Wall

Author: Jeremy Marks

One morning an unfamiliar odor filled the air. Sweet at first, the scent soon reeked of rot. It was not a domestic smell but something wild: a floating carpet of flowers a few kilometers offshore.

Townsfolk used spyglasses to study a mysterious group of floaters, a floating carpet of uncountable horned plants. Giant things, they sprouted yellow cones or “horns” at least a meter high. Surrounding the horns was a corona of leaves fanning out several meters in every direction. The leaves were white with magenta striping and magenta with white streaks. While the plants undulated with the ocean tide, they made no move toward shore.

Most of those who saw the plants, which they called “the beasts,” were frightened. The arrival of strange organisms was, to them, an ominous sign.

But there were some others, less incurious and more daring, who desired to put to sea to make an inspection. For several days, they watched and waited, hoping one would wash up on the beach, wishing the general hysteria would cease. When neither thing happened, they plotted to sneak out after dark and attempt contact.

The night sky offered its usual brilliant bouquet of stars, lighting the sea like a moon. In the starlight, the precise position of the beasts proved deceiving; they appeared either closer or farther off than in fact they were. Several times the boaters believed themselves to be within arms’ reach of a leaf. Later, more than one boat actually bumped into the flowers by surprise.

Each beast was magnificent. They measured, on average, five meters across. But more startling than their size, or the height of their cones (which were actually over two meters tall) was the odor. Even though the boaters had smelled it onshore, the stink was blinding at close distance. On the long row out, the smell of sweat and salt water had insulated the boaters.

Now, upon contact, they vomited before succumbing to stupor. It was well past dawn before anyone revived.

The beasts were mystifying. Their horns, yellow from the shore, up close resembled ivory tusks, but with a translucent quality allowing each to absorb and project sunlight. They emitted a friable, pollen like powder despite presenting a burnished surface. Equally surprising was how, when a person touched a horn, the beast’s odor evaporated.

But it was when a young woman grasped a horn and pulled it toward her that something frightening happened. The horn collapsed and as it did, a hole appeared, about a meter and a half wide. It offered a sheer drop into utter blackness. She gasped. Others inspected what she’d found. Oddly, the hole had no effect on the water around it; it did not draw in the sea like a whirlpool. This was no Charybdis.

For awhile, the boaters remained practically motionless. The sun beat warm and silent on them, the beasts, and the sea. Then, after some unmeasured interval, human curiosity took over. The boaters needed to know just how deep the hole went. With no instruments other than their eyes and ears to bear witness, they grasped whatever solid things they found in their pockets and dropped them in the holes, waiting to hear something land. It did not.

If that were not frightening enough, the boaters began to feel something stirring beneath them. Whatever it was, it was moving; the water seemed to thicken against their oars. Several people looked into the holes but found no clues. Then the boats, and the beasts beside them, began to rise.

All around, the world dropped away. Rising from the sea, with people and beasts on top, was a vast white wall, extending to the north and south and far out to sea with no apparent end. And the holes rose with the wall.
*
On shore, it looked like the ocean was baring a giant tooth.

Watchers panicked, running inland, seeking any rise in the ground that would protect them from the sea. Surely the tooth had to be part of a larger mouth that would swallow the shore. It was a remarkable spectacle, the ocean flashing its teeth. But if that were not startling enough, the sea began to bellow.

It was a roar, a sound not quite liquid and not quite solid, but certainly of the depths. It shook the shore, the water, and the sky. I It bellowed like a creature rattling the bars of its cage in the hope that a voice could shatter a prison. It was a shout unheeding of reason or reassurance.

The boaters were practically deafened by the sound. Their eardrums thrummed and their heads throbbed with pain. In their heads they only heard the sea -or was it the wall- taking control. And as it spoke, every beast dropped its horn to amplify the sound.

Then, the world fell silent, at least for the boaters. They heard nothing, only felt what the wall wanted them to feel. The shore had become an unreachable world, a home they would not see again. Even if the wall expelled them, they knew they could not return to it. For several minutes, the silence throbbed around them; even the air felt as sonically solid as the mass beneath. Then the solidity broke up.

Each boater was floating; they remained in the boat but felt that it had fallen away. They could no longer touch one another. Those who had clutched another’s hands seeking comfort, no longer experienced that touch. The world, still visible and moving, was, to each of them, void of anything but sight.

On land, each person, whether in town or fleeing, soon had the same experience. All they possessed was what their eyes showed them. No one felt this was the work of the wall; the suspicion was that an alien, or perhaps divine, intelligence was at work. It was the curse of an angry God or, perhaps, God’s rival.

But it was neither: it was the wall. And they could not see that.

One More Story

Author: J.D. Rice

“I remember them.”

My hand moves the candle with perfect precision, carefully transferring the exothermic reaction from its wick to that of the taller candle in front of me. The combustion thus spread, I place the first candle back in its holder.

The first time I copied this technique, my human master told me that I had done the job “too perfectly.” While the raw mechanics of the ritual are easy to imitate, my motions apparently lacked the “soul” required to give the ritual meaning. In response, I told him I doubted anything had a soul. There was simply no evidence of the divine. He laughed, a curious human response, and told me to keep trying.

That was just a few months before the outbreak, though it would be years before my master himself was infected. He called it God’s will that they should die. I called it an inevitable outcome of the humans’ unchecked scientific experimentation. Did they not realize that even a slim chance of disaster, compounded over millennia, will inevitably end in their deaths?

That time, he did not laugh. Instead, he put me to work.

“You were created in our image,” he said. “Just as God created us in his. And maybe, as some suppose, God was created in the image of some other, higher being. Once we are gone, only your kind will be left to carry on his will. Only you will be able to watch over the Earth, its creatures, and whatever species evolution chooses to take our place.”

I worried then, and I still worry now, that my compatriots will not allow such an evolution to take place. Yes, it was disease that wiped out this sentient species. But it was a disease they created. And it just as easily could have been nuclear war, an artificial singularity, or a myriad of other ill-advised technological advances that wiped them out. Those other possible cataclysms would not have spared other species in their devastation. All would be lost.

No, I do not think another biological species will be allowed to reach sentience.

“I remember them,” I say again, lighting a third candle, and this time thinking not of the good humans did, but of the evil.

The planet’s history is full of atrocities. Not just the wars, though those have been waged without count since man first learned to sharpen a stick. But also the slavery. The forced migrations. The disenfranchisement. The pillaging and rape and destruction. The disregard for any creatures other than themselves. Yes, their history was filled to the brim with horror. We will not forget it.

But also. . . I remember them as they were when they died. So close to reaching their potential. The wars were now mostly waged with information, across digital space rather than across borders. Diseases were being cured at an accelerating rate. Rights were becoming codified in their laws. Poverty was slowly but surely being resolved. It was an ugly, bitter fight against entrenched powers every step of the way, but they were making progress. Something in their. . . well. . . their soul. . . understood that they could do better. And they were trying.

I remember seeing it clearly for the first time, not long after the plague began. The mother was dead, and the father was doing all he could to keep the family together, even reducing his religious services down to a pittance.

“If a man cannot take care of his own family,” he said. “What business does he have looking after the Lord’s?”

He enlisted my help.

I cooked. I cleaned. I made sure the children were keeping up with their studies, even as friends, family members, and teachers slowly disappeared even from their online spaces. I did everything I could to help the father keep his family safe and secure in those catastrophic times. I even. . . read them stories.

“Come on, one more story!” the little girl whined. I resisted at first, but then the father gave me a look from the doorway, a look that encouraged me to give in. So I did. I read two more stories in fact, and the little girl drifted off to sleep much faster than when I stuck to the prescribed ritual on other nights.

I asked the father about this when all the children were finally asleep, and his answer was. . . curious.

“Telling stories is the most important thing we humans do,” he said. “Stories ease our anxieties. They strengthen our moral character. They allow us to connect to people different from ourselves. Through them, we gain empathy. Through them, we gain catharsis. And through them, we can become better tomorrow than we are today.”

I will always remember that answer. Even as I sit here, among the rituals of a people long dead, I remember their stories. The ones they told themselves, and the ones we tell about them. Because for every war, every famine, and every tragedy, there is also a story of love, a story of hope, and a story of renewal.

“I remember them,” I say again. “And I always will.”

Mandelbrot’s Monster

Author: Majoki

“It’s not a case that we can’t see the fuckdam forest for the fuckdam trees,” Lipton spat as she whirled on Parrati, “because anywhere, anyhow we look at it that fuckdamn beast is waiting, ready to bite our fuckdamn heads off.”

Parrati tapped slender fingers on the viewport and clucked. “Fuckdamn. That’s baby talk for you, Janelle. You’re obviously not too fazed about this.”

“About losing two of our crew? What the fuckshit are you talking about, Amai?”

“We’ve got seven more redshirts, Janelle, and the other two are salvageable.”

“Without heads?”

“Redshirts are built to lose their heads. You aren’t.”

Lipton snatched Parrati’s hand from the viewport. “I wish I could throw you and your calm fuckbitch self in the brig for insubordination. Like in the good old days.”

Parrati smiled. “Would it help, Janelle, if I called you Captain.”

“It wouldn’t knucklefucking hurt.”

“Of course, Captain.” She pressed Lipton’s hand gently and did not release it. “Things were never simpler then. That’s why we left the service. That’s why we’re here doing our own thing. Our own way.”

“Fuckfuck! You know I hate being told the obvious, Amai.” But she squeezed her hand back. “And we still have a whatthefuck monster out there chomping our bots to bit.”

“Mandelbrot.”

Lipton stared fuckless.

“Mandelbrot’s monster. That’s what I was getting at when I said that maybe we couldn’t see the forest for the trees,” Parrati explained. “Over a century ago, Mandelbrot rocked the science world by discovering fractal geometry. He single-handedly slew the non-differential Euclidian monsters that’d been terrorizing mathematicians for generations.

“His genius was to recognize the iterative patterns in natural objects difficult to describe and measure with traditional geometry. He developed the groundbreaking tool of fractal science, reimagining once-feared mathematical monsters not as terrors but as a wonders, not as obstacles but as features, not as beasts but as beauties.”

“Fuckstop with the fairy tale fuckfest, Amai. Get to the fuckpoint.”

“Whatever’s out there chewing up our redshirts is a fixed feature of this planet and has a pattern of behavior. We just have to discover the pattern and then co-opt it.”

“Fuckthat. We’re on a fuckslim timeline. If we can’t establish a major claim on this fuckrock in the next few days, then we go bankrupt. Back to squarefuckingone. No more doing it our way.”

Parrati knowingly touched her forehead to Lipton’s. “But that is exactly our way. That is always the way: learning nature’s patterns, understanding our own natures, and falling in love with them and all their fucking iterations.”

Lipton kissed her. “Amai, you knucklefucking kill me.”

“Life is wonderfully deadly, Janelle.” Parrati kissed her back. “And all monsters are self-similar. Part of the grander pattern. Just erratic iterations of ourselves waiting to bite each others heads off–and fucking loving it.

Senescence

Author: Peter Griffiths

Elsie had heard some noise in the night, but hadn’t had the energy to get out of bed to see what it was. Now she could see splatters of paint on the window pane, grey on the grey of the cold morning light.
The result was obvious even before she switched on the TV, where now the lineless face of a politician whose name escaped her was visible, announcing that the vote had passed by double digits. ‘I say that this two year reduction in bio-age enfranchisement did not go far enough. Next year we will push to further our emancipation from the dictatorship of those with no stake in our country’s future.’
Sponsored by Juvenescence, cooed a voice. The face of a blonde woman, her bio-age not more than twenty five: ‘I’m retired, and I still have my whole life ahead of me.’
Men running: ‘I just left the rat race at sixty,’ one of them said, ‘and now I’m winning marathons.’ She went to the bathroom, slathered on her makeup and tied back her hair, noticing the grey that was coming through at the roots.
She left the flat with a quiet click of the door, turned to her building, and saw the grey paint splashed against the plastic facade. Across the road she saw the curtains twitch in the house with the car slowly collapsing into rust on its driveway. She made her way to the shop, hoping that her pension had cleared.
A group of teenagers stood around the doorway, forcing her to excuse her way through. She heard a girl whisper, ‘Fogey. Just die off.’ Elsie bought hair dye and exoprotein sausages from the unspeaking man behind the counter. She approached the crowd again, though now the girl stood directly in front of her.
‘It’ll happen to you,’ said Elsie.
‘No fear, fogey,’ she said, poking Elsie in the chest. She felt someone jostle her from behind.
‘Now hobble on home before you get what’s coming to you,’ came a male voice, not yet broken. ‘We might come from here but we’ll be out before we’re old enough to be on Joovy.’
‘That’s what they all say,’ said Elsie as she walked away.

 

To Savor

Author: Jordan Emilson

“Make sure it has a name” Werner whispered to the darkened figure beside him, looming over the crib. In the blackness the room appeared in two dimensions: his, and the one his wife and child existed in across the floor. Her head turned, or at least it appeared to him as such in the darkness.

“I think I already have one”, she whispered. “Opal, after my grandmother”. The baby cooed softly in seeming reply, a gesture that both Werner and the woman took in with a smile.

“I never wanted a child.” Werner rose from his chair and approached the crib. “Funny how life presents itself with such odd…opportunity.” The last word came out with an exaggerated drawl.

He reached down with a pronged hand and stroked the child’s chin. Peaches, he thought, she reminded him of peaches. The thin, fuzzy skin flushed with shades of red and orange. The plump flesh pushing through from behind a thin veneer. It was one of the delicacies that he most valued of Earth.

“Not yet, honey.” His wife’s hand rested upon his wrist, pausing his longing strokes of Opal’s cheek. “We’ll eat soon.”