Excerpt From "Children of the Device", by Camille Alexa

Today's excerpt is classic sci-fi, from a very cool story.  Read, and be hooked.

1:1  According to the ship's chronometers, it's a brand new year, and in some archaic tradition carried from Earth by our forebearers along with the tablets, we are urged to make a resolution.  I'm not entirely sure what this entails, but have resolved to begin keeping this diary, this weekly log of thoughts, observations--maybe even jokes if I can think of any not too unfunny even to record them in this digijournal, where they'll never be seen or read or even suspected by anyone else ever.  We'll see.  It's the first Saturday of a new year, and I, Hannah, of the fifth generation of the first and last of Earth's colony ships, The Elkanah, resolve to keep as true and faithful an account of myself as I can.

*

1:2  Is it possible a whole week flew past?  Unbelievable.  Between one Saturday and the next seems a long endless trek from one quadrant of this hulking ship to another and back again and back.  The Elk escaped collapsing Earth with its colonist complement numbering in the thousands.  It's not always easy to decipher our earliest recordings, but shipboard outbreaks of various plagues have a way of making everything else--captain's logs, medical records--seem less important.  Even we fifth-gens have had our share of outbreaks, viral strains like the one that killed my parents mutating in unanticipated ways under the intense radiations of deep space.  Guess those who shot us into the void as the last bombs wiped out Earth anticipated a lot of things, but not that.  No matter how long they'd had to prepare, they might not have been able to safeguard against that first plague, or the subsequent mutations, or the sterilizing effect on the majority of the survivors.  And they certainly couldn't have known how few survivors there would be.

But some few hundred of us are still hanging on, along with the thirty thousand embryos in cold stasis.  Wish I were one of the lucky ones, like Penny, who can have children. Children to love her, talk to her, help her with her portions of the lichen field harvest and the repairs to the urine stills in our quadrant of the ship.  Children to carry on, find another world and get right all the shit we pitiful humans messed up on the last planet.

Yes, Penny's one of the lucky ones.

Excerpt From "Sterrennacht", by Cat McDonald

Continuing with excerpts from issue 7.  This one involves a woman with a very special ability many have dreamed they could have.  Only for her, this time, it's more of a nightmare.

Dana changed her mind as soon as the canvas they’d wheeled into her office stood revealed to the buzzing fluorescent lights.

“Get someone else.”

The Starry Night. Van Gogh’s view from his sanitarium window after he’d been committed.

Michael sat on her desk, his spine rounded forward, his sunken eyes staring at her floor. He didn’t say anything, just stared at the old gray-blue carpet, looking up to trade serious glances with the guard who’d come, in uniform, from the Museum of Modern Art with the painting.

“Dan,” Michael began. So he’d chosen to start this with first names. He felt sentimental, apparently, if a little behind the times.

“Dana.”

“You’re the only diver I can find.”

“Mitch.”

“Vacation.” Finally, he turned his head to look at her, his face worn and sullen. Not a good day to force him to issue an actual order; something had got to him.

The painting’s central swirl of white sneered at her somehow behind that brush-streaked cypress silhouette, blackly luminous in Van Gogh’s world of brilliant light and color. She could see, even from outside the painting, the twisted knots of oil paint that made up that blue landscape.

“I don’t do post-impressionism.”

Michael’s eyebrows didn’t drop, so she had some time before Captain Michael Czerniak straightened his back and informed her that she would, in fact, do post-impressionism. Maybe time to find another diver in the area, someone who could fearlessly slide between the brushstrokes and navigate the maze of colors that looked, from the top, like a night-time landscape.

Excerpt From "Private Transit", by Amy Bright

 The launch is in a week.  An excerpt a day until then.  Enjoy!


  The first time I saw him, he had a black eye.
  “What a shiner.”
  He looked around, the old, hey, you talking to me, but who else would I be talking to through the smoke cloud. I disarmed him with my finger guns, one of them pointed right in line with his bruised melon. His swollen socket.
  He put his free hand up to his face. The other hand was holding a guitar case, slick and new.
  “I don’t even remember it happening,” he said.
  “That,” I said, “is not the end of the world.”
  I pulled down my sweater and showed him the bruise on my arm. I wore it proudly, tank tops, shoulders bare. Doesn’t everyone want to show that they are loved so hard that there is someone out there who will not let them go, not even for a second?
  “You got his fingerprints on there?” the guy asked me.
  I pinched my skin and revolved it around my arm, taking a closer look.
  “They are there,” I told him. “In case a crime is committed.”
  He raised his eyebrows and I lowered my sleeve and we went back to not talking. If I am alone outside of the bar, I hold my breath very tightly in my chest and count out easy numbers in my head. My specialty is reaching thirty exactly every single time. When I am finished counting, I open the door and go back inside.
  Tonight I am breathing. In, out, in, out. It’s heavy humid, Florida-style. We rode the roller coaster at Disney World, me and my sister, when we were family-vacationing on a high school Spring Break. Our hair was wet where it touched our scalps and the ends went curly like it never happens anywhere else in the world. We fell out of the sky and dropped very quickly, safe inside our safety harness, our extra-strength plastic seatbelts.
  “I’m Tom,” he said, offering that spare hand. “Tommy.”
  Woah there, buddy, I wanted to tell him, hang onto your name. Don’t you read fantasy books.

Excerpt From "The Airlock Scene", by Karl Johanson

Continuing with our series of excerpts from our upcoming issue. 

  Captain Winston did his best to look heroic as he stood at the exit to the airlock of his spacecraft, looking over the surface of Mars. The bulging pack on the back of his form-fitting vacuum suit made moving around in the airlock awkward. The other five crewmen in the airlock made it sextuply so. He looked at the terrain below him, held out one arm and said, “Looking out at the new world, the six intrepid men set out from their brave craft, with its numerous shades of orange and red.”
  “Hang on a minute,” the life sciences officer said from further back in the
crowded airlock. “The space ship isn’t red and orange.”

Excerpt From "Numbered", by Duane Burry

Duane has once more produced an awesome story, with a concept that will surprise you out of your socks. If your species wears socks, of course.


  “What is your greatest achievement?” asked specimen 326-7.
  “That is too vague. More precision is required. Please,” answered specimen 46-1.
  “Technologically,” 326-7 added.
  “Hmmm... we have astro-engineered a Dyson sphere. I believe this to be our greatest achievement. It is quite possibly,” spoke 46-1, no more than a voice.
  “Where?” probed 326-7
  YOUR QUESTION MAY NOT BE TRANSMITTED. It was the intelligence within the Device that spoke. Perhaps intelligence was an overstatement. It was hard to tell.
  “A great achievement. To what end?” 326-7 continued to ask questions.
  “As usual, are you still concerned that our intentions are to make war?”
  “I’m simply curious. We know the Devices inhibit any information that can be used to determine user locations. What will you do with that much energy, harnessed through a Dyson sphere?”
  “True. But if we found you another way, or perhaps if we have already cracked these Devices decades ago or perhaps centuries... anyway, it is not our intention. 46s are peaceful. Again, we reassure you that we are. We have no intention of war-waging. We will, however, be better able to defend if required. The energy collected from the Dyson sphere will enable this and much more. Indeed.”
  “46-1, you are one of the earlier civilizations to locate a Device on your planet. Are you close to determining the builders’ identities? Any idea of the purpose?”
  TRANSMISSION BLOCKED.
  The Device’s reaction was clear. Specimen 326-7 felt rattling vibrations though its crystalline form, every lattice-worked piece of its being trembled. The 326s tried repeatedly to find out from the other civilizations in connection with the Devices where they came from. Why plant these Devices across star systems and how? 46-1, it deduced, was from a much older civilization. They had had the Device for much longer; they knew more.
  Also of concern was the fact that so many species were missing. 326-7 assumed it was not likely the Device skipped numbers. And yet, both numbers neighbouring 46 were absent. No 45. No 47. The 46s lived seemingly forever, because only the original 46 was in direct contact with the Device, whereas 326 was the seventh of its kind to be elected guardian.
  46-1 slid its gelatinous membrane from the Device. It interpreted the pause from 326-7 as an attempt to breech the built-in protocol and filters. The builders were opposed to such tampering. Experience with neighbouring civilizations suggested that the builders were most likely dangerous.