knew who started it, but a bioweapon that combined the worst of the Spanish flu and rabies ended it. The islanders called it ‘Mommuck’, an old outer banks term meaning ‘bad craziness’.
Most of the people who got Mommucked died fast. Others turned into raging monsters who had a talent for eating faces.
Five years later, Amelie is still the fastest person on the Island. She’s the only person in Avalon, the last girl standing. Armed with her father’s guns and her mother’s determination, she managed to outrun and defeat every Mommuck in Avalon. Now, everything is hers, from Dirty Dick’s Crab Shop to Miz Daisy’s mushroom patch.
But something — or someone — is out there, sabotaging her octopus traps. Whatever or whoever it is, they’re fast, smart and out to get her. There’s only one former person she knew like that — the nutty Professor from alt-Earth.
Read this story and more in the limitless Visions VII: Universe anthology:
Miss Patel’s Holiday (short story clip)
[This story was inspired by a somewhat disinterested tourist I saw in Venice]
Life used to be good. On a regular day, I’d get up around noon. Maggie was at work, Angie was in school, I could shower my meaty self and smoke in peace. Then, comb my thick black hair, pray the first novena, put on a pair of sunglasses to cover my bloodshot eyes and go to the cafe. Bang down some high-test espressos. Watch the skirts go by, shoot the shit with Uncle Stanz and the guys.
Before the tourists got in, I’d pack the underside of the seats with bootleg smokes and JoySticks, cover them with a cushion before the cops cruise by. Then wait for our marks, umm … chumps … umm … tourists to show.
On a scale from one to ten, farm girls from Tuscany in town for a bachelorette party were the best tourists, definite nines. Silicon Dendrites from one moon over were my least favorite. They were great trading partners – who else would buy tons of brine waste from our desalinization plants – but they talked in farts and ooze. Not great conversationalists.Second from the worst were Deepwater Blavoks from two moons over. Educated and urbane, they saw us the way we saw the dendrites; lower creatures. With them it was a short exchange of sharp-toothed pleasantries, swipe the credit card and slither into the water, on their way to a methane spa.
The best, the absolute tens were our lost cousins, the Earthmen.
“Miss Patel’s Holiday” is part of the awesome, futuristic, Visions VI, Galaxies anthology, edited by Carrol Fix.
Also available via Amazon and Barnes and Noble
Red Planet Plans
NASA is taking a multistep approach to its ultimate goal of putting boots on Mars.
The journey begins in low Earth orbit aboard the International Space Station (ISS), which has hosted rotating crews continuously since November 2000. During this time, NASA and its ISS partners have been learning more and more about how to support astronauts on space missions.This effort took a big step forward this past March, when NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko wrapped up an unprecedented 11-month mission aboard the orbiting lab that gave researchers new data about the physiological and psychological effects of long-duration spaceflight. (A Mars mission will be long-duration; it takes six to nine months to get to the Red Planet using currently available propulsion technology.)
In the next 10 years, NASA plans to extend the reach of human spaceflight out near the moon, to test spaceflight gear — such as the Space Launch System (SLS) megarocket and Orion crew capsule, both of which are in development — in a “proving ground” in deep space. For example, in the mid-2020s, the agency plans to send astronauts out to lunar orbit, to visit an asteroid boulder dragged there by a robotic spacecraft. (The boulder-snagging first part of this Asteroid Redirect Mission is scheduled to launch in the early 2020s.)
After the proving ground comes the journey to Mars itself. Current plans call for sending astronauts to Mars orbit in the early 2030s, with trips to the surface coming sometime after that. NASA officials have said they hope to eventually set up a small outpost on the Red Planet, where astronauts would search for signs of Mars life and perform other research.
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Devil’s Spit
You didn’t consider the darkness.
Now, here you are, laying on your back with your arms stretched out. You feel like you’re floating, like you could rise into the sky.
You could be laid flat on the black ice of Devil’s Spit, an asteroid in the dark side of the Kuiper Belt. Or you could be home on Earth, crocked from space lag, night swimming in Lake Pontchartrain.
There’s no sound but your own breath, coming in short bursts. Maybe you’re wheezy because your rebreather crapped out in the middle of nowhere, 7.5 billion klicks from Earth. Or maybe it’s because you’re doing the polar bear thing, going for a chilled dip in December.
The cold bits scraping your skin, yanking on your hair could be the viscous ice that slimes every surface of Devil’s Spit. Or they could be mangrove leaves floating in the water.
Only one thing is certain. You’re lying there, trying to answer the question that’s vexed you your whole life. Can a living organism be in two places at the same time?
If you opened your eyes you’d have the answer, but a voice in your head is telling you to keep those eyes shut.
That voice is me.
From “Devil’s Spit”, part of the Visions III, Inside the Kuiper Belt anthology.
Sari Sari
You should have been here an hour ago. All of MamaSan’s friends in Pirate’s Cove were there for her funeral. We were all cleaned up, for once, in proper black. Palm trees were swaying over her freshly-dug grave. The suns were shining. I’d done a new tattoo for the occasion, drawn from a photo of her hammering the shelf over the bar. She was in her overalls, her short-cropped hair sticking out at all angles, cigar clenched between her teeth. I’d put the tattoo on my left shoulder, the last patch of my skin that was bare. It had sensors that could feel the mood in the air. I didn’t need it to tell me, the mood was sad.
I was at the podium, giving a eulogy for her when the thin, leathery Police Chief Ponseca, (a.k.a. ‘Loco Pete,’ a.k.a. the former Vice President of Charon), stormed in with his battered robocops. He got behind the podium, cuffed me and declared that I, Elizabeth Aguilar (a.k.a. ‘Lady Inked’) was a suspect in the murder of my guardian, Nicole Santos (a.k.a. ‘MamaSan’, proprietor of the High Dive Bar). I was also a ‘person of interest’ in the murders of twenty people who had been crushed to death by a serial killer appropriately known as ‘The Crusher.’
“Who is accusing me?” I cried as he twisted my arms behind my back.
“I am” Ami Watanabe, our head waitress, shouted. She peeked out from behind the robocops, black hair streaming in the wind, her slender frame hidden behind their rusty, dented bodies.
“You jerk!” I said. “I saved your life.” I don’t know why Ami was out to get me. Maybe it was the bad tattoo I gave her. Or the pink shirt I borrowed and never returned.
Read more of “Sari Sari” and many other futuristic tales in Visions IV: Space Between Stars.
Controlling a Land Shark – With Your Mind
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZPZFeOOerA&w=560&h=315]
This is so awesome. I’m taking an IoT class – there’s got to be some way I can do a project on this…
More about OpenBCI
For Better or Worse
“Live the Martian adventure” the ads said. “Mars has jobs.” Amy said. So Joe packed their bags and they left their hometown in Northern Great Lakestan, convinced that this new life would be better.
It wasn’t. There were jobs and the pay was good, but they were mostly desk jobs–the kind of work that you learn in an hour and wash/rinse/repeat for the rest of your life.
In every other way, Mars was the same as Wisconsin –eleven months of winter and one month of black flies.
Read more “For Better or Worse”, a short story published by Liberty Island Magazine.