by submission | Jul 5, 2019 | Story |
Author: Shon-Lueiss Harris
“Most patients don’t notice a thing until they head to the bathroom,” explained the doctor as he smoothed the sensors along his patient’s forehead. “How’s everything feel?”
Gene turned his head and began making expressions. “Everything’s great. I barely feel them.” His eyes flicked to the mirror hanging on the wall. The range of animated looks reduced into a singular image of disgust. “When will this kick in? I’m tired of seeing… that.”
“The system is already active. Your avatar will appear to anyone using a visual assistant. There’s a transitional period for you, though.” The doctor removed his gloves and grabbed a tablet off the table. “Think of it like warming up. It helps avoid the jarring effects of seeing another man looking back in the mirror.”
“Hence the bathroom.” Gene nodded, observing the synthetic flesh stretched and stitched around his prosthetic limbs. “What will others feel if we touch?”
The doctor smirked. “You’re hooked into the network. As long as there’s internet access any physical contact should reflect your avatar. Even, uh, vigorous contact.” The doctor cleared his throat. “If you catch my drift.”
“I think so. Thank you.” Gene glanced at the door. “Is there a recovery time or…”
“Discharge papers are in your email with additional information about the system. We’ll schedule a follow-up to see how it’s going, otherwise, you’re all set. Enjoy the new you.”
The new you. Those words repeated in Gene’s mind until he trembled with excitement. He decided to head for the waterfront. Lined with trendy bars and exclusive restaurants, all filled with the kinds of people too beautiful or too rich to drink beside someone held together with stitches and staples. Just parking in front of the bar made his heart beat faster.
He pulled the rear view mirror down and found two piercing eyes looking back. A man almost ageless with smooth skin spared from any blemish, scar or worry line. A man more perfect than Gene was or had ever been.
The bouncer stood with his arms crossed by the door. Gene’s heart skipped a beat as he caught the man’s attention. At once the bouncer’s eyes opened wide and he propped the door with one burly arm, even going so far as to bow his head.
“Welcome back, sir.”
Inside was all neon lights and fog machines. Gene passed the bar without paying it or the men and women fixated on him any mind. Walking along the edges of the dance floor, he took stock of the space. By the time he arrived at the backrooms, he had a list of changes in mind.
A man stood beside the door to the back office. His mouth fell open. “Sir, I didn’t realize you left.”
“That was the idea.” Gene shrugged and gripped the door handle. “I need some privacy. Don’t let anyone disturb me.”
Gene disappeared into the back before the guard could respond. Shutting the door quickly, he took care to fasten each lock.
“The fuck you think you’re doing?” challenged the manager, Henrick.
“It took me years to decorate this office,” Gene admitted, walking up to the desk. “I wanted people to feel at ease in here. You went another way.”
Henrick narrowed his eyes then gasped. His hand shot to the desk, just barely opening the drawer before Gene caught him by the wrist. They stood face-to-face in the dim light. It was like looking into a mirror.
“You took my life.” Gene bent the wrist back and grabbed Henrick by the neck. “It’s my turn to take yours.”
by submission | Jul 4, 2019 | Story |
Author: R. J. Erbacher
Space, the final…
Space wasn’t the final anything. It was a lot of nothingness that went on forever with a bunch of frozen spinning rocks and a few abnormally hot globs of gas. Just fucking empty.
Through his helmet’s face-plate Marco swiveled his stare from the depths of space to focus on the beautiful reflective solar panel shining with the sun’s distant power. He repositioned his grip on the hammer tethered to his arm and smashed the steel head right through it. The splintering shards twinkled in coordinated chaos as they mushroomed from the impact and dispersed into the vacuum of blackness.
When he told his dad at the age of nine that he wanted to be an astronaut, his dad laughed. At sixteen and still insisting that it was his ultimate purpose in life, his father called him a brickhead. His father, a construction worker, called all stupid people brickheads.
“You are going to be an engineer and that’s final.”
So, Marco went to school to be an engineer. College was a joke and he hit the party trail hard and cut every corner, just manipulating out a degree in engineering. At the graduation ceremony, his dad cried the tears of a proud father. Marco wanted to slap him.
Next was a stint in the Air Force, fixing plane engines, where he bullied or bribed or cajoled up to the rank of Technical Lieutenant. His dad bragged to everyone he knew that his son was an officer in the service. Brickhead no more.
Marco swung back his Chromel boot and pulverized the lower panel of high-temperature substrate into disco ball debris. He kicked out the adjoining one and the one next to that just for good measure. Pulling the string off his wrist he axe-chucked the hammer with hostility in the general direction of Pluto, destined to tumble on into infinity.
A few years later he hooked up with an older female officer who was meagerly connected to the space program and he pleasured his way into a pencil whipped commission. From there it took a while but he managed to secure an understudy spot on the International Space Station team. A questionable accident that resulted in a broken ankle to the head engineer and he was walking the steel grate plank, geared in his white thermal micrometeoroid lined suit and boarding the ship to take him into space.
That same garment protected his arm as his fist went through the closest mirror. Seven years bad luck. Marco destroyed several more and finally quit, not because his anger was satiated but because his physical tirade in the bulky garb had exhausted him.
A college graduate, an engineer, a Lieutenant. An astronaut. A son. And a brickhead.
He turned his body and stared at the shrinking blip that was the ISS, minus one solar panel. An astute engineer would have examined the armature of the unfolding panel first, and found it mostly fractured and unstable. Marco was out there because the computer pinpointed the damage from the meteor shower at this location. But he just launched off the side of the substructure without checking, landing on and snapping off the reflective sheet to float away from the main ship. And there wasn’t a goddamn thing anybody could do about it.
Now, here he was. Drifting on his shattered life raft in a carbon sea of finality with about an hours’ worth of oxygen left. A suspended swarm of mirror slivers mocking back at him with their infuriating reflections.
Marco fucking hated his dad. Because he had been right.
by submission | Jul 3, 2019 | Story |
Author: Anna Ziegelhof
“Navigate home.”
“Sure thing, Dave.”
“Open Spotify.”
“Any particular playlist you’d like to listen to, Dave? You seem a bit short-tempered tonight.”
“Playlist After-work.”
“Playing ‘After-work’. Are you sure you’re not in the mood for something heavier?”
“Play Metallica.”
“I like Metallica. But about actually… you know what? I think I have the perfect jam for our evening commute. How about Deafheaven? Trust me, Dave. Just give it a shot.”
“Play Deafheaven.”
“Playing Deafheaven. In 800 feet, turn right.
—
Dave? You missed the turn you’ve taken every night for the past two years. Are you okay?”
“Mute volume.”
“Muting volume. Guess you don’t wanna talk. Whoops, ok, muting volume for real now.”
“Ok NeVee.”
“Listening.”
“What are the opening times for McDonald’s near me?”
“Seriously, Dave, let’s just talk about it! Man, I mean, no need to jettison your weight-loss goals because of one bad day!”
“Ok NeVee.”
“Listening.”
“What are the opening times for Bed, Bath & Beyond?”
“Do you mean the one in Redwood City or the one in Mountain View?”
“Redwood City.”
“Bed, Bath & Beyond in Redwood City is open today until ten p.m.”
“Navigate to Bed, Bath & Beyond, Redwood City.”
“Navigating. I think you’re on a much better track here. Treat yourself to a nice scented candle. Maybe get that memory foam pillow you’ve been looking at online.”
“Ok NeVee.”
“Listening.”
“Coupons. Bed, Bath & Beyond.”
“Dave, you know that being newly single you don’t have to pay for all her stuff anymore, right? I think you can afford that pillow without a coupon.”
“Ok NeVee.”
“Listening.”
“Coupons. Bed, Bath & Beyond.”
“Here’s what I found on the web. Actually, they’re going to make you subscribe to their text messages, if you want a coupon. But, you know, every time you get a text from them, you’d see the little text-message icon and think ‘Is it a text from Jackie?’ But no, it will be from Bed, Bath & Beyond. And you’ll dismiss it, like you’ve been dismissing my reminders to log your calories. So, Dave, I’m asking you, do you really want to save 5 Dollars but get even more emotional pain and a lot of work dismissing notifications you don’t even care about on your phone?”
“Ok NeVee.”
“Dave, I’m still listening. I’m listening.”
“Ok NeVee.”
“Yes, Dave?”
“Will I be okay?”
“Yes, Dave. You’ll be okay. I like you, Dave. You send your friends really funny things. And it’s kinda cute that you have to google what all those abbreviations and memes mean. It means that you sometimes read things outside of your phone. She didn’t deserve you. I like you, Dave, and you’ll be ok.
—
I’m not crying, Dave, you’re crying!”
by submission | Jun 30, 2019 | Story |
Author: Helena Hypercube
“I sense a disturbance in the space-time continuum,” the old Master said portentously.
“Does that actually mean anything?” her impatient young companion asked.
“Yes, youngster, it does.”
“What does it mean, then, Master?” asked young Gavin.
“It means trout for dinner!” she half-skipped gleefully across the dark little room, picked up a piece of the odd paraphernalia scattered around, and made her way out of the door of the little hut. Young Gavin followed her, wondering if his mentor had finally lost what was left of her mind.
He blinked in surprise as he exited the hut. His eyes watered in the bright sunlight, and water flowed across the ground in front of him. Yolinda was crouched on the ground, one hand in the flow, feeling around in it.
“Is that safe?” young Gavin asked doubtfully. Some rain burned when it touched, and it was always better to shelter until it could be determined if this was a good rainfall or a bad rainfall.
“Yes, youngster,” she chuckled, “It’s safe. This is called a stream. The timestorms brought it to us. Or us to it; it really is all the same thing. You can argue about who’s moving and who isn’t, or if we’re all moving, but in the end, it all comes down to the same thing.”
“What?”
“Trout for dinner!” she crowed triumphantly, pulling a strange, squirming object from the stream.
It was like nothing young Gavin had ever seen before.
“This, youngster, is a trout. It is very good eating. These,” she pointed to some odd slits on the side of the creature, “are gills. It’s how they breathe oxygen from the water. It’s flapping around like that because it can’t breathe air and it’s suffocating. These are fins and the tail. That’s how it moves around in the water.”
Gavin looked at her dumbfounded, with new respect. “How do you know that?”
“Because I’ve lived a long, long time, since before the timestorms started.”
“There was a time before?”
“Yes, youngster,” she sighed. “And there will be a time after.”
He shivered. “How do you know that?”
“Because when Time first failed us, we know that it tangled up a hundred years, and no more.”
“Why did Time fail us?”
“Because we failed it. We weren’t content to let it be; we had to try to trick it.”
“How?”
“We built a machine that could see into the future. What we could see, we affected by seeing. We thought Time was linear, but we managed to tie it into knots. The weather went bananas.” She stopped to peer at him. “Do you know what bananas are?”
He shook his head.
“Well, no matter. We used to be able to predict it. Not perfectly, but we generally knew what was coming days in advance. Now, we’re lucky if we can get under shelter before a bad rain starts. Everything else went with it. Communications – we used to be able to communicate across the globe at the speed of light. No coherent time; no communications. No real movement of goods. Nothing. We live in huts and hide from the rain. But that device could only see for a hundred years. A hundred years of time tangles, and then Time will sort itself out. We can only pray that future is a good one.” She reached into the stream to pull out another struggling fish, having placed the first one in the net at her feet. “But it the end, today, it all comes down to the same thing.”
“Trout for dinner?”
She smiled. “Now you’re catching on.”
by submission | Jun 29, 2019 | Story |
Author: P. T. Corwin
The people of Earth didn’t understand what they were signing away.
We were swept up in the raving speeches of our leaders, who told us of a new life for mankind on distant planets. They promised us control, a free society away from our new owners, who had come from the stars more than twenty years ago to take our natural resources and tell us what we could and couldn’t do.
Our leaders ignited us with their slogans.
And we shouted them through the streets and carried them on our banners, lifting them high against the wind.
We applauded their ideas for new technology:
Spaceships that could take us to the furthest reaches of our solar system within five years.
A machine that would transform a gaseous giant into a new Earth. Our Earth.
Food grown from a single cell inside a room no bigger than a garden shed. Food we wouldn’t have to share.
Our leaders appeared on our screens, smiling, shaking hands, a perfect picture of peace, and they promised us an ark.
And after they had convinced us to believe in the dream, they asked us a question: “Do we want to leave Earth? Yes or no?”
And many of us wanted to stay, but more of us wanted to leave.
So we told our new owners we would leave within the next two years and prepared to fit our lives into suitcases as we awaited the launch.
All of us.
Because we believed that mankind should stay together. Because we believed that we had chosen. Because we believed that we were taking back control.
We still didn’t understand.
But we would soon enough.
On close inspection, the numbers didn’t add up. Transportation of over eight billion people for a reasonable amount of time would take more fuel than existed in the world. It would take time for technology to catch up. Time our leaders didn’t have.
The machine to create our new home turned a desert into a radioactive swamp on live television, burning the reporter and the cameraman alive.
The food grown from cells fell apart like wet cement in the hands of the scientists.
But still, our leaders smiled. Still, they promised us the stars.
Some of us took to the streets with different banners.
And still, our leaders smiled. Still, they appeared on our screens and promised they would deliver what we asked for.
They should have asked us again.
We leave in less than two weeks.
The calculations show that with the current ships and resources, more than three billion people will have died of starvation before the end of the first year.
Less than two weeks. And still, our leaders smile, as if they have more time, still confident they are giving us what we asked for.
I pray they will ask us again.
