by submission | Oct 26, 2018 | Story |
Author: DJ Lunan
The Zeppelidrone hovered soundlessly outside the window blinking its countdown, indicating less than twenty minutes to make our decision to sign the contract.
“You will need to be sterilised before we can go, no natal medical facilities on-board”, said Dex reciting the small print governing his role as ‘Cosmos Safari Expert’.
“Can I be re-purposed afterward?”, I replied sarcastically.
“Hmpf! All vaccinations, mediation, sterilisation and molecular re-assignation to be completed at travellers’ own expense”, continued Dex hesitantly.
My husband is in his element, seated in his favourite armchair, leafing through the 87-page printed contract. Yes, the SunShip Company sent a real paper contract!
SunShip knew Dex well. Inefficient outdated media fit neatly with his love of pulp fiction, calligraphy, and three-piece-tweed suits.
I knew he would sign it. Sunship knew it too. He always did. Sometimes with a quill.
Our biggest question is whether I would join him. Could I endure three years on a Cosmos Safari?
Dex had asked me to join shorter tours, but I always dodged, preferring a couple of months solo on Earth to exhausting intra-galactic tours scheduled to the minute with gazing at alien life, junk, mammals, and art. And worse, legions of so-called Experts, yawning on clever-clever without injecting any real value.
“Is it all-inclusive?”, I probed.
Dex scanned the contract, pausing to lovingly lick his index finger to help him turn each page, “Food, travel, and air are provided as part of this contract for the Expert…. that’s me”, he paused, evidently chuffed, smiling broadly, brushing crumbs from his vintage Harris tweed jacket onto the floor, “….and their companion”.
“A companion?!”, I responded ironically, “can I not be an associate Expert? I’m actually very clever!”.
“Ahh … just wait, clause 4, states: ‘Food, travel, and air will be provided at économie throughout the Safari, with the daily option to upgrade across and within consumption categories to ordinaire or Premium™ at the expense of the Expert and companion’”, he reported.
For the first time since the contract had arrived by Zeppelidrone, Dex sought approval in my eyes.
I pulled my supremely-unimpressed face, hoping Dex would get the hint to re-negotiate our status.
“I will, definitely….”, faltered Dex, “….inquire….further on this matter”.
I smirked knowingly at his fudging, doubtful he would inquire or negotiate further. He’d simply whip out his favourite feathered quill from his antique crocodile leather Filofax and sign the contract.
“What’s the route?”, I inquired to break the awkward silence.
He smiled geekily, slipped into a daydream, and detailed ponderously, “We will circle Neptune’s frozen moon to slingshot out of the Solar System into the NV quadrant, see the whispering galaxy, catch flowering season on Neunion…..”
I remained bemused by my optimism. Three years of lean food, unlimited access to fitness equipment, swimming pool, music, literature and film coupled with zero money worries would re-invent me as trim, fit, and well-read. Off-worldy wise! Moreover, I would finalise my doctorate while travelling, and return a Doctor, primed for a new career and a family.
“…..visit two lava planets, and all being well, catch the Orplyx migration….I’ve only dreamt of seeing such things”.
I knew I’d lost him. Maybe I only borrowed him while he was planted firmly on Earth.
“….Cosmos Safari Expert….big step up….big leagues, big ships, unconfined vistas….”
But could I find me? Could this be my re-invention?
I packed a pipe with molocum root and lemon leaves, lit it, and passed to Dex.
“Shouldn’t we….”, he started, motioning to the Zeppelidrone blinking ‘fifteen’.
“Nah, let’s get high, then sign”, I smiled, contemplating my looming three years of space to grow.
by submission | Oct 25, 2018 | Story |
Author: Thomas Desrochers
Bg’lkk Ut’rk had found the blue jewel with its eccentric inhabitants and decided he wouldn’t make contact. His name sounded like “big lick” in the planet’s principle political and business language, and he was of the opinion that first contact by “‘Big Lick’ the Curious” was simply a disaster in the making.
So, he watched.
Well, he didn’t just watch.
The humans were a fractious lot. Some among them were concerned about saving species from vanishing, and Bg’lkk thought it was a rather noble endeavor. After all, any species was shaped by the environment around it, and it followed that the organisms that lived there formed a part of their identity. To him, saving these was like saving the monuments and icons of past ages. There were humans saving mammals, and fish and lizards, mundane and exotic creatures, a whole society of spider-keepers! But there were some that were neglected, sometimes fewer than a hundred left and no tears shed or hair pulled.
So, he collected.
And wondered: what sort of sentients would save creatures they had grown up next to but not ones they had created and grown alongside, like a Ku’rkr’rk that favored its coralmate over its own spawn?
–
Ethel sat on her porch wrapped in a wool afghan and sipped at her tea. She liked to sit there in the evenings and watch the lonely cars go by on the distant highway. It was cold out, the trees barren. Heavy clouds overhead carried portents of snow to come.
The roads were quiet, the only lights those from the far off houses in the hills. Tonight the world was small – the porch, the yard, the woods beyond. Ethel liked it when the world was small. “Comfortable,” she called it.
Something intruded on her small world. It was hard to see for it had no lights, a shadow the size of her cottage that descended from the sky to land gently on her lawn. It made no noise as it fell and the air barely moved, but there was a soft hiss and clatter as it settled.
Ethel set her tea down and stood, grabbing her shotgun. She was used to creeping in the night to eradicate the pests that harassed her girls.
She stayed to the edges of the lawn, obscured by the forest. As she came around the intrusion she could see movement – something in her coop! No, somebody! Ethel lowered her shotgun, irritated. If she took out a miscreant like they were a raccoon the sheriff would be less than pleased, so instead she fished her flashlight from her smock pocket.
When she turned on the light it was hard to say who was more surpised: Ethel, or the four foot tall hunched crab monster that was half in the coop. It scuttled back out and raised all six of its double hinged fore-claws in the air, three of Ethel’s hens and one of her roosters ‘bup’ing sleepily in its grasp.
Before Ethel could react the crab monster slurred out, “A lack of violence is favorable! I am here for precious feathered hot-lizards!” It regurgitated something yellow onto the ground. “Recompense!”
Ethel could only watch as it scuttled aboard the shadow and disappeared into the night. One of the remaining hens started up a belated ‘buh-buh-buh, buh-gAwk.’ Ethel gathered her wits and panned her light to the yellow thing.
“Ernie,” she yelled toward the cottage. “Ernie, get out here!”
A window opened and Ernie stuck his head out. “What? What is it?”
“A honest-to-god alien bought some of my girls, and it paid in gold!”
by submission | Oct 24, 2018 | Story |
Author: Jamie Bainbridge-Wood
Marshal was a photographer, an anachronist and a killer. Before we met, he hadn’t bothered to iCap any of the women he had finished with: he used an old camera, the print kind. That’s a throwaway fact- an affectation- for someone who isn’t a killer. In Marshal’s case, it got him caught and they stuck Marshal with me. Marshal behaves himself now.
Mostly.
It’s a rugged neighbourhood: neon-light reflections dancing hopscotch across a thick flow of rainwater, dense streams set to drown the whole borough, reshaping it into a grimy, low-rent Venice. Marshal’s body has its knuckles gripped white around the little moped they rented out to us. His mind snaps at me as we drive and I keep an eye on it but I don’t feed it.
The waypoint is up ahead, silky purple blur vibrating at one extremity of our vision. I get Marshal to pull his head around, get us oriented, and he doesn’t like it.
They used to lock people like Marshal up, or kill them, and now they use them for this. They think it’s punishment. For the most part, it is. People like Marshal, they like to dominate. An arrangement like this is their worst nightmare.
Still, I’ve been with Marshal long enough and I know: there are certain parts he likes well enough.
Marshal used to have a buddy- Lucas Roiland- and my mind, what used to be Marshal’s mind, drifts to him as we take the right off Copeland and onto Main. Marshal was the worst of the two, really. Lucas? He just didn’t have his head together.
Marshal exploited that.
We glide into the waypoint and the vibration stops: out front of the Oakland, that big Gothic facade grinning chipped-teeth from the lower row of windows, halogen glare in the interiors draped by heavy, dark blinds. They’re like coffins, those rooms.
The receptionist, a kid, nods at us as we blow through.
We hit the elevator.
“Carver?”
We hammer on the door of Room 304, the one with the peeling paint and the expectant silence on the other side.
“Carver!”
Silence conjures visions:
Carver, perched in the high-backed chair management provided as a cursory nod to the virtues of good posture.
Carver, easing his way out the chair, toting some screamer rented from a skinny kid with a quick mouth and hard eyes.
I keep an ear out for the footsteps, the sound of metal touching wood, and there’s nothing. I give it a second, two, for him to respond, then I do it the other way: crank back in the corridor, plant a boot at the lock. Splinters, then: Carver, a black-etched simian outline fleeing toward an open window. The piece has enough anaesthetic to sleep Carver permanently. I dial it back. Shoot from the hip.
Carver breaks a table as he goes down.
Into the room.
I take a look around in the dark. There’s enough here to make sure Carver ends up the same as Marshal: binds, tossed carelessly in the bathroom; tools, precisely ordered, placed obviously as prize possessions in the centre of the room.
It’s slap-dash. Looks the same way the developing room did, back when they caught us.
They’ll slave Carver, the same way they slaved Marshal, and they’ll put someone like Lucas Roiland in the driver’s seat.
I look down at Carver with something like pity. I know what the process will do to his mind. But then again, I know what he did, what Marshal did, and what I did.
I am all that’s left of Lucas Roiland.
It’ll be making amends forever.
by submission | Oct 21, 2018 | Story |
Author: DJ Lunan
“London is ours! Zero-ing in on infamy!” announced Haggard Elsson, winking to the air steward and striding purposefully from the First Class exit from BA0171 with his Executive Assistant Freya trailing him, awkwardly wheeling both of their suitcases.
London’s City Airport was one of their first customers and remained a flagship project for sustainable technology in a fractious age. Haggard’s smile was broad as his vibrating footsteps on the skywalk spurred the Zero-walls into life, broadcasting BBC’s News24 in Norwegian – his selected language. On the floor, ceiling, and sides, the world’s daily tribulations laid bare, using zero carbon, solar and kinetic energy and little maintenance.
Yet with considerable dismay, Haggard saw the news displaying on his Z-walls was all about technology, with today’s expert a gleaming, stern-faced liquid-eyebrowed Professor Nochs promoting his latest management book “Progressive Notches”.
Haggard moaned, “Can’t we firewall this insolent turd and his insidious nonsense?”
“Unfortunately”, began Fleur sweating heartily alongside, “we sold the lease rights to our Zero-walls technology, not their content; they can show whatever feeds they want”.
Haggard knew this already. Close-lipped, his eyes husking groundnuts, his arms windmilling as he flipped the bird and other fingered profanities at the Professor’s twenty-foot-high face as they wheeled along endless skywalks towards the elevators.
“Screw you London! This isn’t the welcome I expected!”.
Freya sighed. She quite liked Nochs’ delivery, it was understandable to the layman, and he had a childish fascination that piqued her fancy. She would never tell Haggard. He’d hated him since their childhood rivalry as Rubik’s Cube prodigies.
“Flipping inefficient lifts”, shouted Haggard at no one, pointlessly pushing repeatedly the call button.
Nochs’ bore down on them like a bad dream about a dystopian future. “Everyone talks about progress, and giant transformative leaps being made by technology, but it is only now we can make this leap, with the Omni-cell technology. We will create over 50 million new jobs worldwide. And we will eradicate many inefficient jobs. Did you know the only job that disappeared in the USA since 1950 is ‘lift operator’? We have 50% of the funding from Canadian and US pension funds, I am here in London in final discussions to obtain the remaining 50%”.
The lift doors opened, Haggard shook his head impatiently as Freya bashed her way in with their oversized luggage.
As the doors finally closed and the Z-walls abuse stopped, Haggard let out an audible sigh. Followed closely by a harrumph. “Lift operators, eh, Nochs. Interesting. Let’s ride this lift a few times, Freya”, he enunciated clearly, pressing the Down button once, firmly.
Freya tolerated his peccadillos. She was sure he was returning to punch the Z-walls.
After three fruitless trips up-and-down, Haggard was smiling again, almost giggling.
“Freya, remind me what sort of contract we have with the lease of Z-walls?”.
“Standard lease of hardware, own-maintenance insurance and cover, full tech and hardware support, 0.25 FTE on site, and zero content restrictions”.
Haggard’s eyes were sparkling, “Can we slip a new job into each one that is in a building of more than, say, six floors?”
“An additional maintenance or tech support role you mean?”, Freya quizzed.
“Nope. Marketing. I want a Lift Operator written in. No cost to the clients at all. We will pay. We will use interns, dress them in company pink, and…..”
“….make sure they are charismatic and …”, continued Freya
“…sell the absolute heck out of our company while pressing buttons!”, finished Haggard.
“How can Professor Noch start or obtain funding if his theoretical foundation is built on a historical lie!” exclaimed Haggard proudly.
by submission | Oct 20, 2018 | Story |
Author: James Hornby
In all my days on Gulliver’s Rest, I never believed that the War would reach us. From the window, I see the sky is pitted with scars from the wreckage of an Artari Sunskipper, ripped from history in a series of blinding flashes. I came to this planet to escape from the violence. Now I realise that maybe there was nowhere I could have gone to hide.
I pull Meren and Egar close, kissing their heads, trying desperately to assure them that everything is okay, even if I know it isn’t. They’re my only family; I have to keep them safe. Meren asks me why the War has come to our world. I say nothing, for I have no answers for her, only worries.
There was no time to pack. Even if we tried, the contents of our bags could empty or reproduce due to the twisting and shaping of the timelines around us. On reflection, I doubt we’d even realise if they had. Instead, I take their hands and run from the homestead, out into the chaos beyond the threshold.
Outside is ghostly quiet. I keep thinking I hear someone screaming, yet almost the instant I do my mind moves onto other things, the moment forgotten. I wonder if I’m forgetting because the people who scream no longer exist. Regardless, we must press on if we are to survive this.
I tell the kids that we have to make it to the hill. It’s not far, just a few minutes from where we live. Inside is a bunker, containing a time capsule I stole from the Enemy’s homeworld long ago. The time machine is our way out of here. It’s the only way we can ever be safe now.
I catch glimpses of foot soldiers, slipping in and out of higher dimensions, fighting their battle on every plane of reality. I grasp Meren’s hand tighter, keeping her close. She’s my only child; I have to keep her safe.
We reach the hill and make our way into the bunker, chanting incantations to open the seals that allow our entry. Inside the room is dark, save for a single light under which the time capsule is stood. There it has been for thousands of years, or just a few minutes, for that is how this creation exists.
Tara protests, she is scared of the machine. I reassure her, there is no time for emotion, not now we’re so close. She’s my only child; I have to keep her safe.
The time capsule is warm to the touch, and hums when it feels my presence. I fumble in my pocket for the key, sliding it into the lock with ease. I push against the door and stumble inside. The lights on the console flicker the moment my feet hit the floor. The place is dusty, yet holds that pleasant smell in the air like you get from a freshly printed magazine.
I waste no time and set the craft in motion. I have to get away from here, as far away from the War as possible. Sometimes I forget why I’m running, but I know that it is what I must do. I don’t know where I’m going, somewhere nice, I think. Perhaps it was time I settled down, start a family with someone.
After all, I’ve never had a family before.
