by submission | Jan 24, 2025 | Story |
Author: David Barber
Shantytowns sprang up around every Jirt hiveship, infamous marketplaces of greed and filth. This must be the opinion of the Jirt, because without warning they sometimes reduced them to sterile white ash.
Surely no one would risk living in the volcano’s shadow, but time passed and always the humans came creeping back.
This solitary Jirt was a drone, and therefore idle and curious, with wealth to squander, though his glittering isolation field protected him from the grubby attention of human peddlers.
The drone halted, as if studying the word Clinic above a door, though he had no need to puzzle over human script, since that was the function of the translator-bug that clung to his thorax. No one had yet decided what function humans might serve.
Close up, the human medic was soft and pulpy as prejudice claimed. Humans reminded some Jirt of newly-hatched larvae, which must be why they were not swept away, their world cleansed like a diseased hive.
Reluctantly, the drone began to explain. An itch between the maxillary palps, also some soreness and discharge from the proboscis. Of course this was easily remedied by Jirt technologies, but the Queen and Court was bound hear and the drone could not bear to be gossiped about.
Dropping the isolation field left the drone exposed and vulnerable. It was a difficult moment.
While the human busied itself obtaining samples, it gave a tiresome lecture on germs. Humans were obsessed with these invisible entities and the drone buzzed his vestigial wings with impatience. How much simpler to be sterile inside and out!
The white-coated medic shook his head. “Was it a rubbish tip? A cess pit? Or perhaps road kill?”
A million years ago the ancestors of the Jirt had indeed looked for food and mates in such places, but civilisation changes everything.
The medic was extolling the virtues of penicillin, though the drone had stopped listening. Perhaps these incantations encouraged belief in their potions.
Hurrying to open the door for its customer, the human offered uncalled-for advice. The honoured one should be more careful in future, faecal matter was not the sterile food paste that the Jirt were used to.
“You are far from home and perhaps the primitive has awoken ancient instincts.”
Outside was the marketplace, where one might find amusing gifts for the Queen, though the drone headed deeper into the shantytown, abloom with colours and overripe smells, buzzing with raucous noises and disorder, the source of all that was vile, polluted and rank.
Only later, with a thrill of disgust, did the drone realise he had not rebooted his isolation field.
Waiting on the Queen the next day, the drone remarked he had visited the human market and was appalled. The disgusting place needed to be cleansed.
Only afterwards was the drone embarrassed to discover a whiff of corruption he had noticed was coming from himself.
It was the consensus of the Court that tidying up shantytowns was unlikely to impress Her Majesty, so there was consternation when the Queen summoned the drone to mate with Her.
But while the drone should have been concentrating on the mechanics of this honour, instead, he found himself recalling the tantalising odours of filth borne on the foetid air of the human quarter.
Few copulations in this modern age finish with the roused Queen biting off and consuming the drone’s head, and perhaps it was for this reason that the Queen declared it to have been one of the most satisfactory matings for many cycles.
by submission | Jan 23, 2025 | Story |
Author: Mark Renney
Tanner was a loner. Even prior to the System, during his childhood and throughout adolescence, he hadn’t managed to form any long-term relationships. He had kept his head down, listened intently, and worked hard and he had been an above average student and yet none of his teachers had seemed impressed nor even to notice. When the System came a-calling he had known instantly just what he could do for them, what he could become.
He hadn’t ever felt resentful or blamed his choice of occupation for the solitary life he had led. In fact, he believed they were complementary, that he had been more efficient because of it. In the past, whenever an Eraser was around, people had been worried, close mouthed and reluctant to share or shoot the breeze. Tanner was unsure if this was still the case but he suspected it wasn’t. He still had the same effect and, when those who didn’t work for the System realised he was about, in the proximity as it were, their conversations would stutter to a halt.
Tanner’s colleagues, on the other hand, talked almost constantly and they didn’t care if he was around and could hear or if he was excluded. Their lives seemed to consist of an endless cycle of family feuds, of birthday parties or barbecues and excursions.
As Tanner listened to them, to the other Erasers, he was often struck by just how similar their lives were to those of his suspects. The ones he had unearthed and exposed, the lives he had cut and wrenched from their moorings that he, and they, had erased.
Tanner had often been responsible for the erasure of people he had known. This was against the rules. He was all too aware that cases where the person was known to the Eraser should be passed across to another worker and yet Tanner had ignored this time and again. Over the years he had worked hard at convincing himself it didn’t matter, that it was a small rebellion, just a little thing, but of course he had left a trail.
There had been colleagues from his schooldays, boys and girls he had sat alongside in various classrooms. Occasionally one of his teachers had appeared on the list. Tanner recognised their names immediately and had been able to conjure up the particular individual with his mind’s eye. The pictures had always been and remained vivid and detailed whilst Tanner’s recollections of his so-called class ‘mates’ were hazy.
Tanner had often found himself brooding on this, on the fact that he could remember his former educators but had forgotten his contemporaries. He wondered if this meant that he regretted the removal of certain lapsed citizens, more so than others.
Ultimately though it didn’t matter. It wasn’t Tanner’s job to make sense of it, to understand the how and the why. No, it was his job to wipe all of them from the records and from the system.
by submission | Jan 22, 2025 | Story |
Author: Douglas Mulford
It didn’t take long for everything to become boring.
The past was a kaleidoscope of excitement – both joyous and tragic. The future, in contrast, was suffocatingly dull. Problems that once consumed humanity were relics of history. War, hunger, and disease had been eradicated, thanks to monumental advancements in AI and robotics. Everyone had plenty: food, water, shelter, care. More importantly, nobody aged, fell ill, or died.
At first, this was paradise. But as the years stretched into centuries, and the centuries into millennia, the excitement dulled. Every song that could be sung had been, well, sung. Every novel, every film, every painting, every food recipe – all conceived of and consumed. Humanity then turned outward, exploring the universe with unmatched precision. We uncovered every mystery, mapped every galaxy and star and planet, and touched every corner of existence. We found new forms of life – created multi-planetary Empires, and fought intergalactic wars. Our presence was felt in every part of the Universe.
And then, there was nothing left to do.
When gods achieve omnipotence, what remains? Nothing, except the choice to end it all. And so, humanity’s story did not end with a cataclysm, but simply with suicidal boredom. Humans undertook every dream, and nightmare, they could ever conjure up. But this one seemingly insignificant development, this overlook of simple boredom, was what ultimately did them in. Before all of this happened, though, humanity created something special – the Forever Flowers.
They were one of humanity’s final inventions, created in those last restless years. Why give a bouquet destined to wither, when you could have flowers that stayed fresh forever? Advances in senescence allowed scientists to bio-medically engineer living blooms that required no care, never aged, and never died. Their beauty was eternal, their fragrance unfading, as if freshly cut each morning. They were completely immortal, and totally indestructible.
For a brief moment, the Forever Flowers were a triumph. Everyone wanted them, and soon every home displayed their vibrant beauty. But, as with all things, novelty faded. The flowers became mundane, their once-enchanting colors clashing with ever-changing décor trends. Their perfect fragrance grew tiresome. One by one, they were discarded – tossed into yards, abandoned in closets, trashed, and forgotten.
But the flowers didn’t die.
Unbeknownst to their creators, the genetic modifications that granted the Forever Flowers immortality also endowed them with consciousness. They were sentient, though mute. And so began the eternal nightmare for the Forever Flowers. If they had mouths, they would have screamed – but the Flowers’ nightmare remained isolated within their own minds, a personal prison of sorts.
Millions of years passed, and the last humans ended their lives. The flowers remained.
Billions of years later, suns expanded and devoured entire planets. The flowers endured.
And countless years later, when the universe slowed its expansion, and black holes reigned supreme, the flowers persisted.
When the final stars died, and the universe stretched into a dark and cold wasteland, all that remained were the Forever Flowers. Still alive, still conscious.
It wasn’t until what may as well have been an eternity had passed, and the universe crunched back in on itself to a singularity, that the Forever Flowers were finally freed from the prison of immortality.
by submission | Jan 21, 2025 | Story |
Author: Majoki
When you’ve seen what flashbeams can do to infantry, even with shielding, it’s easy to lose your faith in humanity. When your commander outfits one of your few remaining tactical boostsuits with a golden cape and wings, and then orders you to fly among your maimed and dying comrades trumpeting on a silver horn as if you were the Angel Gabriel, you tend to lose your faith in God, too.
That’s what I did in the final weeks of the Battle of Geryon. My commander said it could turn the tide of the fighting if our dying soldiers witnessed a clear sign of a higher purpose, that their beliefs and hopes in the divine might just help them hang on long enough.
Long enough for their suffering to be of real use. That’s what I learned posing as the Angel Gabriel. That the longer my fellow soldiers lingered, the better the chances the AMVICs could get to them. That sounds heroic. Especially if you think, like most grunts, that AMVIC stands for Advanced Medical Viability In Combat, and that AMVICs are sent out in swarms after battle to save the grievously wounded.
I’m sure if programmed to do so, the crab-like AMVICs with their ten surgically deft limbs and laser scalpels could’ve saved a whole lot of lives, a whole lot of grief. But those football-sized bots on the battlefield were not there to repair and rescue. They were there to reap. To harvest the bounty of functioning organs before soldiers perished and those valuable replacement parts spoiled. Yes, vital organs were the new spoils of war.
What I now know is that AMVIC really stands for Autonomous Mobile Vivisection In Combat. They were programmed to remove what little left the wounded and dying of the lowly infantry class had to offer. And so I was sent to play the Angel Gabriel to fortify the dying, while supposed medbots were robbing them blind. Literally. Eyeballs are near the top on Command’s list of vital organs to harvest.
Why the sacred charade? Why the divine deceit?
Would you fight for commanders that so easily wrote you off? Those commanders might have been able to save you, but they were only interested in saving your organs. Organs that could be used to keep the soldiers that really mattered going: the A-Force, the highly augmented combat warriors that Command really valued.
AMVICs could only hone in on warm bodies to harvest, so my unholy job was to keep the languishing alive and believing in redemption, in the promised land. But there is no redemption here. No promise. For I am sure someday that in the battle that takes me down, the AMVICs sent to harvest my innards will find this former faux angel, long ago, lost both his heart and soul.
by submission | Jan 19, 2025 | Story |
Author: Sophia Collender
If you rest your hand on a mossy rock and sat down beside it, you have the option to stay there forever. The moss will accept the invitation to crawl into the new space. It will grow to encompass your fingers and your arms. It will seize whatever space it can find under your fingernails. You’ll become wrapped up in a plushy green epi-epidermis. Your skin can take a break. You’ll turn green yourself.
The boundary between you and the world will cease to matter.
Of course, this will all have occurred long after a painfully boring (and, more than that, painful) few sacrificial days during which you’ll be conscious.
Dying will be awkward. Getting through that unfortunate (albeit comparatively brief) phase where you must let yourself starve and dehydrate in total stillness is sure to be the most tedious part.
But once it’s over it’s over, and from then on it’s smooth sailing.
The moss will make its way over your body.
It will curl around your lips, and eventually reach inside of you. It might like the dark and whatever remains of the damp. It’s around this point – though it may possibly have occurred before – that the inaction of your limbs will leave them suited to a new form of labor.
Stillness doesn’t mean an end to work – anything that exists must pull its fair share.
You’ll find renewed occupation as a structure, as the contours of your form are discovered to make an excellent home. The familiar bugs that have crawled on you from the start (or by now, more likely their descendants) will make their nests there. Larger things, like rodents and reptiles – might dig into you and near you. You will find new purpose as a shelter. You will make for a useful thing. The sockets of your still eyes might make nice nests. Your teeth will have turned into pebbles – perfect for construction – if they haven’t yet decayed into demineralized mush.
You will have felt the turn of the seasons many times over in this spot. The alternating dryness of summers with the rehydration of winters and springs will have worn away at your flesh many times now. Mushrooms and molds will have populated the corpse-turned-continent many times over. The annual apocalypses and rebirths will wear away at your structural integrity. How many endings can a body withstand?
In your immobility you will find yourself rediscovered as a vessel for movement. Everything that is not life becomes the substance that life moves through; the riverbeds that it flows across and shapes. Nature’s unrelenting labor will not cease – and it will not cease to make use of you. Its fingers will tear away at you as you’re required for new purposes. Less and less of you will remain. Your role may change but you will always have one – even long after it is you.
Your will is only so strong.
If you hold still long enough, nature will move you.
