by submission | Jul 30, 2021 | Story |
Author: Stephen Murtough
The blank screen became the words: Jasmine loved Jonathan more than he loved her.
Thirty children were seated in individual booths with individual screens, and they each answered by pressing one of two buttons. Twenty-eight were correct. The other two were led out of the examination room.
New words appeared: Jasmine and Jonathan knew each other from long ago, and once, they’d loved each other. Eventually, Jonathan realised he loved Katie instead.
As before, the children answered quickly. Four children, who were all very young and were expected to fail the test, were escorted out of their booths, leaving twenty-four remaining. The examiners stood silently behind the booths.
Without delay, statement three appeared: Jonathan had known from the start that Jasmine wasn’t right. She was too introverted, too quiet, too happy to sit indoors and read a book. Nonetheless, she was there, and Katie never seemed interested until the Xmas party. He didn’t regret that evening one jot.
This time, as the examiners expected, the children took longer to answer. They read and re-read the statement and studied the statement’s structure and intricacies, trying to decipher what could have written the statement. The examiners paced, twiddling thumbs in pockets, and some shared looks and suppressed smiles. Eventually, the answers were submitted, and nine children were removed from the test.
Statement four arrived: Jasmine hadn’t had much luck with relationships. She admitted, when alone, that she wasn’t much of a catch. Boring came to mind. Inconsequential useless human. When she met Jonathan and he agreed to her suggestion to go for a drink, even if it had been a joke, she opened her eyes to the possibility: just maybe I am worthy, just maybe I am a catch. When Jonathan didn’t return home that December night, when he didn’t return her calls the following day, and when he sat her down and told her what had happened without ever taking off his jacket, it broke her. Just what do I owe, she wrote that final evening, the pleasure of being so meaningless.
The fifteen remaining children stared at the screen for over five minutes. Their pupils dashed left to right to left, and their hands hovered over their two choices: ‘Human’ or ‘Machine’. One child answered and their booth blacked out: incorrect. The examiners shifted their feet furtively. Another answered and was instantly led out of the room, and then a third, fourth, fifth, until just two remained studying the statement. They answered ‘Human’.
Instantly, statement five appeared: Just last week, Jonathan, you said you love me. What happened?
The two children paused, hesitated, then answered simultaneously. The examiners stepped forward to remove one of the children from the room, whilst the other remained with their hand pressed on their choice. An examiner looked over the child’s shoulder at the correct answer: ‘Machine’.
Holographic fireworks fizzed and the winning child was escorted to the celebration room. A speech was made about technological and educational advancements. Whilst the child’s supervisor schmoozed with other guests, an examiner asked the child how they’d known the final correct answer. I didn’t, replied the child. Lucky guess, they said.
by submission | Jul 29, 2021 | Story |
Author: Hillary Lyon
“How about: ‘Rainbow’s End’?” the art consultant said as she swept her hand in an arc through the air, eyes aglitter.
“How about: No,” said the polling consultant seated beside her. “That might attract little kids, I’m afraid, and that would be disastrous.”
“He’s right,” the project manager concurred. “We want children to mature into workers, consumers, and,” he continued as he rose from the conference table and walked over to the window, “tax payers, of course.”
“What about:‘Sweet Abyss’?” the polling consultant offered. “Sounds ultra-hip and coolly jaded, I think. Just the sort of term to pull in those easily swayed by social trends.”
The religion consultant slammed his hand down on the table. “Are you insinuating there’s nothing waiting for us after death? Because that’s what that name implies.”
“No offense, padre,” the polling consultant sighed. “How about: ‘Lethe’s Portal’?” He held his hands out in supplication. “It’s sounds classy, mysterious, and—”
“And our target demographic will have no idea what the name means,” the project manager interjected. “Our target demographic has no interest in the history of the world before they were born; I assure you they will not grasp a concept of a name taken from the ‘river of forgetfulness’ found in ancient Greek mythology.”
Picking up this thread, the religion consultant added, “He’s right; our desired consumer is only interested in living in the moment.”
The art consultant nodded her agreement. “They are utterly enchanted by the eternal present, from what I see.”
The project manager turned from the window, a sly smile spreading across his face. “Yes. All they really want to do is partake in the everlasting now.”
* * *
The more stubborn social activists publicly refer to the smooth marble structures popping up all over the greater metropolitan areas of the world as SACs, or ‘self-annihilation centers.’ On the streets, people call them ‘suicide shacks.’
Fortunately, for the proponents of ‘The Everlasting Now,’ a large enough percentage of the populace is eager to walk through the ornate brass doors of those same smooth marble structures. For a nominal fee (usually 40 credits, but price varies from city to city), the customer is granted entrance into ‘The Everlasting Now,’ wherein they are guaranteed:
* Freedom from stress related to interpersonal relationships, including but not limited to loneliness, social insecurities, romantic drama, and family dysfunctions.
* No more sleepless nights centering around work, deadlines, finances, and debt.
* Any and all legal issues are wiped away; including fines, fees, and impending prison sentences.
* Alleviation of all physical and mental pain and suffering, including but not limited to disease, injury, self-inflicted harm, and addiction.
Further, customers’ names will appear in the Big Book of Selfless Acts, published annually by the World Population Control Project. All proceeds from ‘The Eternal Now’, and its accompanying book sales, are directed towards the upkeep of the State Infrastructure, which includes, via Global Government edict, funding the WPCP.
by submission | Jul 28, 2021 | Story |
Author: Jason Kocemba
Greg has finally breathed his last. He was a good boy, faithful.
He deserves to be buried and not left to be carrion, but I’m tired.
In the beginning, when the dead were fresh, I buried them: single, double, mass graves, it didn’t matter. When I couldn’t dig I built bonfires. When the carrion eaters had turned most of the dead to well-dressed skeletons I made cairns from the bones, and pyramids from the skulls.
With Greg gone, I feel the loneliness closing in, as I knew it would.
In the early years, when I realised, after a lot of searching, that there was no one else, only me, I used to get drunk for months at a time. The only way I could tell how long I’d been on a bender was by the length of my hair, beard and fingernails.
Why didn’t I just end it? What if, for the sake of argument, I lay down on a bed of bones and just stopped? Why didn’t I let the hungry have their fresh meat, let the worms and flies, bacteria and fungus do what they do? What made me stand up and keep searching?
I buried everyone in my home town. Everyone I knew, drank with, worked with, grew up with. Everyone I dated, kissed and slept with. My brother and sister, my mum and dad, my three remaining grandparents. Friends, friends of friends. Strangers. I buried everyone. By the time I had interred the town I was done with death, done with the town, done with the memories. I could think of nothing to say on their graves.
I set myself adrift and became a nomad. I walked, drove and cycled across the land. I found only death. Scavenging became harder as things spoiled and I had to hunt. Soon the travelling began to pall.
I found a farm and taught myself how to raise animals and grow grains and vegetables and fruit. I had everything I needed. It was easy when you only have one mouth to feed.
I put any time I had left into learning new things. I learned how to play musical instruments, how to make films, how to paint and draw, how to write. I would go on expeditions to find clothes and furniture and any little knick-knack I needed. It wasn’t until later that I realised it was just an excuse to find booze.
And then one day, after nineteen years away, I found myself in my old home town. The memories were fresh in my mind and with my new skills, I made portraits, created sculptures, shot documentaries and wrote poems and stories. I left my works in each of their homes, I told their life stories through art, documented their existence. I found my voice.
I stopped boozing after that. I renewed the search for another survivor. As I travelled I made art for the dead as I went.
I am honoured to have been able to tell their stories and commemorate the lives of the people whose houses I used for shelter and whose clothes I wore and whose beds I slept in.
I’m the last and I’ve done my best. What more can anyone say?
The loneliness is going to catch me. Let it. I’m not going anywhere. I’m old and I’ve been busy.
I’ve got one more dead friend to bury. And then I’m done.
by submission | Jul 27, 2021 | Story |
Author: Connor Long-Johnson
A crowd had gathered and soon snowballed into a frenetic mob on the bridge overlooking the river. Cries and shouts swirled in the air as the crowd surged and morphed like the uneasy river below, sirens blared in the background and two lone police officers, barking orders to the baying masses, were drowned out; their presence a paper boat in a tsunami.
For those at the front of the pack who were leaning, stomachs pushed hard against the concrete barrier of the bridge so much so that they struggled for breath, were busy filming the scene on their phones as it unfolded in front of them.
The ship (they had all – in their collective wisdom – decided that it must be a ship) was still on fire. The purple plumes of smoke rising from the tail end of the vessel, its rear end jutting out of the water, were billowing in the early winter morning breeze westwards towards the smatterings of people that had massed to look at the spectacle. Most were donning masks or coughing steadily into the insides of their jackets as the smoke gently chocked them. Meanwhile the leaking fuel from the craft had turned the water of the Thames a sickly green colour, like the juicy snot at the tail end of a cold.
Like moths to the flame they stayed, mesmerised, inhaling the foreign fumes of another world.
“Did anyone see it come down?”
“Na, I heard it crash though.”
“What do you suppose it is?”
“Well that do you think it is? It’s got to be alien.”
“Bollocks, it’s from the military I reckon, some special sort of secret plane or sumink. They test ‘em all the time.”
“Don’t be so stupid, just look at the damn thing, it’s the size of a bloody building and it’s leaking green goop!”
“Whatever it is it’s fucking huge, and it stinks.”
“I heard that they’ve found two bodies already.”
“Let me guess, bald, green and three feet tall?”
Questions began to swirl into the mixture of sirens and shouts, a blanket of erratic muttering like white noise descended on the bridge.
Then, like a rocket blasting off from the launchpad, a scream rose up out the chatter, shrill and piercing, thundering across the water, turning every head and silencing every tongue.
“Her! She’s an alien!”
A woman was stood clutching a child wrapped in a small bundle in one arm, her other pointing a vicious accusatory finger at someone in the crowd.
“Look at her! Look at her eyes!”
Eyebrows cocked and heads began to turn, following the finger to another woman in the middle of the crowd. The accused was hunched over, a hood guarding her face.
“What? Me?” she said in a raspy voice and pointed a gnarled, ghostly white finger dotted with liver spots into her chest, her face contorted, “I am not an alien!”
“Just look at her!” The woman was no longer screaming, she was stood trembling, a deer in front of imaginary headlights.
“I am not an Alien!” the old woman’s voice rose, the coarseness suddenly replaced with venom, “Are you stupid girl?”
“Why are you wearing that hood? It’s 29 degrees today.”
“Is she glowing?”
“What’s wrong with her eyes?”
The silence ushered in by the woman’s scream was slowly being replaced with another gentle murmur.
Slowly, the woman turned, making her way to the edge of the crowd. Somewhere amongst the tumult, a foot, unseen and unknown sent the woman to her knees and pulled the hood away.
Another wave of silence hushed the crowd.
The woman stood up and they all saw her clearly in the daylight, her hair was the colour of molten silver, falling in liquid metal waterfalls and splashing over her two hunched shoulders. The skin on her face was like that on her hands, deathly pale, an unnatural whiteness. It was like seeing a blanket of snow on a midsummer night.
“I told you, look at her!”
“Oh my god she was right.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Alien!”
“Alien!”
` Before the woman could rise to her feet the crowd had broken out into a panic, it began to surge and swell, cresting over the fallen woman in a stampede of paranoid frenzy.
“Please no! I am not an alien!” The woman begged, struggling to her knees.
“Throw her into the river!”
“Toss her in. I saw a movie once where the aliens were allergic to water, throw her!”
The woman began to feel the peculiar sensation of having her own body hoisted into the air, moving out of her control, her arms flailing as she was chucked over the bridge. She felt her stomach roll and then the cold embrace of gravity as the water rushed to meet her.
“That’s it chuck her over!”
“Hopefully she’ll drown. But there must be more of them.”
There was a general murmur of agreement and the crowd dissipated, rabid dogs with the smell of blood on their snouts, all the while the woman, amongst gargling cries, was still insistent.
“I am not an alien.”
by submission | Jul 25, 2021 | Story |
Author: Brian C. Mahon
Maurice yells in capitalized white letters across her left eye’s field of vision: [DO NOT MOVE.]
Target confirmed – ten feet away, closing.
Shiori’s training keeps excitement in check; the suit keeps her mute. The target, Meng Mei, born to the wrong rich man, is strapped to an oak chair. Shiori creeps closer, toes gently padding the floor and her eye on a digital decibel meter.
[Blue Endeavor pan right. Audio and video are clear. Need to identify him.]
A Sino-Russian Cooperative guard chomps on a cigar, sitting on the desk opposite Meng Mei, scrolling on his phone. Sixty-eight percent left in the suit’s flex-strip batteries, meaning only twenty-three minutes of light-bending active camouflage remaining.
[Stay slow. Tile is engineered sound reflective. Don’t shuffle. Strike team ETA twelve minutes. Monitor and remain.]
*Monitor and remain?* Shiori jerks her head, *no*. She is here, now, and she can strike before the Cooperative kill another hostage.
[Blue Endeavor, monitor and remain.]
Shiori shakes her head quickly. *NO.*
She’s almost breathing on her – Meng Mei is a beautiful girl, ten years old in a pink dress and pink ribbon in her hair but bearing a bruised, swollen eye socket and split lower lip.
[You are reconnaissance. MONITOR AND REMAIN.]
Shiori reaches behind the chair, eyes on the decibel meter, the girl, the stooge, the room, slipping her fingertips around strapping binding the girl’s ankles. *Reconnaissance. Wasted potential. Act now, save now!*
“Shénme?” The girl licks a clot of blood from her lips, looks down at her right ankle. As the strap loosens, the Russian bald and burly spits his cigar onto the tile.
[BLUE ENDEAVOR! YOU WILL BE COMPROMISED!]
Just as the words fill her field of vision, she pulls the emergency knife from her hip pocket and lunges at the Russian. Her blade cleanly whisks across his throat; a soundless execution save his gurgles.
[BLUE ENDEAVOR! WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?]
She whispers, “What we needed to. No arrests, no plea bargains, no more little girls. He dies. She is saved. We leave.”
Maurice’s disappointment buzzes in her ear, “Blue Endeavor. You *can’t* leave. The strike team isn’t there yet.”
Shiori ignores him and concentrates on untying the girl’s wrists.
“Nǐ shì shàngdì ma?” The girl’s dark eyes moisten with hope and confusion. Shiori never learned Chinese, barely knew Japanese, but she knows a look of fear.
*Only one way to build confidence.* Shiori presses two sensor points behind her jaw, unveiling the white-striped azure catsuit, Blue Endeavor.
“Shh. We are getting out of here. I am Shiori.”
“BLUE ENDEAVOR, EXIT, EXIT, EXIT!”
Two faceless, visored brown body suits appear from the corners to charge Shiori. She spins away from one, knife in hand, but a strong embrace inverts the world and delivers tile quickly.
“BLUE ENDEA-R!” Maurice screams as her nose bounces off the floor.
“Meng Mei, you serve your father well. I’ll ask him to get you ice cream,” rolls a heavy Russian accent from the suit sitting on her back.
Shiori picks her chin up in disbelief just to have her head smashed back to the tile. Served?
“How long, Misha? Six months we try to get their technology?”
“Six? Seven? Who cares? It was a good plan. With her suit, we’ll be able to move while invisible. We get promotion this time.”
Shiori relaxes, the ceiling spins. The strike team will be here, full of flash bangs and bullet holes to save the day.
“First, we must get rid of girl. Shame.”
“Shame.”
A crack precedes the white flash from behind her eyes.
Blue Endeavor, mission end.
