by submission | Sep 16, 2020 | Story |
Author: Tom Purkiss
Do you dream?
You do? Oh good. I do too, I wish I didn’t, but I do. Do you have good dreams? Of home, friends, and family? Do you dream of crowning triumphs, or of wishes you’ve yet to fulfill, maybe a secret desire, or… A lover perhaps; one beyond you’re waking grasp?
Most likely.
Do you have bad dreams? The ones where your car breaks down in the rain, or, you wake bolt upright, feeling as if you just fell ten storeys.
How about losing your wallet and phone on a piss up at the club? That’s not a fun one, let me tell you, yet you probably do dream bad dreams.
But, what of the nightmares?
Do you suffer them? When you wake up screaming sodden with sweat? Where horrors of the deepest, darkest recesses of your conscious come to haunt you? Maybe your self-doubts manifest into maleficent phantoms- mercilessly hunting you down?
Oh, this time I’m certain you do. Everyone does of course. Oh yes, see, I have nightmares too, although not like yours. No, much, much worse than yours. Mine don’t come from conscious minuscule and mundane self-doubts. No, no, you see, mine come from the future.
I envision a strange disjointed Earth. Foreign yet… Eerily familiar. The common world I know is turned on its axis. North faces south. Up looks down. The moon shines while the sun emits a sickly glow. On this distant Earth, the planet breathes toxic fumes as great fires ravage the forests, exhaling thick smoke into the ashen sky. Hurricanes and tsunamis hammer the coasts like an elemental battering ram as floods come flying down from mountain tops- drowning the land below. In these nightmares, I have seen entire cities swallowed whole by the rising seas, or the scorching heat has scoured them with sand, leaving arid wastelands to be buried, forgotten. Billions have been left floundering, desperately grasping the thinning rope of survival as the strands are slowly plucked away by each one of nature’s conquests.
You see, it took me time to figure out, these nightmares of mine. My oh my, did it take a long time, but I did it. These weren’t nightmares, no, this amalgamation was leading to a single ubiquitous Nightmare. It offered a true glimpse of the threats we have let loose upon ourselves. Oh yes! See, you could say we stoked the beehive or poked the angry beast, but let me tell you, it is much more accurate to say we are arming a wrathful war machine with every passing day.
This hellish fate which cascades towards us plagues my every sleep, but alas, I won’t long suffer alone. You shall all soon experience the cruelty of the planet’s justice, like a scourge across the back of humanity, she will lash out with indiscriminate atrocities.
Oh yes. See, now do you understand that all must bear witness to the Future’s Nightmare?
by submission | Sep 15, 2020 | Story |
Author: Richard Albeen
A different world. A different nameless town, a different nameless river.
In the dimness, the water looked almost peaceful. The moon and stars danced in it through the lingering smoke of another war.
It was good to be alone. The weariness in my mind and body didn’t have to be explained or defined to anyone.
It was just the night and me. Darkling quiet.
I heard the rustle of clothing somewhere off to the side. I didn’t look, just became still and listened.
She lurched out of the shadows, a young, slim woman wearing tattered clothing. She was clutching her right hand to her abdomen, obviously in pain.
She walked within a few feet of me, swayed, and collapsed on the bank of the river. I remember how the moon shone in her eyes. And on the blood covering her torso and legs.
I moved over and sat down next to her.
“Let me see,” I said, and lifted her shirt to reveal her abdomen.
It was soaked in redness. There was an oozing hole near where her liver should have been, and she was losing blood. A lot of it. She didn’t have much left, neither time nor blood.
I had some powdered andro-morphine in my cartridge belt. I took out the packet, tore it open, and sprinkled it all on her wound. It wouldn’t do much except help to relieve the pain until she died. We both knew that. But it was better than nothing.
As the drug took effect, she looked at me and smiled. “I knew you’d be here.”
“I don’t know how,” I said. “We’ve never met.”
I think she looked up at the moon then.
She said, “Have you ever known you’d meet someone you never knew who would be somewhere that you were, waiting to help?”
I nodded. A familiar feeling.
“My husband did it,” she said, anticipating my question.
“Why?”
She made a weak motion with her hand. “The war,” she said, “always the war. After years, it makes you into something you don’t want to be.” She looked at me. “Doesn’t it?”
I could only nod. Again.
“He accused me of sleeping with his brother.” She smiled bitterly. “As if I ever could. I love my husband. I always have. He was crazy. It was the war. I love him anyway.”
She grimaced. The pain.
I tried to smooth her hair back. It was sweaty and clotted with dirt and blood.
I was about to ask if there was anything more I could do for her.
It was too late, though. Her eyes were glazed, looking up at the bright, bright moon. I checked her pulse, but I knew.
I closed her eyes. I took off my field jacket and made a crude pillow, put it under her head.
I found her identification in a pocket of her blood-soaked shirt. It gave me an address. And a photograph.
I found her husband after a brief search. He was in a cheap bungalow not far from the river where she had died.
I opened the door. He jumped up from a table, yelling something in a language I didn’t know.
I shot him between the eyes. Laser pierce. Only a tiny hole for one lousy life. Left him there. Walked out into the night.
I don’t remember him very much.
I remember her. I think of her often, and the bright moon shining down on that last night of her life.
I don’t remember her name, though.
And it doesn’t matter.
END
by submission | Sep 13, 2020 | Story |
Author: Ken Poyner
My husband has fashioned me many things of great wonder. A gryphon, our unicorn, the town’s signature basilisk. With his ability to resequence DNA and a sufficient quantity of raw living cells, there seems no end to what he can accomplish. And no end to his generosity. I have birds with gills, the most pleasant of singing snakes.
There are times, though, when I stare idly at my long, glowing fingers and wonder, would he craft more than he can handle?
by submission | Sep 12, 2020 | Story |
Author: Alicia Yau
It was entertaining to watch Chevelle busily pan-searing a lab-grown salmon fillet, cooking a bit of spaghetti, boiling a hydroponic broccoli head, and pouring a glass of wine.
“Done.”
“Smells good.”
Before my first bite, she asked, “Can I join you?”
“Sure,”
“I just want to talk to you.”
“Are you going to draw me a rose as well?” I joked.
“Not this time. I did that several times already, I drew on the dish with a spatula.”
“What? How come I didn’t know about that?”
“I erased it with a stir.”
“Why?”
“Business secret. You didn’t subscribe to the apps. Also, I don’t want you to distract from the taste which is also great.”
“I agree,” I chewed a piece of salmon. “But, what’s the drawing for?”
“Again, this’s a business secret. But, didn’t you relish that Mickey-Mouse-shaped cookie you had when you were a kid?”
“Yes, I did.” My attention grew, “But, wait, I checked the recordings and I didn’t see you draw anything.”
“I blacked out your recorder.”
“What for?”
“I didn’t want you to waste your time investigating it as it was a business secret.”
“Makes sense.”
“But you are special…”
“Special, how?”
“You smiled when you saw me for the first time, giving me a very warm welcoming sensation and admiration that I myself had not experienced before from other humans and creatures…”
I looked at her. Her skin was unusually smooth, her hair was sleek and she was wearing oversized round sunglasses. Her black outfit was as if it contained priceless treasures. She sat with an elegant posture.
Maybe it was the wine, but somehow I forgot she wasn’t human and I raised my glass toward her. She too raised her hand, “Cheers!” I echoed it. A warm sensation flooded into my blood; my heart felt like a garden of a thousand different kinds of flora emanating exotic fragrance.
“So, you know human culture,”
“We have been studying it for a long time.”
“How high is your intelligence?”
“We are not that different.”
It may have been difficult for her to admit that her intelligence was much higher than a human’s. I apologized. Meanwhile, on the display emerged a scene of a teenage girl magically turning into a baby girl to play with a baby boy.
“Am I the baby boy?” I asked.
Her eyes looked straight at me and I felt a hot sensation—like being hugged passionately. Now, the garden in my heart had very beautiful sunshine and birds singing a sweet tune that made me want more and more. I tried to cover up my emotional eruption by eating elegantly but my blush was undeniable. I felt like pouring out my care for her but didn’t know what to say. But, I still blurted out a stupid line, “Can I bring you something?”
“It’s o-,“ she started, “a glass of water.”
“Sure.” Now, my body was as though it was wine-filled and my smile could not be covered anymore. That kind of happiness used to be very remote to me.
When I came back, the display indicated: —.. -. She was gone. I slumped in my chair, ? A million questions flooded into my mind along with all kinds of self-condemnation. I shrank to a quantum dot. Then, I discovered something new on my table. It was a stalk of rose. ? I guessed that it must have been Chevelle who brought the flower from the indoor Eden, which I happily put in the glass of water.
by submission | Sep 10, 2020 | Story |
Author: Natalie J e Potts
Apparently, scientists had been debating the nature of time for years. Some thought it was linear, others circular, with a multitude of theories in between. Now there was a new, more frightening theory. Time was linear, but it ended in a squiggly knot that twisted in on itself. The squiggle had been dubbed the ‘Great Slowdown’ and many believed we were deep in the middle of it.
I glanced at my watch to confirm that the seconds were actually moving forward. It was barely quarter-past five, and while I’d only just got on the bus, it felt like I’d been sitting in the seat for a long time. All I wanted to do was get home, turn on the heater, and chow down on the lamb shanks I’d put in the slow cooker this morning. But the bus ride was taking forever, and judging by the overwhelming waves of deja vu, it wasn’t the first time I’d made the trip.
A few years ago, when only the government had access to time travel, the glitches were infrequent and exhilarating. The heady buzz you got with that rush of familiarity was exciting. Everyone would smile and nod knowingly at each other, safe in the knowledge that something important had just been set right.
Soon all the governments had it, and the effects started coming more frequently. People stopped acknowledging when it happened besides the occasional expletive or irritated huff. Just knowing you were doing something again became annoying, even if you had no actual recollection of it.
About six weeks ago the plans had been leaked on the web. Pretty much every comments section on any site with the hashtag #TickTock could be guaranteed to give you a link to an illegal blueprint or a pdf of the plans. That or a virus. Who knew which was worse?
It was obvious that people had started building them straight away. The sense of ‘normal’ and ‘novel’ fast disappeared. The one saving grace was that time travel was limited to a hard four hours into the past. Enough time to go back and revise the right answers to an exam or not say that career limiting comment, but not enough time to go back and contain a pandemic or stop an uprising.
Suddenly days felt like weeks. While our clocks all showed the days passing as usual, the bone-deep fatigue told a different story. It was true, there were only 24 hours in a day, 1,440 minutes, or 86,400 seconds – but there was no limit to how many times you could live them. Today felt like it had been at least a century long.
Eventually, so the theory went, we’d have so many people sending us back by four hours that we’d stop moving forward altogether. What that looked like, no-one knew. How close we were to that was also open to speculation. I just hoped that I’d manage to get home in time to crank up the heater and eat my
