Transmission: Collected Short Stories

Transmission: Collected Short Stories

By Kent R. Conrad

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2011 Kent R. Conrad

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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This collection contains works of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales, or organizations is entirely coincidental.

All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author.

Table of Contents

Introduction

TRANSMISSION

Invasion of the Roach Men

Glass on the Beach

First Call

Excerpt: Vampire Tooth Necklace

Excerpt: Dead Furst

An Introduction

These stories were written in the early days of 2011. They all concern communication – things people want to hear, but should not. Things people say, and do not understand.

TRANSMISSION (the story) is the first part of a serial that also, I hope, stands on its own.

Invasion of the Roach Men is a story in the world of the EXU, investigators of the paranormal. Jimmy Yi, one of their senior operatives, is very good at certain things. This story demonstrates some things he is very much not good at. Jimmy, incidentally, will also appear in the novel The Werewolf Egg, slated to be available in early May of this year. That book is the sequel to Vampire Tooth Necklace, which will be available as of April 3rd.

Glass on the Beach is an epistolary story about a shallow, friendly young American trying to make sense of a world that is rapidly losing its mind.

First Call takes place in the world of Sebastian Furst, who to date has died three times. He still has not gotten very good at it. Sebastian is introduced in the novel Dead Furst, available now, and his search for the real reasons why he’s still alive, will continue in a new, as yet untitled novel, to be released late this year.

TRANSMISSION

This is not a dream, Marty said, the instant Chris finished entering the command into the computer.

He looked at her, feeling as if he was in a fog. The SatRead distributed network was chomping through the blip they’d found at… he couldn’t remember the coordinates. His brain was shuffled, and tired, and after 16 hours wasn’t ready for anything but for hitting the real bedroom for real sleep, not just the damned cot beside the computer.

This wasn’t a dream? No, year three of sitting in a shack staring at radio telescope printouts, even with the gorgeous girl wearing the palladium ring he’d bought her because they were nerds and gold was for norms, was not a dream.

What? Chris said.

This is not a dream, Marty said again, then she made a staticy noise, holding her hand to her mouth to keep the spit from coming out.

Oh. The game.

That episode of the Simpsons with the new girl who’s better at saxophone than Lisa. Uh… but the next line is just Lisa screaming.

Marty grunted, exasperated. "No! And that’s not even the right line. Largo says ‘This is no dream.’ Come on. ‘This is not a dream’."

A million movies. A million TV shows. It could be anything, and they were running through Chris’ brain when all he wanted was sleep. More than contact with whatever they were pretending could be contacting their little foundation’s radio telescope. More than sex with the brunette who was standing, one hand on her hip, disappointed her husband couldn’t read her mind.

Then he got it.

We are transmitting from the year One-Nine-Nine-Nine, he said.

She gave her half-smile, the one that crinkled her left eye and made her look like she was this close (this close) to giving him a sexy wink, then left off.

Right movie, wrong next line.

"Prince of Darkness," Chris said.

He walked by his wife, kissed her on the cheek, and collapsed on the cot. The bedroom was twenty feet too far away.

Tell me if something goes wow, he said, and fell asleep quickly, before she could begin her torrent of Latin complaints.

Marty was staring at the screen, six hours later, when Chris started to stir. She’d taken her own cat nap right next to him, curled up against his body on the too-small cot, but when Chris slept he was like a the stack of fried computer equipment that had piled up on the shelf – no movement, no noise, just hard and still.

Marty could never sleep for more than a few hours at a time, and especially not when they had just fed the machine, and were waiting for it to digest what they had and give it back to them. Even though, 32 months into the project, all they had ever got back was noise. One exciting day where a packet error looked like a signal spike, but that was the best thing that had happened.

It didn’t matter to Marty, though. It was a thrill every time they downloaded their data to Athos Inc.’s distributed network, and let the collected dozen petaflops of processing power read through, parse for areas of interest, and create charts that they, with their expert eyes and human intuition, would then pore over for spikes, for anomalies. For anything that might have been a signal from outer space.

I think we’re the experiment, Chris had said, three months in. You’re telling me with all the computing power Athos has, they don’t have systems that can scan this data better than we can? Naw, we’re being observed.

One month after that, he’d stormed out of the Shack. Which was the wrong name for it. It was a three-room structure with a kitchen and bathroom, and even a bedroom that they had largely quit using. Outside was three miles of California desert, a jeep, and what they were told was the world’s largest array of privately owned radio telescopes. Run by a married couple, an astronomer (her) and a physicist (him, with a Masters to her Ph.D., but she only rubbed that in once a month, to keep him leashed.)

Only one time had they ever been visited by the corporation sponsoring all of it. The shack hadn’t been built just for the two of them, and there was equipment from an earlier team still sitting on some shelves in the computer room – measuring tools neither Marty nor Chris understood, and a black obsidian cube sitting in between them, with a sign in front of it that said Do Not Touch. They did not touch, and when the sponsor came to collect it, did so with barely a word to either of them. The space on the shelf was now where broken stuff went, waiting to be picked up.

For Marty, waiting for the analyzed data to come back, letting her imagination run through all the permutations of hope, was the thrill of the work. That they’d never found anything wasn’t a source of disappointment, it was hopeful.

"The Galaxy Being," Chris said, amidst his waking yawn.

Huh? Marty said.

Chris repeated his mysterious phrase, and Marty just kept staring.

It’s the first episode of The Outer Limits. The original Outer Limits, Chris said, sitting up.

That’s not how the game is played, she said, annoyed that a hint of her accent poked through her words.

You’ve seen it, though? he said.

You probably made me watch it.

Just so, and you remember what happens, right? Some SETI guy contacts an ETI with his crazy radio set, and somehow beams a physical projection of his alien buddy here, to the earth, Chris said.

He sat up and stretched, as if that would punctuate whatever point he was making.

Coffee’s fresh, Marty said, turning back to her computer. Real life.

Of course. Fresh and Latin and spicy like the wife. But do you see what I’m getting at? he said.

Not even a little, but that’s okay. If you weren’t eccentric, I wouldn’t have married you. And I know, sweetheart, that you know the difference between science and science fiction.

No, hear me out. People talk about the dangers for us to come into contact with an ETI, that they would necessarily be more advanced than we are. Every contact between civilizations results in disaster for the more primitive.

Trailer for Skyline. We get to see one movie every three months, and you pick that piece of garbage.

It had aliens in it.

Garumph.

"Anyway, in ‘The Galaxy Being’, the contact was with a peaceful alien who was captured by human beings. He was destroyed, not because the guy who got him was mean, but because he wanted to be the one to bring home an alien."

If these advanced aliens were out there, why weren’t they contacting people before?

50s reasons. You guys have nukes, so we must destroy you. Or never contact you, because you’re so war-like. That kind of crap, Chris said, walking out to get coffee.

You mean that reasonable assessment of the mess that has been human society for 7000 years, Marty called after him. And get me coffee.

She didn’t really know if that was a reasonable assessment of the human mess. It seemed like it should be, but no arguments came to her, one way or another, that were not platitudinous. Maybe she should just be happy she could recognize her own platitudes for the limited thinking they were, and not