by submission | Oct 31, 2019 | Story |
Author: Ken Carlson
Maxx was puttering away with various adhesives and synthetics in the attic of his government-issued pod, one of the perks of being among the few humans on the Gliese 163 c mining colony. Encased in a series of domes and tubes, the inhabitants lived a rugged existence. Maxx’s family enjoyed many luxuries local citizens and visiting aliens could only dream of.
“Is Janica done with her studies?” Maxx asked.
“Yes,” said Ariana, his wife. “The comm-link with Earth should be closing down soon. She’s 13. She knows she has to complete her assignments by then.”
“Then bring her in. I’m almost done.”
Ariana sighed. She thought marrying a diplomat from Earth would be exciting. Instead, they were shuttled from one space station or rock to the next, with his attempts at forming local community bonds and rewriting war-torn history considered failed exercises.
“You wanted to see me, father?” Janica and her mother entered his room.
“Yes,” Maxx said, revealing the product of his work. “What do you think of this?”
“AAAAAGGHH!” Janica screamed and recoiled in fear into her mother’s arms.
“Maxx, have you lost your mind?” Ariana yelled.
“Hold on!” Maxx shouted. “It’s just a mask, see!” He held the rubberized image of a Genesian, a lizard creature that feasted many of this planet’s early inhabitants.
“I sculpted it from images I found in the historical medical data banks.”
“What are you doing with it?” Ariana asked.
“I thought Janica would like to wear it,” Maxx responded. His wife and daughter stared at him, then the mask.
“Back on Earth,” he said, “they used to celebrate a holiday, Halloween.” Maxx was an amateur historian, ever eager to spread the story of Earth. Janica and Ariana thought the overall embarrassment of his last effort, one involving the hiding of sweets throughout their pod under the guise of some enormous rabbit, would be the end of it.
“On that night,” he continued, “children would dress up in costumes representing fears and legends, then enter other people’s homes in search of food.”
“You want me to dress up like a giant gecko and beg for nutrition tablets?” Janica asked.
“You ask for a treat, playfully threatening to play a trick on the residents if they don’t provide one. We can try it with the Sundorffs. They’re human and older. I’m sure they’ve heard of it. They’ll probably think it’s funny.”
Ariana & Janica thought it was a horrible idea. Lars and Leiloni Sundorff were retired military attachés, more interested in credit from warding off nonexistent rebels than sharing pleasantries with their milquetoast neighbors.
Janica walked up to the Sundorff’s door in full Genesian costume. Maxx stood back on his property, beaming at his creation, as Ariana rolled her eyes.
Leiloni Sundorff opened their door. She screamed and ran inside. Janica took a few steps in tried to explain herself but was unable to be heard through the mask. She tried to take it off and couldn’t.
Leiloni returned with her husband and several incendiary laser blasts. A general alarm rang out as Janica ran out the door. Security shields closed down, cutting off Janica from returning to her home. Janica yelled for help as her parents cried as they tried to override the forcefield.
Sundorff slowly stalked his prey, steadying his hand for one final shot. Janica had nowhere to hide. She ran toward Sundorff, yelling through the muffling mask. Sundorff realized this wasn’t what he thought it was, but it wasn’t until after he squeezed the trigger for one more shot.
by submission | Oct 30, 2019 | Story |
Author: R. J. Erbacher
Power reigns supreme.
“Come, Bia. Your Master summons you.”
The man who came to get her was a slob, big-bellied and slovenly. His mouth drooled as he barked his order and stared at her.
She dressed in a simple sparse tunic, her feet were bare, and she knotted her hair atop her head to keep it out of the way. The lackey took her up the stone crest to the small arena with the hard, wooden post in the center. Circling the dirt field stood the masses of the village, murmuring and ready to explode. Her Master was there trying to hide the whip behind his back as if she didn’t know what was coming…again. Bia let her shelf be led to her Master; huge, muscular and formidable, still, even after what she’d taken from him. A single swipe of his hand grabbed the robe and tore it from her body leaving her naked. The crowd cheered. He pushed her face up to the pole and bound her hands stretched over her head, her breasts divided by the shaft.
Stepping back and uncoiling the whip the crowd began to thrum in anticipation. He heaved his arm back cracking the cruel skein behind him and let it snake into the dust, holding it there and drawing out the moment. Then with all his might he propelled his force forward and ripped the leather strap across her back, the tip curling around and catching the side of her breast. Bia’s head jerked with the pain and she bit back the scream. Every other voice erupted in shouts of ecstatic glee. Her Master pulled back the lash, held it and repeated the stroke harder, striking a fresh section of skin. The cord split her flesh and she felt the power of his energy as the braid slid along the flayed muscle, her blood soaking up the impact. Again, and again, each blow investing evermore force against her accepting body. It went on until her Master had exhausted his strength and he dropped the now red-stained leather cable onto the ground and padded away.
The throngs of people scurried off into nooks and niches to pleasure each other with the buildup of lust that had spiked in their loins from the event. Attendants untied Bia’s hands, bundled her onto a travois, covered her with a tarp and dragged her back to her room where she was dumped onto her cot. The pain was real, and Bia felt each stinging lash as it throbbed in her flesh but by tomorrow, they would be healed. Not into puckered raw scars but back to her alabaster smooth skin.
Her beautiful skin that had been the cause of so much of her troubles, had caught the attention of many of the Beings, men and women, who wanted to ravish her. But she’d shunned their advances until finally they’d collectively had enough and banished her to this rock. In this distinguishable appearance, yet still beautiful, for her continuous punishment, thinking they had ruined her. Made her pay for her audacity.
What they hadn’t realized was that each penetrating strike allowed her to absorb the energy from her Master and store it and expand it until she now could crush boulders at a distance, bend the air and manipulate the sea. Soon she would be so strong that she would blow this puny village away with a single breath.
And then it would be the Beings turn. And then they would all understand that beneath her beautiful skin was a Being who was dreadful. And Powerful.
Because power reigns supreme.
by submission | Oct 27, 2019 | Story |
Author: Timothy Goss
Moulju squeezed his hand. Bernard reciprocated as best he could in his feeble condition. Moulju was thankful for the liquidity of her natural state. She wanted to cover him, become with him, aid his breathing and allow him to rest. But she knew it wasn’t her decision and Bernard wanted to die naturally.
Moulju whispered in his ear, “Do you remember when we first met?” she asked with a wicked smile. Bernard smiled too, equally wicked and they remembered together, every moment played out on the tides of her physical form. It was something he loved about her species, something he loved about her, something he had always envied.
As the Moebius Nebula erupted around them, points of light, magnified through liquid, illuminated the room. Each of her movements changed the perspective casting shadows and light. Moulju held his hand in her chest and Bernard felt the warmth of her for the last time. His body became light and airborne as it used to be when they were young and loved in the morning and the night – ‘cause one is nothing without the other.
They met in the hold of a giant KiiK freighter, the Gglokjd Bah, on its way to the Vega gate and the edge of known space – the Nix move closer and closer to the edge. Bernard was hitching a lift he wanted to travel to Tiangulum and the gate was the fastest route. Moulju found him curled up in a consignment of Ref droppings.
They travelled to Triangulum together. The gate dropped them in the nearest system and they were able to ride the ripples toward their destination star. Moulju listened while Bernard explained. She would help him, she and he were one.
A small cloud apparatus above Bernard’s sickbed made an awful noise while flashing red and purple. A nurse drone snaked from the ceiling, connected as it was to the mainframe surrounding them, in the walls, ceiling and floor. It administered medication and adrenalin, fusing them with an eighty volt shock through the central nervous system. Bernard’s body twitched, violently at first, but soon it tired and ceased.
It was an age ago on a planet where time moved in strange, bloated and elongated phases. It was the gravitational distortion brought her closer to the essence than ever before – her soul suddenly moving in opposition, the separation an opening of body and mind. Moulju wanted to share her knowledge her feelings, her clarity with Bernard and covered him where he stood. Bernard breathed her spirituality – they were destined by the universe to be and to become.
Bernard lay still, lifeless. Moulju smothered him him as before, filling his rotten lungs with her oxygen rich liquid, turning darkness into light. He absorbed the gift and took a sudden gasping breath. Moulju smiled at him and Bernard smiled back. He took his final breath holding her image in his mind.
A Jovian vessel scouting for the Lonemire Chemical Corp saw the blaze from orbit. Moulju had left Bernard’s corpse for the nurses and exited quickly. Within hours they were threatening each other with their stink glands – there is something about decomposing humanity. It was an OoLoo technician who finally burned the body before the medical staff bit each other’s ears off, along with other bits and bobs.
At the Vega Gate Moulju thought of Bernard; For all that it was, she mused, there’s a lot that it wasn’t. Moulju joined a KiiK vessel headed for the boundary – she gave the captain of the Gglokjd Bah as a reference.
by submission | Oct 26, 2019 | Story |
Author: Matt Ingoldby
‘Room’ conjures three dimensions of no specific shape. This will have to do.
‘Waiting room’ seems speciously appropriate except that it conjures time – not apt for eternal, infinite multitudes like us. Nonetheless, we are all waiting, most of us since before there was a universe to lay time across.
In your misleading and dimensionally-confused parlance, we have waited ‘a very long time’.
In the waiting room (okay, okay) we dwell. Though we exist at no point, there is a queue. It may shock you to learn that social laws have existed long before the laws of physics.
#953426304582635402390839472-69476029864324538763406578530692876-862-629867534857634876553875623984762342364876238676260000624626230462346200000032426346328756438765235782364 is my friend.
#953426304582635402390839472-69476029864324538763406578530692876-862-629867534857634876553875623984762342364876238676260000624626230462346200000032426346328756438765235782364 is dreaming of what they will achieve in life: “I don’t care what others say,” they muse warm-heartedly (the words are my own). “I’ll still remember. I’ll come and find you, breather to breather, wherever you end up.”
Wherever, in this case, is not meaningless. It means a specific range of coordinates.
I express a mutual sentiment, aware that many others have vowed this before. #953256304582635402390839472-69476029864324538763406578530692876-862-629867534857634876553875623984762342364876238676260000624626230462346200000032426346328756438765235782364 and I stick together.
A jolt of desire takes us into the presence of Perfection. A subliminary byproduct of Perfection greets us with a bath of warmth. Forever they express: “Ready?”
The smell of rotting meat is introduced to us. #953256304582635402390839472-69476029864324538763406578530692876-862-629867534857634876553875623984762342364876238676260000624626230462346200000032426346328756438765235782364 and I respond with nausea. Correct: a positive is expressed.
Now a burst of animal terror lunges at us. It creates fear no academic grasp could prepare you for. In the eternity it leaves, a negative is expressed.
“You forgot to breathe.” the envoy informs #953256304582635402390839472-69476029864324538763406578530692876-862-629867534857634876553875623984762342364876238676260000624626230462346200000032426346328756438765235782364. My friend inflates imaginary lungs desperately, but their portal is already closed.
They transmit courage to me for the advanced round. ‘Human’ is notoriously hard.
(But you did it. You sly genius, you.)
I am forced to regard myself. I respond with hatred and fear. To return to this state of absence is a poisonous thought – I am disgusted by death.
A positive sounds; my disgust is enough. I am jettisoned from non-life. But I remember those eternal moments even as I begin to breathe, witness, and cough.
At last I am born.
by submission | Oct 25, 2019 | Story |
Author: Glenn Leung
The fog in my brain had lifted, and all I saw was the rubble. My memories were there; my family, my friends, my comrades of the ill-fated revolution, the building blocks of my identity. But these blocks lay in heaps and piles, the cement and the steel that once held them together lying uselessly around them.
“Do you remember the imperial guard you shot?” The well-dressed man sitting across me in the interrogation room asked.
“I do,” I replied without thought.
“Do you feel any remorse or pride regarding your actions?”
“I do not feel anything,” came my stone-faced answer.
It was true. I felt nothing, not even the surprise that was supposed to come with realizing you felt nothing. I have memories of being actively involved; of making and throwing Molotov cocktails and laughing as it smashed in the faces of imperial loyalists, of high fiving my friends after I broke through the imperial firewall and messed up the tax records. I should be swelling with pride as the well-dressed man recounted them to me, but I felt nothing.
The well-dressed man made some notes on my eye movement and pulse, then spoke into his voice recorder.
“Teleportation subject appears to be clear so far, proceeding to stage two of confirmation.”
I remember the teleporter, the two stygian obelisks in a room of chrome and ebony. I remember being dragged screaming into one of them and coming out the other with the fog in my head, a side effect of the brain being torn apart then recreated. Often loosely compared to restarting a computer, it is part one of the most effective brainwashing method ever accidentally developed. We kept all our memories, but the Empire could put them together the way they wanted. We would be filled with shame, then pride as we were reminded of the Empire’s regimented education system and the free healthcare. We would believe that the surveillance, the suppression, and the brutality is needed to sustain the New World Order. We would come to love the Empire, and it would be easier to do so without a desire for freedom.
Let the Man repaint the canvas.
“Get in there!”
The well-dressed man had left and returned with a woman in handcuffs, his vice-like grip on her upper arm. She was sobbing. She was my wife.
“You recognize this woman? She’s under suspicion for aiding your kind with crimes against the empire. What can you tell me about that?”
I looked at my wife’s tear-filled visage as she stared back at me in horror, realizing what they had done to me. I remembered how we had embraced amidst the fires of protest, how she had defended me from her friends who said I was no good for her, how she had nursed me back to health when the Empire used biotoxins on the mob. Without any sense of identity, it just felt like somebody else’s life.
“She helped steal the virus that I used to break the firewall,” I told the well-dressed man.
There was a gunshot and my wife fell dead. I blinked a little.
The well-dressed man checked my pulse and spoke again into his recorder.
“Teleportation subject confirmed clean.”
As I sat alone in the interrogation room, my wife’s corpse lying near the door, I remembered my last thought in the teleporter just before the pain of my old body disintegrating.
“How could anyone think this is a good idea?”
