by submission | Feb 1, 2020 | Story |
Author: Moriah Geer-Hardwick
“Don’t try to talk to them.” The consultant clicks another cylinder into place. It makes a satisfied hiss as it seats properly into its compartment. “They don’t react well to the noise. Imagine one of them emptying an entire scent gland in your face. That’s how they feel if you start spewing sound at them.” She inserts the last cylinder, powers up the regulator, and then hands the belt to the specialist sitting across from her. Dutifully, he straps it around his waist
“The belt has seven cylinders,” she explains. “Five are passive pheromones, good for about three hundred and sixty minutes of steady dispersal. Should make us fairly uninteresting, provided our encounters stay casual. Fifteen minutes before the last one runs dry, the regulator pack will start to vibrate in short intervals to let you know you need to refill.”
“You think we’ll be down there that long?”
“The drop is less than a kilometer from the financial sector. Ideally, I’d like to be back in orbit before the first two passives are spent.” She begins working on her own belt. “If the regulator detects any hostility in the chemical spectrum it will automatically vent one of the other cylinders, which are panic pheromone concentrates. They should clear everything around us, for at least thirty meters.” She slings her belt onto her hips and snaps the buckle closed. “Right before it goes off, you’ll get one, long buzz. You feel that, things are about to get heavy.”
The specialist nods, slowly. He eases his weapon around in its tactical harness, checks the action, and initiates the charge pack.
“One more thing,” says the consultant. “We need to stay as far away from the red ones as possible.”
The specialist looks up at her.
“If you spot one, run. If it spots us, hit that button on the regulator, and then run.”
He lifts his weapon to inspect the angular device connected to his belt. In a shallow recess on one side is an unmarked red square.
“That fires both panics instantly. I should warn you, it’ll soak through your clothes, and it smells like cat urine. Old cat urine. And it doesn’t wash off.”
“So, last resort.”
“It’s better than what the reds will do to you, but only by a slight margin.”
“What are they? Soldiers?”
The consultant shakes her head. “They’re more like a militaristic religious sect. Not literally, of course, but the term is arguably analogous. They’re xenophobic, ritualistic, and extremely violent. They’re red because a lot of their ceremonies involve ingesting inorganic materials, mostly metals. Causes an excessive amount of iron to be absorbed into their chitin. It makes their carapaces almost impenetrable. Unless you’re firing depleted uranium rounds, you probably won’t even dent one.”
The coms chirp once to notify them that the skiff is landing. The specialist heaves himself up and moves to stand by the door. He grips his weapon firmly, pulling the stock in tight against his shoulder. One hand drops to the regulator, his thumb just above the red button. The skiff shudders, and lands hard. With a wistful sigh of escaping air, the door splits, the bottom half lowering into a ramp.
In unison, their regulators erupt into a frenzied chatter.
“Uh…” says the specialist.
Through the widening gap, they glimpse a flash of writhing exoskeleton, serrated, angry and red. Instinctively, the specialist clenches down on the regulator and right away the sharp odor of cat urine claws into his eyes and sinuses.
With a sigh, the consultant reaches over and presses the control panel to close the door.
by submission | Jan 31, 2020 | Story |
Author: Mark Renney
I won’t claim that this will be a complete and definitive history of the Mind Wipes because that would be impossible. But I am almost seventy years of age and I have been drained only once. In order to achieve this, to survive with my memories intact, my mind unaltered by that particular cocktail of drugs, I have of course been forced to live off the grid, leading the life of an itinerant. I am a man of no fixed abode and with no gainful employment, at least not that the Authority would recognise.
I am not alone, I haven’t ever been alone. There have always been those who choose to drop out, as it were. Turning their backs on the Authority and existing below the radar, residing in grubby squats and temporary encampments. Working when they are able for a little cash in hand, but mostly scavenging. This is the price they must pay, that we must pay, in order to re-claim our memories or at least have the chance to manufacture some new ones.
There are many who didn’t choose to be here, these are the ones who haven’t abandoned the Authority but have been abandoned by it. They have been discarded for myriad reasons but mostly it is because they are too fragile. Even if they are drained of their past it won’t alter or influence how they behave in the future and to constantly keep wiping their memories would be a pointless task.
Growing up I didn’t pay much attention to the Memory Wipes. The brain drains were a part of the adult world and not something I needed to concern myself with.
The Authority men were a constant in our neighbourhood, patrolling the pavements and disappearing into the houses, re-emerging in their dark suits and with their little black suitcases. I was also aware that, occasionally, the men came to our house. I realise now of course that they visited twice a year. Once in order to administer the drug to mother and again when it was my father’s turn.
I remember vividly bursting into our tiny sitting room early one morning. Dad was sitting in his armchair and mum was standing beside him. As I entered she started talking.
‘Here he is,’ she said. ‘Here’s our boy. Come in and give your dad a hug. He’s feeling a bit worse for wear, come here son, come over here and give him a hug.’
Mum didn’t ever talk like this and we weren’t the kind of family that hugged. Reaching out, she grabbed my hand and tried to pull me into the room but I resisted and started to back away and I looked down at my dad’s face and I could see clearly that he didn’t know where he was and he didn’t know who I was.
It was at that moment I understood. I realised then that the Authority man had only just left, that it must have been merely minutes since he had pushed through our front door and out onto the street beyond, the empty hypodermic in his suitcase that had contained the drug now circulating through my dad’s veins, stealing from him all that he knew and limiting all that he would ever know.
I stared down at him slumped in his chair, a man who would have to re-learn everything and quickly. He would have to re-learn how to be a husband and a father, how to rise in the mornings and make his way. He would have to re-learn not how to be but how to be useful.
by submission | Jan 30, 2020 | Story |
Author: Dean J Tantillo
I don’t remember much, aside from hiding between the garage and the fence, and seeing my grandmother chopping heads off garden snakes with a hoe. And that gigantic lilac bush, the one that shielded me and my secret passageway from view as I pondered what it would be like, what I would be like, when I reached age forty-three. Why forty-three? I don’t remember. Maybe it was just that such an age seemed unreachable.
Now, at age forty-four, I’m allergic to lilac. And cats, but I have one. And, it would seem, objects that swing. Not allergic, really, but filled with anxiety when I see them. Or when I fail in suppressing thoughts of them. Not just playground swings, but tree branches, wind chimes, and picnic umbrellas. I hate picnic umbrellas, their poles rattling in their tables’ holes on breezy days. Makes my neck crawl. I dread my son’s school picnics.
But I’d rather be sitting under a rattly umbrella than here in this deep cave on this desolate world hunting aquidneks for sport.
I tried to hide my condition, but the examiner teased it out via surprisingly astute observation. That got me into the Databank of Unexplained Deficiencies — the one-stop-shopping site for wealthy abductors with unconventional passions and peccadillos.
“Cadence,” she said, “It will be one short trip.”
“I don’t want to leave my son,” I said.
“Not your choice,” she snapped.
Now I’m here, transmitters stuck in my arms and chest and head. The panic-induced changes to my vitals reporting back on the locations of the dangling beasts – exceedingly difficult to spot if not acutely tuned, by distress, to their motions. If only I could climb that swinging ladder without passing out, I could get out of here.
There’s a group now. Shit, I wish I could defocus. Well, at least I won’t have to see it happen, being unconscious and all. They’ll probably just load me onto the flatbed with the severed top stalks, all of us unnaturally still, and haul us away. Still, the mark in my file will be there forever. Where my son can find it.
My son. I long for the days when we did art projects together. The days when he would make finger paintings and I would use them as backgrounds for sumi-e-style pictures. My favorite was the jellyfish we created from his off-center red splotch. When my condition flares, I think of that one, a lone happy memory of something that sways. Well, used to till I trapped it on paper. The one time I succeeded in damping the sway and no one died.
by submission | Jan 29, 2020 | Story |
Author: Morrow Brady
My fingers traced the fine etching of the gold Byzantine coin, lit by the moonlight flooding in through the large window. The etched scene depicted a perfectly carved stone pedestal against a rocky outcrop, overlooking a luscious wooded valley. I looked up from the coin into the cavernous room of the museum. The same pedestal sat before me and I wondered if the dark figure that stood at the centre of the coin’s pedestal would appear tonight.
We didn’t know who built the pedestal. We only knew it sat exposed, forever looking outward while the world transformed around it. The Watchers came to guard and preserve the pedestal. Each generation, reconsecrating the earth with secret ceremony.
In this solemn museum, its vista was now framed by a bullseye window which overlooked that same valley, now burdened by an industrial metropolis of glass and steel.
On watch, I edged forward and eased the coin into the recess. It sighed as a hidden mechanism withdrew it slowly like the last gasp in sinking sand. I stepped back behind a gold inlay border. Expectation prickling within.
The ominous, waist-high pedestal invited the Traveller. Its mirror-flat, dark stone surface reflecting the depths of space and time. I watched slow-moving dust motes give structure to moonbeams that spanned the pedestal like ghosts of dockside gantries. Suddenly they lit up red and my heart skipped. Redness faded, as the air-car sailed past the window.
I smirked at my blind faith. It had been ten generations since the last Traveller appeared. This, however, was good, as the Traveller only appeared when our path was lost. The acts of the last Traveller were testimony to that. Between their arrival and death, they had spirited in the Age of Enlightenment and triggered the French Revolution. Their absence meant we were ok.
To my shock, a deep hum sounded from the pedestal. Ancient mechanisms straining like some tectonic battle. I stood in awe as the pedestal shuddered and fell into a cloud of gold. Glittering steps appeared and after a silent pause, I began to descend. Below, sinewy gold mechanisms filled a chamber like a clockmaker’s soul.
Overflowing from a deep recess, were paper-thin gold discs with a familiar etched scene stretched to great proportions. The process of the pressed coins having long ago been interrupted by an angular tree root. I worked to clear the root and discs began to fall into a marked seam. Machinery instantly came to life. A golden hue irradiated throughout the chamber to form a starlit galaxy revealing peculiar geometries. I turned and from an anti-chamber a dark figure appeared, glowing from the core.
“Watcher! Well done!” its voice boomed, startling me.
“You reopened the long-closed door. I am deeply grateful”
“Welcome Traveller” I stammered, still shocked.
The Traveller continued.
“Seems things have gone astray. Your people are not prepared for the star stone and its cataclysmic arrival is imminent. By now, you should have colonised your solar system but instead, you make war as your planet burns. The final day is nigh”
“Final, Traveller?” I puzzled.
“Yes. Final! The pedestal no more serves a purpose. Your service as a Watcher is over. You are free. As the final Traveller, I bring forth the devolution of this sphere and all that dwells on it”
The Traveller started ascending the steps. Halfway up, the tree root smashed against his ankle and shortly after, its bloodied remnants were returned to the recess.
I am the last Watcher. I care for the pedestal to the end.
by submission | Jan 26, 2020 | Story |
Author: Moriah Geer-Hardwick
Ghelvius 4.
A three-month crawl from the warp gate at Oberon Null.
Most of its surface is a relentless waste of brittle rock scabbed loosely over a seething ocean of noxious gas.
Most, but not all.
There is a place, a single place, nestled deep within a mountainous scar that cuts across the planet’s equator. A place that shimmers green and kind, even from orbit. Here, there is soil, willing and fertile. Water too, pristine and cool, that gushes up from deep inside the crust. Every night, a gentle breeze faithfully seeps in to sooth away the heat gathered during the day.
Those who have made this paradise their home call their settlement Able’s Promise. From a million and more light-years they have come, shedding their old lives like a tree discards its leaves in fall. Each hoping this strange oasis will somehow breathe spring again into their weary souls.
Faithfully, it does.
But not without a price.
In from the fields runs a boy, his chest heaving, his eyes wrenched open in terror. He stumbles into the common area of Able’s Promise, everything within him spent, save enough air left in his lungs to scream a single word.
“Behemoth!”
The chattering bustle of life lurches abruptly to silence. Women draw their children close. Men set their jaws and draw in a single, collective breath.
Behemoth. Gas giant. Hideous, overwhelming torment.
No words are spoken. With grim determination, they move to armored containers scattered throughout the settlement. With practiced severity, they remove the implements and machines necessary for the task ahead. They strap bulky, insectile masks over their faces. Then, they form a line and make their way to the fields.
Across the flowing waves of wheat and barley, they see it. First, the blossoming expanse of mottled flesh, stretched taut with hydrogen, holding it aloft, almost twelve meters in the air. Then, the globular head, studded with sixty or so ocular organs, black and wet. Underneath, a tangle of undulating tentacles drags along the ground.
“Hanging low,” mutters one of the old men, grimly. His words are muffled and lost inside his mask, but still, the men standing nearby shift nervously. They notice it too.
“Point five six four kilometers!” The voice squawks out over a series of loudspeakers, echoing throughout the settlement. Instinctively, they all look back and up to the central communications array, where a single man clings precariously to the top of the tallest spire. “Wind is three twenty-one degrees, northwest!”
Relief washes visibly over them. Only one still seems anxious and tense. He arrived only recently, on the last transport. This is his first encounter with a behemoth, but he’s heard stories. One of the more experienced veterans grabs him and pulls him close.
“That’s good!” he reassures the newcomer, shouting to be heard through his mask. “If the wind holds, the bastard will stay in the fields and drift clear of the settlement!”
The newcomer nods but remains uneasy. He pulls away and stares out at the approaching gas giant.
“Point four seven! Wind steady!”
Across the field, the behemoth pulsates. From underneath it, behind the mass of its tentacles, a meaty protrusion emerges, descending ominously towards the wheat and barley. The protrusion swells, shivers, and then from it explodes a gelatinous torrent of Stygian sludge, which cascades down into the field, exploding against the ground in a great, mushrooming flood.
“Shit,” says the newcomer.
The older veteran nods, grimly.
There is a price for paradise. Every soul in Abel’s Promise is willing to pay. Still, they all pray the wind holds.
