by submission | Nov 3, 2021 | Story |
Author: Chana Kohl
People think the Moon is a tranquil place. I suppose that’s the impression one gets seeing the silvertone reflections of its hauntingly barren expanse from Earth. In reality, it is a painstaking maze of rugged terrain and deep crater mounds, open mouths gasping for breath beneath a cold and empty sky. Lunar dust clings everywhere, leaving lingering traces of saltpeter and sulfur. The most serene thought I have up here is of a long, hot shower, the one thing most scarce in supply.
I maneuver my SEV, like a slow, rumbling, metal crab, past the western ridge of “Mare Serenitatis.” From across the horizon, a lone habitation module comes into view: a small, white sugar cube in a vast bowl of basalt. Why anyone would choose to hole up here is a mystery. I guess Space Force Command believes I can unravel it.
Nearing the docking hatch, I make radio contact. A woman’s voice replies, dulcet and low, as if to convey she probably won’t shoot me, but don’t be too sure, “Who the hell are you?”
“Col. Lily Woodard, this is Capt. Thomas Spike, USSF. I was sent here with an urgent request. I..”
“Nobody calls me that anymore,” she breaks in. “Whatever you’re selling, I’m not buying. Pack it up and roll it out.”
“Ma’am,” I try not to sound desperate. “I also have a private message for you from Brent.”
A minute of thumping silence passes before I hear clamping locks engage. I slide out my suit port and wait until the docking pressure equalizes. An older woman with smooth, umber skin and mahogany eyes opens the hatch. She motions for me to follow her inside.
“I don’t normally get guests out here. You’ve got two options: coffee or coffee.”
Sitting down at the drop-leaf table in the galley, “I’ll take coffee then,” I say. She sets down two, piping cups then sits across from me.
“To the point, Colonel, I’m here on behalf of Central Command. Know that your accomplishments are greatly admired on Earth still. New Columbia needs your expertise with the Mars deployment.”
“That’s not my job anymore, next item.” Reaching too fast for her cup, she misses the target, knocking it over. She freezes, like a kid with a hand caught in the cookie jar.
I stare at her, slowly piecing together what’s off. The peripheral eye contact. The shuffled walking. The harsh, bright lights…. Macular degeneration. Don’t know how I missed it before. “How bad is it?”
“20/180.”
Damn. Sending people to Mars and we still can’t reverse it.
She juts her chin up defiantly, “Still want me advising your pilots?” She wipes up the mess.
So this self-imposed exile isn’t about a falling-out with SF. This is personal. She’s coping with loss, not just of her sight but of her sense of self. New Columbia may have to manage this next operation without their retired hero.
Unless…
I reach into my pocket and place the data pod encrypted for ‘Aunt Lil’ into her open hand. “This is for you.”
She takes it to her port station to listen in private. As the message plays, I watch her expression soften. Something in her family ties connects, an invisible tether, drawing her back to the rest of humanity. When it finishes, she stands.
“I’ll be ready to leave in an hour.”
As the port retracts inside the SEV, I apologize for the odor of burnt gunpowder permeating the air.
“That’s alright, Tom,” she says, inching towards the shotgun seat and smiling. “I love the smell of Moondust in the morning.”
by submission | Oct 31, 2021 | Story |
Author: Rick Tobin
“In regione caecorum rex est luscus.”
Captain Robert Cunningham screamed at his weasel-faced brother-in-law, grasping Milo’s uniform tight against his scrawny pale neck, slamming him against their spaceship’s bridge wall. “You assaulted the sleeping Cetan girl!”
“Back off, Bobby. Wouldn’t want sis to divorce your ass… if we get back.” Lieutenant Surpo strained his soft hands, pushing back his attacker.
“You idiot! You were a last-minute add-on to avoid your death sentence for pedophilia on Mars. Damn your family influence! I thought I could contain you with only men aboard, and the Cetan guarded…but now…it’s too late. I won’t be able to tell anyone why the mission failed. They’ll suspect Mercury Retrograde terrorist cells. That means war!”
Surpo straightened his shirt while feigning superiority. “So what? She’s an alien— no eyes, can’t hear or speak. Nobody’s going to know if you keep your mouth shut. I’ve been on this wreck for six months going through Oort Cloud ice, wondering if we’d get crushed. I needed the R&R. Now back off! Remember your birth class, brother-in-law. You married up, remember?”
“If I had time to eject you out an airlock, I would, but she’ll take care of that.”
“She’ll what?” Surpo’s wide-eyed questioning stopped. Men’s cries of agony filled the ship’s intercom. “What the hell?”
“That’s forty brave men dying because of you.” Cunningham pointed at the speakers, pushing Surpo back against the scorching wall. “That Cetan guide was our ticket for humans to voyage through the fiery plasma barriers around our solar system that’s keeping us out of deep space travel. She guided me telepathically through frozen Oort reefs, but you had no need to know. Years ago, I lived with Ait Haddidu Berbers on Earth; learning ancient dialects Cetans used millennia ago when they last visited. I was the only one trained for first contact. Only I could interpret her telepathic directions. My life…a waste, for what? So my sister’s criminal brother could cause billions of deaths in a conflict between Mercury and Saturn? They’ll blame all this on me— a lower-class defective.”
“Who cares? What’s happening? Those screams?” Surpo struggled to free himself, still pinned by Cunningham to a scorching panel against his back.
“You’ll know soon enough. She wasn’t some longhaired teenage victim like those you tortured on Mars. No, she’s on loan from a superior race. She’s over ten thousand years old. She was in stasis, in dormancy, providing peaceful intent to us unless assaulted. The Cetans once aided Libyans in battle in ancient history. No army stood before them. That’s why Greeks named Cetan warrior women ‘Protectors.’ They tested us on this voyage. Could we evolve beyond our violent ancestors? No, we failed, thanks to you.”
Cunningham choked in thick gas clouds filling the room as he yelled over the horrific cries for help echoing around him.
“Feel the heat on the wall? It’s from a quarter-million degrees Kelvin melting our ship. We’re off course in the plasma barrier. This blue smoke billowing from our ventilation, that’s hull liquefying…but you won’t die that easy.”
Cunningham looked away as bright sapphire flashes rushed past his shoulders. He watched his in-law morph into a scorched skeletal statue, oozing from blistering laser fire. The Captain felt light breezes and heard light flapping sounds from behind him, wafting toxic blue haze about, knowing her dreadful eye was open, above her winged shoulders. He was last to fall from the gazes of the Cetan Medusa, her telepathic pineal gland flailing snakelike from her forehead, fulfilling her role as guardian of the Ring Pass Not.
by submission | Oct 30, 2021 | Story |
Author: Adamson Wood
“Whoever got rid of sleep was an idiot,” screamed Jack, because saying the words out loud gave them validity. He tried to think of the guy’s name. Bill Smith or Johnson. The kind of name you’d easily forget because two billion of them were born every second. As if their galaxy wasn’t already overpopulated. Still sucking on Mother Earth’s tits like an old man with enough amnesia to think he’s a toddler.
He switched his eye contacts to dark mode, disappearing in the black void of emptiness that mirrored the milky way’s vastness, a hundred thousand light-years of nothingness, barren besides human specks splattered on worlds without end that still managed to screw one another over as if a billion miles wasn’t enough separation to sign the divorce papers already. Bill Anderson was it?
Sure he could down a seebe, hallucinate something wilder than any rem sleep cycle could ever dream up. Or if he had money, spend a century or two in a cryo chamber. But everything Jack had read about sleep said it was about more than just passing the time, or even the dreams, more than the revitalization that they now got from invigora injections. Sleep was about forgetting. Starting over. Ending a day and having a fresh start tomorrow. Something now impossible thanks to galactic hero Bill Whatshisname, who was now in a cryo-chamber while the rest of the genetically altered humans were wide awake for the past couple centuries, trying to chemically replicate what was lost like neutered dogs jacking off.
Was it Jack—no, that was his name. He considered asking his eye pod to look up the name, but there was something satisfying about figuring it out himself; something about knowing that he was more than just the technology that fenced his life and occupied his body. He grabbed a pen and tablet, ‘cause he was old-fashioned like that, and started scribbling down names to trigger his memory. Bill Jones. Miller. Williams. Bill Nye the science guy. Every name seemed off, like the high after eight hours in virtual reality, living as some prince instead of the pauper he was. His head vibrated with the dull throb of cooked neurons.
“Why don’t you sleep it off,” his great grandfather used to tell him, too old to receive the genetic “upgrade” himself because at one hundred eighty years of age, what could you possibly offer society? He spent his final three months in and out of sleep, a smile on his face bigger than the statue of Bill Belikeme, titled The Billevable, that Jack now doused in corrosive acid since what else was he supposed to do at 4 am.
“Bill Brown! That’s the one,” said Jack, reading the fine print of the statue right before the letters cankered. He envisioned the real Bill, empty sack still fighting off the rot of death. Bill Brown, body now white as ever as his pale skin turned paler in his cryo-chamber back on Earth—Earth’s number one tourist destination, which was probably why they would never wake him up, not the incurable disease used as a pretext. Someday, thought Jack as police bots surrounded him, after finishing his ten-year sentence of 24/7s for destroying this statue, Jack would visit Bill’s final resting place, wake him up like in Sleeping Beauty. After all, for the man who got rid of sleep, he’d been sleeping an awful lot.
by submission | Oct 29, 2021 | Story |
Author: Alzo David-West
Ean Braun was working late at his college office when a feeling of malaise came over him. His first thought was that he caught the cornea virus, which had caused a voluntary citywide stay-at-home order. He opened the office door, shuffled lamely down a flight of stairs, and went outside to get some night air. His cloudy eyes and scabby temples were aching. He removed his thick bifocal glasses and massaged his wrinkled face. The feeble moon glowed meekly on his pallid skin and patchy dome. He put on his glasses again and, at a distance, noticed his young colleague, Adam, walking briskly on the empty campus grounds.
The picture of the well-dressed, tan, healthy man provoked his anger, and spiteful thoughts boiled in his brain. What had particularly annoyed him was the fellow’s habit of taking vitamins instead of eating breakfast or lunch. Braun recalled a disagreement they had at the faculty lounge, he insisting that food was better, whereas the young man was adamant that vitamins were essential nutrients that maintained physical and mental balance. The retort stirred a rage in Braun, who was not used to being contradicted, so he spoke his unfiltered mind, and the young man stopped talking to him. Naturally, Braun rationalized, the vitaminer was an insane maniac, and the old man took the silences as an unforgivable insult.
The recollection had distracted Braun for a few minutes, but the general unwellness he was experiencing was becoming worse. He felt a painful compression in his wrists, ribs, and rotator cuffs, and there was an acrid taste of bile acids in his mouth. His shabby clothes felt baggy. He hobbled under a lamppost near the closed Human Resources Building and paused to look at his reflection in the large windowpanes. In confusion, he saw he was a third of his height and growing smaller, transforming into something with six clawed legs, four eyes, two antennae, and rows of nostrils on the sides of his stomach. Panicked, he darted out of his pile of clothes and ran across the campus. He found a men’s restroom without a door and decided to hide there until he could figure out what caused his mutation.
The room was dark, and the floor smelled of wet mold and waste particles. He traced the sides of the wall with his feelers, struggling to make his way in the murk. As his confidence was beginning to rise, there was a sudden, immense blast of light that staggered and blinded him. And then he heard the boom of footfalls like bombs on the floor tiles—someone had entered the restroom. Terrified, he scurried helplessly into the corner of the wall, raised his thin flat head, and strained to perceive the moving form. The massive figure slowly came into focus in his compound eyes, and Braun realized who it was—“Adam, it’s me! I transformed into an insect! Adam, help me!” he shouted.
The young man stood before a urinal, oblivious to the minuscule appeals from below. He looked up and down and, without a thought, turned his gaze to the corner where Braun was crying out: “Chikt-chikt chikt-chikt chikt-chikt,” the insect emitted. An instinctual chill surged through the man, followed by a powerful hateful impulse to destroy the disease carrier. He lunged toward the paper towel dispenser at his left, grabbed a handful of coarse brown sheets, and made for the cockroach.
“Help! Help!” Braun screamed, running around the restroom. He ran under the door of a stall and into the shadows behind a toilet bowl. But the young man quickly found him, chased him out, and, after several misses, smashed the pest with the paper towels. He held his breath as parts of the insect twitched in broken, seeping fragments. The man threw the corpse into the bowl, pressed the flush handle with the tip of his left dress shoe, washed his hands in the sink, and turned off the light, with an exhalation of relief. Still aware, Braun descended into the mazy whirling grave. His lugubrious eyes wept melancholy tears.
by submission | Oct 28, 2021 | Story |
Author: Phil Temples
When researchers at the University of Queensland announced the creation of a quantum microscope that could reveal biological structures otherwise impossible to see, they predicted it would answer fundamental questions and spark revolutionary breakthroughs in healthcare, engineering, transportation and communications. Little did they know, however, that the new device based on quantum entanglement would result in even more fundamental questions asked about the nature of the universe.
“Denkins, come here and look at this. I thought you said this equipment was properly calibrated!”
Harold Denkins, Professor William Chidley Fleming’s assistant, scurried in from an adjacent laboratory. Denkins glanced anxiously at his boss. Fleming eyed him with a stern look.
Fleming had chosen a random small molecule chain, dichlorine heptoxide—or Cl2O7—to examine that day.
Denkins peered through the binocular viewing piece for almost twenty seconds.
“Doctor, I—I’m sorry. I adjusted it myself according to manual. The equipment seemed to be working fine this morning. But this looks like…”
“Like what, Mister Denkins?”
“Doctor, if I answered your question honestly, I’m afraid that your opinion of me would drop precipitously.”
As Fleming looked at his assistant, a big grin broke out on his face then he shook his head.
“On the contrary, Denkins. You will probably think that it is I who have taken leave of my senses. But let me assure you—just as the invention of the telescope allowed Galileo to observe the rings of Jupiter for the first time, we are now bearing witness to another quantum leap in mankind’s knowledge of the universe. You and I have just discovered that the universe infinitely repeats itself! I hypothesize that this common molecule we looking at here, dichlorine heptoxide, interrogated under entanglement—is in fact, Messier 51a. The Whirlpool Galaxy. Now, I wonder in which molecule we’ll find our Milky Way lurking?”
