by submission | Nov 27, 2020 | Story |
Author: Stephen Dougherty
The four-month voyage to The Mirror came to an end when the faintest light of the instruments filled Navigator TwoJade’s eyes with figures. The engines fell silent and a barely perceptible feeling of fulfillment bathed the deck of the Excitation. The other Jades allowed themselves to open their eyes but quickly closed them again at the sight of the instruments’ glow. Raised towards the only window of the small craft lay OneAngel, her hands flat on the communicators. It was her job to make the Excitation talk.
The trip from the Dark Earth was uneventful and seemed only a few hours to the crew who slept through it in dreamless suspension. The worlds and wonders passed them by until they reached a point beyond Pluto. Ten thousand miles ahead of them lay an object of unknown origin. Nearly two hundred miles across and forty miles high it was almost completely flat and just a few feet in depth. Its highly reflective surface had reflected the feeble light from the sun and caught the attention of the observatories on moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Just beyond the fringes of the solar system, it waited in silence.
The Excitation also now waited, tantalizingly close. OneAngel, lying before the long oval window, moved her head ever so slightly and thought “Run your preliminary checks before we move into place.” And the craft shared the thought instantly with the others.
Each touched their screens, imagined commands, and influenced numbers with their cool quick eyes. The machineries within the Excitation pulsed and breathed, the engines glowed, and the small dark ship started to move.
At the same moment, a flash of white light shone brilliantly for a fraction of a second from the surface of The Mirror. From its surface, thousands upon thousands of small spheres rose and moved slowly outward, like bubbles in water. The window on the Excitation reacted to dim the light and the crew moved quickly to respond. Once again, eyes darted, thoughts influenced, fingers danced. As they acted to understand this unexpected development the small spheres turned a deep green, stopped in their courses and started to vibrate violently. The crew of the tiny vessel fell unconscious. When they awoke, they found that the spheres had gone, and valuable time had been lost.
OneJade skimmed her instruments. Her sharp mind deciphered the data and projected her conclusion to the Excitation: “We have been unconscious for nearly twenty minutes. Scans suggest the vibrating spheres were a method of communication. She opened her eyes wide. There is a message.”
OneAngel looked through the window instinctively to see if The Mirror was still there. It was. Its liquid-like surface seemed to ripple and flicker. Connected together via their ship, the tiny crew all knew there was a message. And it was now displayed on their monitors:
WE ARE COMING. WE WILL ALTER YOUR SUN.
OneAngel transmitted a thought to the Excitation and her eyes flashed around her displays invoking commands to the ship. The engines glowed once again, and it moved gracefully towards The Mirror. A few minutes was all it took until Excitation stared directly at the center of the giant instrument. OneAngel faced forward, lying flat in her berth, and gave the command to transmit. She looked on as the message was sent into the heart of the device. Her heartbeat rose ever so slightly. This message too was displayed across their screens. It read:
THANK YOU
by submission | Nov 26, 2020 | Story |
Author: David Barber
“What did you say this place was called?” repeated the alien.
“The Large Hadron Collider.”
The man’s name was Theo Jacobson, and before the aliens came, he’d been in charge here. This was where debris from colliding protons had sparkled through the ATLAS detector. It would have been lethal to stand here once. He couldn’t get used to the silence in these vast cathedral spaces.
“Such efforts your kind put into science.”
“Such foolishness,” added its Shadow.
The aliens always went about in pairs; the True and its Shadow. Like so much else, the significance of this eluded us.
The True waved a three-fingered hand. They assumed human form for our convenience, they said. Perhaps they hadn’t looked very closely. “Explain its purpose again.”
The man was weary of all this. “The Higgs boson.”
“A made-up particle.” Grinning, the Shadow waved its arm through the yellow steel tubing of the safety rail.
Holograms, the scientist in Jacobson protested. Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic. Without thinking, he did the experiment and the alien offered no resistance to his hand.
“You are in love with matter,” declared the True, unconcerned. Much of what they said sounded like quotes. “You expect us to be flesh, but we are beyond all that.”
Its Shadow butted in. “Hadrons. Bosons. Holograms. Your science words explain nothing.” It had a go at laughter, sounding like a creaky door.
Jacobson had tried to make sense of what they had told humankind, how the New Agers and astrologers, the believers in spirits, crystals, and magic had been right all along.
It was nonsense. He banged his fist on the safety railing and the sound boomed round the detector hall. I refute it thus!
“Either you are tricking us, or all of science is wrong,” he persisted. “Occam’s razor.”
“Not wrong,” said the True. “But shallow. Like a puddle.”
Politicians and the media had taken to parroting opinions like these. There had been a surprising groundswell of schadenfreude at the plight of scientists.
“We once saw the world as you do,” the aliens had explained in a famous interview. “Then we learned that there was a deeper reality.”
They insisted that sometime around the Renaissance, humankind had taken a wrong turn. Prayer worked in the Middle Ages, miracles were common, and a bag of saint’s bones had power. We should believe more, not less.
The aliens had announced themselves from every TV in the world. A simple magic, they told our leaders, as they popped up at secret meetings, in secure bunkers, in bathrooms. Something anyone could learn to do.
The Shadow was remorseless. “Textbooks only the clever can understand, ever more expensive machines for these rituals, endless theories. This is what you called physics.”
Of course talk like this was nonsense. Science found out how the world worked, but it was hard work, and the aliens had told us we didn’t need to bother.
“What was wrong with steam engines and horses?” the True asked, almost sadly.
Jacobson did not answer. He had glimpsed the future and it did not include him.
“Anyway,” concluded the Shadow. “Most of your kind preferred things the way they were.”
It wouldn’t happen all at once, but in a generation or two, their best minds would be wrangling over alchemy. They had traveled too far and too fast. Imagine if they had gotten loose in the universe.
Soon, the cloaked alien starship could slip away.
by submission | Nov 25, 2020 | Story |
Author: Tyler James Russell
We shook her and asked if she was okay but she wouldn’t budge. Even when Davey tugged on her jacket and said Mommy she held her position on the sidewalk like it was something that might be taken from her. She clutched her briefcase, a paper bag of groceries.
911 was already overloaded. Marissa pressed her face to the window while Davey held his belly. I hollered. The operator, thinking it was meant for him, waited for me to speak and I waited for him to speak and in the end, neither of us did.
Outside, Trish still hadn’t moved. I apologized to the kids, held them, the kind of patient that only comes after losing your temper. It was almost dark. We pulled back the curtains and worried, made faces, but she was impenetrable. What are you supposed to do? In the end I went out barefoot, plucked a few groceries from her hands, but even when I said her name, snapped in her face, it was like only her body was there.
For the rest of the night I kept the curtains drawn, and glued myself to speculations. Apparently, this was going on everywhere, all kinds of people. A lot of women, but not only. A stripped-down newscast showed strings of people along highways—Black, Hispanic, you name it, all frozen in place. Corners crowded with question marks. A transgender woman wore a shirt that said, “Until.”
“Experts say this is voluntary,” a newscaster said. It begged the question, expert in what? “That they all chose it, together, at a designated time.”
Another anchor, obviously crying, said, “Nobody knows. What is happening to these people, and will it happen to us too?” After the commercial, she was gone.
I didn’t do this. Whatever was happening, it wasn’t my fault.
In the morning she was still there, still frozen. For days they didn’t move, didn’t eat. Some fainted, others shrugged off paramedics urging them onto gurneys. Counter-actors—spurned spouses, I imagined, involuntarily now-single parents—screamed in their faces. The kids branched around her like little rivers on our way to the restaurant where the waitstaff wear animal costumes, but even there three employees just stood in the way.
“Ignore them,” a manager sighed.
What gave them the right to just stop in the middle of their lives? Don’t we all have problems?
Then, on the news that night, an otherwise normal-looking man was handcuffed and gentled into a police car. He’d been arrested prowling the streets of Des Moines with a rifle. As they zoomed in on his face he showed a palm and two fingers, mouthing, “Beat that.”
I turned my phone off. I sat for a long time in the dark.
There was one else on the entire street. By now the groceries had gone bad in her hands.
I imagined a sort of abstract trauma-cloud in the air and thought of what it would be like to take that into your body, to own it, voluntarily or not. I didn’t get it though, not really.
“Please,” I whispered to Trish, “I just want to listen.”
But I also wanted her to hit me, to snap awake and take a dented soup can to my temple. I wanted to be emptied at her feet, bloodied and begging, a reckoning sprouting into the air like breathable atomic dust.
But she didn’t, of course. She just stood there, frozen, waiting.
by submission | Nov 22, 2020 | Story |
Author: Emily Wilcox
She died today. Blonde ringlets trodden down into the hardwood floor. A world overlooking her, eyes slick with awe and grins stitched firmly just below. A kingdom, a fandom, whatever we were, we were building from the inside, elevating the pedestal in which we already stood. Like a princess, they loved her. Like a superhero, they beckoned her. Like a diamond, they were not worthy of her. And like a star, nearing the end of its lifetime (which I guess is exactly what she was), she was unstable, finite, destined to burst fiercely into the night. A supernova of gold and now dust.
She’s really gone.
I shouted, “Cut!” on set. Tried to pull her out of it. *Milking the role a bit*, I thought to myself. I hopped up, clapped my hands, shouted at the cast. It didn’t work. Nothing worked. Her life did not resume off-camera. But it ended – there on screen.
It was ironic really; *live television*, when there she lay, anything but.
by submission | Nov 21, 2020 | Story |
Author: Tyler James Russell
When a wall of bone and fascia bloomed from the earth a hundred miles from our village, my dead almost-girlfriend stood over my bed, waiting for me to wake up.
“You,” I whispered.
We’d been longtime girlfriends but only vaguely girlfriends just before she died, making out for the first time the same week a vein throbbed open and the rushing blood sledgehammered her brain. Now, in the dark, her eyes buzzed. Her hair floated and sang.
I didn’t know anything about the wall, not until later, picking up whispers on the road, second and third-hand. People said it was pollution, visitation, a further sign of the planet’s death. As far as walls go it was stupid, just erupted in the middle of a field, dividing nothing. You could walk all the way around it.
She was cold. Every time she opened her mouth, she sputtered. Like her lungs weren’t made for air now. We did our best. For certain things, it doesn’t matter. I imagined mirrors facing each other on either side of some watery barrier, trying my best to anchor her to this side, to me.
There were riots. Mobs and fires. Armies were called in. Some treated the wall like a holy place. A man with no mouth left it speaking. Allegedly a pregnant woman burrowed into it and came out with a baby that glowed. But then a parade of pilgrims arrived to be cured of their sins and one by one they touched their foreheads to the surface and it killed them. Their companions dragged the bodies away, then went back and took their chances.
* * *
When we finished, I felt whole. After she died, all my want had been sharpened to this tiny dagger, this lethal-need. Now I slept like I’d finally been stabbed with it.
But by morning she was wormy again, fly-covered. Centipedes crawled under her skin.
* * *
I set out for answers. It was dark, but everything was always dark. Even day was a shadow. Apparently, the same thing had happened in other places too—a jagged streak of deaths and short-term resurrections, bodies like wind-lifted leaves. Maybe it would have brought a better person hope, but the more I heard of miracles, the more I wanted to burn the world down. A black hole ate everything I fed it.
I followed the Moon-ring from horizon to horizon, heading west. Monolithic shapes drifted in the sky, so exactly the color of night I was never sure what I was actually seeing and what I only thought I was seeing. The wall, when I got there, was the same way. It grumbled and shifted, a thing constantly being born. There were ribbons of color in the air. I thought maybe I’d feel different when I saw it for myself, but everything was still the same.
Soldiers, mounted and armed, streamed out of the hillsides. The pilgrims closed their eyes, held hands in a protesting line. Just before they collided into slaughter, one by one, everyone lifted into the air, floating. I watched them pedaling their feet, faces giddy, in awe.
It made it easy for me to nab someone’s weapon and do what I did.
