by submission | Feb 12, 2021 | Story |
Author: Steven Sheil
Vera exited the Ambassador Suite and activated the vacuum seal, ready for the next guests. The moment the seal was complete, she felt the pulse in her temple that indicated that her work schedule had been updated. COMMODORE SUITE, EAST WING came the order, directly into the forefront of her thoughts. She nodded her head to dismiss the notification, and started on her way to the other side of the hotel, following the route-map overlay that appeared in her left eye.
Her cart hovered beside her, moving with a steady hum in time with her steps. Some of the other maids named their carts like pets – Oscar, Buddy, Lucky, Coco – but Vera never had. The cart, with its compartments full of cleaning products – bleaches, germicides, Tucker and Co’s LeaveNoTrace™ (“the only way to lose that DNA!”) – was just a tool. She had no sentimentality whatsoever where it was concerned.
As she turned the corner at the end of the corridor Vera saw Michael – one of the other maids – approaching, his own cart (“Bellaroo”) hovering beside him. The terms of Vera’s employment allowed for a thirty-three second long personal interaction for every four hours of work and Vera, having seen no-one since beginning her shift 3 hours ago, and loathe to forgo her contracted entitlement, decided to engage him.
“Tough morning?” she asked.
“Overpump in the Starlight Lounge fleshpool caused a glut,” said Michael. He looked exhausted, “Taken three of us till now to get it contained.”
“Sounds like quite a job,” said Vera, who was practiced at avoiding any language which might conceivably be interpreted by the cart’s auditory monitoring system as being critical of the hotel. She raised her eyebrows in sympathy instead, and Michael gave the shortest of knowing nods in reply.
“Yes,” he said, “It was.”
With the interaction over, they both moved on, Vera praying that the fault with the Lounge fleshpool hadn’t spread to the Suites.
The fleshpools were the central attraction of all Bodell Fantasee Hotels. Employing the latest in IET (impulse-extraction technology) and combining it with SLF (synthetic living flesh), the pits were circular tubs recessed into the floor of each suite. On arrival, the pools would fill with SLF – which could then be animated by the IET implants the guests received on arrival. Any desire could be manifested in living flesh – any number of hands, eyes, mouths, genitals, any type of skin, fur, pelt or hide. Endless arrays of mindless, powerless beings, all subject to the whims of their creators.
Vera reached the Commodore Suite. As she went to unlock the door, it opened, and she came face-to-face with the departing guest, a man in his fifties, immaculately dressed, greying hair wet from a shower. For a moment his eyes met Vera’s, and she saw a spark of something – shame? – before he quickly looked away and breezed past her as though she wasn’t there. Beyond him lay the room and the remnants of his desires. Vera sighed and led her cart inside.
by submission | Feb 11, 2021 | Story |
Author: Jeremy Nathan Marks
If breakthroughs keep occurring
let them in
– Death
By the year 2100, Detroit was know no longer as the Motor City. Few people called it Motown. It became known, at least among its own, as City of Cans.
In the 21st century, once the housing crisis became a permanent feature of North American life and no one could any longer afford a mortgage or rent, the Can Craze commenced. Detroiters sough out box cars, shipping containers, and dumpsters. They occupied semi trailers, campers, and tool sheds. Any can or container that wasn’t tied down -and even those that were- was seized and converted into a domicile.
Municipal, state, and national governments claimed they were powerless to tackle the rampant real estate speculation that set home ownership out of reach for everyone save the very rich. Soon, the traditional housing stock of almost every North American city was hollowed out, Detroit’s among them. In Motor City, local pensioners, mostly former autoworkers, lost their homes because they could no longer pay the land tax.
But this did not mean that Detroiters skipped town because, frankly, there was nowhere else to go. Motown’s infamous White Flight was now beside the point.
The young, the enterprising, and the desperate, all of those folks who could not enter the housing market formed a new class of people who abandoned the dream of owning an estate, 2 cars, and a yards of manicured Kentucky Blue Grass. They took to cans and containers, to envisioning their future through the lens of repurposed aluminum and steel. And they took their cans where they could find them: dumpsters squatting in weedy lots; shipping containers down at the port; even the old People Mover that had collapsed onto Woodward Avenue.
Detroiters became walkers. They no longer drove. The local auto industry went belly up. The city converted into 139 square miles of trails and foot paths. When the road pavement cracked it was not replaced. The city retired its bus fleet which added to the new housing stock.
Detroiters became gardeners. They welcomed bees and other pollinators, refusing to cut the grass, mandating that everything flower. They learned to forage for wild onion, mushroom, cabbage and mustard and they farmed worms for their truck gardens.
Depending on your perspective, what was happening in City of Cans was either a “green revolution,” a “libertarian revolt,” or, as the national government was calling it, a form of “leftist terror,” an assault on market freedom. These criticisms served as a warning: dark forces were gathering along Detroit’s frontiers, forces that intended to squash the city as a radical outlier; a rogue republic, a polis so arrogantly attuned to an ice free world plagued by disruptions to the food supply and violent, rising sea fleeing migrations. Everything Detroit did was viewed as insult/insurrection.
And so it was that, in the City of Cans, that the Black Lightning Brigades were born.
The brigades were an accident. It just so happened that at their first concert, held in the lobby of the former headquarters of General Motors, the power trio, Black Lightning, discovered that their music induced a ferocious energy in its audience. The music, performed in 30 second sonic bursts, was a novelty to listeners. It was music that returned to the old ways of guitar, bass, and drums, instruments that had gone out of fashion during long decades of compositions generated by computers. Black Lightning reintroduced the concept of musicians using their hands, their arms, their legs and their feet to perform fills, maintain a beat, strum and arpeggiate. In a do-it-yourself town, the music of manual dexterity won out. But a surprising offshoot was the violence, the feats of strength the music induced.
At that Black Lightning concert, dozens in the audience were injured when the crowd began to thrash about. The music’s impact upon the body was compared to the influence of Phencyclidine (PCP): audience members became so frenzied and strong that they began tearing out elevator doors, balustrades, and overturning booths and barricades with apparent ease. Taking note, Black Lightning introduced social distancing measures at future performances.
When Detroit was finally threatened with invasion, when armies of statists pledging fealty to the national authority showed up along the perimeter of the city, Black Lightning sent brigades of its fans to defend the City of Cans, to protect Detroit’s way of life, to ensure their little republic remained free.
The brigades lined upon along Wyoming Road, 8 Mile, and Alter. They barely knew that they were going to combat the gathered hosts. What they did know was the power of the music, of what Black Lightning did to their nerves, their muscles. And even though the Brigades were unarmed and outnumbered 5 to 1, and many of their members practically shit themselves when they saw what they were up against, still they won. Black Lightning and two of its protégé bands performed as they battle raged, injecting their listeners, their fans with a a ferocity that led to an undisputed victory, a day known locally as “The Battle of the Amplifiers.”
For months afterwards, the national government, the families of the slain, battle witnesses, and so many others in the City of Cans wondered how it was that Black Lightning’s music only impacted the fighting style of Detroit’s defenders, that it did not catalyze the actions of the invaders. There appeared no answer until one day, the bassist of Black Lightning declared,
“If you were from Detroit, you’d know.”
Nothing: not neglect, not economic collapse, not even an invading host could efface a city whose people had always found reasons to beat the odds. The trio’s bass provided the pulse, music-as-galvanic force; a unique source.
Black Lightning was the admission that Detroit’s inner groove was its weapon.
by submission | Feb 9, 2021 | Story |
Author: Don Nigroni
I was an orphan, never adopted, perhaps because I wasn’t ever cute or special in any way. But, when I was nineteen, I was fortunate enough to become a live-in housekeeper to Professor David Knežević. He was a polymath, most renowned for the Knežević equation.
That was over ten years ago. Martha, his wife, had died six years before I arrived and I knew he was still haunted by her death. When someone mentioned her, a cloud descended over his normally calm facial expression. Regardless, my main job was to never ever erase his blackboard.
I called him Uncle Dave and he never objected. He was the closest thing I ever had to family. A year before he passed away, he had confided in me that, since he was getting up there in years, he wanted to keep a promise made to his wife that they’d be reunited after he died.
He told me, “The lack of everything, namely, nothing, can’t produce something yet things do exist. But if there was always something in time then getting to yesterday would take forever. There could never be today.
Hence, there has to be something eternal, without beginning or end, outside of time that’s responsible for something existing in time. And the language of that creative principle is mathematics.
But, to unlock the secrets of the transcendental formula, you have to know the quotient of the highest number divided by the smallest number greater than zero. In other words, what infinity divided by infinitesimal equals.”
Less than a month before my uncle passed away, I walked into his study when he was scribbling on his blackboard. As he continued writing, he told me, “The original copy of the transcendental formula subsists in the noosphere. It’s accessible to the demiurge who inserts various values for different variables into the formula in order to create numerous alternative realities. Unlike the creative principle outside time, the demiurge is a personal god within time who makes the amorphous primary something into specific things in many distinct worlds.”
Then he replaced a symbol with Ω in a certain bracketed section of the transcendental formula on his blackboard and some of the chalk transformed into the English words, “What do you want?”
My uncle could see the horror in my eyes and said, “Fear not. The demiurge means us no harm.”
He wrote on the blackboard, “To be reunited with my wife after I die.”
Whereupon what he had written was rearranged to read, “Only if you keep my secrets.”
He then ordered me to erase and clean his blackboard every day thereafter. And, after he passed away, I learned he left his house to me and realized he had destroyed all his mathematical papers before he died.
Even if I could have, though I surely couldn’t have, duplicated his feat, I wouldn’t have. I hope he’s somewhere nice with his beloved Martha but, personally, I prefer to have a more prosaic finale. I’m perfectly fine with ending up wherever the demiurge deems appropriate.
But, you see, I have no one waiting for me.
by submission | Feb 7, 2021 | Story |
Author: JC Hammer
Everyone hears new and they think different or better. That’s not always true. Humans on Mars? Sure that’s new. There’s nothing different about us, though. Nothing better.
They didn’t exactly take the best of us with them. Sure, we’ve got a couple of scientists, a few doctors, but they’re all here to serve the greater purpose, the Cause. We think we’re so feckin’ righteous, with our plan to bring peace to the universe with buckets of bombs and a brigade of adolescent Marines. I don’t know if you’ve seen Marines at the bar or on shore leave, but there’s nothing peaceful about that circus. And I know you haven’t seen them at their business end, because you wouldn’t be alive to read this if you had.
It’s kind of ironic, though. The same organization that wasted Earth is the same organization that helped me escape from it. I commissioned in the Marine Corps fresh out of college—one of only two women in my class—thinking it would help get me out of the neighborhood I grew up in. Turns out joining the Marine Corps is the wrong thing to do if you want to avoid violent neighborhoods. Who would have guessed? But, it was the military that gave me my ticket off Earth, though all I’ve done is bring the fight with me. We took the same nukes that made quick work of everything living on Earth and used them to power the ships that are shuttling the rest of humanity to Mars. Now, it’s my job—our job—to make sure that the resources on our new home are secured for the “friends of freedom”, using the Marine Corps’ trademark democratic persuasion to encourage the rest of Earth’s survivors to agree.
So, now I’m here, staring through my inch-wide slit of a window at a cloud of red dust swirling feebly in a tenuously thin atmosphere. There’s a persistent buzz pecking at my attention, slowly eroding my sanity—of course, they put the LT next to the compound’s generator. If the Eastern Alliance doesn’t kill me, I’m sure this noise will, or maybe cancer. But it’s all the same to me. Everyone dies one way or another.
At first, I felt lucky to be one of the few to survive the flaming outhouse called Earth, but it’s been a week now since arriving, and I’m starting to realize that the ones left behind were the lucky ones. Food and water are rationed, the air is recycled and barely breathable, and my travel options—for the rest of my life—are limited to the ping-pong room and the mess hall. My bulletproof options, that is. But I’m itching to get out of this bunker inside of a bunker inside of a barracks. It’s too safe. Marines weren’t meant to be caged like a pet.
The klaxon alarm suddenly screams out across the barracks, accompanied by the frantic, flashing red lights lining the walls of my platoon’s hallway. It could be a drill, like the countless others this week, but something about the timing of it all suggests otherwise. I leap enthusiastically off of my rack and zip myself into my form-fitting EVA suit, then grab my rifle and head out the door. My platoon is already gathering by the airlocks that lead to the pressurized troop crawlers, organized into fire teams and squads. It’s a sight that never fails to send shivers running up my back.
Time to bring liberty to the Red Planet.
by submission | Feb 6, 2021 | Story |
Author: I.W.Ray
“What’s the matter? I’m busy.”
“He’s dead,” my ex-wife gulped through her sobs. She didn’t have to continue. I knew who she was talking about. “Are you still there?”
“Yes,” I take a second to brace myself like a dam against the news I knew was coming.
“Come to the desk.” The order flung me to the present and then my eyes are fixated on the woman in the sharp white suit. The whole room was so white. I felt like a giant piece of dust that would be devoured if I dared step farther in. “You have given up all your worldly possessions?”
“I have not a penny on me.”
“You are wearing a watch. You can’t have it.”
It’s a cheap digital watch my youngest son gave to me when he was a kid. The same one I practically threw in his face for wasting his money. I found it after his death. I haven’t taken it off since. “You said I can give a gift,” I explained while caressing the watch. “I choose this.”
I give her the watch as she inspects it by the millimeter. She approves and gives it back to me. “Did you bring any other items?”
“No, just a letter,” which I wave. Without warning, she grabs the envelope and guts it and spills the continents no one but my own eyes should see. As she reads it my anger, shame, and discomfort forces my mind back in time.
“Sorry about your son,” my aide Fremont said. “When is the funeral?”
“I have no idea. My ex and my other kids don’t want me there. My youngest dies because he drops out of college and joins a cult and I’m the bad guy.”
“Sorry, but maybe you should find out and go anyway. It won’t look good in the press if you don’t.”
“Here, you now have seventy-two hours,” the woman in white again forces me back to the here and now. She gives me back my letter with a fresh envelope and the money I will need that has the correct series date on them.
As she is shoving me out the door, she asks me one more time if I truly understand what I’m doing. Of course I do. Go back in time and with a letter and one gift for my younger self to change my future for the better.
“Your path can fracture into a thousand roads. No one can predict the consequences,” she warns again.
“I know.”
She unceremoniously dumps me outside an abandoned industrial center like a stray amongst the gravel and garbage. As I walk to the nearest bus or gas station, an odor rises and attacks my senses. It must be from the old factories but I don’t remember it when I first came here. It was ominous, a dreadful warning but ineffective to one who no longer wants to remember the pain.
#
After a week, I’m back here in the same white office. The woman in white was getting ready for her next transaction when I walked in. She stares at me but says nothing. After a few seconds, I stammered, “It worked perfectly. I got everything I wanted.” After some painful seconds of silence. “ there’s another better me out there. I don’t know where else to go.”
She eyed me up and down. “Level three-point five…no… point four anomaly. You exist on another plane of reality. Welcome, to the realm of the immortals.”
