by submission | Aug 18, 2021 | Story |
Author: Alzo David-West
The hyoum had left after his four-and-a half-year visitation. He had not been entirely satisfied, though in the beginning, he had a broadly favorable impression.
Disembarking on the southwestern region of Otoa, he had appreciated its warmth and the colorful suns, which he believed would heal his physical and internal pains. He did not know why he was ailing, even with prescriptions, for he maintained a generally healthy diet, and he regularly exercised.
But the pace of life on the sphere, while a welcomed change, was increasingly too sedate and monotonous for him, being one who had lived and worked all his years on fast-paced, super-city worlds. Otoa, despite its normal size as a habitable planet, was rather like a widespread small town, something out of a bygone age, though Otoa had been a member of the United Interstellar Territories for almost two centuries.
Surely, a hundred and sixty-eight years was enough time to catch up with modernity, he once thought. However, the reality proved otherwise.
The Otoans were a communal, outwardly decent, hierarchical population of hexapoids, divided into two caste-like classes of monitors and workers, something like Old Planet ants, termites, and bees, but not quite. After all, the Otoans, despite appearances, were self-conscious, rational, and deliberative, yet they reasoned and emoted in manners unfamiliar to him in spite of his many travels.
A few individual Otoans were approachable, even if briefly, but they were mostly unremarkable. They accepted duties as they were and never openly questioned routines. And they worked in allotted, designated roles with intense specialization. Indeed, outside specific tasks, the Otoans had difficulty generalizing, and they usually did not know what others were doing.
When the hyoum had concerns and spoke, they became panicked. When he sought reasons, they responded in circles. When he maintained principles, they thought he was indifferent. Yet, for all the divergences, the Otoans never terminated his visitation, but renewed his obligations every year for the full duration of his invited training lectures.
Might it have been better to have left after a year? he contemplated twenty-four months after experiencing the conceptual chasm separating the Otoans and himself.
To his discontentment, and despite his credentials as an educationist and a poet on four UIT territories, the Otoans regarded him as plain, or so his Otoan monitor spontaneously articulated in a gurgle, with its flat beak, carapace plates, and segmented form. What a bizarre place, he thought. Not knowing what else to do, he decided to make expressions of goodwill and maintain consistent actions, which, to his perplexity, seemed to drive his monitor and a handful of Otoans a bit mad.
The other hyoums on Otoa, a small grey tribe who had made home there two to three generations ago, hobnobbed under the multicolored suns, assuring him, “It’s not a bad place,” and, “They will take your side.” Did the tribe really know, or had they grown comfortable living with hexapoid partners on an isolated, provincial world?
The term limit was nearing, and another hyoum urged him to apply for a renewal, even if for one year. The prospect was somber, but after a month, he messaged his Otoan monitor with a pro forma expression of interest, and the hexapoid referred him to Otoan workers. The visitation ended seven months later as scheduled, and he was fortunate his health had improved in the final year. Discreetly, he departed, taking an assignment off world, which he had planned two years in advance, and sent gifts of gratitude to one neighborly Otoan and seven of the old hyoums.
Overlooking glassy waters and the panorama of a super-city world revolving on the shoulder of Sagittarius, he breathed in deeply … and exhaled.
by submission | Aug 15, 2021 | Story |
Author: Amy Dusto
Excerpts from the Times-Gazette daily puzzle, September 5, 2061
7 down, 5 letters
-A writhing, flying group of insects or nanobots
(Hint: together they’re like a friendly cloud that eats carbon! Be assured they don’t bite people, though.)
28 across, 11 letters
-A fundamental principle of particle observation
(Hint: the gut feeling one has just before turning on a brand-new technology that, once going, will be hard to stop.)
15 down, 6 letters
-Nonzero possibility
(Hint: some might even say this was our last one, as a species. So cut us a break?)
40 across, 5 letters
-Where the billionaires fled to
(Hint: they deserve a vacuum, don’t they?)
13 down, 4 letters
-Where the rest of us are stuck
(Hint: Starts with an h… oh, come on, there’s a less pessimistic option! “Stuck” is really a state of mind!)
Solution: Please contact Drs. Morena-Huber and Carvell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration if you have one. Unhelpful messages will be deleted without response.
by submission | Aug 14, 2021 | Story |
Author: Michael Dempsey
Peter, standing in the bathroom, heard a voice crackle over the intercom. “Mr. Walker, you have five minutes to leave your apartment. If you go on your own volition, you can remain free. If you do not, we will forcibly arrest you and take you to the authorities.”
Peter froze. Who was that? What was she talking about? He rinsed his hands and looked up at the bathroom mirror. He smiled, and wished that his smile was more symmetrical. It had always bothered him. He tried smiling again, but it didn’t improve.
The voice from the intercom spoke again. “Four minutes and thirty seconds.”
This is crazy, Peter thought. I haven’t done anything. He started pacing around his studio apartment. Someone had said that walking was good for thinking, so Peter walked when trying to concentrate.
“Four minutes.”
Peter tried to think of his worst moments. There was a time that he had pulled a chair out from under a classmate in elementary school. She ended up breaking her wrist. His shoulders tensed as he remembered it.
He stopped in front of the living room mirror and smiled. He shook his head at how uneven the smile still was and resumed walking.
What else? Just last week he had taken credit for someone else’s work. A colleague of his said they should start a subscription service with monthly billing and make it complicated to unsubscribe. The department head couldn’t hear her so Peter repeated the idea. The boss thought it was Peter’s suggestion and loved it. Peter was embarrassed about the confusion but was happy that the boss was pleased with him.
“Three minutes.”
Peter kept pacing. He noticed some grime on the floor and wondered when he had last mopped. Months, probably. He was disappointed in himself. His mom had always kept the floors clean when he was a kid. The last time he had seen her was three months before she died. She talked about how cute he had been as a boy, especially when he played Superman in the treehouse. She told him how much she loved being his mother. He just nodded and smiled, wondering how his smile looked.
Peter stopped in front of the mirror again and asked himself why he didn’t tell her how it felt to be her son. He was surprised to see a tear roll down his cheek.
He turned to the closet and packed a small bag with a few sets of clothes. He walked out as he heard the voice from the intercom say, “One minute.”
A woman wearing all white greeted him in the lobby. “Mr. Walker, thank you for complying. This was just a drill. You may return to your room.”
Peter shook his head. “You were right, I’m guilty. I always have been. Take me wherever you like.” Behind the woman was a large mirror. Peter smiled and looked at his reflection as the woman led him outside. Better, he thought, as he kept smiling.
by submission | Aug 13, 2021 | Story |
Author: Ryan Watson
853 is a rather unremarkable number. It is the approximate weight of a male grizzly bear in pounds. A sloth will travel at approximately 853 feet in an hour. It marked a central year of the Danish Viking raids of Europe, resulting in a Swedish Viking raid reply.
Robert Mattheson knew none of these things however.
Robert Mattheson was doing laundry in the basement of his Minnesotan home when a stuck pant leg, caught at the bottom of the basin, had him lean forward overtop of the machine.
It was simply bad luck that at 8:53 pm Robert Mattheson found himself tumbling through the hatch and into the past.
Robert Mattheson was not a scientist; he had not been previously experimenting with time travel. Neither was he an engineer, making untested changes to his washer. He was an accountant. Just a man dealing with an extraordinarily uncommon occurrence in the confines of his laundry room.
One might imagine that the act of traveling backwards through the stream of time would be a dramatic experience, but it is not. One minute Robert was tugging gently at the hem of his work pants and the next he had found himself falling flat on his back on the grassy floor of a Red Cedar Forest.
“This is certainly strange,” Robert thought from the ground. He checked his watch, finding the time to now be 8:54, and stood up. He looked around, confused at his sudden change of scenery. Still holding the wet trousers that had miraculously accompanied him on his journey, he wondered how it came to be that he was now in the woods.
Robert had no way to know that he had not travelled any distance whatsoever, that he was, geographically speaking, exactly where he had been standing 1400 years in the future. But he also had no way to know, or reason to suspect that he had travelled into the past. It simply made more sense to believe he had had an episode, and lost track of the previous day. He had never had an episode before, but to him this must be what one must be.
Draping his damp pants over his shoulder, Robert set off into the woods in the direction he believed to be his home. He would never make it back, and was subsequently fired from his firm for his sudden and continued absence.
by submission | Aug 12, 2021 | Story |
Author: S.R Malone
An officer with a square-set jaw greeted us at our front door.
“Daddy, who is this man?” Myra asked.
“Oh, this kind gentleman is from the army,” I crouched by her side, “He’s here to take you to space camp.”
Liar.
She stared at me with wide, innocuous eyes; the eyes of a firstborn whose lawful duty was to serve for five years off-world in the military. More importantly, the eyes of a daughter who does not wholly believe the truth, nor understand it, but cannot help but trust the word of her loving parents.
“Have a fun holiday, pumpkin,” I said, choking on tears.
Myra squeezed me as tight as she could while her mother passed her backpack to the serviceman. He smiled, dutifully. She sniffled, clutching Myra. They wept together, until the serviceman gently led our child down the pathway to the curb.
Over the tops of the neighbourhood gleamed the upper struts of the launch pad, towering over rows of spotless prefabricated houses. Unified Earth flags stood sentinel on countless laws, blowing mockingly in the breeze.
***
I watched Myra join other innocent faces in the convoy, all prepared for their holiday.
Fury bubbled under my flesh as her pale face pulled away from our street, the row of black SUVs fading to dots in the distance, like a chain of ants as they rounded the corner and climbed the hill to the launch pad.
This day was one I was dreading for seven years. Ever since I held the waxy black and white stills of Nora’s womb back then, a concoction of pride and anxiety swelling in my stomach.
My foreman rang the house earlier, giving the all-clear for my absence today; such is the way of the world now when your eldest is called up.
And that evening I stared heavenwards as the craft’s retros fired up and it ascended into the misty dark blue. I settled on the edge of the porch, watching it soar free of suburbia.
Every night I sit and impatiently await its return, as others do.
I did not anticipate the acidic sorrow that would fill my veins, casting red eyes over Myra’s room, a dark museum to her memory; a baseball bat slunk in the corner, her dolls arranged as she had left them, having a tea party. Her plastic crossbow with foam darts; her little brother Ryan has one too, but he is too young to understand why they are never played with anymore.
The Mathesons from No.10 pass me tonight, waving and smiling their sympathetic greetings. I’m perched here every night, and the neighbourhood knows it. The neighbourhood likes to discuss it.
“Conscription Day,” sighed Emmett Matheson, the last time they’d invited us for dinner, “It isn’t easy. But it’s our duty to the planet, and that’s something worth the sacrifice.” He’d led me into the study, and we’d shared a Scotch. I’d positioned myself near the window so I could watch the skies. “We can’t fight it, and nor would I want to— no, sir.” My gaze had wandered to the photo of him and his lad, a picture a decade old.
Tonight, I blow a kiss to the dying embers of the day as the milky yellow glow from the living room presses out against the gloom of the porch.
Myra would be ten years old today.
I just hope, pray even, that she had a brilliant day.
In the dusk, the spotless homes lining the streets light like fireflies.
This was what we sacrificed for.
This, our utopia.
