by submission | Dec 12, 2024 | Story |
Author: Trinity J. Choi
“W-who are you?”
Those were the three most painful words I’d heard my entire life.
“Someone who loves you dearly.” I responded, unable to control the slight crack in my voice. I could see my face shining back at me through her empty eyes. The reflection of a sister she doesn’t recognize. Hopefully she’ll live in blissful ignorance, bear children, build a new family, and die never knowing the truth that almost cost her her life.
“I’m sorry, I-I’m confused-” Vicki started to fully wake up, pushing herself up from laying on her back. Her gaze hovered from the tears illuminated by moonlight, streaming down my face to the trees that surrounded us. She stared eyes wide and mouth agape as she took in the unfamiliar environment she found herself in.
A cold wind blew, leaves rustled, and a chill ran down both our spines. Reaching out, I tucked a piece of loose hair behind her ear and wrapped my cloak around her.
Vicki looked back up at me with her brows furrowed, but she glanced back between the trees once we heard the sound of shuffling footsteps grow closer. Bright white lights flickered as they enclosed us. We both squinted and her breathing became unsteady, lifting her hand to shield her eyes.
My head ached, I knew so much more than I had seconds before.
A loud voice boomed among the crowd of armed creatures: familiar but inhuman, deep and threatening.
“Vickaria the Kingslayer, you have been discovered. Obey and your people will live.” Vicki whipped her head around to look at me, her eyes wide with fear.
It’s too late for me to change my mind and run now.
Stumbling to my feet, I held my hands up in surrender. Sounds of cocking guns filled the quiet woods, further confirmation of how my story will end. If it is to be in her place, then so be it. “Vickaria isn’t the real Kingslayer, it’s me!”
“Ryana you have no involvement in the corruption within our Sky Castles. Vickaria is the leader of the rebellion. Turn her into us and we will continue to keep you and your colleagues safe while we return Earth to its former glory.” There was a murmur of agreement among the faceless crowd.
Smoke covered skies, oil filled rivers, and every animal but us wiped out of existence. We knew it was all a lie now, they’d probably just kill us all.
I glanced down at Vicki, she was running her fingers through the dying grass and feeling the dirt under her palms. She may not recognize it now, but she was willing to die for this place just minutes ago.
The piercing sound of Oli’s voice screaming the truth through everyone’s screens that day, suddenly came to mind. My head pounded, recollecting of the noise his throat made, slit as he fought and screamed to the very end.
It’s difficult to tell what memories are mine and hers. I’m starting to understand what it feels like to lose someone you love. I can’t imagine what she went through.
Vicki waved her hand to speak, “I-I really don’t know what’s going on! Please tell them! The last thing I remember is–”
I interjected before she could finish, “If you don’t think I’m telling the truth, check my memory! Yeah that’s right, I know you guys can do that!”
In the dark, the creatures exchanged glances. As far as they’re concerned, memory is the only true piece of evidence. I placed my hand on Vicki’s shoulder with a stern expression. The more she didn’t know, the safer she was. “Go on.” I prompted her.
“I don’t know how I got here and I’m not a Kingslayer! How do you know my name?!” She cried out, “Where am I?!”
There was a mumble amongst the crowd, confusion most likely. The owner of the intimidating voice stepped forward.
We finally got to see his true form, a tall and gruesome looking thing. With each step, it inched closer to us. I knelt down and wrapped my arms around Vicki, her shoulders rejecting my embrace. The self proclaimed ‘King’ stopped in its tracks just a few inches away.
“Do you know this woman?” It asked Vicki, a talon pointed in my direction. Covering half her face with my cloak, she shook her head violently. The King looked me over with a sharp toothed smile.
“Leave Vicki alone, and I’ll show you how I did it.” I whispered, quiet enough that only the three of us could hear. “Swear that you will use it to erase what she found and things can go back to the way they used to be.”
A simple exchange: my life for everyone else’s.
“What makes you think I’ll oblige?” the King asked, leaning closer. Vicki’s eyes darted back and forth as we spoke, curiosity getting the best of her yet again. I pulled the cloak further over her eyes. More flashes of memories, a younger version of myself tucking me into bed.
“It’s that or I turn and run right now, your men will kill me on the spot, and you’ll never know how to take people’s memories.” I spoke those last few words as quietly as I could, praying that Vicki couldn’t hear.
The King’s smile gradually turned downward. “Fine. As long as everything’s destroyed.” It kneeled to meet Vicki’s eyes. “Count yourself lucky, Kingslayer.”
With that, the King walked away. A wave of its talons, and a herd of creatures overcame us. Sharp claws pulled and tugged at us, forcing us to separate. It was instinct that forced me to cling onto her for dear life, “I love you..” I managed to blurt out, completely aware of how little it meant to her. But it meant everything to me.
Dragged away, I watched her form blend into the darkness. Letting out a sigh of relief, I closed my eyes and recalled her most recent memory, just before I stole it from her. Arguments, tears, and broken promises. I used her little discovery against her.
It’s my job to take responsibility, it has been since she was born. I just wish memories could be deleted instead of taken. I don’t want to die, but ‘as long as everything is destroyed’ means the truth can only disappear if it’s host does too.
by submission | Dec 11, 2024 | Story |
Author: Majoki
On Splinx, you have to follow the rules if you wanna break the law.
Rule 1: Phasespace is your friend.
Rule 2: In phasespace you have no friends.
Seems simple enough until you try to skirt the laws of thermodynamics and attempt the biggest heist in quantum gambling history. And Splinx, being the mecca of quantum gambling, is the only place to pull that off.
But, Splinx. Right?
Put Schrödinger in the box with his cat, then add Heisenberg and Kolmorogov, and you’d render a pretty good picture of how Splinx works.
Quasiprobability.
That was the problem. That was the opportunity. You never knew until you left Splinx and were light years from that funky phasespaced planet if you’d won or lost. If you were dead or alive.
Or both.
That’s how Mimi Mukta convinced me to go all in with her and rob the Royal Quark. Mimi, a phasespace diva, a quasiprobability savant, a brainiac beauty, hatched a plan to exploit extra-dimensionality and beat the house. Cheat heat death of its thermodynamic due. Grab the elemental bosons by the balls and squeeze them dry. She loves to gamble.
And by gambling Mimi means calculating. As in calculating quasiprobability.
That’s how Mimi determined the seed value, the initial condition, of phasespace. That’s how she was able to quantify life and death to a place value of 42. That’s how she persuaded me to be both dead and alive. To rely on phasespace. To trust her.
Remember the rules about breaking the law on Splinx? Do you see where this is going? Hindsight being a bitch and all that?
But, Splinx. Right?
The planet where nothing can be counted on was exactly why Mimi was so sure about uncertainty. Phasespace is all about position and momentum.
The where of what when.
In phasespace you are able to be both the heads and tails of a coin toss until the energy of that system is spent. And that can be calculated. That’s why a quantum casino like the Royal Quark had the edge. Until Mimi Mukta.
She learned how to fold phasespace—even though there’s not enough energy in the universe to do that. And stodgy thermodynamics delights in reminding us that, regardless of its form, the sum total of energy in the universe has to remain constant.
That didn’t stop Mimi. She just tapped into other universes. Syphoned off dark energy from the metaverse, thereby tilting Splinx’s quasiprobability in her favor.
Only she knew the new odds, and she could use them to rob the Royal Quark blind.
I bet you’d like to know how it turned out. If Mimi beat the house. Or got nabbed. Or betrayed me.
So would I.
Remember my role in this: to be both dead and alive in phasespace. Mimi needed to create a quantum crease to bend phasespace. That was my job. To be on both sides of existence, establishing the seam where only Mimi knew how reality could be neatly folded in her favor.
You see, we weren’t so much breaking the law on Splinx as fooling it.
Just like I was fooling myself. You can’t be both dead and alive. You can’t both love and trust Mimi Mukta.
The odds in any universe with her are not in your favor.
by submission | Dec 10, 2024 | Story |
Author: Don Nigroni
From my source, I knew there was a lot of debate concerning whether we should blow up that spacecraft before it got near Earth. It had suddenly and inexplicably appeared between Mars and Earth last night. It was obviously from another planet and might have been manned, but the fear was that, regardless, it could harbor viruses or bacteria or whatnot that could infect humans and perhaps wipe us out.
Fortunately, NASA was able to establish contact with it around noon while it was still beyond our Moon and warned the lone occupant not to enter cislunar space. I doubt that we were ever a real threat to that craft since their technology is way ahead of ours. I also suspect NASA knew that and was just hoping for the best. Anyway, the spaceship kept its distance.
I heard an explanation from my source around four o’clock about how we communicated, using English, with an alien who spoke a non-Indo-European, nay, non-human language. But I just kept nodding my head until she was finally done with her linguistic babble.
The point my source wanted to make was the same point the alien was trying to make, namely, the planet he came from had developed unimaginable powers due to orichalcum. That strange metal was discovered on one of their moons. They can detect and exploit things that are smaller than any of our subatomic particles within orichalcum which have these extraordinary properties.
Orichalcum technology allows them to travel faster than light through a third realm, neither physical nor spiritual, and to travel into the future, though they can’t return from the latter. It also gave their elite scientists the power to rule their solar system and then their galaxy. They soon expect to become Masters of the Universe. Otherwise, they fear that someday they’ll become slaves.
The envoy demanded we destroy all of our weapons: nuclear, biological, chemical and conventional. We should also unconditionally surrender our planet to him, whereupon he would spare Earth and rule our planet remotely from the Moon. Otherwise, he’d regretfully vaporize it entirely.
Our ultimatum was that he should immediately leave our solar system and never return.
My source was adamant, nay hysterical, that we should have accepted his terms. I wasn’t so sure at the time though, as I expected, he didn’t depart. But when Mars was dissolved that night, I had second thoughts.
Now I can’t sleep wondering what their position might just be concerning second chances. And I do consider that Mars exhibition to be a positive sign.
by submission | Dec 8, 2024 | Story |
Author: Jeremy Nathan Marks
The wind was wet.
It blew down from unseen heights and spread a damp veil across the plain. The soil, not accustomed to dampness, clotted. The surge in moisture caused large, segmented creatures with prolific legs to fall from the trees and lie twitching in the dirt. The trees, stunted, spiny, and bearing small waxy leaves, drooped in the wind. Their leaves yellowed, their arms darkened with rot, and their thorns fell to the ground. The trees seemed to melt.
For a week, the wind blew damp. The longer it blew, the more unstable the soil became. After a few days, it began to collapse and swallow the trees and lifeless creatures. By the end of the blowing week, no sign of the trees or creatures remained.
An Advance Team, looking down from orbit, congratulated themselves: their experiment was an unprecedented success. Now they could report back to their employer that the surface of Planet ΠΑ was barren. Extractive exercises would be permitted. The extraction protocol would be satisfied.
For the first time, an Advance Team had obliterated the life of a planet and left no evidence. In the past, fire was the weapon of choice. It scorched surfaces with inflammables and burned soil down to substrates. Then development would commence but somehow there was always a trace of the past for someone to discover. Often, there was an inspector or even a miner who felt aghast at their discovery and was compelled to report it. The company received a hefty fine and in some cases a demerit in its credit rating. Fire was not a foolproof plan for kickstarting development.
But this Advance Team tried water, and it worked. H₂O was a stroke of genius. They joked that it was a Gandhian weapon, a nonviolent but fatal technique delivered by a surprising source. Water made a thousand flowers bloom. A ship stocked with extensive water tanks was a ship bringing life to the galaxy. Planet ΠΑ required water; it deserved it. Who would gainsay that?
The Advance Team laughed at their audacity, toasted their success, and anticipated healthy bonuses which might allow them to retire from the field. They would be promoted to office jobs. Or they would become consultants, peddling their expert knowledge. They were smart people, businesspeople. They called themselves monetary engineers. Space was the most hostile frontier in existence, a place of pluck. And pluck is what they had proved to have.
While they celebrated, the surface of ΠΑ continued to clot. When a dry wind returned, it gathered no dust. The absence of granules led to scouring breezes that cleared the atmosphere. The clotted soil hardened and was burnished by the wind. The process happened remarkably quickly. When the sky turned pellucid, ΠΑ ceased to be a dull and cloudy detergent color. Now it shone across the distances like a pearl. Observers young and old discovered ΠΑ, and some of those discoverers were enterprising.
On the third day of their bacchanalia, the Advance Team received a call that boomed over their intercoms.
‘Did you deploy a flag?’ a steely voice asked.
There was a pause.
‘I assume from your silence you did not.’
‘No, sir.’
‘You will descend to the surface immediately and deploy a flag.’
‘Sir? We are not equipped-‘
The intercom cut out.
For several minutes, the team sat around looking confused. Confused and inebriated. No one could form a complete thought. Their orbital presence was known only to their employer. They had not brought a flag. They did not possess a working landing craft. The craft they did possess lacked enough fuel to land on ΠΑ and return to orbit. No preparations had been made for any landing on ΠΑ. Moreover, claims were an office matter. They involved filing papers with special seals and codes and clearances.
‘One of us will die.’
‘Who’s going to die? None of you gets to make that decision.’
‘You don’t get to make that decision.’
‘None of us will make that decision!’
One member of the Advance Team went to a view finder and studied the surface of ΠΑ. She began to curse softly to herself. A colleague heard her and came over to look at what she saw. When he saw it he, too, began cursing. For several minutes, each team member took turns. They shook their heads. They gaped at their work.
‘Well, we just won’t do it.’
‘Of course we will. If we don’t, we have no port to dock in.’
‘A burn notice?’
‘A burn notice. Yes.’
The group was silent a moment.
‘How ironic,’ one of the team members said, removing a lighter from his pocket.
Several other team members gasped and someone lunged for the small device. The man held it back, high above his head. He stood up.
‘This would end our troubles.’
‘Why do you have that on you?!’
The man smiled. ‘I don’t know. I stowed it in my things. These few days, all I’ve really wanted is to set my drink on fire. Is that so odd? How better to celebrate a great success than lighting your drink on fire?’
‘Thank God you didn’t!’ One of the women said.
‘Thank God I didn’t. . .’ the man smirked. ‘We’ve just enjoyed the greatest achievement of our lives. Think of the discovery we’ve made. The money we’ve saved. The frontiers we’ve opened. We’re legendary. And yet . . .’ The man studied the lighter for a moment. ‘And yet, I can’t light my own drink on fire. We’re given a burn notice, and I can’t use my own lighter. We squirt a planet with water and I can’t even smoke a cigarette.’
by submission | Dec 7, 2024 | Story |
Author: Jeremy Nathan Marks
At the console, the technician remembered a few Latin words from school: Deux ex machina. He couldn’t remember what they meant, but he heard his teacher saying them. He felt sweat on his temples, and hoped his supervisor would excuse it.
At a different console, a different technician remembered a few words of a poem from a literature class she’d taken in a previous life: ‘Не треба рятувати світ, спробуй урятувати хоча б когось’. Those words had been said in secret, the teacher fired shortly after their recitation. The technician could feel sweat on her temples. She thought her superior wouldn’t notice.
In a classroom in a remote village, where there was a temporary hole in the roof, children gathered to look at the night sky. Little lines crisscrossed it: green and red and blue. The children sat perfectly still to study those lines. There were so many of them. The teacher said: Hlala ngxi. Yiba nomonde. Uza kubona.
On one of the lines, a red line, a man stood. He looked down at the world far below him. Instantly, he recognized it. The man had just come out of a profound sleep, a coma where he had seen nothing but could hear nearly everything there was to hear. The blackness had felt like a void on his skin, but the sounds suggested that void was the furthest thing from where he was.
It was eternity, those voices. And the man, standing now upon his red line, marveled at the planet below him: the source of those sounds. Without seeing the people watching him, he heard snippets of the conversations they were having with themselves.
Hlala ngxi. Yiba nomonde. Uza kubona. Sit still. Be patient. You will see.
Не треба рятувати світ, спробуй урятувати хоча б когось’ ‘You don’t have to save the world, try to at least save someone’ (Serhiy Zhadan).
Deus ex machina. God in the machine.
And the man marveled at this, but also the things the whales were saying to one another. He heard how they could feel the red and green and blue lines up here with him. They told how those lines charged the tops of their spouts of water; how the water fell back on their whale bodies with a unique charge. And the whales were laughing at this new field. They sensed how it caused so many humans to panic, and they asked: Why panic? Why not try and shoot a higher spout to better feel this new field?
So, the man rode his red line for a time, then jumped to a green line. He studied the lens of light encasing the planet, lenses like the ones shaping his own eyes. He wondered whether he would burn up if he jumped off his red line and embraced the lens. Somewhere, deep in his past, he had seen tin cans return to Earth, growing get red hot as they fell.
The man remembered how people had called him Franco then. And once people called him by that name, it was what he called himself. He repeated that name now and laughed as he did.
Franco (laugh). Franco (laugh). Franco (laugh). Franco (laugh).
The name and the sound of laughter looped around each other. Franco made for himself -and the world- his very first Mobius strip.
Far below, two fleets of missiles gained height and acquired an arc. The sweat on the temples of technicians at opposing consoles on opposite ends of the Earth were matched by the first questions of the night sky students sitting in awed silence.
Those questions became tracers in the dark.
The missiles crisscrossed paths, missing the chance to kiss one another.
All of this brought more sweat, more fragments of literature to mind. Shards of prayers emerged as mutinous memories from cerebral cells now in open rebellion. Technicians, low level functionaries with no power to command armies, recalled how missiles were far more primitive than the sentiments, experiences, and intelligences behind verses, passages, and prayers.
The rebellion grew in amplitude and lyricism. Eyes attached to singing cortexes pulsed against codes and colored streaks vandalizing hologrammatic screens. Those technicians, under the sway of their intelligences, almost missed the new orders their supervisors shouted. Those technicians, they couldn’t feel the buttons their fingers pressed. And what made their visions swim: was it numbers or verses? Was it duty or poetry?
Or was it this odd voice laughing in their ears?
The voice was all they heard. The mouths of their superiors flapped in silence. The voice laughed. It laughed and repeated a name. A name that didn’t belong in any poem they recalled; wasn’t from a phrase some teacher once committed to their memory.
Who the hell was Franco?
Franco, who finally chose a blue line. It was his last line. As red and green ones came closer, he reached down and grabbed them with either hand. Franco held them and fused them into the shape of a cane, like a candy cane at Christmas. Then he reached down again and pulled up the blue line on which he was standing.
As he fell, Franco he looped the blue in with the red and green and used his giant cane to collect the two schools of missiles who had just cold shouldered one another. He hooked one school first and then the other. The missiles bucked a little at his touch, but then settled down. He folded them up and placed them in his pocket and laughed.
Franco laughed with the whales, who now laughed louder than ever.
