Welcome to our first new story of 2010!

To help us celebrate our return to running original fiction, Tessa Dick has generously allowed us to repring her short story, "Bear 2.0," a tale of futurewar, cybernetics, and the devaluation of the human soul. We're pretty excited about this, since this is not only our first original story of the new year, but it's also our first story by a published author, rather than our normal gaggle of talenten amateurs. It comes from Tessa's 2008 anthology, "Quachi and Other Stories and Poems."

Tessa has been a great friend to us and our site, and we're deeply indebted to her for allowing us the loan of her talented mind. Thank you, Tessa! We appreciate it!

The complete story is under the jump.

Stony Hill, Florida, 1964

Although there had been a couple unofficial contacts between Humans and Aliens previously, they were not well documented at the time, and didn’t become common knowledge until long after the contact with the Tractus Canis, (or, if you’re pedantic, Intercapedo Canis) so the Canis indecent remained fixed in everyone’s mind as the ‘first contact’, much as Lindberg’s crossing of the Atlantic was remembered as a first, or Columbus’ discovery of America was regarded as a first: none of them actually were, but 99% of the world’s population would swear they really were.