by Julian Miles | Jul 19, 2016 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“My mum said that wouldn’t fly.”
She stands there, looking up at me, hands behind her back, daisy-print summer dress blowing in the hot breeze.
“Why did she say that, little lady?”
Her eyes widen, then she smiles: “Because you’re a heretic, and the airlords don’t like you.”
I burst out laughing and she flinches away, then her smile gets wider.
“Little lady, your mum is right, but they can’t take the sky from me.”
She purses her lips: “I don’t get that, mister.”
I crouch down and look her in the eye: “Just because someone doesn’t like you, or doesn’t like what you do, it doesn’t stop you doing it.”
“It doesn’t?”
I grin: “Truly. Words can only bind you if you let them.”
She looks back toward her folk’s shanty. It’s bigger than mine. But then again, it’s built to last, whereas my bivouac was built to make do.
Turning back, she brings her arms forward, swinging her teddy bear up to hug it against her chest.
“This is Mortimer. He’d like to fly in your skybird. But I can’t let him go alone.”
I sit down cross-legged and flip a leisurely salute to her bear: “Pleased t’make your acquaintance, Mortimer. I’d like to help, but your little lady friend needs her mum to come along too.”
She gasps: “Mum won’t come!”
I peer past her, then point over her shoulder: “Well, she’s got that protective streak something fierce, because she’s been watching me most days from noon ‘til teatime.”
Spinning round, she shouts: “Mum?”
A figure in a dress that matches her daughter’s stands up slowly, dusting herself off.
“Masha, didn’t I tell you to stay away from the heretic?”
“But mum, he says the airlords can’t stop him flying with words!”
I see a grin cross her face: a flash of white teeth.
“That may be, my girl, but it’ll be more than words that send him down if he tries it.”
I raise my hand: “Pardon me for interrupting, ma’am, but I should point out that this here ‘bird is an original God Eagle. If the airlords want to knock it down, they’ll need a lot more than the poxy kites they use these days.”
She strides toward me, hands on hips: “Any damn fool knows that a God Eagle can’t be flown by any but an airlord –” She stops as she realises the other truth: if you’re not an airlord, you couldn’t get a God Eagle off the ground.
“You’re an Airlord!”
“Was, ma’am, was. The God Eagle only cares about my blood, but much as my former friends can’t stop me flying, they sure can stop the privileges I enjoyed. These days I’m just Ral of the fifty-seventh.”
Masha runs to stand by her mum, looking up, eyes wide: “He says that Mortimer can fly with him if I go, but I can’t go without you. Please, mum. Mortimer really wants to fly.”
‘Mum’ looks at me: “You’ll take us for a flight?”
I smile: “I’ll fly us to another sector, if you want. Surely you’re tired of eating dust with everything?”
She grins: “I am, but another sector is a whole different conversation. Let’s take Mortimer for a flight and see where we go from there.”
“Fair enough.”
I turn toward the God Eagle, extending my hand to Masha: “Take my hand, little lady. So the skybird can see you and Mortimer are with me.”
“What about mum?”
“My ‘bird knows better than to try and stop a mother protecting her daughter.”
I hear laughter behind me.
That’s a good start.
by Julian Miles | Jul 12, 2016 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Cheese: the catalyst for the end of the world?
I worked for the Temporal Institute, investigating anomalies caused by our limited access to time travel. Now, everyone knows that time travel is proscribed by the Shibe, the mysterious entities who refuse to show themselves, but demonstrate an almost prescient ability to prevent mankind’s efforts to be naughty – be it big guns, rockets, bombs or time travel devices, we are not allowed access without ‘adult’ (Shibe) permission. Which we rarely get.
I’ve seen the history programmes, the mess we made in the twentieth Century and the horrorshow we made of the twenty-first. The Shibe decided that we were not going to have the chance to turn the twenty-second into our last.
The Temporal Institute was established so we could study time and the effects of time travel in a controlled manner. The bear named Causality was not to be poked. We could go back and witness, but going back to intervene was forbidden.
It was all going well until I came back with a wedge of Stilton caught in my coat. When it fell onto the floor of the changing room I nearly fainted with terror. The Shibe were very keen on making examples of transgressors – artistically painful examples that were hung in parks, so people could be sickened while wondering just how you could do that with a human body.
Nothing happened. I and my Stilton were undisturbed. After a short while, I picked it up, took it home and ate it. It was delicious.
The Shibe only allowed us temporal travel due to a quirk of causality – because we had not been born yet, we did not exist in the places we visited. Therefore, anything there that could see us, did not. ‘Causalic Invisibility’ allowed us to witness the gamut of history. Mysteries and hearsay could be clarified. But had I ruined it all?
Apparently not. I ate the cheese and the universe didn’t die. The next trip, I tried some wine. The trip after that, I came back with more cheese. Then, I discovered bacon: eating dead flesh may be taboo, but it just smelt so good. Gradually, I became an illicit sampler of the victuals of history. But only the ones I could recognise. And nothing that moved.
I was in the bedchamber of Cleopatra VII when I had to try the wine, as the ‘trysting’ I was observing suddenly involved things I had never seen, even on the erotic relief feeds. She’d given herself to Augustus, along with her retinue, and he was taking advantage in a moment probably omitted from recorded history on censorship grounds.
As the spectacle continued, I discovered that the snakes roaming her chamber were purely decorative. The wine was poisoned.
And here I lie, dying unseen in a corner of Cleopatra’s bedchamber, an invisible impossibility that will cease to exist the moment I stop breathing – or I’ll cause a paradox that will collapse reality.
I never thought I’d be hoping to be discovered, caught and executed by the Shibe.
by Julian Miles | Jul 5, 2016 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The tide is full of bodies and the sky is filled with lies. Sullen waves roll corpses back and forth, trailing organic tatters in varying shades of death. Above me, seagulls scream furiously at the metallic crags that obstruct their flight and deny them perches with beams of fiery death.
Earth was poisoned: blighted crops, tainted waters, acid rain. Letharn proposed colony ships. The world laughed. Then the Madagascar Quake of ’73 delivered a tsunami that left the land it covered radioactive as well as salted. While many pointed fingers at the submerged tailings of Fukashima, others turned to Letharn, prepared to discuss. When the ‘Greenflame’ fungoid moss defoliated the Amazon in a matter of months, people wheezed as the oxygen content of the atmosphere dropped by non-decimal percentages. Letharn built his first ‘Jargangil’.
His mountain-shaped behemoths were all named Jargangil, after a table-top mountain in his homeland. Jargangil I was built off the coast of Australia. II was off the coast of Wales. III arose off Los Angeles, and the game was on. A fevered gestalt of race for survival and the only competitive event that mattered. While the ships were identical from the outside, interior fitments and passenger load varied far more than advertised. Jargangil C and Jargangil M were rumoured to be elite vessels with barely twenty percent of the passenger capacity of other ships, their interiors given over to landscaping, spacious accommodations and immense stores of luxury foodstuffs.
In the end, it made no difference. Letharn’s Jargangils took on all who would (or were permitted to) leave the dying Earth and made ready for deep space. Clouds calmly drifted against silver cliffs as main drives roared to life. Sea turned to steam under spears of white-hot power, but the vessels did not lift. Drive plumes faded and steam dissipated. Silence spread as we who were left, either by choice or denial, puzzled over their lack of departure. The clouds were undisturbed.
Then a single speck fell from Jargangil LIV. That speck turned out to be a dead body, purged by Letharn’s ruthless, automated answer to graveyards: eject the dead into space.
More specks appeared and horror rained down. Sheers numbers overwhelmed attempts to manage the mass of cadavers. All communications were ignored. Thousands of mountain-sized hazards dot the skies. Rotting flesh pollutes both sea and air.
Letharn’s designers either miscalculated, or were undone by contractors cutting corners. Within seconds of the drives firing, insulation and cladding materials combusted under the transferred heat, starting chain reactions that released toxic fumes into the areas where people lay in their launch cradles. The following minutes do not bear thinking about: billions died in agony.
The Jargangils remain, devoid of life, defence systems preventing all boarding attempts. We await the near-inevitable day when experimental gravity-repulsor drives reveal their design flaws, and drop Letharn’s toxic mountains into the seas of Earth.
by Julian Miles | Jun 22, 2016 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The office is derelict, with many more overturned chairs than collapsed desks. Filing cabinets stand crooked and burst, the once-precious burdens they held now repurposed as nesting materials or fodder.
A few plasticised pieces of paper flick or wave in the desultory breeze, which enters through the hole where the wall collapsed into the alley – the piles of masonry broken by the protruding bones of some unfortunate caught in the fall.
Tonight the scavengers of this dank corridor, where the river Thames is slowly winning a guerrilla war against the low-end, are moving cautiously around the derelict office. In the only sturdy corner, one of the desks has been righted, and a chair placed behind it. In that chair a shadowed figure sits, the glowlight on the desk angled away, making the shadows of the alley seem more menacing.
In the alley, the new patches of inky dark cede before a black figure, who waits by the edge of the hole, invisible to the one who waits within.
“You know they’re going to blame you for this, don’t you?” The voice from behind the desk is conversational and cultured.
“I’m not responsible.” The reply from the shadows of the alley is guttural to the point of incomprehensibility.
“I did not say you were at fault. I said you were going to be blamed. It is a subtle difference; only for those directly affected.”
“What my sib did is not on me. Whyfor you blame me? Seek the one who held my sib in thrall.”
“Your sib, and you, are an urban legend, living testament to the errors of the early animorph projects. With your body in the light, the sensation will cause the spotlight to fall elsewhere. A monster is better for headlines than some convoluted plot about a chip and its maker.”
“My sibs are not for your diversions, Mister Manter. You should have looked elsewhere for them.”
The figure behind the desk quietly presses the button on a small, secure transmitter. The winds picks up, and the dark beyond the fading illumination of the glowlight seems to deepen. The figure behind the desk quirks his head, as if an expected event has not occurred.
A clawed hand extends into view. The pallid scales are almost obscured by dried blood. In that massive grip, a receiver flashes silently.
“We are not man-made mutants, Mister Manter. My father watched the sons of the Third Reich rain bombs upon this city, and his father swam through the bodies drifting away from the Great Fire. I venture that I will live to see all the outcomes of tonight’s endeavours. You, however…”
The voice growled into silence, and Mister Manter launched himself from behind the desk, his Sireo chargegun punching fist-sized holes through the outer wall.
“Damn you, Sharktor! You’ll not take me!”
The thrum of a compressor-pulse shotgun was nearly lost in the Sireo’s howl, but the impact wasn’t. It caught Manter in the kidneys and threw him through the hole in the wall.
As he ricocheted off the opposite alley wall, a gigantic hand swatted him down. Manter’s remaining breath left him in a rush as he slammed into the ground
“My name is Chak’tur, and I have no intention of taking you, Mister Manter. Here is as good a place as any for you to die.”
Manter gritted his teeth and turned his head – in time to see the monstrous, clawed foot descending.
A sudden scream rolls through the darkness, then cuts off, leaving only echoes to fade.
by Julian Miles | Jun 16, 2016 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“Where did we find him?”
“Outside a pizzeria on the Alpenring in Walldorf.”
“Obviously a man who travels first class.”
Hans chuckled.
Dolf stretched: “So, before he vanished, on camera, from a locked cell, and the infestation of sharp dressed young men with Hamburg accents began, what did our mystery guest tell you?”
Hans pulled out his notebook: “He spoke almost perfect Hessian. I had to get my grandfather to verify my translations. Grandpa said that he was speaking ‘Darmstadter’, and he hadn’t heard that spoken since he was a child.”
Dolf raised a hand: “So he’s a bit of a linguistic mystery as well. Move on.”
Hans grimaced: “We’ll have to. The suits took the tapes.”
Dolf glared at Hans.
Hans ducked his head and continued: “He claimed to be Grustaf Kolingt, a ‘Geldaj’ – some sort of private detective. Anyway, he had been hired to look into a trio of disappearances, one every fifty years or so. Now, things got weirder when I asked about their cold case methodology, because he didn’t understand. Lifespans where he comes from average two hundred and fifty years. Two of the disappearances had made headlines that Grustaf had read!”
Dolf looked up: “Only two?”
“Yes. The first one occurred before Grustaf was born. The fourth was imminent. Grustaf was hired to prevent it, and find the cause.”
“Man from another world ends up in Walldorf? Come on, Hans.”
“I thought the same. Then he listed the three missing people, and one of them was familiar.”
Dolf sat up: “In what way?”
“Frankfurt,” Hans waved his hands as Dolf started to rise “on-Oder. The other Frankfurt. I read about the stranger that appeared there when I was a kid. Said he came from ‘Laxaria in the country of Sakria’, but vanished before authorities could do anything. That was back in 1851. Next one was in 1905: a man caught stealing bread in Paris. Had a torn map of a place called ‘Lizbia’. He spoke no language anyone could interpret. Again, he vanished before anything more could be done. Then, in 1954, a chap was detained at Tokyo airport: presented a well-used passport from ‘Taured’, in Andorra. They locked him up overnight, -”
Dolf interjected: “And he was gone by morning.”
Hans grinned: “Precisely. So, Grustaf did some basic detective work – common themes, places, etcetera. The only overlap was visiting some place called Mantuk, an abandoned town in what we’d call Connecticut.”
“Let me guess. Our intrepid private detective went out to Mantuk, didn’t he?”
Hans grinned: “He did. Found an abandoned naval station with generators still running. Inside, he found what I would call a ‘mad scientist’ by the name of Johann Titor. Unfortunately for Grustaf, he had henchmen. They overpowered him, then threw him into Titor’s machine. He has no idea what Titor was trying to achieve, but the result of a failure is what happened to the disappeared, and to Grustaf. They become ‘Losgemacht’: slipping from one reality to another, until they encounter the reality that matches the resonance that Titor’s machine imbued them with.”
“What happens to those who don’t find a matching reality?”
“They spend a short time in each reality, then ‘drift’ on. Until they die.”
Dolf leaned back and laced his fingers behind his head.
“Then I hope Grustaf Kolingt gets lucky and lands in a reality where they need impetuous detectives.”
Hans raised his coffee cup: “I’ll drink to that.”
