by Julian Miles | Jan 21, 2013 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
As a child I was fascinated by the reflections you see when you place two mirrors facing each other and stand between them. Trying to understand that fascination drove me through mathematics and into science, down into quantum foam and up into the things that make reality real.
I could never shake the feeling that what I saw in those mirrors was something fundamental, if I could only understand it. When the new scientific fields caused by Tennerson’s discovery of the principles of wormhole transit opened their doors, I made sure that I was one of the first to get access to their data. Then Cravedine had his accident during a wormhole transit experiment. It caused an utter sensation, but I ignored the media furore. I knew that deep within the logs of that event was the thing I needed.
To go directly from one reality to its alternate is impossible. But in a wormhole, certain laws are placed in abeyance. A wormhole can deliver you into another reality. I added Cravedine’s rather elegant energy field equations to my mirror theories and used the gestalt result as the focus for a wormhole. Reducing the bizarre mechanism down to a backpack and a bag of portable reflective surfaces took longer than the science.
The paired mirrors are the key. The field generated between them places you in a portal. If you can see a reflection of yourself distinctly, you can go there. There being a reality divergent from our own. Of course, you needed to count how many instances from here the reflection is, so you can return.
My first jaunt was reality plus one, my shorthand for going through the right-hand mirror to the first reflection. I found myself in a familiar place, but standing in a sizeable crater. After scrambling out of it, I found the nearby city blocks deserted. Upon reaching populated areas, I got some odd looks. When I read the headlines about my ‘crazy’ experiment demolishing a neighbourhood, I ran back to the crater, unfolded a pair of mirrors and stepped back into reality minus one.
The guard standing in my laboratory was white-faced with surprise, but he held his rifle steady as he ordered me to stay put. I said I needed to stabilise myself by putting up two reflective surfaces. He nodded assent and while he called for backup, I unfolded my mirrors and stepped back into reality plus one.
I stepped into my laboratory and the me in there screamed like a girl before collapsing, hitting his head heavily on the corner of the bench. I heard his neck snap as his head twisted. I unfolded mirrors and got the hell out as I heard running feet in the corridor outside. This time, I chose reality minus two.
The ruined laboratory was open to the sky. Climbing up, I beheld the ruins of a city stretching as far as I could see. So I sat on charred masonry, snacked, drank and thought hard. Then I mirrored up and selected reality plus fourteen, the furthest that I could make out.
Six years later, I am still here. I have become a best-selling author with a backpack and a bag of mirrors cemented into the foundations of my Swedish home. I didn’t think it through. A reflection is never an exact copy and each reality has its own reflections. The reflections I saw in each reality were reflections of that reality, not mine.
I discovered the most effective method of exile ever. Then inflicted it upon myself.
by submission | Jan 20, 2013 | Story |
Author : Tiana Lexia
The screen flashed on, casting shadows off the cadaver’s body. The tube that ran from the base of her head to the computer slowly radiated light with each passing memory.
Her life started off normal, like any other person who passed through the Cognizance Center. Born to a rich family, raised in a part of town that allowed her opportunity, experience, and unending knowledge that could put her through life with more money than any street rat could even begin to imagine. She was the epitome of High Society, and watching her life being recorded in the Cognizance Center bored me to tears. A million times a day I would receive lives similar to this one; they all went through the same motions. They grew up, got money, got married, and died happily. There was no struggle in their lives.
My boredom began to turn me away once her teenage years began to roll through, but, before I could, a memory caught my eye. She was lying on her back, casting out fake moans for the pleasure of a man thirty years her senior. My stomach churned as I recognized him as her uncle, a prominent political figure in our city. For the next few memories, it continued on much like this. She’s sold and used for the pleasure and amusement of men her uncle knows, men that want to feel the touch of a young woman again. They introduce her to new things, horrible things, and the memories of the next few years are too clouded by the drugs poisoning her mind for anything to register on the screen. I watch her life become a mess before her own eyes.
Soon enough, she’s pregnant. There’s no way to tell who the father is, but she refuses to give the child up. Her parents don’t give her a choice, and, in a matter of weeks, the baby is gone. Her parents think that this will save her from the mess she’s making in her life, but they’re wrong. The girl turned back to the drugs, to the men, the alcohol. Memories continue to flow into the computer, but nothing is registering. If she were alive, I doubt the girl would ever be able to remember this part in her life. Every sense she has is poisoned.
Finally, a memory appeared on the screen. She’s leaning against a bathroom counter, naked, chunks of hair missing from her scalp. Her once beautiful face is mauled by scars from years of drug abuse. Every part of her has changed to mirror what she put in her body, but one thing remained as clear as the sky; her eyes. Brown and flat, they seemed to have a sense of innocence that the girl had lost long ago. They were knowing, worldly, but didn’t seem to understand.
Her hand reached over to her side, pulling a knife from the drawer. My hands are shaking, afraid as I become aware of what’s happening. She positions the knife at the base of her neck. I turn away, sickened, but look back as the memory clouds over and the screen flashes to black.
by submission | Jan 19, 2013 | Story |
Author : Huw Langridge
It started as a series of headaches, but on my fourteenth birthday they made contact. Calling me by my first name. Talking inside my head. We talked for years.
“The tremors are getting more frequent Daniel,” they eventually said to me. “The freak weather patterns more extreme. Snow, storms, tsunamis, earthquakes.”
“I’ve seen the news,” I said into the lonely confines of my car; my journey along the thin Snowdonian mountain road becoming more treacherous with the horizontal rain and gusting wind.
“We don’t have any solutions.”
“Surely it makes sense to warn those in power.” Rounding the side of a steep hill, the mountain road teetering on the precipice of a deep valley to the left, I drew up behind slow moving traffic. Red lights in the hard rain.
“They may not believe you,” the voice continued.
“Are there others who can verify what I tell them?” I said, inching slowly forward round a high crested bend that traversed an elevated promontory.
“We have attempted to contact others in your timeline. Others who were born during that special Autumn hour. When the clocks go back. Children out of time. But they are not as receptive. Perhaps there is a gene.”
“Should I tell the government?”
“They are unlikely to believe you are communicating with me.”
“Then I fail to see how I can help you.” Ahead, men in fluorescent gear waving. Hard to see in the driving rain, which is getting stronger and fiercer as the minutes pass.
“It’s not just us you are helping. It is your timeline. Go to the scientists. The environmentalists. They’ll believe you.”
“How did you develop this technology? This method of contact?” I switch up the speed of my windscreen wipers to keep the view ahead clear, and turn up the heater, rubbing my hands together.
“Bio-quantum resonance. It’s a development that doesn’t exist on your timeline. But you have things that we don’t. We haven’t made it into orbit, hence our further investigation into all things micro.”
“And what if we can’t fix this… this collapse?”
“We don’t know. We are mapping the multiverse, and for some reason there is strength in certain timelines, so we have them listed and marked for contact. Yours, and some others, are a spine. A backbone. Collapse of the spine, in any organism, can be catastrophic for the whole.”
Others are getting out of their cars ahead. Looking down into the steep valley below. More men in fluorescent gear, pointing. Walking towards my car.
I open the door, holding tight so the wind doesn’t steal it from my hand. Pulling the hood up on my rain jacket, I walk to them.
“A tremor,” one yells above the howling gale. “The road ahead has fallen into the valley.”
I look down and see the tumbled pile of cars, trapped beneath an upturned lorry, lights winking, wheels high. A helpless turtle.
“We’re closing the road, you’ll have to turn round.”
A thundering further up the hill. Another tremor. Stones pelt down to us, bouncing on the tarmac. I run back to the car. The rumble increases.
I twist the key in the ignition.
“Warn whoever you can,” says the voice, and I swing the car to the side of the road to execute a turn.
The road cracks. The car jolts, the back dipping. I start to accelerate, but the road beneath me gives way, and I’m rolling back, tumbling down the hill, into a flip, with just enough time to say, or at least think. “Try my son. He shares my birthday. Tell him I love him.”
by submission | Jan 18, 2013 | Story |
Author : Daniel M. Bensen
“Ta zemya.” The lookout cried from the crow’s-nest like a muezzin. “Ta zemya~a! Kapitane, eto ya~a.”
Hristo Galabov gripped the plastic gunwale of his ship and squinted over the heaving Atlantic. “Ta zemya,” the sailor said. Land. The last time, Hristo had leapt with joy at that cry. Now he only closed his eyes and gave a brief prayer to Ta Melarva Miriya. “Thank you. Thank you, Mother of God, for bringing us home. Some of us.”
Hristo stared out at the ocean until even he could see Africa bulking green and fertile on the horizon.
“Kapitane, you seem troubled.”
That was the voice of father Mehmet, with his beard and klobuk and crucifix.
“I am troubled, ebre,” said Hristo.
The priest stood beside him. “You are thinking about what to tell them in Gibraltar Palace.”
“I am thinking about what not to tell them.” Hristo rubbed his thumb against the place where his right pointer finger had been.
“Of course you must tell them the truth, ebane.”
“What truth? That we rediscovered Lost America? Or that it is more Lost than we ever guessed?”
“There are many ways to be Lost, and only one way to be Saved.”
Hristo snorted, “by which I take it you advocate going back to that blasted land and converting the heathen?” The Americans, Hristo meant, although they did not call themselves Americans.
“What else can I advocate?” Father Mahmet stroked his beard. “The truth is always best, ebane. But if we are to help those poor souls…perhaps the Glorious Princess does not need all the facts.”
“Such as the fact that Lost America was lost for a reason.” Hristo sighed, “and the old stories were lies.”
“They were stories, ebane, not lies.”
Hristo gestured at the sea, and his shoulder throbbed. “Streets of gold. Plains of fruit. Wise metal gods and maidens transformed into stars. I wish I could still believe.”
“Then believe, for we made those stories true by our faith and good work. The myth of Lost America was the rope we used to pull ourselves out of the darkness. And those still lost in that darkness…” Father Mehmet’s scarred hand went to the place where his left ear had been, “…Even they are children of God.”
So this was how the priest had made sense of the things they’d seen, convinced himself away from suicide. Hristo had wondered. “I am afraid the Princess has better ways to spend her money than to throw it at degenerate savages on the other side of the ocean.”
“So her advisors would surely say.”
And if they did, if the Princess withdrew her support, then Hristo could turn his thoughts to his own self-murder. Pain and broken promises, past sins and future redemption.
Hope, and in its absence, death.
“What was it the witch-doctor said?” Hristo asked, remembering the cannibal with his teeth filed and the lens-less glasses before his eyes.
“Go West,” said Father Mehmet.
“Go West,” the savage had said, blood on his lips, cold wind in his hair, “Lalaland, Kingdom of the Zombie God, the Gold Mountain.”
Hristo rapped his knuckles on the plastic hull of his ship and the ghosts of his eaten fingers ached. “I know what I will tell Her Majesty.”
“Yes?”
“I will say: ‘Our mission is a success. I will ask: ‘please furnish us with ships, that we may take the benefit of our civilization, our Holy Church to the new-old shores.’ I will say that we have rediscovered America,” Hristo Galabov nodded to himself. “And it is indeed a land of opportunity.'”
by submission | Jan 17, 2013 | Story |
Author : Meg Everingham
In the night Tom rolled over and opened his eyes. Through the dark like a ghost floated the low sound of his mother crying.
She had arrived home earlier, from the airport; she had stared past him like a blind person and disappeared into her bedroom.
Tom followed a light down the hallway. He found her bent into a chair in her office, lovely dark head in her hands, all sharp edges of grief. He stood in the doorway and whispered to her. She looked up and held her arms out to him, red eyes terrible. Tom moved to her obediently, in awe of her sadness.
She settled him on her knee and turned him, so they both faced her desk where she spent so much time working when she was home, away from the ocean. Lying on it was a photograph.
‘Look, Tom,’ his mother whispered, and she traced a finger along the blue lines of the image.
Tom recognized the picture of the humpback whale. He looked up to the empty space on the wall, where it usually hung alongside other luminous images of the deep.
‘The very last one died today,’ his mother said. ‘In a sanctuary up north, where I work.’
‘Why?’ Tom said. Her arms around his waist were hard, cold.
‘He was always going to,’ she replied, speaking into his hair. ‘But it was mainly because of people.’
She stopped working. She spent a lot of time curled on the floor of her study, hemmed in by the walls of photographs. She was silent and lost to the world. Deep underwater.
One morning, some men in suits knocked on the door, and asked Tom politely if they could see his mother. He showed them to her office, where they disappeared inside. Tom sat near the door, his cheek resting on the cold steel. There was the low murmur of questions and answers. They were there for several hours.
Soon after there came an afternoon when Tom got home from school, and his mother was gone. He searched the house, calling softly. He was hungry.
Something had happened in the office. Papers were littered across the room. Framed images from the walls lay crushed on the floor, fragments of afternoon sunlight caught in the splinters of glass. The chair was upside down.
Tom tried to ignore the cold feeling in his chest. He shut the office door and wandered around the house for a while before turning on the television.
She was on it.
Out the front of an important-looking building, the strange men in suits were holding her by the arms as she struggled like an animal. They were restraining her from a nearby knot of angry people, who were throwing objects at her and shrieking. They used the words monster, heartless, murderer.
Tom kept his stare on his mother’s face. Her hair was in her eyes. The camera zoomed drunkenly in on her as she said, over and over again, ‘He was lonely, he was lonely.’
Later that evening, Tom’s grandmother came and helped him pack his things into bags and boxes, and he went to stay with her.
