by submission | Jun 6, 2019 | Story |
Author: David Barber
Your grandfather kept the luck locked away, says my father. It’s Martian, or at least it was found here. No, don’t touch.
The storm rocks the rover, our headlights lost in the swirling dust. We won’t be going anywhere. My father, down from Phobos. The father always away working while I grew up, who never talked about his childhood before.
And this is the firearm your grandfather brought out from Earth. Only has one bullet now. You spin the chamber then pull the trigger.
Certain that the storm dusting half the world would swallow him anyway, with his air getting too thick to breathe, Cal burrowed out of his stalled rover to save Mars the trouble. And tripped over a shiny pretzel of metal uncovered by the wind.
Cal was my grandfather. There’s a picture of him and his first wife, clutching their lucky charm, grinning like fools. A mining rig had loomed from the dust just as he panted his last. What were the odds? It was the beginning of flukes and relentless good fortune for anyone it touched.
Click. No, don’t flinch. Somewhere in the worlds of chance, the hammer strikes an empty chamber, and that world is this one.
No one bet against that winning streak. Soon folk began to ask to touch the luck. Can’t hurt, they’d say. Prospectors. Childless couples. Folk with sick kids.
My grandfather said the artefact was no more intended for luck than a CD twirling in the wind scared off birds. Whatever that meant.
Ill-fortune struck just once. Cal’s first wife was my grandmother. They married young back then. She tried cutting the pretzel in half so kin in distant Pickering could share the luck. A once-in-a-million suit failure.
The luck got locked away after that, and while he lived, my grandfather never let his family touch it, though it still oozed good fortune.
Word spread and a woman from State turned up. Oh, we would get a finders fee. Soon after, the Weeping Plague tore through the colonies and she never came back. Some places had it bad, we heard.
One sol, neighbours crowded our dome, their faces hard. Life here was too much for some. They demanded a share in the luck.
Cal went and fetched the heirloom chest and surprised them with the gun. One of them even moved to stop him before the trigger clicked. Then again. And again. There was a circle on his forehead where the barrel pressed.
That’s the luck, Cal said. You think it’ll let you come in here and take it? Mars knows how to kill folk.
He’s cursing us, one breathed.
Cal’s wife, my grandmother, her unbreakable faceplate cracking. Couldn’t they see? He hadn’t found the luck, it found him.
My father, the only child of Cal’s first marriage, was the first colonist to join NASA. His life was the Phobos Project. Just luck, his step-brothers shrugged.
See it in their faces, he says bitterly. The stupidity of those who always get what they want. You don’t have to be like them.
They will have noticed the heirloom chest was gone. My father wants me to toss the luck back. He thinks he’s letting me choose.
Luck is a word the bitter teach to the ignorant.
Stalled by a dust storm out of nowhere. What were the odds? But we should have known the family would find us. Just luck. Waiting for things to clear before they come knocking.
The twist of shiny metal is surprisingly heavy in my hands.
Let’s see what the luck wants.
by submission | Jun 5, 2019 | Story |
Author: Scott Porter
It was a harsh but beautiful land. Larry stood on the ridge overlooking Homestead Valley. All around him were the bare, fantastically weathered shapes of the Gyrating Mountains. But on the slopes below, vineyards were showing early clusters of grapes, and across the sweep of the valley floor, fields of barley and wheat shimmered in the sun. His irrigation systems had played a part in making all this possible. This year the settlement would not only survive, it would put down roots and prosper.
Someone screamed behind him. “Hookbeaks!” It was Tamara, his beautiful wife. A great, leather-winged beast was swooping down upon her. She swung a rake and sent it tumbling across the yard. Bright flashes erupted all around. Hookbeaks were not the worst thing this planet had. Everyone kept a blaster handy.
Larry drew his and fired in one smooth, well-practiced motion. A hit. “Wait a minute,” he said, looking at the blaster. “How do we charge these things? I mean, this model needs ten-kilowatt hours to charge, and we don’t even have a power station yet. This doesn’t make sense.”
*****
“Good work, Engineer Cooke. You got the reactor’s cooling system back online just in time.”
“Just doing my job, sir.” Larry knew a space station captain was a busy man and didn’t have time for chit-chat. He excused himself and started back for his quarters. Thirty-six hours he had been working. His beautiful wife Tamara, and their two girls would be waiting for him. He passed a portal window that showed a thousand stars etched on the blackness of space, with the sun—from this vantage point of the asteroid belt—only a little larger than the rest. He walked on, but something was bothering him. He pictured the station in his mind. Wait a minute. The station’s spin was oriented to the ecliptic plane. If he was walking on the outer ring, the sun should be below his feet. How could it be in the portal window?
*****
Pod C109 dinged. Jolene punched it up on her screen. Cooke, Larry was rejecting his simulation again. She logged it and authorized the AI to create a new sim for him. Not that he deserved it, the crank.
Jolene hated being on watch. It was only one month out of twelve, but it was so lonely being a podkeeper. She longed to get back to her pod, and her own sweet, simulated life.
The sleeper ship was only ten years into its thousand-year journey. The travelers’ bodies were in fine shape, their physical decay nearly at a standstill. But their minds, even slowed down so the dreams of one REM cycle stretched for weeks, were more delicate things.
So, the AI had the perfect life-dream for everyone, tailored to each person’s experience, and government-approved for all aspects of social adjustment and personal satisfaction. Of course, there were always a few who were hard to please. Who couldn’t just go with it.
The AI’s answer came back. Rejected? The AI was giving up on him? Cutting him loose? Poor Mr. Cooke! A thousand years trapped with his own thoughts!
“Life stinks.” That was the message on the bulletin board as Larry ran past. The sewage treatment plant was failing again. The city never updated anything. No cities did. Everyone was just waiting to abandon earth. And he would be home late again. And Tammy would gripe at him again.
Real life is just too realistic. For everybody . . . almost. In the quiet and dark of the pod, Larry’s face broke into a slow-slow-motion smile.
by submission | Jun 2, 2019 | Story |
Author: Robb White
The black hole first appeared in Aaron Jesperson’s upstairs room Thursday night and seemed nothing more than a fuzzy donut, a “wobbly thing,” according to Emma, when she went in to look for him. She found him in the kitchen swearing and holding his hand under the tap.
“Forgot to put your mug under the Keurig again? You’ll be leaving your keys in the fridge next,” Emma said.
She was short on pity, long on rebuke. Aaron gave her a baleful stare but worried she might be right this time. He’d only been retired a year and time hung heavy nowadays.
It was an hour later before Aaron entered the room and discovered what Emma was talking about.
Circular, soundlessly moving, it seemed to just hover there. The “donut thing” crinkled the air at shoulder height. At first, he thought it might be a trompe-l’oeil effect, light from the window hitting the back of the screen just right and producing this strange ripple—but, no, a second glance proved that wrong. It was there; it was no optical effect of light or shade. More disturbing, it moved of its own volition—a tiny shift to the right then back to its spot like a runner running in place.
Gently, cautiously like a child’s first attempt to pet a dog, he set the corner of a DVD case against the outer edge of the swirling eye. The DVD disappeared. Gone! Nowhere to be seen. Just not there anymore.
Aaron flushed with exhilaration.
More DVDs went into the tiny black hole with the same result. Each time, Aaron’s mind anticipated the thrill of the item being snatched—almost like dropping a moth into a voracious spider’s maw. No telltale sound in its wake—just the thing ceasing to exist. A pen, a plastic yellow backscratcher, a pocket dictionary, and a glass paperweight with a scorpion inside all went the same way.
But where, though?
The thought he might have been sucked into the donut and transmogrified into an eviscerated strand of human spaghetti made his knees buckle. His mind couldn’t fathom such a fate, and he remained in a stupor until the doorbell below gave its usual trill.
He left the room, gave a nervous backward glance, lest its ravening maw should send out invisible tentacles to lug him toward it from that distance. He peeked over the banister rail to see the top of Emma’s salt-and-pepper head greeting her older brother with a rambunctious hug and noisy smack of a kiss on the cheek.
Hugh openly despised Aaron and let him know it at every opportunity.
“I have something to show you, Hugh. You’ll get a kick out of it, trust me.”
Hugh sighed theatrically and headed up the stairs, his heavy tread increased the smile on Aaron’s face a millimeter with every step.
Minutes later, Emma called up the stairs for Hugh to come down for his coffee.
“He’s not here,” Aaron said, his beaming face appearing over the rail. At a trot, he came down the steps and took the cup from her and sipped.
Ah, perfect, made with heavy whipping cream and Brazilian chocolate.
Emma’s pout replaced the scowl. “He might have said something to me before he left.”
He smiled thinking about life’s wondrous strangeness, how the banal could become so magical, so monstrously eye-opening all at once. In the echo chamber of his memory, he heard once more the half-finished alto shriek from his brother-in-law’s throat climbing high like an aria’s single silver note in that split-second as Hugh stretched forth a contemptuous arm to touch infinity.
THE END
by submission | Jun 1, 2019 | Story |
Author: Keith Downey
Crammed as he was into the middle seat of Row F between two gargantuan human specimens, Zim wasn’t sure that he could even reach the tesseract in his pocket, let alone activate it. Excess tissue, barely contained by overworked athletic pants, reached across the border that should have divided the narrow seats. The oversized humans seemed unaware of their encroachment into his territory.
Across the aisle, a dirty minor with a mop of uncouth hair alternated between sticking its tongue out at Zim and shoving candy into its gullet. Its parental units, unconcerned, stared lifelessly at their electronic devices. A male wearing the headdress of a cattle herder shouted demands at a disinterested flight attendant. A small canine inexplicably occupied a seat and added its yips to the cacophony.
The dingy flying machine should have soured Zim’s mood. The rank smell of compressed passengers and their greasy foodstuffs should have stoked his anger. Two surprise fees, one for possessing luggage an inch longer than regulation-size and another for having the audacity to check in with a human representative of the airline, should have driven him to the precipice of rage. The utter lack of in-flight entertainment should have pushed him right over that precipice.
But none of those setbacks managed to damage his disposition, because Zim was, at long last, heading home. It had taken months of tinkering to determine the precise altitude, velocity, and solar flare schedule to guarantee the tesseract’s effectiveness. That so many dreadful samples would be unwittingly coming along was an added bonus.
Zim finally freed his arms from the confines of his neighbors’ girth. He checked the watch-looking device on his left wrist and smiled; almost there. He pulled his hat more snugly over his antennae, then reached into his coat pocket. Caressing the small silvery cube for a few moments, Zim re-familiarized himself with the intricate patterns on its sides.
Checking the readings on his wrist once more, Zim sighed as he pushed the requisite combinations to activate the tesseract. A faint vibration was the only immediate sign that it had worked.
Several moments later, the commander of the flying machine ordered the attendants to repair to the cockpit, anxiety penetrating his voice even through the tinny speaker. The dirty minor was the first to notice the change in scenery outside the tiny portholes; the purple domes of Xilibander-6, Zim’s home planet, shone brightly in the morning suns. The minor’s sticky appendages tried but failed to rouse the concern of its parental units.
Aghast, the juvenile looked wildly across the aisle. Zim winked at it, a smile now blooming on his face as the minor’s mouth made several fish-like movements. Such expressive features would be most interesting to the research committee. He looked forward to pointing out the peculiarities of this species to his colleagues; the wide disparities in weight depending on sugar and fat intake, for example. Or the ability to sit sloth-like for hours while viewing images flashing on screens of various sizes.
As the minor continued to sputter incoherently, Zim felt a brief pang of guilt at resigning the humans to a life of observation chambers and scientific instruments. Then one of his gargantuan neighbors broke wind, quickly reversing Zim’s train of thought. Advancing the knowledge of a superior species would be a most appropriate fate for these humans. A kindness, really.
After all, the lab cages to which the passengers would soon be transferred were much roomier than the seats on Flight 437, and the probes were hardly more intrusive than a TSA pat-down.
by submission | May 31, 2019 | Story |
Author: Irene Montaner
She wandered along time caring for the dead. No galaxy was too big, no planet too insignificant. Everything that had ever lived within the boundaries of her universe was worth of her attention, regardless of whether it had existed for eons or nanoseconds.
She found us right in the middle of a singularity, if there’s ever such a place. A point in time and space where the nothing converged with everything, the darkness with the light. A point where the energy clashed with the vacuum.
She found us and released us from the black hole that had swallowed our stellar system. Her long, thin fingers surrounded us, felt us, searched for any sign of life, as feeble as may. Millions of millions of millions of heartbeats reached the strings of her consciousness at once. It was us calling for help, from the first bacteria that ever swam in our oceans to the last human that ever walked the earth. It was us asking for mercy.
She listened closely and heard beyond our heartbeats. She heard us screaming and yelling, crying and lying, abusing each other. She heard the clash of the battles we fought, the crash of the dishes we broke, the bang of the bombs we dropped. She heard us failing at life and hoping there would be a tomorrow for that very same reason. Because we had failed and wanted to try again.
She brought us closer to her, her lips almost touching us. Every string that made her up vibrated as she insufflated part of her life into us. Quarks, hadrons, atoms, molecules formed again in less than what it took for the universe to be born. It will take a much longer time before our hearts start beating. But they will beat again.
