by submission | Nov 28, 2019 | Story |
Author: Chris Stewart
“Dr. Marco Nutrice. M-A-R-C…”
The council chairman, rumpled and sleep-deprived, interrupted, “Doctor Nutrice.”
The witness, far chipper, countered.
“Noo-trees”
“Pardon?”
“It is pronounce, noo-trees.”
“My apologies, Doctor.” Sighed the chairman. “We will skip the formalities. All of us are aware of who you are.”
“As I say three years ago…”
“Doctor, we know, nobody listened to you then. We know you were all but tossed out of the building. However…”
Another voice, further down the long desk cut in. “Mr. Chairman, I’d…”
“We discussed this already, Dale! Asked and answered!”
“Mr. Chairm…”
“Screw you, Dale! You think we want this? This is where we wanted to be? We are out of ideas and Object 445c is three years closer to dropping in to say howdy!” The louder he talked, the gooier his accent became.
“Why are you even here, Dale? Got a better plan?!”
“Well, no, but…”
“Christ on a crutch, Dale…”
The chairman fumed at the other member for a full half-minute, the gallery murmuring quietly until finally, he banged his gavel.
“Doctor. For expediency, I will summarize. Please clarify if I overlook anything, or otherwise mischaracterize your… proposal.”
Shuffling a well-read sheaf of papers, the chairman looked dejectedly at the rest of the council, then exhaled slowly.
“In the years since Object 445c was detected entering our solar system, a great many resources have been devoted to the matter. The world’s finest minds have conceived of and carried out numerous attempts to spare us calamity, and they have all failed. The last few projects remain, but continued data collection on Object 445c has made it clear they are certainly going to fail as well. As such…”
HONK!
Every head in the vaulted room snapped towards the nose-blowing sound.
“Dale, that’s it. Get the hell out! Bailiff! No, I mean it. You sonnovabitch, out!”
After several minutes and a surprising struggle; “As such, we have asked you back, Dr. Nutrice, to revisit your proposal on, ah…”
“Acquired Savant Syndrome.”
“Goddamn. You know what, I just can’t. Doctor, briefly, if you please.”
“Well, simply, we take volunteers, and we hit them on the head.”
The chairman, looking decades older, sighed. “Uh-huh. Continue.”
“See, in a small fraction of massive brain contusions, the patient recover, but now they have surprising talents. Some familiar, like math. Others, strange, like seeing music as physics. All of them bring fresh perspective to science! So, we use volunteers to try and make these savants, and we give humankind big leap forward in short time!”
Another council member leaned into their microphone. “Doctor, you propose we take a mallet to the heads of thousands…”
“Millions better. And not mallet, but si, hitting very hard.”
“Dear god. Millions. For the wholesale creation of minds capable of saving us from Object 445c?”
“Si.”
In the uproar, the chairman skipped his gavel, picked up his desk lamp and proceeded to smash it onto the desk. In the new quiet, he continued.
“Correct me if I’m wrong, Doctor, but your proposal will kill millions, cripple thousands…”
“Sadly.”
“For a few hundred beautiful minds in the hopes they can build us a fusion cannon or some shit.” The accent was dripping.
“Si.”
“Why would anyone volunteer, Doctor?”
“To be in history books? And their families, we take care of them.”
Someone on the council sobbed.
“Heaven help us, we are desperate, Doctor. But what if you’re wrong and we don’t stop Object 445c?”
Doctor Nutrice smiled, too big.
“Ah, the best reason to volunteer! If it no work, unlucky volunteers, they will instead be the lucky ones!”
by submission | Nov 27, 2019 | Story |
Author: R. Michael
Jenny sat looking at the wonders out her window. In her right hand, she slowly twirled a bit of her silky, auburn hair, and in the other hand, she held a pen. Though intending to jot something down, she mostly just chewed on the end.
In her mind’s eye, she saw wind-tossed trees, the cool surface of a lake, a city – no, a small town. “Yes,” she thought, “that’s what I want.” The house she saw was small, surrounded by a field of tall flowers. Sometimes deer would come along to graze and on rare occasions a mighty buck.
Jenny then pondered what it would look like if snow softly fell around the quaint little house. “Snow seems so pretty. I wonder if any of the places we’ll visit will have it.” Her pen scrawled across the tablet. As she envisioned the biting cold and the crystalline flakes falling slowly and silently to the ground, she longed, even more, to experience it just once.
“Every place we go is oppressively hot and ends up uninhabitable. I wish we didn’t have to live like nomads traipsing from one place to the next just trying to survive.” Jenny thought as she craned her head up, once more captivated by what lay beyond the glass. Though young, a part of her realized there were people who would have traded places with her. The beauty and new sights Jenny had seen in her life were more than what most of humanity got to experience.
Still, Jenny’s heart longed for simplicity and quiet, just her, her brother and their parents. “Such is the life of an explorer’s kid,” she mused. Jenny remembered the anger she felt toward her mom for taking the job, but as she grew and made friends in her new environment, the homesickness slowly faded. Yet there was a part of her that wanted to make her mother suffer and to a lesser degree her father for going along with it. While writing, Jenny thought of none of that. It was a fantasy world, ultimately. After taking a moment to gaze out the window, her pen resumed fluttering along the notepad.
The little house she conceptualized was no longer surrounded by woods, but on one side there was a lake. On the water’s surface, she envisioned a family of ducks, smiling a little as she pondered how cute they must be in real life.
“How can I write such a story? Sure, I’ve seen things most people haven’t, but I also haven’t gotten to experience normal everyday life either. There is so much I’ve missed.” Jenny put the pen down, scowling at the paper in front of her as she debated whether it was worthwhile to continue or not.
“Arriving at planetary system in forty-five minutes,” a female voice spoke over the intercom.
Jenny sighed. The twin stars their next home orbited steadily grew larger, bathing her face in cold distant light. Beyond the two stars was a nebula. It wasn’t the first Jenny had seen, and she doubted it would be the last. All thoughts melted away as she soaked in the nebula’s beauty. Out of the corner of her vision, a brilliant blue and orange gas giant caught her eye. Orbiting the massive planet was a set of rings.
“Here starts another adventure. Maybe someday I’ll get to chase my dream instead of living someone else’s,” Jenny whispered to herself as she tucked the notepad under her arm.
by submission | Nov 26, 2019 | Story |
Author: David Barber
“So,” Hoffmann said to Cally. “You are the poet. The one who claims to hear meanings in queentalk that our software misses.”
The man from Transuranics GmbH had brought his own translator rig; Cally listened to it murmuring the subtext of pheromones and body language in his ear.
She had come here to write about the Jirt, and found she had a gift for understanding the queen’s utterances. Hoffmann was here to talk about pitchblende and the hive workers needed to mine it.
The queen interrupted him. “Reassure this one about the future.” The Jirt queen demanded reassurance almost daily now.
Hoffmann faltered, then began again with the advantage that would be gained over other hives.
The man understood nothing, Cally thought. Absently, she rubbed her eyes; the air in the royal chamber was thick with pheromones.
The queen’s mouthparts chattered with anxiety. “But who will remember this one?”
It seemed new queens erased all traces of the old, and though the hive endured, its nameless rulers faced oblivion.
In their conversations Cally had called her the Red Queen, not guessing how the human habit of names and remembering would be seized upon. Now it was an addiction and she had become the queen’s dealer.
Tell again how this one will be spoken of, the queen would insist, after a lifetime of egg-laying, trapped by her own body, and Cally would invent kennings and couplets, weaving words and stories about the queen.
In return, Cally became the female without offspring, a concept the queen did not comprehend. How could such a trait be inherited? It had proved impossible to explain the choices those prisoned by free will make.
Again the queen asked about being remembered, and Hoffmann cleared his throat. “I like to think we will all be remembered. By colleagues. And our children.”
Cally had not expected this corporate henchman to mention his children. Again, she fended off workers, like frantic to taste her. Something was wrong.
“We should come back tomorrow…” she began, but Hoffmann pressed on.
“As I am sure you will be remembered by your own offspring.”
“There is deception here. Our hives will forget us all.”
Within the queen’s great abdomen, organs that squeezed out the hive’s future no longer pulsed and contracted, and one by one, the scurrying workers also ceased their tasks.
“Still half this one’s eggs remain!” she proclaimed. A grotesquely painted dame might lie about her age in the same way.
“Raus, raus,” Cally hissed at Hoffmann. There were languages they kept from the Jirt. “Schnell!”
And as if she was only awaiting that signal, the queen seized the man in her jaws. His eyes bulged with horror and the queen shook him in a spray of blood.
Cally fled through tunnels and spaces filled with confused workers; she carried the scent of the royal chamber which was a protection and a curse. When she found the main exit jammed with struggling soldiers, she took a side passage, pressing herself to the walls as workers darted past, spraying alarm pheromones, the chaos spreading.
Afterward, there was talk of nuking the hive to teach the Jirt a lesson, but economic sense prevailed.
The hive had no history, Cally told the Transuranics people; barren queens were devoured by their offspring, the hive boiling with murder until a new queen prevailed.
Cally wondered how she might have answered the Red Queen, for it was true, flowers wilt, headstones forget, and in the end mourners become the mourned.
The queens that came after, she did not name.
by submission | Nov 24, 2019 | Story |
Author: Glenn Leung
“I’m sorry, what?” I gave the man my ‘I don’t believe you, but I’m intrigued’ face.
“Perhaps I should use visual aids,” said the man as he set his drink down. He proceeded to grab a napkin from the counter and whip out a pen from his shirt pocket. In quick strokes, he drew two lines from the same point but at an angle to each other.
“See this line? Just imagine it’s nicely lined up with the bottom. That’s your world. This other line, is my world.”
I looked at his sketch with interest. They were rather straight for a man who has had three stouts. He drew a third line down the vertical of the napkin, slowing the pen as he crossed the first two.
“Now, see your world cuts this vertical line at a right-angle, correct? And my world cuts it at a smaller angle. Tell me, which line is longer between the starting point and the vertical?”
I put down the tray I was holding and leaned over the counter. I am always looking for good stories to share with the kids.
“The line that is your world?”
The man slammed his pen down victoriously.
“You got it!”
I looked up at his drowsy eyes and crooked smile.
“I really don’t.”
He laughed as he swayed in his seat, shaking his head.
“Of course! Details! These lines…are timelines!”
I thought it best to remain silent. It was clear that he had a mental script developed after many explanations.
“Our worlds started out from the same Big Bang, following nearly parallel paths in time save for a small angle. Some call them quasi-parallel universes. The angle is much smaller than what I drew here, so we’ve only gained a hundred years on you since the birth of the Multiverse.”
He took a gulp of his drink and looked at me expectantly.
“And the vertical line?”
“Ah!” another gulp. “The slider of perception. It moves along the direction in time some call the Entropy Axis. Your world’s a rare one because it’s exactly along its path, so time passes at the same rate entropy in the Multiverse increases. For my world, time passes a little faster. It is small enough so you wouldn’t notice though.”
He finished that sentence along with his beer. I handed him a glass of water which he swallowed a little too quickly.
“So…’cough’, you…’cough’, got it?”
“I think so,” I said as I wiped up his mess. “You’re from the future, just not my future.”
He gave me a thumbs-up before unceremoniously coughing into his sketch. Most bartenders would have left the man to his fantasies by now, but he gave me a feeling I just couldn’t shake off. Was this curiosity or just boredom?
“So, what brings you to our world?”
“To get away from it all,” his expression had suddenly become more solemn. “There’s nothing but conflict and strife in mine. Honestly, if you all don’t do something soon, it will be your future too.”
The chatter and music in the bar came more into focus after those words. We looked at each other in silence, the cheer gone from his face for several seconds before making an unannounced return.
“Ha! Look at me drowning the mood. You’ve still got some time, buddy! Live on strong!”
I never saw the man again after that night, but I will not be forgetting him any time soon. Whenever I read the news, the drawing on the napkin comes up clear as day.
by submission | Nov 23, 2019 | Story |
Author: David C. Nutt
“As I told you to begin with, if Renslo dies, you would die too.”
I thought the Renegade Commander said that so I wouldn’t kill Renslo under the knife by violating my Hippocratic oath. Oathbreakers never understand the power of an oath taken; especially in my case. I couldn’t violate my Hippocratic oath. Not with someone wounded and helpless. These others? Deserters? Combatants? War Criminals? Not an issue.
“I did my best.”
“It’s OK doc,” one of his men said to me as he fingered his neckless of human ears, most likely my neighbors and their children, “to err is human, to forgive divine. You goofed so now it’s in God’s hands… so we’re arranging a meeting.” Gruff laughter exploded about the room. Their commander held up his and motioned for silence.
“Well, it’s best not to draw this out any farther.” The commander called up a death certificate on my room display. In cause of death under my name, he typed in ‘head trauma.’ He hit ‘enter’ and the form wouldn’t let him save the response.
I was almost ready. Just two more minutes and the set up would be complete. The outer sentries he posted had closed my compound doors for the night. As soon as his guards crossed into the courtyard, I would be ready.
The commander gave up interest in his grand jest and yawned. “Well, I suppose it’s too late for a proper execution tonight. We’ll take care of it in the morning.” There were murmurs of agreement. This was all I needed. The commander stood up. His men scrambled to their feet. The commander and his two aides went to open the door of my office. The lead man reached for the door. I heard the bolt slide, locking the door.
I smiled. I stood up. “You aren’t allowed to leave.”
The commander smiled with pure sarcasm. “I beg your pardon.”
“You may not.” The commander’s face turned red with rage.
“I don’t think-“
“By the authority vested in me as magistrate, I charge you with desertion, treason, and crimes against humanity and sentence you all to die.”
His men laughed loud and carried on a few slapped me around a bit. The commander held up his hand again.
“So harsh doctor? Or as you are now in your magistrate role I should probably say ‘Your honor’, hmmm?” His men let loose their guffaws and catcalls
This time I smiled. I saw the commander swallow. He knew he was missing something. I was done playing with him now. My two spares had eliminated the sentries. I let my left arm fall off. The laughter stopped. There was a brief moment of confusion as all the renegades processed what happened and were scrambling to find a way out. I looked their commander in the eye again. He sat down and shook his head and I triggered myself destruct mode.
From my new vantage point in the courtyard, I watched my lab implode, taking all the renegades with it. By the time I got my remaining duplicates hidden again my report was being transmitted to the regional authorities about the terrible atrocities committed and the heroic self-sacrifice one of my neighbors to take out the renegades. As decommissioned Army AI, one who survived being consigned to the scrap heap, I worked hard establishing my human profile. While not prone to human error and certainly not divine, this was the way it had to be. Then again, not being human or divine, I had a lot of wiggle room.
