by submission | Dec 4, 2022 | Story |
Author: Majoki
“Hustle, hustle, hustle,” Selse hissed. “In this universe, you gotta go fast to go slow.”
Her training team was darting between a random course of high stone pillars, low walls and short ledges, crouching low, praying not to mess up. Selse was praying how to get away from this mess she’d been commanded to oversee. Ahead, one of her trainees careened into a ledge and swore loudly.
They’ll get themselves killed, Selse thought. Or worse, they wouldn’t get killed and would credit her. She didn’t want anything to do with this misfit outfit, but when Keeper said, “Train the bastards,” you did your best to train the bastards. Otherwise it was cut time. For real. And more than anyone in C-force, Selse knew what that meant.
And what it didn’t mean.
She cut to the trainee swearing and holding his head where he’d hit the ledge. “Quarkshit! Where’d you come from?” the stunned young man squeaked.
“From your worst nightmare, trainee.” Selse wasn’t even bothering to learn their names. It wouldn’t matter. Keeper would agree. “Your job is to learn this course. Your job is to learn to cut. You don’t have the luxury of hurting yourself. That’s my job.”
She backhanded his jaw, snapping his head up, so he’d see her pitiless eyes. “Now, get moving as fast as you can go slow.”
The trainee fled back to the course, but he looked more purposeful, more in the moment. Which was a good thing because the moment was about to get real.
Selse opened her connection with Keeper. “Cut ‘em,” she said.
The course evaporated. There was nothing. And everything.
Cut time still affected Selse. She’d been here as many times as anyone in C-force, and it still messed with her. No way to orient. No point of reference. No meaningful context. No fucking fun.
The only thing cut time left you was desire. The sheer desire to get back before the anchor of your memories pried loose in the relentless maelstrom of timelessness.
That was cut time. Being sheared from any construct of time. Everything happening at once and always. It was not something the average human handled well. In fact, very few handled it at all. But for those who survived cut time and made their way back to themselves, they developed the ability to temporize their immediate environment.
They could cut.
They could understand the rhythm of wave functions, the beat of quantum entanglement, the tempo of multiverses. They could hop, skip and jump across time. Fast forward in and out of their surroundings.
A useful skill. Very strategic. For those who could be trained to temporize. And those who trained them.
But these trainees, this chrono-cluster, Selse just didn’t get.
As she listened to the agonized cries, the absolute panic of her trainees, she wondered with ever-deepening misgiving, why Keeper had given her this bunch. How desperate could C-force be if Keeper thought musicians could handle cut time?
by submission | Dec 3, 2022 | Story |
Author: Michael Kerby
A guy, licking the carpet.
He’s on all fours, in a Doctor’s waiting room. And he’s licking the carpet.
Tongue out, dragging it across the rough blue carpet like it’s the most important job in the world. It’s the kind of carpet designed for maximum wear and tear. It’s probably seen millions of shoes, mud, crumbs, child vomit, adult vomit — probably even a few rectal explosions.
The guy stops and looks at us. He shrugs.
“So what? You should see what the other guys got.”
He resumes his sandpapery drag across the floor. Occasionally he winces as he reaches the furthest his neck can stretch, the limit of his tongues reach, his lingual frenulum straining against the back of his bottom teeth. He stops and shuffles his body forward, and resumes.
He sits up on his knees. He spits. Pleh. A bit of fluff, hair, caught in his mouth. He looks at us.
“You know — it’s rude to stare.”
We avert our gaze. It feels woozy and groggy to move our eyes. We notice the door, but our legs don’t seem to move.
“Yeah, I wouldn’t concern yourself with that if I were you.”
Next to the door, on the wall, is a cork pinboard covered in poorly rendered crayon and felt pen interpretations of the humanoid form. Some have extra long arms, some have extra long feet. All of them have oversized black eyes. They’d be menacing if they weren’t smiling.
“They try their best but, when you get down to it, they’re still just kids. They try to make something that could please them, but they just don’t have the artistry, or the coordination. But, you know, they’re still learning–hey!”
He looks straight at us, a bit of lint hanging off his chin.
“I thought I told you to stop staring at me. I still have my dignity.”
We look away. Our eyes seem to skid like socks on a polished floor. We twiddle our thumbs and stare at the drawings.
“Y’nearly done yet, Bill?”
Bill stops. He sits bolt upright on his knees.
“Yes sir! Just a few patches left, around the edges!”
Bill hurries back down to his work, as a noodle-limbed humanoid lopes into the room on long flipper-like feet, holding a clipboard.
It reaches out and gives Bill a pat on the head, ruffling his hair. He pushes back against it like a dog.
“Haha, ok, ok. Good boy, Bill, good boy.”
It notes something down on its clipboard and Bill returns to work, his tongue running alongside the edge of the room where the carpet meets the wall, painstakingly clearing out years of packed in dust and dirt. He peers up at the humanoid.
“Mm. Gritty.”
It watches Bill work for a moment, makes a few notes, then turns and fixes its oversized black eyes on us.
It smiles serenely.
“Hey! You’re awake. Welcome, welcome.”
It reaches out its long spindly arm and pats us on the head.
“I hope you like linoleum.”
by submission | Dec 2, 2022 | Story |
Author: T. Francis Curran
People stand in the vestibule peering in, hoping to spot someone they know. Some enter, making that “am in the right room?” face. Some linger out there, pretending they are waiting for someone but sooner or later, everyone summons the courage and enters. Once inside, they pretty much know how to act; what to do and they blend in and disappear. Wallpaper. That’s all anyone really wants.
There’s an easel with a bunch of pictures pasted on it near one of the couches. It’s pathetic; the saddest thing you could imagine, as if no one had ever heard of a laptop. There aren’t even enough pictures to properly fill it. Somebody tried signing their name in the blank space, as if this was a birthday or a graduation party. They probably just panicked because you can only stand there for so long pretending to reminisce about good times that never happened or happened without you. After a while the line forming behind them nudges them along.
The Aunt Team finally showed up, the three of them, traveling together because there’s strength in numbers. They’re late, of course, and they hardly talked to anyone. Dad greeted them or acknowledged them anyway. He stood with them, shaking his head. They didn’t embrace or anything. The Aunts aren’t huggers.
When someone new arrived Dad excused himself, made his getaway. The Aunts scanned the room, looking for end seats so they wouldn’t have to climb all over other people to sit together. That’s what happens when you travel in groups. They finally gave up and wandered over to the embarrassing picture-board.
They didn’t address me but I did make out something about how I looked like my grandmother, their mother. It bothered me because they never say I looked like my father or my mother, which I do, each of them, a little. My mom more. Still, you had to feel sorry for the Aunts, looking at those pictures and not being in them. It was their own fault, they went everywhere together but never anywhere. Still, it must have been hard for them.
People started getting less uncomfortable. They got louder and louder. A small crowd by the door was laughing. It was too noisy to make out what anyone was saying but it wasn’t just that. I felt my peripheral vision was fading, my hearing too. That happens to me in crowds. It had been happening for a little while but now it felt like the process was speeding up. I felt cold and, for the first time, I felt scared. Like I was shrinking as the crowd got bigger.
I thought one of my safe thoughts, the one about falling asleep in the car when I was little. My father driving; the windows up; the doors locked. Me, cozy, wrapped up in a blanket in my car seat, serenaded to sleep by my parents’ chatter. Too little to know anything except trust. But that memory kept fading, changing to a different night. They thought I was asleep. They were fighting. Their voices scared me with a fear that had mass, density that pressed on me, enwrapping me.
Soon I sensed a claustrophobic deafness descending upon me. I felt a breathless muteness that I tried in vain to scream away. I peeked around the room. No one was looking at me. No one had heard. Then I saw a glimpse of my dad, he was crying but the Aunts were with him, consoling him, embracing him. It was brief but for that moment, I felt warm.
by submission | Dec 1, 2022 | Story |
Author: Brooks C. Mendell
“Happy birthday!” said the spectral dame in a form-fitting doctor’s gown standing at my door one hundred years ago. “This is a milestone for you.”
“More like a millstone,” I said, leaning on my staff.
“Feeling weighed down?”
“I feel ready to feed worms. I can’t catch my breath,” I said. “But no one listens to raspy prayers from withered souls.”
“Not so,” said my visitor. “I’ve brought you a rejuvenating gift.”
“Birthday apples!” I said, taking the basket piled high in sparkling Granny Smiths and Gravensteins. Then I paused. “The price?”
“Nothing unusual. It’s the standard agreement” she said. “Enjoy a century without physical torment, and collections are a lifetime away.”
Who worries about the future when rapture awaits? “Agreed. Now, I’ll get these to the cellar.”
“Don’t bother,” she said. “These won’t spoil.”
“Thank you.”
“And remember,” she added, turning away. “Just one per year!”
Since that day, my birthdays became gleeful ceremonies rather than morbid memories. I’d uncover the basket and select an apple before sitting by the fire to eat it, core and all.
Today, I am an age that best remains unspoken. While others say old age isn’t for sissies, I did not get that message. Each year, I feel and look younger. Today, I seem 21, ready and legal for my first taste of the King’s wine! Anything else is spinning yarn.
This year, having eaten the final apple, I feel anxious. The empty basket sits on the table. Did someone knock on the door?
“Happy Birthday!” says a hideous hag wrapped in a soiled, doctor’s coat. “I’ve come to get my basket,” she growls. “And you.”
by submission | Nov 30, 2022 | Story |
Author: Majoki
Iowa. It didn’t take me long to figure out. That all of us selected for this mission were from the heart of the Midwest. But I didn’t really get it until we came out of cryo-fugue beyond Eris.
The earth is patient with us, the heavens are not. If you weren’t open to the sky, the fetch of space, deep space, then you could end up like Sandros, Melaba, Krieg: untethered.
Humankind talks big about being free, unbounded, masters of all we survey. But we covet the hug, the insular, the bordered. Deep space has no boundaries, no horizons, no recognizable end, and that can mess up our earthborn sensibilities in a million serious and subtle ways. Like with Sandros, Melaba, and Krieg.
Sandros stopped talking.
Melaba developed tremors.
Krieg became invisible. Just faded away. Literally.
That was the rumor, anyway. They didn’t like to talk much about the first Kuipernauts, but they were sure trying to avoid that kind of cluster beyond the outer planets again. So, they threw all the psycho-emotional tests they could at candidates to see who would stick to the wall and not come unglued in the deepest fetch of space humans had ever ventured.
Iowa stuck. I hope that’s a good thing for Stimson, Piler and me. Since departing Phobos Station, we’ve been aboard Kuiper II for over six years, yet only out of cryo-fugue for seventeen days. Ostensibly, our mission is to rendezvous with Kuiper I to recover what (maybe who) we can. In actuality, our prime directive is to not go crazy. That would be a big win for the program, not to mention us.
Unfortunately, it’s not looking good at the moment.
Stimson has stopped talking.
Piler has developed tremors.
And my hands have started to fade.
We can’t understand it. Mission support can’t believe it. Only Percy has been able to help. Percy is our ship’s PRC, procedural reasoning computer, managing all complex systems on Kuiper II.
When queried on what was happening to us, Percy told us: To perceive a phenomenon that casts no shadow, you must search not for its presence but for its consequence.
A rather cryptic, almost poetic, response for a procedural AI, but it nudged us. We, the crew, were the consequence: muted, shaken, vanishing. The cause: a thing that cast no shadow, a darkness beyond our detection, beyond our ken, vaster than the depthless heavens.
Piler, atremble, voiced it, “Dark energy.”
Stimson nodded.
My certainty vanished.
As we closed in on the last known location of Kuiper I and its crew, Percy alerted us: Incoming transmission. And then Percy died. All systems ceased as the ship itself evanesced, and we were left open to the boundless fetch of space.
-welcome-
Sandros, Melaba, and Krieg appeared before us, newly rooted to our beings, tethered to our consciousness in a surprising glut of light. We three down-to-earth Iowans raised under wide open skies were about to become very far-fetched indeed.
