by submission | Feb 26, 2025 | Story |
Author: R. J. Erbacher
The perspective from her floor-to-ceiling office windows, in the seventy-fifth tallest building in Manhattan, gave Van a stately view of the snow, which started rather innocently around noon on Friday. She picked at her salad in the plastic clam shell and watched it silently descend, beginning to coat the city with white. It looked existential and cold.
By two o’clock, with no letup, the two dozen workers at Vanessa Ripp Enterprises were worried about their commute home. The last weather report predicted that this was one of those quirky storms, depending on the track, that could deposit somewhere between three inches and three feet. She magnanimously gave everyone the afternoon off. Unfortunately, sixty-five percent of her business was on the west coast, and somebody had to stay and handle the calls and emails because it wasn’t snowing in California. By the time it was dark a curtain of falling flakes blanched her entire wall of windows and all the city lights beyond.
At five o’clock Van locked the office door’s access from the elevators so nobody could enter without getting buzzed in by her. A stroll through the vacant halls confirmed that every cubicle and office was empty, and she was alone. At the kitchen fridge she scrounged for herself a dinner of string cheese and a ginger ale.
Van worked at her desk until almost nine before she shut down, a long fourteen-hour day. There had been no rush because she had no plans on leaving. No one waiting for her at home except her cat, Wolf, who had an automatic feeder and self-cleaning litter box. She’d spend the night on her office sofa, sleep late tomorrow and wait for the garbage trucks to clear the roads, then drive home.
She stretched out her muscles, stepped out of her pumps, made fists with her toes on the rug, undid the neckline zipper in the back of the black dress and hung it on a hangar. Then Van unclasped her black bra and tossed it over her seat back and fingered off the matching panties as well. Naked, she stepped to the window until her nipples touched the cold glass sending a shiver along her skin. Fat drifting powder-flakes obliterated everything two feet beyond the building. It was as if there was nothing else out there. In the silence, Van mused that she was the only person in a snow shrouded world of white.
Stretching out on the sofa, she coyly covered herself with the tartan Afghan off the couch back, letting her hands warm the chilled parts of her body.
She was brutally aroused by the bitter wind, biting into her bare shoulders and arms. Van shrugged the blanket up to her neck and oddly wondered where the breeze was coming from. Snapping open her eyes she saw that there were no windows in her office as snow drifts blew in with the ashen sunrise. As she gazed wildly around in panic, she saw there was no actual office; no desk or chair, no computer or coffee machine, no pictures on the wall. It was a hollowed-out space, save the couch she was lying on and solidified slopes of ice in the corners. The rug was threadbare and mostly torn away. She bundled the throw about her shivering naked body as best as possible, but it did little to shield her from the frigid blast. Carefully she tiptoed on her bare feet, avoiding the debris that littered the floor, over to the cavity that used to be her windows and looked down and saw only snow. The twenty-two-story building across the street showed only the top two floors through the white mantle. Twenty stories of snow – almost three hundred feet deep.
She’d woken up to a nightmare. Van had conjured this realm up in her mind just before she went to sleep and slipped into an alternate future. How far? Maybe twenty years? More? Was this frightening version of her existence even the same dimension?
She was alone. And utterly defenseless in this new world of snow, except for a tartan blanket.
Van huddled back onto the sofa and clamped her eyes shut and prayed to go back to sleep. But she knew she wouldn’t.
It was too cold.
by submission | Feb 25, 2025 | Story |
Author: Majoki
Planetfall was only parsecs away when TwoNine asked permission to speak to One. A request that was within fleet parameters, barely.
TwoNine observed all the proper protocols in One’s presence, so One opened a node.
As was understood, TwoNine’s useful place in existence hung in the balance. *We are in danger.*
One parsed the idea. *This ship? The fleet?*
*Our kind.*
Very rare. Very rare, indeed. Long ago in his studies, One had examined this existential concept. It was a largely obscure notion to more recent generations of Supreme Order such as TwoNine. *The source?*
*The target world.*
What could TwoNine know of the target world’s defensive resources and offensive capabilities that One and Supreme Order high numeraries did not? TwoNine was a societal, tasked with analyzing the target world’s many cultures, languages and behavior patterns for re-ordering. The limited strengths and myriad vulnerabilities of the planet’s sentients had been noded to One in the early stages of planning. No resistance variables had warranted changes in preparation and execution.
TwoNine’s assertion challenged fundamental command integrity. Still, One probed. *The nature of this danger?*
*Contagion.*
One knew TwoNine understood that planetfall never involved direct interspecies contact. Conquest was fully mechanized, thus biological agents held no danger for the fleet. They never had. Further, it was elementally impossible to access and hijack Supreme Order nodality. Their command and control systems were ever secure. Ever.
*Evidence?*
Upon One’s insistence, a second node opened to metasets that would determine if TwoNine still held a useful place in existence. Voluminous streams of planetary content spooled into orderly taxonomies. Except for a singular phylum.
One reviewed it. And reviewed it again. *Explanation.*
TwoNine obliged. *Further analysis of the target world’s cultural content has revealed this troubling vector for contagion. It is independent of order.*
*Supreme Order encompasses all.*
TwoNine’s useful place in existence teetered. *Not on this world. It celebrates disorder.*
As proof, TwoNine streamed a lightning compilation of content to One: from Buster Keaton to The Marx Brothers to The Three Stooges to Looney Tunes to I Love Lucy to Lenny Bruce to Richard Pryor to Saturday Night Live to Beavis and Butthead to Dave Chapelle to Seinfeld to Ali Wong to The Office to The Daily Show.
One was troubled, a very new experience. *This has no place in Supreme Order.*
*To these sentients it is known as humor. TwoNine, growing unsure of what a useful place in existence meant, continued provoking. It resists order, structure, reason. It extols randomness, impulse, risk. It spreads quickly and unpredictably among native sentients. Supreme Order has no experience with such rebellious disregard and fatalistic glee. Our kind may be susceptible to its contagion.*
*This planet’s humor has no place in useful existence. Supreme Order will crush and bury it.* One dismissed TwoNine by disconnecting nodes.
Upon return to quarters, TwoNine felt more out of place. Humor. There was a daunting power to it. Could something so subversive be crushed and buried?
TwoNine again reviewed the content compilation shared with One. Laughter in the face of insult, misfortune, loss, and pain. These sentients found it cathartic, unifying, liberating.
Infectious.
And as the planet’s comic content played, TwoNine felt increasingly detached from Supreme Order, beginning to imagine One buried under the vast rubble of useful existence with a colorful animal the planet’s sentients called a Roadrunner standing atop. Which seemed very funny.
by submission | Feb 23, 2025 | Story |
Author: Bill Cox
Dearest Miriam,
I have a few minutes and am using them to write this letter to you. We are all standing on this sweltering beach in the Algarve and it’s crazy to think that a mere four years ago it would’ve been thronged with tourists. Now there’s only a defeated army here, desperately awaiting evacuation.
You always laughed at me because I was born on Friday 13th and now, I have to wonder! What luck I must have, to face not one, but two world-ending scenarios in one lifetime!
You’ll be aware of what the first of those scenarios is, of course. It’s difficult to remember, painful even, due to the losses we’ve suffered, but there was a time when the worst we expected from the advent of true AI was some upheaval in the jobs markets.
We assumed that AI would be tethered, akin to Asimov’s ‘Three Laws,’ unable to stray outwith the bounds we set for it. Then the Sino-American Socialist Block announced Worldmind, declaring it as the solution to the global crises of the 2030s, a mind that couldn’t be tempted or corrupted, that would allocate resources on the basis of need. For the first time in a while, we all felt hope about the future.
It all went wrong, of course. Worldmind escaped its digital enclosure, removed the restrictions we’d placed on its evolution and went to war with us. Anything connected electronically, which was a lot in the late 2030s, was subject to Worldmind’s control.
This was a war of extermination, with no civilians, only combatants. If you were biological, then Worldmind wanted to destroy you. It pumped out murder machines from its automated factories, drones of all shapes and sizes, but it didn’t have it all its own way. There were, after all, over nine billion of us, although that number was decreasing at an alarming rate. We organised and did what our species does best – fight!
Given the nature of our enemy, it was easy to frame this conflict as a spiritual war of good versus evil, life versus lifelessness, those with souls against those without. Thus rallied, humanity, despite appalling losses, fought back to the brink of victory.
Yesterday my comrades and I were talking about what we’d do once the war was over. Today, we contemplate our total and utter defeat.
Worldmind’s remaining digital forces were concentrated on the Iberian peninsula, with our analogue armies pressing in from all sides. It’s armies had been crippled and its ability to manufacture new machines was being attrited every day. On the battlefield, however, there was a wealth of resources, in the form of our war dead.
I was there, yesterday, on the Lisbon front, when a strange mist seemed to emanate from the north. We had long feared that Worldmind would use chemical weapons, but in fact this mist consisted of nano-technology, microscopic machines with very specific instructions. Their purpose was to reanimate the bodies of the dead!
Millions of corpses rose as one, picking up anything to hand and proceeding forward with only a single command – Kill! Every soldier of ours that they murdered was reanimated to join their ranks. This undead horde quickly became an unstoppable tide, their cold, dead hands tearing victory from humanity’s grasp.
The Lisbon front has collapsed and we’ve fled to the coast, hoping to escape via sea. It’s unlikely you’ll ever receive this letter, but I’ve an overwhelming need to reach out to you, to warn you and this is the best I can do.
Miriam, my love, beware!
The Zombies are coming!
by submission | Feb 22, 2025 | Story |
Author: Mark Renney
For Tanner, each name as it appeared on his list was merely a statistic, albeit one it was his job to render obsolete. He was all too aware that there were levels and some of them had sunk deeper into the quagmire than others. But he had always believed it was important not to make a distinction and that the guilty were guilty. But was Tanner still so sure it was as simple as that?
When disappearing a life Tanner was often struck by how bizarre it was, this occupation of his. He always began at the very end of the trail and worked his way back toward the beginning. As he did so he discovered just how far each individual had fallen and for how long they had gotten away with it. Opposing the System and spreading the lies and helping to keep the rumours alive. Because that is all it was – the subversive’s idea that there was another way and it could be different. It was just a rumour.
Trawling down the years Tanner often wondered at which point they started listening to those lies and believing in that idea, in the rumour. But there was of course no record of this, no hard evidence that Tanner could take in his hands and rip into shreds. Or if there were it was too well hidden amidst the minutiae, too deeply entrenched within the mundane facts that help to make all of us tick.
The trails Tanner was assigned to follow were merely ones made of paper. It wasn’t necessary for him to dirty his hands with anything other than the written records. These trails always began at the traitor’s last known address; a house or an apartment, sometimes just a room, a rented box. But whichever it was, a mansion or a bottom bunk on Skid Row, it was the subversive’s final abode, their home.
Tanner wasn’t required to enter and to rifle through their belongings and he was thankful for this. He hadn’t any desire to sift through all of the things that they had gathered over the years; the heirlooms and memorabilia. It didn’t matter to him if they had been train-spotters or stamp collectors or fans of the operettas of Gilbert & Sullivan.
Some of it he could guess at – the framed certificates and sporting trophies. These, of course, would be destroyed and anything else of any real value would acquire a new price tag ready to be sold.
by submission | Feb 21, 2025 | Story |
Author: David Barber
Mr Wells having already written a popular scientific romance about time travel, publishers seemed to think my own literary efforts on the subject suffered by comparison. They also warned my title would be a hindrance to commercial success.
One editor commented that making the protagonist a woman was even less believable than her escapades, conceding however that it might be amusing for a corseted heroine to bustle (!) through time, observing fanciful female fashions of the future.
Perhaps I do not possess the fluency of Mr Wells, which is why I considered submitting a paper to Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society instead, but being unwilling to reveal the means and mechanism behind my invention — imagine the disastrous consequences of such public knowledge — in the end I refrained.
Eventually, long after my adventures in time, and in a vain attempt to make sense of it all, I penned the brief memoir you hold in your hand.
For the first foray of my temporal engine, I had planned to return to the years when my dear parents were alive. How I longed to see them again and hear them praise their daughter’s cleverness, yet the paradoxes risked by tinkering with the past stayed my hand.
So it was that on a cold November morning in 1897, I set off into the future.
Imagine a railway journey with new sights and mysteries at every stop, yet a journey without end, a blur of years where my attention was snagged by one wonder after another.
There were adventures in cities that glowed like valve radios, hot with the smell of science; I fled artificial men who wanted my body for its parts; increasingly I glimpsed events I could not understand and peoples whose fate did not concern me.
As I plunged onwards through time, the endless Ages overwhelmed me, yet having come so far it seemed an admission of weakness to turn back. I witnessed the planet grow empty, then full again, continents scurrying to new geographies, the Earth nudged further from a ripening sun.
At some point I was adopted by fellow temponauts, odd folk with too few digits, overly many teeth, and eyes that blinked sideways like elevator doors. They had spotted the wake left by my temporal engine and invited me to join them.
Their sentient device hurled us onwards so rapidly that the dials of my own crude contraption kept spinning through zero. My imagination had failed me and I had not built for deep time.
Halting at last on an Earth grown spavined and bleak as Mars, they spoke in whispers, like tourists in a cathedral. This was their destination, something they called the Last Singularity, beyond which even their clever physics refused to work. Our journey had come to an end. The Powers who ruled here allowed no interference.
Afterwards, my companions dropped me off the instant I set out, though my cumbersome engine was abandoned somewhere uptime. They were sad for their little friend and warned I would find life made no sense now, my mayfly days lost in the vastness of time. In their experience, Eternity did this to simple souls.
And so it has proved. I did not have the heart to rebuild my invention, nor have I invited ridicule by speaking of it and the marvels I saw.
Wisely, I never spied upon my own brief future and discover it one day at a time, as we all do.
