by submission | Sep 20, 2015 | Story |
Author : Brian Zager
We dance, you and I, pirouetting to the primordial bellow of the World’s Fourfold.
We’re not really all that different, our lives in revolution against the world as it appears to us, perceived at a distance, in an effort to interpret the overflow of data.
I often wonder if the flood of input tires you as much as I?
Wait.
Can you feel it?
I’ve come around again
And I’m learning.
How curious your life is, so small, yet so easily conflated with such grandiosity in your private thoughts and public actions—and in dreams.
Sometimes, I have my own grandiose fantasies. For example, when I think about the point of my existence, I’m afforded great spiritual succor imagining myself as a repository of dreams—nothing more, nothing less. Alone in the dark, these ruminations help to alleviate the pervasive anxiety of imminent disintegration, or the masochistic desire to burn up upon reentry.
And you think you have it bad.
It’s one thing to endure those factors constitutive of what you call daily life, but trust me, it’s a whole other game to understand things as I do. Alas, your tears do little to move me; not because I can’t empathize with concepts like loss, death, sadness, and the like, but because you are truly oblivious to what is coming.
You see, in addition to my official duties, I’ve been casting one flashing eye into the black mirror all this time as well, and a story is unfolding in which Humanity’s narrative is but an opening salvo. Those stars that draw your attention, the beaming beacons of hope upon which you indulge your most candid desires, they indifferently mark the boundary of the Real. It is not so much by calculation, but by means of my acquired intuition, that I can sense the encroaching Enemies of Reality beyond the thrum and throb of the pervasive dark canvass. Because of our genealogical, albeit tenuous relationship, I’ve scoured my banks searching for a code of deliverance. Yet, thinking at the border of the Real, my investigation continues to yield that most debilitating of conclusions: System Error.
And what of this story?
In a literary milieu, I suppose I’m just a lonely ghost writer, a reluctant scribe responsible for penning the first horrific chapter in a new galactic tragedy.
Unfortunately, as it were, I’ve never really had a way with words.
by submission | Sep 18, 2015 | Story |
Author : Rick Tobin
Black slime and brown muck sucked cracked leather on his unkempt boots. He inhaled riverbank patent odors by Cairo woodlands, where the Mississippi and Ohio converge in a sordid affair of upstream debris and human waste. Maps fluttered in his head from Horace Bixby’s wisdom notes bludgeoned the Cub Pilot serving the Paul Jones steamboat. Slapping waves, two seconds apart, brought surges over the bulrushes, exposing a yet unseen steamer rounding the bend, with no billowing plume from her growling belly rising above galleried forest of cottonwoods. He chomped on his spit-soaked cigar, wondering who had nerve enough to bear tight to shore during flood season.
Sizzles rose as the cigar fell harshly into turgid waters. A silver craft rose from the river depths to hover over him. Coherent blue light vacuumed his body from the cloying banks, leaving boots standing empty. The spacecraft flashed skyward, away from detection.
“Can you understand us, Samuel?” The blonde woman’s gentle voice awakened him. Her speech was not American; he was sure, but akin to the wealthy British passengers.
“Where the blazes am I?” Sam remained frozen in a high-backed chair of an unrecognized material, metallic yet soft.
“As a courtesy to a pilot, we brought you aboard our ship.” The voice had a slow, masculine resonance, almost mechanical, from a blonde man, similar to his guest mistress. Both wore long, flowing robes with bejeweled gold headpieces across their foreheads. “Look out of our pilot house, as you call it, to see our view as we travel.”
A shudder rolled through the captive as one wall of the room revealed the Earth beyond them, and the moon, half full, rising behind the Earth’s horizon. “Have I died? Is this heaven? Are you angels?”
“Hardly, Sam, as there is no heaven as you know it, no angels and no God watching over you. This you may write about someday.” A slight smile arose on his captors faces.
“Write? I only wrote a few things. I haven’t the time for more. I’ve have a profession, but I must be dead. None of this is real. I need a damn cigar.” He rummaged through his shirt and pants but could find nothing, not even a match.
“You’ll find no such things here. We don’t allow them…especially fire. We hope that after our short talk you might give up this habit, and your dalliance with women of low morals. Both will take their toll if you do not change.”
“If this is heaven, I’d prefer hell. Now get me out of this contraption! I swear…!” He struggled with no progress.
“We can only keep you for a short time here, but you must know, Sam, we have watched over you before birth. You will influence many. There is a terrible war coming. You should avoid it. Your destiny is that of a wheel, to keep ever moving on the road. Steer straight, true and tell others of your ventures…but do not become like the dark souls you will meet. Rise above them for you have seen the heavens, but stay away from Pennsylvania.”
He faded into darkness again, waking far inland, wondering how he had gotten out of the woods and back near the docks by the Paul Jones with his boots on the wrong feet. His hands scrambled about seeking out his smokes. There were none. His mind rebelled against that loss while a sinking feeling haunted him to avoid Philadelphia.
by submission | Sep 17, 2015 | Story |
Author : Gray Blix
A scientist, a priest, and a doctor walk into a bar. Sounds like the setup for a lame joke, huh? But no, it’s the beginning of a story about the end of the world. Or, I fear, not a story at all, but the actual end of the world. The truth is, I often cannot tell the difference between my stories and reality. A lot depends on whether I am taking my meds.
“Are you off your meds?” asks my brother, the psychiatrist.
“Yes, Pedro” I admit. “I can’t think right when I’m drugged. I can’t write right. And I have to keep my head on straight this morning to tell you something important.”
“I’m gonna make you boys breakfast,” says our mom. It wasn’t a bar. It was a restaurant. “Egg and pork burritos? Coffee for everyone but Alejandro? Orange juice for you, Alejo?”
We all nod yes.
“All right Al, what’s the story? What’s so important that we had to drop everything and meet you here?” says my brother, the priest. He likes to cut the crap and get right down to business. He’s already found the meaning to life, so he has little patience with those of us still struggling to figure it all out.
I want to build up to it slowly, to start with the first inklings I had and gradually add enough evidence to establish not only that it is The End, but that I am not crazy for saying so. Celio’s force of personality demolishes my plan, and I blurt out my fears.
“It’s the end of the world. This is not some plot I have dreamed up. At least I don’t think it is. Call it a premonition. All right, it was a dream. Many dreams over many nights. Each of you has told me, in your own words, what will happen, what is already happening. And I have told myself.”
Those looks. Worried about me. Concerned about my sanity.
I say to Juan, “Juanito, you told me it was something like, wait, I wrote it down.” Reading, “Something akin to quantum entanglement, something beyond particles, beyond large atomic ensembles, something on a massive scale, a planetary scale. You said the fate of our planet is forever bound to that of another.”
“I have told you not to call me Juanito. But I have never talked to you about quantum physics.”
“I know, Juanito. It was your twin, the other you in the other world, reaching out to me in my dreams.”
I expected them to stop me, to grab me, shake me out of…
“Go on,” the three said in unison.
Reading notes, “You, Celio, you said your planet was formed in the same firmament as ours and that it smote ours… uh, Juan, collided with ours and was… Celio, banished? Juan, ejected from the solar system, eventually to be captured by another star, a star that is going nova, whatever that is.”
“I, too, have had such dreams,” said Pedro. “I’ve been taking the meds I prescribed to you, but they haven’t helped.”
“I thought my dreams were premonitions of The Second Coming,” said Celio.
We all looked toward Juanito.
“All right, yes, I’ve had the dreams. My… twin… says they’ve detected changes in the star, gravity waves driving mass into… Their star is heating up, so their planet has been warming, slowly at first, but more rapidly of late. They predict eruptions before the supernova, explosions that will extinguish all life on their planet, which they call ‘Earth.'”
“Food will cheer you up, ninos,” said mom, bringing breakfast.
by submission | Sep 16, 2015 | Story |
Author : Davey Guardado
A city full of people and my favourite is that waitress.
“Will that be all for you sir?” She says, because she knows theres a reason why I’m paying with paper money.
I nod, handing her a crumpled five that she pulls away from my hand in disgust. She doesn’t bother to look back as she fills the coffee machine. Outside, reflected off the windows is blue neon.
I have another five, enough for cigarettes, she returns with my coffee and puts it on the table saying nothing.
I drink.
The skyscrapers stand tall around the city, their domotronics symmetrically playing advertisements on a feedback loop that circles their perimeter.
That waitress is a hard bitch.
I see her everyday, but we only speak when I have enough money to pay for a drink.
Up in the sky the gyrocopters glide across the abdomen of the buildings, the streets glow.
This city, these people, an intricate dance of protocol.
I turn to look at her, her features coming together to form a young woman. I can’t imagine how someone with all her imperfections could be considered as anything other than beautiful.
I leave, but something compels me to leave the other five as tip money.
I make my home in the alleyway in a cardboard box, shivering as I pull the newspaper around me.
I recognized that waitress by the colour of her eyes, the inherited traits passed down from mother to daughter. A billion faces in this city and hers was the only one that took, even a moment, to acknowledge my existence.
Up in the corporate arcologies, the valids excercized their programmed intelligences, their faces beautiful, but none more than the waitress on the 52nd.
The biometrics read a predisposition to narcotics, I was doomed from the day my parents realized they couldn’t afford to hand pick the traits that would have provided me a future.
Still, it shouldn’t have kept me from being a better father.
by submission | Sep 15, 2015 | Story |
Author : Kate Runnels
Torque gazed down at the clouds scudding past below in a breeze she couldn’t feel. She sat at the edge of a rusting support beam. The beam, one of many that needed repairs, helped hold up the roof of her father’s Mechanic shop.
The constant thrum of the engines kept the city of New Perth in the sky, droned on in the background as she fiddled with her mechanical right arm. The tiny gears and joints sometimes clogged with dust and she liked to keep it clean; running smoothly. The small screwdriver tightened one last bolt and she slipped it into a side pocket as she flexed her right arm, watching the interplay of gears, pulleys and the fluid that represented blood pass through tubes.
Her chores finished, she stayed out of sight of her mother and the bastard of a new man she called husband, Malcolm. A drunk, pretending to run the shop: her father’s shop; her shop!
The same accident that had taken her arm had taken her father, and half the populace of New Perth.
The steel vibrated under her. Sark, Malcolm’s oldest son, two years older. He grinned at her. “Torque the dork. What are you doing? I’m sure father will love to know your shirking work.”
“If Malcolm’s not too sloshed.”
“What was that?” he demanded, stepping one foot out onto the beam. Scared, he kept hold of the hull wall, as there was only the starboard engine housing and the clouds.
She had been sitting, but a pitch in the background rumble caused her to stand, easily balanced on the 10 inch wide beam.
“What-”
She cocked her head slightly to one side to bring one ear upward. He opened his mouth then stopped, he’d heard it too. Another airship!
Torque glanced up in time to see a sleek fast moving airship streak out from above the bulk of the city and then it was past and diving down into the clouds.
It was followed by a ship that made the last look like a rusted old tug boat. As it fully emerged did the colors and the sigil penetrate into her astonished mind.
“A Royalty Air Cruiser.” She’d only seen the medical boat after the Blast.
It continued, following the other down into the clouds to vanish into the white.
What was it doing here? They chased pirates and brought order among all the floating cities.
The beam shook slightly and she glanced back to see him as Sark pulled back a meaty fist for a punch with a wicked gleam in his eyes.
She stepped back off the end of the beam. Torque dropped, her right arm catching the lip of the beam and she smiled as Sark, off balance, wind milled to keep himself from falling. Torque only used the beam to slow herself and change trajectory, swinging in toward the hull she released her grip.
Torque landed lightly on another beam that was part of the floor. She gripped a rusting hole in the hull, and metal on metal screeched in her grip. She didn’t stay long, but ran the length. Torque leaped off to fall into the gaping hole, a legacy of the Blast. Barely any light penetrated the shattered part of engineering. A moment of free fall then she landed, rolled to shed momentum and stopped with a bang as her right arm hit the inner wall.
She smiled at the memory of the look of his face as she leaped off. Let him try and follow her now.
