1/4/18

The Traveler
By Peter McMillan


Wendall enjoyed life here as a carefree traveller, unburdened and unchained by anything this-worldly. There was just one problem. He had been recalled to complete his two-year compulsory service on the frontier of NGC9860. Because his father was a prominent admiral in the war against the rebels, Wendall couldn't avoid the draft. His departure date was two days away, and there was so much he hadn't seen, having spent all his time in North America.

Brigitte was his new love. He met her late morning at the Gulf station in Pittsburg, when he was thumbing a ride on Highway 3 in northern New Hampshire hoping to disappear in Canada. Just past the park forest, he told her he didn't have any papers. "No problem. You can ride in the trunk. Won't be more than 15 minutes. My uncle is Canada Border Services. He'll wave me through." Wendall looked at the Subaru and tried to convince himself it would be worth it. That wasn't when he fell in love with her. That came later. But he did start thinking she might be a help.

At lunch over rabbit stew and poutine, he told her his problem. Unfazed, Brigitte said, "Well, we'll just have to find someone to go back for you. Now finish up and we'll drive over to Quebec City for the night." He'd never told his story to a human before, and he knew how most humans felt about aliens, so he was pleased and surprised that she took in every bit. That evening over dinner, Brigitte laid out her plan. She'd obviously given it some thought.

They needed a passive host who could be easily managed. "I have chloroform. I use it to euthanize mangled animals caught in vicious traps laid by trappers." That was when he fell in love with her. He was so relieved to have a plan the contradictions escaped him.

The next morning, they crossed the St. Lawrence and drove to L'Anse-au-Griffon at the far end of the Gaspé Peninsula. They waited until dark and spent the evening in a local inn. It was after 2:30 in the morning before they spotted him. The old man was blind drunk.

They followed him outside where he stumbled along the road. Once out of sight from the inn, Brigitte walked up beside him and stuck her leg out to trip him. He went down with a thud and an "Umph." She then chloroformed him. "Get the scalpel in my purse," she said. He knew what to do next. "The chip is set to malfunction mid-transport causing a fatal accident. There will be nothing left of me," Wendall said with a laugh.

Suddenly the drunk awakened and began to fight back. In the struggle, Wendall stabbed him in the eye and blood poured, but the drunk continued to resist. Brigitte stepped in to hold him, but he was too strong. He kicked them both away and lurched and shuffled back to the inn, screaming "Mon Dieu! My eye. I can't see. He stabbed me in my eye." "Let him go," said Brigitte.

"If I'm not back in five Earth hours, a search and rescue team will be dispatched," said Wendall, "but right now we should be worried that the Sûreté will be after us very soon."

"That's not your biggest worry," said Brigitte. "Wendall, I've really enjoyed your company, but I'm not from Earth. I'm with the Resistance, and you have to come with me. The Empire will pay a high price to get the great Admiral's son back. Let's go. Without our decoy, we've got less time."


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The author is an ESL instructor who lives with his wife and one remaining flat-coated retriever, Ollie, on the northwest shore of Lake Ontario.

2/25/16

Boundaries
By Peter McMillan


I'd been on station for two months and didn't have a good feeling about it. It's very different from Earth and even the ship that brought me here. My tour with Space Corps is for two years and I'm not liking my chances of settling in. I'm here, under the radar, so to speak, to investigate longstanding allegations of abuse and mistreatment.

We sleep in pods arranged like the long, flat safety deposit boxes you find in old-fashioned Earth banks. Just large enough to flex your muscles but not enough to turn over. It doesn't matter though because we all take meds to help us sleep, and there is next to no waking time in the pods.

We eat all our meals in the canteen, which is standing room only. Along the walls, the canteen is outfitted with dozens of tubes. We connect these to our upper abdominal ports. The feeding takes 15 minutes. There is no variety, just a uniform mixture of basic nutrients. Here too it doesn't matter since we bypass taste, smell, and texture. I learned this after trying several different tubes.

Sometimes when you get a tube it will still be dripping and you have to drain it and sterilize it. That's happened to me several times. Some people are so careless and what little bit of personal space there is they violate. It's not so much that there is the danger of infection—so we're told. It's the very idea of ingesting someone else's backflow, which is thoroughly disgusting!

The other bodily functions are managed through the lower abdominal port, which requires the same attention to personal space and sanitariness. The facilities are adjacent to the canteen and are equipped with larger plastic hoses that are supposed to be sterilized after each use. Just to be on the safe side, I sterilize the hose before and after use, no matter how long the lineup.

Physical contact is prohibited and every effort is made to ensure that it won't happen accidentally or intentionally. At our workstations, we're suited up and strapped in for 15 hours. You can't even tap your neighbour on the shoulder to ask a question. The range of motion won't permit it. Nonverbal communication is not allowed. You have to go through the chat line to communicate, and it's constantly monitored.

Chats are public, so sometimes people use code, but this is risky. The penalty for being caught is one month solitary detention in the Space Chamber where there is no light, no sounds or smells, and perpetual weightlessness. People are never the same when they return. I got to know the guy from pod 11471-AF before they sent him away. He was a vegetable when he got back, but he didn't stay long before they packed him off to Terra Chamber, a dead end for nonconformists.

One night I couldn't sleep. I hadn't deliberately refused the meds but I think they must have given me something else. I kept having paranoid thoughts that 11471-AF had informed on me. It also felt like bugs were crawling on me, and I couldn't reach them to scratch. I worried that the ingestion and excretion tubes were contaminated and that all sorts of nasty germs were affecting my body and my brain.

Without warning and with no explanation, I was pulled out of my pod and rushed to the Magistrate's Chamber.

“Mr. 14319-ZB, you know this is a Stage 5 classified station and everything that goes on here is top secret and that conspiring against the station's authority is a criminal offense?” asked the magistrate.

“Yes sir,” I answered.

“Mr. 14319-ZB, where are your notes?”

It was my notes they were after, not realizing that I possess an eidetic memory—a prerequisite for my line of work—which I meticulously layer with unrelated and misdirecting memories.

“I haven't taken any notes. I don't have access—“

“You've been observed meeting with 11471-AF and others in the tube stations. What do you have to say about that?”

“I befriended 11471-AF because we're from the same Earth city, Providence.”

“Now sir, no doubt you've heard what has happened to 11471-AF. Unless you cooperate—”

“I am … I'm trying—“

“Then what did you do with your notes? Your cooperation may be taken into consideration during sentencing, but—“

“OK, I used the chat line, but the reason your experts haven't been able to find my notes is that I encrypted them with an auto-delete feature.”

“Your saying, then, that the chats, er, the notes have been deleted? But we have real-time backups.”

“And each time you access my chats from a backup, the auto-delete feature activates.”

“So you're saying there's no way to access your notes?”

“That's right. Even I can't get to them because of the encrypted fail-safe that triggers the delete function.”

“Well, we'll see about that. Let's help you try to remember.”

That's when they severed my head and stuck my brain in a vat of chemicals.

I hadn't seen that coming.

“Now Mr. 14319-ZB, how did you encrypt your chats? What algorithm did you use?

The magistrate turned the questioning over to a cryptographer. Each time I was evasive I received a multi-sensory shock. Several hours into the interrogation, they switched to a different strategy. After making a number of recalibrations, they directly probed my memory center. All they learned was that my memories were inaccessible and interwoven with vivid recollections of urine- and feces-contaminated hoses and vomit-filled feeding tubes.

Now disembodied, it was clear I'd never return to Earth, and it didn't appear likely that any of my findings would ever make it back either. Essentially, my mission was a failure. However, if my record is discovered one day, it will be a damning indictment of the station's human rights violations. But from here in the vat, it seems that discovery will never be made.


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10/1/15

Getting Even
By Peter McMillan


Bruce threw a huge rock at the parking enforcement robot and knocked it to the ground. Seeing the robot go down in a heap of clattering metal and sparks was almost worth the $500 ticket.

The fine was ridiculous—excessive and unfair. Overnight parking at the train station was not allowed between 12:00 a.m. and 6:00 a.m., but he'd only been in violation for one minute, if that. The ticket said 5:59; however his watch read 6:04. Besides, his Ford wasn't even worth $500.

Why not ticket the DeLorean or the Porsche or even the Ferrari in the first row. They were here before he was. And they were the latest 2115 hydro models and could easily afford to pay the fine. It wasn't his fault the robot didn't complete its tour in time to see they had parked before 6:00 a.m.

It wasn't fair but there was really no point contesting it, because these robots had impeccable memories for details and their bodies were hardened to protect the data. Data tampering had plagued earlier models. The data storage was actually protected by greater security measures than was the on-board computer. The computer was essentially just a common circuit board available online and for drone delivery at most big box technology stores. The replacement process was so straightforward that parking enforcement robots were capable of auto-installing their own circuit boards.

It wasn't clear whether he'd done any real damage to the robot, so he walked over to the supine pile of metal. It gurgled and made a number of unintelligible sounds. Their English is generally high school level, so clearly some damage had been caused to the language centre. The midsection, which housed the incriminating data, was still intact though. That was a concern.

Looking around among all the cars and trucks in the parking lot, Bruce found one of those giant tow trucks that are used to tow big trucks and buses. Making sure that no one was paying attention—and everyone was running for the train anyway—he dragged the slurring robot and shoved it up under the rear double tires of the tow truck, ensuring it could only be seen by someone stooping down to look underneath.

He had to be certain that it worked. The damage had to be done and it had to be severe enough to remove all traces of the evidence against him. He could sit in his car and wait for the tow truck to back up or he could go off to work and have faith that the tow truck would finish off the robot.

He decided to wait. He could also call in sick. So he waited. Finally, the driver of the tow truck arrived. The driver checked all the sides but didn't bother looking underneath. When he backed up, incredibly he didn't notice the bump. The tow truck crushed the robot effortlessly and with no bounce whatsoever. Amazingly, the tow truck driver drove off without the slightest idea he'd just flattened a parking enforcement robot.

Bruce was ecstatic. Everything had worked to plan. But just to be sure, he got out of his car to confirm that the robot's torso region had been satisfactorily destroyed. Indeed it had and the robot was no longer gurgling pre-language sounds, so it had to be out of commission—completely out of order. He went back to his car and got in and drove away to enjoy the rest of his sick day.

What Bruce had forgot to consider was the surveillance canopy, the high-tech CCTV net, which continually recorded every square inch of the train station, the parking lot, and the adjoining construction site for the new station. Feeds from the canopy were routinely scanned at head office by parking enforcement robots with desk jobs.


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2/19/15

Virtual Sacrifice
By Peter McMillan


"You got nothing to worry about," the man said. "He's gotta chew off my arm to get away."

The screen was grayish-white, and the intro music faded. It was dead quiet in the theater.

Nothing happened right away, so naturally I started imagining what was going on, what was coming next.

My first thought was that the guy with the speaking part had a muzzled dog on a biker harness—it was that kind of voice—and was taking it for a walk in the park. But that was boring.

Then, I pictured two men locked into a single set of handcuffs. It wasn't clear which had spoken or why. Maybe they were in a diner, ordering at the counter? Better, but hardly original.

Recalling a recent story I'd read that may or may not have been in theNewerYork, I conjured up a geeky little git with a Disney watch knock-off that featured holograms for sociopaths or sociopath-groupies. Now, that WAS different.

The last one came alive, and as I was inching back in my seat to avoid the watch hologram's grasping hand tentacles, a woman laughed heartily. That's twisted, I thought. Behind me two voices gasped—in horror, excitement, I really couldn't tell, though it seemed more appropriate. In front there was sobbing, muffled—a bit premature I felt—and on my left two young children were squealing precociously. I was shocked and repulsed by these reactions, but frankly I was a bit preoccupied with keeping this monster's fangs or claws or whatever they were from ripping me out of my seat.

Shrinking as far back in my seat as I could I banged heads with the person behind me who must have been trying to help but didn't. I collapsed, fell forward, and when I came to the monster had disappeared. My visor was on the floor. The screen was still empty and the audience was getting impatient. In the back of the theater it started—the stamping of feet and the chanting—and like a huge wave it rolled to the front.

I was just about to leave, having had my fill of this absurd theater, but I was promptly stopped by a beefy couple standing between me and the aisle.

“You can't leave now,” said the woman as her partner twisted my arms in their sockets.

“But—“

“It's you it wants, and it's coming back,” she said, picking up my visor and handing it to me.

“This is ridiculous. What are you talking about? There's no movie. There's nothing. Just a blank screen.”

“It's not the screen everybody's watching,” she added. “It's you. You're 'the sacrifice.' Kind of ironic, don't you think?”

“I'm not getting any irony, just a bad headache and sore shoulders from Vince, here.”

“Surely, you had some idea what you were getting into here? It can't be advertised and marketed because it's the underground. You must've heard though—and this is the thrill that keeps people coming back—that for every crowd that comes in one person doesn't come out … quite the same.”

“Besides,” the guy who looked like a Vince added, “yours is the best yet, and everybody's dying, so to speak, to see how it ends.”


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