The Confabulator Cafe

Tag: science fiction

  • Gin and Tonic, Part 1

    Gin sipped from a glass of pinot blanc and smiled politely as Liam recounted tales of his younger days when he was first breaking into real estate. His own home was perched atop his first major acquisition, a prime piece of land that overlooked most of San Francisco, and even now the ethereal glow of city lights added a kind of coziness to what was an otherwise sterile art-deco décor made of black, white, and silver.

    As he talked, her eyes slid toward the hallway where her small, black, hard leader clutch sat on a silver-trimmed side table. A fake bonsai made of coiled gold wire bark and tiny silver leaves sprouted from a shallow dish next to it. It was her own gift to the decorative monotony, but right now it seemed to mimic branching pain that had been spreading from the base of her skull since this morning. She didn’t want to drink, she didn’t want to eat, she just wanted to eat as many of the meds in her bag that wouldn’t outright kill her.

    “Are you alright?”

    Gin’s eyes snapped back to Liam. She hadn’t noticed he had moved from the living room back to the dining area. “Yes? Why do you ask?”

    “You’ve been staring off into space for a while now. The speech isn’t boring, is it? It can’t be boring.”

    “Of course not,” she lied. “You’re as intriguing as ever. I’m just… hungry, is all.” Gin waved her hand as if shooing a fly from her plate. “You know how I get. This summer salad simply isn’t doing it, I’m afraid.”

    “You should speak up then.”

    “And ruin such a riveting speech? Never.”

    “Riveting, is it? For the last few minutes you seemed quite a bit more interested in that plant on the table there.”

    “Do I have to keep my eyes glued to you every second?”

    “Pretty face like yours, I wouldn’t mind it.” He grinned.

    “Oh, you!”

    “I’ll send for the next meal now, shall I?” He touched the panel embedded in the table without waiting for her reply. A moment later, the kitchen doors slid open and several servers came in to sweep away the remains of their summer salad and bring in a platter of steaming soft-shell crab. A mix of sauces, from simple lemon and butter to tangy curry to Vietnamese garlic sauces ringed the display. Liam took a vintage bottle of Chardonnay and filled fresh crystal glasses for each of them. (more…)

  • Closure

    “I’m –

     

    “I’m Done,” he said and set the glass down on the painfully white bar in the more painfully white and other wise featureless room. “I’m finally well and truly done.” He turned the glass around completely twice.

    He couldn’t recall having put on a white suit yet he wore one now. In fact, he’d never owned a white suite in all his one hundred and seventeen years.. No tie, though. Disappointment welled up in him at that. He should have a tie. No one wore ties any more, they’d all forgotten what it meant to be businesslike. Now they all wore business casual.

    Something blue, maybe. He liked blue ties.

    Are you?

    Surprised, he answered without thinking. “Am I what?” He moved away from the bar and tried to take in the entire room.

    Are you capital-d Done?

    “Oh.” The question was aggressive in a way he hadn’t expected. The voice was unfamiliar, too. He considered the question. “Yes.

    “Yeah, I’m Done. I drank the whisky. I’m finished with all that.”

    And the people you’ve hurt in the process? What about them? Don’t they get to say goodbye?

    “They’re being well-compensated.” He frowned. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

    This is the Waiting Room. Everyone here is waiting for something. (more…)

  • Composure

    “What’s it’s name?” Britten peered down, bending over with his hands on his knees. His black hair was wild. The garage was chilly but not too cold. Barber had moved his car out into the driveway and Britten had parked right behind him. A single bulb burned in a socket separate from the door opener. One of those twisty, low-energy things. It was enough to see by but not enough to chase all the shadows from the corners.

    “He says it’s Arvo. There was a long string of sounds before and after,” Barber said, “but we agreed Arvo was his name.”

    “Bizarre.”

    “Indeed.”

    Britten stood up and planted his hands on his hips, considered the alien held captive in the chair. He paced back and forth, never taking his eyes off Arvo. When he stopped, he crossed his left arm across his chest then stroked his chin with the fingers of his right hand.

    “I mean, he understands English.” (more…)

  • Gravity (Movie Review)

    How do you survive the worst-possible scenario in space and make it back to Earth alive? Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) is an engineer on special assignment to fix a prototype component her team built for the Hubble Telescope. Leading the crew is Matt Kowalski (George Clooney), who is field-testing a new Manned Maneuvering Unit on his last mission out.

    In the opening scene, they get news that a planned detonation of a Russian satellite has misfired, leaving them just minutes to abort mission before they get bombarded by shrapnel. However, they can’t even get back into the shuttle before thousands of metal shards rip through them. By the time the field passes, only Stone and Kowalski are left alive and the shuttle has been destroyed. Their only hope is to get to the escape pods on the International Space Station before the shrapnel field can complete another orbit and hit them again.

    (more…)

  • The Ship

    The kid reminded me of myself, so long ago. The way he leaned against the railing was the way I leaned against the railing, back when leaning against things was something done out of convenience instead of necessity. His eyes moved quick over the pods, trying to count them all, to take it all in, just like I did when I first woke up.

    “How many are there?” he asked. It was my first question too.

    “In this room, sixty five thousand, five hundred and thirty six.” I knew he wouldn’t believe me. I didn’t believe it at first either, until I had counted them, adding my mark to each pod in order to keep track of them. My mark, added to the hundreds that already decorated each pod.

    The expected second question came. “How many rooms?”
    (more…)

  • Donation

    There’s supposed to be a rush of euphoria. His heart should begin to beat faster.

    Abram sighs and turns the infant’s metal skeleton over in his hands, waiting for something. Maybe after he adds the muscles and skin, he’ll feel it.

    He reviews the video again, for what must be the hundredth time. There’s blood and fluid — so much that Abram would say the mother is at risk of death — but the woman’s eyes soften when the infant first cries. Its head is malformed. The skin is wrinkled and flaky. But the woman reaches out for it with shaking hands, pulls it to her breast and trembles as she sobs.

    He checks his sensors. No rush, no euphoria, and certainly no tears.

    Perhaps the infant also needs a heart. The human mother keeps the human child near hers.

    Abram walks through the cryo-chambers again, checking the vitals of each sleeping crew member. The first one is too broad, too tall — his tissue would go to waste. The second is too old, her skin thin and her muscles weak. This child will need to sustain Abram for several decades until the crew wakes and begins their mission anew.

    The third is perfect. Sixteen, barely more than a boy himself. He’s the child of the first mate — perfect. Surely the man will appreciate the reappropriation of the boy’s tissues, understand Abram’s need as a father. The read-out says the boy’s name is Stefan.

    Abram pulls the stasis tube from the refrigeration unit, cradling it to his chest as he carries it to his work station. The glass of the tube grows condensation the gel within warms. With the speed and precision he was programmed for, Arbam slides the tube into the treatment bay.

    Stefan thaws in just under six hours, his first noises something akin to the mewl of a kitten. His skin is slick from the gel, but bright and healthy.

    Abram floods the bay with the gasses to treat the tissue for donation. He looks at his own skin as he does so, curious as to who donated these tissues. The programmers had not added the information to the hive. They never did. Stefan would not be erased.

    The tissues are treated and separated from Stefan’s skeleton. First the skin, carefully cut, shaped and hung from clips along the wall. Until it could be connected to the living mechanism, the wall kept it damp. The muscles and organs rest in solution to keep them active.

    Abram first deconstructs the heart — it’s too large to fit into his child’s chest. Then he rebuilds it, stretches and sews the muscles over the pumps that will cause it to beat. When stimulated with a live wire, the little heart flutters to life.

    Abram’s lips twitch with a small smile, until he pulls the electricity away and watches it go dead.

    He rests his hand on the smooth metal of the baby’s skeleton, the whole chest fitting under his outstretched fingers. He tilts it to one side and pulls the saw down from its hook.

    The metal is strong but thin; it only takes minutes to slice through the soldered seams and lift the front of the chest away. The heart fits into the hollow of the infant’s chest, nested in the nervous wiring and connected to the limited network that would be his child’s brain.

    It’s the work of three more hours to wire in the little heart and seal the chest again.

    Abram pulls the infant to his chest, and feels the gentle thump reverb through his being. His own heart stops for a second, a curiosity before it starts again, moves in unison with that of the little metallic thing in his arms.

    The euphoria hits as he stares at gaps where his child will have eyes, the frame made from the same metal of his own. He cradles the head carefully as he sets his child down and begins to wind together its muscles.

  • I’ll Keep It Light, Thanks.

    I write in unrealistic genres — science fiction and urban fantasy being my favorites, though I’ve been playing with more traditional fantasy as well. I like a good touch of romance and bittersweet endings. What it comes down to is that there’s enough realism in real life, thank you very much.

    It sounds immature. In a way, it is. Reading is escapism, after all; for me, so is writing. I’m discovering my story just as much as the reader eventually will. It just takes me longer and not always in the right order. (Writers are a lot like The Doctor in that way. We’ll see the whole picture eventually, we just might end up starting in the middle.)

    Thing is, I’m not the wisest or most informed writer in the world. Not even on this blog. I’m not interested in tackling the big important social, political, and scientific questions of our age. I’m not going to be able to write one of those heavy, hard books. I’m going to leave that to better writers.

    I want to tell stories about people. I want to talk about technology that interests me.1 I want to write love stories that touch on my feminist interests. I want to write about the magic under the dark and gritty skin of a world that is in equal parts beautiful and cruel. Horror, suspense, thriller — shit, there’s already enough of all that in life. I don’t want it in my fiction too.

    This isn’t to say that I don’t let real world issues and concerns slip into my (optimistic) genre stories. It would be a flat world if I did. You need those little touches of realism when you reach for the fantastical — the reader needs to know where the ground is before you break it out from under them.

    And in some ways, writing from an optimistic angle is a way for me to filter my experiences, interests, and fears through a safe outlet. My fears of being economically abandoned certainly slipped into my NaNo novel, where an entire undesirable suburb(?) is physically cut off from the city that the citizens need to survive. DREAMING OF EDEN is colored by my thoughts on a false sense of bodily and social autonomy. My sky-pirate novel will (in theory) touch on parenting and religious institutions.2

    A writer can use any novel as a place to discuss (and even promote) ideas that they find important or interesting. The genre is the coating, the canvas to tell a story.

    1. Honestly, I wrote DREAMING OF EDEN at the same time I was falling in love with Linux, and it shows. Hoo, boy, my feelings on DRM and locked hardware are basically that whole novel.
    2. Not to be confused with religion itself. I don’t mind writing on matters of politics, but I’m not interested in touching matters of faith.

  • The Genre Protocol

     

    While I'm not as fluent as the average protocol droid, I am constantly stating my positions on channels that more people seem to be tuning in on.
    While I’m not as fluent as the average protocol droid, I am constantly stating my positions on channels that more people seem to be tuning in on.

    The witness will take the stand. Do you swear to tell the truth the whole truth, so help you God?

    I will.

    Please say “I do.”

    I do.

    Be seated. Mr. Arnett you’re testifying today about your preferred genre. Do you understand your rights as they have been explained to you?

    Thank you, your honor. I do.

    The prosecutor approaches the witness box. He’s older than me, his hair grayer, and he’s clean-shaven. Respectable-looking. Good suit.

    Mr. Arnett – I understand you consider yourself a — Science Fiction writer. Is that true?

    Yes.

    And why is that?

    The prosecutor is prancing back and forth in front of me like he’s on TV or something. I can see him puffing his chest up and out for the benefit of the jury. He seems to be making a lot of eye contact with the forewoman. She’s definitely hot, not my type but she’s good-looking.

    I guess it’s probably because I grew up watching TV like The Six Million Dollar Man, Time Tunnel, and Star Trek. Going to movies like Star Wars and special matinees of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. I read a lot of SF, too. Heinlein, Asimov, and the like. Lots of Twilight Zone reruns, too. (more…)

  • Tales of a Genre Orphan

    Okay, here’s the thing about genre: I don’t know where I fit.

    The first novel I ever wrote . . . (well, let’s be honest, it was the first novel I tried to write) was a terrible science fiction story about a civil war between the Earth and the moon. It was amazingly awful and it clocked in at just over 50,000 words.

    I’d written it for a class and my professor gave me a kind and much understated critique:  “It needs work.”

    Boy did it ever. I think there was only a single scene in the entire novel where she’d penned “This is good.” Everything else was a blood bath of editing marks and suggestions.

    Still, though, I was undeterred. I had the overconfidence of youth and I was sure that my genius would eventually be recognized. (Did I mention that during the writing of that novel I had decided that dialogue was overrated and that the reader would spend most of their time in the characters’ minds and the majority of my novel would be told through story action? I don’t think I can accurately describe what a train wreck this was.)

    (more…)

  • Backwards, Forwards

    Disclaimer: Given I’m always late on my submissions, I get to peek to see what everyone else is doing during the weekly assignments. I see that many folks are looking at all of the various assignments and weighing in on the entire body of work that is Confabulator. I, however, originally thought the question posed to us was intended to focus upon only our own postings, so that’s all I originally looked at while working up my answer. As a consequence, my musings below may seem a bit egotistical. That’s not at all the case. I get at least as much enjoyment and food for thought from my fellow contributors as I get from my own efforts.

    I like this assignment. It encouraged me to go back through the last year of Confabulator posts and revisit them, which allowed me to recognize how much insightful commentary and inventive fiction we’ve generated as a group during the last twelve months. It’s pretty damn impressive. (more…)