by submission | Jun 30, 2014 | Story |
Author : Cesium
My office glows all night long,
It’s a nuclear show and the stars are gone.
Wind howls past my helmet and something unidentifiable crunches beneath my boots. Dust. It’s dust. It used to be other things, it used to be trees and windows and… and people, but now there’s no more use thinking about that. Now it’s all dust.
It’s odd seeing a bit of starlight peeking through the gray sky. My ship’s waiting for me up there. I imagine it impatient at this bit of sentimentality. It’s right, I suppose. The suit tells me I’ll soon exceed the maximum recommended radiation dose. Lest a cancer take its hold in my chest. Or, another one.
The suit also tells me it’s cold, but I can’t feel it.
If it were properly symbolic the starlight would be an inspiration. But there’s no one left down here for it to inspire. Not anymore. The stars just gaze, fey and oblivious, down through the dust in the sky, the dust swirling about the ground… and me, who will be dust soon enough, watching what’s left of the place I used to work, as if it would live once more.
It still stands, dozens of stories of steel and concrete, a cold-edged skeleton baring everything to the unceasing winds. The nuclear shockwaves blasted away everything but the bones, turned it all into dust. And it shines in my helmet display, shines with gamma rays and high-energy particles. Shines with residual radiation that could kill me, and still might. It’s not a hopeful light, it’s a light of grief and death without rest. The war is over and this place deserves to lie dark and silent beneath the stars.
I look up, but the dust has hidden them once again. There will be no rest, not for years yet.
I wasn’t here when the bombs fell. Those that could quickly fled deep into space, and I was among them. I have no reason to come back here now, but I want to say goodbye. Or that’s what I’ve told myself. The truth is I don’t know why I’ve come. I know I shouldn’t have, I know it’s dangerous. But somehow it felt as if I ought to.
Around me blow the bodies of people I knew and people I’ve never met. The wind whips them into dust devils, little eddies and swirls that stretch up for a second and then dissipate. They scour away at the bones of the buildings, still warm with their nuclear glow, and my presence or absence disturbs them not at all. Dust above, dust below, and my office before me, dead but not buried.
I don’t think about the day it happened, but I remember my life before. Her. Him. Faces I knew, some still alive, most gone. I remember loving them, avoiding them, arguing, laughing, traveling, playing, grieving, writing, enjoying. I can trace the threads of a life gone by, as if I were living it now. But I’m not. That life is over, and closed to me.
There is nothing left here but the radiation and my memories beneath perpetual grey. It’s time to leave the dust behind, leave the skeleton towers and the always howling wind, and go back to the stars. To the only haven I have now, to the others cast adrift by that moment in time. And maybe we will be able to talk, and share, and laugh. About all that we’ve lost.
I turn away and step into the shuttle that will bring me away from this place.
Elevator, elevator,
Take me home…
by submission | Jun 29, 2014 | Story |
Author : Russ Bickerstaff
One more thing love: I believe I forgot to tell you about this strange experience I had the other day. I had visitors. (Yes!) Visitors. Isn’t that strange? From off world of course. I hadn’t seen them before. No idea where they came from. I believe they were interviewing me for something. They do some sort of thing for their world. Some piece of journalism or some sort. They didn’t have the usual media sorts of equipment, though. Actually, now that I think of it their uniforms looked kind of…military.
I don’t know what they were after. It was hard to follow everything. Their language was so low. They actually spoke out of their faces. Can you imagine? Beastly things. Not terribly sophisticated. They were grunting these questions at me. Awful. I know.
Evidently they had been to all of the rest of the worlds in the gallery. They were so brutish and aggressive. Asking all these questions in their face language. Hateful. It was enough to give one a headache. But I felt more than happy to answer their questions. An audience is an audience even if it insists on barking at me like that. They HAD come a long way to speak to me, even if they were being rude.
I tried to answer their questions as best as possible. However, I can’t help but get a feeling that they didn’t intend on being insulting when they asked if I’d been to the other planets. Can you imagine? Had I been to the other planets?
Well not many people that I know of would be unaware of a gallery system when they saw one. It’s positively written all over the star. Even the lowest life forms know THAT. But it was an interesting opportunity, you know, because they didn’t know about the art. I was interested in what they thought of my work. The impressions of the truly ignorant. Fascinating stuff in theory. They were SO banal, though. Utter disappointment. All they wanted to ask where they came from. And it’s not like they were in the business or anything like that. Couldn’t exactly talk shop with them.
Tried to tell them those things out there were my creations. They just didn’t get it. What was I to say? It was all very tedious trying to tell them how I created this or created that. The dragons on this world. The grid of ice on the other. I tried to explain to them what I was trying to express with my work. But as always, the work really has to speak for itself. And it really must speak for itself with people who are sophisticated enough to understand it. Yes, they were intelligent enough to travel across systems. But even insects have a kind of intelligence about them. It was all very tedious.
Anyway, good luck with that latest project of yours, my love. So much brutality in your work. So many gassy planets. Don’t know how you manage. And then to simply let that one third from the sun develop the way it has. Just shoot out a little bit of raw material and let it do its work. Fascinating and minimalist I’m sure but I that sort of thing just isn’t for me. Come to think of it, the ones who came to interview me just might’ve been from one of your works. I know, I know I treated them well. Don’t you worry. I think they’ll be the centerpiece of my next work, actually. Lower life forms are SO interesting to work with.
by submission | Jun 28, 2014 | Story |
Author : J M Walker
he had no idea if she would have this opportunity again. Every second counted. Only moments were left of her two hour time allotment. Her opportunity to advance earth’s technology, and most likely her career, depended on how much information she could gather in these last few moments. She suddenly felt dizzy, her blood sugar was dropping. “Not now!” her mind screamed in panic. She felt in the pocket of her lab coat once again for the piece of hard candy she usually kept there for emergencies. She had used the candy during a meeting yesterday and had forgotten to replace it. She expected to come up with the penny that had found its way there but to her surprise she found a peppermint. Setting the mystery aside, she shoved the candy into her mouth and went back to her notes.
A bell chimed. Dr Richardson sighed and stepped to the personnel lift.
As the lift doors closed the starship vanished leaving stark white walls, floor and ceiling.
The doors swished open a moment later. A janitor with a push broom entered the room.
“Are you okay love?” he asked the voluptuous, scantily dress woman that was handcuffed to an examination table in the center of the room. “Why did they bring you here? What are they doing to you?” This was the fifth day he had found her here and he knew she wouldn’t answer, mute he guessed. He stepped to the table and took her in his arms, comforting her. He wiped the tears from her eyes and kissed her. “I’ll get you out of here, I promise,” he whispered. She excepted his advances greedily.
Half an hour later the janitor left the room, tears in his eyes at leaving her behind. Determined to find a way to get her out.
As the doors closed, the women and exam table vanished.
Dr. Sanders entered the lift. He didn’t know what he would find upstairs today. Yesterday he found the money he needed to pay his parking fine but still no answers to what the alien technology that physically resided there was. His job depended on those answers. If he didn’t find them today he was fired.
Dr. Sanders stepped off the lift. In the center of the room sat a small ornate box. This was different. He sat down cross legged before it and opened the lid. A tiny green woman, dressed in bright colors, stood up to confront him. He could see through her. She appeared almost crystalline. His mind was instantly filled with her thoughts. He knew she acted out of compassion for others, giving them the desires of their hearts and fulfilling their needs.
“Thank you for allowing me to see what is really going on here,” he told her. “I know you want to help me keep my job. Because of how kind you are I can’t let my superiors know about you. They would torture you and dissect you to figure you out. I can’t let that happen.”
“Thank you for your kind intentions toward me. Here is your reward.” His body took on the colors of a rainbow and began to dissolve.
“What is happening to me?” he asked.
“I am sending you to a place where you can become enlightened.”
“Can’t I stay with you?”
“What makes you think we’re real?”
His body finished dissolving. The box and the alien vanished.
The lift doors opened…
by Julian Miles | Jun 27, 2014 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
There is a stream that runs from the foot of the dais where I meditate; shimmering and trickling along the length of the cave system before it fills the little pool under the shading overhang, which drains into the aquifer.
M’tembe smiles as I blink and look up. He hands me a gourd of fermented goat’s milk. As I sip slowly and appreciatively, he brings me up to speed on events that have occurred while I ‘Zenned’ my way through the last two weeks.
“Kinshahou killed his father; the Kinsha tribe has joined the peace. Obuwega came to see you. The spirits fell upon him and he rolled in the dirt. When he stood up, he pronounced you ‘Watela’ and placed his entire nation under the peace.”
I wish I’d seen that. A fifty-year old war chief and notorious barbarian suffering an epiphany before a skinny, white-skinned teenage girl sat in the lotus position deep within a cave deep in equatorial Africa.
My parents thought I had a glandular disorder. I spent my childhood going from specialist to specialist. I was eleven before someone thought to stop the intravenous fluids and see what happened.
If I am not under exertion, I sweat fresh water. More than that: I make it. You can feed me dry ration bars for as long as you like, I do not dehydrate. The water running from me only slows a bit. How I do this is a mystery. All sorts of new ideas were postulated. Arguments still rage, because the proof of their theories would need me to be vivisected. I doubt that they would find the answers even then. When something defies all laws and balances known to science, they don’t need to take the subject apart. They need a genius to deduce the reasons and how they were missed, or to propose a novel solution.
My genius was named Hubert Monchamps and he was brought in after their second attempt to see if I could breathe what I produced all-but drowned me. I was thirteen, having my first encounter with puberty in a place where no-one thought to treat me like a teenage girl.
Hubert arrived as part of some deal made with the fringe science groups and internet lobbies. He took one look and had his thirteen year-old daughter rushed to the facility. Eta was blind but could echolocate. Through her, I found out that a spate of freak child mutations had occurred around the time of my birth. Eta was probably the only one with any semblance of a life as her brilliant father had worked out early what was going on, then taught his daughter to lie to everyone except her close family.
It took Hubert and Eta ten days to work out how to steal me. Through my extensive non-fictional reading I told them where I needed to go. To my surprise, they agreed.
Hubert’s last words were: “Vanish. Become a mythical being or goddess in a place where so-called civilisation has not insinuated itself too much. In you, I see the potential for more good than any since the mythical prophets.” He smiled: “But please make sure your followers do not become bigots.”
My name is Elizabeth Shannon. The tribes call me Elzbeshanou. My peace – the water peace – has ended wars fought for generations. It has destroyed the myths of female inferiority. There is a network of wise men and women now. Missionaries provide schools. I provide counsel. My blessing came from somewhere closer than heaven, and the Earth sorely needs our reverence.
by submission | Jun 26, 2014 | Story |
Author : Suzanne Borchers
Sarah sighed.
She walked past the shelter’s only window—a 6-inch square with 6-inch thick glass. She focused on the gray metallic wall in front of her, refusing to even glance at the window with its hazy view of volcanic rock.
A 2-inch by 3-inch photo on a small, pink paper heart hung in solitary seclusion. She could close her eyes and see it. A grinning geologist encased in astronaut garb held his helmet in one hand and hoisted a piece of large obsidian covered with moss in the other. His eyes crinkled at the photographer with both celebration and love.
Sarah’s eyes blurred as she looked inward to see the scene.
Sam was on the team of scientists working to grow vegetation on the barren planet. This was vital for the community’s life. Their rations would run out before another supply ship would arrive.
Sam and his team had tried various schemes to encourage plant growth in the limited oxygen atmosphere. They drilled holes into the rocks, planting seeds in various types of crushed lava and growth mediums. They tried direct sun and indirect sun with no success even in the oxygenated lab.
But finally the day came when Sam went out into the abyss and brought back the moss covered rock. Eureka! Sarah snapped the photo with a long outdated camera. The soft-focused Sam stood in perpetual happiness. Sarah found paper, mounted the photo, and christened it with a kiss. Then she kissed Sam, again and again. They would be able to wait the years needed for the supply ship, together with their hoped-for children.
Sarah sighed.
The day came that Sam and his team didn’t return with produce from their greenhouse laboratory. When the scientists hadn’t returned the next day, Sarah armed herself with rationed oxygen-supplement, bags of dried food, and containers of shelter-produced water. She placed them in the pack attached to her atmosphere suit. Sarah exchanged looks of hope and despair with the others. The children played demon-dragon, laughing until one noticed his mother crying. Then all went silent.
Sarah stepped out of the double airlock onto the rocky ground. It was morning. The red sun shone bleakly, rising above the extinct volcano before her, washing the gray sky with streaks of scarlet.
The weight of the pack became progressively unbearable, as she struggled to climb the volcano’s rugged slope. Her eyes squeezed shut with effort.
Finally she felt the rock shift downward to the lab with its vegetation experiment so vital to their survival. As she climbed down the slope, she prayed that Sam and the others would be safe.
The laboratory lay before her.
She ran to the door, pushed the airlock button, entered.
The airlock closed behind her without a sound.
Her hand shook as she pressed the second airlock button. The door silently whizzed open.
She stepped inside.
A large rock lay under a ragged hole in the ceiling. The red sun cast shadows on the motionless bodies below. Their suits hung on the wall.
Sarah ran to Sam, scooping him up in her arms, cradling him and rocking him like her lost child. “Sam.” His limp arms dangled while his eyes stared up at nothing.
She forced herself to look away from her husband to the brown, shriveling vegetables, and then to the thirty scattered bodies.
Sarah sighed.
The broken families waited.
They had the right to know.
Their numbers had been cut in half; fewer people to feed with the remaining rations until the supply ship came.
They would survive.
But at what cost?
Sarah sighed.
