by submission | Oct 10, 2018 | Story |
Author: DJ Lunan
Clarke peered mesmerised through the tiny pod’s porthole at the forested planet, verdant, moist and fertile stretching to the horizon. He smiled, doubting it could save his soul, but it was certainly rescuing his mood. Six years wearing a HAZMAT suit in 50 degrees of direct sunshine, digging by hand through briny pans to unearth and capture colonies of salt termites, had left Clarke with limited memory of the colour green, or the texture of water on his skin.
So happy to have left the desert, he’d been hard-drunk persistently during the three weeks’ voyage to his next assignment – prospecting.
“I hate these green planets, they may look placid, but you need to be on your toes, termite-diviner!”, screamed Messina as she battled to align the Sunship with the planet’s gravity.
“Looks like paradise to me, Messi!”, replied Clarke.
It was one week since the communique from HQ directed them here; ‘Our intel is 80% potential for super-mites and great-hoppers. Take Clarke for recon and sampling. Report back.’
“Empty air”, Messina noted.
She was right, no clouds, nothing flying, no large animal heads, no plane-eating snakes.
“Odd. We any intel on the ecosystem?” asked Clarke. Messina was sweating, her eyes darting across the canopy looking for danger.
She finally realised gravity equilibrium, brought the Sunship into hover mode 100 feet above the canopy.
“None. I’ve prospected planets like this before. If we don’t get attacked by something big in the next couple of minutes, there’s a good chance it’s a plantation. And termite-boy, we are still intact! Get ready, 30 seconds.”
Clarke stared out mesmerised. But, like staring at a stereogram, slowly the unerring regularity of the canopy loomed, making his eyes spin. If this is a plantation – then for what and by who?
Worse still, without GPS data, this would be old-world exploration: man-in-a-pod on a strong rope with a collecting jar.
He looked quizzically at Messina, a hundred questions bursting. She winked, releasing his pod, and he fell at blistering speed through the blinding sunlight of the cloudless planet. The pod crashed through the canopy, jerking to a hard stop ten feet above the ground. The triple-butted graphite-steel amalgam rope, rippled up and down, leaving Clarke bobbing like a dinghy in an estuary.
The lush planet had disappeared. Under the canopy, there was nothing, just white earth. It was a plantation. The trees were planted regularly five metres apart in all directions. Each tree had a massive buttress with familiar indentations indicating termite species. But the scale was massive. The trees towered over 200 metres, with termite buttresses extending up 20 metres. These termites would be massive. And valuable. The intel was right, but the eerie silence was unexpected.
Messina barked through the intercom, “Clarke, stop gawking and get sampling.”
Clarke complied, activating the sampling arms, four vacuum cleaners, each sucking twenty grams of organic material into jars. The white earth was dry, with desiccated pine needles, dust and what looked like turtle-sized termite shells.
It conjured memories of pine forests in lowland Scotland, planted with gold-rush gusto when softwood prices were high. But spent twenty years gestating standing soulless, soundless, dry and empty – an arid oasis among the peat bogs and persistent rain. But they were owned, bankrolled by old-families who were banking on their share of the logging prices as royalty.
“Looks like an abandoned colony, Messi.”
“Where are the critters, Clarke?”
“More importantly, who owns this plantation and where are they now?”
“Darn forest planets – always complicated.”
“Give me the desert anyday. Let’s go, Messi”
The line crackled.
“Messi…”
The pod began to bob and weave.
by submission | Oct 7, 2018 | Story |
Author: Michael Hopkins
Olivia told me she saw a double rainbow. She said it just as she stepped through the front door. Water dripped from her long brown hair onto the wood floor entryway, she said it was a sign from god, an answer to her prayers. This was after she saw the funnel cloud, raised her hands to the sky, and prayed that the tornado would shift direction away from our Wisconsin house. The storm intensified; eighteen people were killed one town over.
We watched whales off the coast of Cape Cod. Olivia held her hands over the water. I need to calm the tides, she said, I’m getting sick. The waves disappeared. Praise the lord, Olivia said. Seven humpback whales and three fin whales beached the following day: dead on arrival.
This heat is oppressive; I can’t breathe, Olivia said as we lay on the pristine white sand of Siesta Key Beach in Florida. She raised her hands and the air cooled. The next day a red tide swept through the area. Thousands of dead fish, turtles, and a few dozen manatees washed onto beach.
It was in the boundary waters of upper Minnesota, a place far off the grid, that helicopters found us. Olivia was sedated. I will ask god for deliverance, she said to me before her eyes shut.
Make her love you, they had ordered; you’ve done it before. Have some fun, they said. In a few months, the bio-electric mycelium DNA in her brain will have spread. She will forget her identity. You will be her control panel. Orders for deployment will follow.
She was more than a person altered, weaponized, to control the elements. Her innocent belief in a higher power, something much greater than herself, endeared me to her. Her crooked smile, the magical fragrance of Rive Gauche perfume. An angel I wanted to protect from being turned into a demon. A woman in whose arms, I felt safe.
They reinserted a tracking chip into my neck, a new scar next to the one where I cut one out three months ago, when I took Olivia away. I was ordered to report to the Arkansas base in three days. I asked for a ride. They told me it was out of the way, not their problem, they said.
I watched the copters fly away. Heard the chuf, chuf, chuf of their rotors. Then, too soon, silence. An explosion. The cloudless sky glowed red, flames crackled.
It started to rain. Torrential rain.
I stood watch at the wood’s edge. She would appear, I was sure if it. Praise the lord, I would say. Yes, praise the lord, she would answer. We would hug, I would whisper in her ear the name of a far-off country, where this time, we would never be found.
Yes, she would say, just us, we’ll drift away. People will say I remember them; they were so much in love.
In the rain, I waited, watched, and prayed.
by submission | Oct 6, 2018 | Story |
Author: David C. Nutt
Dimitri sat up as the semi-viscous fluid keeping him alive in suspended animation oozed off his body. “Ship, how long have we been in fluid?” There was an unexpected pause that stretched longer than Dimitri would have liked.
“Commander, the ship logs indicate duration of fluidogenic suspended animation as 912,530 standard days.”
Dimitri reeled back in shock as he did the math: 2,500 years asleep. “Explain- why so long?”
There was the pause. “Collision with uncharted debris caused broad systems damage. Ships internal neural nets damaged beyond effective repair. Connection with 87% of our internal systems lost and no external signals could be transmitted.”
Dimitri winced. For all the power the ship’s AI had, this explanation meant it could only watch as the now compartmentalized systems went about their mission taskers. The left hand did not know what the right hand was doing. All their AI could do is watch as search protocols moved their ship farther and farther away, traveling methodically, relentlessly from system to system, until it found a habitable planet.
“Can you at least tell me where we are?”
“Affirmative. We are currently in orbit around an earth class planet somewhere in the EGS-zs8-1 galaxy. Survey has been done and there is no sentient intelligent or developing sentient intelligent life planetside. Colonization routines have been engaged. ”
Dimitri nodded. Finally a break, but his relief was replaced with a gnawing fear. Even in deep, fluidogenic suspended animation, one could not be maintained indefinitely. “How many survivors?”
There was a pause. “Four deceased due to undiagnosed existing medical conditions. Total survivors: 1,927.”
Dimitri sighed with relief. It should have been much worse. The “acceptable” losses given this long in fluid should have been close to 70%. Just the nutrient baths alone would need replenishing after so many years. Dimitri’s blood ran cold: nutrient baths…there couldn’t have been enough to sustain them. “What did you do with the deceased?”
“Deceased individuals were ejected from fluidogenic chambers and jettisoned into space as per mission SOP.”
Dimitri sighed. “Good. For a second there I thought you were going to tell me you dissolved the corpses for nutrient.”
“Negative. Necrotic tissue is unacceptable for nutrient bath conversion. Only viable tissues may be used in emergency nutrient protocols.”
Underneath the thick coating of fluid meant to keep him alive in suspended animation, Dimitri broke out in a cold sweat. “Explain emergency nutrient protocols.”
There was the long pause. “In the event of catastrophic loss or exhaustion of concentrated protein supplements, spermatozoa will be removed for the senior most male in the command structure and used to impregnate females capable of embryonic production. At no earlier than 112 days and no later than the 120 day mark, embryonic tissue is harvested from its host and injected into the nutrient bath where it is dissolved and absorbed by the crew.”
Slowly, like a cold, rising tide of effluent, the realization of what the AI was saying crept into Dimitri’s consciousness. “Two thousand five hundred years,” he mumbled. “30 generations per 1,000 years… 75 generations.”
Dimitri, threw himself out of the nutrient tank on to the deck. He stood and in a complex emotional mixture of disgust and sorrow frantically clawed off the remaining nutrient stuck to his body. As the protein-rich, viscous sludge accumulated around him, weeping, in shock and horror he wondered, “How many of my sons and daughters?”
by submission | Oct 5, 2018 | Story |
Author: Alzo David-West
Charles Hooper had been away for twelve years. No one was precisely sure where he went, though there were indications he had joined the Space Corps as a volunteer for the generational residents and the new settlers on the Martian and the Jupiterian moon colonies.
He had maintained only occasional messaging contact with his family and friends, so when he returned, his presence was really quite unexpected. He was forty years old and somewhat of a stranger. His general sensibility had changed; he was slimmer but still broad-shouldered; and he had taken on a foreign accent, that distinctive mélange of misplaced stresses, pauses, and intonations that characterized the off-world versions of Universal speech.
First, he visited his sister and brother-in-law, then his father and mother, and later a number of his childhood friends. He did not reveal much about what he did while away, except to say he had traveled variously back and forth through the transit ways between Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn; had worked different long- and short-term contracts; and had done miscellaneous kinds of public and private services for organizations, institutions, and individuals.
His laconism suggested he either took no interest in his diverse occupations, or he was trying to put some unpleasantness behind and move on. No one knew for sure. He was, however, eager to announce that he had met and fallen in love with someone a year ago when he worked at a forest biome in a Bernal Sphere, an extraordinary person—understanding, intelligent, compatible, and beautiful—despite their different worlds, cultures, and beliefs. She was called Y’jk U’ik.
Hooper described her in quaint, effusive terms as his star-begotten goddess. He added, to everyone’s surprise, that he and she were wedded, and she would be arriving on his world after a five-week preparation period. Although she was approved to relocate, she still required, among a few other things, the necessary inoculations and vaccines to strengthen her immune system against the many strains of bacteria and viruses that would be new and potentially harmful to her outside her home sphere.
When everyone naturally asked to see her picture, they were confounded that Hooper did not keep any virtual image files. But it was not really pressing, they reasoned, to pursue the trivial matter of appearance. All sorts of inter-world consummations with all sorts of specially adapted off-worlders were common now. As long as the nuptial unions between the partners were consensual, their personal happiness was their social and moral right.
After his first week, Hooper spent the next four reestablishing his on-world residence status, attending rapid cognitive updating sessions to catch up with cultural life, doing his mandatory fifteen civic labor hours in any field he had abilities commensurate to, and gathering things for Y’jk U’ik at his publicly subsidized domicile. She had many special needs, especially shade, pure water, and purple vegetables, for she was also UV sensitive and a quite particular vegetarian.
On the day of her scheduled arrival, Hooper received a signal message from the regional spaceport. Because of his wife’s delicate physical condition, she would have to be shuttled in a specially equipped medical vehicle to his home. He waited impatiently. His relations and friends nervously organized a welcome party, anxious about her health.
The vehicle arrived. Hooper opened the front door of his domicile and asked everyone else to wait. He went outside, spoke something foreign and indistinct, and led his partner inside. Standing before the two, Hooper’s sister, brother-in-law, parents, and friends beheld Y’jk U’ik in a sublime rapture of speechlessness. The woman whom he had described as the quintessence was, as far as they could discern, a massive, patchy, upright, shell-less, pink-brown snail. She slithered forward on a mucus secretion, her four antennae and long siphon spread out like tentacles.
by submission | Oct 4, 2018 | Story |
Author: Janet Shell Anderson
The thing I just saw dead on the road is huge.
It’s not human. I’m glad of that.
I stop, back up, hear no sound of coming traffic; no one’s around. Since it’s early October, the fields look shaved, most of the corn already harvested. I haven’t been out this way for a long time. Thousands of crows swing over my path, dive in black swoops, rise, plunge again in uncanny formations. Why do they do it? Two houses close enough to the road for me to see, tucked into their windbreaks against the powerful northwest winds, look like they’re hiding. Dust drifts along the side of the road.
The dead thing’s sprawled across the centerline. At first, I think it’s a coyote, but it’s at least one-hundred-fifty pounds, looks like a wolf, not a dog. But what wolf is this big? Turkey vultures wheel in the increasing wind, waiting for lunch.
Right by the road, like a skeleton of a long-extinct dinosaur, a boney central pivot irrigator’s stored for the coming winter, too big to fit in any shed. The sun glints on it. No one’s around the farmstead. No cars. It’s dead quiet.
In the past months, I’ve heard stories of a lot of cattle found ripped apart. Some of the local farmers swear there’re Satanists out here.
I swat flies away, get back in my truck. Why is no one out here? Somebody’s got to get this mess off the road.
I notice there’s still some corn in a field a half mile away. Odd it hasn’t been harvested. It’d be a good day for the big combines to be finishing up. I see one sitting in a nearby field, not moving.
Most people say they don’t like this kind of countryside, flat, empty, nothing but corn, corn, corn, the occasional farmhouse or tall, white, concrete grain elevator, railroad tracks going off to empty horizons. I see the masses of sunflowers along the road, the wide sky. It’s home. Beautiful. I’ve missed it.
I drive on, need to get to the Platte River, have work there. I go through a town, tiny place, ten houses, a bar. No lights on. A big dog moves through the dying hydrangea by a small white house with Halloween pumpkins on the front steps, and then I see the creature better and it’s not a dog, over three feet high at the shoulder, wolfish head, long tail. Where are these things coming from? What in the hell are they?
I keep going west as the wind picks up, feel a pressure drop, as if a storm’s out there, way west, beyond the Platte, beyond this grassland, spot a dead calf in a pasture, not much left but bones, pass a lone, derelict house. Its windows are smashed, door open. I’m am tempted to stop and see if anyone’s there, if they’re all right, but as I slow down, a Black Angus steer stampedes into the road. I swerve to miss it and see in my rearview mirror, by the high grass near the sunflowers and the ditch, a canine pack, all big. The steer bolts into a field, hurtles to a line of cottonwoods. Twelve animals tear after it, lift voices in a two-toned, harmonic howl. Are these timber wolves? Down from Minnesota? What are they?
Seeing a sign to the Interstate just ahead, I turn onto a gravel road, slow down. Dust swarms up behind me. I hear more howling and hit the gas. Four miles later, I brake for the paved curve onto the Interstate.
No one’s on I-80. Not in either direction. I turn on the car radio, get static, slow down, look at my cell. Nothing. A strong wind batters the car, and I see, far ahead, the first signs of black clouds, a big storm that squats on the horizon.
What did I read months ago in one of those magazines by someone who hates fly-over country? Sneering at us all, implying we’re morons, he claimed there could be could be anything out here. Abandoned towns. Robot farms.
Dire wolves.
