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Nuke.
Once upon a time, deep down in the sea there lived a mechanical doll named Mai-hime. When she was still human, she lived in a small fishing village by the sea. While collecting seafood on the beach, she was captured and brought to Ryūgū Castle at the bottom of the ocean. Like other prisoners held captive by the tyrannical king Ryūoh, she was turned into an automaton, deprived of the freedom to move her body at will. Still, thanks to Ryūoh’s whim, she was allowed to keep her consciousness.
Yesterday I zoomed back to ancient Egypt at the time of the Pharaoh Ramon Topek the Fifth. Hang on, first I need to tell you about my time machine, don’t I? Time machines are as common these days as mobile phones were back in the twenty-first century, and mine is a state-of-the-art model. It’s no bigger than a fingernail and it’s made of black onyx with a rim of gold that moves and shivers whenever I look at it. Yes, creepy. But it works a treat.
Once, the geologists told us, the planet had likely been temperate enough to have polar ice-caps, but these had long since dissipated. Now its slow-dwindling seas simmered, driving huge quantities of water vapour into a thick atmosphere dominated by carbon dioxide and nitrogen and blanketed by permanent cloud.
Once, the palaeontologists surmised, life may have been abundant here: varied, complex, ubiquitous. Life still endured in a unicellular form, the simple metabolic processes of which were perfectly adapted to a steam-hot aqueous environment; but if there had at one point been indications of the diversity of former life on this world, those traces had not endured.
“Whoever I choose, I’ll have one triumphant delegation praising my judgement and forty-nine accusing me of prejudice against their kind,” Gillis complained.
DeMaus, his friend, fellow trader and second-in-command agreed. “The bastards set you up!”
Harold Sampson was a hundred and one years old when his draft notice arrived in the form of two uniformed young men. They rang the doorbell on Sampson’s apartment at Cosy Acres Retirement Home on an ordinary Thursday morning. Myrtle Fitzhugh, Harold’s eighty-two year old girlfriend, answered the door. The young men introduced themselves as private Howard Wilson and Staff Sergeant Wilmer Sax, US Army.
“We’d like to speak to Mr. Sampson, is he in?”
I found it in the cupboard under the sink. It sank, but had no stink, just like you.
Heavy, you hated being called that, but that wasn’t the problem for me. Oh no. You see, you had no odour, no flavour, even when I tasted you there was nothing. The lack of smell weirded me out, but I couldn’t call us off, not before I found out the truth of what you were.
Which led me to the cupboard under the sink.
The boy is in a wide field, so large he can’t see beyond the yellow grass that rises to his waist and ripples like the sea. He is trying to make a bow and arrow with a stick and some twine but he’s struggling because his fingers have turned into claws. They look like bear claws but he’s no claw expert. He’s just a boy lost in a wide field and he misses the soft padding and dexterity he used to possess.
The airship rolls and pitches slightly like a boat on a long gentle swell, and the dog watches Taka from the corner of the compartment. The animal’s almost perfect, but he still has a few small tweaks to make. It lives in the walls and roof and floor, roaming where it wants mostly, but with certain limitations on where it can go, and when. Depending on the light it’s grey, or silver, even blue. It could be any colour they wanted, of course, but the lady insisted on absolute accuracy.
I leave the doorway of my pod and follow Steve’s lanky frame down the white corridor. We’re tiptoeing for some reason, like that’ll somehow stop them from seeing us.
I’d like to believe, if we get caught, that I have an excuse. He’s my superior. I’m just a lowly maintenance officer. But I know it probably won’t fly and I’ll be pulled before some tribunal. What are they gonna do though? Fire me via video link from a dozen light years away? Tell me to pack my things and… wait for a lift home?
I stood in front of Taila2, praying I had enough CC’s for Andaya’s meds. Lights blinked and mechanical arms whizzed and whirred between rows and columns of pharmaceutical excipients, the monstrosity waiting to make a tailored biologic fit-for-purpose. I’d be short this time, for sure, using all my Contribution Credits to purchase the last supply, along with child support allocations too. There’d be no hope for higher education for Zella, her CC’s going fully towards Andaya’s meds and astronomical medical bills. She’d be consigned to a menial job like me, providing personal care to the elderly. There wasn’t an algorithm written to make robots suitable for wiping dribble and redirecting the demented mind yet. If only Shawnan hadn’t been injured in that mine blast. If he’d been able to make his mining quota this quarter, we might have made it. It would’ve been tight but doable.
"I presented my new vision for the company's future today."
I raised my head from the mug I was disconsolately staring into. Melinda had left me again — again! And I needed to stop feeling so morose. Of course, people would say that staring into the bottom of a bottomless mug of stout wasn't going to help me, but I needed to ... I looked up at the man who had spoken, quite loudly, to his drinking buddies.
By Major E. B. Gwynn, formerly of the Royal Australian Engineers
(HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL… To be distributed to the relevant parties as and when the situation permits.)
It is no mean feat to command a battalion of infantry in ideal circumstances, where supply, intelligence and manpower are forthcoming. In the present, it is a most unenviable task. The new battlespace in which we find ourselves is fraught with dangers of a hitherto unseen nature.
Read more: Lessons for a Battalion Commander in the Post-Event World
Thul crept low in tall lemongrass, breathing in their scent on the air but never seeing the ones that came down from the sky. They’d come close to the camp in the black of night after cooking fires withdrew deep into coals that glowed wild and red when winds below, and then receded sullen and dark when night’s breath stilled.
The ones that came from the sky always disappeared before dawn.
By Kevin J. Phyland
They dropped me two blocks from the derelict warehouse and left me to make my way on foot.
The radiation signal was very weak but obviously located in the abandoned basement and shielded at least partly. Reaching the building, I forced a rust-riddled door open and jogged to the nearest stairwell and descended to the location pinpointed by the data scan.
The terrorists had messaged CopCom twenty minutes ago with a thirty minute heads-up. Since the object of terrorism is terror it was probably moot for the perpetrators whether the device was authentic or not.
My onboard sensors tickled with increased radiation as I neared the basement area and I knew that this was at the very least a workable dirty bomb and more likely a small yield nuke.
I quickly scanned the room on entering. Five minutes left according to the old analog clock on the wall if the terrorists had been sincere — an assumption not to be trusted.
In the actinic glare of the overhead fluoros my hands were trying not to shake as I carefully pried the dried punk from the recessed screwheads. This was different. Taking the phillips head screwdriver I rotated it feverishly anticlockwise to enable me to remove a piece of the outer casing to get at the device within.
The clockwork mechanism continued its ratcheting as it moved the two sub-critical pieces of uranium-235 inexorably towards each other. Inside the fuel capsule neutrons were whizzing thoughtlessly from piece to piece replacing random uranium atoms with krypton or barium and spewing out energy in the form of radiation.
As the pieces of uranium got closer to each other the number of neutrons escaping lessened and more of them started to create new radiations. If the mass became critical all the material would change pretty much at once with one enormous energy release. This was an obscenity, an atomic weapon, and I now had less than four minutes to disarm it.
This bomb had been designed using mostly non-electronic parts — a clever piece of subterfuge — which precluded simply using magnetic fields or power disrupters to disarm it. My arms were starting to feel warm. Psychosomatic or not, the amount of radiation reaching me now must be giving me some serious rad action.
Three minutes. I removed what I expected to be a klystron housing but it wasn't, and through a tube of plexiglass saw the two pieces of silvery metal sliding slowly towards each other. It was spring-loaded so that the pieces would surge toward each other if the tube was broken. My skin had now reddened and blisters were rising on my hands and fingers. They bled freely.
I paused to consider my next move. The pieces must be kept apart — that was a no-brainer — or those innocuous looking three kilograms of metal would become a five kiloton urban renewal program.
A minute twenty left. I had to give the terrorist points for creativity, as there seemed to be no way for this particular nascent mushroom cloud to have a silver lining without taking at least one victim — me.
There was a buzzing in my ears and my vision started waving with scanlines of interference as the intensity of the emitted beta particles and gamma radiation started interfering with my body's electrical systems.
Only one solution appeared possible.
I took a huge gulp of air and picked up a metal handled corkscrew left by some boozy janitor and, holding it tightly in my fist, smashed it down through the glass between the two pieces of uranium.
The pieces leapt towards one another – but struck either side of my hand – which was keeping a gap of a few centimetres between them, and I flicked the forehand piece away onto the floor.
The radiation would slow and I would probably lose my hand, possibly my eyes and some organs but importantly no big bang.
My sweat dripped freely onto the floor as I collapsed into a chair and signalled for retrieval.
Outside, the city shivered in barely contained fear. Just another day on the front lines.
Kevin J. Phyland
Old enough to just remember the first manned Moon landing, Kevin was so impressed he made science his life.
Retired now from teaching he amuses himself by reading, writing, following his love of weather and correcting people on the internet.
He’s been writing since his teens and hopes he will one day get it right.
He can be found on twitter @KevinPhyland where he goes by the handle of CaptainZero and his work is around the place if you search using google or use the antisf.com.au archive.
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Coming In Issue 269
Aberrant Orbitlusa Channellings
By Sultana Raza
Candy Town
By Amy Logan
Curiosity Coil
By Myna Chang
Emergency
By Bruce McNair
Morning Garden
By Umiyuri Katsuyama
Translated by Toshiya Kamei
Night Music
By Connor Orrico
On Demand
By Kevin J. Phyland
Space Train
By Laurie Bell
State of the Art
By Carl Walmsley
The Broken City
By Michael Casey
The Demise of Major Strom
By Timothy Dwyer
The First Artifact to Reach the End of the Universe
By Haneko Takayama
Translated by Toshiya Kamei
The Polishing of a Knob
By Kerrie Noor
Turn the Tables
By Ashley Noel
Woman Apart
By Keech Ballard
Speculative Fiction
Downside-Up
ISSN 1442-0686
Online Since Feb 1998
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