by Alastair Millar | Apr 20, 2024 | Story |
Author: Alastair Millar
The planet was a blue dewdrop, shining defiantly against the blackness of the Void. It was hard to think of it as home, after twenty years struggling to make Sicyon viable; but all their efforts had been wasted, and they’d had no choice but to return. Ironically, the colony had suffered the same tectonic troubles as its ancient Greek namesake, and its society had similarly been forced to surrender to the inevitable.
Michael stood with several hundred others on the generation ship’s observation deck as it approached Earth. How Angela would be crying now, he thought. She’d loved the moral clarity of building a new homeworld, a place where their intended children could grow up free of pollution, of religious zealotry, of disdain for science. He smiled, remembering that she had been one of the first to move from the ship to the ground camp; she couldn’t wait to get her hands dirty.
When a tremor-induced rockslide had killed her during the planet’s cold season, they’d buried her on the ridge above the settlement, working fast to hack a grave through the ground-ice before they froze themselves. The sky had been so beautifully clear that day, as if trying to make up for his loss.
The spark had gone out of his life, but he persevered. Over time, others had been unable to face the hard choices needed, and had taken their own lives, but for years he had wanted – no, needed – to believe, until ultimately there was no more denying that the quakes were becoming both stronger and more frequent.
Four centuries of cryosleep, with two decades of hard work in the middle, and now the three thousand who survived were coming back to Earth – failures, all their attempts to fight geological instability stymied by an almost complete absence of manufacturing and refining capability.
Perhaps their descendants wouldn’t see them that way; perhaps they’d be seen as heroes, who’d survived against long odds. Maybe new technology, and a new group of idealists, would be sent to tame Sicyon instead. Possibly the problems that drove the settlers to leave Earth had been solved – they could hope, couldn’t they? Would it feel strange to be here, or would they come to feel like they belonged again? Or had this old world been permanently reshaped by climate change, it’s possibilities and population reduced, giving way to endless warfare over scarcer resources?
He knew that the uncertainty was eating the others; as people awoke and met old friends again, their worries were the main topic of conversation. It was a discussion he should be part of; but all he could think about was saying goodbye to her on a crisp Winter’s day, the blue sky fading down to white on the horizon, and air so frigid it sent spikes into his lungs.
by submission | Apr 19, 2024 | Story |
Author: Hillary Lyon
The coronal mass eruption went unnoticed by a good many sentient creatures on the fourth planet from the sun. Engineers, though, noted communications equipment and most industrial machines continued to run without benefit of terrestrial power sources. Moreover, they witnessed those same devices spark—with some even catching fire. The engineers suspected the sun. The clergy blamed the cohort of trickster gods who bedeviled their society from time to time.
A great public debate raged between the two factions, until old Maz slammed his staff down on the polished floor of the Senate.
“It wasn’t the work of trickster lords, nor a random burst from our life-giving star,” Maz declared. “It’s the depletion of our population’s auras! Our halos aren’t as strong they once were—too much easy living, too much decadence. Not enough courage, self-reliance, and patriotic pride.”
A great murmuring rose in the audience. Had they brought this upon themselves? Did this signal the end of their empire?
“Both sides—science and religion—are important to society.” Maz continued, “We need a healthy balance; we can’t function properly without it.”
The audience buzzed. Sure, sometimes one faction held sway over the other, but the pendulum inevitably swung back. Though currently, one faction cast an opaque superstitious shadow over their lives—
Again Maz’s staff slammed down on the floor.
“My nephew Ewton,” Maz crowed, “is brilliant. An engineer! He’s built a device to scan the aura of every citizen. A device to gauge not just the strength and length of individual auras, but also the color.”
Now the audience roared—aura colors were private! They contained personal information only shared with intimates. One’s aura colors were none of the Senate’s business! But some argued, if corrupted auras did cause this strange event—then Senators had to be informed, so they could craft laws to save the empire!
Though fights broke out and blood was shed, the Senate voted to use Ewton’s machine. A law passed compelling every citizen to submit to testing. Trust in the Senate fell into two camps: total suspicion, versus total blind faith. Some citizens packed up their families and in the dark of night fled to the mountains, never to be seen again. Others, thinking obedience was the highest form of patriotism, waited in line for days to be scanned. Society splintered; some cracks would never be repaired.
* * *
Ewton oversaw the test results himself. The Senate gave him an official uniform.
Standing at his console, Ewton twisted knobs, pressed buttons, flipped switches. One by one, citizens passed through the polished arch of the Aura Scanner 3000. The arch beeped and flashed.
“Your aura,” he said pleasantly to one bright-eyed young citizen named Cara, “is pale blue with overlapping shades of pink. So healthy, it’s positively iridescent!” Before the end of the test, Ewton asked Cara out for dinner.
To numerous other citizens he was more somber. “Yours is a sickly dark green. You’ll have to be recycled and repurposed into someone more useful to society.”
Ewton’s work lasted a year, until every known citizen was scanned. He amassed a personal fortune.
Maz was scanned last. When he passed through the arch, there was no beep, no flash.
“Hmmm,” Ewton began, worried Maz would be repurposed. According to the machine, Maz possessed no aura. Impossible! Ewton fretted: Was Maz so old his aura had dissipated? How—
A coronal mass ejection, this one magnitudes larger than the last, slammed into their planet knocking their empire back into the dark ages; a strong-armed blow from which they would never recover.
by submission | Apr 18, 2024 | Story |
Author: Thomas Godfrey
I should have just pleaded guilty. I should have just gone off to some decrepit moon somewhere and put in my ten years of hard labour or whatever it was they were going to have me doing. Breaking my back in the mines of Tormen IV, or being drafted into the Imperial Army and sent off to die in some random frontier war. But no, I’d pleaded not guilty.
Fuck me.
Did I do it? Yeah, of course I did. And I’d do it again. Better to rob some pensioner blind than starve, right? The police didn’t see it that way though, and now, here I am, in the Draxas arena running for my life from HK units programmed with some ridiculous gimmick or another. Apparently, this was a spectator sport in the Elysium sectors of the universe. Rich people bet on how long us cons would last. Kids collected trading cards of the various HKs. What did we get in the slums? Wrestling and raves.
So, forgive me for not knowing exactly what the Draxas arena would look like. I’d been given a crash course. This was my trial. A trial by combat.
They’d dropped me in this arena. Some blown-out old frontier town that got glassed to the Stone Age by Xarens hundreds of years ago. The place was loaded with cameras, and I and about a dozen other lowlife criminals had been dropped in. Last man standing went free.
It was all televised.
Hopefully, someone out there was betting on me. If I got out, I’d make some snobbish police commissioner a wad of credits. Maybe I’d get a trading card or a collectible action figure. Johnny Paxton, the guy who survived Draxas.
I was currently hiding under the ruins of a hovercar.
There wasn’t any food in here. Well, there was. If you could find some other dead guy after an HK had got him. There was also a bit of water here and there. Xaren radiation bombs killed bacteria so the water was fairly drinkable. But I was running out. I’d lasted almost a week.
I’d only seen about four HKS. They all had names like ‘The Butcher’ or ‘The Pope’. There was one called ‘Dominatrix’, who had these spiked chains and tortured you to death. She only aired on the after-dark channels. Best not to traumatize the kiddos.
The fan favorite was ‘Barry’, at least as far as I could tell. His gimmick was that he’d slide-tackle you like an honest Sunday league football player then stamp you to death with bladed cleats.
Fuck me. Should have pleaded guilty.
All was quiet, for now. Then, my stomach growled. I knew in the next street over The Pope had just incinerated some pedophile. The Pope was a great one to follow. His meat came pre-cooked.
So off I went.
I rounded the corner. There it was, a smoldering corpse. I greedily ran towards it. I didn’t care about the cameras. Sure, cannibalism was illegal, but who cared at this point? If they nabbed me again, I’d happily go off to Tormen IV and mine silicon or whatever.
I reach the corpse and start to pluck off flakes of meat. The nonce is still juicy. Yum.
Then something whistled through the air and I felt a sharp pain in my right hand. I screamed as a hooked chain punctured my palm. Then, another chain punctured my left hand, and I was pulled to my feet, screaming in agony.
Fuck me, I’d been found by ‘Dominatrix’.
This was going to be a rough death.
by submission | Apr 17, 2024 | Story |
Author: Thomas Desrochers
It is one of the great mysteries of the late 21st century that the land of Alaska remains as nearly untrammeled as it was a hundred years before. Though its harsh climate was well-preserved by the collapse of the Atlantic Gyre, the exodus from Europe caused by that same calamity created a great many refugees who ought to have seen it as a much less crowded version of the lands they fled. Despite this it remains home to hardly more than a million individuals, its grand vistas largely untouched, the aforementioned preferring off-world vistas.
I came to Alaska in 2087 fresh from the Geological Institute of Colorado on orders from AmMex International, my job to monitor the 40 autonomous nuclear boring probes that restlessly hunted the crust for pockets of mineral wealth. The system was automated and I was a glorified wrench-monkey, a wrench being the best tool to beat the data relays with when they iced up.
To anyone who has lived in this land it should come as no surprise that my romantic visions of life in the far North were quickly replaced by the reality: A body in confusion from nights that swung from perpetual to fleeting, a mind numbed by the seclusion and boredom of life on a lode of quartz ideally located to receive rock-relayed data streams, 47 kilometers from the nearest road. It was no wonder none of my predecessors had lasted more than a year!
The crisis came in the spring of 2088, physical health following my mental health into the depths plumbed by the very probes I monitored. I struck out to my nearest neighbor, a man I had been briefed on but never met who lived a mere 3 kilometers away. Joe was a holdover from a life two centuries past, living in a spruce-log cabin he had built himself and earning his keep trapping the native fur-bearers.
He did not seem much surprised to see me that spring afternoon, perhaps only that I had not come to call sooner. He was an amiable man for one who chooses such seclusion, and for a while we simply traded banalities and drank the tea he had made us from the dried fruit of the local roses. The conversation lapsed to silence, and then my rumination simply spilled out. “Joe,” I asked, “How can a man stand to live in a place like this? It feels as if the land itself is draining the life from me, and I fear that if I stay here much longer I will meet my end.”
Joe smiled at me, thought for a moment, and then said, “In all my years here I haven’t met a foreigner who didn’t feel that way. A man comes up and, sure enough, he’ll meet a crisis of health, of faith, of spirit, within the year. Makes no difference if he’s in the sticks or the city. I did too, some forty years ago.”
For a moment I was shocked from my own misery, the statistical improbability glaring out at me. It was then that Joe told me something I could never forget: “Might be there’s an astronomical explanation, weak magnetic fields or circadian disruption. I don’t think so. Near as I can figure the land itself wants them gone, won’t accept its own taming. A man learns to play by its rules and he’s usually fine.”
This seemingly prosaic wisdom burrowed into my psyche and bore fruit not long after, showing its truth and altering the course of my life. For that I will always be grateful.
-Samuel Goode
by submission | Apr 16, 2024 | Story |
Author: Majoki
We’ve all heard about light pollution and how the glow from cities and towns obscures the night sky, making it difficult to view stars and planets. Maybe we’ve even learned how our luminescent nightlife affects nocturnal animals, migrating birds, and all manner of insects, confusing them and contributing to their alarming decline.
But from space, oh from space, what a show! What a shiny bauble Earth is! Celestial bling of the highest order! Often, I wonder if the stunning view of our glittering globe is the real reason I’ve stayed on Titania all these years. It’s certainly not the amenities.
The self-indulgent whim of the world’s first trillionaire, Titania is the only orbital hotel ever completed. First marketed as a stellar cruise ship for the high-end adventurer, it’s devolved over my tenure into a kind of sketchy skid row hostel for failed opportunists and escapists like me.
Not exactly the class of folks you’d want as our planet’s last best chance for survival.
Because that’s what we became when the lights went out on Earth. Our bright, gleaming world went dark. Like moths to the flame, they came. From Titania’s lido deck, it looked like an impossibly large swarm of insects engulfing the planet. Communication earthside went helter skelter. Then ceased.
Amazingly, Titania’s derelict denizens didn’t panic. We woke up, shook off our malaise, our ennui, our entirely French-forward weariness, and got down to the business of what was happening. Was it an alien invasion or bizarre planetary infestation? Was it organic or robotic?
Was it planned or opportunistic? Were we next?
We shuttered Titania, powered down to standby systems and waited. And, though there was literally nothing to see of the shrouded Earth, we watched as our sensors registered a mysterious spectrum of energy waves, ionizing the atmosphere. Though the lights were out planetside, the air was humming with electricity. Low-level radiation coursed the darkened skies below.
Was life on Earth being zapped out of existence? Was the planet being sterilized for new tenants? Were we just low-hanging fruit for some kind of interstellar harvest by sentient locust?
No one had an answer, though I had an idea: hormesis.
It’s the adaptive response of cells and organisms to low doses of what otherwise might be harmful to them, such as allergens, toxins, and even radiation. I’d had experience with that kind of therapy. It’s why I fled to Titania. Suffice it to say that even a snake oil salesman like me had to quickly part ways with a rogue foreign space agency because I didn’t like the kind irradiation dosing I was directed to give their astronauts to bolster their exposure immunity for a secretive Mars mission.
Still, the concept of hormesis was sound, and the more I saw of the atmospheric telemetry readings, the very systemic increase in ionization, the more convinced I became that our mysterious interlopers were not trying to terraform our planet, but terraform us.
After seven months, just as quickly as the interlopers had come, they (whatever they were) left. The shroud lifted and Earth once again gleamed majestically below us. We cheered on Titania. But Earth remained eerily quiet.
Once we re-established contact, my suspicions were confirmed. Life on earth had been changed. We were not what we once were. We were better. Healthier. Less hostile. More unified. We’d been imbued with a sense of common purpose. As well as an enhanced biological resistance to solar radiation.
From Titania’s vantage, I came to see that our interstellar interlopers hadn’t been attracted by Earth’s gaudy city lights. Instead, they’d been drawn to something more luminous, something more strangely dazzling in humanity.
They hadn’t come to invade or infest. They’d come to invite.
To coax us from our darker shadows, redirect our light, help us ride it to the stars, and fan the flames of self and selfless discovery ever brighter.
by Julian Miles | Apr 15, 2024 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The room is greener than my natural dermal shade in springtime, and the air conditioning is more noisy than effective. Both of which are features of another day on Earth, the quirkiest destination in Cluster 644984, catchily known as ‘The Milky Way’ among the locals.
“I hate humans.”
I turn smoothly to see Mlurbon glaring angrily at the combination of shining bones sticking out the side of their arm.
“No, you hate having to restrict your ability to move. It’s a perfectly natural reaction. We Slurra are invertebrates. Not being able to lunge everything in any direction at whim scares us.”
Mlurbon growls at me. Sensory clusters reshaped as eyeballs glare realistically from left orbit and nasal cavity of the skull floating a handspan clear of the top of its spine. I point towards their pelvis.
“While you’re trying to find a way to tell me you’re not scared of anything, think about manifesting some genitalia.”
The in-joke is wasted. They look down, eyeballs shooting from the skull on a pair of pseudopods.
“Why do we have to wear skeletons?”
“Technically, they wear us, as clothes are worn on the outside.”
Another growl.
“You know what I mean.”
“It forces us to move like them, reducing the chance of accidental disclosure.”
Which presupposes the operator’s ability to stabilise their form… I flush my skin and internal tone back to transparent.
“Mlurbon. Look at me, then arrange your skeleton like mine is. Don’t worry about shading yet. Get the skeleton. Yes. Like that. Now, add the limiters. You know, like when we practiced internal bands at nursery?”
“That basic?”
“Yes. We have to be sure these bodies will move like humans if we have to act instinctively.”
Starting at my feet, I slowly flush my limiters deep red so they can see where they start and end.
They nod.
“Okay. Give me a moment. It’s been a long time.”
As a member of the Slurran Intervention Agency, you should have been practicing physical formations and controls daily. What have you been wasting your downtime on?
“Like this?”
I walk round them. It may be shabby, but it works. A natural assumption of almost human slovenliness. Impressive.
“Now bring your skin tone in to match mine. Dermal colouration is still a divisive factor here.”
Not bad.
“Okay. Details. Body hair. Look at my left arm. Imitate that on the lower sections of all four limbs, but leave the undersides of the manipulators on the end of each free. Good, good.”
No, that really is good. It took me ages to get it right.
“Now shift your air sack inside the upper cage of bones. That’s it. Talk to me while you do it. Makes sure you don’t constrict the tubes.”
“I really don’t see the need to cleeeeeek-”
“That’s the need. No, just rotate it left.”
“Thank you.”
Walking around again, it’s a workable imitation of a middle-aged adult human male.
Mlurbon grins.
“Like what you see?”
“I do. Next is clothing. But first-”
I fire the pistol I placed on the table behind them. Mlurbon emits a warbling shriek and collapses into a quivering wave of Slurra headed away from the noise, leaving an untidy pile of bones in front of me.
That would be a fail, then.
“Not good enough. Get back to internal duties.”
“By your order, chief.”
After they slide out under the door, I press the intercom.
“Find me another volunteer for tomorrow. I’ll patrol on my own today.”
Again.
“By your order. Safe patrolling, chief.”
