by submission | Apr 22, 2023 | Story |
Author: Rick Tobin
Cold steel from a small revolver in his sweaty palms gave little comfort to Jack Chase, sitting alone amidst feral wheat still struggling in an abandoned field near his grandfather’s rotting farmhouse, long since left to crumble after the 2024 financial collapse. There was no sacred family ground left for a wandering empath, unfit for a corrupt, war-mongering society. No one would notice a misfit who never managed to find a companion or create children. His hands shook while he closed his eyes, the setting sun behind him providing its warmth, messaging his bare neck a final time as the moist soil pushed chills up his spine.
Jack was unaware of a sudden flash of light behind him, hidden within the sun’s diminishing rays. He thought the whoosh of fresh wind was the empty prairie whispering goodbye. Light footsteps escaped him as his weapon pressed his right temple.
“No, Jack. We can’t have that.” A soft feminine voice surprised him near his left ear as a powerful hand twisted his gun from his grasp. He twisted, resisting, finding large, blues eyes and thick, silky blonde hair filling his view. He froze as his intruder tossed the gun.
“Not today, my love. There is much to live for. We waited for you.”
“Waited?” He mumbled. “You’re a hallucination. I had this once before. Am I dead?”
She smiled, calmly. “Not yet. You don’t remember that night? You tried this before, out in the rocky outcrops of Sedona. Did you die from drugs then?”
Jack rubbed his eyes, and then slapped his face.
“I’m real enough, dear Jack.” She pinched his reddened cheeks. “Get on your feet to meet someone to change your life.”
“Who are you? I don’t remember…not your name.”
“We don’t have names. That is your species’ waste of time. We recognize each other in full awareness. Now pay attention.” She was suddenly insistent. “Here is someone anticipating meeting you.”
Jack obeyed, still stunned at the bizarre events. The tall woman moved aside allowing him a full view of a silvery saucer craft. In front of it, moving toward him was a female teenager, also dressed in a shiny one-piece suit like her companion. The blonde visitor held his arm, urging him forward.
“This is ours…our mating.”
Chase’s knees buckled. Vague memories rose from his depression—many nightmares and hypnogogic dreams watching a child mature under orange skies surrounded by unrecognizable forests. They came irregularly. He would wake covered in a cold sweat, fearing for his sanity.
“She…she can’t be.”
“Oh, indeed, she is. For your comfort, I will introduce her as Oneha, meaning an explorer.”
“Why…I…this is too much!” Jack pushed his hands hard into his throbbing temples.
“Perhaps you’re in shock. Come, Oneha, and meet Jack, your father.” The blonde alien drew Jack closer as Oneha reached out, touching his forehead, providing relief and calm. He looked at her hard in the dimming light, scanning her youthful redhead beauty—a doppelganger for his Irish grandmother Elise.
“Time to get on board, Jack. Things are moving quickly. Earth’s magnetic field is changing drastically. Please come along. You’ll be treated well in your new home.”
“I can’t just…just leave, without…”
“Really,” she replied, smiling. “You were about to do that as we landed. There is nothing here for you.”
Jack turned, staring at the farmhouse ruins. He shuddered, reaching for Oneha’s hand and his tall partner’s arm. They walked swiftly into the craft, then zipped past the atmosphere as the ground below them heaved, swallowing the remains of an abandoned homestead.
by submission | Apr 21, 2023 | Story |
Author: Gerri Brightwell
We travelled for years before finding a habitable planet. Its one continent would be enough—to the south volcanoes let out wisps of smoke, to the north winds tore across deserts, but between lay a fertile land of easy rivers, and plains creased by the roads of a lost civilisation.
We settled amongst that civilisation’s ruins. Our ships were designed to be taken apart, and from them we built our homes, our schools, our storehouses. Our ships’ machinery we adapted to clear fields long grown wild, while the systems that had protected us in space—the scanners, the alarms, the weapons—we converted to watch over us on this new world. Powering it all was simple enough when we could use the very fuel that had carried us here.
That fuel—in the end, what was spent would need to lie undisturbed for millennia. We scouted sites far from our settlements, far from fault lines and volcanoes, far from the hungry ocean. On the whole continent there was only one such place: beneath a vast northern mountain. To tunnel into it would take years.
By the time the tunnel was almost finished, we had picked clean the hulks of our ships. Children had been born who knew nothing of the dangers of space, and the rest of us gave barely a thought to the sirens perched high on their posts around our settlements. But one autumn afternoon when a cold northern wind was blowing, those sirens screeched to life. It was harvest time and we stood amongst our crops, gazing at the blank skies, at the empty horizon.
It took us too long to understand what that wind was carrying: the toxic decay of a vanished civilisation’s waste, buried deep in the one place it should have lain safe forever.
by submission | Apr 20, 2023 | Story |
Author: Alastair Millar
Eighty lights is a long way to go for a party, but Prosperina Station orbits Dis, the rogue gas giant PSO J318.5-22, and where there’s no sun, the nightlife never stops. More importantly, the Company had decided that I was due a good time, and they were footing the bill to get me there.
Why? Because I’d just landed the contract to supply exotic fuels for a new fleet of starliners. Without semi-biological gas derivatives, you’re just not leaving the Solar System, and we’re a big player in a cut-throat market. This was a big deal in every sense.
The congratulations came on my first office day back after a mandatory medical. “You’ve got the right stuff, Marty!” said CHRIS, the Corporate Human Resources Intelligence System. “Time we got you out beyond warp!”. An all expenses paid trip to a high class playground where most terrestrial laws don’t apply? How could I say no?
Two weeks later, I stepped off the transit liner Magellan, and settled in for a vacation to remember. Which it turned out to be, if not for the reasons I’d expected.
It started, of course, with a girl. Well okay, several, but this one stood out. No facepaint, which I liked: it was a fad I could do without. None of the obvious sensory implants favoured by the ostentatiously kinky, either; also good, I was still getting my bearings and wasn’t ready to experiment yet.
We ended up making out on a couch in a half-lit lounge with an amazing view of the luminous planetary bands. She scratched my neck in a moment of passion… and then I woke up under harsh ceiling lights, strapped down, with tubes inserted in my arms and unmentionables.
“Welcome back, loverboy,” said a honey-sweet voice in my ear. As she walked to the foot of the recliner that held me, I saw she’d swapped her party outfit for a white lab coat.
“What? Where…?”
“Welcome aboard the gas dredger Cerberus.”
“Not Prosperina?”
She laughed. “No, you’re taking a private cruise, courtesy of your employer.”
I started to get a sinking feeling. “What do you mean?”
“Well, it’s like this. Those exotic fuels you sell? Making them needs catalysts – specifically, blood antigens. Really rare ones. We can synthesise them, but we need to calibrate the process regularly using fresh samples. And guess what? You’re one in ten million, so management signed you up for the donation crew!”
“Empty space! You could have just asked.”
“You might have said no. Or worse, demanded a bonus. That’s not how things work.” She winked.
“So here’s the choice. You can yell and complain, in which case I’ll sedate you for a week, take the necessary anyway, and send you home. Or you go “okay ’Seph”, and I hook you up to the VR so you can have fun for a few days while we draw what we need. That way you get the tail end of your holiday. Or,” she leaned in closer, “you say “Yes please, Miss Persephone”, in which case I slip some of my personal content into the VR, reschedule you for a later flight back, and then show you what Prosperina really has to offer. Your call.” She smiled.
Well I mean, it was an offer I couldn’t refuse, right? I’ve already volunteered to go back and donate again next year. It would be irresponsible not to. After all, like HR said, I’m made of the right stuff.
by submission | Apr 19, 2023 | Story |
Author: Bob Freeman
10:43
It was always 10:43
His classy watch, each beat synched with the atomic clock in Colorado, was stuck.
Scientists warned about the hole in the sun, the X-class magnetic burst.
No one paid attention.
“But the flaming telegraph wires in the mid-1800’s!”
He didn’t remember the ancient Morse code he learned in his youth and saw no reason to worry.
The electric car purchased to help the environment didn’t know Morse code either.
The couple lived a few miles from town, not off the grid, but at the far end of services in their quiet retreat, a nice place for retirement.
Now it was quieter, with no power and only a wood stove for heat and cooking.
Water came from a nearby creek, schlepped up the hill, filtered, and boiled to remove the residue of their upstream neighbors and their failing septic tanks.
They were more fortunate than most, still young enough to handle the rough living, and reasonably healthy for their ages.
Solar power was an option, but the north-facing hill and installation cost never made it from their to-do list to to-done. They could get by with batteries and an emergency, hand-cranked radio. A gas generator would have been nice, but gas needed electricity to pump and distribute.
Promises of power and normalcy could be years away. Until then, the options were to move into town and find a cold, tiny apartment or tough it out with the surrounding forest community.
The scientists chimed in. “It was a 500-year solar event,” conveniently forgetting how to do math.
Earth’s dominant species would do as they always do, wait for the disaster to peak, pick up the pieces, and start over. The couple would wait until age, infirmity, or boredom forced them to leave. After all, they had at least another 300 years, more or less, to prepare.
by submission | Apr 18, 2023 | Story |
Author: Amanda E. Phillips
“Mechaornithology,” he said, stumbling over the word in his agitated state, “is a valid and incredibly undervalued field of study.” He tapped the tri-folded letter in his lap as if it somehow proved his point.
“Field of study,” I repeated in a measured voice. He was as flighty as the mechanical birds he studied and anything too loud or too quick would be liable to scare him off. “But you wouldn’t really be studying anything, would you?” I envisioned myself ripping the letter from him and tearing it to pieces. Little pieces, too. Small enough to swallow so that he’d be forced to call up Rubicon Fowl and make them mail off another contract.
“I’d be doing a lot of good work out there.”
“You’d be trekking through a trashed city,” I said, disregarding that if I wasn’t more delicate with how I spoke to him, he’d fly away, “and winding up a bunch of clocks. You’d be leaving me. You get that, right? Those things out there aren’t even real. I’m real.”
“I’d be saving an entire population.”
I rolled my eyes.
“You’re rolling your eyes,” he said. “You always do that. You know what they say about that, don’t you?”
I widened my eyes for effect and rolled them again. I’d read the same article about eye-rolling and relationships. I straightened. “If you sign that piece of paper, it’s pretty much over, wouldn’t you say?”
“I’m signing,” he said, clearly resolute, but it was too late. I already had the contract in my hands, shoved into my mouth, eyes rolling, laughing, choking on the paper as I ripped and chewed.
He only shook his head. He had nothing to say, and if he did, he wouldn’t say it.
In the end, Rubicon Fowl didn’t require that he actually sign the contract. Sending it through the mail had only been a formality. It was just a way, they said, to give the job offer more weight, to make it feel more real.
“I love you,” he said later, the one-way SeaTube ticket pulled up on the screen of his phone. I only shrugged and quietly gloated over the fact that maybe I was the temperamental one after all.
“I’m going to be doing a lot of good work out there,” he said, taking my hands. I pulled them away, crossed my arms, and hid them in my armpits.
“They’re dying out there,” he said. “They’re running low and there’s no one who cares enough to get them back into the air.”
“Are you crying?”
“No,” he lied, the proof already pooling over onto his cheeks.
“There are other things to care about,” I said, manufacturing a frown to make him stay. It wouldn’t be enough, I knew already knew that.
“Wait for me?” he asked.
“It’s a long job,” I said curtly. “You said so yourself.”
“That’s right,” he said. “But will you wait?”
I left him below at the Embarcadero SeaTube Station without answering. He’d have to think about me not answering it over 3,809 kilometers through the watery depths beneath those choppy, uncaring waves. I imagined him out there in the Hawaiian humidity, recovering, restoring, and releasing those mechanical Belted Kingfishers and Blue Lorikeets for the next ten years so that the rest of the world could rest easy with the knowledge that these manufactured birds were not yet wiped out like their predecessors before them, all flesh and blood and feathers.
Mechaornithology had taken my husband away and, unlike the kingfishers, it hadn’t even tried to offer me a replacement full of gears and wiring.
