by submission | Nov 5, 2021 | Story |
Author: Kiel M. Gregory
I live in a world where most things move too fast or not at all. Molasses or honey like water. Lives. I’m thinking more of others and less of myself and I think that’s precisely where this all started to go wrong.
What’s the point of doing anything at all when eventually the stars will burn out and there will be no light and literally nothing will happen forever? How can you escape that or rush toward it?
Imagine trillions of years in the future. We all look the same except we’re inside a cold alloy hull, dodging gravity wells or cannibalistic black holes. The interior of our domiciles is lit only artificially. We “print” everything useful. We recycle everything used, including us. We still fight and occasionally kill each other, but it’s usually over “food” (dinner wafers or quantities of nutritional quasi-solids) and not the color of our skin since we’re all coffee-and-cream colored. Not reproductive rights since we’re all the same sex and fuck ourselves full of kin. Finally, we found something else to feel a way about. Finally, we can be alone and hear only what we want. I can’t imagine what music sounds like in this future, but I can imagine a group of someones are still at the top, letting us own nothing and be happy.
Entropy has stretched the universal fabric to the point where we share thoughts. Occasionally this drives someone mad. This is how evolution works. Time means nothing.
The frictionless drive whispers its secrets along the ship’s expanse.
One of us is dreaming.
The shackled machines weep viscosity, capillary their own tears.
This doesn’t mean anything at all.
by submission | Nov 4, 2021 | Story |
Author: VH Ferguson
There’s a lick of wind that curls around me like satin ribbons, softly against my skin, in my hair. The view is unparalleled, out of this world.
The cliffs to the north west are a grey almost blushing pink, and make companion with the sapphire of the sky, the stars as counterparts to the bird-like shapes below them, circling the cliffs, all trills and whoops.
This place has been… unexpected. I always imagined its beauty but how could I have imagined its culture, as I can only wince and outspread my hands and admit that I never expected there to be one.
My grasp of their language is laughable, but the natives here are staggered and patient. Patient and quiet and pleasantly watchful. They seem to communicate telepathically, almost, with looks and touch and a biotic intimacy so that I feel embarrassed to realise that I am the otherness here.
To help me understand their stories they draw pictures in the alabaster sand of things I’ve never seen for hours, and later as I semi-drift to my bed as if in slow motion, I wonder if I’ll dream that night of shadows in a cave or of Orion Nebula.
I try the local dish, the district famous dish – they’re excited for my reaction as they are for all of my reactions as they’re certainly not used to tourists. It is a soup of sorts, I think. It seems oddly carbonated and lively but looks like liquid silk a shade of molten lava and it’s a highly unusual experience. The air smells not quite like hard-boiled eggs. I have that awkward creeping anxiety of trying to find a familiar sign with which to map their customs – is it rude for food to remain on the plate as in Japan, or is a drop in the bowl enough to quirk the eyebrow in distase like in China?
It makes me laugh, now, that even in the most extrinsic situation the human compulsion is to fit the world in a familiar place. It turns out, of course, that the custom is to bury your bowl in the ground when the meal is complete, the bowl having been made with organic material, which was obviously completely unexpected and sits conspicuous and unaccompanied in the library of my mind under ‘alien cultural dining etiquette’.
The wind picks up a little, as I stand here now, steeping in these last moments, the sun somewhere behind me, vast as it has ever been. I wonder how it will feel to be home, will I be changed?
The cliffs are to the north west. To the east is Earth, a dizzying succulent pinned in the sky, and I get the absurd sense that I could swim the distance.
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.
