309. Don’t worry, we have abandoned anal probing long ago

“Don’t worry, we have abandoned anal probing long ago,” the alien comforted him.

Hogan breathed a sigh of relief. The first thing that had sprung to mind after the tractor beam had swooped him up from the corn field were those stories the National Inquirer ran about abductees and their ordeal.

Still, Hogan was not quite confident yet that the alien meant no harm. He was still lying on his belly on a cold operating table after all, his hands and feet firmly strapped to the sides to prohibit any movement.

“Why did you take me?” Hogan asked.

“Oh, we like Ohio,” the alien said. “You are a friendly people. Don’t make much fuss. Once we beamed up a New Yorker. Never again, I can tell you that. Never. Again.”

Hogan heard clattering metal but from his position could not make out what exactly caused the sound.

“You weren’t lying about the probing, were you?”

“Would an advanced race like ours really travel light years just to ram a rod up an Ohio farmer’s anus?”

The clattering continued.

“So why did you travel to Earth?”

“To test a theory.”

“What theory?”

“If I told you, that would ruin it.”

The sound of metal on metal. Again.

“About that anal probing…” he said.

“We’re not doing that, I told you.”

Hogan’s nerves weren’t settling, despite the alien’s soothing voice.

“Then what are you doing?”

“I can’t tell you.”

Yet more clattering. Hogan snapped.

“For the love of God, I think I’d actually prefer to have that probe up my ass!”

The alien smiled, turned towards his colleague and collected the hundred credits.

“Told you they actually like this,” he said as he prepared the big metal rod for insertion.

307. In the bowels of the Deep Web

In the bowels of the Deep Web, Paisley Jones was lost, with no place to crawl but deeper into its dark secrets. She was sure no-one else would be as thorough to find out the truth about her, but she was taking no chances, so further she crawled into murky digital waters, fishing for the information that could bury her and her career.

She had ventured further from the surface than she had originally intended, collecting along the way every piece of information that could be harmful, then destroying it. There were more of them than she had envisioned and the deeper she swam, the more snippets she encountered.

Her safety line had been cut long ago. Chances were she herself would not be returning to the calm surface. That she would be lost down here forever, along with her secrets. Most likely someone would come looking for her. Perhaps parts of her and her history would eventually float up to the surface and get caught in one of the millions of nets that littered the digital sea. Perhaps they finally would unravel her secret.

The snippets of truth flew by so amply and damning now that they clung to her, weighing her down and impeding her ability to annihilate them. They dragged her deeper and deeper until she was powerless to fight them.

***

He googled her name. There were no matches.

He tried again. And again.

But to the internet she was a ghost.

From experience he knew this was not a good sign. If an applicant was willing to erase every bit of information about her, it mostly meant she had something to hide.

He crossed out her name.

Soon Paisley Jones would be forgotten altogether.

283. Between the noise a sentence hid

Between the noise a sentence hid that could hold the key to Earth’s survival. Our satellite dishes had picked up the signal from Rigel just before the planet had exploded, the result of a fatal experiment with nuclear fusion to counter the effects of a dying sun.

Earth too would soon be faced with this problem, so it had keenly followed the progress the Rigelians had made. From radio waves, beamed across light years of space, Erica Kim, head of the SETI 7 program, had reconstructed invaluable mathematical formulas, that had allowed the world’s leading scientists to build top-secret fusion reactors. But now Rigel was no more, it seemed they had a ticking time bomb on their hands, and no way to know how it might go off.

The final radio wave from Rigel was the last remaining hope. If Erica could sift through the noise and find out the race’s final words, it might reveal the flaw in the fusion process.

She had been labouring for months on the signal, erasing every superfluous toot, whistle and plunk, filtering the thick static that hung like a dense fog over the message, when words finally appeared. Erica scraped away layer after layer, delving into the sound, fiddling at audio knobs till the early hours of the morning, headphones on her ears.

Jubilant because of the breakthrough she stormed into the scientific task force meeting the next day, waving a piece of paper, explaining she had finally cracked the code.

The scientists, as they read the message, were dumbstruck however. They handed back the note to Erica.

“Have you read this?”

She had, but had not paid much attention to what it actually said.

Rereading the massage now,  she knew it was no mere sentence.

This was a death sentence.

 

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266. The Polarians worshipped three gods

The Polarians worshipped three gods.

Naqttom, lady of light was usually portrayed as a three-headed deity, as Polaris Ceti orbited three suns. Haxxul,  lord of the seas, had the appearance of an animal not unlike the narwhals that once roamed Earth’s oceans. Effigies of both were present in nearly every temple on the planet, surrounded by money and milk, the appeasement offers of choice for most Polarians.

Always absent in the temple was Dormag, their god of darkness.

 

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250. Certified bullshit

“Certified bullshit. Guaranteed to last a minimum of seven days.”

The vendor pushed an aluminium, ribbed cylinder with a bold-coloured label and an eight-shaped lip her way.

“That’s our standard package. If you need your bullshit to last longer, we do have an upscale range.”

“No, seven days is fine,” she said.

By Thursday she’d be out of the country anyway.

“And how does this work?”

“You just open the can, bring it to your mouth and suck the bullshit in.”

“That sounds gross.”

“We are FDA approved. You can give it a try. It’s just a sampler. Nothing major.”

Hesitantly she tore off the lip, brought the can to her lips and inhaled.

“I am now going to ask you a simple question. Answer honestly. At what time did you get up today?”

“I didn’t. I’m still sleeping.”

Evidently, that was bullshit, though strangely, she actually believed what she was saying.

“Impressive, isn’t it?” the vendor gloated.

It was exactly what she needed.

“So I’m guessing you’re the one who fabricates the lie?”

“I fabricate the bullshit. We don’t like the word lie. Sounds too dishonest. But yes, I’m the one who puts it in the can.”

“So you are aware of the bullshit? You can see right through it?”

“I can. But I’m the only one in the world.”

That didn’t comfort her.

“In that case I’d like to buy two cans, please. You can make them here? Immediately?”

“Absolutely. What would you like your first piece of bullshit to be?”

“I did not shoot the president.”

The vendor looked worried.

“And the second one?”

“Why don’t you concentrate on this one first,” she said.

“Then we’ll do the second one. I assure you, it’ll be quite similar to the first.”

 

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239. Think of it as a miniature time machine

“Think of it as a miniature time machine,” the salesman explained. “The nanobots spread across your body and simultaneously create tiny wormholes that – put together – produce a stable temporal vortex. That basically allows you to travel back in time. Of course, it would be impossible to take a trip to, say, the stone age. Since the nanobots are constrained to your body, all temporal travel is restricted to your personal timeline.”

 

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214. Garbage spills

Garbage spills over the high-rise balconies onto the 23^rd Century pavement, or rather: on the stories-high litter on top of it. Fourteen months into the strike the city has long put the chaos of the first months behind it and is learning to cope with the distinct possibility the streets will forever be soiled.

People have gotten around the everyday problems the mounting litter pile poses. Most work at home, some commute on the emergency monorail system that winds between the top floors of the skyscrapers. They order their food from molecular processors that eliminate the need to go shopping. Their children are educated by on-screen tutors.

Occasionally a car alarm goes off as another trash can plummets down, attracting wily scavengers on the lookout for high-value scrap metal. The bottom floors of most buildings – walled in by the garbage – have been officially evacuated now, though tens of thousands apparently still live there, lured by the bottom of the barrel rents unscrupulous shylocks ask for the dire lodgings.

But soon they too won’t remember their former lives of unbridled liberty. They’ll forget there once was an existence outside of their apartment, where you did not have to rely on all mod cons of the digital age. Not now but someday soon, they will be totally reliant on computers and machines, of cogs and wheels, of bits and bytes.

It is then the garbage droids will start phase two of their wage negotiations.

When their electronics will give out and the humans will be forced outside.

When they are at their weakest.

When they will pay.

 

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202. Drone 682 to spaceport twelve

“Drone 682 to spaceport twelve.”

In the giant hangar the drone came to life. It had been slumbering in a forgotten corner for years, hidden between bigger robots, never being called upon to do the task it was purpose-built for. But with those five words its boosters charged, the red lights that dotted its spherical body lit up and with a mighty buzz it lifted itself from the floor.

The path to spaceport twelve was not something that was hard-wired into the drone’s circuits. It had to rely on the digital pings that were being beamed through cyberspace once every second. Ping, turn left. Ping, straight ahead. Ping.

In the enormous hallways, the drone passed several robots – cleaning machines, sometimes repair-drones – but no humans. Had the drone been capable of artificial intelligence, it would have found this puzzling. Andromeda-7 was an exoworld after all, constructed to house the billions who excavated the precious ores in the nebula.

The pings came faster now, so drone 682 could safely navigate its way past the scattered debris of the exploded spaceport eighty-one. Its destination was  now directly in front of it: spaceport twelve, one of the oldest of the lot, but still brimming with ships waiting to travel to Earth through the wormhole at its centre.

Ships, not man-made, but alien.

Drone 682 positioned itself in the middle of the port and though it was attacked immediately by the alien vessels, it did not budge and – as planned – opened its belly, releasing the fission bomb into the wormhole.

The surviving alien ships, their envious eyes still bent towards Earth, turned towards the next wormhole.

Through the speakers in the hangar, a message echoed.

“Drone 683 to spaceport 541.”

The drone came to life.

 

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163. Their entire world

Their entire world had gathered around the black corpse now, as a 19^th Century physician cut open its chest and debated its anatomy with half a dozen colleagues.

They were perplexed that – bar the colour of his skin – the man on the table was physiologically identical to them. He was not, as they had thought after murdering him upon first sighting, a demon. But where had he come from? And why?

The mystery had them arguing the most magical of explanations until a young man emerged from the shadows and pointed upwards, to the luminous hole in the ceiling that had watched over them for all existence.

“What if it isn’t just a light source,” he said. “What if it’s a portal?”

Soon ladders were being built, ropes were being flung and adventurers found their courage.

And thus was ushered in the Age if Discovery for the inhabitants of the living history boxes on the shelves of the 12-year-old’s room.

 

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124. The lunar detective

The lunar detective woke up with a hangover. They seemed worse here than on Earth. Must be something to do with the smaller gravitational pull. Luckily they still weren’t quite bad enough to stop drinking altogether.

The cell-phone on his bedside table contained forty-two messages. The detective erased them all with one click of his thumb. He seldom listened to his boss, who had never even set foot on the Moon.

They did things differently here compared to Earth. Even the murders.

Especially the murders.

The latest one was a prime example. The knife of the assailant had pierced the suit of his victim in the abdominal area. The suit immediately decompressed, causing the victim’s blood to boil. It was a gruesome death but one all too common in Lunaville.

The town was originally conceived as the ultimate hang-out for the rich and powerful but the barren Moon surface hadn’t proved enticing. So the government had turned Lunaville into a prison colony. A home to murderers, rapists and criminal embezzlers. They were allowed to roam freely, in the safe knowledge they had no place to go. And if they decided to wipe each other out, that was fine as well.

The lunar detective knew he was merely an elaborate excuse to give the appearance of law and order, as did the criminals. There was an understanding between them, an uneasy truce. If the murders weren’t too elaborate, he’d let them slide. If they were, there’d be hell to pay.

A knife in a belly was considered acceptable by both parties. The detective would check out the crime scene, make a report and that would be it. Some would consider it a cushy job. God knows he did.

As long as Earth kept sending regular supplies of whisky.

 

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