by submission | Oct 12, 2021 | Story |
Author: Gus Doiron
I lift a shovelful from the conveyor belt and heave it into the furnace. Same as the one before, and will be after. I spill nothing on the dirt floor.
There, it is much harder to scoop and my burden has time to build up. The belt, loose and drooping on its squeaking rollers, moves slowly, but never stops.
Regardless, I don’t over work myself. I have learned the more I do, the more They’ll give me.
There is no ventilation in here and I am almost naked. My white underwear is tattered and worn to the point of being see through. On my feet are work boots, three sizes too big. One of the boots has no laces and they belonged to the worker before me. According to her scribblings on the wall, she was a giantess from New Guinea named Matariki.
Full of sweat, I wear nothing else.
As a result of having no gloves, my hands have formed large callouses and are thick and scarred.
This job was tough at first, incinerating the broken dreams and empty promises of the world. The ones from the children are the hardest and burn the hottest, but not even they bother me anymore. In the end, everything goes in the furnace. All I smell is sulphur.
Some days I think I am fueling a macabre machine, its belly lined with hell and brimstone. In better times I feel I may be doing a service, ridding the earth of its never-ending supply of heartache. My greatest moments of clarity tell me the term ‘day’ is misleading as I see no sunlight or night-time. Only a large dark room, partially lit with flickering shadows from the sadness I burn.
If ever granted a wish, it would be to not know the name and location of every person whose failed hopes I throw into the furnace. Occasionally it is somebody I know-knew-and I feel guilty sharing their secret.
I wonder if there are other people like me, with jobs like I have. One thing is certain, things are busier now than when I started. All the failed careers and business ventures, broken homes and missing children. Infidelity and lies are up tenfold.
I met the devil once. He wore jeans and a white long-sleeve button up shirt, walking in with a woman that called Him Fabian. He did not have the red skin and horns on His forehead like books would have us believe, but He was the devil, nonetheless. They were talking productivity and when Fabian looked directly at me I found I could not answer His gaze, even though I wanted to.
The devil did not commend me or even offer a nod for doing a good job, and in some ways that hurt as much as the solitude in which I am confined. But I can’t complain-I got here honestly enough.
There are moments I am fortunate and encounter slight lulls. But there are never any breaks.
Betimes I think back to my old job. A janitor in an arena, a long time ago. I not only had breaks, I had coffee breaks. Coffee with so little milk that people not knowing me would take it for black. In my greatest of times, I even had ginger snap cookies.
When I catch myself reminiscing, I shovel fast to get the memory of coffee breaks out of my mind. For here, there are no ginger snap cookies, no coffee, and no breaks.
There is only the furnace.
I bend and take another scoop.
by submission | Oct 10, 2021 | Story |
Author: Josie Gowler
“Snip, snip,” mutters Clarke.
“That makes a change from ‘guidance system deployed’”, I mutter, gazing down my microscope.
“Sarcasm, Matt? From you?” he replies.
“Breaks the tedium,” I shoot back.
“How can you get bored? We’re doing such exciting work.”
More editing, more clipping. It sounds sexy, but it isn’t: like most lab work it’s ninety-five percent dull. And the incubator shaker has developed an annoying squeak.
“We could gene edit Dave into having a personality.”
“Or politicians into being honest,” I say. Clarke raises an eyebrow. “What?” I respond. “I read the news too, you know.”
“Good. Means you can do that school group from Seattle this afternoon.”
“No, no, no,” I mutter. “No more dodo questions, please.”
“It’s your turn.”
“Fine,” I say, even though I’m pretty sure it isn’t my turn. “You can clear up those petri dishes in the sink before we get a lifeform we weren’t expecting.”
I holochat into the classroom of thirteen year-olds, ready with my spiel. “Hi kids, I’m the one who brings animals back from extinction.” I point my finger upwards and a nice graphic of a cartoon DNA strand jumps out of it.
To be fair, this particular group of children are reasonably engaged. Very little fidgeting. “What about Lonesome George from the Galapagos?” one girl pipes up.
“Yeah, Lonesome George was one of mine. He was the last living specimen so when he died we had to use a host – a similar animal – to bring his species back. I also help when there are just a few breeding pairs left but not enough for what we call a viable community – the gene pool is too narrow to recover on its own but we can fix it.” I pause. “Of course, it’ll be nice to not get into this situation in the first place….”
Smiling at their enthusiasm when I’m talking about splicing recombinant DNA strands, I think there’s hope for them. It doesn’t take a computer to really screw things up, it takes a human in the 20th and 21stcenturies. Thankfully the ones in the 22nd are shaping up to be a lot better so far.
“Why do you care?” asks a grubby-looking boy, scowling at me and poking at a hole in his jeans.
“Because it’s my planet too,” I reply.
After giving the children a brief tour of my work taking in woolly mammoths, Iberian lynx and white rhinos, I say goodbye and return to the lab. I blink hard to clear my vision and the benches and equipment snap back into focus. I gather it’s worse if you have to wear those goggles to holochat.
“How’d it go?” asks Clarke. I groan. No point letting on that I rather enjoy it, otherwise I’ll get stuck with doing all of the school liaison and never get any real work done.
“Big plans tonight?” he asks me as we lock up the lab.
“Very funny. The usual.”
As I settle down into my recharge pod and programme the timer for eight hours, I think that I’m looking forward to not being needed any more.
by submission | Oct 9, 2021 | Story |
Author: Kevin Criscione
We built fires for warmth, shelter from the elements, crude wooden tools to continue building, among other necessities, more crude wooden tools. We found our rhythm, working in simple motions out in the open air. Eventually, we had huts, fire pits, hunting weaponry, an art cave, clear organizational hierarchies, a community. We used some materials we had taken from the burning cities – plastic tubes, bandages, sheets – and tried to craft everything else ourselves. There, beneath the Appalachian mountainside and the scorching sun, we found a way to keep living.
I taught myself to thatch roofs. Anyone could forage the long skinny branches, but you needed a keen eye and deft hands to thread them together tightly. I had a vital role to play, something I hadn’t felt in my previous employment, waiting tables and pouring coffee for wealthy Fifth Avenue clientele.
Elle and I found each other quickly. I noticed something in her eyes, her way of speaking to others, her thoughts on the evolving world around us. A sense of humanity. She became fond of me, too. We were both looking for companionship, even if, for us, that often meant simply sitting in silence.
We built a citadel to house our grain and most valuable supplies, with footpaths branching out to the huts and farms and observation posts nested in the barren trees. We made plans for the long and dark winter ahead. We labored, schemed, and even laughed sometimes. We built a home.
Finally, we needed a purpose.
“Well, what did they do?” Elle asked as we gathered around the fire. “For purpose? What was the operating procedure?”
“I don’t think there was a clear procedure. It was a messy and very human process, involving imagination.”
“But there were specific actionable steps. They told stories around the fire. They invented gods and spirits, and eventually theories about utopia.”
“Yes! That’s what we need. Otherwise, we won’t really be carrying the torch.”
We didn’t actually need the warmth of the fires, the foraged berries, or even the shelter. Our synthetic bodies wouldn’t crack for at least several thousand years. However, the primitive pursuits made us feel connected to our creators. Mimicry was our way of ensuring that, though gone, humankind would not be forgotten. Perhaps one day, with practice, we could become them, or at least a close enough approximation.
I’ve had visions – one might call them dreams – of returning to the ruined cities, with their hollowed out factories and salvageable secrets. I believe it can be done. We can find some of the technology the humans had, and build the rest ourselves. We’ll tinker around until we produce the next generation of our kind, just like humans produced other humans so naturally and beautifully. We’ll build a generation that is smarter, stronger, faster, and more capable of creating its own meaning, that no apocalypse could ever destroy.
“Why don’t we start with stories?” I offered. “Who has one?”
The firelit stares of thirty-one androids turned my way. Elle smiled while gently placing her arm around me. Like me, she has had visions. She believes.
We may find that, after all is said and done, after millennia of religion and art and war and philosophizing about the human condition, humanity’s ultimate purpose was to simply build the next step: artificial intelligence that could survive the collapse of the climate and continue fighting for the great human dream. The Roombas and the self-driving cars couldn’t do that, but we can.
“I can begin,” I said. “I might have a story in me.”
by submission | Oct 8, 2021 | Story |
Author: Rick Tobin
“Not one of your better ideas Inky.” My yelling echoed against the reinforced beams and lines of ready ships stored in launch five.
I shook my head as Enrique Chacon selected and boarded a starcraft alone from the space station’s shuttle bay, or should I say stolen? His reputation as a daring Latino space explorer would only grow and spread after such bravado. By order, the hangar remained bone-chilling cold. Even with that, odors of toasted reentry metal plates filled my mouth with acrid filth.
“Can’t help it. Got to have that last chevron. Only three other cosmos got a selfie there. That’s rare company, Mayfield.”
Inky used my last name when he wanted to make a point that he was a commander while I remained a shuttle captain, simply babysitting robots transporting VIPs and medical supplies between worlds.
“How do I explain this to Central? They’ll pull your bars…maybe put you on a prison planet when you get back…if you do. How can one photo be that important?”
I pulled up my synth suit sleeve, revealing burn scars from an engine test backfire for interdimensional jumps that caught me off guard when I was first out of Academy. My grizzly reminder itched with a crawling pain when bad events were in the wind.
“Commander, AS 134 is still off-limits, even to the Emperor. Every alien race we’ve met avoids it. Those three you admire in the Halls of Records have no graves or memorials. We only show their last, grainy photos. No doubt, standing that close to a black hole with all the stars imploding with their bursting arrays behind you, the comets circling and dying in that pit’s dark blue halo framed by double pink nebulae ionic waterfalls…fabulous. I get it. But it’s a suicide run, Inky. You’ve got decades of adventure ahead. Why now? You have everything other pilots dream of in our empire.”
Chacon waved me off as he closed the entry portal. “A few decades and I’ll be a gray-haired dribbler at the age centers. Ever been there? Gives a new perspective. If I’m near AS 134, I might find the other three, still watching, looking back as all of you fade and disintegrate into your time as ours slows. It’s the sizzle from the steak of immortality. Can’t get that at the commissary. It’s one to a customer. Appreciated our service together, Mayfield. You’re a good sort. You’ll move up, but don’t hold back. Grab wild and wonderful things that come along…and they will. Make your life a flame, not a sputter.”
With that, Chacon closed the door. I slammed the bay door shut, out of harm’s way, spitting bitterness from my throat, as blue plasma roared around his circular ship blinking into the compelling void. Weeks later, I received a short video of Inky with the black hole AS 134 behind him. The new interstellar cameras finally worked. The brief video was every bit as stunning as he described so often in his infamous tirade about the inkiness of space. I’ll remember him as forever walking towards the camera as he shared the rarest views known in the galaxy. It’s now playing continuously on the wall with the other three daring souls’ previously sketchy records. All of them risked everything for a momentary magnificent stroll. If Einstein’s theories about such places are correct, Chacon is watching our galaxy dissolve as he drifts slowly back into a singularity—the ultimate unknown, while I settle for my bucket without a list. I wonder if he is alone.
by submission | Oct 7, 2021 | Story |
Author: Alzo David-West
Ubn Kal-Zar, sovereign prince of Neo Ara, was extremely pleased with his family’s accomplishments and his kingdom—a vast, atmospherically controlled, self-sustaining network city encircling the equator of Mars. That Ubn’s line and nation would be the pioneers of the Martian Age was never apparent in the twentieth century, but became increasingly so into the mid-twenty-first, after the famed linear city was constructed on Earth-based Old Ara. Indeed, in retrospect, the off-Earth development was self-evident. After all, did the great civilizations from Sumer to Babylon not form in the midst of far-flung, torrid terrains, mostly dry, desolate, and dead? And what was Mars but a massive desert land, something within the age-old experiences of the earthy desert peoples.
Ubn Kal-Zat, Ubn Kal-Zan, and Ubn Kal-Zar were the three royal scions who successively commissioned and turned the network city from a speculative fantasy into a concrete reality, establishing Neo Ara to exploit a wealth of natural resources—frozen water, inorganic elements, wind energy, geothermal energy—and to honor the forefathers and the foremothers. Neo Ara, a city built for men, women, and children, the scions maintained, not for machines, and founded on the principles of ecology, efficiency, and equanimity, under the benevolent will of the all-powerful All Knowing. While the Ubn dynasty prided itself on the law-abiding, theocratic, absolute monarchy on the red wanderer—home to 2.9 million subjects and stably growing—rival governments, organizations, and industries on the planetary neighbor Earth were unfavorable to the Martian Kingdom, making several attempts to undermine, even overthrow, it by means of ZamaNet hacking, space embargoes, and agitational propaganda.
The first group to be tried for the attempts of civic disruption were some two-hundred partisans of the ultra-leftist Popular Planetist Party, who were publicly beaten and beheaded on the charges of terrorism, sedition, and atheism. In a way, the network city was a fortress of durability and rectitude—because of its place, population, and personalism. The liberal, progressive, and radical tendencies made a hue and cry over Neo Ara, condemning it as abominable and unconscionable, a model of space tyranny and despotism—an abattoir of transhuman rights abuses and crimes against humanity. While the Martian Kingdom was not free of imperfections—despite its advanced design—Ubn Kal-Zar and his ruling family had a mass base of support: the chieftains, the clerics, the intellectuals, the magistrates, and the mothers, whose loyalty earned the social groups material privileges, spiritual followings, lifelong tenures, legal influence, and domestic stipends—along with maids, mansions, swimming pools, and escalator schools.
Ubn Kal-Zar was on the third floor of his palatial villa, observing the miles and miles of the network city composed of serene districts, farms, forests, gravitrons, heliostats, parks, preserves, roads, temples, and waterways. Beyond the rim of the urbanscape, the outlands were cold, dry, and stern. The ancient sun poured over the realm. The prince held up his palms, closed his eyes, and said, “The All Knowing is good and wise.”
