by submission | Aug 4, 2022 | Story |
Author: Bill Cox
He walks into town just as everyone who could is walking out. Running seems pointless to him, but he can’t blame them for trying. People pass in ramshackle jalopies, their worldly goods piled precariously up, held steady by blank-faced children. Others leave on mules or bicycles, many just on foot. A military truck trundles past, leaving a trail of acrid, black smoke in its wake. In the back he sees four soldiers sitting, grinning, with two teenage girls sandwiched in-between, uncertain looks on their faces. In another time he might have been concerned enough to do something, thoughts of his own daughters on his mind. Now he just lets the truck disappear past the town boundary.
He sees the town’s cantina and walks towards it. It’s not a big town, just a paved main street puffed out with shanty housing and caravans. Funnily enough, it’s still big enough to have three churches. Out here, on the galactic rim, people need religion more than ever, to provide comfort against the dark, to reassure them that they are central to God’s creation despite all the evidence to the contrary. From each church he can hear the sound of singing, a desperate, last-minute show of faith that is unlikely to make any difference.
He walks into the cantina. There are a few other souls here, all drinking alone, hoping they can blot out the fear and hopelessness through some form of alcohol-induced nirvana. He’s no intention of getting drunk, he just fancies one last libation before the end.
Surprisingly, the bar-keeper, a weary-looking middle aged man, is still there, pouring drinks.
“What’ll it be?” the bar-keeper asks.
“Whisky,” he replies and the bar-keeper pours him a glass. He raises it to his nose and breathes in the scent, before drinking the amber liquid down in one go, savouring the warmth that flows down his throat and into his stomach. The bar-keeper pours him another without asking.
“So, you gonna wait for the Wave here too?” the bar-keep asks.
“Don’t see why not,” he replies. A sudden desire to explain arises within him, so he continues.
“I thought I was going to make my fortune here. Frontier mining planet, stake myself a claim, head back home a millionaire. Then the intergalactic economy collapses. No more spaceflight, we’re left here on this rock to fend for ourselves. Come to Providence, they said. Make a fortune, they said. What about the Wave, I asked? Oh, don’t worry about that. It only happens every five years. We ship everybody off-world when it happens. When they go back into hibernation then everybody comes back. What could go wrong?”
“So I took my family here. Wife and daughters. I lost them to the Wave in Saragossa. Barely made it out myself. I end up here, with nowhere else to go, as the Wave is everywhere else. It’ll be here as well before long, so why not enjoy a last drink?”
Suddenly weary and with nothing more to say, he takes his whisky outside and sits on the steps of the cantina. The town is quieter now, save for the muted singing coming from the churches. The twin suns are setting, casting an eerie, orange hue over the distant mountains. It seems somehow appropriate.
Soon the Wave will be here, a global migration of flesh-eating insects, trillions strong. They’re circling the globe, consuming everything in their wake, before eventually returning to dormancy. Then the twin suns will rise again, on a cleansed world.
It’ll be a fresh start for the planet.
He raises his glass to that.
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.
