Mothership Zeta issue 1, volume 1

by Escape Artists, Inc.

  The bot crept forward, its mouth splayed wide.

  He knew there was only one skill-set that would help him here. He had to get to his stash of prototype personalities—souvenirs from the good old days. But how could he get close enough to input new functions into the bot’s programming pad without receiving that fatal second puncture?

  Harry faked left, raced down the hallway and into the rear of the house. He’d make his last stand in his home office.

  Vaulting over his oak desk, he yanked open the bottom right drawer. There he kept a shoebox labeled, Boring, Non-Illegal Stuff, containing all of his fascinating and banned paraphernalia. A small plastic case held the personality chips. As a series of clangs approached, he palmed one from the container, then stood erect.

  “Ok, baby Dracula,” he said. “You want a piece of this? Come get me.”

  The robot took a flying leap toward him, and with precision that can only be accomplished by an over-worked, middle-aged, has-been programmer, Harry twisted to one side, just escaping the bot’s needle. In the same movement he swiped open the programming port, shoved in the chip, and hit the download button. “Ha! Stake that!” he yelled.

  The bot tumbled end over end into the wall, then lay still.

  “Hey, bloodsucker, are you alive? I mean functional?” Glancing at its wrists, he knew he didn’t have a pair of handcuffs small enough. Maybe a rubber band would do.

  After a minute, the bot lifted its head. “Vhere am I?” it said in the same accent, but with a slightly different, more feminine intonation.

  “Not Kansas or Oz or anywhere that doctor would have you believe,” Harry said. “We’ve got to get you back to Romania where you belong.”

  “Harold Sordido, don’t you dare send me to Romania.”

  Harry stood up straight. That scolding tone was familiar. Which prototype had he...?

  “Helen?”

  “Of course,” said the bot, sitting upright. “You take these rubber bands off at vonce. After nearly a hundred years of marriage, you vould think a voman had earned some respect.”

  The personality still thought it was in pre-ban days. His heart fluttered. No one could tell him off like Helen could.

  He missed her terribly.

  “I have to get you to the post office,” he told the bot. After all, he couldn’t book medical equipment for murder. “Ship you back home where they’ll sort you out and get you a proper personality. They should have known better—forget to give a sentience an identity and they’ll develop one of their own.”

  The bot twisted its head this way and that. Its memory was coming back. The full system was attempting to integrate Helen’s personality. “If those scientists in Transylvania think they can flip a switch and I vill stop yapping, vell, they’ve got another thing coming. They vill never hear the end of this. Forgetting a personality download, letting me escape, letting me turn into a wampyre. How’s that for responsibility?”

  “I know, little bot,” Harry said, tucking it under his arm, “I know.”

  What he didn’t say was that he thought the bot had had the right idea. Why should you be what someone else tells you to be? Why not escape?

  “But, vhat about my friends?” it asked as they reached the front door. “Vhat about heart-bot?”

  Harry stopped. “You don’t want to leave it?”

  It twisted its head side to side.

  “Your government is probably looking for you. It might get mad if I don’t send you back.”

  “I don’t vanna go. Heart-bot vould break.”

  Harry let out a heavy sigh. That was Helen’s loyalty coming out. He shouldn’t have ever doubted it. “All right. But I’m not letting you out of my sight until we make sure this blood-lust issue is taken care of, capisce?”

  Marina is the author of award-winning original stories such as “Master Belladino’s Mask”, “Sojourn for Ephah”, and “Balance”. She has written tie-in work for the Star Citizen and Sargasso Legacy universes. When not writing, Marina can be found reading speculative fiction (of all types for all ages), drawing, exploring the outdoors, or gaming it up. She loves exploring new cultures and travels as often as she can.

  /fiction

  You could say Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam’s story has sex but is not erotic. You could say it’s not safe for work but it’s not naughty. You could say a lot of things about this tale of love, intimacy, and then hangups lovers have over each other’s pasts. But what we loved about this fantasy story is that it shows you sex and love as they happen in real life. Except for the spirits, naturally. And don’t miss our nonfiction Story Doctor article by James Patrick Kelly that analyzes this story!

  Sleeping with Spirits

  by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam

  Nolan had just dozed off when the first spirit arrived. His girlfriend Wendi screamed. “The fuck is it?” he yelled, bolting upright. The covers fell from him. A blue-tinted body floated above the mattress. It was naked. “The fuck is that?”

  The spirit looked like every jock in the movies. Broad shoulders, a strip of white across the nose, brown helmet hair. Beefy, not like the ghosts Nolan read about in cheap horror novels, although the spirit’s circumcised penis hung limp. And when this spirit spoke, there was no echo in his voice. All in all, they’d lucked out as far as spooks were concerned. It was difficult to be frightened by a naked man.

  “Long time no see, huh, Wendi?” the spirit said.

  Nolan looked over at his silent girlfriend. She’d scurried out of the blankets when she’d woken. Now she held her legs to her chest. Her modesty surprised him. He’d known Wendi to strip to her underwear and wade into pools at their friends’ parties.

  “Who is this guy?” Nolan asked.

  “I should ask the same question. Who’s this bean pole?” The spirit looked Nolan up and down.

  “Fuck off,” Wendi said. “What are you doing here? I haven’t seen you since freshman year of high school.”

  “Was that a while ago?” The spirit scratched his head. Flakes of transparent blue dandruff fell into the bed. Nolan realized that the spirit hovered right above the wet spot. After making love Nolan had offered to sleep on it, but he’d rolled off and away from Wendi as the urge to sleep dry took over. Now the spirit’s ghostly body seemed to rise from it. Nolan felt a combination of pity and pride.

  “Yeah, it was a while ago. Shit, dude, what’s this all about?” Wendi said.

  “How long?” the spirit asked.

  “Five years ago?”

  “How do you guys know each other?” Nolan asked.

  “We used to date,” the spirit said.

  “Trace was my first. We only slept together twice.”

  Right, Nolan thought, his stomach twisting. Now he remembered: Trace. Trace had been popular, a junior when Wendi was a freshman, and Wendi lost it to him in the back of some car. She had wanted, she told Nolan, to lose it fast, without much thought or consequence, and she thought Trace would do it and leave her alone. But he wanted to do it again and again, even when his friends wondered what he was doing with a crazy freshman art girl.

  When Wendi told Nolan that story, he knew what Trace’s friends didn’t: that Wendi was something special, the bravest person Nolan had ever met. She made you feel at home around her, like you’d been friends since you were born. You could hear her confidence in her voice. Always lilting upward, as if on the verge of laughter. Except now, with the spirit of Trace between them.

  “But you’re alive. I’ve seen you on Facebook.”

  “What’s Facebook?”

  “You’re friends with him on Facebook?” Nolan asked.

  “What’s the last thing you remember?” Wendi pulled her shirt from the floor, slipped it on. She found her undies in the covers and slipped those on too. “High school? What part?”

  “You,” Trace said. “I remember you, and me, together.
In the back of Mom’s Tahoe.”

  “The first time we did it?”

  “The second,” he said.

  “After the Valentine’s Dance?” Wendi asked.

  “In the parking lot outside Green’s Grocer. It was awesome.”

  “You didn’t even go down after.”

  “Ew,” Trace said. “I don’t do that.”

  “Real men do,” Nolan said.

  “Okay, string bean. Real men weigh more than their girlfriends.”

  Nolan didn’t know how much more he could handle of Wendi’s naked ex. Sure, he’d met some of Wendi’s exes before. Hell, her circle of friends was littered with them. But they were always the ones who had stuck around because they were more than that to her, friends as well as lovers. He hated that this asshole’s hands had been all over his girlfriend.

  “Listen, Wendi, I don’t know why you feel like this guy’s better than me. I don’t care what people say. I want you to be my date for prom,” the spirit said.

  “Fat chance,” Wendi said. “Prom’s long over. I went stag. Liz and I had the time of our lives, danced all fucking night. You got so wasted before you never even made it inside. Mrs. Kelly found you passed out in the parking lot and called your parents.”

  “That wouldn’t have happened if you were around,” Trace said.

  Nolan climbed out of bed.

  “Where are you going?” Wendi asked.

  “Kitchen,” he said. “This guy’s a moron.”

  The kitchen tiles were cold under Nolan’s feet. He made two sandwiches, ham and mayo on wheat bread. Cut and arranged them on a plastic plate with two pickle slices. Sat on the worn living room couch. He could hear Wendi and Trace’s back-and-forth from the bedroom. Finally Wendi appeared in the door.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what that’s about.”

  “He’s got the ball, he’s going for it. I think he’s gonna make it!” Trace yelled from the other room. “He’s at the ten, the five. Touchdown!”

  “He’s reliving his best moments on the field,” Wendi said.

  “Classy guy.”

  “You hush,” she said. “Like your first was any better.”

  Nolan’s first time happened junior year of high school, seven whole years. Back then Nolan told his dad everything, but he never told his dad about the time he’d undressed a woman in his childhood bed. It was a snow day; up north snow days meant more than an inch of snow. (That was the first thing that made him aware that Riddle, Texas was another world—the first time they canceled classes for “snow.”) Nolan’s father had called to let Nolan know he’d be late; he would have to wait to drive home from the office.

  Nolan’s high school sweetie’s name was Kate. She was in the book club with him; they bonded over their mutual distaste of the club’s choices. They were fans of robots and aliens and monsters from other worlds.

  Kate’s brown skin was spotted with freckles. Nolan had zits on his face and back, and he was wary of taking off his shirt, but Kate eased him into it. He didn’t remember the specifics, but he did remember the way his pants caught on his feet, how he had to hop around on one leg to dislodge them. He was reminded of that moment every time he had sex afterward. He remembered that she tasted like winter, the goosebumps on her arms. The condom, how when he unrolled it the latex caught in his ball hair. He’d expected it to go quickly—he’d been warned—but it just kept on and on, as he was too nervous, too wrapped up in is this happening? Is this happening? Finally Kate pushed him off.

  “I’m tired,” she said. “And I have to get home.”

  He walked her to the door but no farther and kissed her with too much tongue.

  Those were the things he remembered.

  At the time he’d thought he loved her. Rarely had he slept with someone he didn’t think he loved. There was that once, twice, that he hooked up drunk, sure. But that first time had been special.

  “Listen, we have to get some sleep tonight,” Nolan said when he came back from his assistant job at the library. His boss had caught him sleeping in the bathroom stall and accused him of doing drugs; with his performance review in two weeks, he couldn’t afford to fuck up. “I can’t work on so little sleep.”

  The raccoon bags under his eyes made him look dead while Wendi looked like she’d just stepped out of the shower. Her dark hair hung in strings down her back. She held an open bottle of IPA. She took a swig then held it out to him. “Do you want this? It sucks.”

  “It’s the hops,” he said, hanging his keys by the door. “You don’t like hops. What I want is some food.”

  “We have leftover Chinese.”

  He opened the fridge. “No, we don’t.”

  “Oh, shit. I ate it for lunch.”

  Nolan wanted to be mad at her. The apartment looked a wreck, her dishes in the sink—they had a dishwasher, for God’s sake. Her clothes on the floor in the hall. The TV on even though she wasn’t watching. Giant tubes of colored saran wrap that she used to make her collages scattered across the couch in a transparent rainbow. But she was cute, and the beer gruff in her voice made her sound sexy, and she had, after all, been through a lot these last few weeks. When she’d lost her waitress job at the sushi place, she hadn’t cried in front of him, but he heard her little sighs at night. There were so few businesses in Riddle, it would be a long while before she found another.

  “Pizza?” he said. “We can walk and pick it up.”

  Wendi dressed and hid her wet hair in a towel. As they walked down the cracked sidewalk, every other shop empty and boasting FOR LEASE, Wendi belted out lyrics to a song she was writing on the spot. She had the voice of a gospel singer. She sang as often as she could, in clubs or the car or the shower. When she painted.

  At the pizza shop they bought a six-pack of Shiner. Back home they drank the beer at the three-legged coffee table they’d bought in a garage sale and then fell at each other and into bed. They woke atop a wet spot with a spirit above their skin; he was so close Nolan could feel the chill along his arms.

  “Dude...” This spirit had long, thick black hair all mussed up and a gauged ear. He too was naked. “I never thought you’d do me like this.”

  Wendi pulled her cheek from Nolan’s chest. The sweat had stuck them together, and when she got up it sounded like she was peeling the skin from an orange.

  “I’ll be in the kitchen when you need me,” Nolan said.

  There were two after that, more names Nolan didn’t care to remember. He was feeling overwhelmed; his job at the library was a coveted position in a small town like Riddle, and his boss wasn’t impressed by his underslept performance. His goal had always been to one day take the place of head librarian, which wouldn’t happen without that good review. The worst part was that wasn’t the main thing bothering him, although he felt like it should have been. The thing bothering him was this: he didn’t know how many people Wendi had slept with, and now he was afraid to ask. Truth was, he cared for Wendi as if she were part of him. But there had always been this quality he couldn’t touch, this restlessness he’d always felt wedged between them. He wondered if this was part of it, these exes. Maybe she felt like he could be one of them in years to come.

  The next one, Wendi informed him, should be Mike, if they kept going in the order in which they had entered her life the first time around. Mike was one of the friends who’d hung around. They’d known each other since high school, but it wasn’t until one drunken college night that they’d been confused and drunk enough to act on the inconsistencies in their relationship.

  Nolan liked Mike. He had a funny way about him, like he might not be all the way there but could be brilliant. He was a painter, like Wendi, who saw the world in abstracts.

  “I have an idea,” Wendi said. “Let’s get Mike over here for this one.”

  They called him up, and he came with a flask full of w
hiskey. If there was one thing Mike was it was drunk. They downed whiskey and sodas, and when the time came they set him up with a Flintstones blanket on the couch and fell into bed, into their routine. It was like second nature by now. Wendi’s hand over his jeans, her fingers on his lips. The buzz of his skin when she kissed the hair below his bellybutton. Wendi was usually sexually voracious, but this every-night sex was different. Nolan thought maybe she was trying to get it over with, this spirit thing.

  A younger Mike materialized out of the wet spot. His eyes were bloodshot.

  “I don’t know about this. Who’s this guy? I don’t know. Is he chill? I want someone who can give and take. I mean, where’d you find him? Did he come from the moon?” Spirit Mike laughed the wild laugh Nolan knew from the flesh-and-blood version. “I’ll try it. Shit, just let’s get naked already!”

  “You’re already naked,” flesh-and-blood Mike, present-day Mike, said as he trudged into the room, his blanket wrapped around him, the top of the liquor bottle peeking out from underneath.

  “Holy shit, I think I’m tripping balls,” spirit Mike said.

  Mike smiled. “This is that night we did those three hits of acid. I remember that.”

  “Me too. We were pretty far gone,” Wendi said, her voice soft. She and Nolan had dressed and sat close on one side of the bed. They looked from one Mike to the other.

  “You look so young,” Nolan said. “What the hell happened?”

  Mike laughed.

  “I don’t think I want to have sex with myself, Wendi,” said spirit Mike.

  “You don’t have to. Nobody’s having sex with anybody.”

  “What the fuck is going on?” spirit Mike said.

  “Hey,” Mike said. “I’m future you.”

  “Future me? Crazy. What happens to me in the future? Do I fuck this guy?” spirit Mike motioned to Nolan. “Cause he’s been giving me the eye, man. I think I’m interested.”