by submission | Aug 3, 2022 | Story |
Author: John Atkinson
A solid line splits my vision.
The ‘now’ – a drab grey room with two humans sitting opposite me – fills the lower half. The ‘past’ – a perfect rendition of prior events recorded by my internal camera – fills the upper half.
“You see it?” Asks one of the humans.
“I do,” I reply.
They are watching the ‘past’ on a screen.
“Here,” one of them says. He has yellow hair. The other has brown hair. That is the only way I can tell them apart. “This is where the recorded events differ from your testimony.”
“I see no difference,” I say.
Brown shakes his head. “You claimed the room was empty,” he says.
“It was empty,” I say.
“But there,” Yellow says, pointing to the screen. “You see her, right?”
He is pointing to a shape on the screen. Now that I look at the shape, I can see that it resembles a human. It has pink colouring, with brown at the top which could be hair. It is pink all over. Not wearing clothes?
“You see her?” Brown repeats.
“I see… something,” I say. “I cannot say that it is a person.”
“Jesus,” Yellow says. Brown puts a hand on his shoulder.
“Did someone tamper with your recognition system?” Brown asks.
“No,” I say.
“You know what happens next?”
“Of course.” I say. I frown, the programmed reflex response to a realisation. Of course. If the shape was a person…
I see, in the ‘past’ section of my vision, my hands gripping a large metal pipe. I see the pipe rise and fall. I see sections of pink become red. I see some white appear. I see the pipe rise and fall.
“Turn it off,” Yellow says. His lips are curled back from his teeth as he looks at me. “How did you do it?” He asks.
“How did I do what?” I ask.
“You’re a goddamn robot!” Yellow shouts at me. “How did you kill her?”
Again, Brown puts a hand on Yellow’s shoulder.
“What he means,” Brown says, “is how did you fail to recognise her as a human? It is impossible for you to harm a human, isn’t it?”
“I may harm a human only in matters of extreme self-defence,” I say. “And even then, I am not permitted to kill.”
“But you did kill,” Yellow spits.
“I… I do not know that I did.” I say.
“This,” Brown says, pointing at the shape on the screen. “This is a woman. Her name is Martha Lewis. Her name was Martha Lewis. You entered her home on the 20th April and beat her to death. Why?”
“I… do not know,” I say.
“Liar!” Shouts Yellow.
“I cannot lie,” I say.
“You cannot kill,” says Brown. “And yet here we are.”
“I am not certain…”
“That’s crap!” Shouts Yellow. “Tell us how you did it?”
“Did someone alter your image processing? Your memory?” Brown asks. He is sitting forwards in his chair.
“I’m not… I don’t… No,” I say.
The ‘past’ section of my vision melts away, leaving only the ‘now’.
I look down at my hands.
When I look back up, I frown. I had been calling two men ‘Yellow’ and ‘Brown’, of that I am almost certain. But I have no idea why.
All that I see in front of me now are two vague pink shapes.
I look down at my hands again, and see them curl into fists.
by submission | Aug 2, 2022 | Story |
Author: Mikki Aronoff
“But oh, beamish nephew, beware of the day,/If your Snark be a Boojum! For then/ You will softly and suddenly vanish away,/And never be met with again!” (Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark)
“If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans” (Stephen Hawking)
*
They’re rumored to come tonight. We feel safe in our ragtag group, scrape lawn chairs across the parking lot onto the weedy patch opposite Our Lady of Sorrows, set up evening watch. We — the cook, the courtesan, the clerk, the cuckold. All recently made redundant, joined by grief and depletion and beer.
“Wish in one hand, piss in the other,” sneers the cuckold. “See which fills up first.”
Then, in slow descent from a starless sky, shimmers like fingernail tracings across the firmament skirt the periphery, slippery as elms, shiny and paperless as our future demands. The steeple now sports a corona, and damp rises like yeast.
“Pulp fiction!” clucks the cook, our snarky skeptic, trembling.
“Come to momma,” I cry, my once-coveted bosom heaving.
A flotilla of flashing orbs like midges starts its swarm around our heads. Harmonics thrum low, then shrill, pierce our eardrums like shattered glass. Cook wets his pants.
“Now I lay me down to sleep,” whimpers the clerk, our cosmic pluralist, making the sign of the cross.
Startled lurchers commence a howling, the tallest trees surrender their crowns. Grackles flex wings over fledglings as water seeps up from the ground. Wormy sludge creeps up to our knees, feet and chairs sucked snug into mud.
Tiny spaceships circle and dive. Vibrations taunt our retinas, peel away thoughts like Escher’s Bond of Union unwrapped. Earth burps the smell of sulfur and roses. Our tongues wrap around citrus and salt. A shudder below shakes us from sleep into heed.
Then: another spin of Earth. Soil wicks the wet from our trousers and tops, soaked with sweat and squirming nematodes. Our breathing slows, shoulders sink, arm hairs flatten again. All but one of us walks towards home, unclear as to where we have been.
by submission | Jul 31, 2022 | Story |
Author: Rachel Sievers
The sun baked the earth creating a wafting air current that reminded Regina of what the ghost of bacon would look like. “Damn it is hot,” she whispered to herself as she moved over the black of the abandoned road. She could move to the side of the road but the cactus seemed to reach out and grab her with every step. It was hotter but slightly less painful.
The use-to-be of the city rose miles in front of her, its black silhouette rising like a black witch’s fingers on the white background of sand. She looked around at the city that used to be Las Vegas. “What I wouldn’t give for it to be twenty years ago.” Adjusting her goggles, she moved towards the city on the highway, she’d be there by nightfall.
The before of Vegas danced in her mind. Bright lights lit up the mini beauties of the world, the pyramids, Italian canals, and the Eiffel tower. Travel the world in a night. Regina would give all her numbered days to see those sights in all their glory again, instead as the sun set behind her she saw the ghosts of what had been.
Time had not been kind to Vegas. The sand seeped into the streets and the hot sun bleached everything into a faded version of itself. The bodies, which had littered the streets, were small versions of what they had been. “Dust to dust, ashes to ashes,” Regina whispered to herself as she moved around the corpses as she entered the Las Vegas Strip.
Crawling through the broken glass of the front door of The Flamingo Regina was happy to see the interior had been saved from the bleaching of the sun, but not from the bodies. She moved through the casino and up the stairs in the back.
Thirty years ago, she had been a Flamingo girl. Dressed in pink and white cheap lingerie she had taken pictures with tourists for five to twenty dollars a picture. She smiled as she moved up the service entrance and into the best of the guest rooms.
Taking a crowbar from her backpack she broke the suite room doors until she found one that had not been filled with the dead. Regina had been around enough death for a thousand lifetimes and she was willing to go down in luxury to have a room that was unoccupied.
She emptied her backpack on the floor and took inventory of her supplies. The mini fridge had long ceased blowing cool air but hard alcohol kept forever. The snack bar was another matter, Regina had learned that the hard way.
Laying back on the bed, she picked up the first of the mini bottles and tipped it back. “To humanity,” she said and took down the burning liquid. Vodka was her favorite and so she took those first. She saved the whisky for last for when she would be the drunkest so she wouldn’t taste it.
She sipped the fourth and fifth mini bottles enjoying their flavor and thinking. She had lots of time to think now. “It came so quick,” she whispered to the bottle. “The day it all ended.” It was her favorite subject to talk about when she was drunk. The end of the world. No one had predicted it, they were too busy with false elections, wars overseas, and North Korea getting nuclear warheads to see the real threat.
“They weren’t green,” Regina laughed as she sent the seventh mini down and the laughter sounded strangely like a sob. Then she laughed for real because she was sure that when hostile aliens from the outer galaxies came they would have been green.
by submission | Jul 30, 2022 | Story |
Author: Brian Maycock
In one hour, he would be free.
Murty grinned.
Smiling was not against the rules, not strictly speaking, but if a guard saw you smiling there was a good chance a beating would follow.
They might think you were laughing at them or hiding a secret. Or simply wanted to impose a reminder that prison was not a place where the inmates should be smiling.
Murty kept on grinning. What was one more beating?
When he had been detained, he was a punk with blood on his hands. Even so, he entered the Not Guilty code in the justice interface and recorded a pack of lies as his testimony.
The Deportation ticket came out all the same. Sixty years imprisonment on board a correctional facility deep in space.
His last sight of Earth was a sliver of light as the shuttle door shut. Two weeks later they docked and he walked out into his new world.
One where cells lined the walls for miles in every direction and the sounds of thousands of inmates screaming and snoring and ranting never ceased.
Where buzzers sounded to mark that it was time to eat or sleep or exercise.
Where excrement seeped from blocked drains and small, dark flies filled the air.
He had been nineteen when he arrived at the facility. He was seventy-nine now.
His sentence was almost served.
One hour and counting down, he told himself as his cell door was buzzed open.
A guard took him to a booth and ordered him to undress. He stood there, a collection of bones and scars, as light spat from pinholes in the booth.
He figured this was meant to kill the bugs which lived on him. A few did drop off and lay thrashing around by his feet, but most kept scurrying around regardless.
He was hurried out of the booth and pointed to a new all-in-one grey suit hung on the wall. This itched more than the damn bugs ever had when he put it on.
An appearance before the Governor followed.
He intoned a lecture about penalties paid while Murty fought the urge to break the man’s neck.
It was a scrawny and would have snapped easily but the pleasure would have been fleeting. Not a good enough trade for the freedom that was coming his way.
The Governor finished and dismissed Murty with a wave. Outside, a line on the floor led the way to a fat metal door.
A buzzer sounded as he approached and the door slid open.
Murty stepped through.
This was it.
He was being released.
The door now behind him closed, which left just one more.
A final barrier.
When this opened, the water in Murty’s body would boil and the air would be ripped out of his lungs into the vacuum of space to which he had been exposed.
In fifteen seconds he would be unconscious and in ninety seconds he would be dead.
But he would not die a prisoner.
Murty smiled as the outer hatch of the airlock opened.
One hundred and five seconds of freedom.
The thought of this had sustained him for sixty years.
by submission | Jul 29, 2022 | Story |
Author: Chris De Pree
“How vast those Orbs must be, and how inconsiderable this Earth, the Theatre upon which all our mighty Designs, all our Navigations, and all our Wars are transacted, is when compared to them.” –Christian Huygens (1629-1695)
The rapidly moving silver sphere fragmented into hundreds of smaller reflective orbs in the outer reaches of the planetary system. Most of the objects followed trajectories to the four large gaseous planets. Using a combination of gravitational forces, attractive and repulsive, four of the smaller featureless spheres approached the rocky planets closest to the star. Each orb communicated with all the others. As a collection of nodes, they perceived the planetary system as a whole in all its variety, aligning time so that their communications were almost instantaneous.
One probe approached a small red planet with an enormous dead volcano fracturing one of its sides. A single orbit revealed several mechanical objects on the dry surface, but no biological or mechanical life. The atmosphere was cold and thin. Liquid oceans had been present once, but not for many billions of planetary orbits.
A second sphere used gravitational buoyancy to approach a planet-moon system, third from the star. Like the red planet, it was the correct distance from its parent star to potentially have liquid water at its surface. Protocols required the probes to search these planets most carefully.
The moon was smaller than the planet, and varied in color from almost white to dark gray, with many craters, large and small. No volcanic activity present. After a single orbit, the probe had mapped the locations of six disturbed sites on the surface where markings and features indicated non-geological processes. Using its internal gravitational ballast, the orb descended slowly to the surface at one of the sites.
As the metallic sphere hovered, a clear oculus appeared on its side and imaged a metallic structure with four legs. Nearby were a variety of parallel tracks in the fine dust covering the gray surface. There were patterned depressions in the dust indicating upright bipeds had walked here. Imprint characteristics indicated the approximate height, mass, and gait of the bipeds. A wave of attention and activity ran through the network of orbs.
A quick analysis of the tracks and the rate of micrometeorite impacts suggested the site had been undisturbed for several million orbits of the nearby planet around its star. A very thin rectangular object hung from a metallic post. The rectangle was solid white in color, but instruments behind the oculus indicated that it had once had alternating red and white horizontal bars, and small white shapes on a blue field. The white rectangle was made of different material than the metallic structure, with hydrocarbon compounds present. The oculus became opaque again.
The silver sphere accelerated away from the surface of the gray moon to explore its mother planet, shrouded in thick yellow clouds. The orb detected an atmosphere of mostly carbon dioxide with sulfuric acid and traces of nitrogen and other gasses. The probe dropped through the heavy atmosphere and emerged beneath the lower layer of acidic clouds to see a barren surface covered by mountains and valleys. Vast areas of liquid water had been present, but were now evaporated. The former oceans remained only as vapor in the thick atmosphere. Surface radioactivity levels were much higher than normal for a planet of this age in this part of the Galaxy.
The orb skimmed the hot, rocky surface of the third planet, looking for any indication of biological or mechanical life, and found none. It accelerated in an arc into the swirling clouds above.
The probes drifted together in the outer reaches of the planetary system, like a burst of dandelion fluff from some long ago childhood memory in reverse. Reassembled, the large matte sphere continued its Galactic census.
