by submission | Feb 27, 2020 | Story |
Author: Roger Ley
‘Cadmus,’ his codename for the purposes of this mission, lay motionless on top of the dune. His ghillie skin made him indistinguishable from a clump of the scrubby local vegetation, which wasn’t surprising considering the amount of it he’d incorporated into the surface of the garment the day before. The sun beat down, and he was grateful for the thermal system that kept the outer part of the suit at the temperature of his surroundings and made his heat signature hard to detect, while at the same time keeping the inner part cool enough to prevent him frying in the midday heat. He turned his head slightly and sipped water from the tube of his hydration pack and continued to wait. He was good at waiting; it was his job to wait. He had learned this at the Royal Marine Commando Training Centre years ago, before he’d become a private contractor. When he’d waited long enough, he would squeeze the trigger and leave. The Saudi Land Forces would be onto his position within minutes but he’d be gone.
A voice spoke quietly in his ear.
“Target acquired, Cadmus, stand by for imminent completion.”
He chambered a self-steering round and prepared to take the shot. It was ironic that the three small deployable fins on the body of the bullet and the small pack of quantum electronics in its nose had relieved him of the need for accuracy. He’d calculated the approximate angle of inclination, although it wasn’t critical, and he knew the general direction of the target, four kilometres away in an open area outside Riyadh. As long as a targeting beacon was in position on the victim, the round would lock on to it and arrive seconds after he discharged it. The customer had specified a mercury-filled bullet, so he assumed it was a headshot. Old-fashioned but effective. After the bullet’s casing had penetrated the victim’s skull, the mercury would continue as a cloud of supersonic droplets, pulping their brain. No deflections off the bone and a miraculous recovery, a binary result: life if he missed, certain death if not.
He didn’t know who the target was, neither did he want to. There were other ways of getting the job done, but they all required larger, more trackable items of military hardware. He assumed that the need for deniability on the part of his customer was paramount. It was the limited range of the steerable bullet that required his presence.
“Immediate go, Cadmus.”
He fired, stood, broke down the rifle and piled it with the other equipment he was leaving behind. He triggered the timed incendiaries. All the evidence would be burned or cauterised a few minutes after he’d left, there would be no specks of DNA to trace the assassination back to him. He jogged across the sand to the motorway two hundred metres away, where a beaten-up pickup half-full of goats was parked on the hard shoulder. The bonnet was up and the driver was fiddling under it. When he saw Cadmus, he dropped the bonnet and got into the driver’s seat. Cadmus climbed into the back, thumped the back of the cab, lay down, and pulled the ghillie skin over himself. The goats began to nibble at it as the truck drove sedately away. A few minutes later, he heard the clatter of choppers passing over, heading back in the direction of his pitch. He’d been counting off seconds ever since he’d triggered the incendiaries and reckoned that they’d fire about now. He settled down and made himself as comfortable as he could for the drive to Bahrain, several hours away.
His ride dropped him at a back-street hotel. He left the ghillie skin and went inside. After a quick change of clothes in his room and a taxi ride to the airport, he boarded a commercial flight to his home in Cyprus. A substantial deposit had already been paid into his numbered Zurich bank account. He wouldn’t know if the mission had been a success until he read about it on the news screens or, if it was hushed up, when the second half of the money arrived.
by submission | Feb 25, 2020 | Story |
Author: Morrow Brady
For years, the travellers, with their grimy little lives, laboured their way up through the pillar engine, in a vain hope of reaching the great power chamber. Long lives of suffering through industrial tunnel networks, chain powered lift corporations and mechanised fuel courts. They were near deaf as the machine’s roar grew ever louder. The legend of the gantry fuelled them onwards.
From oil-drenched crevices, they finally crawled out into the great underground chamber atop steel pillar city, their disorientation magnified by the crashing clatter of the world’s machinery. The engineered city struck angled poses, as it teetered on the edge of a bottomless divide serving only to imprison them. Beyond the divide, the mirrored wall, a surface of angry bismuth, rose from deep darkness to the chamber’s ceiling where glistening machinery came alive. Blue streaks of light held motionless silhouettes that watched.
The travellers stood horrified, as edge zealots flung themselves into the dark divide. Their sacrifice but subtle carnage compared to hammering a life out of this den of despair. Leaning over the edge, the travellers looked down the pillar’s steel wall, to catch their first glimpse of the gantry, nestled in like a sleeping coiled snake.
With the extortionate traversal fee paid, the travellers were shoved down oily, machined access-ways to the gantry’s greasy dock. After clambering through an assault course of structural bolts, a large yellow painted assembly led to a series of articulated arms. Wearily they scaled across surfaces slick with machine oil and calloused in salty build-up, to reach the platform at gantry’s end. On the teetering platform, they fearfully looked into the divide.
Glowing green from the control station, the operator awoke the gantry. It shuddered into life and stuttered away from its snug dock, languidly cantilevering out across the perilous divide. Thrown to the platform floor, the exhausted travellers desperately tried to find purchase, as their lungs heaved the hideous stench surging up from divide’s bowel.
The travellers cowered as pillar dwellers gathered at the edge and peppered greasy shards of metal down at them. The gantry sluggishly unfolded, creaking at each movement and snakily extended out across the great void of the divide. The insane surface of the mirrored wall grew in detail as they swung towards it and the gantry then began its final pivot that flung the platform in a wide mechanical arc. In precise articulation, it aligned the platform through a hidden wall port. The platform shook as it penetrated the port and emerged on the other side of the wall to another bottomless chamber. The travellers gasped in amazement at a glass dome above them filled with colourful planets beyond. The legends were true after all.
Against the inside face of the mirrored wall was a broad ledge awaiting the gantry’s arrival. The platform drew closer and as each traveller nervously edged forward in preparation, it suddenly stopped short. It was too far to reach the ledge and after a few tense minutes of confusion, the gantry jogged and started to reverse its journey. Anger turned to bitter disappointment as the platform slowly slid back towards the port. Their screams to the operator sounded in vain.
Before the platform re-entered the port, the gantry jolted with such severity that it flipped the platform. Every traveller was silently dumped into the black void, never to return. The platform reset itself, slid back through the wall port and slowly returned to the dock in the pillar.
In the great chamber, the oblivious operator shutdown the gantry and returned to the edge to seek more travellers.
by submission | Feb 23, 2020 | Story |
Author: David Barber
The man in the armchair by the window is Frank Chappel. He’s been widowed for some years now; he walks a little stiffly because of his knee but is determined not to use a stick; his hair may be white but at least he’s not gone bald like some men his age.
Frank wasn’t always a killer.
It started with a phone call, and him grunting to his feet and limping into the hall to answer it. His internet service provider, a voice said, and there was a problem. Seemed he must give them some information so they could fix it.
The third scam call that week and Frank was getting more and more enraged by them. What was the world coming to? he wanted to know. Had they no conscience? He shouted down the phone once and heard laughter before the line went dead.
“Listen you,” began Frank, and was seized by the thought of his anger rushing down the phone line, traveling at tremendous speed, and squirting into the ear of this man who earned his living cheating old folk.
Frank never finished, because there was the clatter of a dropped handset and a woman crying out in alarm. He listened, hardly breathing, until someone said, “I think it’s a heart attack.”
There were other calls, worrying calls about his bank card, if he could just give them a few details of his account; also persistent double-glazing salesmen, and all of them broke off mid-sentence, perhaps with a gasp or a cry. Soon there were no more scam calls. In fact, the phone hardly rang now.
He sat and thought about it, and decided it must be coincidence or something. Imagine trying to tell someone, and how mad it would sound.
But then there were the teenagers. Some mornings Frank took a walk to Mr. Patel’s shop to buy a paper and milk and biscuits. His wife always said he had a sweet tooth.
Outside, some teenagers ran into him and everything spilled onto the pavement.
“Watch out granddad,” one of them called, as they strolled away.
Shaken, Frank leaned on the shop window and Mr. Patel fussed out to help.
“Such boys,” said Mr. Patel, shaking his head. “No respect.”
Frank glared after them, and abruptly they crumpled to the pavement, like puppets with their strings cut.
Next day, a policewoman knocked at his door. She perched on the sofa with the broken spring, balancing a notebook on her knee. Frank stared at her police hat on the coffee table between them.
“Four teenagers having heart attacks at the same time. For the moment we’re treating them as unexplained deaths.”
Yes, the teenagers had barged into him. No, he didn’t know them. Had she spoken to Mr. Patel?
“Because your phone number came up in a fraud enquiry. Another spate of heart attacks.”
Yes, that was his number. Sometimes he got scam calls. Didn’t everyone these days?
The police officer sensed something amiss, but in the end, put her notebook away.
Frank watched her cross the road to her car. He watched her suddenly claw at her chest. He watched the ambulance come and go. Later that day he watched another police car pull up. These officers didn’t even manage to get out of their car.
Frank Chappel sitting by the window, while his phone rings and rings; and there’s some sort of commotion in the street, and armed men creeping round his back yard. What was the world coming to? He just wanted to be left in peace!
The phone stops ringing.
Outside, everything goes very quiet.
by submission | Feb 22, 2020 | Story |
Author: Janet Shell Anderson
“The extra dimensions of spacetime are sometimes conjectured to take the form of a six-dimensional Calabi Yau Manifold.”
I don’t know about you, but this doesn’t mean a lot to me right now when there’re riots in West Palm and I’m nearby at my cousin’s estate, Florabella, in Delray/Gulfstream, Florida. At his entrance by the Atlantic, only a couple blocks away, I can hear shouting and maybe gunfire.
But the speaker’s interesting even to my cuz’s wife, Tatiana Romanova Baldwin, the most luscious woman in the world according to TODAY TODAY and ULTRAGOOGLE. He’s Chad Simmons, son of a famous film star and the last astronaut, young, horribly handsome, face like a Greek god, body ditto. An astrophysicist. I’m not sure if Tatiana thinks his being an astrophysicist’s an asset, we’re more in need of goons and lots of them.
My cousin, Perry Austrian Baldwin, the USA Vice Prez, needs help. I’m a divorce attorney mostly operating out of the Space Coast, not much help. My apt, my one-room hole in the wall, with no noticeable rats, my one Maine Coon cat, it’s probably a lot safer. Wish Thor, the Maine coon, were here. Or maybe not. I see myself as moderately successful although the last divorce trio I worked for stiffed me. And remarried.
But Perry called and I came over. Nothing to do on a Friday evening anyway. Perry’s pygmy mammoths are all gathered by his infinity pool as if they think they could make a break for it to my cousin’s yacht. Perry’s been studying the 25th Amendment, always a bad sign for everyone, including the current Prez, who’s insisting he has the right to be reelected for a third term.
“Calabi Yau Manifolds have properties such as Ricci flatness.”
Tatiana looks at Chad like he’s a piece of forever forbidden pie. She’s no genius, went to a soup kitchen in a gilded, sequined dress that flashed out gold holograms saying “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche.” “Let them eat cake.”
I didn’t know she knew any French.
“The canonical bundle of M is trivial,” Chad opines and stretches his beautiful legs on the lounge beside the pool, unaware of the gunfire, the shouts, the navy vessel coming up the Coastal Waterway, my cousin crossing rapidly to the pool area. Perry’s thin hair flaps over his high forehead. Like most Vice Presidents, he’s good for attending funerals and standing beside the Big Man, looking inconsequential.
Something like a helicopter churns overhead, a round plastic thing, a time machine, circus prop, whatever. No pilot. The pot-bellied pigs race toward hedges shaped like horses and squeal in German.
“Washington’s on fire,” my cousin cries. “The White House’s surrounded. There’re tanks on Pennsylvania Avenue. No one knows who’s driving them.”
Tatiana slips off her bathing suit top. Her skin gleams. The astrophysicist notices for the first time, takes a sudden breath, doesn’t care about DC.
“M has a holomorphic n-form that vanishes nowhere.” He certainly has a way with words. “We can vanish among the multiple dimensions.”
The round flying object has only room for two .
My cousin smiles at Chad, takes his hand and the two men get in the round clear object which bounces into the cloudless sky and disappears into the sunset.
Tatiana says a word I didn’t know she knew.
That about sums it up.
The canonical bond of M is trivial. Perhaps that will be on her next dress if we survive.
by submission | Feb 21, 2020 | Story |
Author: Kevlin Henney
You get all types here — the good and the bad. The ugly? No, it’s all the beautiful types here at the Nakamoto. You want ugly you go to Zom Zom’s. Gets real ugly. You wouldn’t want to be seen dead there. But seen then dead is how you’d be. Rough joint.
Sure, you get the beautiful types here, but the Nakamoto ain’t high class — and what happens here ain’t classy — but it’s better than Zom Zom’s. Newcomers are here to wash something away; regulars come to soak in it. That ain’t always how it plays it out, but they’re all here for one reason. They come looking for something because they’ve got nothing, sweet nothing.
What can you find at the bottom of a glass? Emptiness. Emptiness and plastic — yeah, even the glass ain’t real. You want more of the anaesthetic of the masses, you ask, you pay, you reach the bottom again. Redemption? You won’t find it. Questions? Always. Answers? Sometimes.
The doll along the bar from me is weeping “What’s she got that I haven’t?” into her ersatz drink, the kind her type likes to drink. Satoshi says nothing. Sure, he knows the answer, but good programming makes for good service — being literal ain’t something you want in a bartender.
“A young model… I thought he loved me!” She knocks back her fauxdka.
“Another for the doll,” I say. Satoshi pours her another, like he always does. Always straight, never watered down. No point, nothing is ever as real as you want it to be — the truth is a cold, hard plastic place.
“Sam,” I say.
She raises an eyebrow. “Me too: Samantha.” Yeah, classic doll.
“Samuel. But only my ID card calls me that.”
She spills the story before pitching me the same “What’s she got that I haven’t?” sob. Like Satoshi, I’m too polite to call up the specs to compare and tell. “Sure, she’s younger — newer — but I’ve had all the upgrades! I’m as good as the latest model.”
I let her finish her drink before I lean over and whisper in her ear — part of the pick-up routine, what they like to call sweet nothings. She sits back, upright, giving me that look. She’s ready to go.
All the world’s a stage? Maybe. Maybe not. But we’re definitely players, each with our part, each with our script.
“Another for the road, ‘Toshi.”
What I offer might not be redemption but — squint at it right, through the bottom of a plastic glass — it might — just might — look like an answer.
She’s still, pupils as dark and as wide as the hole she’d been feeling in her life. With the reset code I whispered — ones and zeroes, but mostly zeroes — she could stay like that for hours. But others might start to notice. Sure, everyone’s here for one reason… but it’s different in each case. Don’t want to make mine any more obvious. Besides, waiting around doesn’t get the job done.
The company’s happy when each line is new and selling by the container load. The company’s happy for them to be yesterday’s models, living their dream living someone else’s dream, being — and wanting to be — your whatever-you-want. But wandering the streets and bars, unowned, desperate with preprogrammed love? Not what they’re designed for. Doesn’t make the company look good.
The company has policies. One of them is No Returns, No Refunds. Redemption is never on the cards. The company has… other policies.
We all have our parts to play. This one’s mine. I finish my synth-ab and we leave.
