by submission | May 2, 2015 | Story |
Author : R Patrick Widner
The signal light above the airlock door glowed red. Tense seconds passed. The atmosphere in the chamber equalized. Finally the interior doors slid open and the rescue team hustled in carrying an improvised battle stretcher.
The soldier being carried writhed in pain, grabbing the sides of his head. The attendants futilely tried to calm his flailing. Chaos was exploding around them in the fire and smoke. Loud alarms were blaring. Frantic racing shadows darted down hallways.
A voice cut through the din.
“To the ER!” “Get him sedated and on the table! He’s got a live one!”
Misty air swirled and danced as he succumbed to the surgeons tools. There was only blank darkness until he awoke.
She was hovering over him and he didn’t recognize her.
“Hey, soldier,” she said. “You had us worried there for a while. They got it out, though. You’re the first one ever to survive. The doctors from Earth really know what they’re doing. You’re lucky, landing up at this base.”
His head was swimming. Somehow he knew that if he tried to talk, he wouldn’t be able to. He raised his eyes and saw gauze bandages surrounding his vision.
“You just relax there, soldier. You had some serious surgery done on your head. They took an intact egg out of your brain. That’s the first time they’ve been able to get one before it hatched. You’re the first one to survive.”
He closed his eyes and tried to remember, but couldn’t.
“You’re pretty much a hero around here,” she said. “Your squad cleaned out an entire nest and you brought back the first intact specimen we’ve seen. It’s going to be a very valuable tool for the genetics lab. They’ll very likely be able to build a bio-weapon from it.”
He nodded slowly as he drifted away.
“One hundred percent eradication,” General Warren said. “We owe it all to you, soldier.”
The ceremony was starting and soon he would be live on TV in every country in the world that had survived.
“Without that specimen I don’t know what we would have done. Sorry about your fellow soldiers, that was a brutal way to go. The video we recovered shows the forward base being overrun in seconds. How you escaped is a miracle. The others, well, they were all injected almost immediately, and gestation lasts between two and twenty minutes.”
“C’mon, soldier; let’s go let them have a look at the hero.”
Looking out at the crowd he felt a swell of emotion. The President was about to speak and he would be mentioned by name and stand and give a nod to the audience . He would humbly accept his medals, even though he still didn’t quite understand the whole concept.
The opening speeches ended and then the main speech began. Shortly he heard his name mentioned and he nodded at the applause. The second time his name was mentioned, he stood.
Suddenly he felt a throbbing pulse of pain from his right eye. He grabbed his head and screamed. His eyeball popped from its socket and dangled on his cheek. Behind it a dull gray orb pushed out.
The pressure behind the egg burst it from its socket and it launched above the crowd. Still in mid-air, it erupted into a frenzy of claws and teeth.
It landed thrashing and slashing. Every human it killed, it grew a little. Soon it dominated the landscape and it wandered away destroying everything it encountered.
A single tear ran down the soldier’s cheek as he watched his baby go off into the world.
by submission | May 1, 2015 | Story |
Author : Stephanie L. Dunn
Sol System: 4509 CE
“Final log: Every planet has people on it, most of the moons as well, hundreds of sovereign city stations scattered like a game of marbles between Venus and The Kuiper belt and a few brave colonies even further out. Twenty Billion people inhabit a ball shaped chunk of space roughly 100,000 AU, or two light-years in diameter. We long ago shed our gods, our guns, conquered disease and hunger – even hobbled death itself. It was not uncommon for a person to see their third century if accident or intent did not overtake them. Earth to Mars in a day, to Neptune in a week, to the most distant station a mere dozen weeks, our technology fast and safe.
(Shuddering sigh)
So why have we never reached even the nearest star system, are we simply content to observe their glory from afar?
The distant stars bloom, blaze and die, some in violent and beautiful displays while others demurely came and went before they were ever perceived. We would get no closer to them than the length of our tether – our connection to our own star. The leash extended generously to the Oort Cloud where our sun becomes lost in the galactic background. What barred us from unclipping that leash was fear. To play in the shallows within sight of shore was pleasant enough but to lose sight of that beacon in the heavens, our sun, caused a deadly panic. Psychologists could neither fathom nor treat the insanity that drove pilots to ram their ships into asteroids or comets; engineers to sabotage their beloved engines, crewmen open airlocks exposing the ship’s occupants to heartless space. The suicide barrier, as it’s come to be known, was a line the human race couldn’t cross.”
*crackle* “Wayfair City station to unknown craft, please reply.”
“Computer, end log … open a channel to Wayfair.”
“Compliance.”
“Wayfair, this is the private yacht Vingilot registry HPL8472 of Ganymede, Captain and sole occupant Kaalyndahl Crafter speaking.”
“Welcome to Wayfair, Captain Crafter…”
(Strained silence)
“You may as well ask, you see it on your screen.”
“Oh … uhm. Records show you registered a flight plan into the suicide zone a year ago?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Okay. Station Commander Marsh would like to see you once you dock, please, follow the beacon in.”
“Acknowledged, Crafter out. Computer set course for the beacon and engage docking autopilot. *beep* Open and continue log.”
“Compliance.”
“No one has ever entered the suicide zone and returned sane, if they returned at all.”
*click*
“Now they will know their fear is valid, but there is nothing out there that can cause physical harm … because there is nothing out there at all. The distant stars and galaxies are but mirages caused by the Oort Cloud’s shell! We are alone in the universe, and I have seen the shimmering globe of our domain against the endless, starless void.”
*BANG!*
by submission | Apr 30, 2015 | Story |
Author : Ron Riekki
“A Curious Knot God made”
–Edward Taylor
We got the call for a girl hit by a drone.
My partner drove.
He hates patients, so he prefers to be behind the console. He leaves me in back to treat the patients. Although there’s not really much we have to do nowadays. Just swap.
We arrived at the scene and the girl had two broken femurs. We scanned her I.D. and it showed she had medical insurance. Otherwise, the rule is that we treat you for the injuries, but there’s no swap. She was all clear. Her I.D. info even showed we didn’t need parental approval. So we loaded her into the time ambulance. We asked her how long ago she was hit. She said about ten minutes. We set it for twenty minutes before the accident.
The blood loss was about a liter. We just let it happen. We’d clean it up later. Her blue sweat pants were now magenta. It was simple color mixing. Jogging blue and arterial red make a perfect magenta. Our floor was white in spots, but now mostly red. They make the floors white so that you can easily find any blood. You don’t want to leave dried blood on a floor. Diseases in dried blood can last for weeks. We had violence janitors for that.
We arrived twenty minutes in the past and waited.
It was a good intersection. A Friday. The streets looked made for femoral breaks. Some roads, you can almost see the blood about to happen in the future.
We looked around at this world. A strange one. A human junkyard of sorts. This other universe is where we drop the bodies. We take what’s healthy. We leave what’s not. It’s a world of wheelchairs and limping, of scars and missing arms. Medicine hasn’t advanced much since the invention of the time ambulance. They say it’s a crutch, that we rely on it too much now.
The girl of her past jogged up. We grabbed her, flashing our badges, the onlookers having seen it before. Her bleeding self in the ambulance looked at the pristine body, how she was only moments before. We explained who were we, but she shouted for her mom. We said her mother was in the future, healthy and perfect. We picked the version of her with the broken bones and placed her on the side of the road. We locked the door before her healthy self could jump out and break an ankle, and we’d have to go back even further in time.
by submission | Apr 29, 2015 | Story |
Author : Roger Dale Trexler
They answered the distress beacon but what they found was unexpected. The planet was far off the beaten path, and it was sheer luck that they received the transmission at all.
Still, it was a requirement of the Space Guild that all distress calls be answered.
Cramdon guided the shuttle into the atmosphere of the planet.
“It’s amazing they haven’t colonized this world yet,” he told Bruen, who sat in the co-pilot seat.
Lena Bruen was a lovely woman. It was rare that such a woman would join the Space Guild, but Tom Cramdon wasn’t about to complain. A pretty face in outer space was a rare thing indeed.
“It’s too far off trading routes,” she said. “There’s no money in it.”
“Money,” Cramdon replied, shaking his head. “When did the universe get so hell bent on turning a profit?”
“When the Space Guild took over,” she said. “My dad was a lifer. He remembers when it was about space explor…..”
She hung on the word. They broke through the clouds covering the planet and, below them, they saw lush, green wilderness. But, it wasn’t the beautiful landscape that dumbfounded her. No, it was something far more unique….and it was man-made.
“What the hell is that?” asked Cramdon.
Bruen, too shocked for words, could not reply.
Cramdon arched the ship around the monolith. The thing was taller than a skyscraper back on Earth and, as they circled it, he realized that it was a humongous hand reaching up toward the heavens.
“It’s a hand,” Bruen said. “Holding a heart.”
They circled the thing several times, admiring the detail and artistry of the sculpture. It was so perfect, so human.
“Who do you think built it?” asked Cramdon as, finally, he set the scout ship down on the ground at the base of the structure.
“I don’t know,” she replied. “But the more important question is why?”
Cramdon was about to speak when he noticed the red light flashing at the base of the sculpture.
“Looks,” he said, pointing.
They disembarked, each of them clutching their blasters tight. As they approached the flashing light, they saw a door. The door opened with a soft hydraulic hiss as they stepped up to it.
Cramdon looked at Bruen, and then stepped inside.
Bruen followed.
Lights flickered on as the station in the base came to life. They walked by a small living quarter, and came to a door. That door opened and they saw a man, long dead, slouched over a console. A red light flashed and, when Cramdon touched it, the distress beacon stopped.
Bruen jumped when a hologram came to life in front of her.
A tired looking old man, whom they realized was the dead man before them, spoke:
“My name is Jamison Dent. I am an artist. I am also a citizen of the universe. I once lived on Earth, as you did, but that world became a farce to me. So, I left. I traveled out into space where I could pursue my interests without the restraints of a world I no longer loved. I wanted to create art. I wanted to leave a legacy that had nothing to do with the petty economy or politics. I have summoned you here to see my life’s work….I love you, Alaina.”
The hologram died off.
“Jamison Dent,” Bruen said. “Could it be? I remember reading about him as a kid. He and his wife, Alaina. They were inseparable.”
“And she died,” Cramdon said. “He became a recluse after that…then he disappeared completely.”
“He hasn’t been heard from in fifty years.”
“Till now,” Cramdon said.
They turned, walked outside, and looked up at the monument to love that a lonely man had built.
Suddenly, nothing else seemed as important.
by submission | Apr 28, 2015 | Story |
Author : Sean Kavanagh
“Save me, save yourself,” the old man muttered, as he did every morning. There was nothing kindly in the sick old man’s words, and the nurse shuddered to hear them or to touch him. Behind her stood a phalanx of three doctors, all looked weary. They were supposed to work in shifts, but it was hard to sleep with this patient. The Final Patient, as the media had named him,
“There,” said the nurse after administering the last in an endless row of daily injections. She carefully backed away, afraid of the one hundred pound man in the bed, with his papery skin and wheezing breath. Death really did have an odour all its own. One of the doctors gave her a pat on the back. They were all in this together.
Literally.
From the dying old man, ran the usual web of tubes and drips. The contraptions that kept him alive, slowing his exit from the world, providing comfort. But there was a second layer of lines connected to his body: fibre optic cables that went out to the internet and from there to the world beyond. Millions of times a second they sent out signals about the old man’s health, letting servers and control panels on all the continents know he was still alive.
The old man had connected himself to the nerve centre of all the nuclear plants he owned around the globe. If he died, they went into deliberate meltdown, taking millions or billions with him. It was the ultimate incentive to science: keep me alive, cure me…or else. I die, you die.
They’d thought about cutting the connections, but the system would only interpret that as death and….well.
Over the months leaders, spiritual and secular, filed in, pleading for him to think again about this act of personal ego that he was committing against the world. He told them to leave – in case he died of boredom. The old man’s family had made the same plea, only to be written out of his will (a cruel joke as who wanted to inherit an irradiated empire of broken power plants?)
He lay dying, the threads of fibre gently counting down his demise.
In the fevered atmosphere of panic, organ donors became national heroes as they came forward to give the old man fresh meat to extend his life a little more. Their sacrifice noted and then forgotten as new ailments took hold. The doctors told the politician to expect the worst any day soon. The politicians told the people to expect good news any day soon. Hollywood worried whether DiCaprio was too young to play the dying old man in the upcoming film of his life and death.
And then the old man’s assistant appeared and whispered in his ear. The old man looked crestfallen. He beckoned the nearest doctor to him, whispered the release code, and allowed the cables to be removed.
His death would be his own.
“What happened?” asked the nurse as the assistant went to leave.
“His rival, Mr Lu in Shanghai is also gravely ill. Mr Lu’s office just announced that he has also connected himself to his nuclear plants. It’s a fashion thing with these rich now.” The assistant looked at his old, dying boss. “These rich guys always want to be the centre of attention, they hate to be the same as each other. “
