by submission | Apr 22, 2015 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
I handed the teenager her milk and syrup laden drink and went back to the cash register. Just then, a Yedla walked into the coffee shop. He was a good seven feet tall and had a row of sharp teeth in his two mandibles. The other patrons in the shop fell silent. As soon as he got to the counter, the intimidating looking alien fell on his knees, bowed his head, and held his webbed hands up with the palms facing me.
“Pree! Pree!” he said with a trembling voice. It was as close to “please” as the Yedla larynx would allow. His clothing was dirty and tattered. Five years earlier, he might have swaggered into an establishment like mine and simply taken what he wanted. Or he might have razed the building to the ground with his particle rifle just for fun. Now he was humbly pleading for the very thing that had quickly ended the Yedla invasion of Earth: a cup of coffee.
The Yedla had arrived in a fleet of twenty starships. They’d transmitted a message in multiple human languages saying they’d scorch the surface of the Earth if we resisted. Then they’d fired a few volleys to let us know they had the means. The Yedla were less of an invading army than a sort of interstellar street gang. They didn’t want to conquer Earth. They’d take what they found desirable and would kill and pillage for the pleasure of it. Then they’d move on and probably scorch the Earth anyway. At least that’s what they thought until one of them tried coffee.
A group of Yedla had kicked in the door of a small coffee shop in Ohio. One of them was curious about the quintessential morning beverage and ordered the proprietor to give him a cup. The alien gulped down the java and almost immediately fell to the floor. He reportedly experienced two full minutes of ecstasy. Ten minutes later, he was convulsing in what physicians would later call Yedla Caffeine Withdrawal Syndrome.
Caffeine addiction spread like wildfire among the hedonistic marauders. Even the Yedla manning the vessels in orbit, once they heard about the exotic Terran hallucinogen, abandoned their posts and came down to the surface leaving their ships derelict and harmless.
Within three months of that first Yedla drinking a cup of coffee, the aliens were reduced to pathetic wretches. Some even resorted to rummaging through trash dumpsters looking for discarded coffee grounds. Earth had survived its alien invasion and the bean had proved mightier than the sword. The trick now is whether we’ll survive leapfrogging a thousand years ahead from all the Yedla tech the governments of the world are busily reverse-engineering.
“Preeeeee!” the trembling creature bellowed again. I broke down. I filled a big take away cup with light roast and handed it to him. He gulped it down and placed a shaking claw on my shoulder in gratitude before he shuffled out the door. I noticed several of my customers tear up. And I did, too. Five years ago, those aliens were the greatest existential threat Mankind had ever faced. Now, we can’t help but feel sorry for them.
by submission | Apr 19, 2015 | Story |
Author : Rick Tobin
It all started in the spring of 1977. I remember Sunday afternoon in Houston, in my future wife’s apartment, slouching on her couch while listening to public radio. The sunshine wafted through flowered drapes, dancing across her handmade Afghan, covering her asleep in a nearby chair, unaware of the coming alien broadcast. Chopin’s Polonaise went scratchy and incoherent. It didn’t wake her, but it caught my attention. A mechanical, bass voice rumbled, introducing himself as an alien commander. He stated listeners were chosen to help prepare for coming Earth changes, including our destruction. The warnings lasted a minute, faded and then went silent. The frantic voice of the show’s host followed just before an advertisement and a return to Chopin.
I called the station. The host answered…terrified. She was alone that weekend, without engineers. I asked what had happened. Her broadcast signal was interrupted after power surges. I asked if she had the FCC required show tapes. She did, but couldn’t get them until Monday. She asked me what I heard. When I repeated the message she freaked and hung up. On Monday morning I asked the station manager to listen to the tapes. He was abrupt and angry. Before he slammed the receiver, he said there were no such tapes and I was never to call again. So I dropped it. I came from a military family. I could smell a cover up.
I remembered part of the message: three quakes shaking the world, the four blood moons, craft rising from frozen tundra, something about a blue star, the white plague, dying children, and then the blue snow.
Now, in 2020, it all makes horrible sense. I didn’t know about the ‘Wow’ signal at SETI in August of ‘77. That was followed by the November Asteron alien broadcast in the UK. It was the year of warnings. Then came the crop circle phenomena. I never connected all of that with the increased UFO sightings. There were signs everywhere, but I missed the symptoms.
I never bought the global warming stories or the fringe element fears about chemtrails and government mold spraying programs. I didn’t see the connection with mycotoxin spores taking out flocks of birds, rivers full of fish and even dolphins or whales. I did note the skyrocketing rise in autism, COPD, asthma and immune diseases. Some hit my family, including Morgellons Disease. I still missed the symptom connections after the quakes, blood moons and even the blue comet. Maybe our government knew and was trying to condition us to survive. No one realized until too late that giant fissures in tundra of the sub-Arctic regions were left by ancient craft emerging for the new terraforming programmed millions of years prior.
Molds from the dinosaur extinction filled surface waters and aquifers. From those waters rose the white death: a new trichothecene mycotoxin. A child reporting headaches at supper would be dissolved in white cilia by morning. Spores spread to neighborhoods, cities and beyond. It went airborne with bird migrations. Like the 10th plague of Egypt, it took all the young mammals. By 2019 the entire planet was infested, just before the mold’s final deadly mutation.
As I record this message, in the last balloon community near the equator, the Earth is being swiftly enclosed by freezing carbon dioxide crystals generated from tropospheric conflagrations of methane escaping from thawing tundra and ocean hydrates. The gases cooled and spread from the poles, concealing sea and land with gigantic blue glaciers, now growing too deep and fast for any of us to ever escape. We were warned.
by submission | Apr 18, 2015 | Story |
Author : George R. Shirer
“Do you ever feel guilty?” Red asked.
“About what?” asked Blue.
“About lying to the humans.”
“No,” said Blue. “Why would I feel guilty? They’re happy. They get to live full lives.”
“But they don’t know the truth,” said Red. “They don’t know that they’re just disembodied consciousness, enjoying a virtual reality that will never end.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” chided Blue. “Besides, they’re the ones who chose this. Remember? When we told them that their star was going to explode, it was the humans who asked for our help.”
“I know,” said Red. “But it doesn’t feel like we’re helping them any more.”
“You think too much,” said Blue. “You always have.”
“And these humans did not make the choice,” pointed out Red. “It was their ancestors. How long ago? A thousand cycles?”
“Who can keep track?” said Blue.
“I think we should contact some of them,” said Red. “I think we should discuss the possibility of reincarnation with them. We could reconstitute bodies for some of them and. . . .”
“Do you have any idea how long and tedious that would be?” complained Blue. “Why can’t you just enjoy things the way that they are? Why do you always have to be such a misery?”
“Excuse me for having a sense of empathy. Reincarnation. What do you think?”
“I think no,” said Blue.
“I think yes,” said Red.
Blue glared at him. “Deadlock.”
“Not if we ask Green,” said Red. “That’s why we’re a triumvirate. Remember? Majority rules.”
“Fine,” growled Blue. “Let’s ask Green.”
It took them a while to find him because Green liked his privacy. When they did find him, Green was sitting beneath a thought-tree, singing a song about love on dusty Altair. He stopped when Red and Blue appeared.
“Hello, Green,” said Red.
Green sighed. “Hello, Red. Blue. What brings the two of you here?”
Blue crossed her arms and nodded at Red. “Ask him.”
“I think we should reincarnate some of the humans.”
“I think it’s a waste of time,” said Blue. “They’re happy as they are. Why spoil that?”
“So you’re deadlocked and you’ve come to me to cast the deciding vote?” asked Green.
“Yes,” said Red. “What do you think, Green? Should we reincarnate the humans?”
* * * * *
The simulation dissolved into pixilated noise.
The teacher tapped her control pad and clicked her claws for attention. The students swivelled their eye-stalks toward her, respectfully.
“We all know what happened next,” said the teacher. “Green chose not to answer, leading Red to act on his own. This was in direct contravention of thousands of years of Triune custom and law.”
The teacher extended her eye-stalks, peering at the young crustaceans before her.
“And we all know what happened next. Don’t we?”
There were murmurs of assent.
“Red reincarnated several hundred humans and helped them establish a colony near the Cirdetaclan Nebula. There, they spawned and spawned and spawned again, becoming one of the most pestiferous nuisance-species in known space until they were wiped out by the Galactic Council.”
The teacher retracted her eye-stalks and shifted her stance. “And what lesson, class, can we learn from these incidents?”
There was no response. The teacher felt a familiar wave of frustration sweep over her, common to educators everywhere, regardless of species or social development.
“The lesson is simple, class: never trust an AI.”
by submission | Apr 17, 2015 | Story |
Author : Joey To
Tris slowly opened his eyes. He let his head remain on the cold workbench for a second before sitting up and rolling his stiff shoulders. Wincing as he rubbed his neck, he squinted at the window: snowflakes fell and white glare flooded the room.
The control-cube laid in front of him, still connected to the diagnostic panel via leads. The monitor displayed multiple graphs and lines of code. But Tris eyed the blinking words in red: AI Protocol #776 Failed.
He sighed and shook his head.
“That is the second night in a row, Tristan.”
He turned to see Jamie at the door, her perfectly neat and straight long brown hair gleamed hard in the natural light. He smiled weakly and shrugged.
Jamie smiled back. “This is bad for you, your neck in particular.”
“I know,” Tris mumbled. “But I need to—”
He stopped himself when Jamie glanced at the dented photo frame in the corner. “Would you like breakfast?”
“Maybe when I get back from the shop.”
•
Barry frowned as he disconnected the cords to the control-cube. “Nothing’s wrong. Maybe it’s your coding?”
Tris stared blankly at the thing as the shop owner sighed and eyed the snow building up at the window sills. “I could swap it for another anyway.”
“Nah, don’t worry about it,” said Tris, picking up the cube. “It probably is just my program.”
As Tris headed for the door, Barry called out. “You’re my best customer and maybe it isn’t my place to say this but it’s time to forget it. Work on something else.”
Tris nodded, strode out the door and trudged toward his car.
•
Back at his workbench, Tris scoffed down the scrambled eggs.
“Is that my spare control-cube?” asked Jamie as she entered the room.
“A replacement.”
He was about to hit the Enter key to initialize another test when the sun emerged and he caught a glimpse of the picture frame as it reflected a beam. He gazed at the photo, barely recognizing himself in it. The little one with brown hair… he had almost forgotten her too.
Outside, the snow finally stopped falling when Jamie nodded at the picture. “She would be my age by now—in appearance I mean.”
“Maybe Barry’s right,” Tris muttered, glancing out the window.
Jamie tapped her neck with her finger, opening up a small port and switch, then smiled. “Maybe he is.”
by submission | Apr 16, 2015 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
The hunting party moved toward the caves at Es Skhul, about 20 kilometers south of Haifa, Israel. Of course, no one in the tribe would have recognized any of those geographic designations any more than they would have regarded the time as being 50,000 BC. The hunt had been comparatively successful. The party, which consisted of twelve men and three women, were anxious to rejoin the rest of the tribe.
One of the tribesmen grunted a series of guttural syllables that approximated the sentiment “The hunt went well. We will have to give thanks to the Light Raft.” The “Light Raft” was what the tribe called the Sun which they regarded as a luminous god that sailed across the sky.
“It is a star,” said the tribesman known as Argin. The word was foreign. It was not the word his tribe used for the lights that dotted the night sky.
“What?” his compatriot asked.
“Yes,” Argin replied. “We must give thanks.”
Argin fell silent. He was thoughtful and brooding, something his companions had noticed over the last few weeks. He used to be much more talkative, they’d noted. Now, he spoke little and usually said something strange when he did speak.
A star, Argin thought. That’s what the Light Raft is. But what does that mean? As he walked on, the answer to his question floated up from somewhere in the depths of his mind. It is a ball of fire, he thought. Or something hotter than fire. And so are the tiny lights in the night sky. They’re like the Light Raft but much farther away. And both they and the Light Raft are hot and bright because… He shuddered. He looked up at the Sun. He lacked the vocabulary to express what he comprehended. But in some vague sense he knew what nuclear fusion was.
He knew when his bizarre way of thinking had begun. It was after he’d encountered the other tribe. He had been out scouting on his own and had come upon them. At first, he didn’t know if they were people or animals. Their skin was hard and bluish. Their legs were jointed differently than his. Their raft had been damaged. Argin had the strength to lift some of the wreckage that the small, frail people of strange tribe could not. They were grateful for his help in repairing their–
“Starship,” he whispered.
Somehow, he understood, if imperfectly, that the world was a giant round rock moving around the Light Raft and that they had come from a similar rock moving around another Light Raft very far away. He knew that one of their shamans had touched his mind, reworked his brain. He knew that the strange tribe had been as his tribe is now a very, very long time ago.
Argin felt depressed. He was acutely aware of how simplistic and backward his people were. He felt ashamed and embarrassed that he himself wore an animal pelt and lived in a cave. He had ideas he couldn’t express. He had thoughts that he could share with no one because they simply couldn’t be made to understand. The other tribe thought they’d given him a gift but it was a curse. That night, his tribe sat around the fire and ate and talked and laughed while Argin looked up at the stars and wept.
