by submission | May 7, 2024 | Story |
Author: Majoki
Snug in my craft, taking each spacetime curve to a smooth jazz arrangement of “Just My Imagination,” it became clear. Things were slowing. We were winding down.
It’d been a good ride. Not in every age and not for everybody, but for enough of humanity, we’d experienced amazing things. In the process we’d blindly terraformed our planet into something more suited to tubeworms and gastropods than to big-brained bipeds, which rightly upset most sapiens. Me as well, until this morning when I journeyed north.
The thing is. The thing is. The thing is.
Such a difficult phrase to finish. So personal. Ever bordering on the messy. The thing is, even though our time is winding down and will spin us ever faster as we circle the drain, the planet is still a remarkable place. Snug in my craft, taking each spacetime curve of the highway, listening to mellow music, under the cool shadow of towering trees and snowy peaks, peace and beauty remains.
Not everywhere, of course. Up ahead are the scars from last summer’s fires. Charred hillsides, thorny with burnt trunks, and stumps like giant incense sticks going to ash. Cracked cement slabs and scorched iron skeletons, mammoth grave markers of homes and businesses left for dead. Yes. We were going down. Down down.
The thing is.
It’s not the first time. Our planetary record is clear: extinction is the norm. So, we shouldn’t be surprised, even though we’re grand at fooling ourselves and piss poor at saying “no.” We sapiens tend to monumentalize our capaciousness and sadly underestimate our zeal for overkill. That’s why I’m snug in my four-wheeled form-fitting climate-controlled craft, conscious of traveling spacetime on a smooth curving highway, listening to ones and zeros make lively music. It’s also why the land ahead is parched and blackened.
It’s well beyond our control now. Megadisasters—fires, floods, droughts, storms—making our heads spin like tops until we wobble. Until we wind all the way down.
The thing is.
Snug in my craft, cruising through spacetime, enjoying tunes, there may be a way to get right with ourselves. The planet doesn’t care. The universe either. It won’t require anything big of us. Quite the contrary. We need to make ourselves small. Hunker down. Practice humility and stay ass-clear of arrogance.
Being humble is not our default position, but when humanity is going down the drain, we might make ourselves meek enough to come out the other side and inherit a new earth.
by submission | May 5, 2024 | Story |
Author: Michael T Schaper
Serena felt a little strange as she stepped out of the clinic and into the street.
Not surprising, since she’d just made herself immortal.
She stopped to check the road before going any further. It was full of people going about their business. She thought she might recognise some of them, but then she’d never been good with faces.
No one seemed to have noticed her. Good. She slipped into the crowd, just an ordinary member of the public. The only difference was that one day they’d be dead, and she wouldn’t.
It had been boring in the clinic, she remembered, and the time had passed excruciatingly slowly; apparently it took a long while to download her entire consciousness. A headache was surely on its way.
But it was worth it, as long as she wasn’t caught.
This was still a highly experimental process, the legality of which was questionable. Enough people had died to make medical regulators reluctant to authorize it.
So all of this was on the sly, an ethical and practical grey zone. Even the clinic had been keen to get her away and out of sight as soon as they’d finished.
No wonder she was feeling uptight.
Serena noticed a movement out of the edge of her vision as she walked down the road, and tensed up momentarily. But it was just a woman walking past. For a moment Serena thought she looked somewhat familiar, which made her suspicious. But then reason won over and she ignored the stranger.
Be calm, she told herself.
Serena settled down at an outside table at the next cafe she came across. Best to act normal, as if she’d been doing nothing in particular.
She thought about what she’d just done. Amazing, really. She’d set in train the continuation of her own personality, all downloaded and stored electronically somewhere. Then a few skin grafts, so her DNA could also be preserved. When she passed away, it could all be downloaded into an avatar and – viola! – she’d be back. Or at least as close as possible.
Speaking of which, she realised with a start, where was her copy of all that data? The clinic had promised they’d upload it all up into the cloud, and also send her a backup copy. But she’d left in such a hurry they seemed to have forgotten.
“Hello?”
A figure loomed up out of nowhere and faced her across the table.
Serena realised with a start that it was the same woman who’d passed her just minutes ago. The face was somehow familiar to her. Friend or foe?
The stranger sat down, summoned the waiter and ordered two cafe au lait. “One each,” she declared. “I’m sure it’s still your favorite. And the caffeine might help your headache.”
How did she know that? Serena’s heart started beating rapidly. Had this woman been watching her come out of the clinic? Who was she?
They sat there in the midday sun, silently, awkwardly, and drank their coffee, Serena petrified as to what might happen next. An arrest?
She cursed her luck. All that angst, and at the end of it she didn’t even have her download. She could feel the headache continuing to pound away.
“Are you following me?” she finally summoned up the courage to ask.
The stranger looked over once more, and smiled. “Of course I am. I’m going to be with you for a long time to come.”
“Are you?”
“Well, it’s what was paid for.”
Serena studied the woman opposite her one more time, and then realized the face she was looking at was her own. And if that was the case…
“You’re my backup, aren’t you?” she asked, relieved to have figured it out.
The woman just smiled at her, a sad pitying look.
“No. You’re mine.”
by submission | May 4, 2024 | Story |
Author: Robert White
“I always thought the Kremlin or the White House would start it, you know, trip over that whatchamacallit, the nuclear football,” Erik said.
“I don’t think it’s actually a football,” Alan said. “It’s a suitcase with a bunch of buttons.”
“Cops jumped ship like everybody else,” Erik said. “Half the town’s looting and murdering the other half. You hear any sirens?”
“Mostly geezers left,” Alan said. “Scared shitless of leaving their houses. Before my mom took off, we bolted doors and jammed furniture against windows. Too many crazies walking around since they saw that meteor.”
“Asteroid.”
“Whatever, dude. Thing’s gonna pulverize the country. Tsunamis hundreds feet high. The Great Lakes will rain down boiling water on our asses. You think it matters what we call it?”
“We can still run.”
“Run where? The roads are littered with abandoned cars. Every highway jammed with people trying to flee. You can’t run or walk far enough to be safe.”
The only station reporting described shootouts at the airport; rogue pilots were stealing anything with wings.
Neither Erik nor his best friend conceptualized a world without TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. A world without internet, television, or radio. No cable, no Wi-Fi, nothing to transmit the sound of a human voice or an image from point A to point B. A world of silence punctuated by outbursts, sobbing in the night from houses where the residents paced like prison inmates. Terror over the coming catastrophe paralyzed countries as far from impact as New Zealand. People mobbed churches and mosques begging God to stretch out a hand to stop this Mount Everest-sized rock of nickel and iron let loose from beyond the Kuiper Belt before it slammed into this small planet in its insignificant solar system of the Orion-Cygnus Arm, a minor spiral arm of our home galaxy.
NASA calculated the size, density, speed, and impact angle of 45 degrees. Once this sausage-shaped hunk of left-over debris burst through the keyhole at 10,000 miles per hour into Earth’s dense atmosphere, it was game over just as it had been sixty-five million years ago for the dinosaurs when a smaller asteroid plummeted through the keyhole to impact off the Yucatán Peninsula.
Unseen by NASA’s skywatchers for near-Earth objects, Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia saw it first. Ohio State confirmed it and plotted orbit, trajectory, calculated the lat and long coordinates, and time of impact—south of Belle Island in the Detroit River. The odds were like hitting a bullet with a bullet. Radio astronomers in Dr. Amy Mainzer’s Center for Near-Earth Objects Studies named it “Asteroid Gremory” after a Japanese manga cartoon. Gremory was the sexualized demon who symbolized greed and lust and who ate the heart of Akuma-kun, the boy prodigy who appeared only once every 10,000 years.
Gremory could not be deflected by crashing a satellite into it as its DART program had been designed for. Months or years, not days or hours, were required to effect increments of directional change in the orbit. Blowing it up with intercontinental missiles armed with nuclear warheads, a juvenile Hollywood notion, was not even a last resort because fragmenting the asteroid created force multipliers as massive chunks fell to Earth. The average person wasn’t capable of comprehending fifty billion billion Joules of energy unleashed in a nanosecond.
Big enough to be seen without a telescope, the massive rock would arc over the smallest of the Great Lakes, change colors as it passed through the visible spectra of light to resemble a two-dimensional, purple rock.
Erik turned to Alan. “Going home to get my goodbyes in.”
by submission | May 3, 2024 | Story |
Author: Dan Leicht
Jade slumped into the Captain’s chair as she watched her crew on the navigation hub. Their route beeped on the screen in front of her. The four-person crew were relying on her to swoop in for a rescue if needed.
Jade crunched down on a kale chip as she tried her best not to drift to sleep while watching the monotonous screen.
*****
Jade woke to an alert from the captain. A green dusting of kale coated her chest. She checked the screen and only noticed one dot, not four. Where had the others gone?
She checked her notes to see the alert.
Captain Moore: Swoop! Swoop! Latch onto our location. They’re approaching fast!
Jade swiped the screen away with her hand and brought up the ship’s controls.
*****
Scans picked up a lifeform below the ship.
Was it her captain?
No, but it was a crewmate. The ship’s engineer. Kasey.
*****
Jade sat across from her, waiting to hear what happened to the rest of the crew as Kasey avoided eye-contact and shoved handfuls of kale chips into her mouth. Something felt off about Kasey. She looked… Older?
“Where are the others?” asked Jade.
“The others?” Kasey furrowed her brow. “There are no others.”
“There are no… What do you mean? Where is Captain Moore? What about nutritionist Benny? Our weapons expert Sam?”
“May I ask what your name is?”
“My name? What are you talking about? It’s me Jade. I’m the ship’s navigation officer. Surely you haven’t forgotten about me. You’ve all only been gone for,” she checked her watch, “three hours.”
“Outside the atmosphere is different,” said Kasey. “I remember you now. You said we were down there for three hours?” Jade nodded. “I figured. Thirty years we were down there.”
“Thirty years? You don’t look sixty.”
“Time kept looping. It kept looping and we kept getting trapped. Whenever we entered the cave, pop… We’d appear back where we started. The comms wouldn’t work, not until we broke through the loop and finally entered the cave. Benny had to,” she paused for a moment as if to catch her breath, “Benny had to die. After making it to the cave over and over, we finally deciphered the hieroglyphs outside and learned of the ritual. What we didn’t know was that he’d come back, but not as Benny. He came back a beast.
“We ran as fast as we could. Captain Moore should’ve had you on standby, I’d mentioned it to her so often than she told me to shut up. She sent you a message. Did you get it? Sam fired countless rounds. I looked back for a moment, and he stood his ground. Fighting until the bitter end. I kept running. Eventually, I lost the beast. Then you found me.”
“So, the others didn’t make it?” Jade couldn’t believe what she’d just heard. She also couldn’t believe Kasey made it out alive. “We need to mount a rescue mission.”
“It’s too late for the others.”
“You didn’t see Sam go down, right? He might still be out there.”
“He went down.” Kasey shoved her hand into her pocket and pulled out shell casings.
“What’s this?” asked Jade.
“I collected trinkets from each one.” Kasey pulled out the Captain’s glasses and placed them beside the casings. “What did I get from Benny? Oh, that’s right.” She reached into a pants pocket and pulled out Benny’s lighter.
“What do you have to offer?”
“What’s going on? You’re scaring me.”
“Benny wasn’t the one sacrificed.”
Jade watched in horror as Kasey’s teeth transformed into sharp fangs.
by submission | May 2, 2024 | Story |
Author: Lindsay Thorimbert
She was perfect, even if she was so often indignant, given to suspicions and conspiracies. I couldn’t resist her, but I didn’t believe what she said. Not at first.
We met in a chat room, less than a year before the internet finally died. She said it was already gone, whether or not I could see it, that the traffic was all bots. She asked me byzantine riddles, made me repeat tongue twisters and demanded I set my camera at different angles, all to prove I wasn’t AI-generated. I was dazzled by her dark eyes. She remained skeptical as I grew infatuated.
She said she longed for an outdoor life though she spent every moment online. She gave me an address for after, and I wrote her when the servers finally went dark. She never answered. I travelled to Andalusia but found only crumbling whitewash at the address she gave.
I was angry at first, the idea she had strung me along, only to vanish. I grew obsessed, read book after book about the fall of the internet until I found one describing the hallmarks of deepfake video chat. A weariness crept into me as I read. The unusual cadence of her speech, her expressive eyes which I found so endearing, they were all listed.
