by submission | Nov 3, 2020 | Story |
Author: Russell Bert Waters
“I’m a reliable courier,” she whispers to herself while entering the lobby.
After the Great Purging, the remaining Humans had been allowed to live, provided they remained useful to the Galactic Council.
Trade was the most important function of the Human race, as Earth was nicely positioned at the intersection of three of the five major trade routes.
She confidently approaches a security desk she has approached many times before.
The entity behind the counter seeks connection, she accepts, and it speaks into her thoughts.
She shares the skeleton of a story, the framework of her mission, leaving out some of the nuts and bolts.
The briefcase she carries is made of living flesh. It is Psionic, and its very strong constitution and mental stamina make it nearly impossible to open.
“I’m a reliable courier,” she whispers again.
The being studies her, studies the case, studies her some more. There is the needling sensation of additional probing.
The sedatives have done their trick.
These beings rely on anxiety and other exploitable characteristics to gain information if their suspicions are aroused. She has very little anxiety.
The being beckons and she approaches the large desk. The desk appears to be living, but not sentient. There is a slight ripple to its sheen occasionally. She briefly wonders if desks ever get nervous.
She is being needled some more. She made the mistake of becoming distracted. Allowing your mind to wander sometimes lets them sneak in with their probing inquiries.
No luck. If it could sigh, it would. Instead, it compels her to turn toward the Portals.
The sign on the wall behind one Pad reads “240 – 440” and she heads to that one. She stands on the Pad, and feels needled again, this time a bit more roughly. She sets her mind to a scene from her past, where she had eaten chocolate ice cream in a park. The needling eventually stops, and a more gentle inquiry comes. She informs the Portal telepathically that she needs Pad 317.
HARD NEEDLES! PAIN! MAKE IT STOP!
The probing seems to last forever, and the briefcase is being probed also. It twitches in her hands.
Suddenly, her mind again becomes her own.
She has been asked to end the war. She will end the war.
There was to be a final purge, as artificial intelligence and other devices were rendering humans obsolete. The room she is being whisked away to contains the Assistant to the Emperor, as well as a secret Pad leading to the connecting point of four enemy homelands. This building often holds meetings composed of several, if not all, of the Galactic leaders simultaneously.
She feels the slight shift of her balance which accompanies Portal travel. She trains her mind on chocolate ice cream in the park, and a bright sunny day.
As she steps off the Platform the needles come again, so forcefully she’s afraid her head will split.
The Emperor’s Assistant regards her without surprise or suspicion.
She quickly strides to the wall beside the Assistant’s desk, and strikes a wall-plate that is so subtly painted one would not even notice it unless they knew where to look.
A portion of carpeting across the room moves mechanically, as startled suspicion enters the face of the Assistant for the first time.
The Pad is now exposed, and the briefcase leaps from her hands popping open in mid-air.
A glowing orb emerges, floating to the Portal Pad.
As the orb explodes into the pad, with the intensity of many suns, she whispers once more:
“I’m a reliable courier.”
And everything goes white.
by submission | Nov 1, 2020 | Story |
Author: Michael Anthony Dioguardi
He who hungers for the past is bound to destroy the future.
A whole generation of humans has been given the opportunity to time travel with no impact on the continuum. Any moment in history can now be watched as if you were sitting down in a movie theatre. But we didn’t have a hypothesis for the long-term effects of such novel technology, and now that we’re experiencing this cannibalistic chaos, let us not forget that this was avoidable and predictable.
Patient zero: Clyde Manning. His story is the most complete picture of what happens when one ignores the suggested directives. During the trial period for the carnal-attachment components (CACs), patients experienced memory loss exponentially correlated with the number of times they had traveled to a previous moment in time. At first, this was mistakenly attributed to time spent in any given past, but this has since been corrected.
The vetting process did not detect any abnormalities in Manning’s personality profile that would lead to such a gruesome and confounding death. He had no proclivities toward violence and demonstrated a peaceful disposition. The first instance in which he displayed symptoms of anthropophagi fame memoriam was during a routine visit to a birthday party from his childhood. He saw a man who looked out of place, stumbling toward him beyond a crowd of parents. Noting the odd behavior, he logged it and returned to the present. The appearances of the stumbling man continued though, popping up during a visit to the construction of the Colossus of Rhodes and again at the First Sacking of Rome.
Around this time, Manning developed frequent headaches, and he had already missed several mandatory log entries. The software picked up on the issue, but before anyone could intervene, the problem had already been resolved. Clyde Manning had consumed his own brain.
We considered the possibility for potential duplicates in the early days of development.
The implication that “duplicates” would ever emerge as a widespread phenomenon was dismissed as unnecessary cynicism. No one expected this.
Manning developed manic tendencies, switching haphazardly from past to present—anything to shake the chase, but wherever he went, the stumbling man followed. In his delirious state, he logged that the man was pale, unkempt, and moved with a combination of limping and crawling. He did not recognize him either. It ultimately would not have helped his situation if he did, for the stumbling man was indeed, Clyde Manning—a duplicate aberration with accelerated anthropophagi fame memoriam—his appearance greatly altered by the late-stage disease. The duplicate, of course, was driven by one motive: hunger, namely, for memories.
The chase ended on the rig Manning worked. He exited the time apparition from the aforementioned birthday party in miserable condition, unable to stand. Before the apparition horizon could fully close, the duplicate fell on top of him. The two tussled for a moment, unaware that their objectives were the same. Each Manning sunk their respective teeth in the other’s head and snacked until they could no longer stomach it; they perished only seconds later—their suffering surprisingly brief.
Manning’s last recorded memory was exiting the birthday party just as the candles were blown out. He’d forgotten any other moment from his past—able to return to the party and nowhere else.
Look behind you now and then. And if you recognize a face in the crowd that looks too familiar—much like a mirror image—it might be too late. Log when your memory begins to….and….I….
…I don’t know. I’ve lost my train of thought…
by submission | Oct 31, 2020 | Story |
Author: G. Allen Wilbanks
“Mama, why is that man so ugly?”
“Hush, child,” the mother chastised her son. “That is rude, and quite a mean thing to say.”
“But Mama,” the boy protested.
“That man is a hero!” the woman proclaimed, loudly enough that if the man had heard her son’s cruel question, he would certainly hear her response to the unkind statement. “He looks like that because of the war. Without people like that man, you would not even be here right now.”
“The human war, Mama?”
The woman nodded. “Yes. The humans. You weren’t born yet, so you don’t understand how bad it was. The humans found us and attacked our homes. There were so many more of them than us, and they had weapons you wouldn’t begin to believe.”
“I know about the humans. They tell us in school. But why does he look like that?”
“We were losing, child. We could not match the horrors that humans turned on us. That man, and a thousand men and women like him, let surgeons change their appearance so they looked like the enemy. They went to the human homeworld to live. While soldiers here fought a lost cause, people like him fought the enemy from the inside, using propaganda and misinformation. They fragmented the human factions and turned them against one another so they could no longer focus on attacking us.”
“Propa-? What is that?”
“It doesn’t matter. The humans turned their weapons on each other and destroyed themselves. They can no longer threaten us, and it is due to brave volunteers like that man.”
The woman waved at the soldier. “Thank you for everything you did for us!” she called out.
The man turned toward her; a twisted, broken smile tried to form on his lips in reply. Despite her best intentions, the woman flinched at the expression. He was truly, quite ugly.
The man dropped his gaze to the child at her side. The boy did not look away. Instead, he peered back at the soldier with the unwavering curiosity managed only by the very young and the very curious.
“Thank you,” said the child, imitating the words of his mother, though he had no understanding of why he said them.
by submission | Oct 30, 2020 | Story |
Author: Beck Dacus
Morris’s gun bobbed as he walked, a glint of moonlight catching his eye with each step. His progress was slow; leaves, sticks, and stones crunched under his feet, sucking the energy from his stride. He dared not use a flashlight this far from camp— it was safer to wander by moonlight and listen to the Geiger-counter-like crackle coming through his earpiece from the Zenobox bouncing on his hip.
The Zenobox was a curious quantum-mechanical novelty that happened to have revolutionary consequences for warfare. Twelve dim green LEDs on the housing, in two rows of six, blinked on and off depending on the spin direction of just as many electrons encased within. The electrons weren’t in one definite state or the other until they were “measured”; the LEDs, entangled with them, weren’t either. But if someone looked at the box and the lights on it, their wave function would collapse, along with those of the electrons. The box registered this as an audible click, telling the wearer that they were being watched.
Of course, being a quantum-mechanical device, the Zenobox spoke in probabilities; it could only give a certain chance that you weren’t alone. The use of twelve electrons pushed this uncertainty down to a manageable level, but random spikes would still waft through the earpiece from time to time. Some of the guys in Morris’s squad had tested it out, sealing themselves in bathroom stalls with all the lights off, but there was no way to get rid of the “chirps.” On boring days, his squadmates would weave tales attributing the chirps to passing ghosts, or people in other universes catching a glimpse of you in the corner of their eye. Morris just laughed along, never giving the stories any stock.
Until one night, wandering the forest alone, the hiss from his Zenobox became steadily louder.
He waited for the buzz to cower back down to random static, but it rose with every passing second. When he could no longer ignore it, he whirled around, sighting down his rifle, looking for the deep maroon of enemy armor. Still, the noise crept up, even as he turned, his Zenobox passing in and out of every possible line of sight. How is that possible? he said to himself. And how is the reading gradually increasing? A person can either see me or they can’t— there’s no in-between. Something’s not right here. Some kind of faulty, experimental perception-masking tech?
Morris was out of ideas. He called out, “It is a far, far better thing that I do…” But instead of hearing the end of the classic quote that would have indicated friendlies, he heard an echo of his own voice. I didn’t say it that loud, he thought. What the hell is going on!?
The Zenobox signal reached a crescendo in his ear, but he still couldn’t see anything. In a panic, he turned on his flashlight, trying to point it in every direction at once. Then he saw twelve green LEDs, four on and eight off, sitting on the belt of an armed man, who at that same instant turned around.
It was himself. It was Morris.
And then he was gone, the original Morris once again alone in the forest. He tried to catch his breath and regain his sanity, questioning if he really saw what he thought he did. But it was real; he had no doubt. It was himself, with his own Zenobox on his hip; unlike his own right arm, however, his doppelganger’s was some kind of prosthetic.
And his armor was an unmistakable red.
by submission | Oct 29, 2020 | Story |
Author: Dr. Ross Clare
The craft is the size of a small country, a monument to the colossal space-missiles of classic science fiction. The humans aboard hope that, as was always the case with those rockets of the imagination, this ship will achieve the impossible and leave Earth forever.
At first, the craft was totally silent.
Then strike the first notes of the orchestra in the nosecone, the frontrunners of the leaderless community aboard. The sombre sound of thick strings on spruce-and-maple instruments larger than their wielders, followed by the gentle momentum of violins and the airy drone of the woodwind section, join forces to set a near-imperceptible rumble into the steel bones of the craft.
Mission Control seize their cue with a raving enthusiasm. Their fingers dance madly across keys on the devices before them. The tools they manipulate whine into frenetic action, producing a speedy, tinny rhythm of electric bup-bup-bups. Monitors whirr to life in response, bottle-green text marching to the beat across deep black backgrounds, and so the ship’s navigation is set – anywhere but here.
This unlikely crossover between timeless and otherworldly sounds is steadied by the ageless buzz of metal smacking against timber now emanating from the deck below. The unpretentious, heart-breaking, raw, quiet sounds of Old Blind Dead Charley Wilson and his Free Crew Band put the craft at ease even as it judders to life, calming and soothing their metal home in a manner akin to the release of liquid coolant.
Hearing this, those with bubble-gum pink skirts and handsome feathery hair leap into spirited action in the sector beneath. The sickly-sweet whizz and jangle of a falsetto Princess and a crooning Prince – upbeat tunes, derided by some, giving hope and joy to others – perform a social function, letting the thousands aboard know that the mission has begun. There is no turning back now, but don’t worry about it. Optimism is key! Remember to love each other, baby.
The pulsing cadence of the ship’s machinery, engendered by the myriad sounds produced by its crew, now tapers off and becomes steady, allowing the women and men on the next floor down to spit their words to its rhythm. Violent, true, aggressive, and beautiful, their voices ride the crescent of the music and hit each beat effortlessly, all style and substance, firing poetics toward the failed society they have all but been forced to shun. The very stability and cohesion of the community aboard would be imperilled without their righteous expressions.
Right beside them, their contemporaries take up sticks, strings, and mics, and issue forth a head-pounding commotion. The snarls and wails and krangs and thumps coalesce to complement one another, to balance each other out until an anthem is formed. The lyrics, shouted out from scrunched-up faces pregnant with attitude, take aim at the failed regime they all hunger to escape. Along with their partners on these lower decks, their crashing melodies let all within the craft know that none are above scrutiny. We all leave this planet free, equal, as one collective soul.
The latter two sounds meet briefly to form a ‘nu’ one, but this is only a passing phase.
Finally, in the bowels of the ship, the perpetually misunderstood thunder into their own singular noise. The creative force that inspires all on board is assaulted and, as a result, fed exponentially by these warlike experimentations with sound. Individuals clothed in jet-black attire roar like wild beasts into the propulsion system they stand atop. Drums like machine guns, the ethereal growls of distortion of a pitch lower, deeper, more primordial than the core of the dying Earth cause the ship’s thrusters to explode into action, a deafening cacophony of chemical reaction to match the human-made sounds of organic catastrophe.
All is set. The conductor of the orchestra at the very head of the craft hears, feels the co-operation of the sounds, the communion of melodic output. Harmony! Tears form in the eyes of one of the violin-players.
The conductor raises her baton to the point in the centre of the nosecone interior. All forces generated aboard lead to this very spot, and to this very moment.
As soon as she lifts her arm, the ship responds. The gigantic feet of the craft pull away from the surface of Earth, steadily but with purpose. The experiment has worked, the collaboration has succeeded.
The ship and its crew rise above, without looking back.
