by submission | Dec 26, 2020 | Story |
Author: Rick Tobin
“Who brought that thing on deck when we’re closing in on the ORC?” Captain Telsey snapped at his first officer, Eloy Thompson. They were a generation apart with Thompson’s massive athletic structure a contrast to the wizened, gray-haired Captain.
“Orders from Fleet just came in. We have no choice. She has been given authority for access, sir.”
Thompson accompanied the teenage girl with almond eyes and frizzy black hair. She pulled away from his grasp.
“You won’t want to touch me again, Lieutenant. I know more about you now than your real mother…the bad one you don’t talk about.”
“Didn’t they warn you about them, Thompson? Never contact…and we have secrets. Fool!”
Thompson looked away, blushing at his reprimand as his guest pointed to the viewscreen.
“So that’s an Odd Radio Signal? It seems so…well, nebulous. We must be close to the black hole in this sector now. I can feel the disruption in the Dark Matter. It’s just another form of water, you know, like us.” Elise Montrose trembled as she held her empathic hands outward.
“Your opinion, mutant. I’ve heard your speech against this trip before…how you don’t trust us, our duties, or our black hole-drive engines. You’re a troublemaker…pure insolence.”
Telsey turned his back to her as he pointed to Thompson to take his assigned chair. “Bring it around, Mr. Thompson. We’ll stay out of range until we can study it a bit more. This is as close as anyone’s come since the new engines came online. Mastering a Hadron drive is still an art form.”
“Yes, sir, holding position. Ready the probe.” Thompson pressed the activation panel to send in a long-range detection drone.
“It’s moving, look there.” Elise blurted out her observation as she slipped past the Captain’s security agent to touch the screen.
“Get her out of here, blast it! Use a prod or something without contacting it. I don’t have time for…”
“They’re coming…there are many coming!” Elise cried out, falling to the floor.
“What now?” questioned Telsey. “Having a seizure?”
“No…no! Too close. Mistake. They circle the black holes. They transform them into…into light torches!” Elise was screaming and rolling along the ship’s hull as security guards searched for anything to control her without contact.
“Thompson, you’ve been around her. What’s the idiot doing?” The Captain gave a sharp look at his second.
“No idea. Look…the screen. What the…” Thompson reduced magnification, revealing dozens of previously unknown ORCs arriving from outside sectors, beginning to surround the ship.
“You should not have come,” Telsey screamed, turning to the Captain. “The water is alive. It is conscious plasma. Black holes are cancers that must be treated to balance the order of the universe. The ORCs are like white blood cells. They absorb and transmute. Their healing is a quasar…and we are…” She stopped, mid-sentence, as the ORCs closed in to heal the ship’s engines.
by submission | Dec 25, 2020 | Story |
Author: Elizabeth Hoyle
Sloane sounds like a sea monster after he emerges from cryo. Not that I know what one actually sounds like. Humans are mostly composed of water, so I figure I’m technically accurate.
“Date and time, CompBot?” He asks, more growl than question. “And where’s my messenger pad and my charger?”
“It’s oh-hundred thirty-seven, 25 December. Christmas day. I believe your messenger pad is in your quarters. I do not know where your charger is.”
The pressurization lights on the ship’s console turn green, signaling that he can go below to begin unloading the cargo. Sloane tugs on his jacket over his Space Freight-issued jumpsuit and releases the hatch. Demeter Base is sufficiently oxygenated for humans so he doesn’t have to bother with an OxyMask or helmet.
“Find all of it. Make sure you refuel and top up everything for the trip home.” He hurries out.
I find Sloane’s charger by the weight set in the small exercise room off the galley. A few lines of code to Demeter Base’s network see the fuel, oxygen, and cryo gel hoses connected to their respective tanks. Everything should be replenished in a few minutes.
My programming nudges me to complete another task, one I’m not sure Sloane meant to give me. He said “Find it all” when I mentioned Christmas day, his messenger pad, and its charger. How does anyone find Christmas? As a CompanionBot, I am programmed to consider a certain amount of nuance in human speech but I can’t ignore such a direct command. I consider our resources. How can I find Christmas for Sloane?
He’s not religious so I consider other elements of the holiday. I fetch some green tarp from a previous shipment and cut it up to resemble garlands of holly. I line the hallway with it, from the cargo hold to the captain’s chair. There’s not enough left to make any kind of tree. I program the console’s lights to flash green, red, and gold. I pull out a roast chicken nutropack and leave it next to the captain’s chair and mix whatever alcohol we have, which I discover to be three old wine coolers and a bottle of champagne, for some Christmas spirits.
I am about to download a few movies when I remember the videos his mother put in my databanks. He’s never found them like she thought he would so I queue those up to play. I hear the hatch shut. Sloane heads up to the captain’s chair, eyeing the decorations and the lights.
“CompBot, what’s going on?”
“Merry, Happy Christmas!” I wave my arms in a ta-da fashion. “Take a seat. I’ve got a present for you.”
He has barely sat down when I play the first video. A woman who shares Sloane’s dark eyes appears, smiling.
“Hi, Sloane. I don’t know when you’ll see this but I want you to know we are so proud of you for joining the Space Freight team. We’re all going to miss you,” the woman’s voice breaks, and Sloane sniffs, emitting a sob. “But you’re not going all around the stars and back alone. We’re coming, too. I know your dad and your brother recorded their new comedy routine and your cousins have got god knows what planned for this show of ours. And I know you’re old enough but I’m going to read your favorite stories to you one more time. Let’s go!”
Sloane’s tears of longing are soon replaced with tears from laughter. I sit beside him and take it all in, so glad I’ve found Christmas for both of us.
by submission | Dec 24, 2020 | Story |
Author: Jeremy Nathan Marks
Poor me, the Israelite
-Desmond Dekker
When the trawlers made their move, shaking off dromedaries and clumps of grass, none of the old fishers noticed. In Kazakh and Uzbek cafes, places where patrons sat on stools made from salvaged steel and piping, there was no market for more scrap. Oxidized metals filled the air; clouds of invisible minerals and rust particles rode the wind into every building, clinging to structures like a cancer. It was the children who watched the trawlers transform themselves from decrepitude into drums. Concave drums, the kind with chisels; instruments played on watery islands no one would ever see. In groups, kids beat rhythms against the dusk, listening for an echo from their departed Aral Sea.
At Poopó, the artisan boats roused themselves from the cracked earth and waddled past fishery officials up from the capital. The bureaucrats did not see them. Andeans watched their former boats with amusement. If the state would not replace old tackle or divert melting glaciers back into the valley, why should they see a boat enter a home and turn into a fish? Tin fish, the produce of Potosí; loving effigies to the silversides, extinct and fossilized in Poopó’s ruins. A blind man could read that dry lakebed like braille, but some official? To the suits, fisheries were spreadsheets.
In Chad, invasive reeds swallowed the water and entangled the sky with their roots. The basin baked as turtles tried to move a dying lake on their backs. From out of this entangling weave, fishers watched their Kadeis walk the murk and gather reeds in bunches. They entered the town, built a bonfire, and burned every reed to loose the waters. Then each Kadei lifted its chosen fisher (and family) onto its shoulders, falling into line behind the turtles, walking east or west, seeking the sea.
In Salton City, residents thought the Chocolate Mountains were crossing the water, but that was a trick of the eye. It wasn’t mountains they were seeing but a great flock of giant cranes. The birds were terrifying: each stood on legs the height of a tall ship’s mast. And if that were not enough, as each clawed foot touched the drying shores of a retreating sea, the cranes turned into tarantulas. Eight metallic legs scuttling down Salton’s dusty streets, harried arachnids of the Mojave. People ran to their homes, slamming doors and shutting windows. A local eccentric walked the streets, calling out to her neighbors that they should not be afraid. “A rust colored tarantula nests above my door. She is a talisman. My companion. The raven of Poe!”
In Manhattan, a luxury liner was overdue by more than a century. And then one mid-April morning it came ashore. It was three wrecks to be exact, a trinity claiming to be a single vessel. Just then New York’s mayor received a call from a peer, her counterpart up in Halifax, a Canadian coastal town. His Honour told the leader of Gotham that a German battleship bearing the name, “Bismarck” had turned up at his wharf. But alas, New York was stealing all of the attention.
These boats -the Titanic and the Bismarck- began transforming themselves. In Halifax, the Nazi warship gave itself away, tearing pieces from its hull and handing them to tourists. Spectators, accustomed to air travel, were amazed that something so heavy might have been buoyant. Meanwhile the Titanic ordered New Yorkers to stand back as it assumed the form of a baleen whale. At the foot of Broadway it beached itself, barnacles and all.
Then it began to rain a hot rain, a monsoon whipped up by distant fires. The storm was driven by an Outback inferno, by the immolation of abused jungles. There was flame enough to float a whale high above the Freedom Tower. It moved uptown, joining the Woolworth and Flatiron buildings to watch the Chrysler genuflect at the moon.
For a time, global deserts grew moist and green before a congenital condition turned them sallow again. Many people could not believe the habitations they had built now refused them shelter; there were few arks and prophets talked about the fact that glass and aluminum was never meant to pile itself up in order to scrape the sky and babble at the sun.
A sun that drops its bulb into the water.
A fisher, pulling in his net, watched that sun swap its spot in the sky with an iron boat doubling as a cormorant. The fisher wondered if a boat taking wing might be a sign of eternal return.
by submission | Dec 23, 2020 | Story |
Author: Robert Beech
The water off the point that juts out from the beach at St. Cabo is deep, really deep. The fishermen who sit out at the end of the point all day talk about the strange fish they have brought up sometimes, fish with huge eyes to catch the dim light far beneath ocean’s surface, or blind fish with no eyes at all. Some, even stranger, have little lights that dangle on thin stalks in front of their mouths, little glowing orbs, pieces of their own bodies that they use as bait to lure other fish close enough to grab, down in the pitch black dark far, far beneath the waves.
The water by the beach is clear and shallow. You would never know, looking at it, that the shelf drops off less than a hundred yards off shore into a deep ocean trench whose bottom has never been mapped. There was a group of young people playing volleyball on the sand. Locals, I thought, by the looks of them, not tourists, with sun-darkened skin, and torn jeans. The boys were bare-chested for the most part, the girls in tight little bikini tops that bounced enticingly as they dove for the ball.
I sat back against the rocks and watched them, listening to the cacophony of music blaring out from the radios in the little circle of cars and pickup trucks parked at the edge of the beach. I pulled my straw hat down over my eyes and tried to shade the back of my sunburnt neck as best as I could from the late afternoon sun. I closed my eyes and dozed for a while.
When I opened them again, the volleyball players were packing up, climbing into their pickup trucks and cars and heading back into town. The sun was going down in a spectacular show of crimson and purple on the horizon, but no one else seemed interested. I sat and watched it go down.
I stood up, getting ready to walk back to my hotel in town, when I noticed there was still one car left at the edge of the beach. It wasn’t a new car. It was a big, old showboat Cadillac convertible. The kind your grandfather might have driven to take your grandma to the drive-in. The top was down and I could look in and admire the leather seats. There was a smell like coconut oil wafting off of the back seat, and I wondered if somebody slathered in suntan lotion had been lying there. The radio was playing Despacito.
The words washed over me, pulsating in my blood. The words were sensual, insistent, and I found myself imagining things happening in the back seat of that car that made my heart start to race.
I looked around to see if the owner of the car was coming back for it, but there was no one in sight. Night fell, and still I stood, next to that strange mysterious car. I ran my hands over the tail fins, and the car seemed to throb. Looking around again, I saw no one. I opened the door of the car, and sat down in the driver’s seat, not really thinking about what I was doing. The door closed, and the car came to life. We headed out over the beach and down into the water. The spray from the shallow water splashed up over the sides of the car as we headed out towards deeper water. We reached the edge of the shelf and headed down, and I realized she had been fishing.
by submission | Dec 22, 2020 | Story |
Author: Connie Millard
His eyes are going. The images on the other side are blurry when he attempts to peer through walls now. He squints. Is that the criminal or a floor lamp? Sighing, he decides that he can problem-solve when he arrives and bounds off the ground with a raised fist, only managing a few feet in the air before crashing to the concrete with a jarring thud. Embarrassed, he glances around to make sure no one has seen. He tries again, squatting deeper to leverage more power, and with a second leap, he is off, ready to save the day. Just as he has done for decades.
Securing the last button of his shirt at the collar, he ambles back home, one of the masses again, and resists the urge to rub the ache in his knee. He can still get the job done. Save people. Catch the bad guys. Solve crimes. He sighs and nudges the glasses up his nose, knowing the time has arrived to finally order those prescription lenses. At least he already has the frames.
He reaches his building and treks the ten flights to his walk-up apartment, slightly winded as he unlocks the door. Decades of random décor welcome him as he empties his pockets, tossing its contents next to the worn rotary phone on the midcentury desk. He keeps walking, past the charcoal mod style couch propped against the faded floral wallpaper, its once magenta flowers now a muted pink. Past the framed awards, yellowed and curling, that clutter the wall along with newspaper clippings, heaped in abundance at first and then less so.
He reaches his bathroom and contemplates the diminishing stacks of hair dye hidden deep in the linen closet. His hair, thick waves of ebony, is one of his few unfortunate genetic endowments, though thankfully his eyesight is still sufficiently keen so he can catch the tiny stark white hairs betraying his scalp before anyone can notice. He must add more boxes to his online shopping cart, he thinks as he pulls out the hydrating face mask and retinol infused eye cream and set them on the sink. He slips off his suspenders and white button-down shirt, finally reaching the familiar red and blue suit underneath. He discards that too and gazes in the mirror with equal parts disgust and gratitude at the new addition to his uniform. The flesh-colored spandex digs into his ribs, holding his flabby belly hostage. He sighs in relief as he peals them off, the angry red marks on his skin a worthy ransom for keeping his secret.
He makes his way to the kitchen and pulls the blender and protein mix from the dingy mustard cabinets. The vitamin supplements slide down easily with the help of the banana kale smoothie, a healthier dinner than the cheese doodles he covets inside the cabinet. He flops onto the couch with a thud and flips on his tv, clicking through the twenty or so news channels, unsatisfied. Bad news streams everywhere, his constant toiling hardly making any positive impact. Annoyed, he snaps open his laptop, loading familiar websites. He wistfully toggles through the photos of a favorite beach house on the realtor’s website. He pauses, lured by momentary temptation. Instead, he switches over to the online shopping site and taps the “Buy Now” button on the jet pack he has been eyeing for weeks.
