by submission | Nov 30, 2015 | Story |
Author : Tiasha J. Garcia
“Um, Houston, we have a problem,” the woman tittered nervously. Really, she was little more than a girl, radiant in the late spring sunshine as it gleamed off her long brown hair.
“Yes, and what would that be?” the man/boy inquired, relaxing amidst a cloud of pillows and a heap of tangled sheets.
Unseen, the Visitor watched them with a ferocious intensity that was almost like hatred.
“This,” and the woman brandished a little white stick, waving it back and forth.
The man/boy blanched, hid his expression with a sudden urge to cough.
The woman/girl’s eyes filled with tears.
The Visitor clenched his slender, skeletal fingers, all eight on each hand, into a powerful fist.
Every time, every time it ended this way. He had gone back and meddled as much as was possible, altered this moment with little touches like inspiring the man/boy to bring her flowers, or the surprise eating expedition at the park, or a mutual viewing of the flickering motion pictures this culture enjoyed so much.
But never wine, or alcohol of any kind, or anything that could potentially harm that precious fetus.
“Listen, I don’t know if now is the right time…”
“Yeah, me neither. I know, I have all that work at the lnstitute, we’re on the verge of a major breakthrough…”
“Can you just see me with a baby strapped to my chest in the lab? Excuse me, it’s time for a feeding, pass me that beaker please…”
Strained laughter dwindled into an awkward silence that hung like a pall in the bright morning air.
The Visitor’s fingertips were embedded in what passed for palms with his people, so deep into the spongy tissue that thin lines of silver seeped out.
He was going to fail.
Again.
Again and again and again, he had seen this moment to its bitter end.
“Well…if that’s really…”
“Maybe if the timing were different, but right now…”
Two of the most brilliant minds on this polluted third world planet casually sealed the fate of billions upon billions with this awkward conversation about career responsibility and personal needs.
There was only one possible salvation, one infinitesimal chance to avoid the galactic Holocaust that would occur in 33.25 solar years.
And once again these blithe idiots threw it away.
The woman/girl picked up the phone, pushing a pre-set number–“Hi, I need to make an appointment with my doctor”–as the man/boy turned away, ashamed, and pulled on his clothes.
They would never meet in this room, or anywhere, ever again.
And so everyone they knew, and trillions of other species, would die.
The Visitor turned away from the window, activating a relay beam to return to the ship.
Research, he thought, more research. We will have to try again. We will have to try harder.
Thus passed a typical Monday, when the destiny of the world was once again decided in favor of a mass extinction event. It was as if the human race didn’t believe it deserved to continue its way of life.
With a rumble of respiratory vents, the Visitor continued to research romance, opening a tome by the esteemed homo sapien author Jackie Collins.
Maybe next time…or maybe not.
by submission | Nov 28, 2015 | Story |
Author : C. J. Boudreau
“We’re ready, Arthur. I just finished loading the instructions to the transmission controller. The fuel will begin transfer at 9:00.”
Doctor Evan Thackeray was the foremost expert on thermonuclear reactor design. His colleague, Arthur Henry, was the second. There wasn’t any rivalry. They were both completely dedicated to building a practical thermonuclear power plant. It seemed they were on the threshold. It was the crowning test.
“The breakthrough in wormholes has made it possible to start and sustain a fusion reaction on a manageable scale. We will finally continuously produce more power than we use. The multiple wormholes delivering hydrogen into the same point in space at one time will start and sustain the reaction just as in the sun. We can fully control it.”
“The wormholes have opened new avenues. Maybe eventually allowing communication across interstellar space and even time.”
“Maybe, but they’re limited in how much they can expand the wormholes. It would take an almost infinite amount of energy to open one large enough to accept a pen. They’ve known for decades that submicroscopic wormholes opened and closed constantly on the quantum level. Capturing and directing them was the challenge. They have succeeded wonderfully. I haven’t had my coffee yet Arthur, and I have to visit the washroom.
We have more than an hour. I’ll meet you in the commissary. After we’ve had coffee
we’ll turn on the coolant and the containment field and go through the checklist. It will only take a few minutes.”
“It seems strange to be working on a reactor so small and simple. In a classroom.”
“It does, but with the fuel transmitted directly from the production facility, and without huge magnetic compression field coils, the space requirements are minimal. Let’s go.”
The blast was small, as thermonuclear explosions go. It still obliterated the entire campus. Even the track field was beyond reclamation. The reaction had continued for several microseconds before the fuel controller sensed a lack of feedback. The loss of life was tragic, but could have been much worse if the student body weren’t on spring break. It’s hoped that Dr. Thackeray at least had a chance to go. He certainly never knew what happened. The washroom was only a few feet away from the reactor. The entire building was vaporized and ionized. All the paper records were gone, but digital records up to the event, including videos from inside the classroom, were backed up off site in multiple locations. Other researchers were able to immediately determine the cause of the disaster. When Doctor Thackeray signed in that Monday morning, he signed in at seven o’clock. The computer recorded the time as eight o’clock. It was a mistake many of us made that Monday. The beginning of daylight saving time had been moved to that weekend because of the new National Gay Pride holiday, in an effort to lighten hangovers and to discourage absenteeism. Neither Thackeray nor Henry or their grad student assistants had checked the time. It was seven minutes to nine when they left for coffee and the washroom, believing it was seven minutes to eight. The hydrogen transmission started on time at nine o’clock.The coolant and containment field were never turned on.
A new team, now at a military facility, is carrying on the fusion reactor project, under government supervision, with improved safeguards and security. In another area of the work, a similar government monitored team at Cal Tech is using wormholes to experimentally communicate with the past. They hope to avert the tragedy.
by submission | Nov 27, 2015 | Story |
Author : Ben Friedman
I remember your gom jabbar. He was a squeaky clean critter, always huddling skittishly by his water bowl, furiously scrubbing his tiny paws then drying them off with wood shavings. He would drop all his waste in a tiny hole he dug out beneath a low flat rock and would shriek his high-pitched lungs out any time he was witnessed in the act.
That gom jabbar was a menace when you let him out too: always rearranging the linens and vestments in the chifferobe outside your parents’ master bedroom, earning you hundreds of boy-hours in the Circle of Shame and Penitence. But you never took your anger out on your little gom jabbar, and you took full responsibility for every mess he got you into. As any good flob-snasher would.
You used to say the poor creature was never meant to live behind plastic walls, that he was meant to scitter up to the electric heights and transmute into a sky elemental at least once a year, in order to gain direct nourishment from the bosom of the cloud gods. And so, despite your parents’ admonitions, you trusted your little gom jabbar out one spring solstice, hoping that sooner or later, he would return to you.
You opened your gom jabber’s cage.
And for two long years you waited, dreaming of your gom jabber, dreaming dreams that your gom jabber was dreaming, dreaming that your gom jabber was dreaming your dreams too. Only when you were drearily awake did you feel the great distance between you again. Between you and your gom jabber.
But then, sure enough, one summer day your gom jabber did return, a gleeful laser light twinkling in his crystalline ventricles, racing up and down his pleated belly as he descended from the skies, a little smaller in mass, but a lot brighter in voltage.
He cooed and sighed in your lap as you pet him, emitting fragrances rare and exotic from the fourteen corners of the wind. But then, that night, your parents found their silverware carefully interlaced into a Middle-Period style cathedral structure — in which little phantom light-cherubs were celebrating the Perpetual Birth of the Great Order — and they came down on you hard for it.
“You have to gain control of that gom jabber, or you don’t deserve to own one!”
“But you can’t own a gom jabber,” you tried to say.
But they wouldn’t listen.
As soon as he was returned to his cage, your gom jabber stared up at you with those bright lemon eyes. And for a moment you could see the many extraordinary things he witnessed out there: the Flying Whalers of Ekkmandu, the Canyon Carvers of Alesaphia, the Topaz Skyscrapers of the Freznak Empire…
And you could feel his sadness, the immeasurable loss at being locked back up in that little plastic cage again, in this little domestic bubble of a home, rather than out there, free, seeing and being one with the world. And you knew. You knew that your gom jabbar truly loved you, his one and only flob-snasher…because why else would he have come back for you?
Why else…but that you belonged to him…as much as he…to you?
by submission | Nov 26, 2015 | Story |
Author : Philip G. Hostetler
Somewhere along the line I drew a circle instead. I thought about it. When thinking in linear terms, does the line break on through to the other side to terminate at the beginning? If so, does it differ at all from a circle, the enigmatic snake biting it’s tail? All a matter of perspective, purely subjective really… But I believe they are one and the same. How so? How can something so different in appearance and direction have the exact same properties? Faith, baby, Faith.
Yeah, I said it, the ‘F’ word. Dirty as fuck, I know, but consider the limited faculty of human senses that are conditioned to the earthly experience. Then consider that if we could perceive the Gamma and X-Ray spectrum we’d be able to witness celestial events, grand explosions, the birth of stars and the degradation of energy. Now imagine your perception is invulnerable, completely resistant to entropy, which is what I’m getting at. Imagine all matter has been broken down to heat, pure heat. You’re there witnessing it, like a cosmic voyeur, not of the universe but suspended at the third person. You’ve seen it all, the formation, the progression and resulting diversity. The spontaneity of life erupting onto hydrated spheres of mass in that perfect goldilocks zone. Not too hot, not too cold- but just right. Ah the neutral zone, the balance…
So what the fuck does this have to do with Maggie Hubbard?
Everything. For she is the circle and I am the line. Here we are suspended, witnessing heat death and a big bang. Of course this was all before we decided to go spelunking into black holes. Not somewhere anyone wants to be really, witnessing your body stretching and tearing apart into base carbon, hydrogen and then concentrated amongst the orgy of elements at the center of a singularity is truly a harrowing experience, let me tell you…
But she’s so beautiful and I’d follow her anywhere, although by jumping into a black hole we never come back quite the same.
I digress, Maggie, oh Maggie, why did we ever leave the goldilocks zone? Why did we rise so far from grace? There we were, happily crawling on our bellies in the filth and muck of the earth, and now we’ve come to such great heights beyond ourselves that our selves are barely recognizable, save for the devotion to the basest elements and our fucked up ability of disembodied consciousness. Go anywhere, be anything, have the experience of any and all matter, for we’re all one and the same. So why are there two of us? That’s still got me all fucked up. I know we’re all one and the same so why does this disembodied consciousness require a pair? Every time we laid down to have Dr. MacArroy break our bodies down until all that remained was a massless wisp of consciousness and project us to various locations around the universe, he said it was absolutely necessary to have two linked souls. Oh, and he paid, he paid well… Every time we came back our bank accounts were burgeoning with digits, some kind of government grant to explore the potential of the human brain or… …whatever. Funny how that shit doesn’t matter when you’ve experienced the simultaneous beginning/end of the fucking universe. Fuck off money, I was a happy laborer, I manipulated earthly materials into humanoid living structures. All right, I was just a fucking carpenter- what do you want from me? Put this kind of knowledge into a layman’s head and see what the fuck happens. A convoluted, disjointed recount of eternity.
Maggie… Where the fuck have you gone? Never has Dr.MacArroy mentioned anything about the abyss. Is that really the only word? The void? The abstract nothing? The unimaginable? Is that where you’ve gone? As if to answer, your hand emerged as if from nothing. I grasped your hand and I pulled, I pulled harder than a singularity. I pulled with love. But now there is a darkness in your eyes. A darkness. As Dr. MacArroy said,
“Once the Circle is drawn, the Circle is gone.”
by submission | Nov 25, 2015 | Story |
Author : Angie Gibson
One more time.
It hurts so much. One more time may just kill me.
My hands shake as I lift my Fenestra Lens to my face. It’s a model A, race car red, as shiny as a freshly picked apple. It cost me everything I had. But thanks to it, I’ve climbed Mount Everest, I’ve explored the flooded labyrinths of Chac Mool, I’ve made love to countless beautiful women, I’ve killed a thousand men, I’ve died a thousand times. It cost me everything, but because of it I’ve LIVED.
But one more time will kill me.
I don’t put it on right away. I just hold it so it catches the fading light. Just a piece of plastic that fits over my head and eyes. So powerful, my bowels churn nervously just looking at it. My palms sweat. My heart races. Holding this, contemplating putting it on, I feel the same terrified thrill that countless others have felt standing in front of the gallows, horrifyingly certain of what lies within that dangling, sightless eye.
I don’t want to die. I could put it down on the ground right now and stomp it to pieces. I could chuck it out the window where a dozen scrabbling children will swoop down on it like hungry dogs. Maybe one of them will get away with The Lens intake—the equivalent of winning the lottery. I could do anything but put it on my head. But I don’t.
I’m a junky. A junky addicted to LIFE. A junky who knows damn well that one more shot is all it’s going to take to kill him. As if on cue my nose starts to bleed. The terrible headache pounds like a gong in my ears. Even if I don’t put it on, I probably only have a good year or two left.
I peer out my window. The faded yellow sun is setting from the septic sky. A sherbet burst of color-pollution that will kills millions upon millions of people. One might consider it beautiful. Cold faded concrete and glimmer-less glass stretch for miles, everything with even a touch of green has been stripped and eaten. Seventeen billion people starving at once. Everything that crawls, hops, swims or flies has been consumed long ago. Some have gone crazy with hunger and started eating dirt until their stomachs burst. Others have wised up and started eating each other. Beware the plump and peaceful.
My shrunken stomach whimpers. Inside The Lens I’ve eaten feasts at kings’ tables. Of all the simulations, The Lens spares you starvation—just a little too close to reality to be marketable. Maybe my last vision will be a dinner. Nothing crazy, something elegant. A view with lights at night. A beautiful woman across the small table. We will clink Champagne glasses and smile into each others eyes while the swollen vein in my brain bursts and floods me with blood. There will be no pain. In fact, it’ll be ecstasy. But what if I wake up impaled on a spear? I may just die writhing in agony. Even still, isn’t that better than the slow death of starvation? The meek and painful submission to a tumor in my spleen or kidneys or lungs? Or perhaps I will join my Family and Friends on the UsNet. Not my real family and friends, those don’t exist, but does it really matter whether they’re real or not? People I created subconsciously and The Lens made real for me? I don’t think so. They love me. That’s all that matters. Strangely, my hands stop shaking.
