by submission | Jul 16, 2022 | Story |
Author: Lorna McGinnis
Dear Valued Employees,
As you may know, the world will be destroyed next Wednesday. A massive asteroid will strike the earth at approximately 4:00pm PST, and that will be the end of humanity.
Unfortunately, additional requests for paid time off (PTO) in the interim cannot be accommodated as this would violate our two months’ notice scheduling policy. We expect you to show up for work promptly at 8am and remain in the office until at least 5pm.
Employees who violate this rule will be written up by their immediate supervisor, and repeated write ups will result in termination.
Any employee calling in sick must provide a doctor’s note.
However, we are able to honor any PTO requests made before the imminent obliteration of the planet became known as those are in accordance with our policy.
If you are deceased after 4pm on Wednesday and cannot work a full day, you will not be issued a write up. The company regards this as an extenuating circumstance. No doctor’s note will be needed in this case.
Best wishes to all of you during this trying time.
Sincerely,
Jane T. Marshall
Chief Human Resources Officer
by submission | Jul 15, 2022 | Story |
Author: Brian Etta
“Breath through the nose and out through the mouth” Justin let that instruction carry him. Sitting in half lotus he resisted the urge to itch as he scanned his body for sensations and in so doing produced and amplified them. There had to be something to that he thought, then he thought, ”Damn…another thought”. He was chasing a dragon. That one time the one sweet, sweet time that everything had aligned just so… sleep cycles, nootropics, caffeine, temperature maybe even the price of beans and the exchange rate with China, who’s to say what? But in that soft almost dream he saw her. There’d been something about the frequency, the high end that caused his brain to synthesise something like a small and gentle fountain, like in a public park. By letting go, not trying to hold onto it, his brain rewarded him with a show. The imagery was red against red, like what you see when you give your eyes a good rub. Coupled with that still feeling that only comes when the mind is zeroed out and can undergo a phase transition to something more solid but yet easier. The fountain morphed into a hibiscus, stamen and all but in a way did not…like the mind is able to do. Riding the wave, looking inwards but more like letting go, Justin was treated to a further transformation. The hibiscus was now a dancing woman undulating her dress in a manner reminiscent of Carmen Miranda. She seemed to smile at him then vanished as a car outside his window announced its passing via doppler effect. Damn, so cool he thought. He was hooked on meditation and was going to figure out how to replicate the effect and conditions to see “Carmen” again.
This day he took micro doses of various and sundry things given him by his naturopath, volume up and on the same track, “Icelandic Wilderness” or “Trail of the Caribou”…who knows? He found his mind quieted and emptied itself with ease and rapidity, he was ecstatic. He felt himself drifting like in shallow water and allowed himself to be carried further still. He was in the center of the universe embedded in tangible and inky darkness. He was the center of the universe. He felt out of depth and tried to rewind his state but couldn’t. He became aware of a slight but growing sensation, somewhat like soft but insistent tendrils that wouldn’t let him up. He wasn’t going anywhere…looking around he saw silhouettes, other forms in various configurations that all seemed trapped and resigned. The universe wasn’t his dream but rather he was merely one of many dreams of the universe…and the universe was about to wake up.
by submission | Jul 14, 2022 | Story |
Author: Majoki
Her eyes were oceans of possibility. Blue and depthless.
And I was shipwrecked.
A fallen eyelash crushed the sails and within moments my ship foundered in the shoals of the iris. When I climbed, half drowned, upon the pupil, I was looking straight down into her optic nerve.
I almost puked.
Which is not a good thing when wearing the Radiculous 3000, a very expensive haptic suit. No, puking in gear that virtually amplified all your senses would be uber foul, not to mention costly to clean. So, I choked back my vertigo and lunch and tried to figure out how I was going to get off Marilyn Monroe.
I’m sure I wasn’t the only one trapped on the miles-long icon that some hackstar had mic-dropped into the waters off New South Seoul last night. That kind of thing was happening all over the metaverse. Coders trying to make or keep their fame, à la Warhol and Banksy, with ever crazier creations. A lot more ancient mythical creatures made sense to me now. A Hydra or Medusa doesn’t seem so outlandish next to a pop icon whose hair is now its own Sargasso Sea.
Yup. Things were getting tangled, and I was certainly part of the problem. I’d taken the clickbait, wanting to be the first to stare into metaMarilyn’s acre-wide eyes. You never knew what portal or pitfalls awaited. It felt like old-time exploring, where-no-one-has-gone-before adventuring, because-it’s-there questing. But, without ever having to leave your comfy couch.
A brave new world, or a cowardly old refuge? Constructing alternate realities, cutting the ultimate umbilical cord, and, literally, living the dream.
Were there boundaries anymore?
Evidently, not on Manhattan-sized Marilyn. I climbed to the tip of her nose and gazed toward her stardust painted toenails bobbing just above the ocean swell. More virts were already landing and starting to claim their pound of digital flesh. Soon metaMarilyn would be colonized and the rush would be on to find the next big thing. The next unspoiled dream.
Was there such a thing?
Where was the magic in wanting, having, in being, everything?
I leapt from Marilyn’s nose, hoping to be kissed by inspiration before I was swallowed into the belly of our beast.
by submission | Jul 13, 2022 | Story |
Author: Jim Anderson
A bell rang and the finding room fell silent.
The finder — a small, silver-haired woman in a lavender robe — turned to Ulrich and said, “A simple question, Citizen. Do you believe in one objective, mechanistic reality governed by the laws of Newtonian physics?”
“I don’t believe in any reality in which that’s a simple question.”
“Yes or no, Citizen.”
The wise strategy was to lie. But Ulrich had already showed a lack of wisdom.
“No, then.”
“Heretic!” The prosecutor sprang to his feet. “He admits his guilt.”
“Finder, my client is insane,” the defender said. She stayed seated and seemed bored by the proceeding.
“Thank you both,” the finder said. She turned again to Ulrich. “Explain your view.”
“Why? So that you can declare me a heretic or a lunatic? The punishment is the same.”
“There is no punishment. Only treatment. Admittedly, the treatments are similar, but that’s to be expected. The law defines heresy as a type of insanity.”
A brain-wash either way, Ulrich thought. He understood why others ran. Had Julie? Maybe. He only knew that the apartment was empty when he came home from his shift supervising the Sector 112 excavations. His mistake was looking for Gil and Vega. The Doctrine cops had their place staked out.
Julie, Gil and Vega. All gone. Disappeared. Were they hiding? Were they being held incommunicado? Washed and witless? Dead?
“Big fish seldom make it to a public finding,” Julie once told him. “Stay small. If you get caught in the net, profess your love for Newton’s Laws.”
Staying small meant staying away from her. Ulrich couldn’t do that. He couldn’t lie about his view of reality, either. Now he’d get a proper washing. He’d be a new man. He’d forget Julie.
“Will you explain your view?”
Ulrich shrugged. “Reality is like an onion.”
“Odorous?”
“Multi-layered. We only live in one.”
“How do you know other layers exist?”
“It’s a model put forward generations ago, along with several others that came after Newton. The state banned them all and destroyed much of the supporting evidence.”
“Why destroy knowledge?”
“The models led to technologies we weren’t ready to control, to weapons that rendered the surface of the planet uninhabitable.”
“That sounds like recitation. Have you simply replaced one doctrine with another?”
“I’m an engineer, not a physicist. Newtonian physics works fine for me. I understand it. But people I trust have studied the other models and found some compelling. They are peeling the onion. I want to help.”
The prosecutor was on his feet again. “Finder, the state no longer seeks a determination of heresy. An insanity finding serves our purpose. Anything to shut him up!”
“Far from shutting up, I’d want him to sing,” the finder said. “Enhanced interrogation is my order. Call my team.”
Three officers in helmets and body-armor entered from a side door.
The defender stood. “The defense asks the finder to reconsider.”
The finder waved her off.
Ulrich marched out of the room between two of the officers. Each grasped one of his arms above the elbow with a power-glove. Beyond the door, the third officer came up behind him and dropped a hood over his head.
Denied sight, Ulrich stopped walking. He expected to be dragged, but the power-gloves released him.
The floor gave way, and he… floated downward.
Not far. His feet touched a firm surface. He heard familiar voices.
Somebody pulled off the hood. Air moved around him, fresh and fragrant.
Julie leaned in and kissed him.
“Ick,” she said. “Have you been eating onions?”
by submission | Jul 10, 2022 | Story |
Author: Majoki
“A synaptic map of the brain.”
“Social media pathways on the Internet.”
“A spider web. If the spider had taken acid.”
The program director waited as each volunteer gave their interpretation of the sprawling diagram being displayed in the research center’s conference room.
“A force much more powerful than any robot overlords we unleash.”
The director prompted, “Go on.”
“Mycelium. The subterranean threads that weave life. The network that links the underland. Fungi. The Wood Wide Web.”
That answer is how I got here. Buried, but far from dead.
I’d been sunk into the ground deep in the Hoh Rain Forest where I’d not be disturbed, except by mycelia. That was the hope which goes a long way in explaining the craziness of the plan. Volunteering to be buried alive.
Not my physical self. That was in a very sterile lab in Olympia, ostensibly doing very well by doing very little, or so the lab monitoring systems reported. No, my flesh wasn’t six feet under. My consciousness was.
For decades we’d been waiting for the singularity. Uploading our ethereal selves into a promised digital land. But, here I was downloaded into the analog underland. My mind melding with mushrooms. The fungilarity.
This was no psilocybic psychedelic trip. I was the program’s first hyponaut, my consciousness inserted into the mycelia of one of the largest temperate rainforests in the U.S. to tap into taproots, sound the soil, and mosey along the myriad subterranean networks that connected all manner of flora, from towering trees to microscopic mushroom spores.
A heady responsibility and a mega headtrip as well. Good thing my head was on ice in a lab. A very good thing because I was discovering how much unnecessary baggage that skull of mine carried.
Yes, humans are social. We crave connections. We search for those forever friends and soul mates, looking to form bonds that transcend–whatever. But, you see, what I really discovered down here in the underland, untethered from my physical form, is that humans have been soul searching in the wrong place. We’ve been raising our eyes and hopes upward, to the heavens, to the celestial depths, when the core of our being is right at our feet, below and within our simple earth. An earth that has been patient with us, even as we smother it.
Now, I was in it, rooted to its roots, connected as no human consciousness had ever been before and all humankind’s fears and myths of inner earth being the domain of the dead were wrong. Dead wrong. Every fiber of the underland was about life. Life bound together and dependent. A true system of survival and revival.
Fungi were among the first organisms to return to the atomic blast site of Hiroshima. From mushroom clouds to mushrooms. That is our way out, to dig deeper, into our earth, into our hearts, into the real soul of our being. If we no longer try to simply bury our mistakes, we can unearth our true potential. Not just as human beings, but as fellow beings.
Partners for life.
