Plasma Frequency Magazine: Issue 14 Read online

  'Yet nowhere near as good as you.' He leaned forward too, pulse racing as he moved towards a kiss.

  She jerked back.

  'We're in a riot,' she said. 'Don't you have any sense of what matters?'

  A whistle blew behind the police lines. Science soldiers came rushing towards the barricade, tesla guns sparking in their hands, electricity blasting the barricade.

  Benoit yelped as man-made lightning struck his leg, sending his knee into spasm. He flung himself back behind the barricade, bruising his chest in the process.

  Amina was on her feet, sledgehammer raised, ducking as tesla fire crackled past.

  'Get up here, all of you,' she yelled, and dozens rushed to join her. She pointed down at the approaching soldiers. 'This is it!'

  Benoit tried to raise himself from the street on aching limbs. As he did so, a manhole cover slid open and the peak of a policeman's cap emerged.

  'No, that is it!' Benoit pointed in panic at the blue-clad figures scrambling out of the manhole.

  The Council must have spent all day rearranging pipes beneath this street, manoeuvring sewer lines through the cables and gears that kept the city moving. Arranged them so slowly that no-one heard a hint of what was to come.

  It had worked. The police were past the barricades, ready to run riot among the protesters.

  Benoit's stomach heaved in terror as they bore down on him, truncheons raised, grinning like beasts from the pit.

  Then came a piston hiss, a pounding of heavy boots. He was lifted from the ground and flung over a muscled shoulder. The world became a jumble of images as his face bounced against Amina's back. He saw police scattering before her hammer, protesters running and fighting, the whole mass receding between rubble and buildings as she raced down the street, faster than any constable on her steam-powered legs.

  They reached an alley, out of sight of the violence on the avenue, and she flung him to the ground. His head thudded on the wall, as bruised and aching at back as at front. A terrible dampness seeped from the gutter into his trousers, but at least he was safe.

  He looked up at his saviour, this fantastic mechanised Amazon, and she looked back down at him.

  'Are you alright?' Her voice held an unfamiliar softness.

  'Of course.' He tried not to wince as he rose unsteadily to his feet. He was trembling as much as the wall behind him, the street straining in its stopped tracks, caught between the machines that would drive it onward and the steel spikes that held it in place. He wanted to be like that building, firm despite the strain, to show her that he was made of strong stuff.

  'Well you shouldn't be.' She slammed him back against the wall, and he realised that she too was trembling, though with frustration rather than pain. 'We've failed. We'll lose our jobs, our homes, our future. We'll all end up beaten and flung in jail, if we even survive. You and your smart talking friends, you led us down this path, but weren't smart enough to beat the police. We weren't strong enough to hold out. It's all lost.'

  They were so close that, even in the darkness of the alley at nightfall, he could see tears shimmering in the corners of her eyes, diamonds of passion gleaming on rough ground. Was that pain or fear or loss? He couldn't tell, but he longed to fix it.

  He should have been scared, trapped by a furious mass of muscle and machine. But he knew there was nothing to fear. He believed in Amina - as a woman, as a worker, as a leader of her cause. He would trust her no matter what.

  He had to show that she too could believe in him.

  'I have a plan.' He lowered a hand to her waist, took a crowbar from her tool belt and slid out of her grasp.

  Praying for time from a god he didn't believe in, he strode out into the street. Gas lamps were flickering into life, their supply reconnected to guide the oppressors. But by the same light he was able to examine the bases of the buildings, the places where their walls gave way to tracks, his best hope for liberty.

  There it was. A steel spike.

  Benoit thrust the crowbar beneath the head of the spike. Applying the science of mechanics and all the strength left in his weary muscles, he levered it free.

  The building shook as the spike clunked out. A tile slid loose and crashed down in the street.

  'What are you doing?' Amina stood behind him, another crowbar in hand. 'I put those in.'

  'Now take them out.' Benoit moved to the next spike, wriggled his crowbar in next to it. 'You have nothing to lose but your chains!'

  'I don't have any chains,' Amina said, but she was bending to the work, flipping the spikes free with unnerving ease.

  The road shook, a terrace jumping a foot down its track. In the distance, the top of a barricade slid away, blocking a pair of science soldiers as they chased protesters down the street.

  'Of course!' Amina exclaimed, and set to the work with renewed energy.

  A policeman yelled. Heavy footfalls headed their way, gaining speed as they grew closer.

  Benoit finished yanking out a spike, grabbed Amina's arm and headed into the alleyway. He ran hell for leather, barely able to keep up with her though she paused every twenty feet to lever out a spike. Each time she grinned back at him, waiting till he caught up before releasing the next set of gears.

  The police entered the alleyway just before it moved. With a sound like a rifle volley the last spikes shot free and the buildings rushed forward. Normally they might have moved thirty feet in an hour, but a day's worth of trapped energy drove them. They whipped the caps from the policemen's heads in the wind of their passage.

  Benoit and Amina kept running, pursued by yells and whistles. With a grinding crunch another building broke free, knocking two of the policemen from their feet. All around them buildings were moving in, a chain reaction that sent spikes spinning free all over the district.

  They ran into a warehouse just before it was closed off by a passing factory. By the time they reached the end of the building their pursuers were lost. Ahead was a frenzy of moving walls, running protesters and bewildered police.

  'I'd like to see them arrest us all now,' Benoit said.

  'And the protest?' Amina's eyes sparkled. She knew the answer, he could tell. But like him she needed to hear it out loud.

  'As long as we're free, the protest goes on. This is our freedom - all equally lost in the spinning city.'

  She grabbed his hand, pulled him close to her.

  'Don't you have a sense of what matters?' he asked.

  'No,' she said, moving in for the kiss. 'But I believe in you.'

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

  Andrew is a freelance writer based in Stockport, England, where the grey skies provide a good motive to stay inside at the word processor. He's had over forty stories published in places such as Daily Science Fiction, Wily Writers and Ann VanderMeer’s Steamunk anthologies. You can find out more about his writing at andrewknighton.wordpress.com and follow him on Twitter @gibbondemon .

  The Beetle Farm

  By DeAnna Knippling

  Jackson's beetle farm had progressed through a period of accelerated development overnight. It wasn't the first thing I noticed when I flipped on the banks of fluorescent overhead lights. That distinction went to the class pet, Gerry the Gerbil, who had...well, let's just say janitors aren't as hard to replace as class pets. In fact, I didn't have time to look at the beetles at all until after class started, when Jackson refused to return to his seat.

  I should have noticed them earlier.

  "Miss Jonquil, the beetles are...come look!"

  I sighed, heaved myself out of the Teacher's Chair, and walked between two narrow rows of wide-eyed peon's children to the back of the room, near the sink.

  "What is it, Jackson? Did your beetles develop anarchy and wipe themselves out, like Janine's?"

  "Come look," he ordered, and I glared at him until he lowered his eyes.

  Then I pushed him to the side and peered downward at the flat, mesh-covered pan. The beetles had been modified to follow two different genetic types: ones
that craved fats, sugars, and salts in unlimited quantities (modeled after the peons), and ones that craved those things, but became satiated on them quickly, and as a result ate more healthful food (the nobles). The peons would inevitably eat all the junk food in the pan, then begin eating each other, while the nobles ate more reasonably, and lived longer. We were studying the "political systems" that arose when different proportions of peons and nobles were combined.

  Jackson's pan held only peons. They should have eaten themselves to death by now.

  Piles of corn chips, candy, and bacon had been shoved in one corner along with a few strangely destroyed or disassembled beetle corpses. The tomato, jalapeno, and piece of lean, cooked chicken had all disappeared.

  The beetles themselves scuttled about the pan in strange patterns. I tilted my head to the side and tried to work out what kind of political structure they had achieved, silently crossing off the anarchist/libertarian groups, the monarchical/tyrannical groups, the oligarchic/corporate groups, and even the various types of collectivism. In any case, the end result of every one of these systems was self-destruction; they relied on humans providing them food, and, in the long run, even the nobles would eat each other when there was nothing else left.

  The beetles seemed to center around a glistening lump in the center of the pan. It was so covered with beetles that I didn't know what it was. I picked up a pencil, took off the mesh covering, and used the pencil to prod some of the beetles aside.

  The creature underneath was made of glistening chitin—a super beetle, a mutated mother of a thing. I prodded around a little more. Her hindquarters weren't laying eggs, but perfect, tiny, eraser-sized tomatoes, which the beetles carried to the other side of the pan and hid under the corn chips. I stirred up the junk food and saw more, a goldmine of miniature jalapenos.

  They hadn't yet figured out how to replicate chicken, thank God. Probably because it had been cooked.

  "It's amazing, Miss Jonquil," Jackson said. "I'm going to start eating tomatoes, too. Tomatoes give you superpowers."

  "Mmm-hmm," I said. "Jackson, if it's all right with you, I'd like to take this over to the high school science teacher's lab. He knows a lot more about genetic modification and mutation than I do. Is that all right?"

  "Oh, yes!" Jackson said. "Can I come with you?"

  "No, Jackson. I have to go after school, when Mr. Jori isn't teaching his classes. We all have work to do."

  "Okay."

  I put the mesh lid back on the pan of beetles. Mr. Jori said that spontaneous mutations toward biologically-based new technologies were happening in classrooms daily, and that it was only a matter of time before something really big, societal-changing big, came out of it.

  He was a fool, Mr. Jori. We were bred the way we were bred, and that was the end of it.

  But he did have a really good garbage disposal, down his sink.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  DeAnna Knippling is a freelance writer and editor in Colorado. Her short stories have appeared in Black Static, Crossed Genres, Penumbra, and more. She has a twelve-year-old daughter and has more than once guiltily wished that she could flush certain projects down the toilet. She writes middle-grade fiction under the pseudonym De Kenyon, and her website is at www.WonderlandPress.com.

  City of One

  By Damien Krsteski

  Clasped around the City like two halves of a coconut. No way in. No way out.

  “Does it have to be like this?” Bertrand shouts from the ground at their cirrus-enveloped features.

  A curt alligator nod, after a perceptible bit of lag. “Of course. You're a hazard.” The two reptilian heads look down from a hole in the City’s ominous orange sky.

  Bertrand has to sway them somehow. He prepares a thought for them: <>

  He sends it.

  Brief lag, then one of the alligators shakes his head. “Verbal communication only.”

  Bertrand sighs. “How do we proceed from here on out?”

  Pause. “We will investigate, leave no stone unturned. Once our analysis is done, we'll weed out the problem and allow your City to transmit and receive again.”

  A desert gust whips at Bertrand's hair. He considers the situation. Under revision of the authorities, with the possibility of a never-ending quarantine unless he cooperates. Trapped, with no way in, no way out.

  He closes his eyes, reaches into the City's config to modify the permissions file.

  The two alligators receive their automatic notifications. Blood-thirsty grins spread on the snouts in the sky. “We begin at once.”

  And their cloudy window into Bertrand's City closes, leaving behind a spotless orange sky.

  ~

  Crossing into Mathilde's personal space takes courage Bertrand isn't always capable of mustering, but desperate times call for desperate measures. He raps twice on her portal – a wooden gate smack in the middle of no man's land, the place where the City's corrupt memory goes to die.

  A yellow line appears, a glimpse into her world, as she opens the door just a tiny bit.

  Peeking through it with an eyeball on a stalk. “What do you want?”

  “Help,” he says.

  The eyeball looks around, sees him alone. She considers, then swings the door open, light pouring out of it into the blank data graveyard. In the doorframe, a shadowy figure, stalks snaking out of her gray head, eyeballs at their tips.

  Bertrand steps inside.

  The room she welcomes him in is made of light, pure white light, but then Bertrand's sight adapts to it and the shapes of vegetation come into focus. Arrayed in clay pots, with fronds like Mathilde's eyestalks, the purple flowers blink at him.

  “Like my garden?”

  His eyes search for a place where the gazing flora can't meet them. “It's wonderful.”

  Mathilde approaches a particularly lively plant. In a quick motion with her gardening scissors she snips off a thorny branch, leaving it to fall to the ground, the eye at its tip no longer blinking. “What do you need help with?”

  He watches the dead branch go from purple to black. “Bureaucrats in orbit are claiming we're a memetic hazard.” He sends: <>

  “Yikes,” she says. Her eyestalks swirl around her head, looking in all directions as if the bureaucrats could be sneaking behind a plant. Turning to face him, “What kind of hazard?”

  “Life-threatening memes. Non-removable by conventional mind cuts.”

  Shuddering, not in any overtly discernible way, but Bertrand knows her well enough to recognize it. “Life-threatening? From here?”

  “Yeah. They had found traces of one of our citizens in Williamsburg, a new City two hundred and thirty light years away.”

  “What happened?” She drops her scissors, folds her arms.

  “She had caused quite a scare there. Three people close to her had committed suicide. Just up and terminated themselves, backups and all.”

  “Holy crap.” Mathilde gasps, her eyestalks stretching out in an atavistic defensive reaction. The purple flower-monsters around her do the same. Whether they understand, or simply are mimicking her, Bertrand doesn't know.

  “Frightening stuff,” he says.

  “Do you know who it was?”

  He shrugs. “She had left Williamsburg before they figured it all out so she’s in another City by now, or in transit. Could be anyone.”

  “How can they be sure of her origin? Those things can be faked, she might be from who knows—”

  “There’s no shred of doubt,” he cuts her off, “that she is from here. She ha
d been either very clumsy, or nonchalant, discussing her origin on several occasions with random citizens.”

  Contemplating the situation with a frown on her face, tapping her foot. “But there are blockages,” she says, “prevention mechanisms. Citizens don’t just commit suicide like that. It’s so… barbaric.”

  “It is.”

  He watches her deliberate, mentally crossing his fingers. After a moment of tension she exhales loudly. “Okay,” she says, sending: <>

  Bertrand smiles. “Thank you,” he says.

  ~

  A fishing rod swung over her shoulder, bucket of worms hanging from her hand, she walks beside him across the desert, toward his hut.

  Tilting her head back, examining the sky. “What is it with you and orange?”

  “Strong color,” he says. “Sooths me.”

  Baked earth cracks beneath their step. “So,” he says, “this your scanning equipment?” Meaning her fishing rod and bait.

  A sidelong glance. “Last time I was your guest your corner of the City was a lagoon. Great piranhas. Very tasty.”

  “Sorry,” he says, meaning it.

  She shakes her head, as if shaking off a creeping bit of nostalgia, then in one deft motion launches the rod and bucket of worms up in the air. With a pop, they vanish. “So am I,” she says.

  In the distance, a thin reddish horizon separates the two shades of orange representing ground and sky. Sometimes, when Bertrand squints, he can't tell which is which.

  His hut begins resolving late in the afternoon as it always does, in the middle of the desert, appearing to his visitors only after they've walked long enough to find it. Made out of dark orange baked earth, with a roof of broken branches tied together with brittle rope, the hut looks big enough to be comfortable for one person only, provided that person's stay is brief. Standing before it, Mathilde shoots another of her sidelong glances at him.

  “Don't worry,” he says, gesturing toward the straw door. “Much bigger on the inside.”

  She crouches to enter, her eyestalks flattening against her back, and once inside, she sees that he's right, that it does seem wider this side of the entrance. They sit down opposite each other on a wooden table. Bertrand gives her City permissions.