Archive for October, 2010
Life on Mars
Thursday, October 7th, 2010
A farm house. Weathered pine boards, joists and rafters spaced haphazardly, nothing level. Completely ordinary in its eccentricity. Only its location was unusual.
Snow and Jenkins were first inside. He was the commander; she was the best shot. Eight rooms, and not a stick of furniture. Pull-down ladder to the attic (nothing up there), just nothing. Carman and Uriyev got pretty antsy during the 20 minutes or so the others were inside.
The mission planners had them continue the planetary survey, but kept them away from the house. When they got back home they were sequestered for months. Rumors flew. Snow was dying of some aggressive new cancer. Carman had gone crazy and killed the other three. Jenkins was pregnant. The haunted house on Mars. Eventually, the astronauts were let out. Everything was back to normal, but no second ship was launched.
The house showed up on Earth. Anyone could walk right in, wherever the house appeared. In a parking lot, on a baseball diamond, in one of those sad developments from 2008 where nothing had ever been built. It could show up in your front yard, or squeezed between two buildings that, you could have sworn, were not 10 feet apart the day before. But you went in and it was full of people. Websites were devoted to following the thing. One, a global real-time map, showed the house appearing simultaneously in dozens of places. Then hundreds. People flooded in wherever it was, mad to be a part of the phenomenon. Kids were fascinated. You could walk in the front door in Tucson and climb out the back window in Kuala Lumpur. Some people tried to destroy it, some practically worshiped it; thrill seekers took their chances with it.
Then, suddenly, there was only one house again. No one came out, no one at all. If you dared to enter, you heard voices. All those people who’d been in the houses when they collapsed to one, it sounded like them. You might listen for somebody, maybe your kid sister, who got away from you when the house manifested by the animal clock in the D.C. Zoo, and eventually you’d hear her. You’d hear her, but she’d never hear you.
End
Escape from the Goldilocks Planet
Wednesday, October 6th, 2010
She lost her name on Stiltskin 9, another casualty when the reputation economy crashed. She made it offworld with a few credit cubes and a broken-down matter fabricator.
From the first, though, her new planet turned out to be just wrong. The fabricator’s nanotech assembly was stuck, would only convert straw to gold. And she couldn’t find any straw, just calderas of steaming, congealed, or lukewarm porridge. The last of her cubes bought her way into a domed city, but it was nearly hibernation season, and the super-intelligent bears shunned her, in spite of her fur coat and matching gloves.
The bears favored semi-communal open-plan architecture, so wandering the city felt to her like wandering a single immense home. Soon enough, she was completely alone, the bears having all retreated to the privacy of their winter dens. She made herself at home, helping herself to the leftovers in the bears’ kitchens, snoozing warily in their summer beds, and whiling away hours in their virtual reality entertainment chairs–at least, whenever she could find one with a neural helmet neither too large nor too small.
One day, she met an insomniac. His was the only brightly-lit living area. Where she’d heard white noise forest-sound lullabies coming from the dens of other bears, he had a frantic electro-fiddle hoedown screeching from his speakers. He was sitting at a bark-covered kitchen table with a mug of coffee as big as her head.
“I get nightmares,” he grumbled.
She hadn’t asked.
“Humans in my house while I sleep. Touching my stuff.”
She folded her hands in her lap.
“Never seen a human.” He shuddered. “I hear they’re mostly hairless.”
She’d noticed the VR entertainments were redacted so that all other sentient species appeared as bears.
She tugged her fur-lined hood forward. “I can’t sleep either. Just moved from the other hemisphere. Biological clock still off.” The quick-spun tale surprised her. “I could keep a lookout for you. Let you rest.”
There was gratitude in the bear’s bloodshot eyes. “I couldn’t pay you, except in trade.” He motioned toward stacks of crates. “I’m in import. High-end porridge bowls.”
She shrugged, “Sure.” It was safer than serial housebreaking.
“Didn’t catch your name,” said the bear.
She saw an open crate, a bit of packing material spilled out. Straw.
“Call me Goldy,” she said. The fabricator was a restless weight in her pocket. “I’m in export.”