by submission | Jan 11, 2024 | Story |
Author: Jeremy Nathan Marks
When astronauts landed on Wolan, some shed tears of joy at what they found while others salivated. They appreciated their fluids touching the dulcet air of another world. And they cried and drooled because there was enough timber to last for at least one decennial cycle.
Nearly as wonderful as the abundance of magnificent trees was the absence of beings of appreciable size on the planet.
On Earth, the resource masters received reports of Wolan’s riches. Outwardly stoic, each privately rejoiced. Every sterling image of four-meter-wide trunks rising forty meters up to split into limbs three times the thickness of the thickest of humans, was the most encouraging find they had received in a very long time.
Some of the masters recalled a distant past time when trees on Earth were the size of Titans. Earth folk had walked among those Gods; they had touched them and experienced a wonderment no officer had known. There were, as yet no holograms capable of replicating the grandeur of magnificent vegetable flesh.
From decision command, the chief resource master issued an order to the culling crew. ‘Select a corner and make your first cuts.’
‘Aye, Sir Mum,’ the culler chief replied.
On Wolan, the astronauts concentrated on finding a quarter acre a short distance from their ship. When they sighted a good lease, they set up an infrared boundary so that any culler, approaching from any direction, would recognize the boundary.
The culling team unpacked their pneumatic axes and scaling gear and approached the infrared barrier. Crossing it, they noticed that the weight of their equipment increased. With each step they took in approach to those first trunks, the strain on their hands, wrists, forearms, elbows, and biceps grew until each culler was plagued by ache.
Since seasoned astronauts were accustomed to all sorts of strains, no one made comment. But what they were not prepared for was an incapacity at lifting their drills above waist level upon switch on.
Fourteen cullers, with fourteen pneumatic axes expelling air, stood immobilized.
‘Culler chief report,’ the chief resource officer called from Earth.
‘Sir Mum, we cannot lift our axes,’ the chief culler replied.
‘Explain.’
‘We cannot raise them north of our middies, Sir Mum.’
‘Drop the axes.’
‘Aye, Sir Mum.’ The chief turned to their team and ordered a lowering of tools. Each culler choked their axe and laid it on the soil.
‘Apply hand axe. Single indentation.’
‘Aye, Sir Mum.’ The culler chief walked to the closest trunk and unsheathed their hand axe. They had no difficulty removing the tool, but as they went to swing the blade toward the tree, the axe head rebounded from a spot in space. The head took the axe with it, both bouncing back, flying from the culler chief’s hand to the ground.
‘Report.’
The culler chief picked up their axe. ‘Aye, Sir Mum. A pain radiates from my wrist toward fingers and forearm. It is the shock of impact. The axe did not touch wood.’
‘Reapply.’
‘Aye, Sir Mum.’ The culler chief again readied to swing their hand axe, and again the head struck a point in space prohibiting trespass. The axe tumbled from the culler’s hand, completing several somersets before reaching dirt.
‘Ah,’ the chief culler winced, clutching their hand which began to swell, purpling in expansion.
‘Report.’
‘Reattempted cut and axe re-met invisible barrier. Cannot lift axe with prime hand as hand, from wrist to fingers, swells.’
‘Pain?’
‘Severe.’
The other cullers, listening to the conversation, said nothing. Several remained in awe of the majesty of the trees, an awe that challenged the itch in their limbs to cut. Still others, not similarly overcome, grew angry at what they felt was arboreal insolence. Without awaiting order, they swung their axes at the trees but met with the same result. Half the culling team now clutched hands immobilized by pain and bruising.
The chief resource officer began a scan of Wolan’s surface. Expecting to find a hidden energy Foco responsible for the barrier, the officer found none. They commenced a subsurface planetary scan but that, too, produced nothing.
‘Sir Mum, what is the directive?’ the culler chief inquired.
‘Cullers will return to the ship. Chief engineer will prepare cannon. Captain, select target and fire.’
The cullers made haste and watched from their viewing screens as the ship’s cannon powered up. In the walls of the ship there was a surge of energy felt by everyone on board. It was a surge to which hey had grown accustomed during warp travel but not sub light speeds, much less in a stationary state.
‘Fire,’ the captain ordered. The gunnery office fired the cannon at a magnificent specimen standing 400 meters tall. The cannon had no effect on the tree.
‘Select a smaller specimen.’
‘Aye, Sir Mum.’ The captain located a sapling and ordered the gunnery officer to fire upon it. Again, to no effect.
A moment passed. Before the chief resource officer could advise, the gunnery officer turned toward the captain. As their pupils dilated, the gunnery spoke in their usual speech tone, but used words they never before would have had the temerity to utter: ‘I reject your attempt to designate us a name we have not chosen.’
In a trice, the captain heard the chief resource officer remark: ‘Captain, we reject your attempt to give us names we have not chosen.’
‘Sir Mum?’
‘I did not name you, captain. You are not at liberty to issue a claim.’
The captain, caught by the forest on his view screen, forgot to blink. With each mote that landed on their lenses, in each tear the ducts produced to wash away each blemish, pain infused the captain’s sight. It maundered into their being, that pain they had suppressed every time they heard themselves called captain. So damn singular, that title.
by submission | Jan 10, 2024 | Story |
Author: Lauren Everling
I didn’t want to end up here. I didn’t want to be in a holding cell with five other women who looked like funhouse mirror versions of themselves, wrinkled and geriatric, although one of them was only twenty-five. She got aged sixty-five for robbing a convenience store. I was waiting for my punishment, but after looking at that cellmate, the suspense wore away, as I knew whatever it was wouldn’t be good.
The day they took me away was cold, with stabbing pains in my stomach. I clutched it while shivering, the snow piling on my eyelashes. My family was everything but well-off. I’m sure now that I was in prison they felt a sense of relief, knowing that they had one less mouth to feed. Some older woman walking out of the grocery store next to where we lay our heads took pity on me and my family and gave me a slice of bread. One slice was all it took for the cops to think that I was stealing. When they forcibly grabbed me by my waist I kicked back, which the officers took as resisting arrest.
Now I sat here and watched a clearly middle aged woman with tattered clothing being pulled out of the cell. The officer threw her to the ground, grabbed her arm, and stuck the needle in. Immediately, her body thrashed and she gasped for air. Her gasp turned to a groan as her face sagged. All the skin on her body now hung off of her bones. Her diminished self got thrown back into the holding cell as a warning to the rest of us. The other un-aged women moved away from her. She became less than them now.
At this point my mind filled up with ping pong balls bouncing from one end to the other, each time reminding me of the horrors that soon would distort my body. The worst part is, they never warned you. As far as I knew, my next breath could be my last before I was forever someone who my brain could no longer recognize.
by submission | Jan 9, 2024 | Story |
Author: Majoki
The universe is a bowling alley. It sets up the pins and we knock ‘em down.
That’s pretty much all you need to understand entropy. You’ll need a little more to understand humanity. We are high maintenance. We basically feast on order and crap disorder.
The chemical energy we consume and absorb is very ordered. Think cheeseburgers and sunshine. The heat energy we radiate and piss away is very disordered. Think garlic breath and sweaty pits.
Humans only survive by increasing disorder in the universe. No wonder we’re so messed up. For so long, we’ve been attracted to this notion of linear progress trending up and up to some golden age where our brains are the size of beach balls and we wear long shimmering cloaks and wax nostalgic over war, famine, corruption, inequality, poverty, climate change and the final season of Game of Thrones.
Our very nature, though, is bipolar. Order/Disorder. The signs that we are thriving as a species, really kicking dominion-over-the-earth ass are crystal clear: it’s mayhem out there. We are increasing global disorder at a mind-boggling rate, creating a golden age of man-made crises.
So, what do we do? Just keep bowling?
Or do we defy the conservation of energy and rewrite the first law of thermodynamics?
That would be a tedious proposition at best. So I suggest, as a species, we embrace disorder. A new kind of disorder.
A disorder where humanity is not always at the front of the line, on the top of the heap, in the number one spot. A disorder where flora and fauna can flourish because they are not competing with our technological heat waste and exploitation. The earth is not our heat sink. It is not our strip mine.
We can turn our waste energy and our wasted energy to shaking up the established order. We can reset the pins ourselves and not bowl them down. We can create a much more liberating and equitable world disorder by embracing biodiversity.
Biodiversity. Not bowling. That’s what the universe is really built for.
Are you ready for it?
Are you hungry for it?
Good. Now, who’s ready to disorder?
by submission | Jan 7, 2024 | Story |
Author: Chris Lihou
Sophia’s hood on her navy-coloured jacket was pulled over her head, her eyes directed towards her feet. She was out walking and needed to ensure a secure footing on the uneven cobbled pavement of smooth dark stones glistening from the recent rainfall. Rainwater was flowing noisily in the gutter, heading downhill to the nearest sewer grating. With head down Sophia received a modicum of protection against the chilly, blustery November wind stinging her face.
To her right, she saw an inviting sign in a shop door’s window. “Why not stop in for a coffee?”
Sophia depressed the lever and opened the glazed, wooden door. It creaked as she pushed it forward. Just inside sat a young man with mangy, braided, unkempt hair and a full beard. He barely acknowledged her arrival, so engrossed was he with his computer screen. “Where’s the coffee?” she asked. “Upstairs at the back” he replied without looking up, leaving her to figure out any further directions. She maneuvered herself past the piles of books on the floor. Each pile had a pink post-it note on top, presumably recording what was planned for them next. The shop had a distinct smell of age; musty and dusty.
Where it existed, the carpeting had patches worn right down to the backing. Where it didn’t, old worn and bare pine floorboards could be seen. The aisles themselves were very narrow; passing other shoppers would be a challenge, not that she could see anyone in the store. The shelving, bulging under the weight of books, went all the way from the floor to the ceiling making it impossible to see beyond the aisle in which she was standing. No natural light appeared to enter the aisles, a warren of dimly lit passages, a maze with no obvious beginning or end.
As she entered the first aisle, labeled Fiction A-F, the muffled voices started. From above her, she heard a deep echoing voice say, “It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like, so long as somebody loves you.” Sophie was immediately unsettled. Where had the voice come from?
She quickly went to the end of the first aisle and entered the adjacent one, Fiction G-M, only to hear another voice “When you play the Game of Thrones you win or you die.”
Quickening her stride, she went into another aisle. The old wooden floorboards flexed and squeaked beneath her feet. Fiction N-S. Another voice! “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” Where are these voices? What is this place?
Sophia was practically running now, lost inside the aisles. Where was the exit? She wanted out. She took the uneven, carpeted but threadbare stairs two at a time. She got a glimpse of a window and headed in that direction. Before she reached the door, she heard yet another voice sounding almost like a preacher, “All we can know is that we know nothing”.
She was agitated, and on high alert. She could feel her pulse thumping in her neck. Finally, Sophie found the door but not before she heard one last voice, a resonant echo from the end of a tunnel “The real world is where the monsters are”.
Fresh air! She gasped. Gulped. She looked back at the sign above the door. FRANK’S BOOKS, Est. 1910, New and Used, AUDIO BOOK SPECIALIST, a fact she hadn’t noticed when she entered.
by submission | Jan 6, 2024 | Story |
Author: Tony D’Aloisio
He’d been in the hospital room for what seemed like weeks, although really it was just a matter of a couple days. The nurse had assured him earlier that morning that he would be able to leave soon. His parents were coming by in the afternoon to pick him up.
They still had him on Valium. He didn’t know how he had gotten any sleep that first night. They had given him several shots of Thorazine and still he was wide awake, pacing the corridors. At times it felt like he was going to explode. As if he was all wound up deep down inside, and there was no way anyone or anything could get in there to put a stop to that whole upheaval.
The worst part of it all was that it had been his fault. As he knew only too well.
His parents had just gotten their Hereafter device installed. “Your Very Own Window Into The Future,” to quote from the ads. It came with all the usual caveats: how it was intended “for entertainment purposes only,” and that any images that might “lead to unfair knowledge or advantage” were blurred (or blocked) by the circuitry.
His parents told him that he wasn’t allowed to touch it (use of the Hereafters was after all prohibited to anyone under eighteen).
Only he couldn’t help himself. High school had so far been a perfect horror to him, with all the awkwardness and shame and feeling like an alien throughout. He was hoping to see that everything he was going through at the moment was simply a phase, and that someday a life of luxury and achievement might be his.
So late at night, while his parents were asleep, he snuck down to the den and switched the device on. He had it set for thirty years to come. By then (for so he imagined) he would have accomplished everything that he might set out to do in the world, with all the pain of growing up and adolescence far behind him.
The receptors focused upon his brain waves, preparing to follow them through the many divergent timelines until they all converged into one and the wave function collapsed, just the way it said they would in the commercials (the whole business was guaranteed to be ninety-nine percent accurate, based upon a thoroughly exhausting series of pre-release tests and trials).
Eventually the screen lit up. And some guy was sitting there.
Balding. Looking a bit disheveled, even slightly deranged. Hovering over a cup of coffee in a dingy little room.
The man who would–someday–be looking out at everything from his eyes. Him.
